In High Places Read online

  "This is not a good time," Jacques said. "They're ready. They have muskets. We have shovels. Bad odds." He hefted his own shovel to remind the older man what he meant.

  "We have spirit. We have bravery." Dumnorix sounded like a wolf on the prowl. "They have nothing. You can see it in their faces."

  Were he a wolf talking about pulling down sheep, or even talking about pulling down elk, Jacques wouldn't have argued with him. But the prey he hungered for had sharper teeth than he did. "They will fight for their lives," Jacques said. "They know they all die if they lose. That makes them fight hard."

  Dumnorix looked at him as if he'd crawled out from under a flat rock. "Where is your spirit?"

  "I have spirit," Jacques answered. "I have sense, too, or I hope I do. Even if we win, even if we kill them, so what?"

  Now the redheaded man just plain stared. "We have revenge, by the gods! What else do we need?"

  "The guards beat the people who live here. They beat them over and over, whenever they fought. The people who live here want revenge, too," Jacques said. "The guards know how to fight them. They know how to use all their tools of war. Do you? What will the people who live here do to us? How will they tell us from the guards?"

  "You worry too much," Dumnorix said.

  "You don't worry enough," Jacques said, and worried more than ever himself. The only way he could stop Dumnorix from rising up was by warning the guards. He couldn't bring himself to do that. If he did, it would make him feel filthy. But if Dum-norix and however many men he would bring with him did rebel, what would happen then? Even if they won by some miracle— and winning would take a miracle—they would still lose. They still had to face the locals afterwards, and they had no idea how to work the machines or the magic or whatever it was that kept lamps burning without fire and did all the other amazing things that happened in the manor.

  Dumnorix didn't care about any of that. He only cared about striking. His being a pagan didn't bother Jacques so much. The guards were enemies, and yet they swore by Jesus, if not by Henri. Some of the Muslims among the slaves had become Jacques' friends, and he thought Muslims were as wrong as pagans. No, the problem was that Dumnorix was a hotheaded fool. He saw only what he wanted to do right now. What might spring from that. . . He didn't care. It wasn't real to him till it hit him in the nose.

  Wherever Khadija had gone, if she'd really gone anywhere, Jacques hoped she'd come back soon. He prayed to Henri that she would. He was the only person here who believed in God's Second Son. He hoped that would persuade Henri to listen to him.

  He wasn't the only slave here who worried about Khadija, though. One evening after supper, the woman with the crooked teeth who'd been her friend said, "I want to talk to you." Her Arabic was almost as bad as the bits of Breton and Dumnorix's language that Jacques used.

  He understood her, though. "Go ahead," he answered, also in Arabic. "You're Emishtar, yes?"

  "Yes," she said. "You know where is Khadija?"

  None of the guards seemed to be paying special attention to them. He knew he had to be careful anyway. "I'm not sure," he answered. "I hope I do."

  "She is all right?" Emishtar asked.

  Jacques only shrugged. "I don't know. I hope so."

  Emishtar eyed him. "She go into danger, yes?" Unhappily, he nodded. She wagged a finger at him. He almost laughed— when she did that, she reminded him of his mother. But she sounded angry as she asked, "Why you not stop her?"

  He did laugh then. The idea that he could stop Khadija from doing anything she aimed to do ... The idea that anybody could stop Khadija from doing anything she wanted to do ... He spread his hands. "How?" he asked.

  That made Emishtar smile, too. Jacques found himself liking her smile even if she had bad teeth. Plenty of people did. And she understood what his laugh and his one-word question meant, too. "She is like bull, yes," Emishtar said, and pawed the ground to make sure he understood what she was talking about. She added, "But she like you. Maybe she listen to you."

  "No," Jacques said, and let it go at that. Khadija really did like him? This older woman was her friend. She would know if anybody did. Jacques felt like grinning like a fool.

  Emishtar smiled at him. "You are a good boy," she said, and walked away.

  Jacques was happy and angry at the same time. A boy? He wasn't a boy! He was about to turn eighteen. If that didn't make him a man, what would?

  Back in Madrid. This time, Annette came by hypersonic shuttle, not by scamming her way aboard a transposition chamber. She went through customs instead of escaping from a man who might have stopped her if he'd thought a little faster. And the reporters in Spain were just as annoying as the ones in the United States. She couldn't even tell them she didn't speak Spanish, because they all spoke English.

  She'd had to make a fuss to get back to Spain. Higher-ups in Crosstime Traffic didn't care that she'd promised some of the slaves at the manor she'd come back. Several higher-ups were under arrest as the scandal widened. Others plainly wished it was never uncovered. They would rather have gone on doing business as usual. Slaves? As long as nobody knew about them, they might as well not have existed.

  But Crosstime Traffic couldn't afford any more bad publicity. The company would have got it by the carload lot after trying to keep Annette from returning to where she'd been enslaved. No matter what the higher-ups might have been thinking to themselves, they weren't dumb. They could see that. And so here she was, at Crosstime Traffic's expense.

  CT technicians were setting up an enormous transposition chamber in a park several kilometers from the building that was in the same spot here as the manor was in that other alternate. Next to the cost of doing that, flying Annette over from the USA was small change. Thanks to endless computer work, the techs sounded sure they could find that other alternate. Annette hoped they were right.

  One of the things that moved into the transposition chamber under cover of darkness was an armored car. A couple of squads of Spanish soldiers boarded the chamber, too. So did a man who looked like a lawyer. "You say they're loaded for bear," he told Annette. "Are they loaded for dinosaur?"

  "I hope not," was all Annette said, because she wasn't sure. Her helmet and body armor were made to fit women in the Spanish Army. The releases she'd signed were made to fit the toughest court of law. Without signing them, she wouldn't have been able to get into the chamber.

  Her parents had made it very plain they wished she were staying home. If it were up to them, they never would have signed the releases. But she was over eighteen, so they couldn't stop her. Her father's comment was, "Yes, you're of legal age. You know what that means? It means you're old enough to be stupid all by yourself."

  "Instead of someone else being stupid for me?" Annette had thought that was the perfect comeback. Her father just rolled his eyes, so he must have been less impressed than she was.

  "Are you ready, Miss Klein?" asked the man who looked like a lawyer. He was a lawyer, and worked for Crosstime Traffic. Even if she'd signed his releases, he didn't look happy to have her along. He went on, "Remember, you've agreed to follow the military commander's orders. If you become a casualty"—a nice, polite way to say get killed or maimed—"the publicity would be very bad." That mattered to him. Her health? She wouldn't have bet a dollar on it. But he was coming along, too. Whatever risks she took, he took them with her.

  That made her answer him politely: "I remember, Mr. Guerrero. I'll play by the rules." Unless things go really wrong. But if they do, nobody else will be playing by the rules, either.

  Somebody closed the door, sealing the transposition chamber off from the outside world. Like most chambers, it had a human along to back up the computer. Most of the time, the human couldn't do much if the electronics went haywire. From what Annette had heard, it wasn't like that here. They were feeling for the alternate that held the manor. They had a good notion of where it lay among so many others. Its world sprang from one where Rome lost the Samnite Wars in the fourth century BCE. No
one dominated the Mediterranean in that sheaf of alternates. Spain was split between people like Basques and the descendants of colonists from Carthage. Just where in the sheaf the right alternate lay ... the human operator would, with luck, be able to tell.

  The operator looked up from the monitor she'd plugged into the chamber's electronics. "We're on the way," she said in English, after what was probably the same thing in Spanish.

  If she hadn't said so, Annette wouldn't have known. The transposition chamber didn't feel as if it was going anywhere. It was, but you couldn't tell till you got there.

  The Spanish lieutenant colonel in charge of things military came over to remind Annette of what she'd promised. She promised all over again. Why not? It took up some duration—time didn't really exist while the chamber was traveling, but it felt as if it did.

  As they got close, the operator used the manual controls. Except in training videos, Annette had never seen anybody do that. She wondered if anybody else had who'd lived through it. Not many people had—she was sure of that.

  Frowning, the operator twisted a knob ever so slightly. "We're just about there," she said. "I'm going to drop us into reality. If it's the wrong alternate, we'll try again."

  "If it's the right one, they're liable to start shooting at us," the Spanish officer said. On that cheerful note, the chamber returned to the timelines.

  One of the soldiers wore headphones along with the rest of his gear. He said something excited in Spanish. I should have got a course through the implant, Annette thought. Then I'd know what was going on. But she hadn't had time. Since escaping, she'd barely had time to breathe. The lieutenant colonel translated for her: "He says he is picking up wireless phone signals."

  'This is the right alternate, then." Excitement of her own tingled through Annette. "In this sheaf, they wouldn't have invented them on their own."

  "Si, " the Spanish officer said. He called orders in his own language. The transposition chamber's door slid open. Soldiers scrambled out and . . . what was the military word? They deployed, that was what they did. The armored car rolled out. The lieutenant colonel gave Annette what was almost a bow. "If you will be so kind as to come with me, Miss Klein . . ."

  Stay with me. I'll make sure you don't get into mischief. That was what he meant. Annette didn't know what she could do about it, though. She nodded to him. "Let's go."

  Her body armor made her top-heavy. She almost fell when she went down the ramp. The officer steadied her. He had to be used to wearing the stuff. The soldiers and the armored car were already heading toward where the manor would be. The distant skyline looked the same as it did when she set out from the home timeline. Someone had taken Madrid away, though.

  Someone took away my freedom, she thought angrily. Now she had the chance to help make sure that wouldn't happen to anybody else. She hurried along with the lieutenant colonel.

  Jacques was digging out the roadbed when one of the men who spoke Dumnorix's language screamed. He hadn't hurt himself—it wasn't that kind of scream. He stared off to the east, his blue eyes open wider than any eyes Jacques had ever seen. "A monster!" he shrieked, and ran back towards the manor.

  He wasn't the only one who ran. Jacques felt like running himself. The monster looked something like what he imagined an elephant would look like. At least, that long snout reminded him of an elephant's trunk, even if it was at the top middle of the thing and not at the front. But shouldn't a trunk be wiggly? This was stiff and still, almost like . . . the barrel of a cannon?

  When that thought occurred to him, he also noticed the thing had wheels, not legs. But it moved by itself, without horses or mules or oxen to pull it. And it moved faster than animals could have hauled it. How was that possible?

  He glanced over to the guards. They could do all kinds of things he hadn't thought possible. What did they make of this— mechanical?—monster? It wasn't strange to them. He saw that right away. He also saw all of them looking as if they'd just been kicked in the belly. They didn't think the monster was good news, not even a little bit.

  Their horrified expressions made hope blossom inside Jacques. Khadija had said her own people would think the guards and the masters were criminals. She'd said her own people could take care of them, too. She'd sounded as if she knew what she was talking about. And maybe she did. Maybe she did!

  Men came forward along with the monster. For a bad moment, Jacques feared they were more guards, for they wore mottled clothing, too. Did the elephant with wheels belong to the people who ran the manor, then? The guards didn't think so. That was plain. And then he saw that the newcomers didn't use quite the same kind of mottling. Theirs was a little browner than the guards', with smaller, more jagged splotches. Did that mean they served a different lord?

  It evidently did. One of the guards raised his musket to his shoulder and fired several shots in the direction of the wheeled elephant. The soldiers coming up with it all threw themselves to the ground. When they lay flat, they almost disappeared against the dirt and bushes.

  A couple of those bullets made sparks clang off the horseless cart. So it's armored in iron, is it? Jacques thought. That was clever. And it spat fire at the guards—not from the cannon, but from a smaller gun next to it that Jacques hadn't even noticed.

  He ducked down when bullets started cracking past. At least he'd been under gunfire before. A lot of the slaves hadn't, and had no idea what to do. When the shooting stopped, Jacques cautiously looked up. Sure as the devil, one of the slaves was hurt. He lay on the ground clutching his leg and howling. The wound didn't look too bad. Jacques was glad to see that, anyhow.

  Two guards were also down. One had a wound not much different from the slave's. He was swearing in French, which surprised Jacques. He hadn't thought anybody here but Khadija spoke his language. This was a funny dialect, much more nasal than the one Jacques used, but it was French.

  The other guard was the one who'd fired at the strangers. He'd taken a bullet in the face, and was dead as an old boot.

  What might have been the voice of God—if God were a woman—came from the armored cart. It shouted in several different languages. One of them was a French that sounded like the dialect the guard used. She called on the guards to surrender if they knew what was good for them. As if to underline that, the cannon roared. Its shell went wide, but it went wide on purpose, as if to say it didn't have to.

  Jacques would have surrendered after that. And so did the guards. They lay down their muskets and put up their hands. The strangers in jagged mottling hurried up to take charge of them. Several of those soldiers were women. Jacques didn't realize it till they spoke—the armor hid their shape, and most of the men were clean-shaven. The women seemed as tough and capable as their male counterparts. That was one more boulder of amazement piled on a mountainside of wonders.

  Then one of the newcomers called Jacques' name. He stared. In that splotched set of trousers and tunic, under that helmet was ... "Khadija!"

  He ran over to her and gave her a hug. She didn't feel like a girl. She had armor on under the clothes. He didn't care. He kissed her on the cheek. He'd never kissed anybody in a helmet before. "You see?" she said in his dialect of French. "I made it!"

  "You sure did," Jacques answered. "And you brought your friends." She nodded. He asked, "What happens next?"

  "We give all these people what they deserve." She looked at the dead guard without flinching. "And we free the slaves. How does that sound?"

  "Wonderful!" Jacques said.

  Thirteen

  Annette was getting sick and tired of hotels. To her, the one in Madrid wasn't much different from those where she'd stayed in the USA. Her room was a little smaller than she would have had back home. The light switches were low and flat—they didn't stick up so much. The bathroom held an extra piece of equipment. But a bed was a bed, a TV was a TV, a computer hookup was a computer hookup all over the world. Just another room. To her.

  To Jacques, whose room was right across the hall,
it was more like a miracle, or a series of miracles. Crosstime Traffic had decided they weren't going to send him back to his old alternate. He knew too much for that. They hadn't decided what they would do with him. Maybe let him settle in the home timeline. Right now, though, he didn't know nearly enough for that.

  Everything here seemed strange to him. Annette found herself being his tutor. She had to show him how to make the running water work. She had to explain—gently—that it was customary to bathe every day, or something close to it, even if he wasn't doing hard work.

  "Why?" Jacques asked in honest bewilderment. "You people don't stink. I'm in the middle of a great big city, and it doesn't stink."

  "We don't stink because we bathe," she said. There were other reasons, too, of course. She'd also had to explain how to use the toilet. The hotel had to throw away a wastebasket, but she couldn't blame Jacques for that. It was the closest thing to a chamber pot he could find.

  And she'd had to show him how to use a fork. He thought that was funny. "Some of the snooty nobles in the Kingdom of Versailles use them," he said. "They want to make like they're as fancy as the Muslims down south. I never thought the likes of me would need to worry about such foolishness."

  "It's our custom here. People would talk if you used your fingers," Annette said. "I'm not telling you it's better or worse. I'm just saying it's how you fit in." He nodded. He could see that. He was pretty sharp. And she knew he took it more seriously because she was the one telling him.

  There were other complications. Before long, Jacques found out her real name was Annette, not Khadija. He could understand why she used a false one in his alternate. But he jumped to the wrong conclusion. "Then you're really a Christian after all!" he said happily.

  "Well, no," Annette told him. "I'm really a Jew." She waited to see what would happen next. People in the Kingdom of Versailles took anti-Semitism as much for granted as people in this Kingdom of Spain took eating with a fork.