In High Places Read online

  "I am well, thank you. May God grant that you be the same. As for this tent"—Muhammad al-Marsawi paused to drive a peg into the ground with a rock—"again, I thank you for the offer, but it is not being too troublesome right this minute."

  "Good. I am glad to hear it." Jacques watched the trader drive in another peg. He suddenly understood why this man puzzled Duke Raoul. Everyone else he knew, Christian or Muslim, would have said something like, I'm not having any trouble with the tent. Jacques had no trouble understanding what Muhammad al-Marsawi meant. The trader's phrase, which gave the tent a life of its own, was more vivid than the usual way of putting things. But it wasn't anything most people would have said. How had he come to put things like that?

  "Have you heard any word of bandits on the road?" the merchant asked.

  Anyone traveling in a caravan might ask a question like that. Anyone might sound anxious when he asked it, too. Muhammad al-Marsawi certainly did. The trader had a pistol stuffed into his belt. Jacques thought he was as likely to shoot himself in the foot with it as he was to bring down a raider.

  Hiding his scorn, Jacques answered, "As far as I know, the road is clear. Of course, I do not know everything there is to know."

  "I hope you know the truth," Muhammad said. "Yes, I hope that very much. God grant it be so."

  "Yes, God grant it." Jacques sketched the wheel over his heart. The trader looked away when he did it. Muslims accepted Jesus as a prophet, even if they didn't believe He was the Son of God. But they thought Satan, not God, spoke through Henri. Their Muhammad had said he was the last prophet. To them, anyone who came after him had to be a fraud. To Jacques, that only proved how ignorant they were.

  Muhammad al-Marsawi coughed. "My family and I were surprised to see you here after we talked a few days ago."

  Jacques' cheeks heated. What could that mean but, Why are you spying on us? The merchant might be strange, but he was smart. Well, that wasn't anything Jacques didn't already know. He said, "Duke Raoul chose me for this duty. How could I say no to my liege lord?" The last two words had to come out in French. Arabic didn't have quite the same notion—you could say master in Arabic, but not liege lord. Any superior could be a master, but a liege lord had obligations to his men in return for the duty they owed him.

  "Well, anyone owes his master obedience." The trader didn't bother with the difference between the one and the other. He spoke French as well as he did Arabic, but that didn't mean he understood there was a difference. He went on, "And what do you think of this duty he gave you?"

  "I like it," Jacques replied. "I get to go places I have never gone, and I get to meet people I have not met before." He bowed to Muhammad al-Marsawi. "And I get to know better people I have already met."

  The trader's eyes twinkled. "Ah, but is it me you want to know better, me with my beard and with my hair going gray, or is it Khadija?"

  Another blush set Jacques' face afire. "I do not wish to be a trouble," he said.

  "Have I said you are?" the merchant asked. "But I am not a blind man, either."

  Most Muslims, from what Jacques had seen and heard, would have been furious if a Christian looked at their daughter. Muhammad al-Marsawi didn't sound furious. He sounded . . amused? That relieved Jacques and puzzled him at the same time. He was glad the merchant didn't want to pull out that pistol and aim it at him. But why didn't Muhammad act like most other men from his kingdom?

  What would Duke Raoul have to say when he heard this? Probably that it was one more piece that didn't fit in the puzzle. Why was Muhammad al-Marsawi so different? Jacques almost asked. That would have given him away, but the trader might have answered just because he was so different.

  Was Khadija different, too? If she was, did that mean she wouldn't mind if Jacques got to know her better? He could hardly wait to find out.

  Annette didn't like riding sidesaddle. To her, if you rode sidesaddle you were a fall waiting to happen. But women in this alternate didn't ride astride, so she was stuck. If she didn't care to ride sidesaddle, she could walk. She did a good deal of that, too—not so much as her father, but a good deal even so.

  She let out a silent sigh of relief when the caravan left the Kingdom of Versailles and passed into the Kingdom of Berry. She felt safer among Muslims here than she did among this alternate's strange Christians. Western Europe here had been through a lot. It was at last starting to emerge from the new dark age the Great Black Deaths had clamped down on it. In another couple of hundred years, it might be a very lively, very exciting place, the way it had been in the home timeline between 1600 and 1700. For now, this alternate's Western Europe was still a borrower, not a creator.

  At the border, the customs inspectors went easy on the Muslims and searched the Christians' goods with great care. It had been the other way around when Annette and her family entered the Kingdom of Versailles this past spring. The inspectors took away a fine bell a trader from the Germanies wanted to bring into their kingdom. He squawked in bad French and worse Arabic, but they wouldn't listen to him.

  "He should have known better," Annette's father said as the caravan got moving again. "That can only be a church bell, and churches aren't allowed to have bells in Muslim kingdoms. The Muslims are willing to let them exist—as long as they pay their taxes—but they can't advertise, you might say."

  "What do you want to bet the Muslims find something to do with the bell themselves?" Mom said.

  "Oh, sure they will." Dad nodded. "Either that or they'll sell it back across the border and make a nice profit on it. But the Germanies are a long way away. Nobody there can go to war with the Kingdom of Berry over how it treats their traders."

  The merchant kept spluttering and fuming and complaining till the caravanmaster got tired of listening to him. "Quit grumbling," he told the German. "You got caught with a church bell, so you're stuck. Thank Jesus and Henri that they didn't confiscate the rest of your goods. Then you'd have something to howl about."

  "You do not help me!" the trader said.

  "I'm sorry." The caravanmaster sounded anything but. "I know a lost cause when I see one." He wheeled his horse and rode away from the German. The man started to ride after him. A couple of guards stepped up and persuaded him that wouldn't be a good idea.

  One of the guards was Jacques. After he helped get the merchant from the Germanies calmed down, he looked over in Annette's direction. As soon as he did, she looked away. She knew he was interested in her. This was one of the times when a veil came in handy. Wearing one meant he couldn't see her expression.

  He wasn't bad-looking. He seemed nice enough. She might have liked him ... if he bathed, if he were deloused, if he were dewormed. She might have liked him ... if he didn't despise people who weren't of his religion, if his head weren't packed full of superstitions. She might have liked him ... if he weren't from this alternate.

  People from Crosstime Traffic were warned not to get too close to the locals when they left the home timeline. People being people, they broke the rules every now and then. When they did, things almost always turned out bad. The rules were there as much to protect people from the alternates as they were to make sure nobody gave away the Crosstime Traffic secret.

  On an alternate like this, giving away the secret was only a small worry. The idea of traveling between alternate worlds was beyond most people's mental horizons here. Even if it hadn't been, the locals couldn't do anything about it. The closest thing they had to a computer here was the abacus. People who knew how could do arithmetic amazingly fast with those beads on wires. Even so ...

  Keeping the secret mattered a lot more on alternates with breakpoints closer to the present. A lot of them had had an industrial revolution and a scientific revolution, too. Some of them had technology nearly as good as the home timeline's. A few had technology better than the home timeline's, at least in things that didn't have anything to do with crossing from one alternate to another. Annette's world had learned a lot from them. And if they ever got the idea for c
rosstime travel, they could run with it.

  The guard with Jacques said something. They both laughed. They were probably talking about what a fool the German trader was. Human nature didn't change much from one alternate to another. The other guard slapped Jacques on the back. This time, Jacques said something, and he got a laugh. Annette didn't think the trader would be happy if he could hear them. With the small crisis solved, they separated.

  Jacques came over toward Annette and her family. She might have known he would—he did whenever he got the chance. He didn't talk directly to her. That would have been rude, even offensive. But he kept an eye on her while he talked to her father. He was interested, all right. She knew the signs. They weren't much different here from what they would have been in the home timeline.

  "God grant that you and yours are well," Jacques said to Dad in his accented Arabic. He'd had to learn it the hard way—no implant for him. You could hear the French underneath.

  "God grant you the same," Annette's father said. "I am glad the commotion is over and done with."

  "So am I," Jacques replied. "You would not be foolish enough to bring something into the Kingdom of Versailles that is not allowed there."

  "Well, I hope not," Dad said. "Life is simpler when you do not go out of your way to make a nuisance of yourself. Not everyone can see that, though."

  "Very true," Jacques said gravely. Did he see that he was making a nuisance of himself by coming around and chatting with the Kleins when they didn't want his company? If he did, would he have kept doing it?

  Annette waited for her father to show it to him if he didn't see it. But Dad just went on talking about the weather and the road and the likely price of olive oil next year. He passed on some gossip he'd picked up in the caravan, and he listened while Jacques passed on some of his own. Back in the home timeline, Dad wasn't so patient. When he came to this alternate, he gave people the benefit of the doubt. Biting their heads off when they acted like fools would have got him talked about, and he didn't want to draw notice to himself that way.

  Instead, he drew notice to himself another way. People from Marseille all the way up to Paris thought Dad was one of the nicest fellows they'd ever met. Even if he is a Muslim, Christians would always add when they talked about him. They might apologize for liking him, but like him they did.

  It might have been better if no one remembered him, or if people remembered him as an ordinary person. But how could you tell your own father to be less nice? You couldn't—or Annette couldn't, anyhow. And so innkeepers and people he bargained with smiled when they thought about him.

  Jacques said, "It must be hard, bringing your wife and your daughter with you on such a long journey."

  In the home timeline, Paris and Marseilles were a couple of hours apart by bullet train, less than that by airplane. Here Jacques was right—a long journey separated them. With a smile and a shrug, Dad said, "Well, being separated from them seems a bigger hardship, and so they travel with me."

  "Don't you worry about bandits and robbers?" Jacques asked, adding, "I would, if I were traveling with women."

  In the home timeline, that would have been a sexist thing to say. In this alternate, as in others that hadn't known an industrial revolution, it was just common sense. On the average, women were smaller than men, and not so strong. And they had babies, which was a dangerous business without modern medicine. In the home timeline, women had a longer life expectancy than men. That wasn't true here, or in other low-tech alternates. Childbirth was the main reason it wasn't true. Some women died of it. Some who didn't were weakened so they died of other things instead. And no one here had any contraceptives that worked. Once women became sexually active, they would get pregnant.

  "May God keep bandits and robbers—far away from me," Dad said. Jacques laughed. And Dad was joking, but at the same time he wasn't. Things could go wrong on the road, and he knew it. He went on, "It would take a bold band of robbers to attack a caravan this size."

  "And one with such brave guards," Mom put in.

  Jacques smiled. He had a nice smile. His teeth were straight, and he still had all of them—but then, Annette didn't think he was even her age. His beard was still mostly fuzz. "Maybe the lady your wife gives me too much credit," he said to Dad.

  "Maybe she does—but she'd better not," Dad answered.

  That made Jacques smile. He bowed to Annette's father. He was careful to keep his long pike upright while he did it. Then he pointed to the pistol on Dad's belt. "If—God prevent it—some cowardly wretches attack us, surely your own great courage and ferocity will make them flee like the jackals and wolves they are." Arabic was a wonderful language for flowery compliments, and for insults that would have sounded over the top in English.

  Dad smiled back. Annette thought the curve of his lips looked a little strained, and hoped Jacques wouldn't notice. That pistol seemed ordinary, but it wasn't, not by the standards of this alternate. It was nice to have, but it was for emergencies only. Dad said, "Any caravan that has to depend on me to save it is in more trouble than it knows what to do with."

  "And here until now I thought you were a hero, a man without flaws," Jacques said. "Now I see you have one after all—you are too modest." In English, he would have been laying it on with a trowel. In Arabic, the teasing came out just right.

  "I am a modest man—a man with plenty to be modest about," Annette's father replied. Annette had heard him use that line before. It really belonged to a twentieth-century British politician. Nobody in this alternate had ever heard it before. It passed for Dad's own wit. If you were going to steal, you should steal from the best.

  Jacques shook his head. "Oh, no, sir. Oh, no. You are a man of accomplishments." He shifted from Arabic to French. "I know that many of your countrymen have learned my language. Many of them speak it well—if you are patient and work hard in spite of troubles, you will have your reward in the end." That was straight from Henri's New Revelation. Still in French, Jacques went on, "But never until now have I met a Muslim man who spoke my language perfectly, as if he were a Parisian himself. And your lady wife and your daughter are just as fluent. Maybe it is a miracle from God." He made the wheel sign Christians here used instead of crossing themselves.

  Annette didn't think he really believed it was a miracle. No—he'd found a polite way to ask, How do you do that? The answer was simple ... if you had the home timeline's technology. Implants made learning a language easy. The information went right to the speech center in your brain, so you used your new tongue as smoothly as if you'd been born speaking it.

  Here, the Kleins spoke this alternate's French a little too well. Whoever had prepared the language module must have done it from a native speaker. She should have done it from someone whose native language was the local Arabic but who also spoke good French. Then Jacques wouldn't have had any reason to wonder about it.

  He waited to see what Dad would say. Dad, for once, didn't seem to know what to say. If he claimed French-speaking relatives, Jacques would check on that. Well, Jacques probably couldn't, but people he knew would be able to. Pretty plainly, he hadn't asked the question at random.

  "We learned the way you would think—from slaves in Marseille," Annette said—in Arabic. However much she despised slavery, it came in handy here. She added, "And we have always been good with languages. All of us have."

  If snoopy Jacques wanted to check on that—well, good luck. By his grin, he knew he couldn't. He spoke to Dad, not directly to her: "If your charming daughter says it, my master, why then it must be so."

  Mom started to laugh. After a moment, so did Dad. Annette and Jacques joined in a heartbeat later. He was looking at her. She wished he could see her. He'd got her good, and he had to know it, and she wanted him to know she knew, too. He'd sounded as if he meant every word of what he said, which only made him more sarcastic than he would have been if he sounded sarcastic.

  Annette pointed at him. "You are a demon," she said, as she might have said, You'r
e a devil to a friend at high school.

  At her high school, though, nobody took demons and devils seriously. They were things you joked around with, things you watched in bad movies, things you killed in computer games, and things that tried to kill you there. They couldn't kill you for real, and you knew it.

  It wasn't like that here. To the people in this alternate, demons and devils were as real as cheese and olive oil. When you didn't really know what caused diseases, when you looked to religion to answer your questions about the world because you had nowhere else to look, of course demons and devils seemed real. Annette should have remembered that, but she hadn't. She'd liked Jacques, and so she'd treated him like someone from the home timeline.

  And that was a mistake. Only a handful of words, but they horrified him. He made the sign of the wheel again. "By God, by Jesus, by Henri, I am no such evil thing," he said, speaking straight to her for the first time. "I am only a mortal, praying for heaven and afraid of hell and the things that dwell in hell."

  "I'm sorry," she said, but he wasn't listening to her. He gave Dad a coldly formal bow, spun on his heel, and stalked away. He was graceful as a cat—a cat whose fur she'd rubbed the wrong way.

  "Oh, dear," Mom said.

  "He made a joke, and so I made a joke," Annette said helplessly.

  "Except that kind of thing isn't a joke here," Dad said. "They broke Henri on the wheel because they thought he was a demon—and no doubt he was." He spoke the last few words louder than the rest, in case anybody else was listening. As someone playing the role of a Muslim in this world, he couldn't have a good word to say about Henri.

  "Maybe it's for the best," Annette's mother said. "Jacques was asking a lot of pointed questions, wasn't he? He'll think twice before he does that again."

  Dad laughed. "He'll think twice before he gets anywhere near us. Either that or he'll want to exorcise us with a bucket of holy water apiece, the way that French priest did with the salamander."