In High Places

Four

Annette thought the countryside south of Grenoble some of the most beautiful she'd ever seen. The woods, the blue, blue sky, the crisp air, the little streams leaping down over rocks and making miniature waterfalls—it all reminded her of walking through a national park back in the home timeline. But this was no park. It was just part of the countryside.

Choughs were raucous overhead. They looked like skinny crows, except they had red legs and feet. Some had red beaks, too. Others had yellow. Dad said they were two different kinds of bird. Annette didn't worry about that one way or the other. She was happy enough admiring them. They swooped and tumbled in the air like Olympic gymnasts. Unlike gymnasts, they didn't have to worry about falling.

Having branches in new leaf overhead was nice. Annette enjoyed the shade. When she got to Marseille, her hands would be suntanned. So would a rectangle that included the bottom of her forehead, the skin around her eyes, the top of her nose, and the top of her cheeks. The rest of her? Fishbelly white. When you saw people with really strange patterns of tan and pale skin in the home timeline, you could bet they'd been out working in the alternates.

Mom was as bad off as Annette was. Dad wasn't, not quite— at least his whole face saw the sun. At the moment, he looked worried. "This is the worst part," he said for the third or fourth time that morning. "If we can get through this stretch, it's all downhill from here." He meant that literally as well as figuratively.

Something changed, up in the air. Annette looked up, trying to see what it was. She didn't see anything for a moment. Then she realized that was the problem. The choughs were gone. The caravan hadn't bothered them. What would have?

Up ahead, the road turned a corner. She couldn't see what lay around the corner because of the trees. She didn't think much of it when her part of the caravan stopped. That happened every now and then. You didn't need a freeway to make a traffic jam. Horses and mules and people and a narrow road would do the job just fine. If another good-sized party was trying to come up this dirt track while her caravan was going down it...

The caravanmaster's horn blew urgently from the head of the column. Guards pounded up toward the van. Annette couldn't see how the pikemen kept from fouling one another with their long-shafted weapons, but they did.

"I don't like the look of that," Mom said.

"Neither do I." Dad pulled the pistol from his belt. He was one of the most peaceable men in the world, but even peaceable men had trouble staying that way if the people around them wouldn't.

The volley of musket fire came from the woods on both sides of the road. The roar was like the end of the world. Wounded men screamed. So did wounded horses. Their cries of pain were terrible. Women on the rack might have shrieked like that. Dad cried out and stared at his hand. He was only slightly wounded—but the precious pistol went flying. In the movies, cops shot pistols out of bad guys' hands all the time. In real life, that was wildly unlikely. But unlikely didn't mean impossible. Whoever fired at him doubtless hadn't tried to knock away the handgun. He'd done it, though, try or not.

Another volley boomed. Thick smoke showed where the musketeers hid behind trees and rocks. It smelled like a Fourth of July fireworks display in a park. Warm summer nights and fireflies didn't belong in this chaos, but Annette couldn't help thinking of them. The smell of gunpowder smoke summoned them to her mind.

"Get the gun!" Dad said urgently. He was opening and closing his right hand, trying to make it work again, while blood dripped from the webbing between his thumb and forefinger.

Annette took two steps toward the pistol. Then a spooked horse bowled her over. She squawked and fell. The horse didn't trample her. That was good luck, the way Dad's losing the handgun was bad luck. The beast's hooves thumped down all around her. It could as easily have kicked her in the head.

As soon as the horse thudded away, Annette's mother pulled her to her feet. "Are you all right?" Mom asked in a strange, shaky voice.

"Get the pistol!" Dad said again, and then, "Where the devil did it go?" The horse that had knocked Annette down wasn't the only one going crazy. One of the animals must have kicked it away—in the chaos, who could say where?

And Annette and her mother got no time to search for it. Men were running out of the woods. Some wore robes, others tunics and breeches. Some had swords, some had spears, some had pistols. A few wore helmets. None seemed to have any other armor. They were all screeching like banshees.

"Run!" Dad shouted. "I'll hold them off!"

But there was nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. The brigands were coming from both sides. One of them grabbed Annette. She flipped him over her shoulder and slammed him to the ground. She'd taken years of judo classes. She'd never imagined they would come in handy against a ruffian who might not have had a bath in his whole life. But they did. Nobody in this world fought like that. The bandit landed on his head and lay still afterwards. Annette hoped she hadn't killed him, but she didn't hope very hard.

She sent another man flying a moment later. Then somebody clouted her just above the ear with a spearshaft. All the judo classes in the world couldn't help her with that. The world flared red for a moment, then went black. She crumpled, and never knew when she hit the ground.

The caravanmaster's horn call meant trouble up ahead. Clutching his pike, Jacques trotted forward to see what had gone wrong. Up till now, nothing had. Older men who'd made a lot of these journeys were talking about how smooth this one was. Talking too soon was never a good idea.

If a robber band wanted to strike the caravan, this was a good place to do it. The forest came down close to the road on either side. They weren't close to any towns. All the same, Jacques had trouble believing anyone would try to bother this particular caravan. Its guards and merchants could put up a good fight.

Then he saw the roadblock ahead. The tree trunks and boulders made sure nobody was going forward. From behind the roadblock, a man shouted in Arabic: "Surrender, you dogs! You cannot hope to get away!"

"If you want us, you'll have to take us!" the caravanmaster yelled back. He was up on horseback. His sword leaped free of the scabbard. The blade flashed in the sun. He shouted again, this time in French: "God and Jesus and sweet Henri with us!"

A dozen men popped up behind the barricade. They rested their muskets on the timber and stone to steady their aim. The boom of the volley stunned Jacques' ears.

Something slammed Jacques in the chest. He groaned and staggered. Breathing hurt, but not the way it would have if he'd got a bullet in the lungs. He tore open his surcoat and looked down at himself. His back-and-breast was lead-splashed and dented, but it had held the bullet out.

Not everyone was so lucky. Men went down, some dead, others wounded. The caravanmaster's horse fell, too. The master had kicked free of the stirrups, though, and was on his feet, still waving that sword. "Come on, men!" he cried. "We can beat these swine!" If the robbers spoke French, that would make them angry. You couldn't call a Muslim anything worse than a pig.

Those musketeers ducked away from the barricade to reload. Another dozen or so took their place. They poured another volley into the guards at the head of the column. More brigands were shooting from the woods to either side. Jacques ground his teeth. Whoever'd planned this attack knew just what he was doing.

"Forward!" the caravanmaster shouted, aiming his sword at the roadblock. "They can't have any more men with guns back there now!" He trotted toward the jumble of stones and felled trees. Cheering, the guards still on their feet followed.

But he was wrong. A man aimed a cavalry pistol at him and shot him in the chest. The caravanmaster was unarmored. He hadn't thought he would need to be a general, too. He groaned. He gurgled. He dropped his sword. He staggered and fell.

The charge he would have led came to a ragged halt. More musketeers popped up behind the barricade and gave the guards another volley. This one was more ragged than the two that had gone before. Jacques knew what that meant. The bandits who'd fired the first volley had reloaded, and the faster men hadn't waited for the slower ones to finish.

A bullet cracked past his ear. That was the noise bullets made when they came too close. Jacques laughed, not that it was funny. How could you come any closer than getting hit square in the chest? But his face wasn't armored. His arms and legs weren't, either.

Another bullet flew by. An instant later, it struck home with a soft, wet, slapping sound. A horse screamed. Jacques thought it was a horse, anyway. With sounds of pain, you couldn't always tell.

"What do we do?" somebody cried, panic in his voice. "Jesus and Henri, what can we do? Do they aim to murder us all?"

If they did, they were like no bandits Jacques had ever heard of. Part of the profit in robbing a caravan came from selling its goods. The rest came from selling people into slavery—or, if they were rich enough, from holding them for ransom. Jacques wasn't rich. Fear made his limbs feel light. He didn't want to fall into slavery. But he didn't want to die here, either.

Screams and shouts and curses rose from farther back along the length of the caravan. He knew what that meant. The bandits were seizing traders, who couldn't fight back so well. They had the guards right where they wanted them.

He started running back. He couldn't help anybody where he was, not even himself. Farther back, he might be able to do Khadija and her family some good. As he ran, he realized he should have thought of Muhammad al-Marsawi and his family. Well, too bad. He'd thought the way he'd thought, and he'd meant it, too.

He got shot a few heartbeats later.

One moment, he was running as fast as he could. The next, he lay in the dirt by the side of the road, howling like a won". Blood turned the can" of his left trouser leg red. He pulled up the trouser leg to look at the wound. It could have been worse. A bullet had torn a chunk of meat out of that big muscle. But it hadn't hit a bone, and he dared hope it hadn't torn the tendon. If the wound didn't fester, he might not even limp in a few weeks.

But that would be in a few weeks. Now . . .

He took his knife from his belt and cut a strip of cloth from the trouser leg to bandage the wound and slow the bleeding. He'd just finished, biting his lip against the pain, when a man with a sword ran up to him. "Yield or die!" the bandit shouted, first in Arabic, then in French.

Jacques let the knife fall in the dirt. "I yield," he said in Arabic. Even if he killed this robber, he couldn't hope to get away.

"Ah, you speak a real language. That means you will sell for more." The bandit sounded happy. Jacques had used Arabic for just that reason. If he was going to be a slave, he wanted to be a valuable one. He'd get treated better. The man who stood over him asked, "Can you walk?"

"I don't think so," Jacques answered. "Not far, anyway."

"All right." The bandit shouted for a friend. The friend came up leading a horse. Earlier that morning, one of the merchants in the caravan had been riding it. Now it was just loot. Jacques realized he was just loot, too. The only reason the robbers kept him alive was to make money selling him. He was glad they had any reason at all.

He couldn't mount by himself, not with the wounded leg. The brigands helped him up onto the horse's back. They tied his feet together under the animal and tied his hands to the reins. By then, the fighting was almost over. A last few bangs, a last few screams, and it ended. The merchants and the guards were either dead or captured. All their trade goods were spoil for the bandits.

Unwounded men who'd surrendered were put to work clearing the roadblock. Jacques got to watch that. He was no good as a laborer, not right now. One of his captors gave him water to drink. He would rather have had wine, but took what he could get. Up there on horseback, he looked around for Khadija and her father and mother. He didn't see any of them. He hoped she was all right—and her parents, too.

When Annette Klein woke up, she wished she hadn't. In those first horrible seconds, in fact, she wasn't sure she had. She was convinced she'd died and gone to hell. For one thing, her head still felt as if it wanted to fall off. Most of her wished it would. She'd seen plenty of movies and TV shows where the hero got knocked cold and was running and jumping and fighting again five minutes later. Real life didn't work like that. She felt as if her brain had just banged off the inside of her skull—and it had.

For another, her eyes didn't want to focus. And even when they did, she didn't want to believe they had. The ground seemed much too close, and everything else was upside down.

She tried to raise a hand to her aching head, and found she couldn't. What with everything else that had gone wrong, she wondered for a panicky instant if she was paralyzed. Then she realized she couldn't move her hands because they were tied to her feet. After she got clouted, somebody'd slung her over a horse's back and tied her up so she couldn't fall off—or get away.

The world made more sense. That didn't make her feel any better, though. The pounding pain in her head and the unnatural way the ground going by looked combined to make her seasick or horsesick or whatever the right word was. She threw up all over the dirt below.

Somebody in robes came up to her. She could see only the bottom half of him, and that was as upside down as anything else. "So—you are awake, are you?" he said in Arabic.

Annette spat a couple of times before answering, trying to get the vile taste out of her mouth. She didn't have much luck. "I—think so," she said.

He laughed. It was the laugh of someone who'd seen plenty of people in the same boat as she was. It was, in other words, the laugh of a man who took slaves. Ice and fire ran through her. She hated him and feared him at the same time. Whatever else he was, though, he wasn't a man who was more cruel to his livestock than he had to be. "Would you like some water?" he asked. "Can you sit right side up on a horse?"

"Water? Oh, please!" Annette said. The other took more thought, and thought wasn't easy. "I'll try to sit up. It has to be better than this." Maybe she could escape when they untied her. It worked in the movies.

By the time they got through dealing with her, she decided she would never take another movie seriously as long as she lived. She was still too sick and woozy to run, let alone to fight anybody. But even if she hadn't been, the man who let her down from the horse called a couple of friends over. One of them had a pistol. The other one had a musket. Those weapons weren't accurate out to any distance. But the bandits couldn't very well miss if she was only a meter or two away.

They didn't come any closer than that, either. "You're the one who sent Ibrahim flying, aren't you?" the fellow with the pistol said.

Her memory of the fight was fuzzy, but she nodded. A moment later, she wished she hadn't—pain stabbed through her battered head. She was lucky she didn't have a fractured skull— or, for all she knew, maybe she did.

"In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful, could you teach others that trick?" the bandit asked eagerly. "We're all still laughing at Ibrahim because of the way he came down, thump!"

"Maybe," Annette said vaguely. She had to try three times before she could climb up into the saddle. She sat there swaying, doing her best not to see double. She pointed a shaky finger at the pistoleer. "And how dare you call God 'the compassionate, the merciful' when you speak of fighting tricks?"

All the bandits thought that was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. "Hear how she talks-—like a qadi al-Islam" the pistoleer said.

"She was an honest judge, Daud, for you did wrong," replied the man with the musket.

The brigand who'd let Annette down from the horse now tied her feet under it. He straightened up, another length of rope in his hand. "She is a warrior maid and a scholar, both at once," she said. "Truly she will bring a great price."

"Inshallah" the other two murmured—if God wills it.

"Here," the first man said to Annette. "Give me your hands, and I will tie them to the reins. We don't want you getting away— oh, no, indeed."

Numbly, she did. He knew what he was doing with ropes. He tied her tight enough to keep her from getting loose, but not tight enough to cut off her circulation. This all seemed more like a bad dream than reality—except for her headache, which was much too real. But I'm supposed to start at Ohio State soon! She wanted to shout it. She wanted to scream it. But she knew too well it wouldn't do her the least bit of good.

She looked around. If she moved her head very slowly, she could do that without hurting herself too badly. "Where are my mother and father?" she asked. It wasn't quite like screaming, Mommy!—although she felt like doing that, too.

The bandits put their heads together. After half a minute or so, the one with the pistol said, "Our friends who are going on to Marseille must have taken them."

"We're . . . not going on to Marseille?" Annette asked. Another hope crashed and burned. Dad might have been able to use his radio—if a robber hadn't stolen it. Even if a robber did, she and her family might have been recognized there. Crosstime Traffic people could have bought them or stolen them away. That might still happen with her mother and father. Annette gulped. "Where—are we going?"

"Madrid," the pistoleer answered. "A really great city with a really great market. Madrid!"

Now Jacques knew what Khadija looked like. The slavers had stripped the veils off all the Muslim women they'd captured. Their modesty wasn't worth protecting any more—a slave had no modesty, except what the master granted. And buyers would want to see what they were getting before they parted with their dinars.

Some of the Muslim women took it very badly. By the way they fussed and carried on, the bandits might have stripped them naked. And so the bandits might have, if they'd wanted to—who could have stopped them? Those women tried to cover their faces with their hands and turned their heads away whenever they saw a man looking at them. When men looked at them from two directions at once, they didn't know what to do. It might have been funny if it weren't so sad.

Khadija wasn't like that. She rode along like a captive princess—her attitude told the world that, whatever had happened to her, it wasn't her fault. She had a big, nasty bruise on one side of her face. A slaver must have had to hit her hard to make her give up. Somehow, that didn't surprise Jacques.

But for the bruise, she was very pretty—not beautiful, but very pretty. He'd already known she had large brown eyes. Her nose was strongly arched, but not too big. She had the finest, whitest, straightest teeth of anyone he'd ever seen. His own teeth were good. Even his wisdom teeth were coming in without giving him torments, the way so many people's did. But her teeth were better. He had to admit it. A good thing the bandit hadn't broken them when he hit her. Of course, he might have been careful about that, because broken teeth would make her worth less. The bruise would go away. Broken teeth were there for good.

The brigands didn't mind if friends among their captives rode with other friends. Jacques was shy at first about moving up next to Khadija, but he soon did. She was the only person in this luckless crew he cared anything about. His fellow guards—older men—were gloomy and sour, and they had reason to be. They had to know they'd likely go to the mines or to galley slavery or something like that—a short life, and not a merry one.

All Khadija said when they first got close enough to talk was, "So they caught you, too."

"I'm afraid so," Jacques said. "How are you?"

"My head hurts," she answered matter-of-factly.

"I believe it," he said. "The whole left side's all over purple."

"Is it?" Her mouth twisted. "Well, I'm lucky not to have a mirror, then. What happened to you?"

He knew what she was asking. Did you just give up? She would have scorned him if he'd quit without putting up a fight. But he hadn't, and he had the wound to prove it, even if it was on the side away from her. "I got shot in the leg," he said, not without pride.

"Oh!" Khadija's mouth got bigger still. "How is it?"

"It hurts." He was as matter-of-fact as she had been. "But it's not too bad. No broken bone, and I'm not hamstrung. As long as the wound doesn't go bad, I'll be all right in a while." Telling that to himself—telling that to the world—made him feel a little less as if a wildcat were gnawing on the leg. A little.

"I hope so." She sounded as if she meant it. "They're taking us to Madrid. Isn't that dreadful?"

Jacques only shrugged. "Madrid? Marseille? Naples? What difference does it make to a slave?"

"It makes a difference to me," Khadija said. "My family and friends are in Marseille. If I went on the block there, they'd buy me and set me free. My father and mother are on the way there now, with the rest of the slavers." Up till then, she'd been strong as an iron bar. But at last her face crumpled. "And I'm all alone here, and I don't know what to do."

He couldn't even reach out and pat her hand, not when he was tied to his horse's reins. In French, he said, "You're not alone here unless you want to be." He wasn't sure he could get the exact meaning across in Arabic, and he didn't want her to misunderstand him here.

She didn't say anything for most of a minute, and her face didn't show anything, either. He remembered she was a master merchant's daughter. She would have more ways than a veil to hide her thoughts. When at last she smiled, the sun might have come out, even though it was already shining. "That is very kind," she answered, also in French. "Truly we are partners in misfortune." She added, "That is the kind of fortune that never misses."

In spite of everything, Jacques laughed. "Well said! You have a way with words."

"You give me too much credit," Khadija said. "It is a saying from—a book of proverbs, I guess you might call it."

"It doesn't sound like any proverb I ever heard," Jacques said. "What is the name of this fabulous book?"

To his surprise, Khadija blushed. "It's called The Devil's Wordbook," she answered. With his hands tied, Jacques couldn't make the sign of the wheel, but he started the gesture anyway. She saw him do it. "There—I knew that would happen," she said. "It's not a bad book, just a ... sharp-tongued one. It's been one of my father's favorites for a long, long time, and he taught me to like it, too."

"The Devil's Wordbook." Jacques tasted the name. It sounded unsavory. It sounded downright unholy. But Muhammad al-Marsawi had struck him as not only a clever man but a good one. And Khadija was the closest thing to a friend he had in the world right now. He didn't want to think ill of her. "Tell me another proverb from this wordbook, then," he said, a challenge in his voice.

She frowned, then nodded. "All right. It calls a beggar someone who has relied on the assistance of his friends."

Jacques needed a couple of heartbeats for that to sink in. When it did, he winced. "Whoever wrote that book dipped his pen in bile, didn't he?"

"Oh, yes," Khadija answered.

"Give me another one," Jacques said. Anything that helped pass the time was good.

Khadija frowned again. Then she gave him one that struck close to home—probably too close to home—for both of them: "It says an auctioneer is a man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a pocket with his tongue."

Paris had plenty of pickpockets, so Jacques got that one right away. He winced again, more painfully this time. He and Khadija would both go under the hammer before long, and some auctioneer would feed his children because of them. He said, "Tell me another one."

"Do you know what an interregnum is?" Khadija said the word in both Arabic and French. Jacques hadn't known the Arabic term. The French . . .

"When a kingdom has trouble with the succession, it's the time between kings."

"That's right." He won a smile from Khadija, which felt even better than praise from Duke Raoul. She went on, "Well, The Devil's Wordbook calls an interregnum the period during which a monarchical country is governed by a warm spot on the cushion of a throne."

Tied up or not, on his way to be sold as a slave or not, Jacques laughed out loud. For three or four heartbeats, he forgot all about his troubles. He wondered if anyone had ever given him a more precious gift. "They ought to hear that in Ireland and the Germanies," he said. Those lands had lots of rulers and lots of strife, so they also had lots of interregnums.

"Maybe they should." But Khadija's smile faded like sunshine after the clouds rolled in. She tried to lift a hand to her head. Her bonds wouldn't let her, any more than Jacques' let him shape the sign of the wheel. "I'm sorry," she muttered. "Sometimes it feels like they're mining for lead between my ears, and they've just sharpened their picks."

"That can happen when you get hit," Jacques said sympathetically. Sometimes people got better in a few days or a few weeks. But he knew men who still got headaches and had trouble thinking clearly years after they were hurt. He didn't say anything like that to Khadija. It would have lowered her spirits. And lowering hers would have lowered his.

What was southern France in the home timeline held four Muslim kingdoms—actually, one was a principality and one was an emirate—in this alternate. Annette got to see them all, in what seemed a slow-motion journey. One field of wheat looked like another. So did one vegetable garden or meadow or vineyard or olive grove.

Cows and horses and sheep and goats and (on Christian farms) pigs were their familiar selves. They weren't so highly bred as they were in the home timeline. Many more of them looked sickly than they would have in her France. Anthrax wasn't a terrorist weapon here. It was an ordinary disease, a livestock-killer that sometimes killed farmers and herdsmen, too.

Little by little, her headaches eased. They came less often, and didn't—quite—make her wish someone would cut off her head. One of the slavers made her a sort of tea from willow leaves. It tasted nastier than anything she'd ever drunk. To her surprise, though, it did take the edge off the headaches. Then she remembered that willow leaves had salicylic acid in them, and salicylic acid was most of the way toward being aspirin. Some folk remedies really worked.

She kept wishing Crosstime Traffic people would swoop down out of the sky in a helicopter and rescue her. There were only two things wrong with that. This alternate had no helicopters. And nobody in Marseille knew where she was. Crosstime Traffic hadn't been here very long, and was still setting down, setting up, and exploring. And southern France might not look big on a map, but it sure did when you rode across it on horseback.

She thought she would have gone straight round the bend if not for Jacques. To her, being captured and sold was something out of a nightmare or a bad movie. To him, it was just something that happened. It wasn't good, but it was part of the world he was used to. He would have had trouble believing how most people in Columbus took fender-benders for granted. Nobody liked them, but an awful lot of people ended up in one every once in a while. Annette would have traded this for a fender-bender a week the rest of her life. She didn't get choices like that, worse luck.

She didn't need long to figure out that Jacques wouldn't have been so friendly, or would have been friendly in a different way, if she were a boy and not a girl. He didn't make a pest of himself, which was something.

Even without that one, she had plenty of other things to worry about. She'd thought she might escape and try to get back to Marseille alone, or maybe with Jacques. But she never got the chance. Her captors were professionals at what they did. Nobody in the USA had ever had a job like this. There'd been slave trackers, slave hunters, before the Civil War, but slave catchers, people who caught free men and women to turn them into slaves? No, not inside the United States. And the slavers made sure they always posted guards. They made sure their prisoners' bonds were secure at night. Nobody got loose. Nobody got away.

After Jacques' leg healed enough for him to limp around, he had the same idea. But his luck was no better than Annette's. "I had a little knife stashed in my boot," he said mournfully. "They found it when they searched me."

"Too bad." Annette meant it. She'd had a little knife strapped to her leg. She didn't have it any more. She didn't remember getting searched, which was probably a mercy. They must have done it while she was still out cold.

The Pyrenees rose in the southwest. Farmers raised some herb in their gardens. Its smell on the breeze was familiar, but Annette couldn't place it. When she asked Jacques, he said, "That's fennel, isn't it?"

"Fennel! Of course it is!" Annette said. Now she knew what the odor reminded her of—the Italian sausage on a pizza.

Jacques was giving her a curious look, and she knew why, too. She should have been more familiar with a southern spice than he was. To cover herself, she said, "That knock in the noggin scattered more of my brains than I'd thought. I'm lucky to remember my own name, let alone fennel."

It worked. "Oh, yes," Jacques said seriously. "That can happen."

She wondered why keeping her secret mattered now. What difference would telling him the truth make? Odds were he wouldn't believe it. And even if he did, what could he do about it?

In the end, training told. She kept quiet. Jacques might get away or buy his freedom after she told him. Even if he didn't, he might tell his master or his fellow slaves. Word might spread. And whatever word did spread would be garbled. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name. Surer—since the concussion, she sometimes really did have to fight to hold on to who she was. But talk here about Crosstime Traffic would be talk about witches and wizards, or at best talk about alchemists. The company didn't need that kind of talk, and this alternate didn't need it, either. It could send people here looking in too many wrong directions, just when they were finally starting to come out from under the shadow of the Great Black Deaths.

Crossing the mountains meant crossing a border, as it did in the home timeline. On the other side, the people who didn't speak Arabic spoke Catalan, the same as they did back home. It wasn't quite the same Catalan, any more than the French and the Arabic were the same. Annette could pick out a word here and there, but that was about all. She hadn't learned it through her implant or studied it on her own. She did a little better with signs, but there weren't many signs to see. Gutenberg had never been born in this alternate. No one had invented printing here.

They kept on to the south and west. They crossed the Ebro at Zaragoza. By then, lisping Castilian Spanish had replaced Catalan. Annette had an even harder time with that, especially when she heard it. The country was broad and high and rolling, hot and dry, with herds of sheep and also camels—on its way to being a desert if not quite there. The camels didn't seem out of place, even if Spain in the home timeline had none. She wanted to say something to Jacques about the camel being the sheep of the desert. But the pun worked only in English, not in French or Arabic.

Maybe that was just as well. She wondered if such a bad pun meant her wits were coming back or if she had more brain damage than she thought.

Madrid in the home timeline was an enormous city, not much smaller than Paris. In this alternate, Madrid was bigger and more important than Paris. That didn't make it an enormous city, but did make it a fair-sized one. At a guess, Annette thought it held somewhere between a quarter-million and half a million people. In an alternate without good roads, that was about as big as a city could get.

Suburbs straggled out beyond the big, thick walls that defended the city's heart. Houses showed the street nothing but walls and doors and narrow, shuttered windows. They centered on their courtyards, where only family and friends would come. The richer homes had whitewashed walls and red tile roofs. They looked a little like houses in California in the home timeline. Those houses were often called California Spanish. The weather was similar, so the colonists coming up from Mexico had brought with them what worked in their Spain.

Poorer homes weren't whitewashed. Their walls were of plain mud brick, their roofs often thatched. And hovels could be made of anything at all, which meant mostly wood and rubble. People here didn't have sheet iron and plastic.

Madrid was richer than Paris as well as being bigger. Even the suburbs outside the wall had cobblestoned streets. That made the way less dusty than it had been. Less dusty, yes—less smelly, no. Madrid had no sewers. People threw slops and garbage into the street from rich homes and poor alike. Flies buzzed. Dogs and pigs rooted through the rubbish. So did skinny children, looking for things they could use that their richer neighbors didn't want.

Annette had seen that in Paris, too. It made her sad and angry at the same time. People shouldn't have to live as scavengers off other people. But in so many alternates—and, even now, some places in the home timeline—they did.

Jacques took the scrounging children for granted. From things he'd said, he hadn't been that poor when he was a little boy, but he knew plenty of people who had. Wrinkling his nose, he said, "You forget how much a city stinks till you've been away from one for a while."

"They shouldn't smell this bad," she said. "People ought to be cleaner. They shouldn't throw trash and slops every which way."

"What are you going to do with that stuff, then? You can't just leave it in your house." Jacques sounded like someone who'd just heard something silly being reasonable. By this alternate's standards, he was.

They passed over a drawbridge and through a gate and into the walled part of Madrid. Two low, broad buildings stood side by side next to a market square. Annette and the female captives were herded into one, Jacques and the men into the other. Annette needed only a moment to realize what the buildings were— slave barracks. And that market was bound to be a slave market. Some time before very long, they were going to sell her there like a bit of mutton. And she couldn't do a thing about it.