In High Places

Nine

Dumnorix looked at the musket in one guard's hands. "Strong magic," he said. "Strong, strong, strong." He bent his arm and made his biceps stand up to show what he meant. "It goes bang! here. Over there, a man falls dead." Like most men who'd been in battle, he could do a good impression of a dead man.

"Not magic." Jacques fumbled for words, using the bits of Breton he knew and the even smaller bits of the language that sounded like it he'd learned from the redhead. "/Vo£ magic," he repeated. "Knowing how. Like sword. Like shovel." He hefted the one he was carrying.

Dumnorix tapped the side of his head with a forefinger. He spun the finger by his ear. He said, "You're crazy," just in case Jacques missed the point.

Jacques made the sign of the wheel over his own breast. "By Jesus and Henri, I swear this is true," he said. Dumnorix only shrugged. He knew nothing of Jesus and Henri. The other slaves who'd come here with Jacques knew who God's Sons were, but they didn't follow them. Jacques had heard the guards use Jesus' name, but never Henri's. I'm the only true Christian here, he thought.

"Knowing how? Art? Skill?" As Dumnorix spoke, his pick dug into the ground. He'd wasted no time learning to do enough to keep the guards from giving him too hard a time. Did that mean his people kept slaves, so he knew from the other end how much work he needed to do and how little he could get away with? Jacques wouldn't have been surprised. Dumnorix asked, "How?"

Before Jacques answered, he loaded a couple of shovelfuls of dirt into a basket by his feet. A guard walking along next to the trench kept on walking. Jacques had learned how much he could get away with, too. Once the guard was gone, he stooped and picked up a little clod of dirt and ground it to powder between his thumb and forefinger. He pointed to the powder with his other forefinger and said, "Word is?"

"Powder," Dumnorix answered in his language. Jacques hoped that was what the answer meant, anyhow. He'd guessed wrong a couple of times. Sooner or later, though, you sorted things out.

"Powder," he echoed now. Dumnorix corrected his pronunciation. He tried again. The older man nodded. "Is special powder in muskets," Jacques went on. Muskets was a word Dumnorix had had to learn, because his language had no term for firearms. "Powder burns. Burning pushes out bullet." That was another French word. "Bullet flies fast, like arrow. Hits, kills."

"Huh," Dumnorix said. That might have meant anything. The redheaded man did some more work—another guard's eye was on him. Jacques shoveled some dirt. The slave with the basket—a man who spoke the sneezing language Jacques couldn't understand at all—heaved it up out of the trench at the end of the roadway.

The guard nodded. As long as the slaves looked busy enough, the men in the mottled clothes didn't give them too hard a time. More often than not, they weren't mean to the slaves just for the sake of being mean. They saved a lot of that for the locals.

Jacques remembered the horseman coming back with his necklace of ears.

Once the guard turned away, Dumnorix and Jacques and the slave with the basket slacked off again. "Powder, eh?" Dumnorix said. "What kind of powder?"

Jacques knew: sulfur and charcoal and saltpeter. He didn't know how to say any of them, except in French. He thought he might have been able to get the idea of charcoal across in Arabic, but that didn't do Dumnorix any good. "Not enough words," he answered—a phrase he used more often than he wanted to.

Dumnorix scowled. "Maybe you don't know enough words," he said. "But maybe you're making this up, too."

"Liar? You say liar?" Jacques let his shovel fall to the dirt. "You say liar?" He set himself and waited to see what happened next.

The blond and redheaded men who spoke Dumnorix's language understood what was going on. The rest of the road gang needed a little longer to figure it out, but not much. They'd all been around fights and the things that led up to fights. People started to gather around Jacques and Dumnorix. The guards gathered to watch, too. The men with the muskets didn't mind if slaves fought, as long as they didn't damage each other too badly. Sometimes the guards bet on who would win. It was fun for them. Why not? They weren't getting hit.

Dumnorix let his pick fall, too. But he didn't wade into Jacques. He was smaller, but had broad shoulders and thick arms. Scars on those arms said he'd done his share of fighting, maybe more than his share.

He waited to see if Jacques would charge him once they'd both put down the tools that could turn a fight into a killing match in a hurry. When Jacques didn't, Dumnorix nodded to himself. "No, I do not say you are a liar," he answered. "Maybe you don't know enough words. I said that, too. All right?" His posture said they would fight if it wasn't all right.

But Jacques also nodded. "Good enough." He held out his hand. Dumnorix didn't clasp it the way a man from the Kingdom of Versailles would have. Instead, his hand closed on Jacques' wrist. Jacques' hand took the redhead's wrist the same way. They let go of each other and stepped back.

The rest of the slaves returned to work. The guards drifted away. One of them snapped his fingers. Jacques had seen they sometimes did that when they were disappointed. If they'd wanted a fight so badly, they could have got one. If they'd shouted, Cowards! . . . Jacques didn't see how he and Dumnorix could have done anything but go at each other. Neither would have been able to hold up his head if they hadn't.

Guards in the Kingdom of Versailles would have done that. Jacques might have done it himself if he were a guard. The men who carried muskets were strange. It was as if they had to remember how to be mean, and weren't always good at it. Maybe Khadija knew why that was so. Jacques knew he didn't.

"Get back to work! Show's over!" one of the guards yelled in Arabic. He shouted in the language that sounded a little like it, in the sneezing tongue, and in Dumnorix's language. The guards had no trouble giving the slaves plenty of work. If they'd been more practiced at nastiness, though, they would have kept them hungry and thirsty, too.

Why didn't they? Jacques might have, if he were a master. Food cost money. But the guards and the man who told them what to do didn't worry about money. They just did what they pleased—they bossed the manor and the slaves who worked on it. Sometimes the bossing seemed to matter more to them than what the slaves actually did.

Khadija had said they were criminals. By the way she said it, having slaves was enough to make them criminals all by itself. Jacques didn't understand that. He didn't like being a slave— who did like getting the dirty end of the stick? But somebody had to do the work. Some work was hard enough or nasty enough that you couldn't pay people to do it. That didn't mean it didn't need doing. So what were you supposed to do? You made people take care of it, one way or another.

In the Kingdom of Versailles, peasants had to work on the roads in their lord's domain so many days a year. They didn't get paid for doing it, either. That wasn't slavery, not quite—nobody could buy and sell them. But it wasn't more than a long step away, either.

And real slaves, slaves of the king, worked in mines and rowed galleys. Few free men would grub for iron and lead and coal under the ground. It used them up too fast. But the kingdom couldn't get along without iron and lead and coal. So ... slaves.

Jesus had never preached against slavery. Neither had Henri. It was part of the way things worked. It always had been. Jacques had believed it always would be. If not for some of the things Khadija said, he still would. Even now, a lot of him still did.

A lot of him—but not all of him, not any more. Whatever strange place Khadija came from had transposition chambers. It had lights that shone without smoke or flame. It had muskets that fired bullet after bullet without reloading. What other marvels did it have, marvels Jacques hadn't seen yet? Things with clockwork and gears that could do the work of slaves? He wouldn't have been surprised.

In that case, though, why would anybody there want ordinary slaves at all? Jacques scratched his head. Not everything Khadija said made sense to him. He started to decide that that meant she didn't always make sense, period. He started to, yes, but then he remembered he couldn't explain gunpowder to Dum-norix, either.

He was very thoughtful the rest of the day.

Gunfire in the night woke Annette a couple of times. She wondered if the locals were trying to attack the manor. If they were, a lot of them would get killed and they wouldn't break in. The guards here were murderous thugs, but they knew their business.

Annette didn't stay awake more than five minutes either time. No matter what was happening to the poor natives, she was exhausted. She didn't think the crack of doom could have kept her awake for long. Gunfire? Gunfire wasn't anything much, not when she was this tired.

More gunfire rang out as she went to the refectory for breakfast. The guards on the outer wall were yelling in several languages. "Goats?" Emishtar said. "They shout about goats?"

"I think so," Annette answered. "Why are they getting all excited about them, though?"

Emishtar looked sly. "Olive trees—small. Almond trees— small, too. Goats eat shoots. Goats eat everything."

"Oh!" Suddenly, Annette grinned. Maybe the locals had found a way to fight back without getting shot themselves. If their goats ate up the slavers' crops, they could say it was an accident.

The first thing the guards did was send some cooks' helpers to bring in the dead goats. That probably meant goat stew for the next few days. Annette didn't mind—it would be something different. She'd eaten goat in the home timeline, at Mexican and Korean restaurants. It wasn't bad, as long as you cooked it long enough to take away the toughness and gaminess.

But the guards didn't stop there. They didn't think the goats had visited by accident, any more than Annette or Emishtar did.

Had the manor really depended on those growing groves, it would have been badly hurt. Annette knew it didn't, but she couldn't expect the locals to.

A troop of mounted guards larger than the one that had ridden out the last time left the manor before noon. Annette wouldn't have wanted to get in the horsemen's way. She especially wouldn't have wanted to get in their way if she could only fight back with bow and arrow.

Some of the women who spoke the sneezing language that might have been related to Basque began to wail and keen. That only made Annette more certain they were enslaved locals. They knew what the guards could do to their kinsfolk—and they knew the guards were going out to do it.

Emishtar also saw that. "Too bad for them," she said.

"Too bad for everyone," Annette said. Emishtar nodded. After a moment, Annette realized it wasn't necessarily so. It wasn't too bad for the guards. They would have a happy time shooting at people who couldn't shoot back.

"I like goat stew," Emishtar said—she'd been watching the cooks' helpers, too, then.

"So do I," Annette said. "But when I eat goat now, I'll think of dead men, not just dead animals."

"Pray for the dead men's spirits, then eat the goat." Emishtar was superstitious and practical at the same time.

"Work!" a guard shouted in one language after another. Not all the men with assault rifles had gone off to punish the locals. Enough stayed close to the manor to make sure the slaves didn't get out of line. The guard walked over to Birigida and yelled at her in particular. Again, Annette didn't know exactly what he was saying, but she could make a pretty good guess.

When I say work, I mean you! I'll have my eye on you. If I catch you goofing off, you'll end up envying those goats!

If that wasn't what the guard meant, it had to come close. Bi-rigida nodded and smiled nervously. She said something, too. I'll be good, Mr. Guard, honest I will.

One more strongly held opinion from the guard. Was that You'd better be! or Yeah, right!? By the way Birigida flinched, Annette would have bet on Yeah, right!

The blond woman really did work at a steady clip for a while. Annette hadn't thought Birigida had it in her. Maybe the guard's warning put the fear of her gods in her. Annette hoped so, for her sake.

Seeing Birigida busy at her job, the guard didn't watch her so closely. She began looking around to see if he still had his eye on her. When Annette saw that, her heart sank. Trouble was on the way. She could feel it coming, like lightning before a strike.

She wanted to go over to Birigida and shake some sense into her, the way she might have with a five-year-old. She'd never imagined having that feeling toward somebody ten or twelve years older than she was, but sh# did. Two things held her back—knowing she'd get in trouble with the guards and knowing it wouldn't do any good anyhow. She and Birigida didn't have enough words in common for her to tell the blond woman what was wrong. And Birigida probably wouldn't listen anyway.

Emishtar had the same thought, or its first cousin. Nodding toward Birigida, she said, "That woman wants trouble. She is not happy without trouble."

"That's—" Annette started to say it was crazy. She thought it was, too, which didn't mean Emishtar was wrong. People did crazy things sometimes—keeping slaves when they had no earthly need to, for instance. Maybe Birigida needed to be the center of attention, even if it was the wrong kind of attention. If she did, she was liable to pay a high price for getting what she needed.

What did the people who ran this place need? What did the guards need? Power over other people? The chance to be the boss, without anyone to tell them no? Annette couldn't think of anything else. Computer games that let you do such things had been popular for a hundred years. Why couldn't these people have stuck with those?

Maybe the games weren't enough for them. Maybe they needed the kick of the real thing. If you were the master, Annette supposed you could enjoy yourself a lot at a place like this. But if you were a slave . . .

They didn't think about the slaves, though, except as their toys. If they tried the other side of the coin, they wouldn't like it so much.

Working all that through couldn't have taken more than a few seconds. Annette nodded, too. "I'm afraid you're right."

"Some people are fools," Emishtar said. "All different kinds of fools." She looked toward Birigida again. "Here, that is wrong kind of fool to be." •">.;

"Yes, I know." Annette bent to her own work, but kept watching Birigida out of the corner of her eye. She might have been watching a film with two trains rushing toward each other along the same track. Birigida and . . . what? Her own stupidity. That seemed to be plenty.

And it was. Birigida got behind the other women working their way down the rows. That would have made her stick out to the guards. She didn't seem to want to be so obvious. She caught up with her fellow slaves by scooting along and leaving weeds behind.

Then a guard came down the row. To no one's surprise except perhaps Birigida's (and Annette wondered if even the blond woman was very surprised), he saw what she'd been doing—or rather, what she hadn't been doing. He shouted at her and yanked out his billy club.

Was that real fear on Birigida's face, or was she playacting? If she was, the play didn't last long. The guard gave her a more thorough thumping than she'd ever had before. Her squeaks of fright turned into squeals of pain. In his own way, the guard was a professional. He knew how to make her hurt without doing much real harm—without leaving her too sore to work.

When he finished, he shouted at her in her musical language. She was crying too hard to answer right away. He shouted again. Still crying and sniffling, Birigida nodded. The guard said something else. She nodded once more. He stomped away. This time, Annette wasn't sure what he'd meant. Too many possibilities. It might have been, You'll get more of the same the next time I catch you. It might have been, We'll feed you to the pigs the next time I catch you. Or it might have been, We'll beat you and whip you and use red-hot pincers on you and then feed you to the pigs the next time I catch you.

Whatever it was, it worked, at least for the rest of the day. Birigida kept sobbing every so often, but she worked as hard as any of the other women. Annette didn't think she'd ever done that before, not for such a long time. "Maybe she sees it's not a game," she said.

"Maybe." But Emishtar didn't sound as if she believed it. She added, "Does that kind ever really learn?"

Annette wished she weren't thinking the same thing. "Well, we can hope," she said. The way Emishtar nodded said she might hope, too, but what was hope worth?

Another day done. Jacques started back toward the manor with the rest of the roadbuilding gang. A cool breeze blew from the northwest. Thick gray clouds rolled in. The air held the wet-dust smell of rain. It wasn't here yet, but it would be soon. Jacques eyed the clouds and smiled. "They can't make us work if it's pouring rain," he said to Dumnorix.

The redhead shrugged. "They can't make us work on the road," he said. "They can always make us do something."

He and Jacques didn't really talk so smoothly. Dumnorix spoke his own language, plus bits of French he'd learned from Jacques and Arabic he'd picked up from Jacques and other slaves. Jacques had his shreds of Breton, along with French and Arabic and what Dumnorix had taught him of his language. They both gestured a lot and made silly faces. It wasn't pretty or neat or quick. After a while, though, each could figure out what the other meant—most of the time.

"Bath soon," Dumnorix said.

"Yes." Jacques was bathing more and more often the longer he stayed here. He bathed more as a slave than he ever had when he was free. They had more hot water at the manor than they knew what to do with. Finding he could like baths was a surprise. The hot water helped unkink sore muscles. And the soap wasn't harsh like the stuff he'd known in the Kingdom of Versailles—it didn't want to eat away his hide along with the dirt.

His boots thumped on the paving stones other roadbuilders had already laid. A shout came from behind him. He looked back over his shoulder. Here came the guards who'd ridden out to punish the locals after the goats went for the olives and almonds. More shouts, these from the guards. The slaves hurried off the road onto the shoulder to let the horsemen ride past.

As usual when the men in the splotchy clothes returned from a fight, they were in a fine mood. They laughed and joked and sang. Why not? Jacques would have been in a fine mood, too, fighting foes who could hardly hit back. How would the guards have done against men who also had muskets that could shoot again and again?

Are they soldiers, or just bandits? He realized that was the question he was asking. He wasn't sure. They had good discipline for bandits, but would it hold up in real battle?

He laughed at himself, not that it was really funny. When would the guards need to fight a real battle? Who could hope to stand against them? Maybe other fighting men from the strange place Khadija had described. But from everything she'd said, they didn't even know the manor was here.

A drop of rain hit Jacques in the nose when he walked into the courtyard. By the time he sat down in the refectory to eat supper, the skies had opened up. Whatever he would be doing in the morning, he wouldn't be digging out the roadbed. He didn't mind that. He didn't think the master and the guards could set him to much harder work here.

He glanced over to where Khadija ate among the women. They wouldn't be able to walk in the courtyard and talk, not in this rain. Khadija was chatting with a friend she'd made, an older woman with crooked front teeth. They both kept looking towards a blond woman about halfway between them in years. She sat by herself, which was unusual. She didn't look very happy with the world. Something must have gone wrong for her during the day. Jacques wondered what.

After supper, Jacques went up to Khadija. Her older friend smiled knowingly at him. The way she acted reminded Jacques of how Khadija's aunt might have behaved in the world from which they'd both been stolen. It amused him.

Khadija noticed it, too. It annoyed her. In French, she said, "Pay no attention to her. She thinks she knows everything."

"Who doesn't?" Jacques said, which made Khadija smile. He went on, "We could stand under the eaves, if you want to." The roofs projected out some little distance from the buildings inside the wall—far enough to need columns for support. That gave shade in the summer and, Jacques was finding, kept away the rain in the winter.

"All right," Khadija said after a moment's hesitation. As they walked out there, she added, "We have to be a little more careful about what we say, though. Easier for them to listen."

"Listen how?" Jacques asked. "There's nobody close by."

"They have ways." Khadija sounded as if she knew what she was talking about.

Jacques couldn't very well argue with her. Oh, he could, but it wouldn't do him any good. He changed the subject instead, asking, "What's wrong with that blond woman? I saw you watching her in the refectory."

Khadija rolled her eyes. "Birigida, you mean?"

"If that's her name."

"She doesn't want to work, that's what's wrong with her." Khadija didn't seem to mind talking about the other slave. "What's worse is, she's too dumb to hide it. The guards watch her all the time now. When they catch her, they give her lumps. And they keep catching her, too."

"Oh," Jacques said. "No wonder she looks like her puppy just died. At that, she's lucky. If she were a man, they'd probably kill her."

"Some luck," Khadija said. "They could do things to her they likely wouldn't do to a man, you know. They haven't—yet— but they could."

Jacques nodded. Those things happened in the Kingdom of Versailles, too. He said, "Why won't she work enough to get by? As long as you do what you have to and look busy, the guards don't bother you too much. Can't she see that?"

"I think she can. I don't think she cares," Khadija said unhappily.

"What? How can she not care, if they're beating her up? Especially if they're liable to do worse than that? Is she crazy?" Jacques said.

"Not the way you mean, or I don't think so," Khadija answered. "She doesn't think she's a king or a tree or an angel." Jacques laughed—that was what he'd meant. Khadija went on, "But there are people who always have to have other people notice them so they know they're real. Do you know what I'm saying? They can be noticed for good or bad, but they can't stand it when other people ignore them."

For a moment, Jacques didn't understand. Then, all at once, he did. "Oh, yes," he said. "I once knew a fellow who kept doing stupid things so the drill sergeant would thump him."

"That's it!" Khadija said. "That's just what I mean."

"It ended badly," Jacques said. "Finally the drill sergeant got sick of this fool and clouted him with a musket butt. He broke the fellow's jaw and knocked out about six teeth. The recruit had to go home. I don't know what happened to him after that, but I don't think it was anything good."

"I'm afraid something like that will happen to Birigida," Khadija said. "I don't know what I can do to stop it."

"Sometimes you can't do anything," Jacques said. "If people are going to be fools, how can you stop them? You wish they wouldn't, but___"

Khadija bit her lip. "I know. I know. I keep telling myself that. But she'd be all right if they hadn't grabbed her and brought her here and made her a slave. It isn't fair."

Jacques put his hand on her shoulder. She started to pull away, but then stood still. Gently, he said, "You can't even talk to her, can you?"

"No." Khadija looked out at the rain. "What's that got to do with anything? She's still a person, isn't she?"

"Some people wouldn't worry as much about their friends as you do about her," Jacques said.

"My friends have the sense to take care of themselves—like you, for instance," Khadija said. "Birigida needs somebody to worry about her."

"When you're home, you probably take in lost puppies and kittens, too," Jacques said. She stirred under his hand. He guessed that meant he was right. "Puppies and kittens don't know any better than to get lost. This Birigida does, or she ought to. Worrying about her won't get you anywhere—unless you land in trouble along with her."

Khadija's sigh held more winter than the weather. "That makes more sense than I wish it did."

"All right, then. You're a sensible person. You're the most sensible person I've ever met, I think. So listen to me, all right?" Khadija didn't tell him no. He knew she heard him. Listen to him? That, he feared, was another story.

When the weather was bad, the guards didn't make people stay busy for the sake of staying busy. Annette had wondered if they would. Busywork fit the way the late twenty-first century thought. But there was only so much of it to do. And the house slaves didn't want the garden slaves helping.

Annette needed a little while to figure out why. The house slaves feared the garden slaves would steal their jobs. They didn't want to leave the manor. They thought they would have to do harder, less comfortable work outside—and they were probably right.

Even if they were, seeing how they acted made her sad. All the slaves should have pulled together against the people who ordered them around. They should have, but they didn't. They had factions, too, and the masters and the guards used those factions to keep them divided among themselves. Annette began to understand how masters in the home timeline had stayed on top for so long, even in places where slaves outnumbered them.

She tried to talk about that with Emishtar. By the look the older woman gave her, Emishtar had always understood it. "Masters are masters," she said—she might have been talking about the weather. "Some not so bad, some bad, some worse. But always masters—oh, yes."

"There shouldn't be any," Annette said fiercely. "Not anywhere. Keeping slaves is a great wickedness." In the home timeline, she didn't think she'd ever needed that word. But she didn't know another one that fit.

"Being a slave is a great sorrow," Emishtar said. "If I had silver, though, if I had gold, would I buy slaves for myself? Of course I would. Why should I work like a donkey when someone else can work for me?"

I can't blame her, not really, Annette thought. She's from a low-tech alternate. She doesn't know about machines. Slaves are the only labor-saving devices she does know. But slaves don't save labor, not really. They just put it on someone else's shoulders.

Birigida worked harder when she had nothing to do than she did out in the garden plot. Everything she did was aimed at getting a house slave's job. She could see house slaves didn't have to do so much, too.

Nothing she tried did any good. The house slaves either ignored her or screamed at her. None of them spoke her language, but that didn't matter. A shout and a scowl and a clenched fist meant the same thing to everybody. And the guards only laughed at her. They spoke her tongue, but that didn't help her. They wouldn't do anything for her. They'd seen she didn't want to work, so they wanted to make sure she did. One of them pointed in the direction of the garden, said something Annette couldn't follow, and laughed. You'll stay there till you rot, Annette guessed.

Could looks have killed, the guard would have started rotting right then.

The next day, Birigida hatched another scheme that didn't work and got her yelled at. "She'd better be careful," Annette said to Emishtar. "If she doesn't watch it, they'll put her on the roadbuilding gang."

She meant it for a joke, but Emishtar took it seriously. "Serve her right, too," she said. Emishtar made a good friend— Annette had seen that. If she wasn't your friend, though, you weren't much more than a beast to her. Birigida was not her friend. To Emishtar, Birigida was a beast you couldn't count on, nothing more.

After the storm finally blew off to the east, the guards took the women out to the garden plots. The roadbuilders got to stay in for another day. Some of the women grumbled. Annette wasn't overjoyed herself, but she understood. You couldn't make a roadbed from soupy mud. You could pull a lot of weeds, though. They came out of soft dirt more easily than from hard.

The ground was still wet when they went out to the gardens. Annette's shoes squelched in the mud. When she got down on her hands and knees and started weeding, she got her dress filthy. That would have been more annoying to a slave in the home timeline than it was here. Here, at least, the slaves could get plenty of clean clothes.

Some of the women had been surprised they didn't have to spin and weave, especially while it was raining. Annette wasn't, or not very. Her long cotton skirt came from Wal-Mart.

What it meant to Annette was that the slaveowners found it easier or cheaper to buy clothes in the home timeline than to have their slaves make them. Or maybe they just hadn't thought of that. Maybe they would one of these days. Maybe listening to their own slaves would give them ideas. Annette hoped not. They'd already had too many ideas, and too many bad ones.

As the women started to work, a guard came over and stood in front of Birigida. She looked up at him the way a kid who'd got caught doing something he wasn't supposed to at school looked at the principal. He growled at her. She nodded. He growled again. She nodded again. It went on for quite a while. At last, the guard turned his back and stomped away. He didn't kick mud in her face, but he might as well have. She bent down and started weeding as if her life depended on it.

Maybe it did.

Watching her, Annette worried. She couldn't keep that pace up for long. Nobody could. And when she slowed down, how much would she slow down? To what the rest of the slaves were doing? That would be enough to keep her out of trouble, anyway. Or would she slow down the way she usually did, doing so little she got noticed?

Annette knew which way she'd guess. She wished she didn't.

Emishtar also watched Birigida working. The woman with the crooked front teeth wasn't impressed, either. "Soon she will see a bird, or a leaf going by. That will be interesting. She will stop and watch. And she will forget what she is supposed to do."

"She shouldn't," Annette said with a sigh. "I wish she wouldn't."

Emishtar only shrugged. "They watch her all the time now. They don't watch us so much. So we don't have to do so much. We ought to thank her."

That was more cold-blooded than Annette could make herself be. She'd seen hard living in the alternate Jacques came from. She'd lived hard herself, but she'd always known she was playacting. Till those raiders caught her, the home timeline had never been far away. Emishtar, by contrast, had never had it easy. She probably ate better and worked less as a slave than she had when she was free. That didn't leave a whole lot of room inside her for compassion.

A blackbird hopped in the field. He caught worm after worm. He liked rain fine—it made the worms come up. She could watch the blackbird and work at the same time. Could Birigida? Annette kept sneaking glances over at her. The blond woman had slowed down some from her frantic opening burst, but she was still going pretty well. Annette nodded to herself in relief. She hadn't thought Birigida had it in her.

Emishtar must not have, either. "Maybe the guard really say he will kill her if she does not work," she said. "Maybe she believe him, too." She paused to murder a weed. "Me, I would have knocked her over the head a long time ago." Yes, the milk of human kindness ran thin in Emishtar.

"She's—" Annette started to say Birigida wasn't a bad person. People in the home timeline always said that. Annette couldn't do it here, not with a straight face. Birigida was out for Birigida, first, last, and always. She didn't care who knew it, either. That made her less likely to get what she wanted, of course. If she were a little smarter, she would have figured that out for herself. If she were a little smarter, she wouldn't have had a lot of her problems. Annette tried again: "She's doing fine right now." There. She'd told the truth without even being insulting. They said it couldn't be done, she thought.

"Right now, yes," Emishtar said. "Can she keep it up?"

The guards wondered, too. They circled Birigida like vultures over roadkill. If she gave them any kind of excuse, they would pounce. What happened then wouldn't be pretty. Annette could see as much. Could the blond woman? She sure hadn't been able to up till now. But she kept working away, and did enough so the guards let her alone. She wasn't the best worker in the garden plot, but for once she wasn't the worst, either.

She got through the whole day without more than a warning or two. Annette wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes.

As the sun sank in the southwest, the women trooped back toward the manor. Birigida let out a long, weary sigh. Well, for once she'd earned the right. Then, with Annette only two or three meters away, the blond woman muttered, "Lord, am I beat," to herself. Annette took two more steps, then tripped and almost fell. Birigida had spoken in English.