Annette understood why birds and other wildlife were more common here—people were less common. They didn't have the tools to kill on a large scale, either. They didn't have many tools at all, in fact. Those peasants plowed behind oxen. They used hoes and spades and a few other hand tools. In good years, they raised enough to feed themselves and the towns. People went hungry in bad years.
Seeing the towns made her want to cry. Paris was a real city—a raw, smelly city, a twisted ghost of the Paris in the home timeline, but a real city even so. Marseille, too. But even Lyon was just a little country town here. It huddled inside walls that followed the lines of the ones the Romans had built. People said wolves had howled outside those walls not long before the caravan got there.
"Is there any alternate that has enough technology to let people be comfortable but hasn't messed up the environment getting it?" she asked her father in the hostel in Lyon.
He thought for a minute, then shook his head. "Not that I've ever heard. If you've got technology, what do you use it for? To change the environment. That's what technology does. You do what seems best for yourself right then. You chop the head off the big bad wolf that ate your granny. You bake four-and-twenty blackbirds in a pie. And you worry about what happens later, later—if you worry at all."
In this alternate, wolves still ate grannies. They hadn't got anybody when they prowled close to Lyon, but they could have. Blackbirds in Europe were different from the ones back in America. They were thrushes, and acted and sounded a lot like American robins. Europe had birds called robins, too, but they weren't closely related to the American kind. It all got confusing. People who studied birds used scientific names to clear up confusion like that. Annette wasn't a scientist, and got confused.
She did know people here baked blackbirds in pies, even if they didn't make rhymes about it.
When she thought about blackbird pie, she missed Burger King and Tuesday's Tapas and Panda Express even more than she had before. "I can't wait to get home!" she exclaimed.
"Won't be long now," Dad said.
The farther south Jacques got, the richer the countryside seemed to him. Traveling in the Muslim kingdoms rubbed his nose in how backward his own was. Everybody here seemed well fed. People ate wheat bread all the time. They didn't bother with barley or rye, let alone oats. When they grew oats, they fed them to their horses. Well, so did people in the Kingdom of Versailles. But Jacques had eaten plenty of oat porridge himself. He even liked oats—as long as he was with other people who ate them, too. Down here, it would have taken a torturer to get him to admit he'd ever touched them.
And the farther south he went, the more he found himself speaking Arabic. A lot of the peasants were still Christians. They paid taxes to their overlords so they could keep their religion. And most of them spoke French. But Jacques couldn't always follow them when they did, and they couldn't always understand him, either. Their dialect was so nasal and singsong, it might as well have been another language.
They had no trouble with his Arabic. Theirs sounded pretty much the same. When he mentioned that to Muhammad al-Marsawi, the merchant said, "Arabic has dialects, too. When I talk with a man from Egypt, or from Baghdad, we have to go slowly and figure out what we mean. Sometimes we even have to write things down. The written language is the same everywhere—well, almost—but people from different places pronounce the letters differently."
"But Egypt and Baghdad—they're far, far away. They're over the sea. They're at the edge of the world." To Jacques, those all meant about the same thing. "No wonder people talk funny in places like that. We haven't come anywhere near that far, though, and already these people talk French like . .. like ... I don't know what."
"It is different from what you hear in Paris," Muhammad agreed.
"It sure is." Jacques took off his helmet, scratched his head, and put the helm on again. "Why don't you speak French the way they do down here? Really, this time."
"Oh, I can talk like this," the Muslim trader said through his nose. That was what Jacques thought he said, anyhow. The Devil might have invented this dialect to torment him. When Muhammad al-Marsawi spoke again, it was in the French of Paris: "But if I did talk like that, people up there couldn't follow me. And so I talk the northern way when I'm with folk from the north."
"Right." Thwarted again, Jacques wondered if there was anything Muhammad couldn't do. "Why don't you know all the other Arabic dialects, too?"
"I don't hear them so often or need them so much," the trader answered as easily. Jacques couldn't trip him up no matter how he tried. He wondered what kind of luck Duke Raoul would have had. Raoul was about the cleverest man he knew. But he'd started to think Muhammad al-Marsawi was just as clever. The Muslim was slick as boiled asparagus.
Jacques glanced over to the shrouded shape of Khadija. He was happier thinking about her than about her father. She gave signs of being clever, too, but—when she wasn't talking about demons—she didn't intimidate him the way Muhammad al-Marsawi did. For one thing, she was female. For another, he thought she was around his own age—though how could you be sure from a pair of eyes? And, for a third, he thought she liked him.
Oh, he didn't think she liked him like that. She'd given no sign of it if she did. But she talked at him as they traveled south. She couldn't very well talk with him, not when he answered through her father. Still, she did talk. And he thought he heard a smile in her voice every now and then. He even thought he saw a smile in her eyes once or twice. People always talked about how expressive eyes were. And eyes told a lot—when you saw them with the rest of somebody's face. By themselves, they were a lot harder to judge.
"Good day," she called to him in French two mornings after they left Lyon. "I hope you are well. I hope you slept well."
"Please thank your daughter and tell her I am very well, and that I rested well," Jacques said to Muhammad al-Marsawi. He also used French. Speaking his own language felt good. "Tell her also that I hope the same is true for her."
The trader bowed. "By some miracle, I think she will hear you even if I do not speak. Perhaps an angel will whisper your words into her ear. What do you think, eh?"
He was grinning. He might have been inviting Jacques to share the joke. The only trouble was, Jacques wasn't sure there was any joke to share. It sounded more like blasphemy to him. Of course Khadija could hear Jacques even if her father didn't pass his words on to her. Jacques had just done his best to be polite instead of talking straight to her. He hadn't imagined anybody, Muslim or Christian, joking about angels. God's messengers were serious business—just like demons.
"My father. . ." Khadija said in Arabic. Her voice held no smile now. Instead of being a daughter, she might have been a mother scolding a naughty little boy.
"Yes, I know. I went too far," Muhammad al-Marsawi answered, as if he deserved that scolding. He looked back to Jacques. "Never mind me, my young friend. There are times when my tongue runs away like an unbroken horse, and I do not even have the fun of getting drunk first. Life is full of sorrows." His face turned sad, comically sad. He made fun of himself as easily as he made fun of angels.
But this, at least, was a familiar kind of foolery. Jacques had heard other Muslims act sad that they couldn't drink wine or beer or spirits. He'd also seen some who went ahead and drank whether they were supposed to or not. To them, that was a sin, but all men were sinners, weren't they? Muslim or Christian, that didn't matter. Nobody acted the way he—or even she—should all the time.
"Easy to make peace with me," Jacques said. He lifted his pike a few inches, aiming the point toward the heavens. "Have you made your peace with God?"