"I hope I have," the trader answered. "But that's my worry, don't you think?"
The question made Jacques scratch his head. He scratched his head a lot around Muhammad al-Marsawi and his family. They seemed to look at the world through a different window, and they saw different things. And then they went and talked about them! Wasn't salvation everybody's business? Jacques had never known anybody, Christian or Muslim, who didn't think so. Society on both sides of the border was set up with that in mind. If Jacques understood Muhammad al-Marsawi—and he thought he did—the merchant said what other people thought didn't matter.
Jacques didn't ask him about that. One of these days, Muhammad and his family would come back to Paris. Duke Raoul could worry about it then. It was too much for a messenger and caravan guard to get to the bottom of.
And Jacques had other things to worry about. The road from Lyon went south and a little east. The country rose. There were fewer farms and more forests. Some places, trees and brush hadn't been cleared back far enough from the road. Some places, they'd hardly been cleared back at all. He muttered to himself. All the guards were muttering and fuming. If this wasn't ambush country, he'd never seen any that was.
He breathed a sigh of relief when they made it to Grenoble, in the valley of the Isère. But a look south from the town told him the worst part of the journey still lay ahead. Real mountains still stood between the caravan and Marseille, mountains with forests of oak and ash and elm and hickory on their lower slopes and darker, gloomier pine woods farther up their sides. They might have been daring honest men to come through them.
A long, slogging day and a half out of Grenoble . . .
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.