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.