Jacques knew what he thought. He needed a little while to realize the black man would think the opposite. He said, "If there were any Jews here, they would tell us we're both wrong."
"Ah, do you have Jews in your country?" Musa ibn Ibrahim asked. "I know there are some in the Maghrib, the land between my kingdom and Spain, and they say some of these Spaniards are Jews, too. In my land, though, we have none."
"You're lucky. We have a few," Jacques said. "We'd have more, too, if we didn't give them a hard time."
Musa looked at him. "We feel that way about Christians."
The Kingdom of Versailles felt that way about Muslims, too. But it couldn't treat them as badly as it treated Jews. The rich, powerful Muslim lands to the south would have gone to war to protect the Muslims in the kingdom if it did more than make them pay a special tax. Jacques didn't want to admit his land was too weak to do everything it wanted to. He changed the subject instead, asking, "What kind of dangerous animals do you have?"
"You mean, besides Christians?" Musa said slyly. Jacques spluttered. The black man laughed. He'd wanted to hit a nerve, and he had. He went on, "Well, the beast a warrior measures himself against is the lion."
"Lions? You really have lions?" Jacques said. Musa gave back a sober nod. The idea of lions impressed Jacques almost as much as the other man's color. "Have you hunted them?"
"I have killed three," Musa ibn Ibrahim declared with somber pride. Believe me or not—I don't care. I know what I have done, his manner seemed to say. Because of that manner, Jacques did believe him. Musa asked, "And what beasts have you? Not lions, by the way you speak of them. You are lucky if you do not."
"We have wolves and bears," Jacques said.
They were just names to the other captive. Jacques had to explain what they were. At first, Musa wasn't much impressed. "Wild dogs? We have wild dogs, too. I did not think to name them."
"Big wild dogs," Jacques said. "They can weigh almost as much as a man. And they hunt in packs. A lion could kill one wolf, I suppose. But I don't think a lion could beat a pack of wolves."
"Lions hunt in prides, too," Musa said, which Jacques hadn't known. "What of these other beasts, these beers?"
"Bears," Jacques said, laughing. "A beer is something else." As well as he could, he told Musa about bears. He wondered how much sense his words made to the black man. Then he wondered how well he understood Musa. Which of them was the looker, which the image he looked at? Or were they just two mirrors, looking back at each other?
Annette found herself bored in the slave barracks. She'd expected a lot of things, but not that. She asked permission to write a letter to her kin in Marseille, asking for ransom. The men who'd caught her refused. "It would take too long," one of them said. "We need the money now, as soon as the next auction comes. And we would have to pay to send the letter all that way, and find someone who was going there to carry it."
They plainly meant it. They'd stopped worrying about her judo tricks, too—they didn't seem to have time to worry about them. In the home timeline, she could have telephoned or e-mailed or faxed or, when speed wasn't too important, put a stamp on an envelope and thrown it in a mailbox. Mail here was catch-as-catch-can. If you wanted to send a letter, you found someone who was going your way and paid him to take it. The person who got it would usually pay him a little something, too.
The other women in the barracks thought she was odd for knowing how to read and write. If any of them could, they didn't want to admit it. To amuse themselves, they spun wool into thread, rolled dice for pebbles they dug out of the rammed-earth floor, and chattered. The chatter didn't amount to much—mostly how they'd got caught and how many men would be sorry they weren't coming home. The Muslims among them also complained about how naked they felt without their veils.
To keep from seeming like a white crow, Annette complained about that, too, even if she didn't mean it. But she said, "Even if we don't have men to take care of us, we've got to do the best we can for ourselves. After all, we're people, too."
A couple of the others nodded. More looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. "What can we do?" one of them said. "They're going to sell us, and then we'll be stuck with whoever buys us."
"Even so," Annette said stubbornly. "We can make things better, or we can make them worse. Look at Sheherezade and the stories she told to Harun al-Rashid. She was just a harem girl, but she ended up a queen." The Arabian Nights were popular in this alternate, too. Not all the stories were the same as the ones in the home timeline, but lots of different versions circulated there, too.
"Yes, but Sheherezade was beautiful," said the other woman, who unfortunately wasn't.
"So what?" Annette said. That made all the other women exclaim. To them, if you weren't beautiful, you weren't anything. "So what?" Annette repeated. "Harun al-Rashid had lots of beautiful girls in his harem. He was the caliph. He could have as many beautiful girls as he wanted. If Sheherezade had been beautiful and stupid, he would have called her once and never bothered to do it again. She didn't get where she was because she was beautiful. She got there because she was smart. And if you're smart, you can get somewhere, too."
In the home timeline, that would have been water to a fish.
Here, Annette might have been preaching revolution. Some of the women saw what she was driving at. One of them said, "If you're really smart, you won't let your master know just how smart you are."
That might have held some truth in the home timeline, too. Bits and pieces of sexism lingered there even at the end of the twenty-first century. They sometimes popped up in surprising places, too. Things were better than they had been a hundred years before, though, and much better than they had been two hundred years earlier. Here, what the woman said was plain old good advice.
"If you want to show off how clever you are, you'll end up in trouble," another woman predicted.
"If you need to show off, you aren't as clever as you think you are," Annette said. "I didn't mean that. But if you act helpless and foolish all the time, what will happen to you?"
"You'll catch a man, and he'll take care of you." The other woman looked down her nose at Annette. "Well, you probably won't. Your tongue is too sharp."
"I'd rather have a sharp tongue than an empty head," Annette said. The other woman squealed. For a second, Annette thought she'd end up in a fight, which she hadn't done since she was in the fourth grade. She remembered using that judo throw against one of the slavers—it was about the last thing she did remember for a while. The other woman would fly through the air with the greatest of ease, too, if she came after her.
But she didn't. She just said, "You'll find out," and went back to her spinning.
Most of the time, the comeback would only have annoyed Annette. The way things were, it held too much truth for comfort. One way or another, she would find out, and sooner, not later. Before long, there would be another auction, and someone would buy her. Then she would see firsthand what slavery was like. If she ever escaped, that might come in handy as research. If she didn't. . .
Or maybe no one would buy her, and she'd have to come back to the barracks. Would that be better or worse? She had a hard time deciding. At least she wouldn't turn into property. But she would have to face the humiliating notion that nobody wanted her, even as a slave.
A slave. Back when she was training, they'd warned her, Anything that can happen to anyone else in that alternate can happen to you. Oh, she was immunized against diseases the locals could catch. Drinking the water probably wouldn't give her the galloping trots. She had had insect repellent to keep away bedbugs and lice. Now she didn't, and she itched. But the idea that they could sell her in the market square like a kilo of corned beef seemed ridiculous.