"I'd say the odds are against it, sir," Pierre replied. "Things have been pretty quiet lately." He paused and tugged at his beard. "7bo quiet? I didn't think so, not till now."
"I didn't, either." Guillaume's gaze swung to Jacques. "What about you, son? See anything strange on the way down from Paris?"
Jacques needed less than a heartbeat to decide he wouldn't want to be Count Guillaume's son. He would be richer than he was now—which wouldn't take much—but a lot less comfortable. To have Guillaume always looking over his shoulder, never happy with anything he did ... He shivered, down inside where it didn't show.
But the count had asked a good question. "Sir, everything was fine till I got close to this place," Jacques said. "Then I heard a stick break. I ducked behind a tree and saw a deer. No real sign of anything else. The deer spooked when it took my scent. I guess it was my scent, anyway."
"How far north of here?" Guillaume rapped out.
"Maybe two miles," Jacques said after thinking about how long he'd needed to get to the fort. "Yes, that's about right."
"Send out a patrol, Sergeant," the count told Pierre. "We don't want those people sniffing around this place. Tell our boys not just to look for men, but for tracks and any other signs we've had visitors we don't want."
The underofficer saluted. "I'll take care of it right now, your Grace." He hurried away, shouting for men as he went.
Guillaume gave his attention back to Jacques. "I don't want you heading back till the patrol comes in. If Berbers are prowling around, they might grab you. Or you might scare them off, and that wouldn't be good, either. Why don't you go over to the buttery and get some bread and sausage and a mug of wine or beer or whatever suits you? If the cook squawks, tell him to talk to me. That should take care of it."
"Thanks, your Grace. I will." Jacques didn't think the cook would bother the count. He could no more imagine taking Guillaume's name in vain than he could taking the Lord's.
As it happened, the cook recognized him from earlier visits. Jacques drank sparkling cider with his food. It wasn't as strong as wine or as heavy as beer. He didn't want to curl up and fall asleep under a tree before he'd gone very far. When the cook offered to fill his mug again, Jacques turned him down.
The cook clucked in reproach. "Never say no to anything free," he advised. "It may not come your way twice." When Jacques explained why he didn't want more cider, the cook sent him a sly look. "I'll give you a mug of water instead, then."
"Henri on the wheel, no!" Jacques said. The cook laughed— he'd been joking. Oh, you could drink water. People did it all the time. But nobody with any sense did it by choice. Nothing was more likely to give you a flux of the bowels than bad water—and you couldn't always tell whether water was good by looking or even by smelling. People went around in misery for weeks at a time with an illness like that. Or they died of it—it happened all the time. Little children suffered most, but anybody could come down with a bloody flux. Whole armies had broken up when half the men in them or more got sick.
Pierre's patrol didn't come back till late afternoon. They hadn't found anything out of the ordinary. "Must have just been that deer," the sergeant told Jacques. "But you made out all right, didn't you?" He winked. "You won't want to head north now—too late. So you'll get supper here, and a bed tonight, and then breakfast in the morning. Not bad, eh?"
"Could be worse," Jacques allowed. Sergeant Pierre laughed and clapped him on the back. That must have been the right answer. Adults often used a language of understatement and saying the opposite of what they meant. It had baffled Jacques when he was younger—and, no doubt, it was meant to baffle him. Now he was learning it himself. Whether he'd wanted to join or not, he was turning into a member of the club.
In the Paris in this alternate, Annette Klein was known as Khadija the oil merchant's daughter. She was slim and dark, well suited to play the role of someone up from the south. In the home timeline, she was on the short side. People weren't so well nourished here—163 centimeters made her taller than average.
In the home timeline, she was Jewish. Here, she played a Muslim. Christianity here was vastly different from what it was in the world where she'd grown up. Even so, the people of the Kingdom of Versailles hated and feared and persecuted the handful of Jews who lived among them. They hated and feared Muslims, too. They didn't persecute them, though—their Muslim neighbors were too strong to let them get away with it. Islam here wasn't the same as it was back home, either, but it was less different than Christianity.
And Paris . . . The Paris she saw from above her veil only made her sad. In the home timeline, Paris was one of the great cities of the world, and had been for hundreds of years. In this alternate, it was the most important town in the Kingdom of Versailles—which wasn't saying much.
Horses clopped on cobbles or splashed through nasty-smelling mud. Knights in shining—or, more often, rusty—armor rode them. A good back-and-breast would stop a pistol shot, and even a ball from a matchlock musket if it wasn't fired at close range. Pigs and chickens and stray dogs ate garbage in the gutters. So did rats, some of them almost as big and sleek as the local cats.
Rats . . . Annette couldn't look at them without wanting to shudder. Rats had made this alternate's history split away from the home timeline's almost 750 years earlier. In the home timeline, bubonic plague—the Black Death—had killed about a third of the people in Europe, starting in 1348.
Here, the plague went on and on and on. By the time it petered out at last, four out of five Europeans were dead. What had been a thriving civilization was mostly dead, too. Not enough people were left to keep the Muslims, who'd almost been pushed out of Spain, from retaking it. They'd eventually conquered southern France, too, and Italy, and the Balkans. The Turks had also conquered the Balkans in the home timeline, but they did a more thorough job of it in this alternate.
No wonder the European Christians, or what was left of them, thought the end of the world was at hand. No wonder God acquired a Second Son here. Henri preached patience in the face of suffering. He promised a better life to come, and gathered a large following. When he said he was God's Son, the King of France and the Pope—who was living at Avignon, inside the country—ordered him put to death. And so he was broken in front of a large and sorrowful crowd, broken and then burned.
The very next day, the King of France and the Pope went into a church to thank God for being delivered from the sinner. For no reason anyone could see—an earthquake? a crucial beam breaking?—the church collapsed. Both men died in the ruins. So did most of their chief followers. After that, the Kingdom of France was never the same again. Neither was the Papacy.
And the miracle—who then could have believed it was anything else?—made the cult of Henri spread like wildfire across almost all the lands where Christianity still held sway. The Bible here had a Final Testament that spoke of the Second Son's life and deeds. Churches in this alternate had two steeples, a shorter one in front topped by a cross and a taller one in back topped by a wheel.
Even Notre-Dame de Paris, begun long before the plague broke out, was finally finished in the new style. Above the veil, Annette's brown eyes swung toward the great cathedral. As far as she knew, it was the only building her Paris and this one had in common, and even it wasn't identical in the two different worlds. Without the Eiffel Tower, without twentieth- and twenty-first-century highrises in this alternate, the cathedral's great and soaring bulk dominated the skyline here in a way its sister couldn't in the home timeline.
"What is it, my sweet?" Annette's mother asked. Tiffany Klein—here called Aisha—was only a centimeter taller than her daughter. Her eyes were the same warm brown as Annette's, and full of sympathy now. "Does the veil trouble you?"