"See how white and fair he is!" the auctioneer said. "A Frank from the North!" Muslims called all Christians Franks, after the vanished Kingdom of France. The auctioneer eyed him. "Do you speak Arabic, fellow? Do you understand it?"
"No, I'm sorry, your Excellency, but I don't understand even a word of Arabic," Jacques answered—in Arabic.
The auctioneer threw back his head and laughed. "Clever as well as fair!" he said, and looked back to the crowd. "How much for this big, strong, smart slave? He will be a foreman in a few years, if God is kind."
Hassan ibn Hussein opened the bidding. Another man raised it a couple of dinars. Then Marwan al-Baghdadi spoke up. Jacques hoped Marwan would buy him, as much because the man was a great traveler as for any other reason. He'd come here to Madrid all the way from far-off, fabled Baghdad.
Hassan and Marwan and two other men bid Jacques' price up and up. When it got over a pound of silver, the other men dropped out, first one, then the other. At not quite a pound and a half of silver, Hassan sent Marwan a look that should have killed him. Marwan smiled back, which only made Hassan angrier. Angry or not, he threw both hands in the air instead of raising his bid again.
"Going once! Going twice! Sold!" the auctioneer chanted, and pointed toward Marwan al-Baghdadi. "Sold to this fine gentleman here!" He shoved Jacques, not too hard. "Go to your new master. Serve him well." Jacques got down off the platform. One of Marwan's men took charge of him. The fellow tied his left leg back to that of Musa, the last slave Marwan had bought.
"There," the man said, straightening up. "You're not going anywhere."
"No, I suppose not." Jacques hoped that sounded like a nice, meek answer. No, he wasn't going anywhere—not unless he saw a chance.
Annette had expected it to be ladies first, but it wasn't. They sold the men before they got around to the women. She had to stand out in the sun for two or three hours before things started happening with her. It wasn't torture or anything. The day was warm, but it wasn't hot. A man with a clay jar of water and a dipper went up and down the line. The waiting women could have a drink whenever they wanted to. The water in that jar was surprisingly cool. Had the jar been metal, the water would have been warmer. Sure enough, evaporation caused cooling, just the way they said it did in physics.
She watched Jacques get sold. He got down off the platform and went over to his new owner. Like the others who got sold, he didn't seem especially upset. This was part of life here—not a part anybody liked, but a part everybody knew how to handle. Annette didn't—couldn't—understand it. Why weren't they all screaming their heads off? This was wrong. And so it was, to her. But not to them.
Then the women started going up on the block. The auctioneer made his dumb jokes. He asked them questions about what they'd been before they got caught. If their answers showed they had two brain cells to rub together, he praised them to the skies. He wanted them to go for high prices, because that meant his commission went up.
Every so often, mostly with women who said they'd had children, he would look at their teeth. Whenever he did, Annette would grind hers. He really might have been selling horses up there, not human beings at all.
Except he was. And her own turn came closer every time someone else stepped down from the platform. And then she was stepping up onto it. "Here is a fine girl, good for all sorts of things!" the auctioneer said, and then, "Tell them your name, sweetheart."
"I am not your sweetheart, God be praised," Annette said coldly, which only made him chuckle. She went on, "I am Khadija, daughter of the merchant Muhammad al-Marsawi. If you send to Marseille, my father will pay far more than I cost to ransom me."
"There you go!" The auctioneer beamed at her. He beamed out at the crowd. "Hear that, my friends? Do you hear that? Spend a little money now, make more money later. How can you go wrong?" He looked back at Annette. "So you're a merchant's daughter, are you? What can you do?"
"I read and write Arabic and French," she said, adding, "I speak French, too," in that language. Returning to Arabic, she went on, "And I can cipher. I could keep your books better than whatever cheating fool you use now."
The auctioneer blinked. Annette wondered if she'd laid it on too thick. Women here weren't usually able to do things like that. If they could, they weren't supposed to brag about it. "Hear what a clever maid this is!" the auctioneer cried after that little startled pause. "You can put her to the test, if you like. And if she fails, by God, you can beat her as she deserves!"
Out in the crowd, men were nodding. If a donkey balked, they would beat it to make it go. And if a slave failed, they would beat him—or her, too. Why not? A slave was just as much their property as a donkey was.
"What am I bid, then?" the auctioneer called. "If she is as good as she says she is—and I believe her—you will get your money's worth from her even if you never see a copper of this ransom."
It boiled down to Hassan ibn Hussein against Marwan al-Baghdadi. She thought the older man wanted her for the ransom, the younger one for what she could do. She hoped Hassan would win—that gave her a better chance of getting free. But Marwan seemed to have more silver than he knew what to do with. Every time Hassan bid, Marwan raised the price. Finally, a horrible look on his face, Hassan turned away. "Going once!" the auctioneer called. "Going twice! . . . Sold!"
Numbly, Annette got down off the platform. Sold. She'd been sold.
Jacques was glad Marwan had also bought Khadija. At least there would be someone else he knew in the household. He had no idea how often he would have the chance to see her, but you could often work those things out. A lot of the time, it just depended on getting in good with a steward or a butler or maybe a head cook. He would have to look around and see which way the wind blew.
After the auction was over, Marwan paraded his new slaves through the streets of Madrid. Here as in the Kingdom of Versailles, you showed off if you were a rich man. Showing off was a big part of being rich. And the story of how he'd outbid Hassan ibn Hussein time after time would race through the city faster than wind-whipped fire. His prestige would rise. Hassan's would fall.
Marwan himself swaggered along at the head of the procession. He was having fun, laughing and joking with passersby and throwing coins to beggars and cripples and children.
"He acts like a prince, or a man who wants to be a prince," Musa ibn Ibrahim whispered.
"He does, doesn't he?" Jacques said. "I wonder what the men who are princes in this city will say to that."
"My very thought," Musa agreed. "I wonder what they will say after Hassan ibn Hussein whispers in their ears. And he will whisper in them, unless he shouts in them instead."
"Nothing we can do about that," Jacques said, and Musa nodded. What could a slave do about anything? Not much. Back in Paris, Jacques could have whispered into Duke Raoul's ear. The duke might not have paid any attention to him—but then again, he might have. Here, the only people Jacques knew were Musa and Khadija, and they were both slaves, too.
"Almost there," one of Marwan al-Baghdadi's men called.
From up on a roof or behind a shuttered window, someone said, "More slaves for the demons to eat up!"
"I don't like the sound of that," Jacques said. "I hope he's just a friend of Hassan ibn Hussein's."
"I fear no demons," Musa said stoutly. "As long as I worship God, how can demons harm me?" But in spite of his bold words, the black man nervously looked this way and that. Jacques wondered what he thought demons looked like. Jacques had thought they looked like him.