As the guard inside the manor had said, there were vegetable plots. There were fields of growing grain. And there were what would be olive groves when the saplings got bigger. Beyond them, the near-desert of central Spain stretched out as far as the eye could see.
"Where did the city go?" one of the Muslim women asked as she weeded in the garden.
"They must be mighty wizards, to make it disappear!" another one exclaimed.
Annette said things like that, too. She didn't want the people who ran this place to think she took travel between alternates for granted. That would have been dangerous. Right now, she couldn't imagine anything that would have been more dangerous. If they decided she knew about travel between alternates . ..
They'll kill me, she thought as she grubbed a weed out from between a couple of tomato plants. The people who were doing this were committing so many crimes, one more murder might not even make it into the balance sheet. The one thing they could not have was anyone in the home timeline finding out what they'd done.
Slavery. Moving low-tech locals from one alternate to another. Using high technology against low-tech locals. Importing life-forms to alternates where they didn't belong—highly bred tomatoes were as much out of place here as assault rifles. At least two murders that Annette had seen, plus who could say how many more? Who could say what other acts of cruelty went on here, either?
Where did the slaves who didn't speak Arabic come from? Were they from this alternate? Or had the slavers brought them in from somewhere else? Did this alternate have any people at all, or was it one of those where human beings had never evolved? Those were all important questions, and she had answers to exactly none of them.
Even starting to find out wouldn't be easy. Annette had never tried to learn a foreign language on her own, without the help of her implant. People did it. Even in the home timeline, people in countries that weren't so rich had to do things the hard way. If you learned words, you could figure out grammar a bit at a time . . . couldn't you? She had to hope so.
One of the rifle-toting guards in camouflage clothing tramped past her. She worked faster while she thought he was looking at her, then slowed down again. How many slaves in how many alternates had done something like that over how many thousand years? She watched the man out of the corner of her eye. Did he carry that rifle to protect himself from the slaves and from wild beasts, or did he worry about wild men, too?
The woman weeding in the next row said something in the language that sounded a little like Arabic but wasn't. She looked over at Annette and smiled. She was somewhere close to forty, her skin tanned and leathery. Her teeth were crooked, a couple of them broken. She spoke again, then cocked her head to one side, waiting.
"I'm sorry, but I don't understand you," Annette replied in Arabic.
More gutturals came from the other woman. She was probably saying she couldn't understand Annette, either. She jabbed a thumb at her own chest and said, "Emishtar."
Was that the older woman's name? Annette didn't see what else it could be. Pointing to the other woman, she said, "Emishtar." The woman smiled and nodded. She pointed to Annette and made a questioning noise. "Khadija," Annette told her. She had to be Khadija—that was the name under which she'd come here. Changing it would make people wonder, which was the last thing she could afford.
"Khadija," Emishtar said. She rattled off something that made no sense to Annette. It didn't sound like a question. Maybe it was a prayer.
They taught each other names for parts of the body and tools and the sun up in the sky. Some of the words Emishtar used did sound something like the Arabic ones Annette had picked up through her implant. Annette wondered how long she would be able to remember them. She had to try. The other woman didn't seem to have any trouble remembering her words. That made Annette more determined not to let somebody from a low-tech alternate get ahead of her.
Sun was shams in Arabic. It was shamash in Emishtar's language. That was pretty plainly a Semitic tongue, too—related to modern Arabic and Hebrew in the home timeline, and to ancient Aramaic and Assyrian and Babylonian. But Annette was almost sure it wasn't any Arabic dialect.
"La ilaha illa'llah—Muhammadun rasulu'llah" she said. There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God. Emishtar just looked at her and shook her head. The older woman didn't know anything about Islam. She would have recognized the shahada, the profession of faith, if she did. In all the alternates Annette knew of where Arabic was used in Spain, Muslim conquerors had brought it here. That pretty much nailed it down. Whatever language Emishtar used, it wasn't one of the many varieties of Arabic.
But what was it? For a while, Annette couldn't think of any other Semitic tongues that had been spoken in Spain. Then she remembered the Punic Wars, where Carthage had fought Rome. Carthage—in modern Tunisia, in North Africa—had been a Phoenician city, and the Phoenicians spoke a Semitic language. Carthage had planted colonies of its own in Spain.
"Carthage?" Annette asked, making sure no guard could hear her do it. She pointed east and a little south. "Carthage?"
Emishtar just looked at her and shrugged. She didn't get it. Carthage, of course, was the English version of the Latin version of the real name of the place. It wasn't close enough to the original to make sense to Emishtar—if Annette had guessed right in the first place about how this alternate got started.
She laughed at herself. It was either that or pound her head into the dirt. How much she didn't know! She didn't know the right name for Carthage, the one that would have made sense to a real Carthaginian. And she didn't know whether Emishtar came from this alternate. Maybe she'd got here in a transposition chamber, too. If she had, all of Annette's guesses about this place were worthless.
How many alternates did these slavers visit? How long had this been going on? Annette had no way to be sure, except by noting that the manor seemed new. The roadbuilding Jacques and the other men were doing also argued this place hadn't been here very long. If it had, the road would already have been in place, wouldn't it? Annette thought so, but she couldn't prove a thing.
If word of this ever reached the home timeline . . . Somewhere under downtown Madrid was a subbasement with an outlaw transposition chamber. What would people do? Say they were coming into town on business or on vacation? Travel to this alternate or the one with the Great Black Deaths or some other unknown one and play at being masters for a while, then go back to the home timeline with a suntan and with memories they didn't dare share? Again, that was how it looked. Again, Annette knew she couldn't prove it.
She couldn't prove it as long as she was here. Even if she could prove it while she was here, it wouldn't do her any good. But if she could get back ... If she could ride that transposition chamber back to the home timeline . . .
Most chambers had a human operator in them to take over if anything went wrong with the computers. The slavers hadn't bothered here. Annette could see why not, too. An operator would be one more person, maybe one person too many, who knew the secret. And the computer hardly ever went wrong. Even when it did, the operator couldn't do much about it most of the time. But transposition chambers did have manual controls.
Annette laughed at herself again. It was either that or break down and cry, which she didn't want to do. Suppose everything went just right. Suppose she could hop into the transposition chamber and pilot it back to the home timeline. Then what? Then somebody in that Madrid would knock her over the head, and she would have wasted a thrilling escape.