"Huh? Oh." Annette managed to sound as foolish in the Berber-flavored Arabic they were using as she would have in her own English. "No, truly, that was not what was in my thoughts."
When she first came to this alternate, she'd kicked up a big fuss about going veiled. In the home timeline, the veil was still the symbol of the most backward and sexist parts of the Muslim world. Here, everybody was sexist, Muslims and Christians and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and the Native Americans on the continents people from the Old World were just now discovering. The Industrial Revolution hadn't come to this alternate. Women really were the weaker sex here, and they paid for it.
And the veil here was just something to mark Khadija as a Muslim girl, not a Christian one. She'd needed a while to see that, but now she knew it was true. She'd needed even longer to see there might be a blessing in disguise. People didn't stare at her. What was there to stare at? Eyes, hands, and feet? They weren't worth the bother. The veil could be shield as well as prison.
Annette could see only her mother's eyes. They still looked worried. "Something bothers you," her mother said. "You will not tell me this is not so." They'd both learned this alternate's version of Arabic (and French) through the implants behind their left ears. They spoke without a foreign accent that could have raised eye-brows. Because Annette had learned it that way, it felt as natural as English to her unless she thought about it. Then—but only then—she noticed how much more formal the phrasing was.
She had to nod now, because her mother wasn't wrong. Her wave took in the whole city, especially the great cathedral that wasn't quite like the one in the home timeline. Her wide, flapping sleeve startled a couple of pigeons that were pecking at something in the muddy street. They fluttered off. When they landed three meters farther away, they cocked their heads and sent her reproachful stares.
"This poor, sorry world," she said. "It isn't everything it might have been." Most people who went out to the alternates on Crosstime Traffic business ended up saying that in one language or another. The home timeline wasn't everything it might have been, either, but the people born there lived far richer, more comfortable lives than those on most of the alternates. They weren't always happier—that wasn't the same thing. But good health, a full belly, and high technology did make happiness easier to come by.
"You speak truth—it isn't," her mother agreed. "Still, you should not speak this truth in the streets. More than a few Franks"—the usual Arabic name for any Western European— "know this tongue, and would wonder why you grieve for the world."
"You are right, and I am sorry," Annette said. "But the thought comes, and it does not want to go again."
"Thoughts come as they will. There are times and places to let them free and times and places to hold them in," her mother said.
Since that was plainly true, Annette nodded again. A local woman came by. She wore a long wool skirt that she held up with one hand to keep it out of puddles, a linsey-woolsey blouse, and a white lace cap whose pattern said what part of the kingdom she came from. She was, in other words, almost as covered up as Annette and her mother. But her face was bare to the world. Like about one face in three in this alternate, it showed smallpox scars. Seeing them made Annette want to shiver again. Except as a bioweapon, smallpox was long extinct in the home timeline.
The hand that didn't hold up the Frenchwoman's skirt held on to a three-year-old. The toddler didn't mind mud. He jumped into every puddle between the cobblestones he found. "Henri on the wheel, don't do that!" his mother said. When the mud he splashed up splattered her once too often, she let go of his wrist and whacked his bottom. He howled. She wagged a finger in his face. "I told you not to do that. See what you get when you don't mind?"
Annette had to work hard not to stare. In the home timeline, nobody would spank a child in public. Hardly anyone would spank a child in private. She wondered if this little boy would be warped for life. He hadn't gone ten meters before he was singing and looking for more mud puddles to jump into.
"Children are tougher than you think," Annette's mother said, her voice dry.
"They must be," Annette answered.
"They are. Our ancestors got spanked, too, remember. They lived. He will, too—or he won't die from that, anyhow."
"No." Annette let it go at that. Somewhere between a third and half of the children in this Paris died before they got to be five years old. Smallpox took some. So did measles and whooping cough and diphtheria. All of those had vaccines in the home timeline. But diarrhea, from one germ or another, was the biggest baby-killer here. Clean water and clean food made those kinds of illnesses almost unknown in the world where Annette grew up.
Nothing was clean here. This Paris had no sewers. It dumped slops in the streets. The stink was everywhere. So were the flies. Not uncovering much of yourself had one more advantage here—you didn't get bitten so much.
Annette and her mother walked past a butcher's shop. The meat was out there in the open. It wasn't refrigerated. No one knew about refrigeration in this alternate. If they wanted to preserve meat here, they dried it in the sun or salted it or smoked it. More flies crawled over the fresh meat on display. The butcher, his hands filthy and his leather apron bloody, brushed them away from a beef tongue as he haggled with a woman who wanted to buy it. When they settled on a price, he picked it up and gave it to her. She put it in a grimy canvas sack along with whatever else she'd already bought.
A shop right next to the butcher's sold spices. Many of those came up from the Muslim kingdoms. Without refrigeration, meat went bad fast. If you used lots of pepper and cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger, you could keep on eating it for a while even after it started to go off. Of course, you might get sick if you did. But if the choice was between maybe getting sick and going hungry for sure, what would you do? You'd eat, and you'd hope.
And you'd pray. A monk in a black robe sent Annette and her mother a sour stare as he walked past them. He was a Lad-nerian friar, an order that didn't exist in the home timeline. He wore both a wheel and a crucifix on a rawhide thong around his neck. The Ladnerians were reformers. They wanted to keep money out of the churches. That battle went on, and was usually lost, in one alternate after another.
They turned a corner. "There." Annette's mother pointed ahead, to a market square next to the Seine. "There is your father's stall."
"I see it," Annette answered. Beyond the merchants' stalls, men were fishing in the river. They did that in Paris in the home timeline, too. There, as far as Annette knew, nobody ever caught anything. Here, a man drew a trout out of the river. Several more lay at his feet. This Seine was less polluted than that one.
That didn't mean it was clean. Annette's stomach did a slow flipflop as she watched a woman dip a bucket into the water and carry it away. Whenever it rained, it washed the filth from the streets into the river. Nobody here had ever thought of boiling water before using it, either, and bad water was at least as big a killer as bad food.
Annette's father waved to her and her mother. His real name was Jacob. In this world, he went as Muhammad al-Marsawi— Muhammad, the man from Marseille. Here as in the home timeline, Muhammad was the most common men's first name.
"Fine olive oil!" her father called. "The first pressing! Fine olive oil!" Olives didn't grow as far north as Paris. Olive oil was an expensive luxury here. People mostly used butter or lard instead. Nobody in this alternate had ever heard of cholesterol, either. It probably didn't matter. Disease killed most people here before heart attacks or strokes could.