The horse and carriage lay within the range of what he could understand, even if he hadn't thought of the arrangement till he saw it. The airplane was as far over his head in terms of ideas as it was high up in the sky. In the same way, the Celts—and Emishtar—could admire the gardening tools. They could see what those were for and how well they were made. The transposition chamber was beyond them. Even the safety on an assault rifle had been beyond that luckless slave in Jacques' gang.
"Come on, get to work!" a guard shouted to her in Arabic. "You think you can stand around lollygagging all day long? Things don't work that way around here. You better believe they don't!"
"I am so sorry. Please forgive me," Annette said. She got down on her hands and knees and started weeding. The guard went off to yell at somebody else. Annette hated acting like— well, like a slave. But sometimes the guards didn't just yell. Sometimes they smacked somebody with a billy club or a rifle butt or gave somebody a kick in the backside or in the ribs. Annette thought that enjoying hitting people who couldn't hit back was part of what went into being a guard.
After this one got out of earshot, Emishtar whispered, "I so sorry, too. I so sorry guard not dead. I so sorry guard not on fire. I so sorry guard not in pile of manure. I so sorry guard not sick, horrible sick. I so sorry—"
She went on for quite a while. She might not have known much Arabic. Everything she did know that was bad, she aimed at the guards. Long before she ran down, Annette was giggling helplessly. A guard sent her a suspicious look, but she was working as well as giggling. The guard didn't do anything but look.
Emishtar said some things in her own language, too. Annette didn't understand all of that. What she could follow was along the same lines as the Arabic, but even juicier. She tried to remember some of the best parts.
And Emishtar also showed her something else. The older woman had to do the work, just as Annette did. Even so, her spirit stayed free. Some of the slave women—and some of the slave men—seemed hardly more than beasts of burden to Annette. They'd accepted their fate. They were resigned to it. Emishtar reminded her it didn't have to be that way.
And there were times when she needed reminding, too. Sometimes the home timeline felt a million miles away. Sometimes the transposition chamber in the subbasement also felt a million miles away. It might come and go, but how could a slave get down to it? Try as she would, Annette couldn't figure out a way to sneak past the guards or overpower them. And if she couldn't, she'd stay a slave forever.
Here came the guards who'd ridden out like knights. Jacques counted them. They hadn't lost a man. What a shame, he thought. One of them had a bandaged forearm. He seemed more angry at himself than badly hurt. By the way his friends teased him, they thought the wound was pretty funny.
For a moment, Jacques wondered why. War was a serious business, and the people on the other side were trying to hurt you just as hard as you were trying to hurt them. His leg still twinged every now and then to remind him the raiders who'd overrun his caravan had put a bullet through it.
But that had been an even fight. Men on both sides used the same kinds of weapons. It didn't look as if the people around here had any firearms at all, let alone quick-shooting muskets like the ones the guards carried. Going up against them wouldn't be war, not in the true sense of the word. It wouldn't even be like hunting wolves, where your quarry was ferocious and had sharp teeth. It would be a lot more like hunting rabbits.
Or, since you were hunting people, wouldn't it be a lot like murder?
The guards didn't seem to think so. They were laughing and joking and telling stories. Jacques couldn't follow what they were saying, but he didn't need to know what the words meant. Their smiles and their gestures said they'd had a terrific time doing whatever they'd done out there.
One of them wore a strange necklace. That surprised Jacques—the guards didn't usually go in for display the way soldiers from the Kingdom of Versailles and its Muslim neighbors did. Then the man came close enough to let Jacques see what he'd strung on that cord.
It was a necklace of human ears.
A few bloodthirsty men in Jacques' kingdom kept souvenirs of their kills like that. Most, though, thought it was bragging. Jacques looked at it that way, too. And he wondered why anybody would want to brag about killing enemies who could hardly fight back. It didn't seem sporting.
The guards keeping an eye on the roadbuilding gang called to the ones who'd gone . . . hunting. The horsemen in mottled clothes shouted back. Again, Jacques didn't need to know their language to have a notion of the kind of things they were saying. When a man threw back his head and thumped his chest as he spoke, he wasn't likely to be doing anything but boasting.
One of the guards with the roadbuilders called, "We just taught the chicken thieves and cattle rustlers a lesson. See if they come bothering us any more."
Jacques didn't know they'd come around before. He shrugged. Whatever the locals had done, what the guards did to them was like killing a mouse by dropping a building on its head.
That guard went on talking in the language that sounded a little like Arabic, and then in the one that was full of hisses and sneezes. Jacques kept an eye on the slaves who spoke that tongue. He thought they were from right around here. They didn't look very happy. A couple of them muttered back and forth. But what could they do besides mutter? Not much, not that he could see.
Then the guard spoke to the new men, the fair-haired men, who'd come up from the subbasement a few days earlier. Their speech reminded Jacques of the language men from Brittany used. He knew a few words of that tongue. The Duke of Brittany was a vassal—of sorts—to the King of Versailles. Some of the duke's men hardly spoke any French at all. If you didn't talk to them in Breton, you didn't talk to them.
"Hello," Jacques said to a redheaded man with a droopy mustache. "Understand me?"
He got back a wide-eyed stare. The other man's eyes were almost as green as leaves. "Understand," he said—or Jacques thought he did, anyway. It wasn't the same language as Breton, just one close to it, the way Catalan was close to French. When the redhead went on in a hurry, Jacques couldn't follow him at all.
"No understand," he said, and threw his hands in the air. He knew only a few words of Breton. It wasn't like Arabic, which he actually spoke, even if he didn't speak it well. "Go slow," he added.
Maybe the redhead didn't understand that, because he babbled on, fast as a galloping horse. Jacques put his two index fingers together, then very slowly moved them apart. Maybe sign language would work.
And maybe nothing would. A guard yelled in the redhead's language—he had no trouble using it. Jacques wondered how the guards all spoke so many languages so well. Maybe Khadija knew. She knew all kinds of curious things. But Jacques didn't get a chance to wonder much about that. As soon as the guard got done yelling at the redhead, he switched to Arabic and yelled at Jacques: "Go on, you lazy good-for-nothing, dig! You didn't come out here so you could gab!" He set a hand on the club he wore on his belt to show what would happen if Jacques didn't dig.
Jacques dug. Most of the time, the guards didn't threaten more than once. After that, they really walloped you. If you were dumb enough not to work while they were keeping an eye on you, you almost deserved to get clobbered. And if you were dumb enough to work hard when the guards weren't watching, you almost deserved . . . what?