To be a slave, that's what, Jacques decided.
After a bit, the man in the mottled clothes decided to bother somebody else. Jacques hadn't expected anything else. As soon as the fellow's eyes weren't on him any more, he slacked off. He had the chance to look this way and that and see what was going on around him. The first thing he saw was that the redhead with the droopy mustache was watching him.
Plainly, the new slave didn't speak Arabic. Jacques tried him with French. So far, the only person here with whom he could speak his own language was Khadija—one more reason for him to think she was special. The redheaded man shook his head and spread his hands and shrugged. French didn't work.
It would have to be Breton, then, or Jacques' tiny bits and pieces of it. He pointed towards a guard and said the nastiest thing he knew how to say. Would that make any sense to the redhead?
The man's eyes widened again. He snorted. He almost giggled. He turned very red—his skin was so fair, it made the flush easy to see. He pointed toward the guard and said something else. Jacques wasn't sure exactly what it meant. He thought it had to do with horses—parts of horses, anyway. He knew which part of a horse he thought the guard was. He grinned at the redhead and nodded.
"Dumnorix." The man with the mustache pointed at himself.
Jacques gave his own name. He pointed at the redhead and tried to pronounce Dumnorix. The other man corrected him. When Dumnorix tried to say Jacques, he had trouble with the first sound. Jacques repeated it. On Dumnorix's second try, he got it right—or close enough, anyhow.
That still didn't give them much to talk about. They could swear at the guards, but they'd been doing that before they found they had any words in common. Now Jacques could follow some of Dumnorix's bad language. And if Jacques cursed in Breton instead of French or Arabic, Dumnorix could understand some of that.
Can I tell him about the safety on the guards' muskets? Jacques wondered. That was something Dumnorix needed to know. If he wanted to make trouble, and if he wanted to do it without getting killed right away, he had to know it.
But when Jacques tried to explain, he ran into a stone wall. The man with the red mustache figured out he was talking about muskets. Jacques' sign language and his handful of words were plenty for that. To Dumnorix, though, the weapons weren't tools like picks and shovels. If Jacques understood him rightly, he thought they were magical.
Try as Jacques would, he couldn't convince Dumnorix that magic had nothing to do with it. Dumnorix saw a thing that went bang! over here and killed somebody over there. He didn't see how the one was connected to the other.
How did gunpowder work? Jacques couldn't explain that, though there were men back in the Kingdom of Versailles who could have. Jacques just knew that it worked. That wasn't enough for Dumnorix.
Sometimes Jacques wanted to knock sense into the older man's foolish head. And then he wondered how Khadija felt when she was trying to explain things like the transposition chamber to him. Would it ever be anything but magic, as far as he was concerned? You got in it, it didn't seem to move, but you were somewhere else when you got out again. If that wasn't magic, what was it?
It wasn't magic to Khadija, because she knew that it worked, maybe even how it worked. Jacques stopped being quite so annoyed with Dumnorix. Weren't the two of them in the same boat?
Emishtar turned out to be right about the newly arrived women. The master forgot about the slaves who'd been there for a while. He started summoning the blondes and redheads who had come out of the subbasement. Some of them just went. Some raised a fuss. They ended up going anyway. They came back in tears.
"Is part of being slave," Emishtar said in her halting Arabic.
"It shouldn't be." Annette was furious. She'd read about things like this, but she'd never dreamt she would see them. She'd especially never dreamt they would happen because of people from the home timeline. "Women shouldn't have to put up with things like this."
Emishtar's laugh sounded old as time. "Go ahead. Make men listen to you." She laughed again.
In the home timeline, there were laws against things like this. Not only that, strong customs backed up the laws there. Annette would have said everybody followed those customs. And she would have been wrong, wrong, wrong. The proof of that was right here. Some people—not many, but enough—behaved the way they should as long as anybody was watching. As soon as the eyes went away . . .
As soon as the eyes went away, they turned into slave drivers. Literally.
What did they say, back in the home timeline, to explain why they were away so much? Were they supposed to be on vacation? On business trips? Working in some foreign country. If you googled them thoroughly, would a pattern show up? Of course it would. It would have to. Keeping a secret these days was next to impossible once somebody decided to look for it.
The only way to keep a secret was not to let anybody know you had one in the first place. Then no one would start searching to see what it was.
Too late, Annette thought. Much too late. Somebody from the home timeline who isn't in on it knows. All Annette had to do was get back and start sending e-mail and calling people on the phone.
Now she laughed, almost as bitterly as Emishtar had. Yeah, that was all. Easy. Ha!
Her friend eyed her. "What is joke?" Emishtar asked. If you had a joke, you told it. You didn't just sit on it. There were no written rules here, but that seemed to be one of the strongest unwritten rules. Things that were funny were too precious to be hoarded.
"It's on me," Annette said. "If I could get away, if I could get back to where I come from, I have friends I could tell what's happened, friends who would rescue me." She spoke in short phrases to give Emishtar a better chance to understand.
And the older woman did—or at least she understood the words. "But what is the joke?" she asked again, using her own language instead of Arabic.
"If I could go back where I come from, I wouldn't need rescuing!" Annette exclaimed. "I would be free." She laughed again.
This time, so did Emishtar. "Oh, yes. That is funny. That would be funny, only. . . ." She pantomimed laughing and crying at the same time. She was a natural mimic and actress. Annette wondered if they had theaters in whatever alternate she came from. If they did, she wondered whether women could perform in them. Or were they like the ones in ancient Greece and Shakespeare's London, where men and boys played all the parts?
She did the best she could to ask in Emishtar's language. When she ran out of words, she used Arabic. They had to go back and forth several times before Emishtar caught on. "Ah!" she said. "Yes, we have. We do. But we do only with men. In your country, with women, too?"
"Yes," Annette said. "We call them actresses." She used the Arabic word. "The men who do it are actors."
Emishtar taught her the word for actor in that other Semitic language. It sounded nothing like the one in Arabic. The two tongues had plainly got them from different places. The languages were cousins, which helped Annette learn bits and pieces of the other one, but they weren't close cousins.
A guard strode towards Annette and Emishtar. They both started weeding and pruning harder. The guard tramped on past them. They breathed sighs of relief.
One of the blond women was weeding not far away. She'd been out in the sun too long. Even though it was autumn, she'd got burned. One of Annette's friends back in Ohio had what she called phosphorescent Irish skin. This woman was like that— she would burn if the sun looked at her sideways.
She must have sensed Annette's eye on her. She looked across the onions and leeks and garlic and managed a weary smile. She brushed her filthy hair back from her face with a dirty hand. Sweat ran down her cheek. She said something in her musical language.