Get out of here, Annette thought. But Emishtar wouldn't believe that. Emishtar thought they were stuck in this alternate forever. Given what she knew, how could she think anything else? Annette didn't think so, but none of what she knew would make sense to Emishtar. Most of it didn't make sense to Jacques, and he came from a much higher-tech alternate than Emishtar did.
"It wouldn't be a good idea," was all Annette could come up with.
Emishtar rolled her eyes and went back to pulling weeds. She didn't say what she thought, but every line of her body shouted, Fool! at Annette. Had Annette come from her alternate, or from Jacques', Emishtar would have been right. A little happiness mixed in with the misery of being a slave would have been the most she could hope for.
But she was what she was, and she still had real hope. Sometimes she wondered why. This operation was slick, no two ways about it. The people who ran things here didn't slip up.
The blond woman who'd tried to talk with Annette was working not far away. Annette had found out the woman's name was Birigida, or something like that. She'd managed to get across that her own name was Khadija, which the blond woman had a devil of a time pronouncing. They hadn't gone much past that. The languages they used were too different from each other.
A guard yelled at Birigida. She was one of those people who did as little as they could to get by. All slaves did as little as they could, but Birigida did as little as she could even for a slave. She sped up a little when he shouted, but only a tiny bit. And she slowed down again as soon as he turned his back.
That was too soon. The guard might have been a jackass, but he wasn't a stupid jackass. He spun around to see if he could catch her goofing off. When he did, he pulled out his billy club and whacked her across the backside.
She yelped and jerked. The guard did some more shouting. He shook the billy club in her face. If you don't work harder, you'll get more! Annette didn't need to understand a word of the language to know what was going on.
Did Birigida get it? Annette wouldn't have bet a dollar on it, and the little aluminum coins were as near worthless as made no difference. Some people just wouldn't make an effort, even if they got in trouble for not making one. Annette had no idea why that was so, but she'd seen it was. She'd known half a dozen smart people in high school who either weren't going to college at all or weren't going to the one they wanted because they hadn't cared about their grades.
Some of them would find something that interested them and do all right anyway. Some . . . wouldn't. Birigida didn't have the choice. Nothing could make gardening and weeding interesting. But not getting whacked in the fanny should have been reason enough for her to keep her mind on her work.
The women around Birigida worked harder and faster—the guard would be keeping an eye on them, too. Annette knew she did more than she would have otherwise. She scowled at the blond woman for making her speed up.
No, Birigida didn't get it. Nothing under the sun could make her work harder than she felt like working. The guard yelled at her again. That didn't do much. Then he hit her again. She yelped louder this time—he must have hit harder. She started to cry. He shouted again, and waved his hands. What do you expect? Didn't I warn you? Again, Annette could follow along.
"That one trouble for everybody." Emishtar nodded toward Birigida.
"Well—yes," Annette agreed.
"One of her people should make her work," Emishtar said.
"Yes," Annette said again. "But they do not talk with her much." She'd noticed that before. Birigida spoke the same language as the other blondes and redheads, but she didn't seem to have a lot to do with them.
"Different clan," Emishtar guessed.
"Maybe," Annette said. "But how much difference does it make here?"
Emishtar shrugged. "How much? As much as anybody wants it to make."
She was bound to be right about that. If Birigida's clan or tribe was enemy to the one the rest of the new women came from, they might not want anything to do with her. But why—why!— couldn't she work enough to stay out of trouble?
Nine
Dumnorix looked at the musket in one guard's hands. "Strong magic," he said. "Strong, strong, strong." He bent his arm and made his biceps stand up to show what he meant. "It goes bang! here. Over there, a man falls dead." Like most men who'd been in battle, he could do a good impression of a dead man.
"Not magic." Jacques fumbled for words, using the bits of Breton he knew and the even smaller bits of the language that sounded like it he'd learned from the redhead. "/Vo£ magic," he repeated. "Knowing how. Like sword. Like shovel." He hefted the one he was carrying.
Dumnorix tapped the side of his head with a forefinger. He spun the finger by his ear. He said, "You're crazy," just in case Jacques missed the point.
Jacques made the sign of the wheel over his own breast. "By Jesus and Henri, I swear this is true," he said. Dumnorix only shrugged. He knew nothing of Jesus and Henri. The other slaves who'd come here with Jacques knew who God's Sons were, but they didn't follow them. Jacques had heard the guards use Jesus' name, but never Henri's. I'm the only true Christian here, he thought.
"Knowing how? Art? Skill?" As Dumnorix spoke, his pick dug into the ground. He'd wasted no time learning to do enough to keep the guards from giving him too hard a time. Did that mean his people kept slaves, so he knew from the other end how much work he needed to do and how little he could get away with? Jacques wouldn't have been surprised. Dumnorix asked, "How?"
Before Jacques answered, he loaded a couple of shovelfuls of dirt into a basket by his feet. A guard walking along next to the trench kept on walking. Jacques had learned how much he could get away with, too. Once the guard was gone, he stooped and picked up a little clod of dirt and ground it to powder between his thumb and forefinger. He pointed to the powder with his other forefinger and said, "Word is?"
"Powder," Dumnorix answered in his language. Jacques hoped that was what the answer meant, anyhow. He'd guessed wrong a couple of times. Sooner or later, though, you sorted things out.
"Powder," he echoed now. Dumnorix corrected his pronunciation. He tried again. The older man nodded. "Is special powder in muskets," Jacques went on. Muskets was a word Dumnorix had had to learn, because his language had no term for firearms. "Powder burns. Burning pushes out bullet." That was another French word. "Bullet flies fast, like arrow. Hits, kills."
"Huh," Dumnorix said. That might have meant anything. The redheaded man did some more work—another guard's eye was on him. Jacques shoveled some dirt. The slave with the basket—a man who spoke the sneezing language Jacques couldn't understand at all—heaved it up out of the trench at the end of the roadway.
The guard nodded. As long as the slaves looked busy enough, the men in the mottled clothes didn't give them too hard a time. More often than not, they weren't mean to the slaves just for the sake of being mean. They saved a lot of that for the locals.
Jacques remembered the horseman coming back with his necklace of ears.
Once the guard turned away, Dumnorix and Jacques and the slave with the basket slacked off again. "Powder, eh?" Dumnorix said. "What kind of powder?"
Jacques knew: sulfur and charcoal and saltpeter. He didn't know how to say any of them, except in French. He thought he might have been able to get the idea of charcoal across in Arabic, but that didn't do Dumnorix any good. "Not enough words," he answered—a phrase he used more often than he wanted to.
Dumnorix scowled. "Maybe you don't know enough words," he said. "But maybe you're making this up, too."
"Liar? You say liar?" Jacques let his shovel fall to the dirt. "You say liar?" He set himself and waited to see what happened next.