When I say work, I mean you! I'll have my eye on you. If I catch you goofing off, you'll end up envying those goats!
If that wasn't what the guard meant, it had to come close. Bi-rigida nodded and smiled nervously. She said something, too. I'll be good, Mr. Guard, honest I will.
One more strongly held opinion from the guard. Was that You'd better be! or Yeah, right!? By the way Birigida flinched, Annette would have bet on Yeah, right!
The blond woman really did work at a steady clip for a while. Annette hadn't thought Birigida had it in her. Maybe the guard's warning put the fear of her gods in her. Annette hoped so, for her sake.
Seeing Birigida busy at her job, the guard didn't watch her so closely. She began looking around to see if he still had his eye on her. When Annette saw that, her heart sank. Trouble was on the way. She could feel it coming, like lightning before a strike.
She wanted to go over to Birigida and shake some sense into her, the way she might have with a five-year-old. She'd never imagined having that feeling toward somebody ten or twelve years older than she was, but sh# did. Two things held her back—knowing she'd get in trouble with the guards and knowing it wouldn't do any good anyhow. She and Birigida didn't have enough words in common for her to tell the blond woman what was wrong. And Birigida probably wouldn't listen anyway.
Emishtar had the same thought, or its first cousin. Nodding toward Birigida, she said, "That woman wants trouble. She is not happy without trouble."
"That's—" Annette started to say it was crazy. She thought it was, too, which didn't mean Emishtar was wrong. People did crazy things sometimes—keeping slaves when they had no earthly need to, for instance. Maybe Birigida needed to be the center of attention, even if it was the wrong kind of attention. If she did, she was liable to pay a high price for getting what she needed.
What did the people who ran this place need? What did the guards need? Power over other people? The chance to be the boss, without anyone to tell them no? Annette couldn't think of anything else. Computer games that let you do such things had been popular for a hundred years. Why couldn't these people have stuck with those?
Maybe the games weren't enough for them. Maybe they needed the kick of the real thing. If you were the master, Annette supposed you could enjoy yourself a lot at a place like this. But if you were a slave . . .
They didn't think about the slaves, though, except as their toys. If they tried the other side of the coin, they wouldn't like it so much.
Working all that through couldn't have taken more than a few seconds. Annette nodded, too. "I'm afraid you're right."
"Some people are fools," Emishtar said. "All different kinds of fools." She looked toward Birigida again. "Here, that is wrong kind of fool to be." •">.;
"Yes, I know." Annette bent to her own work, but kept watching Birigida out of the corner of her eye. She might have been watching a film with two trains rushing toward each other along the same track. Birigida and . . . what? Her own stupidity. That seemed to be plenty.
And it was. Birigida got behind the other women working their way down the rows. That would have made her stick out to the guards. She didn't seem to want to be so obvious. She caught up with her fellow slaves by scooting along and leaving weeds behind.
Then a guard came down the row. To no one's surprise except perhaps Birigida's (and Annette wondered if even the blond woman was very surprised), he saw what she'd been doing—or rather, what she hadn't been doing. He shouted at her and yanked out his billy club.
Was that real fear on Birigida's face, or was she playacting? If she was, the play didn't last long. The guard gave her a more thorough thumping than she'd ever had before. Her squeaks of fright turned into squeals of pain. In his own way, the guard was a professional. He knew how to make her hurt without doing much real harm—without leaving her too sore to work.
When he finished, he shouted at her in her musical language. She was crying too hard to answer right away. He shouted again. Still crying and sniffling, Birigida nodded. The guard said something else. She nodded once more. He stomped away. This time, Annette wasn't sure what he'd meant. Too many possibilities. It might have been, You'll get more of the same the next time I catch you. It might have been, We'll feed you to the pigs the next time I catch you. Or it might have been, We'll beat you and whip you and use red-hot pincers on you and then feed you to the pigs the next time I catch you.
Whatever it was, it worked, at least for the rest of the day. Birigida kept sobbing every so often, but she worked as hard as any of the other women. Annette didn't think she'd ever done that before, not for such a long time. "Maybe she sees it's not a game," she said.
"Maybe." But Emishtar didn't sound as if she believed it. She added, "Does that kind ever really learn?"
Annette wished she weren't thinking the same thing. "Well, we can hope," she said. The way Emishtar nodded said she might hope, too, but what was hope worth?
Another day done. Jacques started back toward the manor with the rest of the roadbuilding gang. A cool breeze blew from the northwest. Thick gray clouds rolled in. The air held the wet-dust smell of rain. It wasn't here yet, but it would be soon. Jacques eyed the clouds and smiled. "They can't make us work if it's pouring rain," he said to Dumnorix.
The redhead shrugged. "They can't make us work on the road," he said. "They can always make us do something."
He and Jacques didn't really talk so smoothly. Dumnorix spoke his own language, plus bits of French he'd learned from Jacques and Arabic he'd picked up from Jacques and other slaves. Jacques had his shreds of Breton, along with French and Arabic and what Dumnorix had taught him of his language. They both gestured a lot and made silly faces. It wasn't pretty or neat or quick. After a while, though, each could figure out what the other meant—most of the time.
"Bath soon," Dumnorix said.
"Yes." Jacques was bathing more and more often the longer he stayed here. He bathed more as a slave than he ever had when he was free. They had more hot water at the manor than they knew what to do with. Finding he could like baths was a surprise. The hot water helped unkink sore muscles. And the soap wasn't harsh like the stuff he'd known in the Kingdom of Versailles—it didn't want to eat away his hide along with the dirt.
His boots thumped on the paving stones other roadbuilders had already laid. A shout came from behind him. He looked back over his shoulder. Here came the guards who'd ridden out to punish the locals after the goats went for the olives and almonds. More shouts, these from the guards. The slaves hurried off the road onto the shoulder to let the horsemen ride past.
As usual when the men in the splotchy clothes returned from a fight, they were in a fine mood. They laughed and joked and sang. Why not? Jacques would have been in a fine mood, too, fighting foes who could hardly hit back. How would the guards have done against men who also had muskets that could shoot again and again?
Are they soldiers, or just bandits? He realized that was the question he was asking. He wasn't sure. They had good discipline for bandits, but would it hold up in real battle?
He laughed at himself, not that it was really funny. When would the guards need to fight a real battle? Who could hope to stand against them? Maybe other fighting men from the strange place Khadija had described. But from everything she'd said, they didn't even know the manor was here.
A drop of rain hit Jacques in the nose when he walked into the courtyard. By the time he sat down in the refectory to eat supper, the skies had opened up. Whatever he would be doing in the morning, he wouldn't be digging out the roadbed. He didn't mind that. He didn't think the master and the guards could set him to much harder work here.