Annette took a deep breath. "How you doing?" she asked— in English.
"I'm tired. I'm sore. Those—" Birigida automatically started to answer in the same tongue. Then she broke off. Her blue eyes opened wide, wider, widest. What showed up in them surprised Annette—it couldn't be anything but fear. And fear sharpened Birigida's voice, too, when she asked, "Who are you? What are you? Are you a guard? Are you a spy?"
"I wish!" Annette answered, which startled a laugh out of the older woman. Annette went on, "No, I'm a slave, just like you."
"Oh." Birigida thought about it, then nodded. "Okay. They didn't tell me anybody else was doing this, too. Hi."
"Hi." Annette tried to figure out what to ask next. Who didn't tell you? rose to the top of the list. But she couldn't ask that, either, because she already ought to know who they were. She tried a different question instead: "Why don't you let the guards know you're from the home timeline? They'd go easier on you then, I bet."
"I can't," Birigida said. "Didn't they give you a hypnotic compulsion, too? If I thought you were a guard, I wouldn't be able to talk about it with you, either."
"No, no compulsions," Annette said. There they were again.
Birigida said several harsh things in low-voiced English, then several more that sounded harsh in that Celtic language. It didn't sound so musical when it was loud and angry. The blond woman dropped back into English—and started speaking softly again: "I might have known. They told me they gave it to everybody, but I halfway figured they wouldn't if you paid 'em enough not to."
"I paid plenty," Annette said. That was true, even if it had nothing to do with benjamins. She still got headaches every so often. If that slave raider had hit her any harder, he might have caved in her skull. And she still didn't know whether her parents were all right. All right or not, they didn't know about her, either. She went on, "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure. Go ahead. A dollar for your thoughts." Birigida seemed happy to be speaking English.
"How come you get in so much trouble all the time? Don't you see they wouldn't treat you so bad if you did even a little more?"
They might have been using the same words, but they weren't speaking the same language. Annette had also had that feeling when she talked with Jacques, and with Emishtar. Birigida looked at her the way a teacher would if she asked a really dumb question in school—as if she should have known better. "Isn't it boring if you're a good little slave all the time?" the older woman said. "Getting in trouble is part of the fun."
"I guess," Annette said. That seemed unlikely to land her in trouble. She bent and tried to brush some of the mud off her skirt. She didn't want Birigida—or whatever the woman's real name was—to see her face.
She'd run into all kinds of horrors since she got sold to the man who called himself Marwan al-Baghdadi. Seeing people from the home timeline, people from Crosstime Traffic, in the slave trade was bad enough. Even if she thought it was disgusting, though, she could at least understand why one person might want to lord it over another one. Crosstime Traffic made the rules against having anything to do with slavery as strong as it could because the people who ran the company understood that others might be tempted.
But, while Annette could see how some people might want to be masters, she'd never dreamt others got the same sort of kick from being slaves. She supposed they talked about people like that in some of the psychology courses she wasn't taking at Ohio State. Talking about them in college was one thing. Meeting somebody like that was something else again.
She couldn't show any of what she was thinking. If anybody was the key to getting her back to the home timeline, Birigida was. As casually as Annette could, she asked, "When does your compulsion wear off?"
Her heart pounded while she waited for the answer. The compulsion would have to wear off, wouldn't it? Maybe some people from the home timeline wanted to be slaves all the time. But the people who ran this outfit wouldn't go for that. If men and women from the home timeline disappeared for good, others would wonder why. That could be dangerous.
"Two weeks," Birigida said. "How about you? You were here when I came."
"I've got another month to go," Annette answered.
"Wow." Birigida eyed her. "No compulsion, and you're staying a long time. You're so lucky." She might have been saying, You're so rich. Sure enough, she went on, "That must have cost you an arm and a leg."
Annette shrugged. "Getting away for so long was the hard part," she said, and Birigida nodded wisely. Annette asked, "So how do you like . . . your time here?" That was the safest way she could think of to put it.
"It's wonderful!" Birigida's eyes glowed. Did she understand what could have happened to her? Did she understand it nearly had happened to her? Maybe she did, for she continued, "Back in the home timeline, I'm a bigwig. I tell people what to do all the time. They do it, too, or they get in trouble. Here"—she laughed—"well, that's one thing I don't have to worry about, anyhow."
"No, not hardly," Annette said, and then she shut up, because a guard was getting close. The next thing Birigida said was in the Celtic language Annette didn't understand. Maybe she couldn't speak English around a guard till the hypnotic compulsion went away.
But the compulsion didn't seem to apply to other slaves. Maybe the people who'd given it to her hadn't thought any other slaves from the home timeline would be here. If their man in that other Madrid hadn't bought her by mistake, none would have been.
Emishtar walked over to Annette after Birigida went off on her own. "What was that about?" Emishtar asked. "You found a language you both know?"
"So we did," Annette said.
Emishtar wasn't very tall—she was shorter than Annette, and twelve to fifteen centimeters shorter than Birigida. She managed to look down her nose at the blond woman even so. "Does she make any sense when you do talk to her?" she asked.
"Not much," Annette said. One of Emishtar's eyebrows rose, as if to say, Why am I not surprised?
After Annette gave the answer, she thought about it. Why anybody would pay for the privilege of being a slave was beyond her. It seemed to make sense to Birigida, though. She wanted to get as far away from what she normally was as she could.
Before the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette and her court ladies had played at being milkmaids. Annette supposed that was part of the same impulse that made Birigida do what she was doing. But a queen's notion of what being a milkmaid was like would be different from the real thing. Birigida really was a slave.
Birigida really was a slave ... for a while. When the hypnotic compulsion set her free, she would go back to the home timeline and pick up her real life where she'd left off. She wouldn't have to worry about beatings any more. She wouldn't have to worry about hard physical work. She wouldn't have to worry about being made into someone else's toy.
She wouldn't, no. For her, slavery was a thrill, a vacation. Annette's stomach twisted. For the rest of the slaves on the manor, this was no vacation. This was their life. If I hadn't heard Birigidajust then, it would have been my life, probably for as long as I lived, Annette thought.
And it still might be. She understood that. Now she had a chance. But a chance was all she had. If she didn't make the most of it, she'd still be stuck here.
She found herself eyeing all the other slaves who worked in the garden plots. When she got back to the manor and ate supper, she knew she would look over the house slaves and the men from the roadbuilding gang the same way. Were any of them from the home timeline? Were they just pretending to come from a low-tech alternate? Were they getting their jollies by being ordered around? Would they go home with happy memories of being abused—and then fit right back into the ordinary world of the late twenty-first century?