Two

The innkeeper thought Annette and her family were odd because they had no servants or slaves. They couldn't hire locals, not without showing them things they shouldn't see. And there weren't enough people from Crosstime Traffic here to play the role. This alternate hadn't been opened for long. People from the home timeline still had a lot to learn here.

Back home, people said Crosstime Traffic was spread too thin. When Annette was in the home timeline, she'd said the same thing. People had known how to travel from one alternate world to another for only about fifty years. They had so many to explore, so many to examine, so many to exploit. Without food and energy from the alternates, the home timeline probably would have collapsed by now. But there was so much to do. And even though Crosstime Traffic had become far and away the biggest corporation in the world, there weren't enough people to do it all in a hurry.

So if the innkeeper scratched his head and muttered to himself . . . then he did, that was all. It didn't matter if he thought the Kleins were peculiar. If he thought they were peculiar because they didn't belong to this alternate . . . that would matter. But he didn't. He had no reason to. Some people drank only water. Some people fed their dogs better than they fed themselves. He thought they were peculiar like that—strange, yes, but harmless.

Dad took a big brass key off his belt to open their room. The big brass lock on the door looked just like the ones they made here. No local burglar could hope to beat it, though. It was brass only on the outside, case-hardened twenty-first century steel within. Dad's key had a microchip that shook hands with one inside the lock. Without that handshake, the lock wouldn't open, period—exclamation point, even. The same kind of lock secured the shutters over the windows.

After they went inside, Dad used another lock and a stout wooden bar to make sure the door stayed closed.

He plopped himself down on one of the stools in the room—-only nobles here sat on chairs with backs.

"Whew! It will be so good to head for home," he said in Arabic.

"Oh, yes," Annette held her nose. "I can't wait to get back to air that doesn't stink."

"People back there complain about pollution." Her mother had to use the Arabic word that usually meant a religious offense. No one here worried about polluting the environment, or even knew such a thing was possible. People just wanted to take what was there to be taken. Mom went on, "The home timeline has to be careful, too. I understand that. But anybody who's ever smelled a low-tech alternate will tell you there's pollution, and then there's pollution." As Annette had, she held her nose.

"Even getting back to Marseille will be good," Dad said. "I didn't think we'd land in any trouble up here, and we haven't, but it could have been bad trouble if we did. We're a long way from anybody who could give us a hand."

Staying inconspicuous made things harder. They couldn't carry assault rifles here. They couldn't drive an SUV between Marseille and Paris. Actually, that might have been just as well. What passed for roads here would have murdered any car's shocks in nothing flat. They traveled on foot, on horseback, and by boat.

Dad had an automatic pistol, but it was disguised like the locks. It looked like one of the big, clumsy weapons the locals used. And it was for the worst emergencies only.

Mom sighed. "This poor alternate. Since the plagues, it's had nothing but bad luck."

"As long as we don't catch it," Annette said.

"You can say that again." Dad bent and knocked on the leg of his stool. They knocked on wood for luck here, the same as they did in the home timeline. A surprising number of small things were the same. All the big things were different.

Annette felt like sighing, too. "Europe was all set to take off. It did in the home timeline—all the explorations, and the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Here—"

"Everybody died," Mom said. That wasn't how Annette had intended to go on, which didn't mean it wasn't true.

"No Scientific Revolution anywhere but in Europe in this alternate, either," Dad said. "The Muslim world knows some things the Europeans—what's left of them—don't, but the Muslims don't know how much they didn't know before the plagues."

"Thomas Aquinas and al-Ghazzali," Annette said. Her father nodded. They'd drilled that one into the Kleins in their briefings. In the home timeline and here, the Christian saint and the Muslim holy man had asked the same question—was scientific research compatible with religion?

Aquinas had said yes. He said there could be no conflict between religion and science. All knowledge, to him, was one. He made Aristotle's logic fit inside the Christian faith. In the home timeline, that helped pave the way for the Scientific Revolution.

Al-Ghazzali had believed just the opposite. He thought scientific research undermined faith, and he thought faith was more important. In the home timeline, Aquinas' view dominated western Christianity.

Al-Ghazzali's prevailed in Islam.

Al-Ghazzali's ideas prevailed in Islam in this alternate, too. If anything, the Great Black Deaths here had only made those ideas stronger. If God could do such a thing, how could any man hope to understand Him or His works? Muslims in this alternate feared and distrusted science. They clung to religion, and they clung to it hard.

The irony was, al-Ghazzali was right about whether science undermined faith. St. Thomas Aquinas was wrong. Studying science did weaken belief in God and in traditional religion. A lot of experience in the home timeline and in alternates with breakpoints more recent than this one's showed as much.

That studying science could also lead to a richer, healthier, more comfortable and more knowledgeable life on earth . . . was beside the point if you thought religion the be-all and end-all. Just about everyone in this alternate felt that way. Some people in the home timeline still did, too. Every so often, they used the products of science—explosives, radioactives, tailored viruses— to try to make their point.

"By the time Western Europe got its people back, it wasn't the same kind of place any more," Mother said.

Europe had needed more than two hundred years to get back to where it had been before the plagues came. It never took off, the way it had in the home timeline. That was partly because Muslims had reconquered Spain and Portugal and reoccupied Italy. It was also partly because of the Second Son and the Final Testament. Henri's take on Christianity wasn't as hostile to science as Islam was. But Aquinas'

certainty that science and God went hand in hand was one more plague victim in this alternate.

"I wonder why China didn't do it," Annette mused.

In this alternate, the Manchus still ruled China. No pressure from Europe had weakened their dynasty there. China was the biggest, strongest, richest country in the world. But it wasn't much further along than it had been at the breakpoint, either. Some Emperors favored scholarship, some didn't. The ones who didn't tore down what the ones who did had built. In this alternate as in the home timeline, great Chinese junks under Zheng He had visited Arabia and East Africa in the 1410s. They'd taken Chinese porcelain to Africa and a giraffe back to China. But no Chinese ships had made the journey again in all the centuries since.

Trade stayed in the hands of Arab and Indian and Malay middlemen.

Scholars in the home timeline still argued about why things turned out this way. They would go on arguing, too, till they knew a lot more—and probably even after they knew more. Arguing, testing ideas against evidence, moved scholarship ahead.

"China has always been very good at how," Dad said. "It hasn't been so good at why. Being good at how will make you more comfortable in the short run. In the long run, finding out why things work the way they do makes for bigger changes."

"Some people say you need to believe in one god first, before you can believe there's one why behind everything," Mom added. "If you explain things by saying they happen because this imp is fighting with that spirit, how are you going to look deeper?"

"So you think that's true?" Annette asked.

"I don't know. It can't be the whole answer—I'm sure of that," her mother replied. "But it may be part."

It seemed neat and clean and logical. Of course, plenty of things that seemed neat and clean and logical were also wrong. "I'll be studying all this stuff when I get to college, won't I?" Annette said.

"You'd better believe it," Mom said. Dad nodded.

So did Annette. Travel across timelines was the biggest thing that had happened to people since the discovery of the New World, maybe since the discovery of writing and the wheel. As far as Annette was concerned, anybody who didn't want to get involved with it probably would have thought Columbus would fall off the edge of the world or that wheels ought to be square. If seeing all the different ways things might have turned out didn't interest you, odds were you didn't have a pulse.

And the home timeline needed the alternates, too. They had all the things the home timeline was running out of when Gal-braith and Hester discovered crosstime travel. Trade for a little here, trade for a little there—the alternates would never miss it. Sink oil wells in a world where men had never evolved, and you could take whatever you needed.

Not everything was perfect. When was it ever? Some diseases had reached the home timeline. These days, biotech usually blunted them in a hurry. People who didn't work for Crosstime Traffic often complained the company had too much power. Annette thought they would have grumbled the same way about scribes back when writing was new. CT had to be the most closely watched company in the history of the world.

The early days had seen a few scandals—again, nothing was perfect. But nobody's found any trouble like that for as long as she'd been alive.

"College," she murmured.

Her father chuckled. "Seems far away, doesn't it, when you're in a world where you get sick because your humors go out of whack, where they've forgotten what the Romans used to know about plumbing, and where they've got markets to sell human beings just like we've got markets to sell beans and watermelons?"

"Markets to sell human beings. Slave markets." Annette's mouth twisted. She'd seen one of those markets, down in Marseille. She understood that people in this alternate needed other people to do their work for them. They didn't have machines, the way the home timeline did. Even if she understood that, the idea of slavery gave her the cold horrors. To sell people like beans, to use them—or use them up—like farm animals . . . The day was cool, but that wasn't why she shivered.

Mom understood. She reached out and set a hand on Annette's shoulder. "It's a nasty business," she said.

"Our hands are clean of that, anyhow."

"They'd better be!" Annette exclaimed. "We shouldn't just sit back and watch it, though. We ought to try to stamp it out."

"Where we can, we do," Dad said. "In an alternate like this, it's not easy. People here don't think slavery's wrong. They think it's natural. And it helps make the wheels go round. Sooner or later, the time will come when that's not so. But it hasn't got here yet."

To Annette, sooner or later might as well have been forever. To anybody in this alternate who was bought and sold like a bushel of beans, sooner or later was much too late. She could understand what Dad was driving at. Even in the home timeline, people hadn't started questioning slavery till the eighteenth century.

Nobody—except maybe the slaves—questioned it here. Annette's heart said that was wrong, that was wicked, that needed to be changed yesterday—if not sooner.

It wouldn't happen. She knew that, too. Crosstime Traffic had way too many other more urgent things to worry about. Too bad , she thought. Oh, too bad!

Jacques worked hard on his pike drill. He wished he were a musketeer. But he was big and strong. That helped him most of the time, but it didn't help make his wish come true. Size and strength counted for more with a pike than they did with a musket. Jacques didn't suppose he could blame Duke Raoul for making sure the men best suited to the pike were the ones who used it.

His target was a post driven into the ground. He lunged, withdrew, lunged again. The gleaming iron head of the pike tapped the post at what would have been belly height. He imagined the post was one of King Abdallah's men, a bearded infidel screaming, "Allahu akbar!" He'd scream, all right, when the spearhead went home. Jacques stretched forward and lunged again.

"That's very smooth," a dry voice said from behind him.

Jacques whirled. There stood Duke Raoul. He was a little gamecock of a man, short and skinny but tough.

He had a long face, a scarred cheek, a pointed chin beard going from seal-brown to gray, and the coldest blue eyes Jacques had ever run into. Those eyes saw everything that went on in Paris, and almost everything that went on in the Kingdom of Versailles. They even saw the pike drill of a no-account young soldier.

"I thank you, your Grace. I thank you kindly," Jacques said.

"If you bend your back leg a little more, you'll be able to extend the lunge," the duke said. "Let me show you." He took the pike from Jacques. He might not have been big, but he was plenty strong—he handled the sixteen-foot shaft like a toothpick.

Raoul went through the same drill as Jacques had. Watching him, Jacques was much less pleased with his own performance. Oh, he wasn't bad. But Duke Raoul was supple as a dancer, quick as a serpent. Jacques wouldn't have wanted to face him across a battle line.

After just enough work to break a sweat, the duke straightened and handed back the pike. "Here—run through it again," he said. "Remember that back leg. It really does make a difference."

"I'll try, sir." Jacques did his best. He still felt clumsy and slow next to Raoul. And he had to think about that back leg now.

Thinking was bad on a battlefield. It cost time. You needed to do, on the instant. Speed counted for so much. But he did see he could extend the lunge that way. Reach counted, too.

Duke Raoul was nodding. "Not bad. You were trying to bend that leg. I noticed. Now you've got to keep doing it till it turns into a habit."

"Yes, sir. I was just thinking the same thing. I don't want to have to try to remember it if I'm out there fighting."

"Don't blame you. I wouldn't, either. But keep practicing— it'll stick. 'Patience is rewarded. The fool shows his folly and gives way before the end.' So Henri said, and I'm sure He's right." Duke Raoul paused. Then he changed the subject even faster than he'd shifted the pike: "Tell me—what do you think of the traders from Marseille you were talking with the other day?"

How did Raoul know about Muhammad al-Marsawi and his wife and daughter? Jacques hadn't said anything about them. Had the boatman talked to the duke? Did Raoul have spies in the market square?

"What do I think, your Grace?" Jacques echoed. "I wonder if the daughter is pretty." At the least, an answer like that bought him time.

It made Raoul laugh. "That I can't tell you. I don't know anybody who's seen her without her veil. You don't want to mess with things like that. Offend a woman from King Abdallah's country and we're liable to have a war on our hands." A clear warning note rang in his voice.

"Oh, I know, your Grace," Jacques said quickly. He didn't want the duke to think he was stupid enough to do something like that.

"All right. Good." Raoul stroked that neat, pointed beard. With his clever face and cold eyes, it made him look a little like the Devil. Jacques couldn't imagine anyone, not even King Charles, having the nerve to come out and say that to Raoul. After the pause for thought, the nobleman went on, "Did you notice anything . . . odd about those Muslims?"

"Odd?" Jacques scratched his head. "I'm not sure what you mean, sir. They did seem to be clever people—not just Muhammad but his wife and daughter as well."

"Yes, I've heard that from others as well. I've said it myself, in fact—I've met them." Duke Raoul paused again. "How many other women from down south do you know—or know of—who have much of anything to say in public? They're rich, too, these traders, or at least a long way from poor. Did they have any slaves or servants with them?"

"Not that I saw." Jacques did some more scratching, and hoped he wasn't lousy again. "That is funny, isn't it?"

"Well, I've never heard of any other Muslims with goods as fine as theirs who didn't," the duke said. "I don't know what it means. I can't swear it means anything. But when you find something that doesn't fit in with the rest of what you've seen over the years, you start wondering why it doesn't."

He'd had many more years than Jacques to form patterns like that in his mind. For the first time, Jacques began to see getting some wrinkles and some gray in your hair might have advantages. Did they make up for bad teeth and sore joints and all the other ills of age? Not as far as he could see, but they might be there even so.

"Another thing," Raoul said. "Did they speak French while you were around?"

Jacques had to think about it. "Yes, they did," he answered after a moment. "I know some Arabic, but not a whole lot."

"Good you know some," Raoul told him. "How did the traders sound to you?"

"I don't know." Now Jacques was lost. "Like people speaking French. How are they supposed to sound?"

"Like this, the way most people from down in the south sound." Duke Raoul talked through his nose, as French-speakers from the south did. He was a good mimic. And he'd noticed what Jacques had missed—those traders didn't talk like that. He went back to his usual way of speaking to say, "If you listen to them, you'd think they came from Paris, wouldn't you?"

"Yes, your Grace, you would," Jacques agreed. "What can that mean?"

"I don't know, any more than you do," the duke said. "But I'd like to find out. How would you like to give me a hand?"

"Me?" Jacques almost dropped the pike. "What do I have to do?"

"Well, they're going back to Marseille soon. They won't travel by themselves, not unless they're idiots—and they aren't. They'll go in a group, with other southbound traders," Raoul said. Jacques nodded. That was how things worked, all right— numbers brought safety. The duke pointed a scarred forefinger at him. "How would you like to be a guard in that company?"

Jacques bowed. "Whatever you want me to do, your Grace, you know I'll do it." You had to talk that way around Duke Raoul. If he thought you didn't want to do something he told you to do, he wouldn't tell you to do anything—and you'd never move up if he ignored you. Jacques wanted to move up, and winning the duke's favor was a good way to do it. Besides, he really did want to do this. Raoul had made him curious.

"How can I serve you best?" he asked.

"Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut," Raoul answered bluntly. "Think you can manage that? Some people can't. If you're one of them, say so now. I won't hold it against you—I'll be glad you're honest. You'll get other chances, I promise. But if you go along and you mess things up by blabbing ... I won't like that a bit."

He had ways, painful ones, of making his dislike felt. Jacques gulped a little, but he managed a nod. "I don't talk out of turn, sir," he said.

"Well, I hadn't heard that you did," the duke said. "If I had, I wouldn't have offered this to you. We'll see what happens, then. Don't make it obvious you're snooping, either. If you do, you won't learn anything worth having. Do you read and write?"

"I read some. I've picked it up on my own, mostly. I might be able to write my name. Past that—" Jacques shrugged. He'd never needed to write before. Now maybe he did. He went on, "I read some French, I should have said. I can't make head nor tail of the funny squiggles the Muslims use."

"All right. Don't let it worry you. If you want to, after you come back I'll have someone teach you more. It comes in handy all kinds of ways."

"Thanks, your Grace. I'd like that." Jacques bowed again. "I'll never make a scholar, but I like to learn things."

"That's a fair start for a spy. Of course, it's also a fair start for a gossipy old granny." Even when Duke Raoul praised you, he liked to jab you with a pin, too. He smiled a crooked smile at Jacques. "And if you do get too snoopy, maybe Muhammad there will think you're trying to see under Khadija's veil, eh? And maybe he'll be right, too." He nudged Jacques with his elbow and strode off whistling a bawdy tune.

Jacques stared after him. Raoul wasn't wrong—he wouldn't mind finding out what Khadija looked like. That wasn't why he stared, though. He understood why the duke knew Muhammad al-Marsawi's name. The merchant was wealthy, and Raoul was interested in him. But that Raoul also had Muhammad's daughter's name on the tip of his tongue . . . She was just a girl. Jacques wouldn't have thought she was important enough to stick in a duke's mind. But Raoul kept track of all kinds of things. That was part—a big part—of what made him what he was.

The pikeman practicing next to Jacques sent him a jealous glance. "His Grace spent a lot of time with you,"

the man said. He was probably twice Jacques' age. Though short, he was broad-shouldered and strong. He made a good enough soldier, but no one would promote him to sergeant if he lived to be a hundred.

Since Jacques didn't want trouble from him, he tried to shrug it off. "He wanted to know about. . . some things I saw on my way up from Count Guillaume's fortress." Everybody knew he'd been there. He'd almost talked about Muhammad and Khadija. But hadn't Raoul told him to keep his mouth shut? If he didn't, the duke might—likely would—hear about it.

"He spent a lot of time," the older man repeated. "I've fought for him since you were born, and he's never spent that kind of time with me."

"Duke Raoul does as he pleases," Jacques said. The other pikeman couldn't very well argue with that.

There were ways to get the duke to notice you. Jacques had found one—he'd done well at what Raoul told him to do, and he'd dealt with people Raoul found interesting. If you made a big enough mistake, that would make the duke notice you, too. Afterwards, you'd wish it hadn't, but it would. Jacques feared the other pikeman would draw the Duke of Paris' eye that way, if he ever did.

Caravan guard! That was something. It beat carrying messages back and forth. And he'd get a chance to see what the Muslims' country was like. People in the Kingdom of Versailles were jealous of their southern neighbors. The Muslims were richer. People said they were smarter. They lived more comfortable lives.

Paris tried to be like Marseille. No one had ever heard of Marseille trying to be like Paris.

All at once, Jacques wished he hadn't let Muhammad al-Marsawi and his family know he understood Arabic. Now they would be on their guard around him. If they'd thought he only spoke French, they might not have watched what they said in their own language. But he'd wanted to show off. He'd wanted to impress the merchant—and the merchant's daughter. He hadn't worried about what might come of that.

Duke Raoul would have. Jacques was sure of it. The duke always thought before he did things. He was as clever as any Arab. Jacques wished he could be like that. He'd never be a duke, of course—he didn't have the blood. But he might make a captain, or even a colonel. And if he made colonel, his children, when he had them, could marry into the nobility. Oh, snobs would sniff, but they could do it. And his grandchildren might be nobles themselves. If you were going to rise in the Kingdom of Versailles, that was how you went about it.

Jacques laughed at himself. Here he was, seventeen years old, not even a sergeant, and dreaming of being a captain or a colonel. Dreaming higher than that, in fact—dreaming as high as any man in this kingdom could dream. If Raoul found out he wanted his grandchildren to be nobles, what would the duke do?

That was a scary thought. Or was it? Wouldn't Raoul grin and wink and nudge him and whisper, "Good luck"? Somewhere two or three hundred years ago, hadn't one of Raoul's many-times-great-grandfathers gone and done what Jacques dreamt of now? Sure he had. Noble families, except the king's, hadn't come down from before the days of the Great Black Deaths. They had their start in the newer days, the days of Henri, the days of the Final Testament.

Muslims sneered at Christians for following Henri. They said Muhammad was the last man through whom God spoke.

Jacques made the sign of the wheel over his heart. He didn't care what Muslims thought. He knew what he believed.

But he didn't like the idea of Muhammad al-Marsawi laughing at him because of his religion. And he really didn't like the idea of Khadija laughing at him because of it. He didn't know what he could do about that, short of converting.

Christians did, every now and then. The Kingdom of Berry had been all Christian once. Little by little, the people there were giving up their faith. Some wanted to escape the higher taxes Christians had to pay in a Muslim kingdom. Others, though, others decided God was on the Muslims' side. Didn't their wealth and power show that? Lots of people must have thought so, because Berry didn't have many Christians left in it these days.

Things were different here in the Kingdom of Versailles. The only mosques here were for traders up from the south. If you converted to Islam, you couldn't even stay and pay extra taxes. You had to leave the kingdom. Except for the clothes on your back, you couldn't take your property with you, either.

In spite of that, people did convert and go into exile. Not a flood of them, but a slow, steady trickle. Some thought they had a better chance of getting rich down in the Muslim lands. Others, again, really believed in what they were doing. They had to, or they wouldn't have put themselves to so much trouble.

Jacques didn't like the idea that his kingdom and the other Christian kingdoms to the north and east were the Muslims' poor, backward cousins. One of these days, we'll know as much as they do, he thought. One of these days, we'll be as rich as they are. And then . . . And then they'd better look out, because we'll have a lot of paying back to do.

He lunged with the pike one more time. It was perfect. Duke Raoul would have been proud of him.

"Are we ready?" Dad asked for what had to be the twentieth time.

Mom finally lost patience with him. "I don't know about you," she said, a certain edge in her voice, "but I am."

The sarcasm didn't faze him. When he was in one of these moods, nothing fazed him. He just turned to Annette and said, "And you, Khadija? Are you ready?"

"Yes, my father," she answered. Her mother snapped back at Dad. Annette mostly didn't. Life was too short. She let him work the jumpiness out of his system.

"Are you sure?" he persisted. "You have everything you will need to take back to Marseille?"

"Yes, my father," Annette said again. Now, whether she wanted it to or not, a certain edge found its way into her voice. The room they were staying in, like any room in any inn in this alternate, held no more furniture than it had to. It had beds, stools, a chest that now stood open. Nobody could have much doubt about whether her stuff was packed. Dad ... got the fidgets.

"God be praised!" he said now. He let it go at that, a sign that this case wouldn't be so bad as some of the ones Annette had seen him have.

"Let's go," Mom said. "I want to head back to the south as soon as we can. This caravan has taken too long coming together."

"It's here now," Dad said, "^fwe have everything out of the room, let's load the mules and get on our horses and be on our way."

Annette was ready to go. Back to Marseille, back to the home timeline, back to the United States . . .

Fieldwork was an adventure, but going off to college would be an adventure, too. And the dorms, unlike this inn, would have showers and computers and fasartas, and wouldn't have bugs. There was something to be said for adventures that didn't smell bad.

The innkeeper met his departing guests in the stables. He wasn't fat and jolly, the way innkeepers were supposed to be. He was scrawny and looked like a man who worried all the time. He had a pinched mouth and deep lines between his eyes. He also had horrible bad breath. In the home timeline, a dentist would have fixed his troubles long ago. Here, all you could do with a rotting tooth was pull it. They had no anesthetics but wine and opium. You went to the dentist as a last resort.

He bowed and made the sign of the wheel. "May the roads be fair for you. May God watch over you. May your travels bring you back to my inn once more," he said in pretty good Arabic. Annette was sure he meant the last part. Her father had paid him well.

"It will be as God wills," Dad said, which sounded impressive and meant exactly nothing. Then he asked a question that did mean something: "Have you heard any news of how the roads are?" He didn't mean whether they were muddy or dry. That would change with the weather. He meant whether bandits had been raiding lately.

"What news I have is good," the innkeeper said. "King Abdallah is supposed to have smashed Tariq's band of thieves. If that is true, they will not trouble you on your way home."

"May it be so!" Dad sounded as if he meant it, and he did mean it. The Kleins were at risk till they got back to Marseille. Dad had the disguised pistol. He also had a radio that looked like a set of worry beads. If they got in trouble, they could let the Crosstime Traffic people in Marseille know what had happened. But help couldn't reach them faster than the speed of a galloping horse, and that might not be fast enough.

After exchanging one more set of bows with the innkeeper, Dad led the horses and mules through the winding streets of Paris to the riverside market square where the caravan was assembling. Shopkeepers popped out of their stores to try to sell him medicines or brass candlesticks or carved wooden figurines or bullet molds or whatever else they had for their stock in trade. He waved them all away. "Next time, my friends, next time," he said in French, again and again. That was as polite a way as Annette could imagine to tell them to get lost.

Merchants and pack animals swarmed in the market square. The chaos and the noise and the smell were very bad. People shouted and swore in half a dozen languages. Muslims in flowing robes made broad, sweeping gestures. Traders from the Kingdom of Versailles got excited over trifles, much as Frenchmen might have done in the home timeline. Men from the Germanies wore tight breeches and brimless round caps. They stood with their arms folded across their chests and waited for things to get moving. A couple of Englishmen wore breeches like the Germans but had on flat, broad-brimmed hats that looked like leather pancakes.

Listening to them, Annette could follow their brand of English about half the time. Chaucer had lived in this alternate, too, and had written, though the plague killed him here before he started The Canterbury Tales.

The merchants' English was a lot like his—German with a French overlay. It didn't have most of the layers of vocabulary that had come afterwards in the home timeline. In this alternate, England had never been a great power. The British Isles were a backwater in Europe, which was a backwater in the world. Scotland was still independent here. Ireland held hah0 a dozen little kingdoms that fought among themselves all the time.

"What dost tha mean, tha great gowk?" one of the Englishmen shouted at another. Annette wondered what a gowk was. Nothing good, plainly. Maybe she would have done better with this dialect if she'd grown up in Yorkshire or somewhere like that.

The merchants chatted about what they'd bought and what they'd sold and the prices they'd got. They argued about who would go where in the southbound caravan. Nothing got settled in a hurry. A lot of them took squabbling over such things as a game. Haggling over prices was a game here, too. You had to play along, or the locals would think you were peculiar. It wasted a lot of time, but then, so did sitting in front of a TV screen. People who didn't find one way or another to waste time probably weren't human.

While the traders talked and bickered, the men who would guard them on the way south stood around and waited. Some of the guards would be mounted when the caravan finally got moving. They had big, clumsy matchlock pistols in holsters on their belts, and spares tucked into their boot tops. Dad's was made to look like theirs. Unlike his, the locals' were single-shot muzzle-loaders. Reloading a pistol like that on horseback was as near impossible as made no difference. That was why they all carried more than one.

Musketeers had matchlocks, too, but longer ones that would fire farther. They would march on foot. They wore iron back-and-breasts—most of them had light linen surcoats on over them— and high-crested helmets. Feathers or plumes of horsehair topped some of the helms. They marked sergeants and officers.

Pikemen wore similar armor. They and the musketeers looked a lot like Spanish conquistadors from the home timeline. No conquistadors in this alternate—the plague had left Spain almost empty. The pikemen were careful to keep their long spears upright. They could have snarled traffic even worse than it was already if they'd let the pikes drop to the horizontal.

Pikemen, musketeers, and cavalrymen all wore swords along with their main weapons. If a spearshaft broke, if they couldn't reload a matchlock fast enough, they could still defend themselves. Even in the home timeline, officers sometimes wore ceremonial swords to this day. These, though, weren't ceremonial blades.

Their leather-wrapped hilts were plain and businesslike, and bore dark sweat stains that said they'd seen use.

One of the pikemen looked familiar to Annette. She needed a moment to figure out why, because he hadn't worn a helmet the last time she saw him. She nudged her mother. "Look," she said. "That's the fellow we were talking with here the other day."

Her mother looked that way. "Why, so it is," she said. "We'll have to watch what we say when he's around.

His Arabic isn't bad." Her gaze sharpened. "I wonder if that's why he's along. It seems like something Duke Raoul would do."

"Spy on Muslim merchants, you mean?" Annette asked.

"Maybe," Mom said. "Maybe just spy on us. We come from a lot farther away than Marseille, after all.

Even though we try our best to fit in, even though we speak the languages perfectly, we're strangers here.

Maybe it shows enough to make the locals wonder. I hope not, but maybe."

The pikeman—Jacques, his name was—noticed Annette and her mother looking in his direction. He nodded back at them. His smile, Annette suspected, was aimed at her in particular. She pretended not to notice it.

The trip south could get complicated all kinds of ways.

Three

As long as nothing went wrong, guarding a caravan was easy duty. Jacques laughed at himself. As long as nothing went wrong, any duty was easy. But he'd had to hurry down to Count Guil-laume's fortress, worrying every step of the way. If you were alone, you always had to worry.

Well, he was anything but alone here. A small town might have gone on parade—and on slow parade at that. Animals ambled along. People either walked or rode beside the beasts of burden. Everybody gabbed with everybody else. Nobody seemed to care when the caravan got to Marseille. The merchants had nobody to haggle with but one another. They might as well have been on holiday.

As for Jacques' fellow guards ... Most of them were older men, in their twenties or thirties or even forties.

To him, men in their forties were almost as old as the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. That was a good age for a ruler, for someone like Duke Raoul. For a man out in the field? He had his doubts.

He needed a while to realize the older men had their doubts about him, too. They called youngsters tadpoles, and seemed to think he couldn't do anything his mother hadn't taught him. That made him furious.

He needed a while to realize they thought his fury was funny. He stopped giving them the satisfaction of steaming where they could see it. They treated him better after that—he'd shown he could figure something out, anyhow.

When he left Paris, he thought he would spend most of his time spying on Muhammad al-Marsawi and his wife—and his daughter. Things didn't work like that. The caravanmaster rotated his guards three or four times a day, so nobody kept the same station too long.

Jacques didn't need long to see that that was fair. A few hours as a rear guard, eating everybody else's dust, drove home the lesson. But it meant he couldn't even get close to Muhammad and his family most of the time. At first he thought Duke Raoul would be angry at him for falling down on the job. He was hustling up to the front of the caravan so everyone else could breathe his dust for a while when he saw he was being silly. Raoul knew how caravans worked. He knew better than Jacques did, and that was for sure. So he couldn't have expected Jacques to spend every waking moment around Muhammad al-Marsawi . . . and Khadija. Marseille was a long way from Paris. / have time, he thought.

He breathed a great big sigh of relief. He didn't have to keep twisting his head to see where the Muslim trader was and what he was up to. A lot of Henri's preaching was about the patient man and what he could do. Jacques had listened to endless sermons from those verses in the Final Testament, but they hadn't made much sense to him. Now, all at once, they did.

He got his first chance to talk with Muhammad when the caravan encamped the second night out from Paris. The caravan-master had stopped in a meadow that gave the animals good grazing and the people enough room to pitch their tents. Swallows swooped overhead, hawking bugs out of the sky. A white wagtail—actually, the bird was mostly gray and black, though it had a white face—hopped in the grass.

Chaffinches called from the bushes around the meadow.

"I hope you are well," Jacques said to the merchant, and then, "Do you need help with your tent?"

"I am well, thank you. May God grant that you be the same. As for this tent"—Muhammad al-Marsawi paused to drive a peg into the ground with a rock—"again, I thank you for the offer, but it is not being too troublesome right this minute."

"Good. I am glad to hear it." Jacques watched the trader drive in another peg. He suddenly understood why this man puzzled Duke Raoul. Everyone else he knew, Christian or Muslim, would have said something like, I'm not having any trouble with the tent. Jacques had no trouble understanding what Muhammad al-Marsawi meant. The trader's phrase, which gave the tent a life of its own, was more vivid than the usual way of putting things. But it wasn't anything most people would have said. How had he come to put things like that?

"Have you heard any word of bandits on the road?" the merchant asked.

Anyone traveling in a caravan might ask a question like that. Anyone might sound anxious when he asked it, too. Muhammad al-Marsawi certainly did. The trader had a pistol stuffed into his belt. Jacques thought he was as likely to shoot himself in the foot with it as he was to bring down a raider.

Hiding his scorn, Jacques answered, "As far as I know, the road is clear. Of course, I do not know everything there is to know."

"I hope you know the truth," Muhammad said. "Yes, I hope that very much. God grant it be so."

"Yes, God grant it." Jacques sketched the wheel over his heart. The trader looked away when he did it.

Muslims accepted Jesus as a prophet, even if they didn't believe He was the Son of God. But they thought Satan, not God, spoke through Henri. Their Muhammad had said he was the last prophet. To them, anyone who came after him had to be a fraud. To Jacques, that only proved how ignorant they were.

Muhammad al-Marsawi coughed. "My family and I were surprised to see you here after we talked a few days ago."

Jacques' cheeks heated. What could that mean but, Why are you spying on us? The merchant might be strange, but he was smart. Well, that wasn't anything Jacques didn't already know. He said, "Duke Raoul chose me for this duty. How could I say no to my liege lord?" The last two words had to come out in French. Arabic didn't have quite the same notion—you could say master in Arabic, but not liege lord. Any superior could be a master, but a liege lord had obligations to his men in return for the duty they owed him.

"Well, anyone owes his master obedience." The trader didn't bother with the difference between the one and the other. He spoke French as well as he did Arabic, but that didn't mean he understood there was a difference. He went on, "And what do you think of this duty he gave you?"

"I like it," Jacques replied. "I get to go places I have never gone, and I get to meet people I have not met before." He bowed to Muhammad al-Marsawi. "And I get to know better people I have already met."

The trader's eyes twinkled. "Ah, but is it me you want to know better, me with my beard and with my hair going gray, or is it Khadija?"

Another blush set Jacques' face afire. "I do not wish to be a trouble," he said.

"Have I said you are?" the merchant asked. "But I am not a blind man, either."

Most Muslims, from what Jacques had seen and heard, would have been furious if a Christian looked at their daughter. Muhammad al-Marsawi didn't sound furious. He sounded . . amused? That relieved Jacques and puzzled him at the same time. He was glad the merchant didn't want to pull out that pistol and aim it at him. But why didn't Muhammad act like most other men from his kingdom?

What would Duke Raoul have to say when he heard this? Probably that it was one more piece that didn't fit in the puzzle. Why was Muhammad al-Marsawi so different? Jacques almost asked. That would have given him away, but the trader might have answered just because he was so different.

Was Khadija different, too? If she was, did that mean she wouldn't mind if Jacques got to know her better?

He could hardly wait to find out.

Annette didn't like riding sidesaddle. To her, if you rode sidesaddle you were a fall waiting to happen. But women in this alternate didn't ride astride, so she was stuck. If she didn't care to ride sidesaddle, she could walk. She did a good deal of that, too—not so much as her father, but a good deal even so.

She let out a silent sigh of relief when the caravan left the Kingdom of Versailles and passed into the Kingdom of Berry. She felt safer among Muslims here than she did among this alternate's strange Christians. Western Europe here had been through a lot. It was at last starting to emerge from the new dark age the Great Black Deaths had clamped down on it. In another couple of hundred years, it might be a very lively, very exciting place, the way it had been in the home timeline between 1600 and 1700. For now, this alternate's Western Europe was still a borrower, not a creator.

At the border, the customs inspectors went easy on the Muslims and searched the Christians' goods with great care. It had been the other way around when Annette and her family entered the Kingdom of Versailles this past spring. The inspectors took away a fine bell a trader from the Germanies wanted to bring into their kingdom. He squawked in bad French and worse Arabic, but they wouldn't listen to him.

"He should have known better," Annette's father said as the caravan got moving again. "That can only be a church bell, and churches aren't allowed to have bells in Muslim kingdoms. The Muslims are willing to let them exist—as long as they pay their taxes—but they can't advertise, you might say."

"What do you want to bet the Muslims find something to do with the bell themselves?" Mom said.

"Oh, sure they will." Dad nodded. "Either that or they'll sell it back across the border and make a nice profit on it. But the Germanies are a long way away. Nobody there can go to war with the Kingdom of Berry over how it treats their traders."

The merchant kept spluttering and fuming and complaining till the caravanmaster got tired of listening to him. "Quit grumbling," he told the German. "You got caught with a church bell, so you're stuck. Thank Jesus and Henri that they didn't confiscate the rest of your goods. Then you'd have something to howl about."

"You do not help me!" the trader said.

"I'm sorry." The caravanmaster sounded anything but. "I know a lost cause when I see one." He wheeled his horse and rode away from the German. The man started to ride after him. A couple of guards stepped up and persuaded him that wouldn't be a good idea.

One of the guards was Jacques. After he helped get the merchant from the Germanies calmed down, he looked over in Annette's direction. As soon as he did, she looked away. She knew he was interested in her.

This was one of the times when a veil came in handy. Wearing one meant he couldn't see her expression.

He wasn't bad-looking. He seemed nice enough. She might have liked him ... if he bathed, if he were deloused, if he were dewormed. She might have liked him ... if he didn't despise people who weren't of his religion, if his head weren't packed full of superstitions. She might have liked him ... if he weren't from this alternate.

People from Crosstime Traffic were warned not to get too close to the locals when they left the home timeline. People being people, they broke the rules every now and then. When they did, things almost always turned out bad. The rules were there as much to protect people from the alternates as they were to make sure nobody gave away the Crosstime Traffic secret.

On an alternate like this, giving away the secret was only a small worry. The idea of traveling between alternate worlds was beyond most people's mental horizons here. Even if it hadn't been, the locals couldn't do anything about it. The closest thing they had to a computer here was the abacus. People who knew how could do arithmetic amazingly fast with those beads on wires. Even so ...

Keeping the secret mattered a lot more on alternates with breakpoints closer to the present. A lot of them had had an industrial revolution and a scientific revolution, too. Some of them had technology nearly as good as the home timeline's. A few had technology better than the home timeline's, at least in things that didn't have anything to do with crossing from one alternate to another. Annette's world had learned a lot from them. And if they ever got the idea for crosstime travel, they could run with it.

The guard with Jacques said something. They both laughed. They were probably talking about what a fool the German trader was. Human nature didn't change much from one alternate to another. The other guard slapped Jacques on the back. This time, Jacques said something, and he got a laugh. Annette didn't think the trader would be happy if he could hear them. With the small crisis solved, they separated.

Jacques came over toward Annette and her family. She might have known he would—he did whenever he got the chance. He didn't talk directly to her. That would have been rude, even offensive. But he kept an eye on her while he talked to her father. He was interested, all right. She knew the signs. They weren't much different here from what they would have been in the home timeline.

"God grant that you and yours are well," Jacques said to Dad in his accented Arabic. He'd had to learn it the hard way—no implant for him. You could hear the French underneath.

"God grant you the same," Annette's father said. "I am glad the commotion is over and done with."

"So am I," Jacques replied. "You would not be foolish enough to bring something into the Kingdom of Versailles that is not allowed there."

"Well, I hope not," Dad said. "Life is simpler when you do not go out of your way to make a nuisance of yourself. Not everyone can see that, though."

"Very true," Jacques said gravely. Did he see that he was making a nuisance of himself by coming around and chatting with the Kleins when they didn't want his company? If he did, would he have kept doing it?

Annette waited for her father to show it to him if he didn't see it. But Dad just went on talking about the weather and the road and the likely price of olive oil next year. He passed on some gossip he'd picked up in the caravan, and he listened while Jacques passed on some of his own. Back in the home timeline, Dad wasn't so patient. When he came to this alternate, he gave people the benefit of the doubt. Biting their heads off when they acted like fools would have got him talked about, and he didn't want to draw notice to himself that way.

Instead, he drew notice to himself another way. People from Marseille all the way up to Paris thought Dad was one of the nicest fellows they'd ever met. Even if he is a Muslim, Christians would always add when they talked about him. They might apologize for liking him, but like him they did.

It might have been better if no one remembered him, or if people remembered him as an ordinary person.

But how could you tell your own father to be less nice? You couldn't—or Annette couldn't, anyhow. And so innkeepers and people he bargained with smiled when they thought about him.

Jacques said, "It must be hard, bringing your wife and your daughter with you on such a long journey."

In the home timeline, Paris and Marseilles were a couple of hours apart by bullet train, less than that by airplane. Here Jacques was right—a long journey separated them. With a smile and a shrug, Dad said,

"Well, being separated from them seems a bigger hardship, and so they travel with me."

"Don't you worry about bandits and robbers?" Jacques asked, adding, "I would, if I were traveling with women."

In the home timeline, that would have been a sexist thing to say. In this alternate, as in others that hadn't known an industrial revolution, it was just common sense. On the average, women were smaller than men, and not so strong. And they had babies, which was a dangerous business without modern medicine. In the home timeline, women had a longer life expectancy than men. That wasn't true here, or in other low-tech alternates. Childbirth was the main reason it wasn't true. Some women died of it. Some who didn't were weakened so they died of other things instead. And no one here had any contraceptives that worked. Once women became sexually active, they would get pregnant.

"May God keep bandits and robbers—far away from me," Dad said. Jacques laughed. And Dad was joking, but at the same time he wasn't. Things could go wrong on the road, and he knew it. He went on, "It would take a bold band of robbers to attack a caravan this size."

"And one with such brave guards," Mom put in.

Jacques smiled. He had a nice smile. His teeth were straight, and he still had all of them—but then, Annette didn't think he was even her age. His beard was still mostly fuzz. "Maybe the lady your wife gives me too much credit," he said to Dad.

"Maybe she does—but she'd better not," Dad answered.

That made Jacques smile. He bowed to Annette's father. He was careful to keep his long pike upright while he did it. Then he pointed to the pistol on Dad's belt. "If—God prevent it—some cowardly wretches attack us, surely your own great courage and ferocity will make them flee like the jackals and wolves they are." Arabic was a wonderful language for flowery compliments, and for insults that would have sounded over the top in English.

Dad smiled back. Annette thought the curve of his lips looked a little strained, and hoped Jacques wouldn't notice. That pistol seemed ordinary, but it wasn't, not by the standards of this alternate. It was nice to have, but it was for emergencies only. Dad said, "Any caravan that has to depend on me to save it is in more trouble than it knows what to do with."

"And here until now I thought you were a hero, a man without flaws," Jacques said. "Now I see you have one after all—you are too modest." In English, he would have been laying it on with a trowel. In Arabic, the teasing came out just right.

"I am a modest man—a man with plenty to be modest about," Annette's father replied. Annette had heard him use that line before. It really belonged to a twentieth-century British politician. Nobody in this alternate had ever heard it before. It passed for Dad's own wit. If you were going to steal, you should steal from the best.

Jacques shook his head. "Oh, no, sir. Oh, no. You are a man of accomplishments." He shifted from Arabic to French. "I know that many of your countrymen have learned my language. Many of them speak it well—if you are patient and work hard in spite of troubles, you will have your reward in the end." That was straight from Henri's New Revelation. Still in French, Jacques went on, "But never until now have I met a Muslim man who spoke my language perfectly, as if he were a Parisian himself. And your lady wife and your daughter are just as fluent. Maybe it is a miracle from God." He made the wheel sign Christians here used instead of crossing themselves.

Annette didn't think he really believed it was a miracle. No—he'd found a polite way to ask, How do you do that? The answer was simple ... if you had the home timeline's technology. Implants made learning a language easy. The information went right to the speech center in your brain, so you used your new tongue as smoothly as if you'd been born speaking it.

Here, the Kleins spoke this alternate's French a little too well. Whoever had prepared the language module must have done it from a native speaker. She should have done it from someone whose native language was the local Arabic but who also spoke good French. Then Jacques wouldn't have had any reason to wonder about it.

He waited to see what Dad would say. Dad, for once, didn't seem to know what to say. If he claimed French-speaking relatives, Jacques would check on that. Well, Jacques probably couldn't, but people he knew would be able to. Pretty plainly, he hadn't asked the question at random.

"We learned the way you would think—from slaves in Marseille," Annette said—in Arabic. However much she despised slavery, it came in handy here. She added, "And we have always been good with languages.

All of us have."

If snoopy Jacques wanted to check on that—well, good luck. By his grin, he knew he couldn't. He spoke to Dad, not directly to her: "If your charming daughter says it, my master, why then it must be so."

Mom started to laugh. After a moment, so did Dad. Annette and Jacques joined in a heartbeat later. He was looking at her. She wished he could see her. He'd got her good, and he had to know it, and she wanted him to know she knew, too. He'd sounded as if he meant every word of what he said, which only made him more sarcastic than he would have been if he sounded sarcastic.

Annette pointed at him. "You are a demon," she said, as she might have said, You're a devil to a friend at high school.

At her high school, though, nobody took demons and devils seriously. They were things you joked around with, things you watched in bad movies, things you killed in computer games, and things that tried to kill you there. They couldn't kill you for real, and you knew it.

It wasn't like that here. To the people in this alternate, demons and devils were as real as cheese and olive oil. When you didn't really know what caused diseases, when you looked to religion to answer your questions about the world because you had nowhere else to look, of course demons and devils seemed real.

Annette should have remembered that, but she hadn't. She'd liked Jacques, and so she'd treated him like someone from the home timeline.

And that was a mistake. Only a handful of words, but they horrified him. He made the sign of the wheel again. "By God, by Jesus, by Henri, I am no such evil thing," he said, speaking straight to her for the first time. "I am only a mortal, praying for heaven and afraid of hell and the things that dwell in hell."

"I'm sorry," she said, but he wasn't listening to her. He gave Dad a coldly formal bow, spun on his heel, and stalked away. He was graceful as a cat—a cat whose fur she'd rubbed the wrong way.

"Oh, dear," Mom said.

"He made a joke, and so I made a joke," Annette said helplessly.

"Except that kind of thing isn't a joke here," Dad said. "They broke Henri on the wheel because they thought he was a demon—and no doubt he was." He spoke the last few words louder than the rest, in case anybody else was listening. As someone playing the role of a Muslim in this world, he couldn't have a good word to say about Henri.

"Maybe it's for the best," Annette's mother said. "Jacques was asking a lot of pointed questions, wasn't he?

He'll think twice before he does that again."

Dad laughed. "He'll think twice before he gets anywhere near us. Either that or he'll want to exorcise us with a bucket of holy water apiece, the way that French priest did with the salamander."

"Salamander?" Annette said, and then, "Oh." He didn't mean a little four-legged creature that lived in damp places and ate bugs. He meant a fire elemental. But that still left her confused. "What French priest?"

"Why, the one in The Devil's Dictionary,"" her father replied, as if she should have known without asking.

"A very fitting book for the circumstances, don't you think?" And so it was, but Dad always thought The Devil's Dictionary was a fitting book. In it, Ambrose Bierce didn't have a good word to say about anybody or anything, and all his prods and pokes and gibes had style. Dad grinned wickedly. "Can you imagine what would happen if I translated it into the French they use here?"

"I can," Annette's mother said before she could answer. "They wouldn't understand half of it, and they'd want to burn you at the stake for the other half."

That sounded about right to Annette. Dad mimed being wounded. As far as Annette was concerned, he was the biggest ham left unsliced. He knew it, too, and took advantage of it. It probably made him a better merchant than he would have been otherwise. And people in this alternate were less restrained than they were in the home timeline. They had no TV, no movies, no radio, no recorded music, no computer games. If they wanted fun, they had to make their own. Overacting when they haggled was part of it.

Another caravan came up the road from the south. It was even bigger than the one coming down from Paris. The two edged past each other. Traders made a few hasty deals as they did. Caravan-masters screamed at both groups to keep moving. The dust they churned up was amazing. Annette's veil kept some of it out of her mouth and nose, but not enough. The guards from each caravan eyed those from the other as if they were about to fight. Nothing came of that, but it worried Annette just the same.

She walked and rode, rode and walked. Peasants in the fields stared at the caravan. A lot of them wouldn't have traveled more than a day's walk from where they were born in their whole lives. Little by little, the weather grew warmer and drier. Marseille had a Mediterranean climate, like that of Los Angeles or Melbourne or Cape Town. The rugged North Atlantic ruled the weather in Paris.

A hoopoe flew by, a bird that looked as if it had no business existing. It was salmon pink, had a feathery crest on its head, and made the strange noises that gave it its name. Birds of all sorts were more common here than they were in the home timeline. Over on the other side of the Atlantic that this world's sailors were only now beginning to cross, passenger pigeons still flew by the billion.

Annette understood why birds and other wildlife were more common here—people were less common.

They didn't have the tools to kill on a large scale, either. They didn't have many tools at all, in fact. Those peasants plowed behind oxen. They used hoes and spades and a few other hand tools. In good years, they raised enough to feed themselves and the towns. People went hungry in bad years.

Seeing the towns made her want to cry. Paris was a real city—a raw, smelly city, a twisted ghost of the Paris in the home timeline, but a real city even so. Marseille, too. But even Lyon was just a little country town here. It huddled inside walls that followed the lines of the ones the Romans had built. People said wolves had howled outside those walls not long before the caravan got there.

"Is there any alternate that has enough technology to let people be comfortable but hasn't messed up the environment getting it?" she asked her father in the hostel in Lyon.

He thought for a minute, then shook his head. "Not that I've ever heard. If you've got technology, what do you use it for? To change the environment. That's what technology does. You do what seems best for yourself right then. You chop the head off the big bad wolf that ate your granny. You bake four-and-twenty blackbirds in a pie. And you worry about what happens later, later—if you worry at all."

In this alternate, wolves still ate grannies. They hadn't got anybody when they prowled close to Lyon, but they could have. Blackbirds in Europe were different from the ones back in America. They were thrushes, and acted and sounded a lot like American robins. Europe had birds called robins, too, but they weren't closely related to the American kind. It all got confusing. People who studied birds used scientific names to clear up confusion like that. Annette wasn't a scientist, and got confused.

She did know people here baked blackbirds in pies, even if they didn't make rhymes about it.

When she thought about blackbird pie, she missed Burger King and Tuesday's Tapas and Panda Express even more than she had before. "I can't wait to get home!" she exclaimed.

"Won't be long now," Dad said.

The farther south Jacques got, the richer the countryside seemed to him. Traveling in the Muslim kingdoms rubbed his nose in how backward his own was. Everybody here seemed well fed. People ate wheat bread all the time. They didn't bother with barley or rye, let alone oats. When they grew oats, they fed them to their horses. Well, so did people in the Kingdom of Versailles. But Jacques had eaten plenty of oat porridge himself. He even liked oats—as long as he was with other people who ate them, too. Down here, it would have taken a torturer to get him to admit he'd ever touched them.

And the farther south he went, the more he found himself speaking Arabic. A lot of the peasants were still Christians. They paid taxes to their overlords so they could keep their religion. And most of them spoke French. But Jacques couldn't always follow them when they did, and they couldn't always understand him, either. Their dialect was so nasal and singsong, it might as well have been another language.

They had no trouble with his Arabic. Theirs sounded pretty much the same. When he mentioned that to Muhammad al-Marsawi, the merchant said, "Arabic has dialects, too. When I talk with a man from Egypt, or from Baghdad, we have to go slowly and figure out what we mean. Sometimes we even have to write things down. The written language is the same everywhere—well, almost—but people from different places pronounce the letters differently."

"But Egypt and Baghdad—they're far, far away. They're over the sea. They're at the edge of the world."

To Jacques, those all meant about the same thing. "No wonder people talk funny in places like that. We haven't come anywhere near that far, though, and already these people talk French like . .. like ... I don't know what."

"It is different from what you hear in Paris," Muhammad agreed.

"It sure is." Jacques took off his helmet, scratched his head, and put the helm on again. "Why don't you speak French the way they do down here? Really, this time."

"Oh, I can talk like this," the Muslim trader said through his nose. That was what Jacques thought he said, anyhow. The Devil might have invented this dialect to torment him. When Muhammad al-Marsawi spoke again, it was in the French of Paris: "But if I did talk like that, people up there couldn't follow me. And so I talk the northern way when I'm with folk from the north."

"Right." Thwarted again, Jacques wondered if there was anything Muhammad couldn't do. "Why don't you know all the other Arabic dialects, too?"

"I don't hear them so often or need them so much," the trader answered as easily. Jacques couldn't trip him up no matter how he tried. He wondered what kind of luck Duke Raoul would have had. Raoul was about the cleverest man he knew. But he'd started to think Muhammad al-Marsawi was just as clever. The Muslim was slick as boiled asparagus.

Jacques glanced over to the shrouded shape of Khadija. He was happier thinking about her than about her father. She gave signs of being clever, too, but—when she wasn't talking about demons—she didn't intimidate him the way Muhammad al-Marsawi did. For one thing, she was female. For another, he thought she was around his own age—though how could you be sure from a pair of eyes? And, for a third, he thought she liked him.

Oh, he didn't think she liked him like that. She'd given no sign of it if she did. But she talked at him as they traveled south. She couldn't very well talk with him, not when he answered through her father. Still, she did talk. And he thought he heard a smile in her voice every now and then. He even thought he saw a smile in her eyes once or twice. People always talked about how expressive eyes were. And eyes told a lot—when you saw them with the rest of somebody's face. By themselves, they were a lot harder to judge.

"Good day," she called to him in French two mornings after they left Lyon. "I hope you are well. I hope you slept well."

"Please thank your daughter and tell her I am very well, and that I rested well," Jacques said to Muhammad al-Marsawi. He also used French. Speaking his own language felt good. "Tell her also that I hope the same is true for her."

The trader bowed. "By some miracle, I think she will hear you even if I do not speak. Perhaps an angel will whisper your words into her ear. What do you think, eh?"

He was grinning. He might have been inviting Jacques to share the joke. The only trouble was, Jacques wasn't sure there was any joke to share. It sounded more like blasphemy to him. Of course Khadija could hear Jacques even if her father didn't pass his words on to her. Jacques had just done his best to be polite instead of talking straight to her. He hadn't imagined anybody, Muslim or Christian, joking about angels.

God's messengers were serious business—just like demons.

"My father. . ." Khadija said in Arabic. Her voice held no smile now. Instead of being a daughter, she might have been a mother scolding a naughty little boy.

"Yes, I know. I went too far," Muhammad al-Marsawi answered, as if he deserved that scolding. He looked back to Jacques. "Never mind me, my young friend. There are times when my tongue runs away like an unbroken horse, and I do not even have the fun of getting drunk first. Life is full of sorrows." His face turned sad, comically sad. He made fun of himself as easily as he made fun of angels.

But this, at least, was a familiar kind of foolery. Jacques had heard other Muslims act sad that they couldn't drink wine or beer or spirits. He'd also seen some who went ahead and drank whether they were supposed to or not. To them, that was a sin, but all men were sinners, weren't they? Muslim or Christian, that didn't matter. Nobody acted the way he—or even she—should all the time.

"Easy to make peace with me," Jacques said. He lifted his pike a few inches, aiming the point toward the heavens. "Have you made your peace with God?"

"I hope I have," the trader answered. "But that's my worry, don't you think?"

The question made Jacques scratch his head. He scratched his head a lot around Muhammad al-Marsawi and his family. They seemed to look at the world through a different window, and they saw different things.

And then they went and talked about them! Wasn't salvation everybody's business? Jacques had never known anybody, Christian or Muslim, who didn't think so. Society on both sides of the border was set up with that in mind. If Jacques understood Muhammad al-Marsawi—and he thought he did—the merchant said what other people thought didn't matter.

Jacques didn't ask him about that. One of these days, Muhammad and his family would come back to Paris.

Duke Raoul could worry about it then. It was too much for a messenger and caravan guard to get to the bottom of.

And Jacques had other things to worry about. The road from Lyon went south and a little east. The country rose. There were fewer farms and more forests. Some places, trees and brush hadn't been cleared back far enough from the road. Some places, they'd hardly been cleared back at all. He muttered to himself. All the guards were muttering and fuming. If this wasn't ambush country, he'd never seen any that was.

He breathed a sigh of relief when they made it to Grenoble, in the valley of the Isère. But a look south from the town told him the worst part of the journey still lay ahead. Real mountains still stood between the caravan and Marseille, mountains with forests of oak and ash and elm and hickory on their lower slopes and darker, gloomier pine woods farther up their sides. They might have been daring honest men to come through them.

A long, slogging day and a half out of Grenoble . . .

Four

Annette thought the countryside south of Grenoble some of the most beautiful she'd ever seen. The woods, the blue, blue sky, the crisp air, the little streams leaping down over rocks and making miniature waterfalls—it all reminded her of walking through a national park back in the home timeline. But this was no park. It was just part of the countryside.

Choughs were raucous overhead. They looked like skinny crows, except they had red legs and feet. Some had red beaks, too. Others had yellow. Dad said they were two different kinds of bird. Annette didn't worry about that one way or the other. She was happy enough admiring them. They swooped and tumbled in the air like Olympic gymnasts. Unlike gymnasts, they didn't have to worry about falling.

Having branches in new leaf overhead was nice. Annette enjoyed the shade. When she got to Marseille, her hands would be suntanned. So would a rectangle that included the bottom of her forehead, the skin around her eyes, the top of her nose, and the top of her cheeks. The rest of her? Fishbelly white. When you saw people with really strange patterns of tan and pale skin in the home timeline, you could bet they'd been out working in the alternates.

Mom was as bad off as Annette was. Dad wasn't, not quite— at least his whole face saw the sun. At the moment, he looked worlied. "This is the worst part," he said for the third or fourth time that morning. "If we can get through this stretch, it's all downhill from here." He meant that literally as well as figuratively.

Something changed, up in the air. Annette looked up, trying to see what it was. She didn't see anything for a moment. Then she realized that was the problem. The choughs were gone. The caravan hadn't bothered them. What would have?

Up ahead, the road turned a corner. She couldn't see what lay around the corner because of the trees. She didn't think much of it when her part of the caravan stopped. That happened every now and then. You didn't need a freeway to make a traffic jam. Horses and mules and people and a narrow road would do the job just fine. If another good-sized party was trying to come up this dirt track while her caravan was going down it...

The caravanmaster's horn blew urgently from the head of the column. Guards pounded up toward the van.

Annette couldn't see how the pikemen kept from fouling one another with their long-shafted weapons, but they did.

"I don't like the look of that," Mom said.

"Neither do I." Dad pulled the pistol from his belt. He was one of the most peaceable men in the world, but even peaceable men had trouble staying that way if the people around them wouldn't.

The volley of musket fire came from the woods on both sides of the road. The roar was like the end of the world. Wounded men screamed. So did wounded horses. Their cries of pain were terrible. Women on the rack might have shrieked like that. Dad cried out and stared at his hand. He was only slightly wounded—but the precious pistol went flying. In the movies, cops shot pistols out of bad guys' hands all the time. In real life, that was wildly unlikely. But unlikely didn't mean impossible. Whoever fired at him doubtless hadn't tried to knock away the handgun. He'd done it, though, try or not.

Another volley boomed. Thick smoke showed where the musketeers hid behind trees and rocks. It smelled like a Fourth of July fireworks display in a park. Warm summer nights and fireflies didn't belong in this chaos, but Annette couldn't help thinking of them. The smell of gunpowder smoke summoned them to her mind.

"Get the gun!" Dad said urgently. He was opening and closing his right hand, trying to make it work again, while blood dripped from the webbing between his thumb and forefinger.

Annette took two steps toward the pistol. Then a spooked horse bowled her over. She squawked and fell.

The horse didn't trample her. That was good luck, the way Dad's losing the handgun was bad luck. The beast's hooves thumped down all around her. It could as easily have kicked her in the head.

As soon as the horse thudded away, Annette's mother pulled her to her feet. "Are you all right?" Mom asked in a strange, shaky voice.

"Get the pistol!" Dad said again, and then, "Where the devil did it go?" The horse that had knocked Annette down wasn't the only one going crazy. One of the animals must have kicked it away—in the chaos, who could say where?

And Annette and her mother got no time to search for it. Men were running out of the woods. Some wore robes, others tunics and breeches. Some had swords, some had spears, some had pistols. A few wore helmets. None seemed to have any other armor. They were all screeching like banshees.

"Run!" Dad shouted. "I'll hold them off!"

But there was nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. The brigands were coming from both sides. One of them grabbed Annette. She flipped him over her shoulder and slammed him to the ground. She'd taken years of judo classes. She'd never imagined they would come in handy against a ruffian who might not have had a bath in his whole life. But they did. Nobody in this world fought like that. The bandit landed on his head and lay still afterwards. Annette hoped she hadn't killed him, but she didn't hope very hard.

She sent another man flying a moment later. Then somebody clouted her just above the ear with a spearshaft. All the judo classes in the world couldn't help her with that. The world flared red for a moment, then went black. She crumpled, and never knew when she hit the ground.

The caravanmaster's horn call meant trouble up ahead. Clutching his pike, Jacques trotted forward to see what had gone wrong. Up till now, nothing had. Older men who'd made a lot of these journeys were talking about how smooth this one was. Talking too soon was never a good idea.

If a robber band wanted to strike the caravan, this was a good place to do it. The forest came down close to the road on either side. They weren't close to any towns. All the same, Jacques had trouble believing anyone would try to bother this particular caravan. Its guards and merchants could put up a good fight.

Then he saw the roadblock ahead. The tree trunks and boulders made sure nobody was going forward.

From behind the roadblock, a man shouted in Arabic: "Surrender, you dogs! You cannot hope to get away!"

"If you want us, you'll have to take us!" the caravanmaster yelled back. He was up on horseback. His sword leaped free of the scabbard. The blade flashed in the sun. He shouted again, this time in French:

"God and Jesus and sweet Henri with us!"

A dozen men popped up behind the barricade. They rested their muskets on the timber and stone to steady their aim. The boom of the volley stunned Jacques' ears.

Something slammed Jacques in the chest. He groaned and staggered. Breathing hurt, but not the way it would have if he'd got a bullet in the lungs. He tore open his surcoat and looked down at himself. His back-and-breast was lead-splashed and dented, but it had held the bullet out.

Not everyone was so lucky. Men went down, some dead, others wounded. The caravanmaster's horse fell, too. The master had kicked free of the stirrups, though, and was on his feet, still waving that sword. "Come on, men!" he cried. "We can beat these swine!" If the robbers spoke French, that would make them angry.

You couldn't call a Muslim anything worse than a pig.

Those musketeers ducked away from the barricade to reload. Another dozen or so took their place. They poured another volley into the guards at the head of the column. More brigands were shooting from the woods to either side. Jacques ground his teeth. Whoever'd planned this attack knew just what he was doing.

"Forward!" the caravanmaster shouted, aiming his sword at the roadblock. "They can't have any more men with guns back there now!" He trotted toward the jumble of stones and felled trees. Cheering, the guards still on their feet followed.

But he was wrong. A man aimed a cavalry pistol at him and shot him in the chest. The caravanmaster was unarmored. He hadn't thought he would need to be a general, too. He groaned. He gurgled. He dropped his sword. He staggered and fell.

The charge he would have led came to a ragged halt. More musketeers popped up behind the barricade and gave the guards another volley. This one was more ragged than the two that had gone before. Jacques knew what that meant. The bandits who'd fired the first volley had reloaded, and the faster men hadn't waited for the slower ones to finish.

A bullet cracked past his ear. That was the noise bullets made when they came too close. Jacques laughed, not that it was funny. How could you come any closer than getting hit square in the chest? But his face wasn't armored. His arms and legs weren't, either.

Another bullet flew by. An instant later, it struck home with a soft, wet, slapping sound. A horse screamed.

Jacques thought it was a horse, anyway. With sounds of pain, you couldn't always tell.

"What do we do?" somebody cried, panic in his voice. "Jesus and Henri, what can we do? Do they aim to murder us all?"

If they did, they were like no bandits Jacques had ever heard of. Part of the profit in robbing a caravan came from selling its goods. The rest came from selling people into slavery—or, if they were rich enough, from holding them for ransom. Jacques wasn't rich. Fear made his limbs feel light. He didn't want to fall into slavery. But he didn't want to die here, either.

Screams and shouts and curses rose from farther back along the length of the caravan. He knew what that meant. The bandits were seizing traders, who couldn't fight back so well. They had the guards right where they wanted them.

He started running back. He couldn't help anybody where he was, not even himself. Farther back, he might be able to do Khadija and her family some good. As he ran, he realized he should have thought of Muhammad al-Marsawi and his family. Well, too bad. He'd thought the way he'd thought, and he'd meant it, too.

He got shot a few heartbeats later.

One moment, he was running as fast as he could. The next, he lay in the dirt by the side of the road, howling like a won". Blood turned the can" of his left trouser leg red. He pulled up the trouser leg to look at the wound. It could have been worse. A bullet had torn a chunk of meat out of that big muscle. But it hadn't hit a bone, and he dared hope it hadn't torn the tendon. If the wound didn't fester, he might not even limp in a few weeks.

But that would be in a few weeks. Now . . .

He took his knife from his belt and cut a strip of cloth from the trouser leg to bandage the wound and slow the bleeding. He'd just finished, biting his lip against the pain, when a man with a sword ran up to him.

"Yield or die!" the bandit shouted, first in Arabic, then in French.

Jacques let the knife fall in the dirt. "I yield," he said in Arabic. Even if he killed this robber, he couldn't hope to get away.

"Ah, you speak a real language. That means you will sell for more." The bandit sounded happy. Jacques had used Arabic for just that reason. If he was going to be a slave, he wanted to be a valuable one. He'd get treated better. The man who stood over him asked, "Can you walk?"

"I don't think so," Jacques answered. "Not far, anyway."

"All right." The bandit shouted for a friend. The friend came up leading a horse. Earlier that morning, one of the merchants in the caravan had been riding it. Now it was just loot. Jacques realized he was just loot, too.

The only reason the robbers kept him alive was to make money selling him. He was glad they had any reason at all.

He couldn't mount by himself, not with the wounded leg. The brigands helped him up onto the horse's back.

They tied his feet together under the animal and tied his hands to the reins. By then, the fighting was almost over. A last few bangs, a last few screams, and it ended. The merchants and the guards were either dead or captured. All their trade goods were spoil for the bandits.

Unwounded men who'd surrendered were put to work clearing the roadblock. Jacques got to watch that.

He was no good as a laborer, not right now. One of his captors gave him water to drink. He would rather have had wine, but took what he could get. Up there on horseback, he looked around for Khadija and her father and mother. He didn't see any of them. He hoped she was all right—and her parents, too.

When Annette Klein woke up, she wished she hadn't. In those first horrible seconds, in fact, she wasn't sure she had. She was convinced she'd died and gone to hell. For one thing, her head still felt as if it wanted to fall off. Most of her wished it would. She'd seen plenty of movies and TV shows where the hero got knocked cold and was running and jumping and fighting again five minutes later. Real life didn't work like that. She felt as if her brain had just banged off the inside of her skull—and it had.

For another, her eyes didn't want to focus. And even when they did, she didn't want to believe they had.

The ground seemed much too close, and everything else was upside down.

She tried to raise a hand to her aching head, and found she couldn't. What with everything else that had gone wrong, she wondered for a panicky instant if she was paralyzed. Then she realized she couldn't move her hands because they were tied to her feet. After she got clouted, somebody'd slung her over a horse's back and tied her up so she couldn't fall off—or get away.

The world made more sense. That didn't make her feel any better, though. The pounding pain in her head and the unnatural way the ground going by looked combined to make her seasick or horsesick or whatever the right word was. She threw up all over the dirt below.

Somebody in robes came up to her. She could see only the bottom half of him, and that was as upside down as anything else. "So—you are awake, are you?" he said in Arabic.

Annette spat a couple of times before answering, trying to get the vile taste out of her mouth. She didn't have much luck. "I—think so," she said.

He laughed. It was the laugh of someone who'd seen plenty of people in the same boat as she was. It was, in other words, the laugh of a man who took slaves. Ice and fire ran through her. She hated him and feared him at the same time. Whatever else he was, though, he wasn't a man who was more cruel to his livestock than he had to be. "Would you like some water?" he asked. "Can you sit right side up on a horse?"

"Water? Oh, please!" Annette said. The other took more thought, and thought wasn't easy. "I'll try to sit up.

It has to be better than this." Maybe she could escape when they untied her. It worked in the movies.

By the time they got through dealing with her, she decided she would never take another movie seriously as long as she lived. She was still too sick and woozy to run, let alone to fight anybody. But even if she hadn't been, the man who let her down from the horse called a couple of friends over. One of them had a pistol.

The other one had a musket. Those weapons weren't accurate out to any distance. But the bandits couldn't very well miss if she was only a meter or two away.

They didn't come any closer than that, either. "You're the one who sent Ibrahim flying, aren't you?" the fellow with the pistol said.

Her memory of the fight was fuzzy, but she nodded. A moment later, she wished she hadn't—pain stabbed through her battered head. She was lucky she didn't have a fractured skull— or, for all she knew, maybe she did.

"In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful, could you teach others that trick?" the bandit asked eagerly. "We're all still laughing at Ibrahim because of the way he came down, thump!"

"Maybe," Annette said vaguely. She had to try three times before she could climb up into the saddle. She sat there swaying, doing her best not to see double. She pointed a shaky finger at the pistoleer. "And how dare you call God 'the compassionate, the merciful' when you speak of fighting tricks?"

All the bandits thought that was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. "Hear how she talks-—like a qadi al-Islam" the pistoleer said.

"She was an honest judge, Daud, for you did wrong," replied the man with the musket.

The brigand who'd let Annette down from the horse now tied her feet under it. He straightened up, another length of rope in his hand. "She is a warrior maid and a scholar, both at once," she said. "Truly she will bring a great price."

"Inshallah" the other two murmured—if God wills it.

"Here," the first man said to Annette. "Give me your hands, and I will tie them to the reins. We don't want you getting away— oh, no, indeed."

Numbly, she did. He knew what he was doing with ropes. He tied her tight enough to keep her from getting loose, but not tight enough to cut off her circulation. This all seemed more like a bad dream than reality—except for her headache, which was much too real. But I'm supposed to start at Ohio State soon!

She wanted to shout it. She wanted to scream it. But she knew too well it wouldn't do her the least bit of good.

She looked around. If she moved her head very slowly, she could do that without hurting herself too badly.

"Where are my mother and father?" she asked. It wasn't quite like screaming, Mommy!—although she felt like doing that, too.

The bandits put their heads together. After half a minute or so, the one with the pistol said, "Our friends who are going on to Marseille must have taken them."

"We're . . . not going on to Marseille?" Annette asked. Another hope crashed and burned. Dad might have been able to use his radio—if a robber hadn't stolen it. Even if a robber did, she and her family might have been recognized there. Crosstime Traffic people could have bought them or stolen them away. That might still happen with her mother and father. Annette gulped. "Where—are we going?"

"Madrid," the pistoleer answered. "A really great city with a really great market. Madrid!"

Now Jacques knew what Khadija looked like. The slavers had stripped the veils off all the Muslim women they'd captured. Their modesty wasn't worth protecting any more—a slave had no modesty, except what the master granted. And buyers would want to see what they were getting before they parted with their dinars.

Some of the Muslim women took it very badly. By the way they fussed and carried on, the bandits might have stripped them naked. And so the bandits might have, if they'd wanted to—who could have stopped them? Those women tried to cover their faces with their hands and turned their heads away whenever they saw a man looking at them. When men looked at them from two directions at once, they didn't know what to do. It might have been funny if it weren't so sad.

Khadija wasn't like that. She rode along like a captive princess—her attitude told the world that, whatever had happened to her, it wasn't her fault. She had a big, nasty bruise on one side of her face. A slaver must have had to hit her hard to make her give up. Somehow, that didn't surprise Jacques.

But for the bruise, she was very pretty—not beautiful, but very pretty. He'd already known she had large brown eyes. Her nose was strongly arched, but not too big. She had the finest, whitest, straightest teeth of anyone he'd ever seen. His own teeth were good. Even his wisdom teeth were coming in without giving him torments, the way so many people's did. But her teeth were better. He had to admit it. A good thing the bandit hadn't broken them when he hit her. Of course, he might have been careful about that, because broken teeth would make her worth less. The bruise would go away. Broken teeth were there for good.

The brigands didn't mind if friends among their captives rode with other friends. Jacques was shy at first about moving up next to Khadija, but he soon did. She was the only person in this luckless crew he cared anything about. His fellow guards—older men—were gloomy and sour, and they had reason to be. They had to know they'd likely go to the mines or to galley slavery or something like that—a short life, and not a merry one.

All Khadija said when they first got close enough to talk was, "So they caught you, too."

"I'm afraid so," Jacques said. "How are you?"

"My head hurts," she answered matter-of-factly.

"I believe it," he said. "The whole left side's all over purple."

"Is it?" Her mouth twisted. "Well, I'm lucky not to have a mirror, then. What happened to you?"

He knew what she was asking. Did you just give up? She would have scorned him if he'd quit without putting up a fight. But he hadn't, and he had the wound to prove it, even if it was on the side away from her.

"I got shot in the leg," he said, not without pride.

"Oh!" Khadija's mouth got bigger still. "How is it?"

"It hurts." He was as matter-of-fact as she had been. "But it's not too bad. No broken bone, and I'm not hamstrung. As long as the wound doesn't go bad, I'll be all right in a while." Telling that to himself—telling that to the world—made him feel a little less as if a wildcat were gnawing on the leg. A little.

"I hope so." She sounded as if she meant it. "They're taking us to Madrid. Isn't that dreadful?"

Jacques only shrugged. "Madrid? Marseille? Naples? What difference does it make to a slave?"

"It makes a difference to me," Khadija said. "My family and friends are in Marseille. If I went on the block there, they'd buy me and set me free. My father and mother are on the way there now, with the rest of the slavers." Up till then, she'd been strong as an iron bar. But at last her face crumpled. "And I'm all alone here, and I don't know what to do."

He couldn't even reach out and pat her hand, not when he was tied to his horse's reins. In French, he said,

"You're not alone here unless you want to be." He wasn't sure he could get the exact meaning across in Arabic, and he didn't want her to misunderstand him here.

She didn't say anything for most of a minute, and her face didn't show anything, either. He remembered she was a master merchant's daughter. She would have more ways than a veil to hide her thoughts. When at last she smiled, the sun might have come out, even though it was already shining. "That is very kind," she answered, also in French. "Truly we are partners in misfortune." She added, "That is the kind of fortune that never misses."

In spite of everything, Jacques laughed. "Well said! You have a way with words."

"You give me too much credit," Khadija said. "It is a saying from—a book of proverbs, I guess you might call it."

"It doesn't sound like any proverb I ever heard," Jacques said. "What is the name of this fabulous book?"

To his surprise, Khadija blushed. "It's called The Devil's Wordbook," she answered. With his hands tied, Jacques couldn't make the sign of the wheel, but he started the gesture anyway. She saw him do it.

"There—I knew that would happen," she said. "It's not a bad book, just a ... sharp-tongued one. It's been one of my father's favorites for a long, long time, and he taught me to like it, too."

"The Devil's Wordbook." Jacques tasted the name. It sounded unsavory. It sounded downright unholy. But Muhammad al-Marsawi had struck him as not only a clever man but a good one. And Khadija was the closest thing to a friend he had in the world right now. He didn't want to think ill of her. "Tell me another proverb from this wordbook, then," he said, a challenge in his voice.

She frowned, then nodded. "All right. It calls a beggar someone who has relied on the assistance of his friends."

Jacques needed a couple of heartbeats for that to sink in. When it did, he winced. "Whoever wrote that book dipped his pen in bile, didn't he?"

"Oh, yes," Khadija answered.

"Give me another one," Jacques said. Anything that helped pass the time was good.

Khadija frowned again. Then she gave him one that struck close to home—probably too close to home—for both of them: "It says an auctioneer is a man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a pocket with his tongue."

Paris had plenty of pickpockets, so Jacques got that one right away. He winced again, more painfully this time. He and Khadija would both go under the hammer before long, and some auctioneer would feed his children because of them. He said, "Tell me another one."

"Do you know what an interregnum is?" Khadija said the word in both Arabic and French. Jacques hadn't known the Arabic term. The French . . .

"When a kingdom has trouble with the succession, it's the time between kings."

"That's right." He won a smile from Khadija, which felt even better than praise from Duke Raoul. She went on, "Well, The Devil's Wordbook calls an interregnum the period during which a monarchical country is governed by a warm spot on the cushion of a throne."

Tied up or not, on his way to be sold as a slave or not, Jacques laughed out loud. For three or four heartbeats, he forgot all about his troubles. He wondered if anyone had ever given him a more precious gift.

"They ought to hear that in Ireland and the Germanies," he said. Those lands had lots of rulers and lots of strife, so they also had lots of interregnums.

"Maybe they should." But Khadija's smile faded like sunshine after the clouds rolled in. She tried to lift a hand to her head. Her bonds wouldn't let her, any more than Jacques' let him shape the sign of the wheel.

"I'm sorry," she muttered. "Sometimes it feels like they're mining for lead between my ears, and they've just sharpened their picks."

"That can happen when you get hit," Jacques said sympathetically. Sometimes people got better in a few days or a few weeks. But he knew men who still got headaches and had trouble thinking clearly years after they were hurt. He didn't say anything like that to Khadija. It would have lowered her spirits. And lowering hers would have lowered his.

What was southern France in the home timeline held four Muslim kingdoms—actually, one was a principality and one was an emirate—in this alternate. Annette got to see them all, in what seemed a slow-motion journey. One field of wheat looked like another. So did one vegetable garden or meadow or vineyard or olive grove.

Cows and horses and sheep and goats and (on Christian farms) pigs were their familiar selves. They weren't so highly bred as they were in the home timeline. Many more of them looked sickly than they would have in her France. Anthrax wasn't a terrorist weapon here. It was an ordinary disease, a livestock-killer that sometimes killed farmers and herdsmen, too.

Little by little, her headaches eased. They came less often, and didn't—quite—make her wish someone would cut off her head. One of the slavers made her a sort of tea from willow leaves. It tasted nastier than anything she'd ever drunk. To her surprise, though, it did take the edge off the headaches. Then she remembered that willow leaves had salicylic acid in them, and salicylic acid was most of the way toward being aspirin. Some folk remedies really worked.

She kept wishing Crosstime Traffic people would swoop down out of the sky in a helicopter and rescue her.

There were only two things wrong with that. This alternate had no helicopters. And nobody in Marseille knew where she was. Crosstime Traffic hadn't been here very long, and was still setting down, setting up, and exploring. And southern France might not look big on a map, but it sure did when you rode across it on horseback.

She thought she would have gone straight round the bend if not for Jacques. To her, being captured and sold was something out of a nightmare or a bad movie. To him, it was just something that happened. It wasn't good, but it was part of the world he was used to. He would have had trouble believing how most people in Columbus took fender-benders for granted. Nobody liked them, but an awful lot of people ended up in one every once in a while. Annette would have traded this for a fender-bender a week the rest of her life. She didn't get choices like that, worse luck.

She didn't need long to figure out that Jacques wouldn't have been so friendly, or would have been friendly in a different way, if she were a boy and not a girl. He didn't make a pest of himself, which was something.

Even without that one, she had plenty of other things to worry about. She'd thought she might escape and try to get back to Marseille alone, or maybe with Jacques. But she never got the chance. Her captors were professionals at what they did. Nobody in the USA had ever had a job like this. There'd been slave trackers, slave hunters, before the Civil War, but slave catchers, people who caught free men and women to turn them into slaves? No, not inside the United States. And the slavers made sure they always posted guards. They made sure their prisoners' bonds were secure at night. Nobody got loose. Nobody got away.

After Jacques' leg healed enough for him to limp around, he had the same idea. But his luck was no better than Annette's. "I had a little knife stashed in my boot," he said mournfully. "They found it when they searched me."

"Too bad." Annette meant it. She'd had a little knife strapped to her leg. She didn't have it any more. She didn't remember getting searched, which was probably a mercy. They must have done it while she was still out cold.

The Pyrenees rose in the southwest. Farmers raised some herb in their gardens. Its smell on the breeze was familiar, but Annette couldn't place it. When she asked Jacques, he said, "That's fennel, isn't it?"

"Fennel! Of course it is!" Annette said. Now she knew what the odor reminded her of—the Italian sausage on a pizza.

Jacques was giving her a curious look, and she knew why, too. She should have been more familiar with a southern spice than he was. To cover herself, she said, "That knock in the noggin scattered more of my brains than I'd thought. I'm lucky to remember my own name, let alone fennel."

It worked. "Oh, yes," Jacques said seriously. "That can happen."

She wondered why keeping her secret mattered now. What difference would telling him the truth make?

Odds were he wouldn't believe it. And even if he did, what could he do about it?

In the end, training told. She kept quiet. Jacques might get away or buy his freedom after she told him.

Even if he didn't, he might tell his master or his fellow slaves. Word might spread. And whatever word did spread would be garbled. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name. Surer—since the concussion, she sometimes really did have to fight to hold on to who she was. But talk here about Crosstime Traffic would be talk about witches and wizards, or at best talk about alchemists. The company didn't need that kind of talk, and this alternate didn't need it, either. It could send people here looking in too many wrong directions, just when they were finally starting to come out from under the shadow of the Great Black Deaths.

Crossing the mountains meant crossing a border, as it did in the home timeline. On the other side, the people who didn't speak Arabic spoke Catalan, the same as they did back home. It wasn't quite the same Catalan, any more than the French and the Arabic were the same. Annette could pick out a word here and there, but that was about all. She hadn't learned it through her implant or studied it on her own. She did a little better with signs, but there weren't many signs to see. Gutenberg had never been born in this alternate. No one had invented printing here.

They kept on to the south and west. They crossed the Ebro at Zaragoza. By then, lisping Castilian Spanish had replaced Catalan. Annette had an even harder time with that, especially when she heard it. The country was broad and high and rolling, hot and dry, with herds of sheep and also camels—on its way to being a desert if not quite there. The camels didn't seem out of place, even if Spain in the home timeline had none.

She wanted to say something to Jacques about the camel being the sheep of the desert. But the pun worked only in English, not in French or Arabic.

Maybe that was just as well. She wondered if such a bad pun meant her wits were coming back or if she had more brain damage than she thought.

Madrid in the home timeline was an enormous city, not much smaller than Paris. In this alternate, Madrid was bigger and more important than Paris. That didn't make it an enormous city, but did make it a fair-sized one. At a guess, Annette thought it held somewhere between a quarter-million and half a million people. In an alternate without good roads, that was about as big as a city could get.

Suburbs straggled out beyond the big, thick walls that defended the city's heart. Houses showed the street nothing but walls and doors and narrow, shuttered windows. They centered on their courtyards, where only family and friends would come. The richer homes had whitewashed walls and red tile roofs. They looked a little like houses in California in the home timeline. Those houses were often called California Spanish. The weather was similar, so the colonists coming up from Mexico had brought with them what worked in their Spain.

Poorer homes weren't whitewashed. Their walls were of plain mud brick, their roofs often thatched. And hovels could be made of anything at all, which meant mostly wood and rubble. People here didn't have sheet iron and plastic.

Madrid was richer than Paris as well as being bigger. Even the suburbs outside the wall had cobblestoned streets. That made the way less dusty than it had been. Less dusty, yes—less smelly, no. Madrid had no sewers. People threw slops and garbage into the street from rich homes and poor alike. Flies buzzed. Dogs and pigs rooted through the rubbish. So did skinny children, looking for things they could use that their richer neighbors didn't want.

Annette had seen that in Paris, too. It made her sad and angry at the same time. People shouldn't have to live as scavengers off other people. But in so many alternates—and, even now, some places in the home timeline—they did.

Jacques took the scrounging children for granted. From things he'd said, he hadn't been that poor when he was a little boy, but he knew plenty of people who had. Wrinkling his nose, he said, "You forget how much a city stinks till you've been away from one for a while."

"They shouldn't smell this bad," she said. "People ought to be cleaner. They shouldn't throw trash and slops every which way."

"What are you going to do with that stuff, then? You can't just leave it in your house." Jacques sounded like someone who'd just heard something silly being reasonable. By this alternate's standards, he was.

They passed over a drawbridge and through a gate and into the walled part of Madrid. Two low, broad buildings stood side by side next to a market square. Annette and the female captives were herded into one, Jacques and the men into the other. Annette needed only a moment to realize what the buildings were—

slave barracks. And that market was bound to be a slave market. Some time before very long, they were going to sell her there like a bit of mutton. And she couldn't do a thing about it.

Five

As far as Jacques was concerned, the slave barracks were just. . . barracks. They were more crowded than the ones in Paris or in Count Guillaume's fort. The beds weren't as good— thin pallets of musty straw wrapped in scratchy fabric. The food wasn't as good, either, and they didn't get as much of it. But he could sleep on his pallet, and they didn't starve him. He had nothing to do but wait. A lot of soldiering was like that, too.

He did have interesting people to wait with. Some of the men in the barracks were black as ebony, almost as black as coal. When he first saw them, he thought they were captive demons. When they found out, they thought he was an idiot. They spoke better Arabic than he did, though with an odd accent.

"We were taken in war," one of them said. "It must have been God's will, though what we did to make Him angry at us, I cannot say." He spread his hands, palms up. Those palms were pale. So were the soles of his feet. That fascinated Jacques. The black man—his name was Musa ibn Ibrahim—went on, "And what of you, stranger? Till we came here, all the men we ever saw had brown eyes and black hair, whether their skin was light or dark."

Jacques' hair was an ordinary brown, his eyes gray. He said, "Some in my kingdom have hair darker than mine, some lighter. Some have yellow hair."

"Yes, I have seen this," Musa agreed. "It is peculiar."

"Not as peculiar as a black hide," Jacques said. But Musa only thought that was funny. Everyone in his kingdom was black, and so to him people were supposed to be that way. Jacques went on, "Some people—a few—in my kingdom have hair the color of polished copper."

"This I have not seen." Musa ibn Ibrahim raised an eyebrow. It was hard to make out against his dark skin.

"I think you are telling stories to see what I will believe."

"By God and Jesus and Henri, I am not," Jacques said indignantly. "Ask any of the men from the north who are here. They will tell you the same."

Musa sighed. "Who knows what a Christian oath is worth? Muhammad was the seal of prophets, so Satan must have sent this Henri."

Muslims always said that. Jacques' fists bunched. He didn't feel like hearing it now. "You take it back!" he said. He was bigger than the black man, but Musa was older and no doubt more experienced. Musa also looked ready to fight, but he didn't throw the first punch.

"Hold up, both of you," an older man said. "They whip you if you brawl. They don't want you damaging the merchandise."

"I am not merchandise," Musa ibn Ibrahim said with dignity. "I am a man."

"Well, so am I," Jacques said, "and I'm a man you insulted."

"I did not insult you. I insulted your foolish religion," Musa said.

"Same thing!" Jacques said. "Shall I tell you what Christians think of Muhammad?"

"Who cares about such ignorant opinions?" Musa said, but Jacques saw him get angry. To Jacques'

surprise, Musa saw himself getting angry, too. He started to laugh. "We are in a mirror, you and I. But which of us is holding it and which the reflection?"

Jacques knew what he thought. He needed a little while to realize the black man would think the opposite.

He said, "If there were any Jews here, they would tell us we're both wrong."

"Ah, do you have Jews in your country?" Musa ibn Ibrahim asked. "I know there are some in the Maghrib, the land between my kingdom and Spain, and they say some of these Spaniards are Jews, too. In my land, though, we have none."

"You're lucky. We have a few," Jacques said. "We'd have more, too, if we didn't give them a hard time."

Musa looked at him. "We feel that way about Christians."

The Kingdom of Versailles felt that way about Muslims, too. But it couldn't treat them as badly as it treated Jews. The rich, powerful Muslim lands to the south would have gone to war to protect the Muslims in the kingdom if it did more than make them pay a special tax. Jacques didn't want to admit his land was too weak to do everything it wanted to. He changed the subject instead, asking, "What kind of dangerous animals do you have?"

"You mean, besides Christians?" Musa said slyly. Jacques spluttered. The black man laughed. He'd wanted to hit a nerve, and he had. He went on, "Well, the beast a warrior measures himself against is the lion."

"Lions? You really have lions?" Jacques said. Musa gave back a sober nod. The idea of lions impressed Jacques almost as much as the other man's color. "Have you hunted them?"

"I have killed three," Musa ibn Ibrahim declared with somber pride. Believe me or not—I don't care. I know what I have done, his manner seemed to say. Because of that manner, Jacques did believe him. Musa asked, "And what beasts have you? Not lions, by the way you speak of them. You are lucky if you do not."

"We have wolves and bears," Jacques said.

They were just names to the other captive. Jacques had to explain what they were. At first, Musa wasn't much impressed. "Wild dogs? We have wild dogs, too. I did not think to name them."

"Big wild dogs," Jacques said. "They can weigh almost as much as a man. And they hunt in packs. A lion could kill one wolf, I suppose. But I don't think a lion could beat a pack of wolves."

"Lions hunt in prides, too," Musa said, which Jacques hadn't known. "What of these other beasts, these beers?"

"Bears," Jacques said, laughing. "A beer is something else." As well as he could, he told Musa about bears.

He wondered how much sense his words made to the black man. Then he wondered how well he understood Musa. Which of them was the looker, which the image he looked at? Or were they just two mirrors, looking back at each other?

Annette found herself bored in the slave barracks. She'd expected a lot of things, but not that. She asked permission to write a letter to her kin in Marseille, asking for ransom. The men who'd caught her refused.

"It would take too long," one of them said. "We need the money now, as soon as the next auction comes.

And we would have to pay to send the letter all that way, and find someone who was going there to carry it."

They plainly meant it. They'd stopped worrying about her judo tricks, too—they didn't seem to have time to worry about them. In the home timeline, she could have telephoned or e-mailed or faxed or, when speed wasn't too important, put a stamp on an envelope and thrown it in a mailbox. Mail here was catch-as-catch-can. If you wanted to send a letter, you found someone who was going your way and paid him to take it. The person who got it would usually pay him a little something, too.

The other women in the barracks thought she was odd for knowing how to read and write. If any of them could, they didn't want to admit it. To amuse themselves, they spun wool into thread, rolled dice for pebbles they dug out of the rammed-earth floor, and chattered. The chatter didn't amount to much—mostly how they'd got caught and how many men would be sorry they weren't coming home. The Muslims among them also complained about how naked they felt without their veils.

To keep from seeming like a white crow, Annette complained about that, too, even if she didn't mean it. But she said, "Even if we don't have men to take care of us, we've got to do the best we can for ourselves.

After all, we're people, too."

A couple of the others nodded. More looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. "What can we do?" one of them said. "They're going to sell us, and then we'll be stuck with whoever buys us."

"Even so," Annette said stubbornly. "We can make things better, or we can make them worse. Look at Sheherezade and the stories she told to Harun al-Rashid. She was just a harem girl, but she ended up a queen." The Arabian Nights were popular in this alternate, too. Not all the stories were the same as the ones in the home timeline, but lots of different versions circulated there, too.

"Yes, but Sheherezade was beautiful," said the other woman, who unfortunately wasn't.

"So what?" Annette said. That made all the other women exclaim. To them, if you weren't beautiful, you weren't anything. "So what?" Annette repeated. "Harun al-Rashid had lots of beautiful girls in his harem.

He was the caliph. He could have as many beautiful girls as he wanted. If Sheherezade had been beautiful and stupid, he would have called her once and never bothered to do it again. She didn't get where she was because she was beautiful. She got there because she was smart. And if you're smart, you can get somewhere, too."

In the home timeline, that would have been water to a fish.

Here, Annette might have been preaching revolution. Some of the women saw what she was driving at.

One of them said, "If you're really smart, you won't let your master know just how smart you are."

That might have held some truth in the home timeline, too. Bits and pieces of sexism lingered there even at the end of the twenty-first century. They sometimes popped up in surprising places, too. Things were better than they had been a hundred years before, though, and much better than they had been two hundred years earlier. Here, what the woman said was plain old good advice.

"If you want to show off how clever you are, you'll end up in trouble," another woman predicted.

"If you need to show off, you aren't as clever as you think you are," Annette said. "I didn't mean that. But if you act helpless and foolish all the time, what will happen to you?"

"You'll catch a man, and he'll take care of you." The other woman looked down her nose at Annette. "Well, you probably won't. Your tongue is too sharp."

"I'd rather have a sharp tongue than an empty head," Annette said. The other woman squealed. For a second, Annette thought she'd end up in a fight, which she hadn't done since she was in the fourth grade.

She remembered using that judo throw against one of the slavers—it was about the last thing she did remember for a while. The other woman would fly through the air with the greatest of ease, too, if she came after her.

But she didn't. She just said, "You'll find out," and went back to her spinning.

Most of the time, the comeback would only have annoyed Annette. The way things were, it held too much truth for comfort. One way or another, she would find out, and sooner, not later. Before long, there would be another auction, and someone would buy her. Then she would see firsthand what slavery was like. If she ever escaped, that might come in handy as research. If she didn't. . .

Or maybe no one would buy her, and she'd have to come back to the barracks. Would that be better or worse? She had a hard time deciding. At least she wouldn't turn into property. But she would have to face the humiliating notion that nobody wanted her, even as a slave.

A slave. Back when she was training, they'd warned her, Anything that can happen to anyone else in that alternate can happen to you. Oh, she was immunized against diseases the locals could catch. Drinking the water probably wouldn't give her the galloping trots. She had had insect repellent to keep away bedbugs and lice. Now she didn't, and she itched. But the idea that they could sell her in the market square like a kilo of corned beef seemed ridiculous.

In the home timeline, it would have been. They took slavery for granted here. The only time the locals saw anything wrong with it was when they were being sold instead of doing the buying. To Annette, that was the wrong attitude. The thing was wrong all the time. Why couldn't they see it?

The home timeline had slaves, too. But its slaves had plugs or batteries. In this alternate, as in so many others, they didn't have machines to do things for them. They had to use people instead. And they did, and they didn't lose a minute's sleep over how unfair and evil it was.

It still didn't feel real to Annette, right up until the morning they took her out to the market square.

Every so often, Jacques had had daydreams about buying a slave. Owning one would make life easier for him. It would also be a sign that he'd arrived, that he'd become somebody. He knew lots of people who had dreams like that. In fact, he hardly knew anybody who didn't.

But who had daydreams about getting sold into slavery?

They tied Jacques' hands together behind him. They tied his left leg to Musa ibn Ibrahim's left leg. They tied another man's left leg to Jacques'. When they had all the men who were going up for sale in a line, they marched them all out into the market square. It was a slow, awkward march. They had to get used to staying in step with one another. Nobody fell down, which would have made things even worse. Jacques stumbled once. Catching himself without flailing his arms wasn't easy, but he managed.

Another line of luckless people was coming out of the women's barracks. Was Khadija there? Jacques smiled when he spotted her. A familiar face was nice. A familiar pretty face was nicer.

Guards with matchlock muskets stood not far from the auctioneer's platform. Slow, small trails of smoke rose from the men's lengths of match. The matchlocks were ready to shoot. If anybody tried to get away—if anybody could try to get away—he (or she) would be sorry.

Jacques looked out at the crowd in front of the platform. Some of the people out there would be customers.

Others would just be out for a morning's entertainment. They would look over the men, ogle the women, and listen to the bidders going against one another. Then they would head off to their eateries and coffeehouses and gossip about what they'd seen and heard.

The auctioneer stepped up onto the platform. He was a small, dapper man with spotless white robes and a neatly trimmed black beard with a few streaks of gray. Bowing to the crowd, he said, "Welcome, my masters, welcome, three times welcome." His voice was bigger and deeper than Jacques would have expected from a man his size. It easily filled the square. Bowing again, the auctioneer went on, "In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful, we have several fine lots of slaves to present to you this day."

In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. Where was the compassion here? Where was the mercy? Did the auctioneer even notice they were missing from what he did? Jacques didn't think so. Would he notice if he went up on the block himself instead of selling others? Jacques nodded to himself. Yes, very likely he would.

Up went the first man out of the barracks. He was middle-aged and scrawny. "He will work hard for you,"

the auctioneer said, trying to make him sound as attractive as possible. "See how honest he looks?"

Musa ibn Ibrahim laughed softly. "As if any slave is likely to be honest! Or is it different in your country, man who knows not lions?"

"Not a bit," Jacques whispered back. Musa laughed again. Jacques didn't intend to be any more honest than he could help once he got sold. He owed himself more than he owed any master, especially one he hadn't chosen for himself.

A few bids came in for the scrawny man. In spite of everything the auctioneer could do, he went for thirty dinars—less than half a pound of silver. That wasn't much of a price, and the auctioneer didn't look thrilled to get his silver. For that matter, the fellow who bought the scrawny man didn't look thrilled to have him.

Up came another man. He looked as ordinary as the one who'd gone before him, but he said he was a skilled mason. A big man out in the crowd asked him a couple of questions. He answered without any trouble. "See how clever he is!" the auctioneer cried. "He will do well for you!" The second man did better for the auctioneer, bringing in almost twice what the scrawny fellow had sold for. The big man who'd questioned him sent a flunky up with the money.

The big man bought several other slaves, including a couple of Musa's countrymen. He and an older fellow bid against each other time after time. More often than not, the big man outspent his rival. The older man looked less and less happy each time it happened. At last, he burst out, "A plague take you, Marwan! Have you all the silver in the world to call your own?"

The big man bowed. "Not all of it, sir, but enough for my needs, for which I thank God. What man could ask for more?"

"That is well said," declared the auctioneer, who didn't care where money came from as long as it came.

'Ten years ago, who in Madrid had heard of Marwan al-Baghdadi?" the older man said, playing to the crowd. "Who? Anyone? And now he dares to bid against me—me, Hassan ibn Hussein! Has my family not led here for generations? Where is the justice?"

"I have silver. I earned it honestly. I am free to spend it as I see fit," Marwan replied. "That's justice, as I see it." He had backers in the crowd, too, and they nodded and clapped their hands.

Hassan ibn Hussein frowned. "Silver goes only so far, sir. There is also blood."

Jacques would have agreed with that, but Marwan didn't. "Blood says your great-great-great-great-grandfather made your family's silver," he answered, politely but firmly. "It says nothing about what kind of man you are yourself. But silver you've earned on your own—well, that may say you have done well in the world."

His followers clapped again. They weren't rich enough to buy slaves, but they probably dreamt of the days when they would be. Hassan ibn Hussein muttered under his breath. He didn't say anything more, not out loud. But when the next man came up on the block, he bid the fellow's price up and up, even though the new slave didn't look very strong and didn't seem very smart.

His last bid raised the price to more than three times what the man looked to be worth. He glared over at Marwan al-Baghdadi, waiting for him to bump things up still further. By the way Hassan's eyes gleamed, he thought they'd both put their prestige on the line over the slave. Maybe he thought so, but Marwan didn't.

With a smile and a bow, he said, "He's all yours, my friend."

Hassan ibn Hussein gaped. He looked like a fish just pulled from the water. Marwan had left him as high and dry as if he were a fish just pulled from the water. Now he had to lay out all that silver on a slave who wasn't worth it. That left him less money to buy slaves he really wanted at prices he could really afford to pay.

"That is an angry man," Musa ibn Ibrahim whispered to Jacques. "I hope he doesn't buy me. He would make me pay for his own folly."

Looking at the fearsome scowl on Hassan's face, Jacques nodded. "He tried to make this Marwan into a fool, but Marwan turned the tables on him."

A helper undid the rope that bound Musa's leg to Jacques. The black man got up on the platform. "See what a fine figure of a man we have here!" the auctioneer exclaimed. He asked Musa, "How were you taken?"

"In war. I was unlucky. It was the will of God," Musa answered.

"Do you see? He speaks Arabic well, and he is a pious man," the auctioneer called to the crowd. "He will work hard for you!"

Marwan al-Baghdadi bid on Musa. So did a couple of other men. Hassan ibn Hussein kept out of the auction. Marwan won it, and probably paid a little less than Musa might have brought.

That helper undid the rope between Jacques and the man behind him. He gave Jacques a little push, muttering, "Go on." Jacques went. He took his place where the others for sale had stood before him.

"See how white and fair he is!" the auctioneer said. "A Frank from the North!" Muslims called all Christians Franks, after the vanished Kingdom of France. The auctioneer eyed him. "Do you speak Arabic, fellow?

Do you understand it?"

"No, I'm sorry, your Excellency, but I don't understand even a word of Arabic," Jacques answered—in Arabic.

The auctioneer threw back his head and laughed. "Clever as well as fair!" he said, and looked back to the crowd. "How much for this big, strong, smart slave? He will be a foreman in a few years, if God is kind."

Hassan ibn Hussein opened the bidding. Another man raised it a couple of dinars. Then Marwan al-Baghdadi spoke up. Jacques hoped Marwan would buy him, as much because the man was a great traveler as for any other reason. He'd come here to Madrid all the way from far-off, fabled Baghdad.

Hassan and Marwan and two other men bid Jacques' price up and up. When it got over a pound of silver, the other men dropped out, first one, then the other. At not quite a pound and a half of silver, Hassan sent Marwan a look that should have killed him. Marwan smiled back, which only made Hassan angrier. Angry or not, he threw both hands in the air instead of raising his bid again.

"Going once! Going twice! Sold!" the auctioneer chanted, and pointed toward Marwan al-Baghdadi. "Sold to this fine gentleman here!" He shoved Jacques, not too hard. "Go to your new master. Serve him well."

Jacques got down off the platform. One of Marwan's men took charge of him. The fellow tied his left leg back to that of Musa, the last slave Marwan had bought.

"There," the man said, straightening up. "You're not going anywhere."

"No, I suppose not." Jacques hoped that sounded like a nice, meek answer. No, he wasn't going anywhere—not unless he saw a chance.

Annette had expected it to be ladies first, but it wasn't. They sold the men before they got around to the women. She had to stand out in the sun for two or three hours before things started happening with her. It wasn't torture or anything. The day was warm, but it wasn't hot. A man with a clay jar of water and a dipper went up and down the line. The waiting women could have a drink whenever they wanted to. The water in that jar was surprisingly cool. Had the jar been metal, the water would have been warmer. Sure enough, evaporation caused cooling, just the way they said it did in physics.

She watched Jacques get sold. He got down off the platform and went over to his new owner. Like the others who got sold, he didn't seem especially upset. This was part of life here—not a part anybody liked, but a part everybody knew how to handle. Annette didn't—couldn't—understand it. Why weren't they all screaming their heads off? This was wrong. And so it was, to her. But not to them.

Then the women started going up on the block. The auctioneer made his dumb jokes. He asked them questions about what they'd been before they got caught. If their answers showed they had two brain cells to rub together, he praised them to the skies. He wanted them to go for high prices, because that meant his commission went up.

Every so often, mostly with women who said they'd had children, he would look at their teeth. Whenever he did, Annette would grind hers. He really might have been selling horses up there, not human beings at all.

Except he was. And her own turn came closer every time someone else stepped down from the platform.

And then she was stepping up onto it. "Here is a fine girl, good for all sorts of things!" the auctioneer said, and then, "Tell them your name, sweetheart."

"I am not your sweetheart, God be praised," Annette said coldly, which only made him chuckle. She went on, "I am Khadija, daughter of the merchant Muhammad al-Marsawi. If you send to Marseille, my father will pay far more than I cost to ransom me."

"There you go!" The auctioneer beamed at her. He beamed out at the crowd. "Hear that, my friends? Do you hear that? Spend a little money now, make more money later. How can you go wrong?" He looked back at Annette. "So you're a merchant's daughter, are you? What can you do?"

"I read and write Arabic and French," she said, adding, "I speak French, too," in that language. Returning to Arabic, she went on, "And I can cipher. I could keep your books better than whatever cheating fool you use now."

The auctioneer blinked. Annette wondered if she'd laid it on too thick. Women here weren't usually able to do things like that. If they could, they weren't supposed to brag about it. "Hear what a clever maid this is!"

the auctioneer cried after that little startled pause. "You can put her to the test, if you like. And if she fails, by God, you can beat her as she deserves!"

Out in the crowd, men were nodding. If a donkey balked, they would beat it to make it go. And if a slave failed, they would beat him—or her, too. Why not? A slave was just as much their property as a donkey was.

"What am I bid, then?" the auctioneer called. "If she is as good as she says she is—and I believe her—you will get your money's worth from her even if you never see a copper of this ransom."

It boiled down to Hassan ibn Hussein against Marwan al-Baghdadi. She thought the older man wanted her for the ransom, the younger one for what she could do. She hoped Hassan would win—that gave her a better chance of getting free. But Marwan seemed to have more silver than he knew what to do with.

Every time Hassan bid, Marwan raised the price. Finally, a horrible look on his face, Hassan turned away.

"Going once!" the auctioneer called. "Going twice! . . . Sold!"

Numbly, Annette got down off the platform. Sold. She'd been sold.

Jacques was glad Marwan had also bought Khadija. At least there would be someone else he knew in the household. He had no idea how often he would have the chance to see her, but you could often work those things out. A lot of the time, it just depended on getting in good with a steward or a butler or maybe a head cook. He would have to look around and see which way the wind blew.

After the auction was over, Marwan paraded his new slaves through the streets of Madrid. Here as in the Kingdom of Versailles, you showed off if you were a rich man. Showing off was a big part of being rich.

And the story of how he'd outbid Hassan ibn Hussein time after time would race through the city faster than wind-whipped fire. His prestige would rise. Hassan's would fall.

Marwan himself swaggered along at the head of the procession. He was having fun, laughing and joking with passersby and throwing coins to beggars and cripples and children.

"He acts like a prince, or a man who wants to be a prince," Musa ibn Ibrahim whispered.

"He does, doesn't he?" Jacques said. "I wonder what the men who are princes in this city will say to that."

"My very thought," Musa agreed. "I wonder what they will say after Hassan ibn Hussein whispers in their ears. And he will whisper in them, unless he shouts in them instead."

"Nothing we can do about that," Jacques said, and Musa nodded. What could a slave do about anything?

Not much. Back in Paris, Jacques could have whispered into Duke Raoul's ear. The duke might not have paid any attention to him—but then again, he might have. Here, the only people Jacques knew were Musa and Khadija, and they were both slaves, too.

"Almost there," one of Marwan al-Baghdadi's men called.

From up on a roof or behind a shuttered window, someone said, "More slaves for the demons to eat up!"

"I don't like the sound of that," Jacques said. "I hope he's just a friend of Hassan ibn Hussein's."

"I fear no demons," Musa said stoutly. "As long as I worship God, how can demons harm me?" But in spite of his bold words, the black man nervously looked this way and that. Jacques wondered what he thought demons looked like. Jacques had thought they looked like him.

Marwan's man laughed. "Pay no heed to what foolish folk say. Sometimes we take slaves out to my master's country estates while it is still dark, so they can start work as soon as the sun comes up. The ignorant and lazy do not see them go, and so they think something bad has happened to them. In the name of God, it is a lie."

That sounded fair enough. All the same, Jacques would have scratched his head if his hands weren't tied behind his back. What the hidden man had said was so strange, he didn't know what to make of it. If someone had warned him that he'd be beaten or that he wouldn't get enough to eat, those threats would have made sense. But talk about demons? He supposed Madrid had its share of crazy people, like any other place.

Marwan al-Baghdadi's house was larger than most of the others on its block. Its outer wall was freshly whitewashed. The tiles on the roof were new and bright red—sun and rain hadn't faded them yet. All those things were signs of wealth, but didn't prove it. Coming back to the house with a new troop of slaves—that proved it.

Once the last slave went inside, Marwan's men closed the door and barred it. They undid the ropes that tied one slave's leg to another's, and also the bonds on their hands. Jacques chafed at his wrists where the rope had rubbed them raw. He looked around the courtyard in which the slaves stood. It held a fountain, a garden of flowers and herbs, and an old-looking statue of a lion.

"If you work well for me, I will treat you well," Marwan said. "You will have plenty to eat. You will have plenty to do, too, but not too much. If I work you to death, I lose the money I paid for you. But if you try to run away, you will be very, very sorry. I promise you that. You have no idea how sorry you will be. And you will not escape. I promise you that, too."

As usual, he sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about. Jacques didn't intend to try to disappear right away. He wanted to wait till he had a better notion of the lie of the land and what things were like here. If he saw a chance then . . . That would be a different story.

The stew Marwan's cooks served was full of mutton and barley and onions. You could have seconds if you wanted. Jacques did. His new owner seemed to be telling the truth about the food, anyway. And the beds in the men's hall were real cots with wood frames and mattresses on leather lashings, not just pallets on the floor. He hadn't slept so soft since he left Paris. It wasn't what he wanted, but it could have been worse.

It could have been worse. Everyone around Annette said so. She supposed the locals knew what they were talking about. Marwan al-Baghdadi did seem to give his slaves enough to eat. He worked them only till they got very tired, not till they fell over dead. No law told him he had to be so generous. No custom did, either.

Everybody seemed to know stories about masters who made him look like a saint by comparison. But if he was such a saint, why did he own slaves?

Like the others, Annette had to get up at sunrise. After breakfast, she went to Marwan's kitchens. They were always full of women, and the women always had plenty to do. In low-tech kitchens, there always seemed to be more work than people to do it.

Something as simple as the heat under a pot wasn't simple. You couldn't just turn a valve or a switch to control it. You had to keep a real live fire going, feeding it sticks every so often so it didn't get too big or too small. If it did, whatever was in the pot either burned or didn't cook at all. And you got in trouble.

Annette had had practice back in Marseille. She needed all of that not to give herself away a dozen times a day. She didn't lose her breakfast when she had to gut freshly beheaded ducks or chickens or pigeons. She just thanked heaven she didn't have to use the hatchet herself.

Washing dishes was as bad as getting food ready for cooking. There was no hot water. There was no dishwashing soap—even people-washing soap was an expensive luxury. Plates and cups mostly weren't glazed. Things stuck to them and soaked into them. There were no scouring pads, either. There was sand and there was elbow grease and there was time, lots and lots of time.

People talked. People sang. People scrubbed in rhythm. People chopped vegetables in rhythm. Every so often, people wandered out into the courtyard for a break. If you didn't do it too often or stay out there too long, nobody yelled at you. Annette was cautious. She didn't want to get in trouble. Some of the other women stayed out more. They did get yelled at. Nobody pulled out a cat-o'-nine-tails and whipped them, though.

Every so often, Annette and Jacques took a break at the same time. Then, not quite by accident, it was more than every so often. Some of the older women in the kitchens smiled behind their hands. But Annette wasn't the only one with a friend. Nobody made any big fuss about it.

Jacques said, "It could be worse," too. He was pleased with the way he'd helped repair a wagon.

"You should be working for yourself," Annette said.

He shrugged. "I suppose so. I hope I will again one of these days. But for now . . ." He shrugged again.

Slavery was part of his world. He didn't like it at all, but it didn't sicken his spirit the way it did Annette's.

"We have to get away," she said. She wouldn't have said that to anyone else. Trusting anyone from an alternate didn't come easy for somebody from the home timeline. But you couldn't stay all alone, either. The poet who said nobody was an island knew what he was talking about.

Jacques looked around to make sure nobody could overhear. "Wait till they relax about us," he said in a low voice. "Wait till they think we're all right. Then . . ." Annette nodded.

But they left sooner than that, though not in the way they'd intended. A woman shook Annette awake in the middle of the night, saying, "Come with me. We are going to take you to another of the master's properties."

She yawned and got out of bed. Several more slaves were already up. The woman woke a couple of others. Then she led them all out of the female slaves' barracks. Annette thought they would go out on the road, but they didn't. Instead, the woman who'd wakened them led them to a doorway that looked like all the rest. When she opened it, it showed nothing but a stairway leading down.

One of the slaves laughed nervously. "Does this take us to the underworld?" she asked.

"No, no, no. Don't be foolish." The leader sounded as businesslike as if she came from the home timeline.

"Just go down. Others will be waiting for you."

Down they went, farther than Annette had expected. The chamber at the bottom of the stairway was bigger than she'd thought it would be. Torches on the walls cast a dim, yellow, flickering light. As the woman had said, other slaves—men— already stood there. After a moment, Annette spotted Jacques. He saw her, too, and waved.

"Stay back near the edges of the chamber, everyone." Mar-wan al-Baghdadi's big voice raised echoes from the ceiling. "Do not go out near the center. It is not safe. By God, no harm will come to you as long as you do what I tell you to do."

Annette yawned again. What was he talking about? You'd almost think . . .

One instant, the middle of the underground chamber was empty. Then, silently and without any fuss, a huge, shiny metal box appeared out of nowhere. Slaves screamed and shrank back against the walls. Annette screamed with them. Her amazement was mixed with delight, not fear. That was—could only be—a Crosstime Traffic transposition chamber.

Six

Jacques blinked several times. The great metal box stayed there, right before his eyes. He wasn't drunk.

These Muslims didn't even give their slaves beer or wine. All he'd had with supper was a tart, orange juice from some kind of fruit that didn't grow in the Kingdom of Versailles.

A door in the box slid open. Bright light spilled out, light far brighter than that from the torches. It might almost have been daytime inside the box. Jacques sketched the sign of the wheel. Beside him, Musa ibn Ibrahim murmured, "Truly there is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God."

"Go inside. Take seats," Marwan al-Baghdadi called. "I say again, no harm will come to you. This is a ...

traveling chamber. It is like a ship or a wagon. There are seats inside. You will be comfortable as you go."

It wasn't like any ship or wagon Jacques had ever seen. He wasn't the only slave who hung back instead of going forward. But then, to his surprise, Khadija went in as calmly as if she were swinging up onto a horse.

If she wasn't afraid, Jacques figured he didn't have to be, either.

As he was a couple of steps behind Khadija, so Musa was one step behind him. "Let no one claim you go where I dare not follow," the black man said. He sounded angry, not at Jacques but at himself.

Seeing that nothing bad happened to the first ones who went into the box, others went after them. Inside the box, a voice spoke in Arabic from out of the air: "Please take your seats. All passengers, please take your seats."

Try as Jacques would, he couldn't see anyone talking. What he could see was Khadija's face, shining as brightly as the lamps inside the box. What about those lamps? He saw no torches or candles—no oil lamps, either, such as they used in these southern parts. He smelled nothing burning, either. The whole top of the box—the ceiling, he supposed you'd have to call it—glowed. It wasn't too bright to look at, but it shed better light than anything he'd ever seen except the sun.

"Please take your seats," that voice from the air repeated. "All passengers, please take your seats."

Khadija sat down right away, still smiling as if she'd just been promised heaven. She knew about boxes like this—knew about them and liked them. That encouraged Jacques to sit down beside her. The chair was comfortable enough, but what was it made of? Something hard and smooth and . . . orange? It wasn't metal or wood or stone or cloth or even bone. What did that leave? Nothing Jacques knew of.

"What is this place?" he whispered to Khadija in French.

"It's a transposition chamber," she answered in the same language. That told him nothing he didn't already know. She went on, "It will rescue us. It will take us back to ... to where I come from."

"To Marseille?" Jacques said, more confused than ever. "It's only a box in the middle of an underground room."

"No, not to Marseille," Khadija said impatiently. "To . . . Oh, never mind. You'll see when we get out. And it's not just a box. It—"

As if to prove what she said, the door slid shut all by itself.

With all the people inside the box, the air should have got hot and stuffy in nothing flat. It didn't—it stayed fresh and cool. Jacques tried to decide whether that was more marvelous than the lamps or the other way around. He couldn't.

"What are you two talking about?" asked Musa ibn Ibrahim. He had no more reason to understand French than Jacques did to follow whatever language he spoke besides Arabic.

Before Jacques could explain—no, could answer, because he couldn't explain—some lights at the front of the box started winking on and off. They reminded him of candle flames seen through stained glass. Some were red, some amber, but most a clear green. "We're going," Khadija said. Now she spoke in Arabic, so Musa could also make sense of her words.

Jacques shook his head. "No, we're not," he said. "We're just standing still." He knew what motion felt like.

He felt none of it here. The box might have been nailed to the floor of the underground room. Musa ibn Ibrahim nodded agreement with him.

But Khadija said, "Remember how the transposition chamber came out of nowhere at Marwan al-Baghdadi's? Well, when it stops it'll come out of nowhere someplace else."

She sounded very sure. Musa leaned forward so he could look at her past Jacques. "How do you know these things?" he asked in a low voice.

She bit her lip. "Never mind. It doesn't matter right now, anyway. But I'm right. You'll see."

Musa eyed Jacques. "What do you think?" the black man asked.

"I think she has to know more about this—chamber?—than I do, because I don't know anything," Jacques replied. "As for the rest... I don't know. Let's see what happens when that door opens again. One way or another, we'll find out then."

Musa ibn Muhammad pursed his lips. He looked up at the ceiling—the ceiling that glowed. Maybe the impossible but undeniable glow helped him make up his mind. He nodded. "This is good sense, Jacques of the north. When the door opens again—however it opens—we shall see what we shall see."

"How long will it take?" Jacques asked Khadija. If anybody knew, she did.

"It will seem like about half an hour," she said, an odd answer. Then she added something even odder: "It really won't take any time at all."

It seemed like more than half an hour to Jacques. By the way Khadija frowned and fidgeted, it seemed like more than half an hour to her, too. He wondered if something was wrong. He could only wonder—it wasn't as if he could do anything about it. Then a green light on the front panel turned red. A heartbeat later, the door slid open. "All passengers out," said the voice without a source. "All passengers please leave the chamber at once. All passengers out. All passengers please leave ..."

Jacques and Khadija and Musa and the others filed out. What else could they do? They found themselves in an underground room. But it wasn't the room where they'd got into the chamber. It was bigger and better lit. When Jacques looked up, he saw glowing tubes that shed the same kind of bright light as the transposition chamber's ceiling. Khadija was nodding to herself and smiling. She'd seen tubes like those before, even if Jacques and Musa hadn't.

"Over this way! Up these stairs!" a man shouted in Arabic. He wore a tunic and trousers of mottled green and brown. He had stout leather boots on his feet, and wore a helmet with a cloth cover of the same mottled fabric as the rest of his clothes. He carried what was obviously a weapon. It looked something like a matchlock musket, but was much shorter and more compact. And it had a knife sticking out below the muzzle, so it could double as a short thrusting spear. What a clever idea! Jacques thought, wondering why no one in the Kingdom of Versailles had ever thought of it.

"Be careful," Khadija whispered to him. "It can shoot many bullets quickly, without reloading between shots." Her smile had gone out. Whatever she'd expected, this wasn't it.

"Up the stairs! Get moving!" yelled the man with the gun-and-knife combination. Unlike the strange voice in the chamber, he didn't repeat himself exactly.

Up they went. These stairs were iron, and clanged under Jacques' boots. They must have cost a fortune.

More men with weapons waited as people came up from below. "Male slaves to the left!" one of them shouted. "Female slaves to the right! Get moving, if you know what's good for you!"

"No," Khadija whispered. "No, no, no, no!" But the men with the weapons didn't look as if they would take no for an answer. Jacques and Musa went to the left. Still with that look of astonished disbelief on her face, Khadija went to the right.

Annette had thought she was living a nightmare ever since she got captured and separated from her parents. Now she discovered what nightmare really was. That had been a Crosstime Traffic transposition chamber. She'd thought it would take her back to the home timeline. She hadn't known why it was taking so many people from that alternate with her, but she hadn't worried about it. Why worry when she was on her way home?

But she wasn't. This seemed more like hell than home— industrialized hell. The rest of the slaves, the ones who really had come from the alternate of the Great Black Deaths, didn't realize what was wrong. How could they? The only timeline they'd ever imagined was their own.

Wherever this was, it was in a different alternate. The house and grounds above the underground room where the transposition chamber came and went were bigger than the ones in the other Madrid. The house and the other buildings had solar panels on their roofs, too. Those would generate at least some of the electricity this place used. And if the locals were low-tech, they'd have no idea what the panels were for.

Even before Annette got to the barracks, she decided the locals were low-tech. For one thing, she couldn't see any sky-glow from street lamps over the outer wall. For another, the stench of sewage and garbage filled the air. Again, the other slaves took no special notice. They'd lived with that smell all their lives. They took it for granted.

They did exclaim when they found fluorescent tubes lighting the barracks. "Our new master must be a strong wizard!" one of them said. She sounded more proud than otherwise, as if being owned by such a man gave her extra status. For all Annette knew, it did.

She made herself exclaim, too. If she took those glowing tubes too much for granted, the others might wonder why. If they wondered why, Marwan al-Baghdadi—or whatever his real name was—might start wondering, too. Or maybe he didn't even come to this new alternate. Maybe he was just a hired man like the goons with the guns. But having the boss here wonder about her would also be very bad news.

Slaves! One of Crosstime Traffic's strongest rules was the one against buying or selling other people.

Annette wouldn't have thought the rule even needed to be there. It had been almost 250 years since the United States fought a civil war over slavery.

But. . . That was a CT transposition chamber. She'd been in enough of them to recognize another one. It didn't come from some other alternate that also knew how to travel between timelines. That had always been Crosstime Traffic's worst nightmare. This trouble, though, this trouble was homegrown. To Annette, that made it worse, not better.

She lay down on a bed just like the one she'd had in that other Madrid. The rest of the newly arrived slave women soon went to sleep. They didn't fully understand what had happened to them. Annette did, and her whirling thoughts kept her tossing and turning. People inside Crosstime Traffic were dealing with—dealing in—slaves. They'd got their hands on their own private transposition chamber. If that didn't mean there was corruption in very high places, Annette would have been amazed.

Why would they want slaves? She worried at that as if it were gristle stuck between her teeth. Whatever they dug up or grew here, Crosstime Traffic could surely get it somewhere else. And besides, how many people connected to Crosstime Traffic needed money? Most of them made more benjamins than they knew what to do with.

She yawned. However upset she was, she was tired, too. What else besides money would make people want to own other people? For a while, she couldn't think of anything. She yawned again. She was going to fall asleep in spite of herself.

She'd almost drifted off when she suddenly sat bolt upright instead. Maybe just the thrill of doing something this wrong would be enough. In the home timeline, people didn't wear furs. Up till this moment, Annette had never asked herself why they didn't. That she hadn't asked said a lot about how strong the taboo was. She'd always just taken it for granted.

Every once in a while, though, you would hear stories on the news . . . Reporters would talk in hushed voices about how so-and-so—sometimes somebody famous, sometimes someone no-body'd ever heard of—had been caught with a fur jacket or a mink stole in the closet. You could only wear something like that where no one (except maybe someone as twisted as you were) saw you do it. The only reason you would do it was because everybody else thought it was sick. You got some sort of perverted pleasure from going against the way everyone else felt.

Well, if wearing furs was a perverted kick, wasn't buying and selling and owning people an even bigger one? It sure looked that way to Annette. The idea made more sense than anything else she'd come up with, that was for sure.

Finding something that made sense, even if it was something horrible, helped her relax. She lay down again and began drifting off.

She began, yes. But then she jerked and twisted, there on that slave's bed. Sleep wouldn't come after all.

Maybe part of the thrill of slavery was buying and selling and owning people. But wasn't the rest of it doing anything you wanted to them while you had them? Anything at all? Why not? They were just property, weren't they?

Annette lay awake the rest of the night.

When Jacques woke the morning after the strange ride in the transposition chamber, he found that not all the slaves in the barracks were men who'd come with him. He also found he couldn't speak with the strangers. They didn't use Arabic or French. They didn't use Spanish, either—he knew what that sounded like, even if he couldn't speak it. Some of them had a language that reminded him a little of Arabic, though he couldn't follow it. Others made noises that hardly sounded like speech at all to him. Their tongue was full of sneezes and hisses and coughing sounds, and he couldn't tell where one word stopped and the next began.

"I think it is the Tower of Babel," Musa ibn Ibrahim said gravely. "God has confused our speech."

The only answer Jacques could find was, "Why would God want to do that to the likes of us?"

"God is God," Musa said. "He may do as He pleases. We have not the right to question Him."

How could you argue with that? Jacques couldn't, and he knew it. But he did say, "God didn't put us in that—that chamber, Khadija called it. People did. And the people who did know more about it than we do."

"Then we will learn—when God wills that we learn," Musa replied. Jacques gave up.

A man stood in the doorway. He shouted a couple of incomprehensible words. Then he said, "//tor/" That was Breakfast! in Arabic. Jacques guessed he'd said the same thing in the other two languages. Next time the man said those words, Jacques told himself, he would remember what they were. He wasn't sure he could pronounce one of them, but he'd try.

He didn't know where to get breakfast here. The slaves who spoke the strange languages did. He followed them. So did Musa and the other slaves who'd come here in the chamber. A bored-looking cook ladled porridge into bowls. Those bowls, and the spoons that went into them, were of some hard white stuff Jacques hadn't seen before. It reminded him of the orange stuff that went into the seats in the transposition chamber. Maybe Khadija had a name for it. Even if she did, though, would it mean any more than transposition chamber did?

To his relief, the benches and tables where the slaves ate were of ordinary wood. He got a splinter in his hand when he sat down. As he dug it out with a fingernail, it made him feel at home.

This place didn't try to keep its slaves hungry. The bowls were big, and the cook had filled them full. The porridge even had bits of meat in it. Jacques spooned it up. Things could have been worse—and how many times had he had that thought?

"What is this flesh?" Musa ibn Ibrahim asked after eating for a little while. "It does not taste like anything I have had before."

"Ham, I think," Jacques answered with his mouth full. And then, a heartbeat slower than he should have, he said, "Oh."

Grimly, Musa shoved the bowl away from himself. "You are a Christian," he said. "This food is not forbidden for you." By the way he said it, he meant, You don't know any better. Iron in his voice, he went on, "You will know, though, the swine is an unclean beast for Muslims." He called out, "Muslims! My brethren! My sisters! The food has forbidden flesh in it!"

Some of them cursed. Some of them prayed. Some of the women screamed. They all stopped eating breakfast. Some of the other slaves, the one who'd been here before, looked at them as if they were crazy.

Others moved away from them on the benches. Jacques knew what that meant. They thought trouble was coming, and they didn't want to get stuck in the middle of it.

Jacques went on eating. He felt guilty about it—Musa and the other Muslims were going hungry—but nothing was wrong with the food for him. Even Musa had said so. He was hungry now, and he thought the porridge tasted fine.

In tramped three guards with those muskets with the blades attached. "What's going on here?" one of them yelled in Arabic.

Musa stood up and bowed to him. "You will excuse me, please, sir, but this porridge has pork in it. It is haram—forbidden." He spoke respectfully. He knew he was a slave here. He knew how slaves were supposed to act. But he also knew he had a problem, one the guards and their superiors needed to hear about.

The guard who'd spoken before glared at him. "You can eat, or you can starve. Those are your choices.

But you're going to have to work any which way."

Musa bowed again. "Thank you, sir. In that case, I will starve. When I am dead, God will welcome me into Paradise. I hope you have a care for your own soul." He sat down.

"You're a troublemaker! You'll be sorry. It's not like you can hide around here," the guard warned. He was bound to be right about that. Only three or four black men had traveled in the chamber. Still glaring, the guard spoke to all the Muslims: "You'd better watch yourselves. We don't have time for your foolishness.

You'll all be sorry if you aren't careful."

"I hope you won't get into too much trouble on account of that," Jacques whispered to Musa as the guards stomped out.

"Let them do as they please," the older man said with a shrug. "God may have made me a slave. All right—His will be done in that as in all things. But God would not make me break His commandments. That has to be Satan."

"I suppose so." Jacques wondered what he would do if these people tried to make him break a rule set down by Jesus or Henri. Would he have the courage to stay stubborn? He hoped so, and knew he wasn't sure.

People inside the dining hall were still muttering back and forth when the guards returned. One of them pointed his musket at Musa. "Come with us," he snapped.

"I obey." Musa got to his feet. "What will you do with me?"

"You say you won't eat pork, eh?" The guard had a nasty grin on his face.

"That is right," Musa ibn Ibrahim said with great dignity.

"Well, we'll see." The guard's smile got nastier still. Jacques hadn't thought it could. "We're going to stick you in a cell. You can have all the water you want. But if you want food, you'll eat pork or nothing—and if you do starve, too bad for you." He gestured with the musket's muzzle. "Come on. Get moving."

"I come." Musa murmured something else, so softly that Jacques thought he was the only one to hear it:

"Truly there is no God but God. Truly Muhammad is the Prophet of God." The black man took a couple of ordinary steps toward the guard. Then he lowered his head and rushed him.

It wasn't the worst bet in the world—or it wouldn't have been against a matchlock musket. The guard would have time for one startled shot. If he missed, Musa would be on him. If Musa could wrestle away the musket, he had at least a chance of smashing down the other two guards. Maybe the other Muslims would join him. Maybe this would turn into a full-scale uprising.

Khadija had said the guards' weapons could fire more than one bullet without reloading. Musa ibn Ibrahim might not have heard it. If he had, he might not have believed it or understood what it meant.

When the guard pulled the trigger, his musket made a sound like a giant ripping a sheet of canvas. Jacques had no idea how many bullets hit Musa ibn Ibrahim. They were enough to come close to cutting the black man in half. For a moment, there was a horrid pink mist as the bullets tore his insides out. Some of them went through him and hit other people. They screamed. He didn't. He fell and scrabbled at the floor with his hands for a little while. Then he died.

The iron smell of blood and the stink of his bowels filled the air. Smoke didn't. Jacques needed a moment to notice that. He didn't smell gunpowder, either. What sent the bullets flying, then?

Whatever it was, it was plenty to do the job and then some.

"Anybody else?" the guard asked. Except for the shrieks of the wounded, no one said a thing. The guard gestured with his musket again. "Anyone who's hurt, go on out. You'll be treated.

If you can't walk, somebody near will help you." He spoke in the other two languages that seemed to be used here, probably saying the same thing. Close to half a dozen people had been shot. Out they went—except for a woman who'd taken a bullet between the eyes.

After more shouted orders, two men dragged her out by the heels. Her blood made a long trail across the floor. When the men came back, the guards made them drag Musa's body out, too. Flies had already started landing in the gore pooled under him. Jacques usually thought Muslims were bound for hell. He hoped God would make an exception for the black man.

He looked down at his bowl of porridge. He was glad he'd eaten most of it, because he sure didn't want any more.

Was Khadija all right? He hadn't seen her limp away, but he knew that impossible burst of gunfire might have unnerved him. No, there she was. Her face was pale and drawn—no surprise, for most of the people in the dining hall were pale and drawn. Jacques probably was himself. Khadija nodded to him when their eyes met, but then quickly looked away.

At first, that offended Jacques. Then he realized she might be smarter than he was. They'd got into the transposition chamber together—and together with Musa ibn Ibrahim. She might not want to remind their new master that they were friends, and also that they'd known a slave who'd tried to rebel. Jacques had never been a slave before, but he could see that staying as close to invisible as you could was likely to be a good idea.

He could see that—once he'd thought about it for a while. Khadija must have seen it in the wink of an eye.

Forget that maybe. She was smarter than he was.

One of the guards came back in. As usual, he gave his orders in three languages. Jacques could follow the Arabic: "Men are on the roadbuilding detail today. Women will work in the garden plot—except those on duty inside the manor. You know who you are. Any questions?"

Nobody said a word. If he'd told them to jump off the wall around the manor, most of them would have done it without a peep. Whatever happened when they hit the ground had to be better than facing one of those terrible muskets.

Roadbuilding. Jacques muttered to himself. That didn't sound easy, and it didn't sound like much fun. But he was young and strong and—except for the leg that pained him now and again—healthy. He could do the work. It wasn't as if the guard had said he was going to the mines. That was a mankilling job, one where you might as well rise up because you had nothing left to lose and nothing left to live for.

Out into the courtyard he went. He and the rest of the newly arrived slaves stuck together. They couldn't even talk with the ones who'd been there longer. They weren't friends, but they all spoke Arabic. That made them companions.

Another guard, a big, beefy fellow, took charge of them. "You will come with me," he barked. "You will do what I tell you. You have work you need to do, and you will do it. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, sir," Jacques and a few other slaves said.

"Do you understand me?" the guard roared.

"Yes, sir!" This time, everybody spoke up.

"That's more like it." The guard nodded. Jacques felt oddly reassured. The man didn't sound like a cruel master. He sounded like a sergeant drilling raw recruits. If he spoke French, Duke Raoul would have hired him in a heartbeat.

Under his lead, the road gang marched out of the manor. As soon as Jacques saw what lay outside, he knew Khadija told the truth. The chamber had taken the slaves somewhere new. He'd already partly realized things were different here. He hadn't heard city noises, and he hadn't smelled city smells. But seeing bare countryside, as if noisy, smelly, brawling Madrid had never existed, jolted him to the core.

As the guard inside the manor had said, there were vegetable plots. There were fields of growing grain.

And there were what would be olive groves when the saplings got bigger. Beyond them, the near-desert of central Spain stretched out as far as the eye could see.

"Where did the city go?" one of the Muslim women asked as she weeded in the garden.

"They must be mighty wizards, to make it disappear!" another one exclaimed.

Annette said things like that, too. She didn't want the people who ran this place to think she took travel between alternates for granted. That would have been dangerous. Right now, she couldn't imagine anything that would have been more dangerous. If they decided she knew about travel between alternates . ..

They'll kill me, she thought as she grubbed a weed out from between a couple of tomato plants. The people who were doing this were committing so many crimes, one more murder might not even make it into the balance sheet. The one thing they could not have was anyone in the home timeline finding out what they'd done.

Slavery. Moving low-tech locals from one alternate to another. Using high technology against low-tech locals. Importing life-forms to alternates where they didn't belong—highly bred tomatoes were as much out of place here as assault rifles. At least two murders that Annette had seen, plus who could say how many more? Who could say what other acts of cruelty went on here, either?

Where did the slaves who didn't speak Arabic come from? Were they from this alternate? Or had the slavers brought them in from somewhere else? Did this alternate have any people at all, or was it one of those where human beings had never evolved? Those were all important questions, and she had answers to exactly none of them.

Even starting to find out wouldn't be easy. Annette had never tried to learn a foreign language on her own, without the help of her implant. People did it. Even in the home timeline, people in countries that weren't so rich had to do things the hard way. If you learned words, you could figure out grammar a bit at a time . . .

couldn't you? She had to hope so.

One of the rifle-toting guards in camouflage clothing tramped past her. She worked faster while she thought he was looking at her, then slowed down again. How many slaves in how many alternates had done something like that over how many thousand years? She watched the man out of the corner of her eye. Did he carry that rifle to protect himself from the slaves and from wild beasts, or did he worry about wild men, too?

The woman weeding in the next row said something in the language that sounded a little like Arabic but wasn't. She looked over at Annette and smiled. She was somewhere close to forty, her skin tanned and leathery. Her teeth were crooked, a couple of them broken. She spoke again, then cocked her head to one side, waiting.

"I'm sorry, but I don't understand you," Annette replied in Arabic.

More gutturals came from the other woman. She was probably saying she couldn't understand Annette, either. She jabbed a thumb at her own chest and said, "Emishtar."

Was that the older woman's name? Annette didn't see what else it could be. Pointing to the other woman, she said, "Emishtar." The woman smiled and nodded. She pointed to Annette and made a questioning noise.

"Khadija," Annette told her. She had to be Khadija—that was the name under which she'd come here.

Changing it would make people wonder, which was the last thing she could afford.

"Khadija," Emishtar said. She rattled off something that made no sense to Annette. It didn't sound like a question. Maybe it was a prayer.

They taught each other names for parts of the body and tools and the sun up in the sky. Some of the words Emishtar used did sound something like the Arabic ones Annette had picked up through her implant.

Annette wondered how long she would be able to remember them. She had to try. The other woman didn't seem to have any trouble remembering her words. That made Annette more determined not to let somebody from a low-tech alternate get ahead of her.

Sun was shams in Arabic. It was shamash in Emishtar's language. That was pretty plainly a Semitic tongue, too—related to modern Arabic and Hebrew in the home timeline, and to ancient Aramaic and Assyrian and Babylonian. But Annette was almost sure it wasn't any Arabic dialect.

"La ilaha illa'llah—Muhammadun rasulu'llah" she said. There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God. Emishtar just looked at her and shook her head. The older woman didn't know anything about Islam. She would have recognized the shahada, the profession of faith, if she did. In all the alternates Annette knew of where Arabic was used in Spain, Muslim conquerors had brought it here. That pretty much nailed it down. Whatever language Emishtar used, it wasn't one of the many varieties of Arabic.

But what was it? For a while, Annette couldn't think of any other Semitic tongues that had been spoken in Spain. Then she remembered the Punic Wars, where Carthage had fought Rome. Carthage—in modern Tunisia, in North Africa—had been a Phoenician city, and the Phoenicians spoke a Semitic language.

Carthage had planted colonies of its own in Spain.

"Carthage?" Annette asked, making sure no guard could hear her do it. She pointed east and a little south.

"Carthage?"

Emishtar just looked at her and shrugged. She didn't get it. Carthage, of course, was the English version of the Latin version of the real name of the place. It wasn't close enough to the original to make sense to Emishtar—if Annette had guessed right in the first place about how this alternate got started.

She laughed at herself. It was either that or pound her head into the dirt. How much she didn't know! She didn't know the right name for Carthage, the one that would have made sense to a real Carthaginian. And she didn't know whether Emishtar came from this alternate. Maybe she'd got here in a transposition chamber, too. If she had, all of Annette's guesses about this place were worthless.

How many alternates did these slavers visit? How long had this been going on? Annette had no way to be sure, except by noting that the manor seemed new. The roadbuilding Jacques and the other men were doing also argued this place hadn't been here very long. If it had, the road would already have been in place, wouldn't it? Annette thought so, but she couldn't prove a thing.

If word of this ever reached the home timeline . . . Somewhere under downtown Madrid was a subbasement with an outlaw transposition chamber. What would people do? Say they were coming into town on business or on vacation? Travel to this alternate or the one with the Great Black Deaths or some other unknown one and play at being masters for a while, then go back to the home timeline with a suntan and with memories they didn't dare share? Again, that was how it looked. Again, Annette knew she couldn't prove it.

She couldn't prove it as long as she was here. Even if she could prove it while she was here, it wouldn't do her any good. But if she could get back ... If she could ride that transposition chamber back to the home timeline . . .

Most chambers had a human operator in them to take over if anything went wrong with the computers. The slavers hadn't bothered here. Annette could see why not, too. An operator would be one more person, maybe one person too many, who knew the secret. And the computer hardly ever went wrong. Even when it did, the operator couldn't do much about it most of the time. But transposition chambers did have manual controls.

Annette laughed at herself again. It was either that or break down and cry, which she didn't want to do.

Suppose everything went just right. Suppose she could hop into the transposition chamber and pilot it back to the home timeline. Then what? Then somebody in that Madrid would knock her over the head, and she would have wasted a thrilling escape.

It wouldn't have worked out like that in a video game. There would have been some puzzle to solve. You might have to look real hard for it, but it would be there. You could win the game.

Here .. . She laughed one more time—those tears she didn't want to shed were much too close. The only way she saw now to win the game and get out of that subbasement in home-timeline Madrid was to look like a master on the way back from her time as lord of all she surveyed. Only one thing was wrong with that.

She couldn't do it.

All she had in this alternate were the clothes on her back. They wouldn't convince anybody she was anything but a slave. She hadn't seen any women from the home timeline here. Even if she did, how likely were any of them to be eighteen years old?

Young people weren't likely to do anything like this to begin with. The passion to lord it over other people, to set yourself up as a little tin god, got worse with age.

"You!" a—middle-aged—guard yelled at her in Arabic. "Work harder!"

As long as he was watching her, she did. Then she slacked off again. She'd already learned one lesson of slavery—never do more than you had to.