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.
Seven
When these people built a road, they didn't fool around. Jacques found that out in a hurry. A track already led east. The road went in the same general direction, but ignored the track. The track meandered and took the easiest way across the hot, dry countryside. The road went straight as a string. In fact, strings stretched from posts driven into the ground marked out the way it would go on.
It was about twenty feet wide, and built on a foundation four or five feet deep. Digging out that much dirt was hard work. The slaves traded off with pick and with shovel and with a wicker basket with which to dump out the spoil. They argued about which job was hardest, using both signs and words. Everybody claimed whatever he was doing at that moment was the hardest thing in the world.
Jacques learned Arabic curses he hadn't known before. He learned some curses in the other two languages, too. He didn't always know what they meant, but liked the way they rolled off his tongue.
The one good thing he could say was that the guards gave the slaves plenty to drink. Without that, men would have died like flies, and they wouldn't have got much roadbuilding done. Some of the swarthier men and the few blacks left after Musa ibn Ibrahim got killed worked stripped to the waist. Jacques couldn't do it. This hot southern sun burned him wherever it touched his skin. He kept his shirt on. He sometimes thought the breeze blowing through the sweat-soaked linen helped cool him. Other times . . .
"I feel like a sausage in an oven," he said, grunting as he lifted a basket of earth and rocks and dumped it to one side of the trench.
"You're still wearing your casing," a slave named Muhammad said with a grin. Four or five of the slaves who'd come over to this place—wherever it was—had that name. This one was short and lean and tough and a brown that staying out in the sun only made browner. He had no trouble shedding his shirt.
Behind the gang that dug down to the foundation came another that filled in the trench to make the roadbed. They threw in dirt mixed with sand, then gravel, then bigger pebbles. Once they'd built the roadbed up close to ground level, they tamped everything down so it was good and firm. Then they set flat, close-fitting paving stones on top of the foundation. Another gang somewhere was probably cutting those stones. Curbstones denned the edge of the road.
There were highways like this in the Kingdom of Versailles. People said they went back to the days of the Romans. Jacques didn't know a lot about the Romans. They'd been strong before Henri's time, before the Great Black Deaths. And they'd crucified Jesus, Henri's older brother. Once you know that much, what else did you need to know?
Because the road was so much work, it didn't move forward very fast. That didn't seem to worry the guards, as long as the road gang worked hard. They kept an eye on the slaves and talked among themselves. Sometimes they used Arabic, sometimes one of the two tongues the slaves who didn't speak Arabic spoke, and sometimes another language Jacques didn't understand. The sounds of that one reminded him a little of the ones in the speech of traders from England.
One day a couple of weeks after Jacques got to the manor, a guard pointed down the track. It ran straight east here—the fancy road was eating it a foot at a time.
A horsemen rode up the track toward the roadbuilding crew. As he drew near, Jacques saw he was waving something in his right hand. It was an olive branch—no mistaking the small, gray-green leaves. A sign of peace? The rider wore a baggy tunic, something that looked like a divided skirt, and rawhide boots. He had on a floppy hat that shielded his face from the sun. Jacques wished he had one like it. The man's face was strong and square, with a big, straight nose, a thick black beard, and bushy eyebrows that grew together in the middle.
The stranger reined in about fifty yards from Jacques and the closest guards. He yelled something in the sneezing, hissing language some of the slaves used. One of the guards shouted back in the same tongue. When he did, the one-eyebrowed man on horseback looked as if he'd got a big mouthful of vinegar. He called out again. The guard answered, and gestured with his musket. Come ahead—Jacques could figure that out without understanding a word.
Still with that sour expression on his face, the horseman rode forward. His mount's hooves thumped in the dirt, then clattered on the paving stones of the finished section of road. A guard near Jacques talked into something small that he held in the palm of his hand. Jacques thought he heard the—the thing answer back. That was impossible, though. Or maybe not, he thought, remembering the voice that had spoken out of the air in the transposition chamber. Who could say for sure what these—wizards?—were able to do?
Khadija might know, Jacques thought. He hadn't had much chance to talk with her since they got here. Both of them were too busy. He promised himself he would ask when he did get the chance.
As the stranger rode on, the guards started to laugh. "What's so funny, sir?" Jacques asked the closest one. If you stayed polite to them, they would sometimes answer.
This one did. Still smiling, he said, "The flea-bitten fool is angry because we speak his language as well as he does."
Jacques scratched his head. His hair was filthy and matted with sweat. "I don't understand, sir," he said.
"His people say foreigners can't learn their language," the guard told him. "They say demons tried to learn their language and couldn't do it. But we can." He laughed some more.
And what does that make you? Jacques wondered. He didn't ask. He didn't think the guard would tell him. He wasn't sure he wanted to know, either.
Annette was weeding when she heard a sound that reminded her heartbreakingly of home: a telephone rang. A guard took it out of his pocket, listened, and said, "Yeah?" He listened some more, then said, "Okay," and put the phone away again.
Emishtar was weeding next to her. They'd got into the habit of doing that, so they could teach each other bits of their languages. The guards didn't seem to mind. Emishtar made strange gestures in the direction of the guard who'd used the telephone. To her, it had to be some sort of magical gadget. Maybe she was trying to make sure the magic didn't come down on her.
The guard pointed down the road. Annette looked that way, too, when she was sure nobody was looking at her. A stranger! The first man she'd seen who didn't belong to the manor. He looked . . . like a man. The olive branch seemed to serve as a flag of truce. His horse trappings and his clothes all seemed made by hand. He probably wasn't riding for fun, then, the way he would have in the home timeline. He was riding because this was the best way he knew to go from one place to another. Annette nodded to herself. She'd known this couldn't be a high-tech alternate.