Another guard stepped out into the roadway as the horseman neared. He held up his hand, palm out. The rider reined in. The guard spoke to him. The language sounded like the one some of the slaves used, not Emishtar's tongue but the other one. The horseman answered in what seemed like the same language. After some back-and-forth, the guard waved him on toward the manor.
Once the horseman rode off, the fellow who'd spoken to him came over to the guard near Annette. They were both grinning. Annette wouldn't have wanted those nasty grins aimed at her.
"Lord Wog's not so high and mighty any more?" one of them said.
"Nope," the other answered. "We taught the savages that all kinds of horrible things happen to 'em if they mess with us. They're like any other dogs. Kick 'em a few times and they'll roll over and show you their bellies." He laughed. So did his pal.
Annette kept her head down. She didn't want them to see the look on her face. Savages was bad enough. But wog! And dogs! In the home timeline, calling people names like that was almost as sick as wearing furs. Crosstime Traffic training went on and on till everyone's eyes glazed over about how the people in the alternates were people just like anybody else. They might believe some things that weren't so, but that was because they didn't know better, not because they were stupid. Annette could have repeated those lessons in her sleep. She'd believed them, too. She'd thought everybody believed them.
Shows what I know, went through her head.
She'd had some notion of what the masters here got from keeping slaves. It sickened her, but she thought she understood how it worked. What the guards got out of being here—besides piles of benjamins—hadn't been so obvious. She wouldn't have trusted money alone to make people keep their mouths shut. And it didn't look as if the slavers did, either.
If you thought you were better than someone else because you came from here and he came from there, or because your skin was this color and hers was that one, you couldn't show it in the home timeline. If you did, nobody would want anything to do with you. You had to keep those feelings to yourself, to hide them. If you came to a place where you could let them out instead . . .
Wouldn't that be fun? It sure would, if you were the right kind of wrong person.
What had the guards done to the locals? Taken slaves from among them, plainly. What else? Do I really want to know? Annette wondered. Her stomach twisted. The locals would have swords and bows and arrows. The guards had assault rifles and body armor and night-vision goggles and all the other tools of twenty-first-century war. They'd won. They probably thought they were heroes because they'd won, too.
Or maybe this was like a duck-hunting trip for them, not even war at all. A lot of people in the home timeline looked down their noses at hunting, but some still enjoyed it. If Annette had her opinion, she knew it was only an opinion. On other things, where just about everyone around her thought the way she did, she sometimes confused her opinions with laws of nature.
People in other alternates were apt to do the same thing. The difference—to her mind, anyway—was that they were likely to be wrong. She couldn't imagine sensible people approving of slavery, for instance, or of male chauvinism, or of furs.
"What are you doing sitting there like a mushroom?" a guard shouted at her in harsh, guttural Arabic. "You didn't come out here to get a suntan, sweetheart. You came out here to work. You'd better remember it, too, or you'll be sorry."
Annette started weeding like a machine. The guard scowled. He didn't have a whip, like an overseer in the South before the Civil War. But he did have a billy club on his belt to go with his automatic rifle. Guards didn't hit slaves here very often. That didn't mean they wouldn't if you gave them an excuse, though, or sometimes just if they felt like it.
"He bad man," Emishtar whispered in bad Arabic.
"He very bad man," Annette agreed in the older woman's language. They'd taught each other man and bad by pointing at the guards. Annette wished she could ask Emishtar about the man who'd just ridden into the manor, but she didn't have the words. Trying to remember the ones she'd learned without an implant wasn't easy, and she knew she was pronouncing them wrong.
An accent. I've got an accent. She'd never had to worry about that before. The implant let her speak perfectly when she used it. Emishtar had an accent when she used Arabic. That made Annette feel a bit better.
A small bit better. Feeling good about something else while you were a slave was like feeling good about something else while you had two broken legs. You could do it, but not for long and not very well. After a while, you got over a broken leg. How did you get over being a slave if you couldn't escape and there was nobody in this whole alternate to ransom you?
Yes, how did you? Did you? Could you?
When Jacques came in from a day of work on the road, he began to understand how a pack horse felt. The guards insisted on getting so much work out of him. If he could do that much work without trouble, all right. If he couldn't. . . They insisted on getting that much work out of him anyway, and out of the other slaves. "You've got to do it!" the guards yelled. "You'll be sorry if you don't!"
And if men didn't, if men couldn't, the guards made them sorry. They did excuse people who were really sick. But if you goofed off, they made you regret it. Those sticks they carried could raise welts almost like a whip. They didn't always bother with them, though. Sometimes they would use a boot or a musket butt to get their point across.
Once, brutality led to tragedy in short order. A guard clouted one of the men who'd come here in the transposition chamber with Jacques. The man leaped to his feet and smacked the guard in the face. Taken by surprise, the guard fell down and dropped his musket. With a roar of triumph, the slave snatched it up. He squeezed the trigger.
And nothing happened.
The slave cried out again, this time in despair. The other guards gave him the ultimate insult—they took the time to laugh at him before they shot him. The muskets worked fine for them. They spat bullets like a boy spitting melon seeds to annoy his sister. The slave fell, with as many holes in him as a colander. The bullets made horrible wounds, worse than any Jacques had ever seen. When they tore through a man, they tore his insides out with them. Jacques wondered why they were so much nastier than any other musket balls. Maybe they traveled faster. The gunshots certainly sounded quicker and harsher than any he'd known before. They went crack! instead of boom!
After the slave lay dead, his blood soaking into the dirt, the guards rounded on the rest of the roadbuilding gang. "Anybody else feel brave?" one of them shouted in Arabic. "Anybody else feel stupid? You mess with us, only one thing happens—you end up like this." He stirred the body with his boot. Then he shouted some more, in the other languages the slaves here used.
None of the roadbuilders said a word. What could you say? The guards even seemed to have a spell on their muskets, so they could use them and no one else could. How were you supposed to fight men like that? Jacques saw no way, however much he wished he could.
"You and you and you." The guard who'd shouted picked a pikeman and two shovelers near Jacques. "Get off to the side of the road and dig him a grave. You don't need to make it too deep—just enough so the animals won't dig him out."
"May we pray for him?" one of the shovelers asked.
By the look on the guard's face, he wanted to say no. He wanted to, but he didn't. "Yes, go ahead," he said gruffly. "And while you're at it, pray he's got more sense in the next world than he did in this one."