Could looks have killed, the guard would have started rotting right then.
The next day, Birigida hatched another scheme that didn't work and got her yelled at. "She'd better be careful," Annette said to Emishtar. "If she doesn't watch it, they'll put her on the roadbuilding gang."
She meant it for a joke, but Emishtar took it seriously. "Serve her right, too," she said. Emishtar made a good friend— Annette had seen that. If she wasn't your friend, though, you weren't much more than a beast to her. Birigida was not her friend. To Emishtar, Birigida was a beast you couldn't count on, nothing more.
After the storm finally blew off to the east, the guards took the women out to the garden plots. The roadbuilders got to stay in for another day. Some of the women grumbled. Annette wasn't overjoyed herself, but she understood. You couldn't make a roadbed from soupy mud. You could pull a lot of weeds, though. They came out of soft dirt more easily than from hard.
The ground was still wet when they went out to the gardens. Annette's shoes squelched in the mud. When she got down on her hands and knees and started weeding, she got her dress filthy. That would have been more annoying to a slave in the home timeline than it was here. Here, at least, the slaves could get plenty of clean clothes.
Some of the women had been surprised they didn't have to spin and weave, especially while it was raining. Annette wasn't, or not very. Her long cotton skirt came from Wal-Mart.
What it meant to Annette was that the slaveowners found it easier or cheaper to buy clothes in the home timeline than to have their slaves make them. Or maybe they just hadn't thought of that. Maybe they would one of these days. Maybe listening to their own slaves would give them ideas. Annette hoped not. They'd already had too many ideas, and too many bad ones.
As the women started to work, a guard came over and stood in front of Birigida. She looked up at him the way a kid who'd got caught doing something he wasn't supposed to at school looked at the principal. He growled at her. She nodded. He growled again. She nodded again. It went on for quite a while. At last, the guard turned his back and stomped away. He didn't kick mud in her face, but he might as well have. She bent down and started weeding as if her life depended on it.
Maybe it did.
Watching her, Annette worried. She couldn't keep that pace up for long. Nobody could. And when she slowed down, how much would she slow down? To what the rest of the slaves were doing? That would be enough to keep her out of trouble, anyway. Or would she slow down the way she usually did, doing so little she got noticed?
Annette knew which way she'd guess. She wished she didn't.
Emishtar also watched Birigida working. The woman with the crooked front teeth wasn't impressed, either. "Soon she will see a bird, or a leaf going by. That will be interesting. She will stop and watch. And she will forget what she is supposed to do."
"She shouldn't," Annette said with a sigh. "I wish she wouldn't."
Emishtar only shrugged. "They watch her all the time now. They don't watch us so much. So we don't have to do so much. We ought to thank her."
That was more cold-blooded than Annette could make herself be. She'd seen hard living in the alternate Jacques came from. She'd lived hard herself, but she'd always known she was playacting. Till those raiders caught her, the home timeline had never been far away. Emishtar, by contrast, had never had it easy. She probably ate better and worked less as a slave than she had when she was free. That didn't leave a whole lot of room inside her for compassion.
A blackbird hopped in the field. He caught worm after worm. He liked rain fine—it made the worms come up. She could watch the blackbird and work at the same time. Could Birigida? Annette kept sneaking glances over at her. The blond woman had slowed down some from her frantic opening burst, but she was still going pretty well. Annette nodded to herself in relief. She hadn't thought Birigida had it in her.
Emishtar must not have, either. "Maybe the guard really say he will kill her if she does not work," she said. "Maybe she believe him, too." She paused to murder a weed. "Me, I would have knocked her over the head a long time ago." Yes, the milk of human kindness ran thin in Emishtar.
"She's—" Annette started to say Birigida wasn't a bad person. People in the home timeline always said that. Annette couldn't do it here, not with a straight face. Birigida was out for Birigida, first, last, and always. She didn't care who knew it, either. That made her less likely to get what she wanted, of course. If she were a little smarter, she would have figured that out for herself. If she were a little smarter, she wouldn't have had a lot of her problems. Annette tried again: "She's doing fine right now." There. She'd told the truth without even being insulting. They said it couldn't be done, she thought.
"Right now, yes," Emishtar said. "Can she keep it up?"
The guards wondered, too. They circled Birigida like vultures over roadkill. If she gave them any kind of excuse, they would pounce. What happened then wouldn't be pretty. Annette could see as much. Could the blond woman? She sure hadn't been able to up till now. But she kept working away, and did enough so the guards let her alone. She wasn't the best worker in the garden plot, but for once she wasn't the worst, either.
She got through the whole day without more than a warning or two. Annette wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes.
As the sun sank in the southwest, the women trooped back toward the manor. Birigida let out a long, weary sigh. Well, for once she'd earned the right. Then, with Annette only two or three meters away, the blond woman muttered, "Lord, am I beat," to herself. Annette took two more steps, then tripped and almost fell. Birigida had spoken in English.
Ten
Jacques had never seen Khadija so excited. She was doing her best not to show it, which was like asking a house not to show it was on fire. She all but dragged Jacques out into the courtyard after supper. The older woman with the crooked teeth who was her friend smiled out at both of them.
No matter what Emishtar thought, Khadija wasn't excited about Jacques himself. He wished she would be, but no. In a ferocious whisper, Khadija said, "You know Birigida?"
"The one who won't work?" Jacques said, and Khadija nodded. Jacques went on, "I can't help knowing of her. You've hardly talked about anybody else lately. What now?"
"She speaks my language. "
"Arabic?" Jacques scratched his head. They were using French now, but she was from Muslim Marseille, so Arabic would be her first language. "Lots of people here speak Arabic. I didn't know this Birigida did, but so what?"
Khadija gave him an impatient look. "No, no, no—not Arabic. My language, the language I use every day in the world I come from." She said a couple of soft sentences in it.
He felt like thumping his head with his hand to let some light in on his brains. He'd known for a while now that she wasn't exactly a Muslim trader's daughter from Marseille. He'd known and he'd forgotten, because it didn't seem to matter. Now he tried to find something to say that wasn't stupid. The best he could do was, "If I didn't know better, I'd say that sounded like English."
Khadija laughed and laughed. She laughed so hard, other slaves and guards stared at her—and at Jacques. Jacques didn't even know what he'd said that was funny. Khadija laughed till she got the hiccups. "Oh, dear," she said in between them. "Oh, dear."
When the hiccups wouldn't stop, Jacques pounded her on the back. It didn't do much good. Nothing did much good when somebody had the hiccups—you just had to wait for them to stop. "Are you all right?" he asked crossly.
"I—hie!—think so," she said, and then, "Oh, dear," again.