"Is she all right?" a guard called to Jacques. "She acts like she's having a fit."
"She says she thinks she is," Jacques told him. The guard waved and nodded, as if to say, That's good. Jacques understood why he wondered—slaves were worth a lot of money. What he didn't understand was why Khadija had the fit in the first place. "Will you please tell me where the joke is?" he grumbled.
Little by little, she won back control of herself. "Oh, dear," she said one more time. Then, at last, she managed something that made a little sense: "I'm sorry." She took a deep breath and held it. She was still hiccuping, but not so often. After she breathed out, she went on, "The joke is, I really do speak English." She kept her voice low, so no one but Jacques could hear. "It's not quite the same English as the one you know about, but it's pretty close."
"Oh." He scratched his head. "I guess that's funny." He liked Khadija too much to come right out and say, It's not that funny.
Even if he didn't say it, she must have understood what he was thinking. "I am sorry," she repeated. One of the reasons he liked her so much was that she had such a good idea of what was going on inside his head.
"Why does it matter so much that she speaks English?" he asked. Most of what was in his head right now was confusion. "Maybe some people in her, uh, world use it, too." He thought French would make a better language for them to use, but that seemed beside the point.
"No." Khadija shook her head. "She doesn't speak some other dialect, the way people in your England do. She speaks the same kind of English as I do—the same kind as the guards and the masters, too. She's just pretending to be one of those people like Dumnorix."
"Who would want to do something like that?" Jacques thought it was the craziest thing he'd ever heard. "She makes a lousy slave. They beat her. They kick her. They could take her into a back room and—well, never mind. Henri on the wheel, they could kill her. We've talked about that. So if she's one of those people, why doesn't she say so? Then all those horrible things would stop happening to her."
"I don't know. I wish I did," Khadija said. "I know what I hope, though. I hope she's here as a, a spy for our government. If she is, and if she can get back, they'll come and rescue everybody."
"That would be good." Jacques would have got more excited if he thought it was likely. "If she was a spy, wouldn't she want them not to notice her at all?"
Khadija bit her lip. "You'd think so, wouldn't you? But what else could she be? She's not an ordinary slave—I'm sure of that."
"No, she's a stupid slave. She's a lazy slave," Jacques said. "So how will you find out about her?"
He watched Khadija. She started to charge right into that, but stopped before she said anything. It wasn't as easy a question as it looked at first. That she saw as much made Jacques think even more of her good sense than he did already. At last, she said, "I'll have to find a chance to talk to her in English. I don't see what else I can do."
"I guess so." Jacques had been looking for some other answer. He hadn't found one, either. He knew why that one bothered him: "Then she'll know you aren't just a trader's daughter, too."
"You're right. That's what worries me." Khadija looked as unhappy as he felt.
And if she wasn't just a trader's daughter . . . "What are you, anyway?"Jacques asked.
"In one way, I am a trader's daughter, but not from Marseille in your world," Khadija answered. "In another way, I'm your friend, or I hope I am." She took hold of his hands.
He squeezed hers, not too hard. "Yes," he said. "Oh, yes."
Annette watched Birigida with different eyes. Her first hope had been that the blond woman was investigating the slavers and getting ready to lower the boom on them. She tried to make herself believe it. Try as she would, she couldn't. Jacques had hit that nail right on the head—he might not be educated, but he wasn't dumb. If Birigida was a cop or a detective, she wouldn't want the guards to pay her any special attention. And she couldn't have got any more notice from them if she dyed her hair purple and painted her face green.
But if she wasn't a spy, what was she? Did she work for Crosstime Traffic the way Annette and her folks did? Had she got captured in a slave raid? That made some sense, but only some. Annette didn't think Crosstime Traffic let anyone as bad at what she did as Birigida go out to the alternates. You were too likely to get in trouble and give yourself away—maybe give away the Crosstime Traffic secret, too. Annette supposed that risk was smaller in a low-tech alternate. Even so ...
If Birigida wasn't a spy or a cop, if she wasn't somebody from Crosstime Traffic, what was she? Annette couldn't think of anything else, try as she would. That worried her. It made her angry, too. Birigida was some kind of key—that seemed plain. But what would happen if you turned her in the lock? What would she open up?
Because Annette spent so much time wondering about Birigida, she didn't pay enough attention to what she was supposed to be doing herself. "Have you fallen asleep out here?" a guard yelled at her in Arabic. "Pick it up, or you'll be sorry! I thought you were a good worker, not a lazy, useless fool like some I could name."
Like Birigida, he meant. Annette had enough sense not to get in trouble that way. Why couldn't the blond woman from the home timeline do the same? "I am sorry, sir," Annette said, and she worked faster.
The guard watched her for a little while. Then he nodded. "That's more like it." He went off to bother somebody else.
"May the demons gnaw at him, that son of a jackal," Em-ishtar said in her own language. "May he eat dust and live in shadow in the underworld forever after he dies. And may he die soon."
"May it be so," Annette answered in Arabic. When she said something like that, she meant she was annoyed at the guard. When Emishtar said something like that, she was really cursing him. To her, demons and the underworld were as real as the world in which she walked.
When Birigida fell behind the other women near her in the garden plot, a guard slapped her. He would have spoken to Annette or Emishtar. They'd shown they were reliable. Birigida had shown she was anything but. She yelped. That only made the guard laugh. One day's worth of real work hadn't changed her, and hadn't made the men with the assault rifles stop watching her for signs of weakness like so many vultures.
It hadn't made her stop showing weakness, either. Couldn't she see she paid for it whenever she did? Annette sighed. As far as she could tell, Birigida couldn't see anything.
But she spoke English, American English from the late twenty-first century. That had to mean she came from the home timeline. It also had to mean the home timeline raised just as many jerks as any alternate did. Annette had already realized that—it only stood to reason. But realizing it and getting your nose rubbed in it were two different things.
Winter days were short. The sun scurried across the southern sky. Even so, Annette felt a couple of years went by before the guards finally shouted, "That's enough!" in all the languages the slave women used.
As the women walked back toward the manor, Annette fell in beside Birigida. The blond woman had got swatted and spanked a couple of more times as the afternoon wore along. For her, that didn't make it too bad a day. She gave Annette a curious look—most of the time, Annette and Emishtar walked and talked together.
Birigida said something in the musical language the other blond and redheaded women spoke. Something like Erse, something like Breton—Celtic, sure enough. That fit their looks. What she said sounded like a question, but Annette didn't understand a word of it. She looked around. None of the guards was close by, or paying much attention to Birigida. Maybe they wanted to forget about her once the day's work was over, too.