Two guards were also down. One had a wound not much different from the slave's. He was swearing in French, which surprised Jacques. He hadn't thought anybody here but Khadija spoke his language. This was a funny dialect, much more nasal than the one Jacques used, but it was French.
The other guard was the one who'd fired at the strangers. He'd taken a bullet in the face, and was dead as an old boot.
What might have been the voice of God—if God were a woman—came from the armored cart. It shouted in several different languages. One of them was a French that sounded like the dialect the guard used. She called on the guards to surrender if they knew what was good for them. As if to underline that, the cannon roared. Its shell went wide, but it went wide on purpose, as if to say it didn't have to.
Jacques would have surrendered after that. And so did the guards. They lay down their muskets and put up their hands. The strangers in jagged mottling hurried up to take charge of them. Several of those soldiers were women. Jacques didn't realize it till they spoke—the armor hid their shape, and most of the men were clean-shaven. The women seemed as tough and capable as their male counterparts. That was one more boulder of amazement piled on a mountainside of wonders.
Then one of the newcomers called Jacques' name. He stared. In that splotched set of trousers and tunic, under that helmet was ... "Khadija!"
He ran over to her and gave her a hug. She didn't feel like a girl. She had armor on under the clothes. He didn't care. He kissed her on the cheek. He'd never kissed anybody in a helmet before. "You see?" she said in his dialect of French. "I made it!"
"You sure did," Jacques answered. "And you brought your friends." She nodded. He asked, "What happens next?"
"We give all these people what they deserve." She looked at the dead guard without flinching. "And we free the slaves. How does that sound?"
"Wonderful!" Jacques said.
Thirteen
Annette was getting sick and tired of hotels. To her, the one in Madrid wasn't much different from those where she'd stayed in the USA. Her room was a little smaller than she would have had back home. The light switches were low and flat—they didn't stick up so much. The bathroom held an extra piece of equipment. But a bed was a bed, a TV was a TV, a computer hookup was a computer hookup all over the world. Just another room. To her.
To Jacques, whose room was right across the hall, it was more like a miracle, or a series of miracles. Crosstime Traffic had decided they weren't going to send him back to his old alternate. He knew too much for that. They hadn't decided what they would do with him. Maybe let him settle in the home timeline. Right now, though, he didn't know nearly enough for that.
Everything here seemed strange to him. Annette found herself being his tutor. She had to show him how to make the running water work. She had to explain—gently—that it was customary to bathe every day, or something close to it, even if he wasn't doing hard work.
"Why?" Jacques asked in honest bewilderment. "You people don't stink. I'm in the middle of a great big city, and it doesn't stink."
"We don't stink because we bathe," she said. There were other reasons, too, of course. She'd also had to explain how to use the toilet. The hotel had to throw away a wastebasket, but she couldn't blame Jacques for that. It was the closest thing to a chamber pot he could find.
And she'd had to show him how to use a fork. He thought that was funny. "Some of the snooty nobles in the Kingdom of Versailles use them," he said. "They want to make like they're as fancy as the Muslims down south. I never thought the likes of me would need to worry about such foolishness."
"It's our custom here. People would talk if you used your fingers," Annette said. "I'm not telling you it's better or worse. I'm just saying it's how you fit in." He nodded. He could see that. He was pretty sharp. And she knew he took it more seriously because she was the one telling him.
There were other complications. Before long, Jacques found out her real name was Annette, not Khadija. He could understand why she used a false one in his alternate. But he jumped to the wrong conclusion. "Then you're really a Christian after all!" he said happily.
"Well, no," Annette told him. "I'm really a Jew." She waited to see what would happen next. People in the Kingdom of Versailles took anti-Semitism as much for granted as people in this Kingdom of Spain took eating with a fork.
He stared at her. "You're joking," he said.
"No. I'm not. It's important for you to understand that I'm not," Annette said. "People here can believe anything they want, most places. We find that works better. We still have quarrels about religion, but fewer than we used to."
"But this Spain is a Christian country, isn't it? I've seen the cathedrals, even if you don't know about Henri." Jacques sounded sad. He'd seen that nobody in the home timeline knew about God's Second Son, but he didn't like it.
'This Spain is mostly a Christian country, yes. But it's not against the law to be a Jew or a Muslim or anything else here. You don't even have to pay a special tax or anything. As long as you don't cause trouble, you can believe whatever you please."
"Oh," he said. She watched him weighing that. She watched him not caring for it very much. He put what troubled him into words: "I didn't mind so much when I thought you were a Muslim. Muslims are wrong, but they're strong, too. Jews aren't just wrong—they're weak."
Part of Annette wanted to take a vase off the end table and bash him over the head with it. She understood he didn't know any better. Even so ... As patiently as she could, she said, "You're judging things by your own alternate. The only reason Jews aren't strong there is that it doesn't have very many of them." That was also partly true here, but she didn't want to complicate things.
She watched Jacques wrestle with it. "I never thought I could like a Jew," he said at last. "All I ever wanted to do was throw rocks at them. That's what they're for."
"Oh?" Annette raised an eyebrow. "How do you suppose they feel about that?"
He blinked. Plainly, wondering how Jews felt had never once occurred to him. Maybe he wouldn't care even after it did. There were still people who didn't care about those who weren't like them, even here in the home timeline. There were way too many of them, as a matter of fact. But Annette knew she couldn't stay friends with anybody like that.
"I don't suppose they'd like it very much, would they?" Jacques said after a long pause.
"No, I don't think so," Annette agreed, glad he'd seen that much. Maybe he could get beyond the prejudices he'd grown up with after all. She went on, "Most places here in the home timeline, it's against the law to discriminate because of religion or race or sex. We think those are good laws—they give everybody a fair chance."
"Race? What do you mean by race?" Jacques asked.
"What color you are." Annette smiled. The Kingdom of Versailles didn't have much racial trouble. How could it? Just about everybody in it was white.
"That's silly," Jacques said. "I didn't mind those Moors because they were black. They couldn't do anything about that. I didn't like it that they were Muslims, though. They could choose there, and they chose wrong."
One step forward, one step back, Annette thought. "Sometimes things that are different are just different, not right or wrong," she said again. "You can't prove anything about religions till after you're dead, and then you can't tell anybody else. We even have people who don't believe in God at all."