In High Places

by Harry Turtledove

  Well, if wearing furs was a perverted kick, wasn't buying and selling and owning people an even bigger one? It sure looked that way to Annette. The idea made more sense than anything else she'd come up with, that was for sure.

  Finding something that made sense, even if it was something horrible, helped her relax. She lay down again and began drifting off.

  She began, yes. But then she jerked and twisted, there on that slave's bed. Sleep wouldn't come after all. Maybe part of the thrill of slavery was buying and selling and owning people. But wasn't the rest of it doing anything you wanted to them while you had them? Anything at all? Why not? They were just property, weren't they?

  Annette lay awake the rest of the night.

  When Jacques woke the morning after the strange ride in the transposition chamber, he found that not all the slaves in the barracks were men who'd come with him. He also found he couldn't speak with the strangers. They didn't use Arabic or French. They didn't use Spanish, either—he knew what that sounded like, even if he couldn't speak it. Some of them had a language that reminded him a little of Arabic, though he couldn't follow it. Others made noises that hardly sounded like speech at all to him. Their tongue was full of sneezes and hisses and coughing sounds, and he couldn't tell where one word stopped and the next began.

  "I think it is the Tower of Babel," Musa ibn Ibrahim said gravely. "God has confused our speech."

  The only answer Jacques could find was, "Why would God want to do that to the likes of us?"

  "God is God," Musa said. "He may do as He pleases. We have not the right to question Him."

  How could you argue with that? Jacques couldn't, and he knew it. But he did say, "God didn't put us in that—that chamber, Khadija called it. People did. And the people who did know more about it than we do."

  "Then we will learn—when God wills that we learn," Musa replied. Jacques gave up.

  A man stood in the doorway. He shouted a couple of incomprehensible words. Then he said, "//tor/" That was Breakfast! in Arabic. Jacques guessed he'd said the same thing in the other two languages. Next time the man said those words, Jacques told himself, he would remember what they were. He wasn't sure he could pronounce one of them, but he'd try.

  He didn't know where to get breakfast here. The slaves who spoke the strange languages did. He followed them. So did Musa and the other slaves who'd come here in the chamber. A bored-looking cook ladled porridge into bowls. Those bowls, and the spoons that went into them, were of some hard white stuff Jacques hadn't seen before. It reminded him of the orange stuff that went into the seats in the transposition chamber. Maybe Khadija had a name for it. Even if she did, though, would it mean any more than transposition chamber did?

  To his relief, the benches and tables where the slaves ate were of ordinary wood. He got a splinter in his hand when he sat down. As he dug it out with a fingernail, it made him feel at home.

  This place didn't try to keep its slaves hungry. The bowls were big, and the cook had filled them full. The porridge even had bits of meat in it. Jacques spooned it up. Things could have been worse—and how many times had he had that thought?

  "What is this flesh?" Musa ibn Ibrahim asked after eating for a little while. "It does not taste like anything I have had before."

  "Ham, I think," Jacques answered with his mouth full. And then, a heartbeat slower than he should have, he said, "Oh."

  Grimly, Musa shoved the bowl away from himself. "You are a Christian," he said. "This food is not forbidden for you." By the way he said it, he meant, You don't know any better. Iron in his voice, he went on, "You will know, though, the swine is an unclean beast for Muslims." He called out, "Muslims! My brethren! My sisters! The food has forbidden flesh in it!"

  Some of them cursed. Some of them prayed. Some of the women screamed. They all stopped eating breakfast. Some of the other slaves, the one who'd been here before, looked at them as if they were crazy. Others moved away from them on the benches. Jacques knew what that meant. They thought trouble was coming, and they didn't want to get stuck in the middle of it.

  Jacques went on eating. He felt guilty about it—Musa and the other Muslims were going hungry—but nothing was wrong with the food for him. Even Musa had said so. He was hungry now, and he thought the porridge tasted fine.

  In tramped three guards with those muskets with the blades attached. "What's going on here?" one of them yelled in Arabic.

  Musa stood up and bowed to him. "You will excuse me, please, sir, but this porridge has pork in it. It is haram—forbidden." He spoke respectfully. He knew he was a slave here. He knew how slaves were supposed to act. But he also knew he had a problem, one the guards and their superiors needed to hear about.

  The guard who'd spoken before glared at him. "You can eat, or you can starve. Those are your choices. But you're going to have to work any which way."

  Musa bowed again. "Thank you, sir. In that case, I will starve. When I am dead, God will welcome me into Paradise. I hope you have a care for your own soul." He sat down.

  "You're a troublemaker! You'll be sorry. It's not like you can hide around here," the guard warned. He was bound to be right about that. Only three or four black men had traveled in the chamber. Still glaring, the guard spoke to all the Muslims: "You'd better watch yourselves. We don't have time for your foolishness. You'll all be sorry if you aren't careful."

  "I hope you won't get into too much trouble on account of that," Jacques whispered to Musa as the guards stomped out.

  "Let them do as they please," the older man said with a shrug. "God may have made me a slave. All right—His will be done in that as in all things. But God would not make me break His commandments. That has to be Satan."

  "I suppose so." Jacques wondered what he would do if these people tried to make him break a rule set down by Jesus or Henri. Would he have the courage to stay stubborn? He hoped so, and knew he wasn't sure.

  People inside the dining hall were still muttering back and forth when the guards returned. One of them pointed his musket at Musa. "Come with us," he snapped.

  "I obey." Musa got to his feet. "What will you do with me?"

  "You say you won't eat pork, eh?" The guard had a nasty grin on his face.

  "That is right," Musa ibn Ibrahim said with great dignity.

  "Well, we'll see." The guard's smile got nastier still. Jacques hadn't thought it could. "We're going to stick you in a cell. You can have all the water you want. But if you want food, you'll eat pork or nothing—and if you do starve, too bad for you." He gestured with the musket's muzzle. "Come on. Get moving."

  "I come." Musa murmured something else, so softly that Jacques thought he was the only one to hear it: "Truly there is no God but God. Truly Muhammad is the Prophet of God." The black man took a couple of ordinary steps toward the guard. Then he lowered his head and rushed him.

  It wasn't the worst bet in the world—or it wouldn't have been against a matchlock musket. The guard would have time for one startled shot. If he missed, Musa would be on him. If Musa could wrestle away the musket, he had at least a chance of smashing down the other two guards. Maybe the other Muslims would join him. Maybe this would turn into a full-scale uprising.

  Khadija had said the guards' weapons could fire more than one bullet without reloading. Musa ibn Ibrahim might not have heard it. If he had, he might not have believed it or understood what it meant.

  When the guard pulled the trigger, his musket made a sound like a giant ripping a sheet of canvas. Jacques had no idea how many bullets hit Musa ibn Ibrahim. They were enough to come close to cutting the black man in half. For a moment, there was a horrid pink mist as the bullets tore his insides out. Some of them went through him and hit other people. They screamed. He didn't. He fell and scrabbled at the floor with his hands for a little while. Then he died.

  The iron smell of blood and the stink of his bowels filled the air. Smoke didn't. Jacques needed a moment to notice that. He didn't smell gunpowder, either. What sent the bullets flying
, then?

  Whatever it was, it was plenty to do the job and then some.

  "Anybody else?" the guard asked. Except for the shrieks of the wounded, no one said a thing. The guard gestured with his musket again. "Anyone who's hurt, go on out. You'll be treated.

  If you can't walk, somebody near will help you." He spoke in the other two languages that seemed to be used here, probably saying the same thing. Close to half a dozen people had been shot. Out they went—except for a woman who'd taken a bullet between the eyes.

  After more shouted orders, two men dragged her out by the heels. Her blood made a long trail across the floor. When the men came back, the guards made them drag Musa's body out, too. Flies had already started landing in the gore pooled under him. Jacques usually thought Muslims were bound for hell. He hoped God would make an exception for the black man.

  He looked down at his bowl of porridge. He was glad he'd eaten most of it, because he sure didn't want any more.

  Was Khadija all right? He hadn't seen her limp away, but he knew that impossible burst of gunfire might have unnerved him. No, there she was. Her face was pale and drawn—no surprise, for most of the people in the dining hall were pale and drawn. Jacques probably was himself. Khadija nodded to him when their eyes met, but then quickly looked away.

  At first, that offended Jacques. Then he realized she might be smarter than he was. They'd got into the transposition chamber together—and together with Musa ibn Ibrahim. She might not want to remind their new master that they were friends, and also that they'd known a slave who'd tried to rebel. Jacques had never been a slave before, but he could see that staying as close to invisible as you could was likely to be a good idea.

  He could see that—once he'd thought about it for a while. Khadija must have seen it in the wink of an eye. Forget that maybe. She was smarter than he was.

  One of the guards came back in. As usual, he gave his orders in three languages. Jacques could follow the Arabic: "Men are on the roadbuilding detail today. Women will work in the garden plot—except those on duty inside the manor. You know who you are. Any questions?"

  Nobody said a word. If he'd told them to jump off the wall around the manor, most of them would have done it without a peep. Whatever happened when they hit the ground had to be better than facing one of those terrible muskets.

  Roadbuilding. Jacques muttered to himself. That didn't sound easy, and it didn't sound like much fun. But he was young and strong and—except for the leg that pained him now and again—healthy. He could do the work. It wasn't as if the guard had said he was going to the mines. That was a mankilling job, one where you might as well rise up because you had nothing left to lose and nothing left to live for.

  Out into the courtyard he went. He and the rest of the newly arrived slaves stuck together. They couldn't even talk with the ones who'd been there longer. They weren't friends, but they all spoke Arabic. That made them companions.

  Another guard, a big, beefy fellow, took charge of them. "You will come with me," he barked. "You will do what I tell you. You have work you need to do, and you will do it. Do you understand me?"

  "Yes, sir," Jacques and a few other slaves said.

  "Do you understand me?" the guard roared.

  "Yes, sir!" This time, everybody spoke up.

  "That's more like it." The guard nodded. Jacques felt oddly reassured. The man didn't sound like a cruel master. He sounded like a sergeant drilling raw recruits. If he spoke French, Duke Raoul would have hired him in a heartbeat.

  Under his lead, the road gang marched out of the manor. As soon as Jacques saw what lay outside, he knew Khadija told the truth. The chamber had taken the slaves somewhere new. He'd already partly realized things were different here. He hadn't heard city noises, and he hadn't smelled city smells. But seeing bare countryside, as if noisy, smelly, brawling Madrid had never existed, jolted him to the core.

  As the guard inside the manor had said, there were vegetable plots. There were fields of growing grain. And there were what would be olive groves when the saplings got bigger. Beyond them, the near-desert of central Spain stretched out as far as the eye could see.

  "Where did the city go?" one of the Muslim women asked as she weeded in the garden.

  "They must be mighty wizards, to make it disappear!" another one exclaimed.

  Annette said things like that, too. She didn't want the people who ran this place to think she took travel between alternates for granted. That would have been dangerous. Right now, she couldn't imagine anything that would have been more dangerous. If they decided she knew about travel between alternates . ..

  They'll kill me, she thought as she grubbed a weed out from between a couple of tomato plants. The people who were doing this were committing so many crimes, one more murder might not even make it into the balance sheet. The one thing they could not have was anyone in the home timeline finding out what they'd done.

  Slavery. Moving low-tech locals from one alternate to another. Using high technology against low-tech locals. Importing life-forms to alternates where they didn't belong—highly bred tomatoes were as much out of place here as assault rifles. At least two murders that Annette had seen, plus who could say how many more? Who could say what other acts of cruelty went on here, either?

  Where did the slaves who didn't speak Arabic come from? Were they from this alternate? Or had the slavers brought them in from somewhere else? Did this alternate have any people at all, or was it one of those where human beings had never evolved? Those were all important questions, and she had answers to exactly none of them.

  Even starting to find out wouldn't be easy. Annette had never tried to learn a foreign language on her own, without the help of her implant. People did it. Even in the home timeline, people in countries that weren't so rich had to do things the hard way. If you learned words, you could figure out grammar a bit at a time . . . couldn't you? She had to hope so.

  One of the rifle-toting guards in camouflage clothing tramped past her. She worked faster while she thought he was looking at her, then slowed down again. How many slaves in how many alternates had done something like that over how many thousand years? She watched the man out of the corner of her eye. Did he carry that rifle to protect himself from the slaves and from wild beasts, or did he worry about wild men, too?

  The woman weeding in the next row said something in the language that sounded a little like Arabic but wasn't. She looked over at Annette and smiled. She was somewhere close to forty, her skin tanned and leathery. Her teeth were crooked, a couple of them broken. She spoke again, then cocked her head to one side, waiting.

  "I'm sorry, but I don't understand you," Annette replied in Arabic.

  More gutturals came from the other woman. She was probably saying she couldn't understand Annette, either. She jabbed a thumb at her own chest and said, "Emishtar."

  Was that the older woman's name? Annette didn't see what else it could be. Pointing to the other woman, she said, "Emishtar." The woman smiled and nodded. She pointed to Annette and made a questioning noise. "Khadija," Annette told her. She had to be Khadija—that was the name under which she'd come here. Changing it would make people wonder, which was the last thing she could afford.

  "Khadija," Emishtar said. She rattled off something that made no sense to Annette. It didn't sound like a question. Maybe it was a prayer.

  They taught each other names for parts of the body and tools and the sun up in the sky. Some of the words Emishtar used did sound something like the Arabic ones Annette had picked up through her implant. Annette wondered how long she would be able to remember them. She had to try. The other woman didn't seem to have any trouble remembering her words. That made Annette more determined not to let somebody from a low-tech alternate get ahead of her.

  Sun was shams in Arabic. It was shamash in Emishtar's language. That was pretty plainly a Semitic tongue, too—related to modern Arabic and Hebrew in the home timeline, and to ancient Aramaic and Assyrian and Babylonian. But Annette w
as almost sure it wasn't any Arabic dialect.

  "La ilaha illa'llah—Muhammadun rasulu'llah" she said. There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God. Emishtar just looked at her and shook her head. The older woman didn't know anything about Islam. She would have recognized the shahada, the profession of faith, if she did. In all the alternates Annette knew of where Arabic was used in Spain, Muslim conquerors had brought it here. That pretty much nailed it down. Whatever language Emishtar used, it wasn't one of the many varieties of Arabic.

  But what was it? For a while, Annette couldn't think of any other Semitic tongues that had been spoken in Spain. Then she remembered the Punic Wars, where Carthage had fought Rome. Carthage—in modern Tunisia, in North Africa—had been a Phoenician city, and the Phoenicians spoke a Semitic language. Carthage had planted colonies of its own in Spain.

  "Carthage?" Annette asked, making sure no guard could hear her do it. She pointed east and a little south. "Carthage?"

  Emishtar just looked at her and shrugged. She didn't get it. Carthage, of course, was the English version of the Latin version of the real name of the place. It wasn't close enough to the original to make sense to Emishtar—if Annette had guessed right in the first place about how this alternate got started.

  She laughed at herself. It was either that or pound her head into the dirt. How much she didn't know! She didn't know the right name for Carthage, the one that would have made sense to a real Carthaginian. And she didn't know whether Emishtar came from this alternate. Maybe she'd got here in a transposition chamber, too. If she had, all of Annette's guesses about this place were worthless.