Harry Turtledove - In High Places

"Maybe she does—but she'd better not," Dad answered.

That made Jacques smile. He bowed to Annette's father. He was careful to keep his long pike upright while he did it. Then he pointed to the pistol on Dad's belt. "If—God prevent it—some cowardly wretches attack us, surely your own great courage and ferocity will make them flee like the jackals and wolves they are." Arabic was a wonderful language for flowery compliments, and for insults that would have sounded over the top in English.

Dad smiled back. Annette thought the curve of his lips looked a little strained, and hoped Jacques wouldn't notice. That pistol seemed ordinary, but it wasn't, not by the standards of this alternate. It was nice to have, but it was for emergencies only. Dad said, "Any caravan that has to depend on me to save it is in more trouble than it knows what to do with."

"And here until now I thought you were a hero, a man without flaws," Jacques said. "Now I see you have one after all—you are too modest." In English, he would have been laying it on with a trowel. In Arabic, the teasing came out just right.

"I am a modest man—a man with plenty to be modest about," Annette's father replied. Annette had heard him use that line before. It really belonged to a twentieth-century British politician. Nobody in this alternate had ever heard it before. It passed for Dad's own wit. If you were going to steal, you should steal from the best.

Jacques shook his head. "Oh, no, sir. Oh, no. You are a man of accomplishments." He shifted from Arabic to French. "I know that many of your countrymen have learned my language. Many of them speak it well—if you are patient and work hard in spite of troubles, you will have your reward in the end." That was straight from Henri's New Revelation. Still in French, Jacques went on, "But never until now have I met a Muslim man who spoke my language perfectly, as if he were a Parisian himself. And your lady wife and your daughter are just as fluent. Maybe it is a miracle from God." He made the wheel sign Christians here used instead of crossing themselves.

Annette didn't think he really believed it was a miracle. No—he'd found a polite way to ask, How do you do that? The answer was simple ... if you had the home timeline's technology. Implants made learning a language easy. The information went right to the speech center in your brain, so you used your new tongue as smoothly as if you'd been born speaking it.

Here, the Kleins spoke this alternate's French a little too well. Whoever had prepared the language module must have done it from a native speaker. She should have done it from someone whose native language was the local Arabic but who also spoke good French. Then Jacques wouldn't have had any reason to wonder about it.

He waited to see what Dad would say. Dad, for once, didn't seem to know what to say. If he claimed French-speaking relatives, Jacques would check on that. Well, Jacques probably couldn't, but people he knew would be able to. Pretty plainly, he hadn't asked the question at random.

"We learned the way you would think—from slaves in Marseille," Annette said—in Arabic. However much she despised slavery, it came in handy here. She added, "And we have always been good with languages. All of us have."

If snoopy Jacques wanted to check on that—well, good luck. By his grin, he knew he couldn't. He spoke to Dad, not directly to her: "If your charming daughter says it, my master, why then it must be so."

Mom started to laugh. After a moment, so did Dad. Annette and Jacques joined in a heartbeat later. He was looking at her. She wished he could see her. He'd got her good, and he had to know it, and she wanted him to know she knew, too. He'd sounded as if he meant every word of what he said, which only made him more sarcastic than he would have been if he sounded sarcastic.

Annette pointed at him. "You are a demon," she said, as she might have said, You're a devil to a friend at high school.

At her high school, though, nobody took demons and devils seriously. They were things you joked around with, things you watched in bad movies, things you killed in computer games, and things that tried to kill you there. They couldn't kill you for real, and you knew it.

It wasn't like that here. To the people in this alternate, demons and devils were as real as cheese and olive oil. When you didn't really know what caused diseases, when you looked to religion to answer your questions about the world because you had nowhere else to look, of course demons and devils seemed real. Annette should have remembered that, but she hadn't. She'd liked Jacques, and so she'd treated him like someone from the home timeline.

And that was a mistake. Only a handful of words, but they horrified him. He made the sign of the wheel again. "By God, by Jesus, by Henri, I am no such evil thing," he said, speaking straight to her for the first time. "I am only a mortal, praying for heaven and afraid of hell and the things that dwell in hell."

"I'm sorry," she said, but he wasn't listening to her. He gave Dad a coldly formal bow, spun on his heel, and stalked away. He was graceful as a cat—a cat whose fur she'd rubbed the wrong way.

"Oh, dear," Mom said.

"He made a joke, and so I made a joke," Annette said helplessly.

"Except that kind of thing isn't a joke here," Dad said. "They broke Henri on the wheel because they thought he was a demon—and no doubt he was." He spoke the last few words louder than the rest, in case anybody else was listening. As someone playing the role of a Muslim in this world, he couldn't have a good word to say about Henri.

"Maybe it's for the best," Annette's mother said. "Jacques was asking a lot of pointed questions, wasn't he? He'll think twice before he does that again."

Dad laughed. "He'll think twice before he gets anywhere near us. Either that or he'll want to exorcise us with a bucket of holy water apiece, the way that French priest did with the salamander."

"Salamander?" Annette said, and then, "Oh." He didn't mean a little four-legged creature that lived in damp places and ate bugs. He meant a fire elemental. But that still left her confused. "What French priest?"

"Why, the one in The Devil's Dictionary,"" her father replied, as if she should have known without asking. "A very fitting book for the circumstances, don't you think?" And so it was, but Dad always thought The Devil's Dictionary was a fitting book. In it, Ambrose Bierce didn't have a good word to say about anybody or anything, and all his prods and pokes and gibes had style. Dad grinned wickedly. "Can you imagine what would happen if I translated it into the French they use here?"

"I can," Annette's mother said before she could answer. "They wouldn't understand half of it, and they'd want to burn you at the stake for the other half."

That sounded about right to Annette. Dad mimed being wounded. As far as Annette was concerned, he was the biggest ham left unsliced. He knew it, too, and took advantage of it. It probably made him a better merchant than he would have been otherwise. And people in this alternate were less restrained than they were in the home timeline. They had no TV, no movies, no radio, no recorded music, no computer games. If they wanted fun, they had to make their own. Overacting when they haggled was part of it.

Another caravan came up the road from the south. It was even bigger than the one coming down from Paris. The two edged past each other. Traders made a few hasty deals as they did. Caravan-masters screamed at both groups to keep moving. The dust they churned up was amazing. Annette's veil kept some of it out of her mouth and nose, but not enough. The guards from each caravan eyed those from the other as if they were about to fight. Nothing came of that, but it worried Annette just the same.