Harry Turtledove - In High Places

When that thought occurred to him, he also noticed the thing had wheels, not legs. But it moved by itself, without horses or mules or oxen to pull it. And it moved faster than animals could have hauled it. How was that possible?

He glanced over to the guards. They could do all kinds of things he hadn't thought possible. What did they make of this— mechanical?—monster? It wasn't strange to them. He saw that right away. He also saw all of them looking as if they'd just been kicked in the belly. They didn't think the monster was good news, not even a little bit.

Their horrified expressions made hope blossom inside Jacques. Khadija had said her own people would think the guards and the masters were criminals. She'd said her own people could take care of them, too. She'd sounded as if she knew what she was talking about. And maybe she did. Maybe she did!

Men came forward along with the monster. For a bad moment, Jacques feared they were more guards, for they wore mottled clothing, too. Did the elephant with wheels belong to the people who ran the manor, then? The guards didn't think so. That was plain. And then he saw that the newcomers didn't use quite the same kind of mottling. Theirs was a little browner than the guards', with smaller, more jagged splotches. Did that mean they served a different lord?

It evidently did. One of the guards raised his musket to his shoulder and fired several shots in the direction of the wheeled elephant. The soldiers coming up with it all threw themselves to the ground. When they lay flat, they almost disappeared against the dirt and bushes.

A couple of those bullets made sparks clang off the horseless cart. So it's armored in iron, is it? Jacques thought. That was clever. And it spat fire at the guards—not from the cannon, but from a smaller gun next to it that Jacques hadn't even noticed.

He ducked down when bullets started cracking past. At least he'd been under gunfire before. A lot of the slaves hadn't, and had no idea what to do. When the shooting stopped, Jacques cautiously looked up. Sure as the devil, one of the slaves was hurt. He lay on the ground clutching his leg and howling. The wound didn't look too bad. Jacques was glad to see that, anyhow.

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.

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."