Alternate Americas

by Gregory Benford

  “What is this you say, my son?” Hisdai clapped his hands to his eldest’s shoulders. “Do you mean that the voyage was—a failure? The homeland we seek, the refuge for our people once these accursed Catholic Monarchs destroy Granada, is only another of the admiral’s insane fancies?”

  Daud’s travel-tattered moustache twisted itself into a wry expression. “O my father, if I hear you call the admiral mad, you’ll have me thinking there’s some truth to Mother’s allegations. Why else would you commend me to a madman’s care?”

  Hisdai waved off his son’s words impatiently. “Your mother, foremost of my wives, is a virtuous woman. As such, her price is above rubies, even if her love of gossip is beneath contempt. You are my heir, Daud! Would I entrust a diamond of untold price to a lunatic? But if the diamond is yet rough, I would select with utmost care the jeweler into whose hands I place it for proper cutting, polishing, setting, until the every refinement of his art had perfected it as it deserves to be.”

  “In other words, you sent me to fall off the edge of the earth for my own good,” Daud concluded.

  “Also to get you away from that Egyptian dancing-girl your worthless friend Barak spends all his money on,” Hisdai grumbled under his breath.

  Daud heard, and did his best not to choke on laughter. “Fear not, O my father! We encountered no such temptresses in the court of the Great Khan. As is well known, the almighty monarch of Cathay surrounds himself exclusively with the fairest daughters of Israel, the flowers of Judaea, the untouched virgins of Jerusalem-in-exile, the—”

  “Is it so much for an old man to want his son wed to a nice Jewish girl?” Hisdai sulked into his beard.

  “Ah, Father, you would not be satisfied until I wed a veritable princess!”

  “And is that such a bad ambition?” Hisdai demanded.

  “Not at all, not at all.” Daud gazed at his father with real affection. “So it was my taste for forbidden delights that counted as one more rough spot for your Genoese jeweler to strike off? And here I thought it was the dream of establishing a new homeland for our people that drove you to pour my patrimony into those three rachitic ships you bought him.”

  Hisdai ibn Ezra was in no joking mood. “Daud, I see that at least one of my dreams has been in vain. You return as much the mocker as you departed.”

  “Oh no, my father.” Daud dropped all pretense of jest. “Believe me, I return to your house a changed man. If I banter with you now, it is only to keep my heart from crumbling beneath the full weight of what I have to tell you.”

  Fear and consternation showed themselves boldly in the old Jew’s eyes. “What news, then? Tell me! Not that the voyage failed, no, or else you could not be here, solid flesh beneath my hands. What then? The Great Khan denied our petition, rejected my gifts? Once there were many Jews in Cathay, respected, honored, permitted to dwell in peace, to follow the ways of our fathers. Did you remind the Great Khan of the prosperity we brought the land?”

  Daud nodded. “I tried. Our translator did, at any rate. Moshe ibn Ahijah is a wonderful scholar. No one was more surprised than he when the Great Khan did not know Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Castilian, Greek, or Latin.”

  “But surely you managed to communicate? By signs? By a show of gifts? In my day, when I accompanied the caravans, I always managed to make my intents clear—”

  “We, too, managed. The gifts you sent to the Great Khan,” Daud replied, “were very eloquent. Entertaining, I should say. They made him laugh.”

  “Laugh! At masterpieces of the goldsmith’s art? Gems that were the finest I could call in from our people here in al-Andalus, in Castilla, in France, in Italy, even across the water in Mamlakah al-Maghribiyah—!” Hisdai began to pace the room. “When word first reached me of this man Columbus, I thought it to be the answer to my wildest prayers. Any half-educated man knows that the ancients proved the world to be round—that much of the Genoese’s fancies needed no confirmation—but to apply that knowledge to the establishment of a westerly trade route—!” He smacked a fist into his palm. “That was the prize I desired. A way for us, for all Jews, to reach the haven of the East safely, there to live unmolested by the periodic excesses of zeal that afflict our Christian neighbors. Once there, we would prosper as never before.”

  “So you said, my father.” Daud remained glum.

  “So I said, and so it would be! The East has ever favored us, and with new trade routes opened we would thrive. Oh, Daud, you will never know how fervently I thanked the Lord when those purblind Catholic Monarchs rejected Columbus’s plan and sent him packing! You cannot begin to imagine all I did, or how speedily, to bring him here so that I might finance his scheme, and our future!”

  “I recall it well. I did not spend all my time mooning over Barak’s dancing-girl.”

  In his distracted state Hisdai disregarded Daud’s mordant comments. “My son, the treasure I sent with you was to be the ransom of the Jews, our payment for refuge in the lands of the distant East once that vainglorious Genoese proved a safe sea route there possible. And you say the Great Khan laughed?”

  In silence Daud reached into the large leather pouch at his side. His fist emerged overflowing with the glitter of pure gold and priceless jewels. Chains and pendants, adornments for ears, breast, wrist, and ankle, gorgeous enhancements for body parts beyond the old man’s imagining all spilled over the blue-and-green carpet.

  While Hisdai gaped, Daud simply plunged his hand back into the pouch and followed the first handful of gold with a second, then a third, then a fourth, each scattered with the disinterested prodigality of a rich man tossing crumbs to the birds.

  “You see now why he laughed? Because next to the treasure hoard the Great Khan already commands, our gifts were regarded as no better than the pinched clay figurine one of his children might make him for a present: charming, but hardly to be taken seriously. What you behold is merely my share of the first gift the Great Khan made to us. The first, mark me. It was a reward.”

  “A—reward?” Hisdai managed to wrench his gaze away from the heap of wealth strewn so casually at his feet. “What for?”

  “For making the admiral shut up about Christ.” Daud shrugged. “His harangues were putting the Great Khan’s priests off their stride, and they had such a lot of people to—to serve that day.” An unpleasant memory appeared to grip him. Fine sweat stood out on his forehead.

  “Christ?” Hisdai echoed, overlooking his son’s discomfort. “But I thought he was over all that.”

  “My father, one does not get over one’s faith as one does a fever,” Daud commented tartly.

  “Bah! Christianity was never truly the admiral’s faith. It was a—a convenience, the path that seemed to him smoothest for getting on in the world, particularly as he desired royal backing for this unheard-of voyage of his.” Hisdai spoke as one who knows such things too surely to debate them.

  “You may be right,” Daud admitted. “In all our time on board the Tziporah, I often thought that the admiral gave his prayers to God but his worship to himself.”

  “Of course I am right!” Hisdai snapped. “Christian just for show, he was, and to gain the ear of the powerful. Much good it did him! He had so many royal doors slammed in his face that he had the arms of Castilla, León, y Aragón impressed on his forehead.”

  He began to pace the floor, kicking aside the golden baubles. “He came to me fresh from long and profitless waiting upon Ferdinand and Isabella. In my presence he no longer needed to play the pious Catholic. He told me that his own folk back in Genoa were our kindred—as if I had not already secured that knowledge before sending for him!—exiles from the Christian kingdoms of Spain. I did not have to tell him what our fate would be if Granada falls. Ah, my son, if you could have but heard how wistfully he spoke of the faith of his ancestors!”

  “Was this before or after you offered him the money for his expedition?” Daud’s question was dust-dry.

  “Now you say he preached Christ in the Great Khan’s court
?” Hisdai ibn Ezra wrung his hands. “Alas, what was he thinking of?”

  “Probably the same thing he is acting on even now.” Without warning, Daud seized Hisdai by the shoulders, fixing him with a terrible, burning glance. “Father, cease your wailing and pay heed. Your Genoese friend may be a visionary, but he could give the Evil One lessons in opportunism. Christopher Columbus has returned with two of your three ships intact. The Tziporah he ran aground off the coast of Cathay before we began our homeward sail. The Bat-sheba we brought safely to harbor in Tangier, where its—ah—cargo is presently being sent after me by our family connections in Mamlakah al-Maghribiyah, and as for the third—”

  “Cargo?” Hisdai interrupted, the keen professional interest of a seasoned merchant lighting up his eyes.

  “Listen to me, I said!” Daud came dangerously close to shaking his father soundly. “As for the third ship, the Hadassah ha-Malkah, as soon as we came within sight of Tangier, your precious admiral ordered it to veer away north. Yes—do not stare—I said north; north to the ports of the Catholic Monarchs! North with a hold filled with the later gifts of the Great Khan, beside which what you see upon the carpet here is nothing. And even now, as we speak he has gone to present himself before Ferdinand and Isabella at their battle camp at Santa Fe. Don’t you see? Now he has proof that will command the attention of royalty in a manner they cannot ignore. The paltry gold of Granada’s Jews was insufficient to buy us refuge from the Castilian troops, or safety for the last city where our Moorish masters allowed us to follow our faith in peace. The endless gold of Cathay will buy your pet Genoese what he has always hungered for—a noble title, royal patronage, and his place as the honored favorite of our enemies!” His face was a mask of scorn as he added, “Once a snob, always a snob.”

  “But we must stop him!” Hisdai grabbed his son’s arms in a grip that was the equal of the younger man’s.

  “Do you think we did not try, O my father? Too late. By the time we realized what he was about, he had gained too much time. After the wreck of the Tziporah, he made certain to crew the Hadassah ha-Malkah with men who would go along with his treachery.”

  “Impossible.” Hisdai shook his head like one suddenly weary. “Everyone aboard those ships was of our own people. They knew our great purpose! How could they—?”

  “Present promises of a greater share in a hold full of treasure weighs more with some men than dreams of a distant Jewish homeland,” Daud said with neither pride nor shame.

  Hisdai slumped in his son’s grasp. “Even so. How can I blame them? The siege has lasted almost a year and a half. Granada is all that remains to our sultan.” With faltering steps he turned from Daud and went to the window. “In the streets he is no longer called Abu Abd Allah Muhammad, but al-zogoybi, and in truth he is a poor devil. He will go down, and we shall fall with him. The taking of Granada is the death of our people’s last truly safe haven. In the dark times to come many will fancy gold a better rock to cling to than Torah.”

  So rapt was Hisdai by his burden of hopelessness, he hardly noticed that when his son’s shadow crept up behind him, a second shade—then a third, then a fourth—glided silently into the room and joined it. He only half heard Daud say, “O my father, you are wise to have kept faith.”

  “Faith?” Hisdai’s laugh was brittle and hollow. He continued to gaze up at the steel-bright sky above Granada. “Of what use is faith? I have squandered our wealth to back the vision of a renegade! We need soldiers, Daud—not scholars, not visionaries—and soldiers will not fight for faith alone.”

  “Yet I hear these Catholic Monarchs call this battle for Granada a new Crusade.”

  “That shows all you know of Crusades, my son. If Granada were a poor mud-hut village, these Catholic Monarchs and their minions would not care if we worshiped the birds of the air or the snakes that crawl over the face of the earth, but because we have wealth—”

  “Father,” Daud cautioned. “Father, it would be wiser not to speak with mockery of snakes and birds.”

  “I mean no scorn. Who am I to mock the Lord’s creation?” Hisdai leaned heavily against the side of the window. “I am just a poor man who put his faith in dreams. Dreams fly. Only death is certain.”

  Then Hisdai ibn Ezra turned from the window, and in that instant beheld a sight that convinced him that madness, too, is one of life’s little certainties. “Blessed Lord,” he murmured, and took one backward step that came near to toppling him out the window.

  Daud sprang forward and seized Hisdai by the arm. “Have a care, O my father. It is not courtesy to leave your faithful so precipitously.”

  “Faithful?” Hisdai quavered.

  “Well, so he has assured me. Although officially he is a priest of Huitzilopochtli, he has confided in me that his heart”—for some reason, Daud swallowed hard—“his heart is devoted to the worship of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent. Uh … would you mind if he touched your beard? It would be an honor, and he has promised us so much—”

  Giddy with trying to make sense of the gibberish Daud was spouting, Hisdai found himself face-to-face with a man unlike any he had ever encountered, even in the years of his widest mercantile wanderings. Straight black hair, deep copper skin marked with tattoos and other scars, wide nose ornamented with plugs of gold and jade, the apparition regarded him with an unreadable expression.

  “He wants to … touch my beard?” Hisdai could not tear his eyes away. From the gilded and gemmed sandals on this creature’s feet to the exquisite feathered mantle on his shoulders to the gorgeously plumed headdress crowning all, one thing about the new caller was certain: Not even Mahmoud would mistake him or the two burly fellows accompanying him for Castilians.

  As if to confirm this, Mahmoud chose that moment to enter with the refreshments, a dish that was tribute to both Cook’s frugality and his creativity. “Remember to tell ya-sidi Hisdai that the meat is for the Castilian only,” he mumbled to himself, so intent on keeping the heavy tray level that at first he did not really notice the extra people now gathered in the room. “Remember to tell him, or Cook will have my head. Master is—was—so fond of Rover.”

  This apposite consumer warning now went flying out of Mahmoud’s skull as he looked up from his burden and actually saw his master’s additional guests. One wore what looked like a leopard’s pelt, the head a fanged helmet, the other was sheathed in feathered armor with an eagle’s beak overshadowing his keen eyes. Both were heavily armed with eccentric weapons that looked nonetheless mortally effective for all their strangeness.

  Mahmoud screamed, dropped the canine khus-khus, and ran. The eagle-helmed warrior threw what looked like a primitive ax, which nailed the fleeing servant’s sleeve to the doorpost.

  Before Mahmoud could wrench free, he was laid hold of by both bizarrely armored men and thrust to the floor at Hisdai’s feet, as if for the older man’s approval.

  Daud stepped in at once. “O my father,” he said smoothly, “may it please you to welcome the beloved nephew of the Great Khan Ahuitzotl, the Lord Moctezuma?”

  Without word or hint of their intentions, the three copper-skinned strangers fell to the carpet alongside Mahmoud and assumed positions of the utmost humble submission. Hisdai opened and closed his mouth, wet his lips numerous times, nibbled the ends of his snowy moustache, and in general made every visual preamble to speech without actually managing to utter an intelligible word. He looked as if he did not know whether to object to the display of obeisance at his feet, to demand an explanation, to offer the abused Mahmoud a raise in salary, or just to go to the window, leap for the padded awning below, and make a break for it. There was also the chance that he might miss the awning, but at the moment that did not seem like such a bad alternative to the irrationality besetting him. At the end of his reason, he searched his son’s face and ultimately managed to choke out a hoarse yet eloquent plea: “Nu?”

  Daud looked sheepish. “Ah, yes, there was one small matter I forgot to mention about my new friend, O my father.�
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  He reached once more into his pouch and pulled out a rolled parchment on which was a meticulously copied drawing of a venerable-looking gentleman—bearded, fair-skinned—whose preferred mode of transport was obviously a raft made out of live snakes. “I made the drawing myself, copying it from one of Lord Ahuitzotl’s holiest manuscripts,” he said, showing it to Hisdai. “This is Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, the god who departed, sailing away to the East, but whose return has been foretold. Specifically foretold. Promised, I should say, for a few years from now. Of course, as I told Lord Moctezuma, who are we to quibble if a god shows up for his appointments a trifle early?”

  He tilted the page so that the light might fall on it from a better angle, and hopefully prompted his father, “You do see the resemblance?”

  Hisdai’s reaction to this unsought Annunciation would remain one of Time’s unfinished mysteries. From somewhere beyond the walls a long, blood-chilling ululation shivered the air and tore all attention from every matter save itself. It was a scream beautiful in its ghastly perfection. Not even the most ignorant of hearers could confound a sound that horripilating with the muezzin’s common cry; not unless the muezzin had suddenly been seized with the urge to boil himself alive slowly, in a vat of vengeance-minded lobsters.

  At the fearful outcry the primal instincts of every man in that small room asserted themselves. Mahmoud tendered his resignation and bolted. Hisdai clutched his grown son protectively to him as if Daud were still a child. Moctezuma and his entourage calmly lifted their heads and smiled: quaint, nostalgic smiles such as other folk might wear on hearing a dear, old, familiar cradle-tune.

  “Oh, good,” said Daud. The model of unflappability, he disengaged himself from his father’s arms and brought a stub of charcoal and a much-folded document out his shirt bosom. The blood of generations of steel-nerved merchant princes never flowed more coolly through his veins as he consulted the parchment, checked off an item, and remarked to all concerned, “I see the rest of the cargo has arrived.”