Worlds That Weren't

by Walter Jon Williams

  There was no energy to spare for a while after that; paddling went easier once they had reached the ebb-water on the other shore, driving northward to the little semi-islet they’d left. Robre hopped overboard and took a line over his shoulder, hauling them into a tongue of water, halting when the canoe touched bottom. Instead of trying to haul it out solo, he tied off a leather painter to a nearby dead cypress root. Meanwhile Sonjuh got their weapons in order and helped the wounded man out. He hobbled upward, supporting his weight on her shoulder; their supplies were undisturbed, and when she let him down next to them he immediately broke out a box of shells and refilled bandolier and pistol. Then he took out a notebook, made quick notes, tore out the sheet of paper and folded it. Robre squatted nearby, replacing scavenged enemy arrows with shafts from his own bundles.

  “All right,” King said, looking from one to the other. He closed the notebook; when he spoke, his voice had more of the hard, clipped tone than it had shown in a while. “What you’ve got to do is get this to Banerjii back at Donnulsford. He’ll see that the garrison commander in Galveston gets it. And you have to warn your own people on the way—?”

  “Wait just one damn minute,” Sonjuh said hotly. “You expect me to leave you here?”

  “Well, yes, of course,” he said, peering at her in the moonlight. He smiled. “My dear, do think—”

  She restrained herself from slapping him with a visible effort. “What’re you thinking of me, that I’d take up with a man ’n’ walk off from him when he’s hurt, like some town trull?”

  King winced, since he’d obviously been thinking something like that. He went on more gently: “Sonjuh, remember how many of them there were. The only thing that they could have gathered in numbers like that for was war. They’re going to come swarming over the border and hit your people’s frontier settlements like Indra’s lightning—like Olsaytn’s hammer. They might not even stop at the Three Forks River. Your people have to be warned.”

  Sonjuh opened her mouth, then closed it, then brightened. “Robre can do that. I’ll stay to keep you safe—we can hide you—”

  Robre shook his head. “Empire man, I swore to guide ’n’ help you, not leave you for the swamp-devils to eat, ’n’ that’s a fact.”

  King’s face went grimmer. “I might have expected more logic, even from a native,” he said.

  Sonjuh felt herself flushing with anger again—she’d guessed what that word meant—but Robre surprised her by laughing.

  “No, Jefe, you’re not going to argue me into leaving you, ’n’ you’re not going to anger me into it, either. I figure we’ll stock the canoe, then try ’n’ get you down past the swamp-devils. Your folk hold the coast, no?”

  King gaped at him. Sonjuh unwillingly admitted to herself that there was some sense in that, cold-blooded though it was. Fighting their way for days downriver, through hordes of the cannibals, with only three warriors and one of them wounded, in a canoe too big and heavy for them to handle well—

  “We hold Galveston, and we patrol the coast to either side…lightly and infrequently,” King said. “Talk sense, man!”

  “You do the talkin’,” Robre said cheerfully; his face was grim. “I’ll get busy on loading the canoe.”

  King was swearing again when Sonjuh put her hand across his mouth for silence. Slasher was on his feet again, bristling, fangs showing in a silent snarl, his nose pointed landward whence came the wind. The humans froze, peering about, and then Robre quietly put the box of supplies down and stepped backward to dry land to reach for where his bow leaned against another.

  “Down!” she called.

  They all flattened themselves. Arrows whipped by at chest-height above them, and a howling broke free from the woods to the eastward. More screeches answered it, out on the river; Sonjuh looked that way, and saw canoes boiling out from the bluff there, paddles stabbing into the water.

  A rhythmic cry rose from the crews, near enough to her tongue that she could understand the words: “Meat! Eat! Meat! Eat!”

  “Watch the land!” King shouted, rolling behind a couple of sacks of cornmeal and aiming his rifle riverward. Crack…crack, and a canoe went over as a rower sprang up in the final convulsion of death.

  Howls came from landward. Sonjuh prepared her crossbow with hands that would have shaken, if she had permitted it. They must have sent runners up the bank and then over, she thought. And had more canoes there…too smart, for swamp-devils. They’ve been learning, damn them!

  The cry from the woods turned into a chant: “MEAT! EAT!”

  “I was never so glad to hear good old-fashioned Imperial volley-fire…ai!”

  The last was a brief involuntary exclamation as Ranjit’s thick-fingered right hand pulled the arrow-stub free with one long surging draw. His left poured the disinfectant, and King felt it through the wound and in streaks up the nerves of his leg, into his groin and belly. It was far from the worst pain he’d ever experienced, but it was certainly among the top five in an adventurous life. To deal with it as the Sikh’s experienced fingers tied on the field dressing, he looked past Sonjuh’s anxious face where she knelt holding his leg for the bandage and to the eastern shore where the sun rose over tall forest, across a river like molten metal wisped with mist. Were hating black eyes looking at him? Probably, he thought. We only killed a dozen or two of them—it was hard to tell how many bodies had gone into the water, especially since a patrol of alligators had gone by, picking up snacks—and there were thousands over there. I’d be surprised if they aren’t crossing north and south of here already. Dismally determined types.

  The clansmen and soldiers were grouped around the islet, less three dead and several wounded. The stink of the cannibals’ corpses was strong, stronger than the newly dead usually were; flights of ravens and great-winged buzzards waited, on the wing or perched in trees nearby.

  “How did you get here so fast, on foot?” King went on.

  Ranjit Singh grinned whitely in his black beard. “I mounted us all on the pack animals, huzoor,” he said. “By turns; each man on foot to hold onto a strap while he ran. So we made good time.”

  King nodded; that had been clever. The trick had been used before; sometimes cavalry brought infantry forward so during an attack, with a foot soldier clinging to a stirrup while the horse trotted.

  “Did you hear?” he called over to Robre, who was sitting in a circle with his fellow tribesmen, amid fast speech and gestures.

  “Yup,” Robre said, turning to face the Imperial. “Figure you’re planning on leaving us now?”

  “To get help,” he said, and at Robre’s dubious look, “We have several vessels at Galveston, and this river is navigable to the coast. It’ll take me some time to get there, with Ranjit and the garrison soldiers. Your people need to be warned.”

  “Am I comin’ with you?” Sonjuh asked quietly.

  “My dear—” Eric winced slightly at the hurt in her eyes. “My dear, we should each go to our own people now. Believe me, it’s best.”

  She nodded quietly and picked up her pack, rising and turning away. He winced again, for himself, and then shrugged. Well, I’ll be over it by the time we make the coast. If we make the coast. Six guns was not much to run that river of darkness.

  “Let’s go,” he said briskly.

  Robre Hunter rose up from behind the overturned oxcart and loosed once more. The fresh wound in his left arm weakened the draw, but the target was only thirty feet away—and the swamp-devil went down coughing out blood, with the arrowhead through the upper part of his right lung. The others wavered and fell back a little; they were the outer wave of the onrushing cannibal flood, a scouting party. The clansman looked behind him; the last of the settlers they’d warned were out of the road through the woods, and probably across the cornfield. He worked a dry mouth, hawked, spat, suddenly conscious.

  “Let’s go!” he called.

  Slasher came out of the brush on the left side of the trail, licking wet jaws. Sonjuh came from the right,
her bright hair hidden by an improvised bandage with a little blood leaking through it, almost like a wife’s headscarf.

  Robre looked back down the road; there were swamp-devil bodies scattered along it, and two of the men who’d come back from the Black River with them. It galled him to leave the dead men for the enemy to eat, but there was nothing that could be done—it was a miracle so many of the settlers had gotten away. Pillars of smoke smudged the horizon, from burning cabins and hayricks and barns, filling the air with the filthy smell of things that should not burn, but far fewer of his people were dead in them than might have been.

  Sonjuh flashed him a brief smile. Ten miles of grit and bottom that girl has and no mistake, the hunter thought admiringly. Aloud, he went on: “Let’s run.”

  They turned and trotted out of the woods. The fields beyond still had occasional oak and hickory stumps in them—this was ax-claim land—but mostly they were full of cornstalks, tall and dryly rustling. The rutted path through them showed the twelve-foot logs of the station stockade; it was littered with goods refugees had dropped…and the narrow gate was closed.

  A howling broke out behind them, far closer than he liked; the swamp-devils had found the bodies of their scouting party.

  “Made your tally of scalps yet?” he gasped to the girl running beside him, bow pumping in his hand as he bounded ahead. She kept pace easily, despite his longer stride.

  “I have,” she said. “Doesn’t seem so important, no more.”

  Well, that’s different, he thought.

  The howls behind them grew louder; the two clansfolk gave each other a glance and stepped up the pace, almost sprinting. Normally a half-mile wouldn’t be anything much, but they’d been running and fighting for near a week now, and even their iron fund of endurance was running low. Slasher panted, as well, tongue unreeled, his gray fur matted with blood; some of it was his, and he limped a little.

  “No use telling them to open the gate,” Robre grunted, as an arrow went whissst-thunk! into the red mud behind him. “We’ll have to go over. You first.”

  “Won’t hear me complaining,” Sonjuh gasped.

  Robre looked over his shoulder. The swamp-devils had hesitated a little; the sun was shining directly into their eyes as they pursued, and they weren’t enthusiastic about coming into the open in daylight anyway. But they were coming on now, not graceful on their short powerful legs, but as enduring as one of the Imperials’ steam engines. At the sight of two enemies on foot, their screeching ran up the scale to the blood-trill, and even now the hair along Robre’s spine tried to stand up.

  “Lord o’ Sky with us!” he shouted, and made a final burst of speed.

  More arrows were whickering past him now, on to thud into the dry oak timbers of the palisade; luckily the marks-manship wasn’t good, with the sun in their eyes and shooting while they ran. Breath panted hard and dry through a parched throat, and his muscles were one huge ache. He threw his bow up over the palisade—it was lined with cheering spectators—and bent, making a stirrup of his hands. Sonjuh covered the last ten yards in her old bounding deer-run, then leapt high for the last; her foot came down into his hands, and he flung her upward with all the strength that was in him. She soared, clapped hands around the pointed end of a log, and eager hands dragged her over it. Slasher whined as Robre’s hands clamped on his fur ruff and a handful at the base of his tail, and he made a halfhearted snap. The man ignored it, swung him around in two huge circles and flung him upward likewise; he did bite a couple of the people who pulled him over. Then a rope dangled down for the man. He jumped, caught it three feet above his head-height and swarmed up; the wound in his left arm betrayed him, and he would have fallen at the last if Sonjuh had not leaned far over and grabbed the back of his hunting shirt.

  He gasped for a moment as he lay on the fighting platform inside the little log fort that made up the Station; three families lived here usually, but now it was crowded with refugees, their faces peering upward awestruck at him.

  “Get those idjeets under cover!” he shouted; a few arrows were already arching over the walls to land in the mud-and-dung surface of the courtyard.

  Winded, he still forced himself back erect, took his bow, looked to right and left. The swamp-men were pouring out of the woods, a black insect tide in the lurid light of the sunset. Some stopped to prance and flaunt bits of loot at the defenders—a woman’s bloodstained dress, the hacked-off, gnawed arm of a child. Others were cutting pine trees, bringing them forward, trimming off branches to use them as scaling-ladders.

  “What are you waiting for?” he bellowed, to the men—and a few women—who crowded the fighting platform. “We’ll need torches up here, water, more arrows. Move!”

  The horde poured forward. A sleetstorm of arrows, crossbow bolts, and buckshot met it; the howling figures pressed on, and a counterstream of black arrows hissed upward—

  There had been fighting all along the Three Forks River, fierce fighting before the walls of Dannulsford. The tents and brush shelters of refugees clustered thickly all about it, and the eastern horizon was still hazy with the burning cornfields, and the air heavy with the smell of it. More tents sprawled to the west, where fresh war parties of wild young fighting-men from all the clans poured in each day—the war-arrow had been sent throughout the lands of the Seven Tribes, by relays of fast riders. Other aid poured in as well, wagons filled with shelled corn, hams, bacon, wheat, jerked beef, cloth, and whiskey. By the western gate the skulls of bear, bison, wild cow, cougar, plains-lion, and wolf stood high beside the alligator, the standards of many a clan Jefe. No heads on poles were there now, but many were being set up along the river—hanging in bunches rather than impaled singly, to save work. Canoes and ferries went back and forth without cease. Noise brawled surflike through the stink and crowding, voices, shouts, songs, war whoops, the neighing of horses and bellowing of oxen; the wind was out of the west, cool, dry, and dusty.

  And in the middle of the stream floated a steamboat; not the little wooden stern-wheeler of a few weeks ago, but a steel-hulled gunboat, likewise shallow-draft but bristling with Gatling guns behind shields, an arc-powered searchlight, and a rocket launcher. The Empire’s flag floated over the bridge, and the bosun’s pipes twittered as the chiefs left. Or most of them—one young war-chief, newly come to fame as a leader, stayed for a moment. Beside him stood a young woman in the garb of a male woods-runner; she clung to his hand with a half-defiant air, and her dog bristled when crewmen came too close. The captain of the craft and the colonel who commanded the Empire’s garrison in Galveston had discreetly withdrawn, as well.

  “Yi-ah,” Robre Devil-Killer said. “We heard how this—” He gestured about at the Imperial warcraft, which rather incongruously bore the tile Queen-Empress Victoria II in gilt on its black bows. “—turned ’em back when it steamed up the Black River. We might have lost all the east-bank settlements, without that. The ones who got across ’fore you came back weren’t enough to do that, or cross the river and take Dannulsford.”

  “Glad the Empire could help,” Eric King said sincerely.

  He was in uniform again, his turban freshly wrapped, although he also carried a stick and limped heavily. He looked at their linked hands, smiled, and murmured, “Bless you, my children,” in Hindi.

  “What was that?”

  “Just that I’m glad to have met you. Met you both,” he said. “In India, it’s customary to give gifts to friends on their wedding. I understand that’s in order?”

  He called, and Ranjit Singh came up with a long rosewood chest strapped with brass and opened it. A double-barreled hunting rifle lay within.

  Robre nodded, grinning as he took the weapon and broke the action open with competent hands; he’d received the single-shot weapon as pay from Banerjii, but this new treasure was pure delight. Sonjuh smiled at last, as well.

  “Well,” King went on, “for the bride, I could have given a cradle…or a spinning wheel…” The smile on the girl’s face was turning
to a frown. “But since it looks like you’ll be having other work to do first—”

  Another case—this held a lighter weapon, the cavalry-carbine version of the Martini-Metford rifle. She mumbled thanks, blushing a little, then laughed out loud as King solemnly presented Slasher with a meaty ham-bone; the dog looked up at his mistress for permission, then graciously accepted it.

  The Imperial and the clansman shook hands, hands equally callused by rein and rope, sword-hilt and tomahawk.

  “Good-bye, and good luck in your war,” King went on. “I hope you exterminate the brutes.”

  “So do I, Jefe,” Robre said. “But I doubt it. They’re a mighty lot of ’em, the swamps are big, ’n’ they can fight. Fight even harder in their home-runs, I suppose.”

  “In the end, you’ll beat them,” King said. “You’re more civilized, and the civilized always win in the end, barring something like the Fall.”

  Robre looked around at the gunboat, frowning slightly at a thought. “Could be you’re right,” he said. “Time will tell.”

  The slight frown was still on his face when he stood on the bank and watched the smooth passage of the Queen-Empress Victoria II downstream. Then he turned to the girl beside him and met her smile with his own.

  WHY THEN, THERE

  Alternate history has many uses. One of them is to revive literary worlds that time has rendered otherwise inaccessible to us. Writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs or A.A. Merritt could, with some small degree of initial plausibility, litter the remoter sections of the world with lost races and lost cities; their models, writing a generation earlier, had a broader canvas to work with, as exploration wasn’t nearly so complete.