Worlds That Weren't

by Walter Jon Williams

  By the 1930s, Burroughs was taking his heroes to other planets and to a putative world within the hollow core of ours, and the last lost races were tribes in the interior of New Guinea. Even Mars and Venus were taken from us a little later, their six-armed green men, canals, and dinosaurs replaced with a boring snowball of rust and a sulphuric-acid hell…although alternatives to that are another story, one which I hope to tell someday.

  Likewise, the supply of exploits available to a dashing young cavalry officer became sadly limited after 1914. Being machine-gunned at the Somme just isn’t up to the standards of the sort of exploit conveyed by Kipling, Henty, or (in nonfiction) the young Winston Churchill, who participated in one of the last quasi-successful charges by British lancers in 1898, against the Mahdists at Omdurman. Dervish fanatics tend to use plastique these days, rather than swords. Pirates are rather ho-hum Third World extortionists and sneak thieves, rather than characters like Henry Morgan—who was sent home in chains and ended up as governor of Jamaica, after a private audience with Charles II!

  In short, by the second decade of the last century the gorgeous, multicolored, infinite-possibility world that opened up with the great voyages of discovery of the sixteenth century was coming to an end. So was the fictional penumbra that accompanied, mirrored, and even inspired it—for the Spanish conquistadors were themselves quite consciously emulating the feats of literary heroes, of the knights of the Chanson du Roland or the fantastic adventures of Amadis of Gaul.

  From a literary point of view, this was a terrible misfortune. It’s often forgotten in these degenerate times how close to the world of the pulp adventurers the real world could be in those days.

  Allan Quatermain, of H. Rider Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines, was based fairly closely (fantasy elements like immortal princesses aside) on the exploits of Frederick Selous, explorer and frontiersman.

  What writer could come up unaided with a character like Richard Francis Burton, the devilish, swashbuckling swordsman-adventurer who fought wild Somalis saber-to-spear, once escaped certain death on an African safari when he ran six miles with a spear through his face, snuck into at least two “forbidden” cities (Mecca and Medina) in native disguise, and translated the Thousand and One Nights to boot, after writing a firsthand account of the red-light district of Karachi?

  Or Mary Kingsley, who went singlehanded into the jungles of Gabon and did the first field enthnography among the cannibal Fang. In her books, she recommended from personal experience a nice thick set of petticoats, which was exactly what was needed when falling into a pit lined with pointed stakes, and noted that said skirts should contain a convenient pocket for a revolver, “which is rarely needed, but when needed is needed very badly.”

  Who could devise adventures more unlikely and fantastic than the real life of Harry Brooks in the 1830s, who sailed off to the East Indies in a leaky schooner with a few friends, fought pirates and headhunters, and made himself independent raja of Sarawak? And he was at the tail end of a tradition that began with Cortés and Pizzaro setting off on private-enterprise quests to overthrow empires at ten thousand-to-one odds.

  That world is still available to us through historical fiction, of course, but that is sadly limiting in some respects; the “end” of the larger story is fixed and we know how it comes out. The Western Front and the Welfare State are waiting down at the end of the road.

  Like many another, I imprinted on the literature of faraway places and strange-sounding names at an early age, and never lost the taste for it—or for the real-world history and archaeology to which it led. Fortunately, I also discovered alternate history, a genre within the larger field of speculative fiction, which allows a rigorous yet limitless ringing of changes.

  Alternate history can give writer and reader a breath of fresher air, of unlimited possibility, of that world where horizons are infinite and nothing is fixed in stone; where beyond the last blue horizon waits the lost city, the people of marvels, the silver-belled caravan to Shamballah and the vacant throne….

  “Shikari in Galveston” springs from the backbone of my novel The Peshawar Lancers. The universe of The Peshawar Lancers stems from an alteration in the history of the nineteenth century: a catastrophic strike by a series of high-velocity heavenly bodies. We know that this sort of thing actually happens, and that a similar (though larger) impact ended the dinosaurian era 65 million years ago.

  Being fictional, my impacts could be precisely controlled by authorial fiat, within the boundaries of the physically possible. What they did was to derail “progress” by taking out the most technologically advanced part of the world, and by drastically reducing the world’s overall population.

  And so the twentieth and twenty-first centuries see a world where the most advanced regions are only just surpassing the Victorian level of technology and social development, and much remains sparsely inhabited by a wild variety of cultures at a very low level of technology.

  In other words, a world larger and better suited to the classic adventure story than ours.

  The Peshawar Lancers took place mostly in India, the center of the British Empire and the most advanced state of its day; “Shikari in Galveston” is set on the Imperial frontiers, in the wilds of a re-barbarized Texas. Both put people in situations that suit the definition of “adventure”: somebody else in very bad trouble, very far away.

  I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!

  S. M. Stirling was born in Metz, France, in 1953; his father was an officer in the RCAF, from Newfoundland, and his English-born mother grew up in Lima, Peru. He has lived in Europe, North America, and East Africa, and traveled extensively elsewhere. After taking a history BA, he attended law school at Osgoode Hall, Toronto, but decided not to practice and had his dorsal fin surgically removed. After the usual period of poverty and odd jobs, his first book sold in 1984 (Snow-brother, from Signet), and he became a full-time writer in 1988. That was the same year he was married to Janet Cathryn Stirling (née Moore), also a writer, whom he met at a World Fantasy convention in the mid-1980s.

  His works since then include the Draka alternate history trilogy (currently issued in a combined volume under the title The Domination), the Nantucket series (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, and On the Oceans of Eternity), The Peshawar Lancers, and Conquistador.

  He and Janet and the obligatory authorial cats currently live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He’s currently working on a new alternate history novel, Dies the Fire, which will be published by Roc.

  Steve Stirling’s hobbies include anthropology, archaeology, history in general, travel, cooking, and the martial arts.

  THE LOGISTICS OF CARTHAGE

  MARY GENTLE

  I have put this document together from the different sources included in the Ash papers, and have again translated the languages into modern English. Where necessary, I have substituted colloquial obscenities to give a flavor of the medieval original. Let the casual reader, expecting the Hollywood Middle Ages, abandon hope here.

  PIERCE RATCLIFF, A.D. 2010

  “MOST women follow their husbands to the wars…. I followed my son.”

  Yolande Vaudin’s voice came with the grunt and exhalation of physical effort. Guillaume Arnisout looked at her down the length of the corpse they were carrying.

  He grinned. “Your son? You ain’t old enough to have a grown-up son!”

  She appeared a wonderfully perverse mix of male and female, Guillaume thought. The clinging of her belted mail shirt, under her livery jacket, showed off the woman’s broad hips. Her long legs seemed plump in hose, but were not: were just not male. Shapely and womanly…He got a kick out of seeing women’s legs in hose: entirely covered, but the shape so clearly defined—and hers were worth defining.

  She had her hair cut short, too, like a page or young squire, and it curled sleekly onto her shoulders, uncovered, the rich yellow of wet straw. She had been able to slip her helmet off before the sergeant noti
ced: it was buckled through her belt by the chin strap. That meant he could see all of her wise and wicked face.

  She’s willing to talk, at least. Can’t let the opportunity go to waste.

  He put his back against the Green Chapel’s doors and eased them open without himself letting go of the corpse’s ankles. Yolande held her end of the dead woman’s body tightly under the arms, taking the weight as he backed through the door first. The blue-white flesh was chill against his palms.

  Not looking down at what she held, Yolande went on. “I had Jean-Philippe when I was young. Fifteen. And then, when he was fifteen, he was called up in the levy, to be a soldier, and I followed.”

  The partly open door let in the brilliant sunlight from the barren land outside. It glittered back off the white walls of the monastery’s other buildings. Guillaume twisted his head around to look inside the chapel, letting his eyes adjust, unsure of his footing in the dimness. “Didn’t he mind you being there?”

  Her own sight obviously free of the morning glare, Yolande pushed forward. The legs of the body were stiff with rigor, and they shoved against him. Bare feet jabbed his belly. There was black dirt under the toenails.

  He backed in, trying to hold one door open with his foot while Yolande maneuvered the dead woman’s shoulders and head through it.

  “He would have minded, if he’d known. I went disguised; I thought I could watch over him from a distance…. He was too young. I’d been a widow five years. I had no money, with his wages gone. I joined the baggage train and dyed my hair and whored for a living, until that got old, and then I found I could put a crossbow bolt into the center of the butts nine times out of ten.”

  The chapel’s chill began to cool the sting of sunburn on the back of his neck. His helmet still felt excruciatingly hot to wear. Guillaume blinked, his sight adjusting, and looked at her again. “You’re not old enough.”

  Her chuckle came out of the dimness, along with the shape of the walls and tiled floor.

  “One thing a woman can always look like is a younger man. There’s her,” Yolande said, with a jerk of her head downward at the rigid dead body between them. “When she said her name was Guido Rosso, you’d swear she was a beardless boy of nineteen. You take her out of doublet and hose and put her in a gown, and call her ‘Margaret Hammond,’ and you’d have known at once she was a woman of twenty-eight.”

  “Was she?” Guillaume grunted, shifting the load as they tottered toward the altar. He walked backward with difficulty, not wanting to stumble and look stupid in front of this woman. “I didn’t know her.”

  “I met her when she joined us, after the fall.” Yolande’s fingers visibly tightened on the dead woman’s flesh. There was no need to specify which fall. The collapse of Constantinople to the Turks had echoed through Christendom from East to West, four years ago.

  “I took her under my wing.” The woman’s wide, lively mouth moved in an ironic smile. Her eyes went to the corpse’s face, then his. “You wouldn’t have noticed her. I know what you grunts in the line fight are like—‘Archers? Oh, that’s those foulmouthed buggers hanging around at the back, always saying “fuck” and taking the Lord their God’s name in vain….’ I dunno: give you a billhook and you think you’re the only soldier on the battlefield.”

  Guillaume liked her sardonic grin, and returned it.

  So…is she flirting with me?

  They staggered together across the empty interior of the Green Chapel. Their boots scraped on the black and white tiles. He could smell incense and old wood smoke from the morning’s prayers. Another couple of steps…

  “I used to help her back to the tents, drunk. She was never this heavy. There!” Yolande grunted.

  Just in time, he copied her, letting the stiff ankles of the body slide down out of his dirty grip. The body thunked down onto the tiles at his feet. No one had cleaned it up. The bones of her face were beaten in, the mess the same color as heraldic murrey: purple red.

  His skin retained the feel of hers. Stiff, chill, softening.

  “He Dieux!” Guillaume rubbed at his back. “That’s why they call it dead weight.”

  He saw the dead Rosso—Margaret—was still wearing her armor: a padded jack soaked with blood and fluids. Linen stuffing leaked out of the rips. Every other piece of kit from helmet to boots was gone. Either the jacket was too filthy and slashed up to be worth reclaiming, or else the charred and bloodstained cloth was all that was still holding the body’s intestines inside it.

  Yolande squatted down. Guillaume saw her try to pull the body’s arms straight by its sides, but they were still too stiff. She settled for smoothing the sun-bleached, blood-matted hair back. She wiped her hands on her peacock blue hose as she stood.

  “I saw her get taken down.” The older woman spoke as if she was not sure what to do next, was talking to put off that moment of decision—even if the decision was, Guillaume thought, only the one to leave the corpse of her friend.

  The light from the leaf-shaped ogee windows illuminated Yolande’s clear, smooth skin. There were creases at her eyes, but she had most of the elasticity of youth still there.

  “Killed on the galley?” he prompted, desperate to continue a conversation even if the subject was unpromising.

  “Yeah. First we were on one of the cargo ships, sniping, part of the defense crew. The rag-heads turned Greek fire on us, and the deck was burning. I yelled at her to follow me off—when we got back on our galley, it had been boarded, and it took us and Tessier’s guys ten minutes to clear the decks. Some Visigoth put a spear through her face, and I guess they must have hacked her up when she fell. They’d have been better worrying about the live ones.”

  “Nah…” Guillaume was reluctant to leave the Green Chapel, even if it was beginning to smell of decomposing flesh. He felt cool for the first time in hours, and besides, there was this woman, who might perhaps be an impressed audience for his combat knowledge. “You never want to leave one alive under your feet. Somebody on the ground sticks a sword or dagger up and hits your femoral artery or your bollocks—Ah, ’scuse me.”

  He stopped, flustered. She gave him a look.

  Somewhere in his memory, if only in the muscle-memory of his hands and arms, is the ferocity with which you hack a man down, and follow it up without a second’s hesitation—bang-bang-bang-bang!—your weapon’s thin, sharp steel edges slamming into his face, throat, forearms, belly; whatever you can reach.

  He looked away from the body at his feet, a woman to whom some soldier in the Carthaginian navy has done just that. Goose pimples momentarily shuddered over his skin.

  “Christus Viridianus! I couldn’t half do with a drink.” He eased his visored sallet back on his head, feeling how the edge of the lining band had left a hot, sweaty indentation on his forehead. “Say, what did happen to your son? Is he with the company?”

  Yolande’s fingers brushed the Griffin-in-Gold patch sewn onto the front of her livery jacket, as if the insignia of their mercenary company stirred memories. She smiled in a way he could not interpret. “I was a better soldier than he was.”

  “He quit?”

  “He died.”

  “Shit.” I can’t say a thing right! “Yolande, I’m sorry.”

  Her mouth quirked painfully. “Four months after he went to war. What was I thinking, that I could protect him? He was carrying shot in the first siege we were at, and a culverin inside the castle scored a direct hit on the powder wagon. When I found him he’d had both his hands blown off, and he’d bled to death—before his mother could get to him.”

  “Jeez…” I wish I hadn’t asked.

  She’s got to be ten years older than me. But she doesn’t look it.

  He guessed Yolande had not, like “Guido Rosso,” even temporarily tried to pass as a man.

  Because she’s a woman, not a girl.

  “Why did you stay with the company?”

  “My son was dead. I wanted to kill the whole world. I realized that if I had the patience to l
et them train me, the company would let me do just that.”

  In his stunned silence, Guillaume could hear goat bells jingling outside and some shuffling noises closer to hand. A warm breeze blew in through the Green Chapel door, which had lodged open on a pebble. The smell of death grew more present now, soaking into the air. Like the back of a butcher’s shop in a heat wave.

  “Shit.” He wiped at his mouth. “It’s going to get hot later in the morning. By evening…she’s going to be really ripe by Vespers.”

  Yolande’s expression turned harsh. “Good. Then they can’t ignore her. She’s going to smell. That should get the bloody rag-heads moving. The captain’s right. This is the only thing to do.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t care what the fucking priests say. She’s going to be buried here like the Christian soldier she is.”

  Guillaume shrugged. For himself, he would as cheerfully have chucked all the bodies overboard, to go with the Carthaginian Visigoths and feed the fish; evidently this wasn’t the thing to say to Yolande right now. Especially not if you want to get into the crossbow woman’s knickers, he reminded himself.

  “If the abbot can ignore the stink she’s going to make…” He let his grin out, in its different context. “What do you bet me he’ll send for the captain before Sext? Hey, tell you what…I bet you a flagon of wine she’s buried by midday, and if I lose, I’ll help you drink it tonight. What do you say?”

  What she would have answered wasn’t clear from her expression, and he didn’t get to hear a reply.

  The scuffling noise that had impinged on his consciousness earlier grew louder, and he spun around and had his bollock dagger out of its sheath at his belt and pointing at the altar a full second before a boy rolled out from under the altar cloth and sat staring down at the woman soldier’s corpse.