Alternate Empires

by Gregory Benford

  “Speak so I can understand you,” said the Edomite.

  “This is not for the likes of you to hear,” I told him. He flushed. I looked into the hatchet face of the Ispanyan and said in his tongue: “Quickly, do you know if the Saxonian Otto Gneisberg and his household are with you?”

  “They are,” he answered. “What do you want? We stand on a volcano.”

  “I have a word of hope, mestro.” I gave him my name.

  “Reccaredo de Liria,” he gave back, “hiltman in His Gothic Over-lordship’s Valencian Grenadiers.”

  I told him what von Heidenheim had told me. He gnawed his lip. “The Saxonians, the pagan Saxonians—”

  “They are Europeans too,” I said.

  His pride snatched at that. “By the Bull, good enough in these miserable times! What would you have me do?”

  “Tell Gneisberg. We must move fast. If we have everything ready before Zigad Moussavi hears of it, we can hope he will overlook the matter, set it aside, because he will not know what it means and he has his hands full already. But if first he gets any hint— They have an art in Persia of flaying a man alive and showing him his stuffed skin before he may die, do they not?”

  “They will buy mine dearly,” de Liria snorted. “Very well, I will go straight to Gneisberg.” Luck had been with me. Many a young officer would first have sought the garrison commander. We had no time for that. I should think the chefe del hirdo would later be happy to learn that a few refugees had gone out from under his ward.

  If they did.

  De Liria flipped me a Roman salute and went back. The gate shut. “He is to bring forth certain men who have need to return to their home,” I told the Edomite overling.

  He glowered. “What plot is this?”

  “None. How can an unarmed spoonful menace the triumph of the New Revelation? If anything, they become hostages to it. This is a simple business of perishable goods that have just arrived and require care. You have already shown that you may let people leave the compound.”

  “Ey-yah, what you Westmen will do for money!” he fleered.

  I shrugged. “The lord Zigad Moussavi is a man of wisdom. He will wish to keep their goodwill, when it costs him nothing, and take taxes from them afterward.”

  I waited. These warriors were ignorant of much, and their heads were afire with their faith, but they were not stupid. Give them time, only a short time, and they would begin to wonder. Then I would be done. I tried to dwell on things far away, ice skating in New Denmark, a girl in London, a moonlit night off the Azores; and I waited.

  After some part of endlessness—but the sun was still above the tower—the gate opened anew. A man came out beside de Liria. Though he was short and bald, he walked briskly. Behind them were another half-score, both European and inborn, who must belong to the trader’s staff. My heart knocked.

  They stopped before me. “I am Otto Gneisberg,” said the short man in Saxonian.

  “Mithras, could I go with you!” de Liria breathed.

  “Hold fast where you are,” Gneisberg said. “That will be your service.”

  Our band thrust into the crowd. It yielded surlily. “You’re doing well to heed me, herr,” I said.

  Gneisberg’s smile was wry. “Hiltman de Liria said something about preserving civilization. But we have left wives and children with him. If the compound comes under attack, it cannot hold out more than a few days.”

  “Do you think your post can do as well?”

  “No. A while, though, yes, a while. We have firearms and provisions in the cellar, a cistern on the roof. I understand why it is critical that we be in possession of the place.”

  Herod tagged after us. We walked unhindered to the Street of the Magi.

  Beneath the sign of the Handelsbund, Gneisberg unclipped a key from his belt. “I will now send a pigeon with this news, and the Saxonians offshore will make ready,” he said. “If we are then bestormed, and I think we shall soon be, I will send the next message, and a relief expedition is justified under the Law of Kings, that the Russians honor too. It will put down these rebels, which should dampen insurrection elsewhere in the province.”

  For a time, I thought.

  “You will join us?” he asked. “You have done well. If I live, I will see to it that you get a commendation.”

  I forebore to say I would rather have a cash reward. “No, I must be off.”

  He raised his brows. “What? This is not the most secure spot in the world, I grant you, but surely your chances are better here than anywhere else outside the compound, and your presence will improve them. Or are you leaving Mirzabad?”

  “Not yet. I have unfinished work.”

  “The gods be with you,” he sighed. “Or, in my philosophy, may you gain by the principles of righteousness.”

  “Mithras be with us both,” I said, and left. Herod trotted at my side.

  “Do we go back to the House of Sorrows?” he asked.

  “We do,” I answered, “and there we stay till the danger is past.”

  “Oh, good, good!” he warbled. “It is misnamed. I never knew how wonderful it is inside.”

  The real wonders you do not know about, I thought. I hardly do, myself. Maybe we can learn something together.

  This time he took me by the straightest way, as nearly as I could tell from the westering sun. Alike his ears and whatever inward senses his life had whetted must be saying that rage had rolled elsewhere. Or had calm already begun to fall throughout the city? Hope flickered in my breast.

  It died when he stopped, lifted a bird-frail hand, strained forward. After a moment he stared back at me. “Lord, I fear bad men are at the House,” he whispered.

  Otherwise I heard only the seething in my ears. Drawing breath, I told him, “Bring me there unbeknownst.”

  “It is deadly,” he said. “What oath have you given them?”

  None. If anything, my duty was to keep myself hale for whatever von Heidenheim wanted next. Yet something in me without a name refused me the right to sheer off. At least I must see if there was any way of helping. “I am a man,” was all I could think of to say.

  Herod squared his shoulders. “And I am the man of my man,” he said, red in the cheeks, so gravely that I almost laughed.

  As fast as would keep stillness, we ran. Soon the noise reached me, yelp, clatter, thud. By houses we had passed earlier, I knew it came indeed from the Basileum. At the end, Herod took me into an alley and pointed upward. The building alongside was low; the grate over a window gave a hold for fingers and toes. I boosted him to the flat roof and scrambled after. On our bellies we glided to the other side and peered across the dolphin paving.

  I counted nine men on the stairs. They seemed inborn here. The rags and the dirt could have been anybody’s, but they yelled in Aramaic—street scourers, day laborers, stunted and snag-toothed. However, their thews were tough; they carried knives, clubs, an ax; once they got inside, Ailill and the African could slay two or three at most before going under. Then Jahan, his scholars, his daughter were booty. The gang had gotten a balk of timber. Again and again they rammed it against the door. Bronze groaned. Hinges began to give way.

  “Too many, lord,” Herod breathed in my ear.

  “We shall see,” I murmured back. “Surprise and a good blade have much to do with fate. Wait here, small one. If I fall, remember me.”

  I crouched and sprang. As I fell, it flashed through me that I had not given him his pay.

  I landed loose-kneed on stone, drew sword while I sped forward, wrapped end of cloak about left forearm. The robbers were lost in their work, sweating, slavering, a-howl with glee. I bounded up the stairs.

  The heart is a fool’s target, hard to find and fenced by the bones. My point went into the nearest scrawny back. I twisted to gash the liver, pulled my steel loose, and got the next man in the neck. Blood geysered, dazzling red. He rolled down the steps to lie crumpled.

  “Out, out!” I roared in Danish. “Give me a hand, you scuts
!”

  The seven who were left let go the beam and whirled around. I caught a thrust on my basket hilt and slashed downward. There is a big artery in the thigh. The six yammered around me. I stopped a stab with the padding on my left arm.

  The door swung wide. Ailill’s staff whirred and crashed. In skilled hands, that is a fearsome weapon. I heard him sing as he fought, a song of wild and keening mirth. The African had found a mace among relics of old, proud days. I saw a skull splinter beneath it.

  The axman came at me. He knew his trade. I withdrew before the battering weight. It could tear the sword out of my grip. Down the stairs we went. My friends had enough else to do.

  A little form darted from nowhere. Catlike, Herod swarmed up the axman’s back and clawed at his eyes. He shrilled and spat. The axman reached around, pulled him off, dashed him to the ground. Meanwhile I had the opening I needed. I stepped in and freed my foe’s guts.

  Two of the gang were still on their feet. They fled. “After them!” I bawled. “Let them not get away!”

  I overtook the closest and hewed. Ailill and the African crushed the other.

  They came panting to me. “Make sure of them all,” I said. Ailill’s knife slid forth. Soon the disabled stopped screaming.

  I went back to Herod. The axman had fallen across him. I dragged the carcass off and knelt to see. In the pinched face, mouth gaped and eyes stared blind. The limbs were dry sticks. I lifted his head. He had landed on the back of it, hard. I lowered it again and rose.

  Ailill and the African sought me anew. “Let’s haul these corpses away,” I ordered. My look went to the portico. Jahan and his folk clustered on it. They seemed well-nigh as drained of blood. “You,” I called to the scholars. “Fetch mops and water. Scrub these stones as best you can. Take that timber inside. Be quick.”

  Nobody stirred. “Ahriman in hell,” I snarled, “we’ve need to hide that anybody ever was here. Else we’ll soon have others, more than we can handle.”

  Boran trod forward. “We heed you,” she said softly. To the scholars: “Come.”

  It is folklore that a man is heavier dead than alive, but he does feel thus, and we three were wearied, shaken. Remembering how Herod had led me, I found an alley off a side street about a quarter mile away, narrow and already choked with rubbish. We ferried ours to it. Surely eyes watched from behind walls, but those that saw this end of our trip did not see the other. Nobody showed himself, nor questioned us from within. I had counted on that. The main wish of most folk is to be left in peace. They seldom get it. Witnesses would do and say naught. If these wretches we’d rid ourselves of had kin or friends, it was unlikely that those knew what had happened or where. Only a second mischance would bring the Basileum again under attack.

  By the time we were done, the sun was behind westward walls. Streets brimmed with shadow. Jahan met us on the stairs. In the dimming light he looked ill, and his voice came faint. “We have washed the stones, as you see. I pray you, go not straightway inside. Go to the back door and down into the storage room. We have brought soap, water, fresh garb. Cleanse yourselves.”

  “Of course, venerable one,” said the African.

  Jahan’s words stumbled onward. “We are grateful to you beyond measure. Never think us otherwise. But it is not fitting to track blood over these floors.”

  “Sure and it’s glad I’ll be to get the stickiness off,” laughed Ailill when I had explained.

  Jahan shivered. “How can he be merry after … what was done?”

  “It is nothing uncommon, you know,” I answered.

  Bewilderment crossed his face. “But this has been horrible.”

  “Few lives are like yours. Today you have glimpsed the world as it is.”

  For another heartbeat I stood still, while the dusk rose around us beneath a sky turning green in the west, violet-blue in the east. “Before I myself wash, I have one more thing to do,” I said. “Where is the nearest Fire Temple?”

  Jahan gave me directions. It wasn’t far. The scholars had laid Herod Gamal-al-Mazda on the portico, folded his hands and closed his eyes. When I picked his light form up, it felt colder than it really was. Nonetheless I held it close to my breast as I walked.

  The Zarathushtran priest was aghast at sight of me and my burden, but stood his ground like a man. I smiled through the dusk. “Be at ease,” I said. “This is a believer whom I bring home to you. Give him the rites and take him to your Tower of Silence.”

  To make sure of that, I handed over the three gold royals I had promised. Then I returned to the Basileum.

  Thereafter we abided in our lair. Every day we heard a few shots. Thrice, somebody close by screamed. But none beat on our doors, and we dwelt day and night, day and night, as if outside of creation.

  “Why do they call this the House of Sorrows?” I asked Boran.

  She winced and frowned. “The commoners are superstitious,” she said, and went on to speak of something else.

  Later I talked with the African. Rustum Tata, his name was. Like me, he had come from afar to Mirzabad, knowing little, soon enthralled by the witchcraft that lay in the books. In some ways he was a better guide to them than Boran. She knew so much, her mind was so swift, that I was apt to find myself groping for what she meant. Thus she and I became likeliest to talk of homely things when we were together, our own lives and dreams.

  “Why do they call this the House of Sorrows?” I asked Rustum.

  He shrugged. “It holds whatever chronicles and relics of the city are left after more than three thousand years,” he said. “That gives time for much weeping.”

  Me, I took happiness out of the vaults. Suddenly around me, speaking, loving, hating, striving, not dead but merely sundered from me in time, were the builders, the dwellers, the conquerors, Persians, Turks, Mongols, Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Peleshtim, Egyptians, endlessly manyfold. In their sagas I could lose myself, forget that I was trapped and waiting for whatever doom happened to be mine.

  Oh, yes, it was beyond me to read what stood on the crumbling paper, parchment, papyrus, clay. The scholars misliked my even touching them with my awkward fingers. But they would unfold a text for me, and put it into words I kenned, and we would talk about it for hours, down in those dim cool caves. The lesser men are now wan in my mind. I remember bluff Rustum, wise Jahan, Boran the lovely.

  What I learned is mostly lost too, flotsam in my head. How shall a wanderer carry with him the dynasties of the Shahs, the Khans, the Caesars, or the Pharaohs? Here a face peers from the wreckage, there a torch glimmers in the distance, a word echoes whose meaning I have forgotten, ghost armies march to music long stilled. It was with a wry understanding of each other that Boran and I said farewell.

  One voice is clear. That may seem odd, for belike it mattered the least of all. But it lingers because it was the last that came to me.

  Jahan had been my guide through time that day. We were down in the deepest crypt where the oldest fragments rested. A lantern on a table cast a light soon eaten by the shadows around. The air was cold, quiet, with a smell of dust.

  Under our gaze was a Babylonian tablet. Beside it lay a sheet of papyrus that must have been torn off a scroll. The inked letters were well-nigh too faded to read, but they looked like far kin to Edomite or Arabian. I pointed and asked idly, “What is that?”

  “Eh?” said Jahan. He bent over the case and squinted. “Oh … oh, this. I have not thought about it for years. A fragment of an ancient lament.”

  “What does it mourn?”

  “That is unclear. For see you, the language is long extinct. A predecessor of mine puzzled out a partial translation, by comparing related words in languages that he could read. Um-m.” Jahan stroked his beard. His tone quickened. “I studied it once. Let me try whether I can still decipher it.”

  He opened the case and carefully, carefully took the papyrus out. For a while he held it close to the lantern. His lips moved. Then, straightening, he said:

  �
�It is by a man of an obscure people who held this city and hinterland for a while in the remote past. Sennacherib of Assyria captured it and dispersed them through his empire. The many races within it blotted theirs up. A similar fate had already befallen a sister kingdom of theirs. This poet was, I believe, an aged survivor, looking backward and bewailing what had come to pass.”

  He peered again at the sheet and word by slow word rendered into Persian, not the everyday tongue but the stately speech of old:

  “Jerusalem hath grievously sinned; therefore she is removed … for she hath seen that the heathen entered into her sanctuary…. For these things I weep; mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water, because the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me: my children are desolate, because the enemy prevailed.”

  He glanced at me. “I skip over lines that are illegible or that I cannot well make out,” he explained.

  “Was Jerusalem the name they gave this city?” I asked.

  He nodded. “They appear to have been a peculiar people, always questioning things, even their gods, always driven toward a perfection they should have known is impossible. Certainly they had some ideas unique to them.” He read onward:

  “Thou, O Lord, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation. Wherefore dost thou forsake us for ever, and forsake us so long time? Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.

  “But thou hast utterly rejected us—”

  Boran’s shout flew down the stairs. Jahan put the dead man’s cry back in the case before he followed me. By then I was on the ground floor. Through the walls I heard the rumble and crash of the Saxonian cannon.

  REMAKING HISTORY

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  The point is not to make an exact replica of the Teheran embassy compound.” Exasperated, Ivan Venutshenko grabbed his hair in one hand and pulled up, which gave him a faintly Oriental look. “It’s the spirit of the place that we want to invoke here.”

  “This has the spirit of our storage warehouse, if you ask me.”