The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology]

by Edited By Ian Watson

  In his later years, Charles became very fat, and died one Passover of a surfeit of salt beef. He was succeeded by his eldest son David. David followed the policies of his parents - his mother was still alive looking over his shoulder throughout his reign - and embarked on further conquests. He took Britain and Ireland, for all the good those miserable daces would do him. And since he claimed to be ruler of a revived Roman Empire, logic dictated that he retake Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Judaea and those other parts of the old Eastern Empire. He made war on the Byzantine rulers with some success, but never got close to his great ambition of recapturing Judaea, and with it Jerusalem.

  David had no sons. He was succeeded by his daughter Ruth, whose first act was to have her grandmother Deborah exiled to Aachen to stop her giving advice all the time. Deborah passed her few remaining years in that old cold castle where it had all started, attended by a few loyal friends. Rumour had it that she kidnapped and ate babies to try and recover her youth and beauty. You can believe that if you want.

  Ruth’s pagan general Roland led the armies of the Empire against the now-rotten Kingdom of the East and conquered it whole in ten years. Ruth did not marry, and there is no truth in the story that she and Roland were lovers. Roland brought back the Queen of the East, the cruel and vicious Irene to Rome bound in silken cords. Irene was dangerous, even in captivity. Had she not overthrown her own son and put out his eyes with copper needles? There was no telling what a woman like that might get up to. It was the prevailing fashion at Ruth’s court for young men to wear their hair long and compose love-poems and gushingly express their chaste romantic attachment to their queen. It didn’t take a wise elder to predict that it would only be a matter of time before a cabal among them transferred their affections to the fair queen of the East. In truth, Irene was sixty years old and never had been any kind of beauty. She manipulated these young idiots into conspiring to free her, raise an army and recapture her lost realm. Most of these pomaded fools wouldn’t have known one end of a spear from another, and in any case not one of them could keep a secret. It was enough for Ruth to have Irene’s head cut off and sentence her conspirators to work in the royal stables for the rest of their lives where I doubt they ever had the leisure to write poetry about glanders and horse turds.

  With the conquest of the Eastern kingdom, the Empire was now whole again and Ruth entered Jerusalem in triumph, accompanied by Roland and the greatest army the world had seen for centuries. I was with them that day, an ordinary infantry soldier once more. I was still there a few weeks later, searching unsuccessfully for any remaining Christian community, when they were discussing rebuilding the Temple and moving the capital of the Empire to Jerusalem, for by now almost everyone of influence, however slight, had joined or been born into, the ranks of the Chosen People.

  I was still there when the dreadful plague broke out among the army and the host of officials and religious people who had accompanied Ruth on her triumphal entry. It was suicidal to take so many people into such a small city and cram them all together. Any fool could have seen that it would cause illness, but I suppose it was all forgotten in the excitement. I myself died of it before it struck down both Ruth and her Mithras-worshipping general.

  Ruth was succeeded by her cousin Solomon, son of David’s younger brother. There were others with claims to the throne, but Solomon wisely judged that Rome was still the centre of government and immediately went there and declared himself Emperor before anyone else could. He then followed tradition and slaughtered all the other members of his family who could compete with him. Solomon declared his intention of keeping the capital in Rome until Jerusalem was plague-free.

  Of course, when the plague had cleared from Jerusalem, the Saracens, an energetic people fired by the new religion of Mohammed, attacked out of the east and took the city for their own. The Empire had recaptured Jerusalem for less than three years. Men said this was God’s punishment for their pride and arrogance.

  Perhaps Solomon was mindful of this, or maybe he was just plain idle. Whatever the case, he made no attempt to retake Jerusalem and settled into a life of lethargy and vice, trying to outdo the splendour of his ancient namesake. Solomon the Magnificent, as he was called, imported every conceivable luxury into Rome from the East and made of it a city of unrivalled glory. With peace on most frontiers it was a golden age, in which building and the arts flourished. Solomon himself in later years became more introverted and cranky, for his insatiable appetites left him tortured with the strangury.

  Solomon’s long reign ended with the succession of his grandson Saul, a young man who rejected the ease of the court and who dreamed of military glory. This was just as well, because there were now predators massing on every frontier who wanted a piece of the Empire. The Saracens soon got the better of us in a great sea battle near Rhodes that left them with unrivalled control of the Mediterranean sea; their allies, the Barbary Pirates, now made life hell for merchant seamen. The Saracens had long since taken Egypt and the north coast of Africa and now they moved into Spain where Saul came to meet them with a huge army. But the army, like everything else, had grown soft under Solomon and was defeated in the battle of Salamanca. Saul himself was captured by Saladin, who treated him with hospitality and respect before releasing him. Saul died soon afterwards of shame and a broken heart. He was thirty-two years old.

  Saul had been keen to enforce religious orthodoxy. That sort of thing made life difficult for a person like me who would go around saying the Jews were all wrong and that Yeshua Christos had been the Messiah. Now the religious toleration of earlier years came to an end. One of the artists that Saul patronized, Elihu the Engineer, invented a machine specially to deal with blasphemers. It was like a mill-wheel the paddles of which fired rocks in the blasphemer’s general direction. To me fell the honour of being the first person to be killed by Elihu’s stoning engine for saying that this man nobody had heard of had been the Messiah.

  I avoided Rome, preferring to stick to less technologically advanced regions. I preached in the countryside, but a faith without books has no future. I lived among dwindling Christian communities in remote places. Then I went and lived in the lands of the Saracens for many years. Strange to relate, I was always treated with courtesy there, for the Saracens are tolerant of all religions and treat madmen with kindness. I won no converts.

  Saul’s place was taken by his uncle Gideon, our present ruler. He is a learned man, but I don’t think he’s a big enough bastard to save the Empire. It’s been ten years since the Persians and the Saracens joined forces. Now they act like a pair of vultures, picking at the carcase of the Roman Empire. It is an apocalyptic struggle between Jews, Mohammedans and Zoroastrians.

  There are no Christians left. The last of them I found in a monastery out on the far west coast of Ireland. These few old men had managed to keep their sacred scriptures hidden from the imperial authorities, but no one could read them except me. I begged them to break their vows of chastity and try to re-establish the seed of our faith, but they refused, saying I was mad and a heretic. By the time I found them they were in any case too old to be capable of marrying, even if we had found women of child-bearing age willing to have them. I know what you’re thinking. The answer is that I found out a long time back that I was incapable of fathering children, for Yeshua’s curse had also deprived me of that particular joy. And it’s been a good few hundred years since I last derived even a passing pleasure in lying with women - or anything else for that matter.

  I buried the last of the Irish monks three years ago, put the scriptures in my sack, took up my staff and started wandering once more, returning as always to Rome.

  Now it is a millennium since the birth of Christos, the Persians are hammering at the gates of the eternal city and there is another sign in the sky.

  The same sign, perhaps. This time, it should be correctly interpreted. I feel at last that my wanderings are over. Yeshua has returned, to gather up the faithful to himself while the unrighteous sha
ll be cast down.

  But where are the faithful?

  * * * *

  The light in Joseph’s eyes dimmed.

  “He’s dead,” Absalom said.

  The rabbi began to mumble.

  “Really dead.”

  “A madman,” someone spat. Isaac had died during the story.

  Absalom wondered about Joseph’s tale. If it were a fanciful lie, he had taken extraordinary care over it.

  “Rabbi,” he asked, “was what he said . . . ?”

  “Nonsense,” the rabbi said, “he was maddened, reciting an old folk tale ...”

  “This Yeshua Bar-Joseph, the Christos . . .”

  “I have never heard of him.”

  “The sign?”

  The rabbi was angry, almost afraid. He didn’t answer.

  Absalom hawked and spat blood.

  The ground seemed to be shaking.

  Around Joseph’s neck were two symbols, a cross and a fish. Absalom reached out to touch them.

  The dead man’s body rippled like water, and dissolved into the ground.

  Astonished, Absalom turned. The rabbi was gone. There had been no witnesses.

  Joseph’s cross was left.

  Obviously, the Christos had not returned. The portent in the sky had been wrong again.

  Absalom picked up the cross, and held it tight in one hand. He held it until he died.

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  * * * *

  Hush My Mouth

  Suzette Haden Elgin

  First time ever I saw a Silent, I was no more than a tiny child; I might have been five years old. And it meant nothing to me. It was just a woman, and not a very pretty one to look at, with her head shaved. I remember her skull; it had a lumpy look to it that bothered me. I had never before seen a bald woman, nor very many bald men. I wasn’t eager to see this one, either, because my sisters had been pushing me on the swing that hung from our black walnut tree, and I had complained bitterly at being made to leave that and go look at this woman passing by.

  But my father paid no mind to my fuss, hauling me up onto his shoulder and almost running out to the edge of the street, the other children hurrying along behind us. He stopped at the curb and he shook me a little bit to be sure he had my attention, and he said to me, “Now you remember that, boy! You put it away in your heart, and you remember it, that there was a morning a Silent walked by your house so close you could’ve touched her if you’d had a mind to!” The woman turned to look at us as she passed, and her smile was the only thing about her not black as the inside of our water well, and Daddy squeezed my thighs where he had me braced on his shoulder and added, “And you remember she smiled at you, child! See you remember that, forevermore!” And I have remembered it, as he told me to do, all these years.

  She smiled at Matthias Darrow, too, him standing down on the corner of our street with his father and his grandmother and his two big brothers. I suppose his mother was busy with her everlasting tending of the sick and with someone she couldn’t leave, even for this occasion. Matthias was there, and all my other friends and their parents, lining both sides of the street to watch a Silent go by on her way to somewhere. I don’t know where she could have been going; nobody told me to concern myself with that. But we all stood and watched her walk to the end of the street, tall and straight and stake-thin in her long black dress. We watched her turn the corner and go on down the side street. Not until she was out of sight did anybody move to leave the curbs and go back to what they had been doing. I remember there was a little bit of a breeze, and it stirred the branches of the pink mimosa and spread their perfume all around; I remember that smell, mimosa and hot dust and the several smells of sluggish summer river, mixed. I can smell it now, as strong as I smelled it that day.

  And I remember Matthias, watching the Silent and shouting out, “Morning, ma’am!” as she went by, and his father clapping a swift hand over his mouth and bending down to tell him that he’d appreciate it if he’d behave like he had good sense, whether he did or not. And Matthias, looking up over Mr Darrow’s huge hand with eyes wide and round and scared, wondering what he’d done.

  * * * *

  Matthias broke this morning. I heard it happen. The Lord God help me, please, I’ll hear it forever, the sound of his head - the sound his head made as he smashed it against the wall of his room. Bare flesh, not a strand of hair to cushion it, smacking against white-washed brick. Seven blows, it took. Seven times, that sound. That unspeakable sound.

  How could a human being have the strength to take his life by battering his own head against a wall? Will you tell me that? How could he stay conscious long enough to get to the fatal blow that ended it? And to do it silently! How in the name of God could you do that and stay silent?

  Matthias did. I could not have done it, but he did. I swear to you, as I shall swear to the judges that come to question me. I will close my eyes three times, signifying NO, when they ask me if Matthias Darrow cried out at the last. His family has no shame coming, for he died without so much as a gasp. And the town we came from, he and I, all those people who were so blazing proud to have two of us choose to be Silents, there’s no shame coming to them, either. We took our vows together, Matthias and I, both of us just seventeen; and now he is gone.

  We were expecting that he would do something. All of us had seen it coming. He had taken to chewing at his lips, so that they were always cracked and bloody. His fingers were forever twitching; he’d notice, and he’d shove them out of sight into the pockets of his robe. We watched him day by day as the tension drew his skin tight to his skull, till the bones strained to shove through the flesh and the whole head gleamed like polished ebony. When he started wearing the leather gag even in the daytime, that foul gag that stands witness to our frailty and guards us from the word spoken in sleep, we knew that he was going to break. If there had been anything we could have done to help him, we would have done it, but there was nothing to do. When the lust for language consumes a man, you can only watch him burn and dedicate your prayers to him.

  We were on our guard on his behalf; we were not just praying. We had taken to being wary around him. When we walked along the balconies of the shelterhouse, one of us would walk at his side next the rail, and two others ahead and behind him, so that he could not throw himself into the courtyard. The elders had begun tasting his food and drink at the table openly, so that if he were so mad as to poison either he would have to take one of them with him into death. We watched what he picked up and what he put down; we went with him when he walked out of the building. At least one of us stayed close by no matter what he was engaged in; we were watchful of our brother. Except in the privacy of his room, where we could not follow.

  I am sure I’m not the only one who wishes we had been more careless. If Matthias had been able to slip poison into his soup in the dining room, it would have been easier for him, and I would not now be hearing in my soul the wet thud of his skull against brick.

  Still. It must be noted that Matthias Darrow did not give in. For his family there will not be the shame of a failed Silent with broken vows, sent home from the shelterhouse in disgrace. He spared them that. He spared all his vast family, spared them the scandal that shames the line down to the cousins many times removed, that is the end of respect and the beginning of a courteous pity that is like a stone hung round the neck. Matthias saw to it that his people did not have that shame to endure. The Lord God help me be as brave if I come to such a pass. The Lord God grant I never come to such a pass, and let my never-ending silent dialogue with my own foolish self be my worst failing.

  * * * *

  All of this, we will be reminded, was born of the sin of pride, beside which murder and debauchery are no more than childish foibles. First the white man’s pride; and that not being foul enough, the black man’s pride to cap it off. Pride, that is not called the worst of all the sins for idle reasons. When the preacher comes this Sunday, that will be his sermon, and his text will be “Pride go
eth before a fall”. There is no room in this house where that text is not burned into a beam or painted over a window. Because of what pride has brought us to.

  If the Union Army had let us serve with them in the Civil War, the North would have won; no one disputes that. President Lincoln himself said it was so - they would have won! But they wouldn’t allow it. Not them. No black man was going to put on the uniform of a Union soldier, or ride a horse of the Union Cavalry, or march in the least last straggling row of the Union infantry. They were told we’d serve in our own clothes, or serve naked, if they felt that would be sufficient to keep us from being mistaken for their comrades at arms. But they were stiff-necked; it made no difference. No black - Negroes, they called us then - no Negro was going to be able to say he had served in the Union Army. We were not fit even to die beside them; that was their position on the matter, and they would not budge from it.

  You’d have thought the Confederates would have had better sense. White and black, we’d played together as children and suckled at the same black breasts as infants and gotten blind drunk together as young men. But the Confederate Army followed the Yankees’ lead, bound they’d outdo them. If a Negro was not good enough to soldier for the Union, well then by god he was twice that not good enough to soldier for the South! Damn fools they were, too, for we would have fought to the death beside them and no quarter given, after the way the Union spurned us.