The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology]

by Edited By Ian Watson

  But there were too many of them; and the cavalry shield was little use in building the Roman shieldwall. Frayed already by startlement and rage and the Franks’ inborn resistance to marching in step, they tore apart as the enemy rallied. Men were down. Oliver could not count, could not reckon. He had his own life to look after, and his brother’s.

  Roland was always calm enough when a battle began, well able to array his troops and judge their moment. But let his sword taste blood and he was lost.

  Someone was on Roland’s other side, sword-side to Oliver’s shield-side. Turpin, again. He had the bull of Mithras on his shield. It seemed to dance among the fallen, its white hide speckled with blood.

  Oliver’s foot slipped. He spared a glance for it: blood, entrails, a hand that cracked like bunched twigs under his boot. His eye caught a flash; his spear swung round, swift, swift, but almost too late. Fool’s recompense, for casting eye on aught but the enemy. The good ash shaft jarred on steel and shattered. He thrust it in a howling face, let it fall, snatched out his sword. Roland’s was out already, his named-blade Durandal, running with blood.

  Most often a battle runs like the sea: in ebbs and flows, in eddies and swirls and moments of stillness. But that is where armies are matched, and one side cannot count twenty men for every man of the other. Here, there were no respites. Only battle, and battle, and more battle. Death on every side, no time even for despair. They three had fought their way clear to the front of the battle and backed against the wall of the pass, as high up as the fallen stones would allow. Through the press of the fight they could see the downward way: a roil of ants in the nest, no head raised that did not wear a turban, and everywhere the sight and stench of slaughter.

  Oliver, turning a bitter blow, was numb to the marrow. So soon? he wondered. So soon, they are all fallen?

  So soon, in their heavy armour that was never made for fighting on foot, dragged down and slaughtered by the sheer mass of their enemies. His arm was leaden. He flailed at a stroke he barely saw, and never saw the one that glanced off his helmet. He staggered, head ringing, and fell to one knee. Lightning smote the man who stooped to the kill.

  Durandal, and Roland’s face behind it, white in the helmet, burning-eyed. He had dropped his shield, or lost it. His olifant was in his hand.

  Oliver cursed him, though he had no breath to spare for it. “What use now? It will never bring the king. He’s too far ahead.”

  Roland gave a yelling savage a second, blood-fountained mouth, and sent him reeling back among his fellows. For an impossible moment, none came forward in his place. There were easier pickings elsewhere; a whole baggage train to plunder. Roland set the horn to his lips.

  Oliver, who knew what he would hear, clapped hands to his ears. Even that was barely enough to blunt the edge of it. The great horn roared like the aurochs from which it was won; shrieked up to heaven; sang a long plaint of wrath and valour and treachery. Roland’s face was scarlet. A thin trail of blood trickled down from his ear.

  The horn dropped, swung on its baldric. Roland half-fell against Oliver. Turpin caught him; they clung to one another. The enemy had frozen in their places. Many had fallen, smitten down by the power of the horn.

  They rose like grass when the wind has faded. They turned their faces towards the three of all their prey who yet lived. They reckoned anew their numbers, and the number that opposed them. They laughed, and fell upon them.

  Oliver could not reckon the moment when he knew that one of his wounds was mortal. It was not when he took the wound, he was reasonably sure of that. He had others in plenty, and they were in his way, shedding blood to weaken his arm and foul his footing. But this one was weakening him too quickly. He found himself on the ground, propped against the rock, trying to lift his sword. A foot held him down. It was Roland’s; that came to him when he tried to hack at it and the voice over his head cursed him in his brother’s voice. “Sorry,” he tried to say. “Can’t see. Can’t—”

  “Be quiet,” said Roland fiercely. Oliver was too tired to object. Except that he wanted to say something. He could not remember what. Something about horns. And kings. And turbans, with faces under them. Faces that should be - should be-

  * * * *

  “Oliver.”

  Somebody was crying. It sounded like Roland. Roland did not often cry. Oliver wondered why he was doing it now. Had something happened? Was the king hurt? Dead? No, Oliver could not conceive of that. The king would never die. The king would live forever.

  Oliver blinked. There was Roland’s face, hanging over him. Another by it: Turpin’s. They looked like corpses. “Am I dead?” Oliver asked, or tried to. “Is this Hades? Or the Muslims’ Paradise? Or—”

  “You talk too much,” Roland growled.

  They were alive. But it was very quiet. Too quiet. No shrilling of enemy voices. Unless that were they, faint and far away and fading slowly, like wind in empty places.

  “They’re gone,” the priest said, as if he could understand what Oliver was thinking. Maybe he could. Priests were unchancy folk. But good: very good, in a fight. “They took what they came for.”

  “Did they?”

  They both heard that. Roland glared. “Wasn’t the king’s whole baggage train enough?”

  “You,” Oliver said. “You live. Still.”

  Roland burst into tears again. But he looked worse than furious. He looked deadly dangerous.

  The dark was closing in. “Brother,” Oliver said through it, shouting in full voice against the failing of his body. “Brother, look. The enemy. Turbans - turbans wrong. Not Saracen. Can you understand? Not Saracen.”

  Maybe Oliver dreamed it. Maybe he only needed to hear it. But it was there, on the other side of the night. “I understand.”

  * * * *

  “I understand,” Roland said. The weight in his arms was no greater and no less. But suddenly it was the weight of a world.

  He knew the heft of death in his arms. Not Oliver, not now: not those wide blue eyes, emptying of life as they had, moments since, emptied of light.

  He flung his head back and keened.

  “My lord.” Dry voice, with calm behind it. Turpin was weary: he had lain down beside Oliver, maybe with some vanishing hope of keeping him warm.

  Or himself. Not all the blood on him was the enemy’s. Some of it was bright with newness, glistening as it welled from a deep spring.

  Dying, all of them. Roland, too. The enemy had seen to that before they left. He had not intended to tell either of his companions about the blade that stabbed from below, or the reason why he held himself so carefully when he rose. When he had finished doing what he must do, he would let go. It would not be a slow death, or an easy one, but it was certain. A good death for a fool, when all was considered.

  He spoke lightly; he was proud of that lightness. “I’m going to see if I can find our fellows,” he said to the one who could hear him and the one who was past it: “give them a word of passage; cast earth on the ones who’ll need it.”

  Turpin nodded. He did not offer to rise. But there was, Roland judged, a little life in him yet. Enough to mount guard over Oliver, and keep the crows from his eyes. They were feasting already and long since, and the vultures with them: racing against the fall of the dark.

  He walked the field in the gathering twilight, dim-lit by the glow of the sky above him. The birds of battle were as thick as flies; but where they were thickest, there he knew he would find his men. Two here, three there, five fallen together in the remnant of a shieldring. The king’s seneschal, the count of his palace, the palatium that was not a thing of walls and stone but of the household that went with the king wherever he journeyed. Lost, here, gone down the long road with men in knotted turbans.

  But not all of those who had come to seize it had left the field. Many of their dead, they had taken, but they had left many, pressed by the fall of the dark and the need to escape with their booty before the King of the Franks swept down in the full force of his wrath
. There at Roland’s feet, locked in embrace like lovers, lay a camp follower who had lost her man at Pamplona, and a brigand; but there was a knife in his heart and a look of great surprise on his face. Roland could not tell if she smiled. There was too little left of her

  The man, sheltered by her body, was barely touched by the crows. Roland grasped him by the foot and dragged him into what light there was. The turban fell from a matted and filthy head. Roland bent to peer. The face - anonymous dead face. But odd. Ruthlessly he rent the tunic away from neck and breast and belly. The trousers, he need hardly tear at. He saw beneath them all that he needed to see.

  His breath left him in a long sigh. With care, holding his middle lest his entrails spill upon the ground, he made his way among the enemy’s dead. All; all alike.

  Not far from the place where Oliver had died, he found the last thing, the thing that drained the strength from his legs, the life from his body. But he smiled. He took what he needed, and the body with it, crawling now. The night, which seemed to have waited for him, fell at last.

  Turpin was stiff and still. Oliver lay untouched beside him, familiar bulk gone unfamiliar in death. Roland kissed him, and with every last vestige of his strength, staggered upright. The stars stared down. “Allah!” he called out. His voice rang in the gorge. “Allah! Will you take us all, if I speak for us? Will you, then? He’d like your Paradise, my brother. All the lovely maidens. Will you take him if I ask?”

  The stars were silent. Roland laughed and flung up Durandal. He had, somehow, remembered to scour the blade of blood: prudence worn to habit. A pity for a good sword to die, though its master must. Take my sword, Allah. Take my soul and my oath; if only you take my brother with it. You’ll find him waiting hereabout. Come, do you hear him whispering? He’d say it with me if he could. Listen! There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God.”

  The echoes throbbed into silence. Roland sank down in them. His heart was light. In a little while he was going to convulse in agony, but for this moment, he knew no pain. Only a white, mad joy. To have chosen, and chosen so. To have taken the purest revenge of all, on Ganelon who had betrayed him.

  Oliver was waiting. Roland laid Durandal on the broad breast, and his head beside it, and sighed. Then at last, with all the courage that was left in him, he let go.

  * * * *

  3

  Charles the king stood once more on the sweet soil of Gaul, the horrors of the pass behind him, the army finding new vigour in the sight of their own country spread below. But he was not easy in his mind. Word from the rear was unvarying. No sign of the baggage. A scout or two, sent out, did not return.

  As the sun sank low, he called a halt. Without the baggage they could not raise a proper camp, but every man had his store of food and drink, and many had women who marched with them and carried the necessities of living. They settled willingly enough.

  The king left his servants to make what shift they could with what they had, and rode back a little, up towards the pass. One or two men rode with him. The empress’ ambassador; the caliph’s man, not to be outflanked; Ganelon. Beyond the fringe of the army, the king paused.

  “Do you hear a horn?” he asked.

  They glanced at one another. “A horn?” Ganelon inquired. “No, sire. I hear nothing but the wind.”

  “Yes,” said Charles. “The wind. That’s what it must be. But I could have sworn . . .”

  “My lord’s ears are excellent,” the Arab said. No; Charles should be precise, even in his mind. The man was a Persian. The Persian, then, and a smoothly smiling fellow he was, oily as a Greek, and yet, for all of that, a man worth liking. “Perhaps he hears the rearguard as it comes through the pass.”

  “Perhaps,” said Ganelon. The Greek, for a marvel, said nothing at all.

  They sat their tired horses, waiting, because the king waited. He could not bring himself to turn away. He had not liked the pass as he scaled it, and he had not liked the failure of his scouts to come back. Still less did he like his folly in letting the rearguard fall so far behind. He had been in haste to abandon the pass, to see his own lands again. He had let himself be persuaded to press on. The one man he sent back to find the rearguard, had not found him again.

  In the falling dark, in silence barely troubled by the presence of an army, he saw what he had willed not to see. He saw it with brutal clarity; he knew it for what it was. There was no pain, yet. Later, there would be; a whole world of it. But now, only numbness that was not blessed. Oh, no. Not blessed at all. “They are dead,” he said, “my Bretons. There was an ambush in the pass.”

  “My lord,” said Ganelon, “you cannot know that. They will have been sensible: seen that night was falling, and stopped, and made camp. In time their messenger will come. Only wait, and rest. You can hardly ride back now. Night will catch you before you mount the pass.”

  “Yes,” said Charles. “It will, won’t it?”

  His voice must have betrayed more than he knew. Ganelon stiffened; his mouth set. His eyes darted. Charles noticed where they fell first. The Byzantine refused them, gazing expressionless where Charles’s mind and heart were.

  With great care, the king unknotted his fists. He had no proof. He had nothing but the feeling in his bones, and the absence of his rearguard. His valiant, reluctant, pitifully inadequate rearguard.

  He was, first of all, king. He turned his back on the pass of Roncesvalles, and went to see his army.

  * * * *

  The king did not sleep that night. When he drowsed, his mind deluded him: gave him the far cry of a horn, a great olifant, blown with the desperation of a dying man. Roland was dead. He knew it. Dead in battle; dead by treachery.

  He rose before dawn. His army slept; he silenced the trumpeter who would have roused them. “Let them sleep,” he said. “We go nowhere until the baggage comes.”

  When his horse came, others came with it. The Greek and the Persian, again and perpetually; Ganelon; a company of his guardsmen. He greeted them with a nod. They were all, like the king, armed as if to fight. It was odd to see the Byzantine in mail, carrying a sword. Charles had not known that he owned either.

  Morning rose with them, surmounted the pass, sped above them while they went down. They picked their way with care, finding no trace of the baggage, and nothing ahead of them but fading darkness.

  A wall of tumbled stones where none had been before, woke in the king no surprise, not even anger. Wordlessly he dismounted, handed his horse to the man nearest, and set himself to scale the barrier. It was not high, if much confused. At the top of it he paused.

  He had expected nothing less than what he saw. He had seen sights like it ever since he could remember. But it was never an easy thing to see; even when the dead were all the enemy’s.

  Someone had seen to the dead of Gaul. Each was consecrated in his own fashion: a cross drawn in blood on the brow of the Christian, a scattering of earth for him who held to Julian’s creed, a simple laying out in dignity for the follower of Mithras or of the old faith. But hope, having swelled, died swiftly. No living man walked that field.

  Beyond them, as if they had made a last stand, lay three together. Turpin the priest of Mithras with his bones given to the birds of the air, and Roland and Oliver in one another’s arms as they had been since they shared their milkmother’s breast. They had died well, if never easily.

  The king was aware, distantly but very clearly, of the men nearest him: Greek, Persian, Frankish counsellor. None ventured to touch the dead. He knelt beside them, and gently, as if the boy could feel it still, took Roland in his arms.

  Roland clasped something to his breast, even in death. His olifant. Which Charles had heard; he was certain of it now. Heard, and never come. The king steadied it as it slipped. It was heavier than it should be, unwieldy. It eluded the king’s hand and fell, spilling brightness on the grass.

  Byzantine gold. And mingled with it, the rougher coin of Gaul, and Charles’ face on every one.

  He
did not glance, even yet, at his companions. There was a message here; he was meant to read it. At the brothers’ feet lay one of the enemy’s dead, whom Charles had had no eyes to see. But there was no other close by, and this one looked to have been brought here.

  Charles laid Roland again in Oliver’s arms, and examined the body. He was perfectly, icily calm. Intent on his own dead, he had not seen more than that the enemy wore turbans over dark faces. This one’s turban had fallen beside him; his tunic was rent and torn, baring white skin, skin too white for the face. And between them, a ragged line, the stain rubbed on in haste with no expectation of need for greater concealment. And, below, what Charles did not need the Persian to say for him.