The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology]

by Edited By Ian Watson

  “This man is not a Muslim. He is not circumcised.”

  “So,” said Charles, “I notice.”

  Even dying, Roland had kept his wits about him. Gold of Byzantium, gold and silver of Gaul. An infidel in Muslim guise. Trap, and battle, and the deaths of great lords of the Franks.

  Here was treachery writ large.

  He read it, writ subtle, in Ganelon’s face. He could never have thought to be so betrayed, and so simply. And by his brainless braggart of a stepson.

  They had all drawn back from him. He seemed just now to realize it. He was white under his elegant beard, struggling to maintain his expression of innocence. Ganelon, who had never made a secret of his hatred for Roland; whose very openness had been deceit. Who would have expected that he would turn traitor? Open attack, surely, daggers drawn in hall, a challenge to a duel; but this, no one had looked for. Least of all, and most damnably of all, the king.

  “It would have been better for you,” Charles said, “if you had killed him before my face. Clean murder bears a clean penalty. For this, you will pay in your heart’s blood.”

  “Pay, sire?” Ganelon struggled even yet to seem baffled. “Surely, sire, you do not think—”

  “I know,” said Charles. His eyes burned. They were wide, he knew, and pale, and terrible. When they fell on the Greek, the man blanched.

  “I am not,” he said, “a part of this. I counselled against it. I foresaw this very outcome.”

  “You sanctioned it with your empress’ gold,” said the king.

  “For what an agent does with his wages, I bear no responsibility.”

  Charles laughed. His guards had drawn in, shoulder to shoulder. If the traitor had any thought of escape, he quelled it. He regarded his quondam ally with no surprise, if with nothing approaching pleasure.

  “You shall be tried,” the king said to him, “where the law commands, before my tribunal in Gaul. I expect that you will receive the extremest penalty. I devoutly pray that you may suffer every pang of guilt and grief and rage to which even a creature of your ilk should be subject.”

  Ganelon stiffened infinitesimally, but not with dismay. Was that the beginning of a smile? “You have no certain proof,” he said.

  “God will provide,” said Charles.

  “God? Or Allah?”

  Bold, that one, looking death in the face. If death it was that he saw. It was a long way to Gaul, and his tongue was serpent-supple. Had not Charles himself been taken in by it?

  Charles met his eyes and made them fall. “Yes,” he said, answering the man’s question. “There you have it. God, or Allah? The Christians’ God, or all the gods of my faith who in the end are one, or the God of the Prophet? Would you have me choose now? Julian is dead, his teachings forgotten everywhere but in my court. The Christ lives; the sons of the Prophet rule in Baghdad, and offer alliance. I know what I am in this world. Byzantium dares to hope in me, to hold back the armies of Islam. Islam knows that without me it can never rule in the north of the world. How does it twist in you, betrayer of kin, to know that I am the fulcrum on which the balance rests?”

  “Islam,” said Ganelon without a tremor, “offers you the place of a vassal king. Byzantium would make you its emperor.”

  “So it would. And such a marriage it would be, I ruling here in Gaul, and she on the Golden Horn. Or would I be expected to settle in Constantinople? Who then would rule my people? You, kinslayer? Is that the prize you played for?”

  “Better I than a wild boy who could never see a battle without flinging himself into the heart of it.”

  The king’s fist lashed out. Ganelon dropped. “Speak no ill of the dead,” Charles said.

  The others were silent. They did not press him; and yet it was there, the necessity, the making of choices. If he would take vengeance for this slaughter, he must move now.

  He began to smile. It was not, he could well sense, pleasant to see. “Yes,” he said. “Revenge. It’s fortunate for my sister-son, is it not, that I’m pagan, and no Christian, to have perforce to forgive. You plotted well, kinslayer. You thought to turn me against Islam and cast me into the empress’ arms. Would there be a dagger for me there? Or, more properly Greek, poison in my cup?”

  Sire,” said Ganelon, and that was desperation, now, at last. “Sire, do not judge the empire by the follies of a single servant.”

  “I would never do that,” Charles said. “But proof of long conviction will do well enough. I will never set my people under the Byzantine heel. Even with the promise of a throne. Thrones can pass, like any other glory of this world; and swiftly, if those who offer them are so minded.”

  “Still, my lord, you cannot choose Islam. Would you betray all that the Divine Julian fought for? Would you turn against Rome herself?”

  If the Greek had said it, Charles would have responded altogether differently. But it was Ganelon who spoke, and Ganelon who felt the pain of it.

  “I am,” said Charles, “already, in the caliph’s eyes, his emir over Spain. I am not able for the moment to press the claim. Gaul needs me, and Gaul is mine first. If Baghdad will want the justice in that, then,” he said, “I choose Islam.”

  No thunder roared in the sky; no shaking rent the earth. There were only a handful of men in a narrow pass, and the dead, and the sun too low still to cast its light on them. Spain was behind them; the mountain before and beyond it, Gaul. What its king chose, it also would choose. He knew his power there.

  He bent and took up Roland’s horn. It rang softly, bearing still a weight of imperial gold. With it in his hands, he said the words which he must say. If his conviction was not yet as pure as it might be, then surely he would be forgiven. He was doing it for Gaul, and for the empire that would be. But before even that, for Roland who was his sister’s son, who had died for Byzantine gold.

  Charles was, when it came to it, a simple man. The choice had not been simple, until Ganelon made it so. A better traitor than he knew, that one. Traitor even to his own cause.

  “ There is no god but God,” said the king of the Franks and the Lombards, “and Muhammad is the Prophet of God.”

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  * * * *

  The English Mutiny

  Ian R. MacLeod

  I was there. I was fucking there.

  I know that’s what they say, all of us English anyway, and half the rest of the Empire besides. The fact that people think they can make that claim—tell anyone who’ll listen to them how they survived the atrocities and sieges—is supposed to be evidence enough. But I was. I was there. Right at the beginning, and way, way earlier than that. I knew Private Sepoy Second Class Johnny Sponson of the Devonshires long before that name meant anything. More than knew the guy, the bastard, the sadhu holy monster, the saint—whatever you want to call him. I loved him. I hated him. He saved my fucking life.

  Me? I was just a soldier, a squaddie, another sepoy of the Mughal Empire. I really didn’t count. Davey Whittings, Sir, Sahib, and where do you want that latrine dug? Always was—just like my dad and his dad before him. All took the Resident’s rupee and gave their blood. No real sense of what we were, other than targets for enemy cannon. Stand up and salute or drop down and die. Nobody much cared what the difference was, either, least of all us.

  But Johnny Sponson was different. Johnny came out of nowhere with stories you wouldn’t believe and a way of talking that sounded like he was forever taking the piss. In a way, he was. In a way, he was shitting us all with his tall good looks and his la di da. But he was also deadly earnest.

  This was at the start of the Scottish campaign. One of them anyway—rebellious bastards that the Scots are, I know there’s been a lot. Never really saw that much of Johnny at first as we marched north through England. But I knew there was this new guy with us who liked the look of his reflection and the sound of his voice. Could hear him sometimes as I lay trying to get some sleep. Holding forth.

  But no—no ... Already, I’m getting this wrong. The way I’m describin
g Johnny Sponson, someone like him would never have got as far as being torn apart by Scottish guns. He’d have copped it long before in a parade ground misfire with some sepoy—oops, sorry Sarge, silly me—leaning the wrong way on his musket. Or maybe a garrote in the night. Anything, really, just to shut the loudmouthed fucker up. But with Johnny, there was always something extra—a tale beyond the tale he was spinning or some new scam to make the half-blood NCOs look like even bigger cunts than they already were. Even then, even before the revolt, mutiny, freedom war, whatever you want to call it, Johnny simply didn’t give the tiniest fuck about all the usual military bullshit. He was an original. He was a one-off.

  Johnny might have been just a private, a sepoy, lowest of the low, but he’d grown up as Lord-in-waiting on one of the last English estates. Learned to read and fight and fence and dance and talk there, and do all the other things he could do so much better than the rest of us combined. Even I was listening to Johnny’s stories by the time we crossed Hadrian’s Wall. We all were. And the place he was describing that he’d come from didn’t sound much like the England I knew. There were no factories or hovels or beggars. I pictured it as a world of magic—like so-called Mother India or heaven, but somehow different and better still. The landscapes were softer, the skies less huge. I saw green lawns and cozy rooms filled with golden warmth, and the whole thing felt real to me the way things only can when you’re marching toward battle and your back aches and your feet hurt. It was a fine place, was Johnny’s estate, and all of it was taken from him because some Indian vakil lawyer came up with a scrap of ancient paper that disproved the Sponson family title.

  The way Johnny told his story, it span on like those northern roads we had to march. He used words we’d never heard. Words like right and liberty and nation. Words like reversion, which was how the Mughal Empire had swallowed up so much of England when the country was rightly ours. Bankrupted, disinherited, thrown out on the streets, Johnny had had no choice but to sign up for the Resident’s rupee like the rest of us. And so here he was, marching north behind the elephants with the rest of us Devonshires to fight the savage bloody Scots.

  Never seen such mountains before. Never felt such cold. The Scottish peasants, they live in slum hovels that would make a sorry dump like York or Bristol seem lovely as Hyderabad. They reek of burned dung. The women came to our camps at night, offering to let us fuck them for half a loaf of bread. They’d let you do it, as well, before they slipped a dagger into your ribs and scarpered off with the bread. Can’t even remember how I got hit exactly. We were on this high, wind-bitten road. Elephants pulling the ordnance ahead. Then a whoosh. Then absolute silence, and I was staring at a pool of my own steaming guts. It seemed easy, just to lie there on the frozen road. I mean, what the hell difference did it make? Private Davey Whittings, second class. Snap your heels, stand up straight lad, salute the flag of Empire and pay good attention to the cleanliness of your gun. Death or glory, just like my dad always used to say before beating me for something I hadn’t done.

  But the voice I heard was Private Johnny Sponson’s, not my dad’s at all. My dad’s been dead these last fifteen years, and I hope the bastard didn’t give the vultures too much bellyache. But I was raving about him—and how my dear mum had then done the decent thing and walked into a furnace—as Johnny pushed my insides back where they belonged, then lifted me up and tied me to what was left of a wagon. Then, seeing as all the elephants were dead and the bullocks were all shot to mincemeat, he started to haul me himself back along that windy road for ... I really don’t know how many days, how many miles.

  At the end of it, there was this military hospital. I already knew all about military fucking hospitals. If you wanted to live, you avoided such places like the plague. If you wanted to die, it was far better to die on a battlefield. Without Johnny Sponson there, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. The whole place was freezing. Wet tents in a lake of mud. Got me through, though, Johnny did. Found me enough blankets to stop me freezing solid. Changed the dressings on my wound, nagged the nurses to give me some of the half-decent food they otherwise saved for themselves. Bastard saved my fucking life. So in a way I was the first of Johnny Sponson’s famous miracles, least as far as I know. But Christ wasn’t there, and neither was Mohammed or Shakti. Johnny wasn’t some ghost or saint or angel like the way you’d hear some people talk. It was just him, and he was just being Johnny, and filling my head with his Johnny Sponson stories. Which was more than enough.

  Told me how half the platoon had got killed or injured in that Scottish bombardment. Told me how he’d fluked his way around the cannonfire in the same way he’d fluked his way around most things. Then he’d seen me lying there with half of me insides out and decided I could do with some help. Suppose he could have saved someone else—someone with a far better chance of living than I ever had. Why me? All the time I knew him, I never thought to ask.

  Johnny told me many things. How, for example, little England had once been a power to be reckoned with in the world. How this guy called William Hawkins had once sailed all the way around the Horn of Africa to India back in the days when the Mughal Empire didn’t even cover all of India let alone Europe, and no one had even dreamed of the Egyptian Canal. How Hawkins arrived in pomp at the court of Jehangir. How, the way things had been back then, he’d been an emissary from equal kingdoms. No, more than that, because Hawkins had sailed from England to India, and not the other way around. After that, there’d been trade, of course. Spices and silks, mainly, from India—with English wool and the sort of cheap gewgaws we were already getting so good at manufacturing in return. The stuff became hugely fashionable, so Johnny assured me, which always helps.

  So there we were, the English and the Mughals, equal partners, and safely half a world away from each other, and between us lay the Portuguese, who were traveling and trading as well. Then something changed. I was still half in and out of my fever, but I remember Johnny shaking his head. Like, for just this once, he didn’t know the answer. Something, he kept saying, as if he couldn’t figure what. Of course, these were difficult times, the sort the priests will still tell you about—when it snowed in England one sunless August and the starving ate the dead, and the Mughals expanded across India looking for food and supplies—looking for allies, as well. They could have turned to England, I suppose. That was what Johnny said, anyway. But the Mughals turned to Portugal instead. A great armada was formed, and we English were defeated, and the Mughal Empire expanded all that way to the northerly fringes of Europe. I know, I know—I remember Johnny clapping his hands and laughing and shaking his head. Bloody ridiculous—England and India united by an Empire, which has since pushed south and west across France and Spain and Prussia, and east from India across all the lands of Araby. Half the world taken as if in some fit of forgetfulness, and who the hell knows why...

  So I recovered in that hospital with a scar on my belly and a strange new way of looking at things. Sometimes, it sounded to me as if Johnny was just talking to himself. In a way, I think he was. Practicing what he wanted to say in those famous speeches that came not long after. He certainly had a way of talking, did Johnny. So much of the truth’s lost now, but Johnny really was an educated man. He’d say the words of writers written years ago in English, of all languages—instead of proper Persian or Hindi or Arabic—as if they were fresh as baked bread.

  There was this Shakes-something, and I thought at first Johnny meant an Arab prince. I can even remember some. If it is a sin to covert honor, then I am the most offending soul. That was one of them. Learned from his tutors, who taught him about the old ways of England in that fine estate before the Mughals took it away from him like the greedy bloodsucking bastards they are. Not that Johnny would put it so bluntly, but I learned that from him as well—how it wasn’t as simple as the Indians being in charge and us English being the servants, the sepoys, the ones who worked the mines and choked on our own blood to keep their palaces warm.

  Death. Guns. S
pit and blood and polish. How to use a bayonet in the daylight of battle and a garrote in the dark. That was all I knew before Johnny Sponson came along. I was never that much of a drinker, or a chancer, or a gambler of any kind. Don’t stand out—that was the only thing I’d ever learned from my dear departed dad, bastard that he was. I spent most of what little spare time I had, and even littler spare thought, on wandering around whatever place I happened to be billeted. Liked to look up at the buildings and over the bridges and stand outside the temples, just studying the scene. Watch the sadhu beggars with their ash-smeared bodies, their thin ribs and twisted and amputated limbs. I was fascinated by the things they did, the way they adorned and painted what was left of themselves, affixed it with hooks and nails and bamboo pins. But what struck me most was the contrast—the beauty of their aspiration to be one with God, and the ugliness of what you actually saw. And the ways they smiled and rocked and moaned and screamed—was that pain, or was it ecstasy? I never really understood.

  Those of us Devonshires considered alive enough to be worth saving were put on board this ship which was to take us to our next posting in London. The winter weather was kind to us on that journey south. The cold winds pushed us easily and the sea was smooth, and the sailors were good at turning a blind eye in the way that sailors generally are. We sepoys lay out there on the deck underneath the stars with the sconces burning, and we talked and we danced and we drank. And Johnny, being Johnny, talked and drank and danced most of all.