The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (23 page)

Hisdai had barely taken his place in the feasting hall when Daud returned and whispered something in his ear.

“A job?” Hisdai echoed. “That renegade Genoese betrays us and you give him a job?”

“Why not?” Daud made a lazy, beckoning gesture, and one of Moctezuma’s doe-eyed waiting-women hastened to fetch a tray of chilled melon slices. As part of the Great Khan’s favourite nephew’s entourage, these select highborn ladies had been definitely off limits for the course of the voyage. Now, however, they were just another gift to Lord Quetzalcoatl’s household. “You didn’t want to be bothered.”

Hisdai lowered his eyes. “I feared having my enemies in my power. Nothing reduces a man to his animal nature faster than the opportunity for exacting unlimited revenge.”

“Most admirable. Which was precisely why I sent Christopher Columbus to deliver your will to our - I mean, your new subjects.”

“My will? How, when I never stated it?”

“Not precisely, perhaps, but I assumed you wished the captives be shown mercy.”

“True.”

“You just couldn’t trust yourself to say as much with Isabella addressing you so - unwisely.”

“And shall I trust the Genoese to do as much? The Catholic Monarchs scorned him once. Has he the strength of character to resist paying them back now?”

“Perhaps not.” Daud ogled the waiting-woman, and she returned a look of most exquisite promise. “Which was why I told him Moctezuma has already been advised that the fate of one captive is the fate of all.”

Hisdai relaxed visibly. “My son, you are wise. But - you did tell him to request compassionate treatment? You are certain? Does Columbus know enough of the Cathayan tongue to make himself understood beyond doubt?”

Daud sighed. “Alas, no. Christopher Columbus is a man of vision, not linguistics. Which was why I took the precaution of having Moshe ibn Ahijah translate the
exact
words our once-admiral should relay to Lord Moctezuma.”

The waiting-woman knelt beside him with seductive grace, offering her tray and more besides for Daud’s inspection. Rumour had it that she and the others were ranked as princesses in their own land. Idly Daud wondered whether - the lady’s eventual conversion permitting - such a match would satisfy Hisdai. So caught up was he in these pleasant musings that he did not hear his father’s next question.

“Daud! Daud, wake up. I asked you something.”

“Hmm? And what was that, O my fondle - father?”

“What he
said.
What you told the Genoese to
say.”

“Oh, that. I kept it simple. I told him to say—”

From somewhere outside a loud cheer from many throats assaulted heaven, loud enough certainly to cover the lesser cry of one man surprised by the religious practices of another.

“ - have a heart.”

<>

* * * *

Ink From the New Moon

A. A. Attanasio

Here, at the farthest extreme of my journey, in the islands along the eastern shores of the Sandalwood Territories, with all of heaven and earth separating us - here, at long last, I have found enough strength to pen these words to you. Months of writing official reports, of recording endless observations of bamboo drill-derricks and cobblestone canals irrigating horizons of plowed fields, of interviewing sooty laborers in industrial barns and refineries roaring with steam engines and dazzling cauldrons of molten metal, of scrutinizing prisoners toiling in salt-canyons, of listening to schoolchildren sing hymns in classrooms on tree-crowned hilltops and in cities agleam with gold-spired pavilions and towers of lacquered wood - all these tedious annotations had quite drained me of the sort of words one writes to one’s wife. But, finally, I feel again the place where the world is breathing inside me.

Forgive my long silence, Heart Wing. I would have written sooner had not my journey across the Sandalwood Territories of Dawn been an experience for me blacker than ink can show. Being so far from the homeland, so far from you, has dulled the heat of my life. Darkness occupies me. Yet, this unremitting gloom brings with it a peculiar knowledge and wisdom all its own - the treasure that the snake guards - the so-called poison cure. Such is the blood’s surprise, my precious one, that even in the serpent’s grip of dire sorrow, I should find a clarity greater than any since my failures took me from you.

You, of course, will only remember me as you left me - a sour little man for whom being Third Assistant Secretarial Scribe at the Imperial Library served more as punishment than privilege; the husband whittled away by shame and envy, whom you dutifully bid farewell from our farm’s moon gate on the avenue of chestnuts. All so long ago, it seems. What a humiliation that the only way I could support you was to leave you. And for such an ignoble task - to examine the social structure of rebel provinces that have repudiated our finest traditions. I was so embittered that for most of my journey I referred to the region as the Sandalwood Territories of the Dawn, as if their secession from the Kingdom had happened only in their minds, two hundred years of independence from us an illusion before the forty-five centuries of our written history. Even their name for themselves seemed sheer arrogance: the Unified Sandalwood Autocracies. As if there could be any true autocracy but the Emperor’s. Still, the Imperial Court had selected me to regard them as if they possessed authenticity, and I had to humble myself or face the ignominy of losing even this menial job.

I never said any of this to you then. I could barely admit it to myself. Yet, I need to say it clearly now - all of it, the obvious and the obscure - to make sense of my life and yours. Yes, I do admit, I was ashamed, most especially in your eyes. Only you, Heart Wing, know me for who I truly am - a storyteller hooked on the bridebait of words, writing by the lamp of lightning. Even so, my books, those poor, defenseless books, written in the lyrical style of a far-gone time! - well, as you know too well, we reaped no livelihood from those printed pages. My only success as a writer was that my stories won you for me. After our blunderful attempt to farm the Western Provinces, to live the lives of field-and-stream poets - a defiance of destiny and station that cost us your health and the life of our one child - after that, all my pride indeed soured to cynicism and self-pity. I felt obliged to accept the Imperial post, because there seemed no other recourse.

From that day, eighteen moons ago, until now, the shadow of night has covered me. I was not there to console you in your grief when our second child fell from your womb before he was strong enough to carry his own breath. By then, the big ship had already taken me to the Isles of the Palm Grove Vow in the middle of the World Sea. There, I sat surrounded by tedious tomes of Imperial chronicles about the Sandalwood Territories, while you suffered alone.

Like you, I never had a taste for the dry magisterial prose of diplomacy and the bitter punctuations of war that is history. What did it matter to me that five centuries ago, during the beginning of our modern era in the Sung Dynasty, the Buddhists, persecuted for adhering to a faith of foreign origin, set sail from the Middle Kingdom and, instead of being devoured by seven hundred dragons or plunging into the Maelstrom of the Great Inane, crossed nine thousand
li
of ocean and discovered a chain of tropical islands populated by Stone Age barbarians? Of what consequence was it to me that these islands, rich in palm, hardwoods, and the fragrant sandalwood beloved of furniture makers, soon attracted merchants and the Emperor’s soldiers? And that, once again, the Buddhists felt compelled to flee, swearing their famous Palm Grove Vow to sail east until they either faced death together or found a land of their own? And that, after crossing another seven thousand
li
of ocean, they arrived at the vast Land of Dawn, from whose easternmost extreme I am writing to you?

Surely, you are pursing your lips now with impatience, wondering why I burden you with so much bothersome history, you, a musician’s daughter, who always preferred the beauty of song to the tedium of facts. Stay with me yet, Heart Wing. My discovery, the hard-won clarity gained through my poison cure, will mean less to you without some sharing of what I have learned of this land’s history.

We know from our school days that the merchants eventually followed the Buddhists to the Land of Dawn, where the gentle monks had already converted many of the aboriginal tribes. Typical of the Buddhists, they did not war with the merchants but retreated further east, spreading their doctrine among the tribes and gradually opening the frontier to other settlers. Over time, as the Imperialists established cities and trade routes, the monks began preaching the foolishness of obeisance to a Kingdom far across the World Sea. “Here and now!” the monks chanted, the land of our ancestors being too far away and too entrenched in the veil of illusion to be taken seriously any more. Though the Buddhists themselves never raised a weapon against the Emperor, the merchants and farmers eagerly fought for them, revolting against Imperialist taxation. And out of the Sandalwood Territories of the Dawn, the settlers founded their own country: the Unified Sandalwood Autocracies.

There are numerous kingdoms here in the USA, each governed by an autocrat elected by the landowners of that kingdom. These separate kingdoms are, in turn, loosely governed by an overlord whom the autocrats and the landowners elect from among themselves to serve for an interval of no more than fifty moons. It is an alien system that the denizens here call Power of the People, and it is fraught with strife, as the conservative Confucians, liberal Buddhists, and radical Taoist-aboriginals continually struggle for dominance. Here, the Mandate of Heaven is not so much granted by celestial authority as taken by wiles, wealth, or force, grasped and clawed for.

I will not trouble you with this nation’s paradoxical politics: its abhorrence of monarchs, yet its glorification of leaders; its insistence on separation of government and religion, yet its reliance on oaths, prayers, and moralizing; its passionate patriotism, yet fervent espousal of individual endeavor. There are no slaves here as at home, and so there is no dignity for the upper classes, or even for the lower classes, for all are slaves to money. The commonest street sweeper can invest his meager earnings to form his own road-maintenance company and after years of slavery to his enterprise become as wealthy as nobility. And, likewise, the rich can squander their resources and, without the protection of servants or class privilege, become street beggars. And not just men but women as well, who possess the same rights as men. Amitabha! This land has lost entirely the sequence of divine order that regulates our serene sovereignty. And though there are those who profit by this increase of social and economic mobility, it is by and large a country mad with, and subverted by, its own countless ambitions. In many ways, it is, I think, the Middle Kingdom turned upside down.

The rocky west coast, rife with numerous large cities, is the industrial spine of this nation, as is the east coast in our land. On the seaboard, as in our kingdom, refineries, paper mills, textile factories, and shipbuilding yards abound. Inland are the lush agricultural valleys - and then the mountains and beyond them the desert - just as in our country. Where to the north in our homeland the Great Wall marches across mountains for over four thousand
li,
shutting out the Mongol hordes, here an equally colossal wall crosses the desert to the south, fending off ferocious tribes of Aztecatl.

Heart Wing, there is even a village on the eastern prairie, beyond the mountains and the red sandstone arches of the desert, that looks very much like the village on the Yellow River where we had our ruinous farm. There, in a bee-filled orchard just like the cherry grove where we buried our daughter, my memory fetched back to when I held her bird-light body in my arms for the last time. I wept. I wanted to write to you then, but there were irrigation networks to catalog and, on the horizons of amber wheat and millet, highways to map hundreds of
li
long, where land boats fly faster than horses, their colorful sails fat with wind.

Beyond the plains lies the Evil East, which is what the Dawn Settlers call their frontier, because said hinterland is dense with ancient forests no ax has ever touched. Dawn legends claim that the hungry souls of the unhappy dead wander those dense woods. Also, tribes of hostile aboriginals who have fled the settled autocracies of the west shun the Doctrine of the Buddha and the Ethics of Confucius and reign there, as anarchic and wild as any Taoist could imagine.

When our delegation leader sought volunteers to continue the survey into that wilderness, I was among those who offered to go. I am sorry, Heart Wing, that my love for you was not enough to overcome my shame at the failures that led to our child’s death and that took me from you. Wild in my grief, I sought likeness in that primeval forest. I had hoped it would kill me and end my suffering.