The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (50 page)

“Careful,” said David Mickelson at his elbow.

News of the find had spread through the city and a crowd had gathered, in which Grant was just one more curious observer. He supposed it was best this way, though he would rather it was his own people moving the paintings. The police were unwontedly rough with the works, but there was nothing he could do about that.

Things had got a little out of hand.

“Hard to believe it’s been sitting under our noses all this time,” said Mickelson. “You say you actually got a good look at it?”

Grant nodded abstractedly. “Fairly good. Of course, it was dark in there.”

“Even so . . . what a catch, eh? There have been rumours of this stuff for years, and you stumble right into it. Amazing idea you had, though, organizing a tour. As if anyone would pay to see that stuff aside from ruddies and radicals. Even if it weren’t completely restricted.”

“What... what do you think they’ll do with it?” Grant asked.

“Same as they do with other contraband, I’d imagine. Burn it.”

“Burn it,” Grant repeated numbly.

Grant felt a restriction of the easy flow of traffic; suddenly the crowd, mainly black and Indian, threatened to change into something considerably more passionate than a group of disinterested onlookers. The police loosened their riot gear as the mob began to shout insults.

“Fall back, Grant,” Mickelson said.

Grant started to move away through the crowd, but a familiar face caught his attention. It was the Indian, the jeweller; he hung near a corner of the museum, his pouchy face unreadable. Somehow, through all the confusion, among the hundred or so faces now mounting in number, his eyes locked onto Grant’s.

Grant stiffened. The last of the vans shut its doors and rushed away. The police did not loiter in the area. He had good reason to feel vulnerable.

The jeweller stared at him. Stared without moving. Then he brought up a withered brown object and set it to his lips. Grant could see him bite, tear, and chew.

“What is it, Grant? We should be going now, don’t you think? There’s still time to take in a real museum, or perhaps the American Palace.”

Grant didn’t move. Watching the Indian, he put his thumb to his mouth and caught a bit of cuticle between his teeth. He felt as if he were dreaming. Slowly, he tore off a thin strip of skin, ripping it back almost down to the knuckle. The pain was excruciating, but it didn’t seem to wake him. He chewed it, swallowed.

“Grant? Is anything wrong?”

He tore off another.

<>

* * * *

Roncesvalles

Judith Tarr

Spain,
ad
778/161
ah

1

Charles, king of the Franks and the Lombards, sometime ally of Baghdad and Byzantium;, sat at table in the midst of his army, and considered necessity. He had had the table set in full view of it: namely, the walls of Saragossa, and the gate which opened only to expel curses and the odd barrel of refuse. The city was won for Baghdad against the rebels in Cordoba, but precious few thanks Charles had for his part in it. He was an infidel, and a pagan at that. Saragossa did not want him defiling its Allah-sanctified streets with his presence. Even if it had been he who freed them.

He thrust his emptied plate aside and rose. He was a big man even for a Frank, and a month of playing beggar at Saragossa’s door, with little else to do but wait and eat and glare at the walls, had done nothing to lessen his girth. He knew how he towered, king enough even in his plain unkingly clothes; he let the men about him grow still before he spoke. He never shouted: he did not have the voice for it. He always spoke softly, and made men listen, until they forgot the disparity between the clear light voice and the great bear’s body. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we leave this place. Spain has chosen to settle itself. Let it. We have realms to rule in Gaul, and enemies to fight. We gain no advantage in lingering here.”

Having cast the fox among the geese, Charles stood back to watch the spectacle. The Franks were torn between homesickness and warrior honour; between leaving this alien and unfriendly country, and retreating from a battle barely begun. The Arabs howled in anguish. How could he, their ally, abandon them now? The Byzantines stood delicately aside and refrained from smiles.

One voice rose high above the others. Not as high as Charles’, but close enough for kin, though the man it came from had a body more fitted to it: a slender dark young firebrand who was, everyone agreed, the very image of the old king. “Leave?
Leave,
my lord? My lord, how can we leave? We’ve won nothing yet. We’ve lost men, days, provisions. And for what? To slink back to Gaul with our tails between our legs? By Julian and holy Merovech, I will not!”

The reply came with the graceful inevitability of a Christian antiphon. “You will not? And who are you, young puppy? Are you wisdom itself, that you should command our lord, the king?”

Our lord the king pulled at his luxtiriant moustaches and scowled. He loved his sister Gisela dearly, but she had a penchant for contentious males. Her son, who was her image as well as her father the old king’s, took after his father when it came to temper. Her husband that was now, barely older than the son who faced him with such exuberant hostility, looked enough like the boy to prompt strangers to ask if they were brothers; but Roland’s forthright insolence clashed head-on with Ganelon’s vicious urbanity. There was a certain Byzantine slither in the man, but his temper was all Frank, and his detestation of his stepson as overt as ever a savage could wish. He was a Meroving, was Ganelon; they hated best where the blood-tie was closest. What Gisela saw in him, Roland would never comprehend; but Charles could see it well enough. Clever wits, a comely face, and swift mastery of aught he set his hand to. He was not, all things considered, an ill match for the daughter of a king. But Charles could wish, on occasion, that Gisela had not come to her senses after the brief madness of her youth, and abandoned the Christians’ nunnery for a pair of bold black eyes.

Her son and her husband stood face to face across the laden table: two small, dark, furious men, bristling and spitting like warring cats. “Puppy, you call me?” cried Roland. “Snake’s get, you, crawling and hissing in corners, tempting my lord to counsels of cowardice.”

“Counsels of wisdom,” said Ganelon, all sweet reason. “Counsels of prudence. Words you barely know, still less understand.”

“Cowardice!” Roland cried, louder. Charles was reminded forcibly of his own determination never to shout. Yes; it was almost as high as a woman’s, or like a boy’s just broken. In Roland, it seemed only a little ridiculous. “A word
you
can never understand, simply be. Where were you when I led the charge on Saragossa? Did you even draw your sword? Or were you too preoccupied with piddling in your breeches?”

Men round about leaped before either of the kinsmen could move, and wrestled them down. Roland was laughing as he did when he fought, high and light and wild. Ganelon was silent. Until there was a pause in the laughter Then he said calmly, “Better a coward than an empty braggart.”

“That,” said Charles, “will be enough.”

He was heard. He met the eyes of the yellow-haired giant who sat with some effort on Roland. The big man settled his weight more firmly, and mustered a smile that was half a grimace. Charles shifted his stare to Ganelon. His counsellor had freed himself, and stood shaking his clothing into place, smiling a faint, mirthless smile. After a judicious pause he bowed to the king and said, “My lord knows the path of wisdom. I regret that he must hear the counsel of fools.”

Charles had not known how taut his back was, until he eased it, leaning forward over the table, running his eyes over all their faces. “I give ear to every man who speaks. But in the end, the choice is mine. I have chosen. Tomorrow we return to Gaul.” He stood straight. “Sirs. My lords. You know your duties. You have my leave to see to them.”

* * * *

Once Roland was out of Ganelon’s sight, he regained most of his sanity. Never all of it, where his stepfather was concerned, but enough to do as his king had bidden. Even before he was Ganelon’s enemy, he was the king’s man, Count of the Breton Marches, with duties both many and various. Oliver, having seen him safely engaged in them, withdrew for a little himself, to look to his own duties and, if truth be told, to look for the girl who sold sweets and other delights to the soldiers. She was nowhere in sight; he paused by his tent, nursing a new bruise. It never ceased to amaze him how so little a man as Roland could be so deadly a fighter. The best in Frankland, Oliver was certain. One of the three or four best, Roland himself would say. Roland was no victim of modesty. He called it a Christian vice. A good pagan knew himself; and hence, his virtues as well as his vices.

Oliver, whose mother had been Christian but whose father had never allowed her to raise her son in that faith, had no such simplicity of conviction. He was not a good pagan. He could not be a Christian; Christians tried to keep a man from enjoying women. Maybe he would make a passable Muslim. War was holy, in Islam. And a man who did not enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, was no man at all.

“Sir? Oliver?”

He had heard the man’s approach. He turned now, and raised a brow. His servant bowed, which was for anyone who might be watching, and met his eyes steadily, which was for the two of them. “Sir,” said Walthar, “there’s something you ought to see.”

His glance forbade questions; his tone forestalled objection. Oliver set his lips tight together, and followed where Walthar led.

* * * *

Walthar led him by a twisting way, more round the camp than through it, keeping to the backs of tents, pausing when it seemed that anyone might stop to put names to two men moving swiftly in shadows. Oliver crouched as low as he could, for what good it did: he was still an extraordinarily large shadow.

He had kept count of where they went, and whose portions of the encampment they passed. From one end to the other, from Roland’s to - yes, this was Ganelon’s circle of tents, and Ganelon’s in the middle. Turbulent as the camp was, stung into action by the king’s command, here was almost quiet. There were guards at the tent’s flap, but no one in the dusk behind, where Walthar led Oliver with hunter’s stealth and beckoned him to kneel and listen.

At first he heard nothing. He was on the verge of rising and dragging his meddlesome servant away to chastisement, when a voice spoke. It was not Ganelon’s. It spoke Greek, of which Oliver knew a little. Enough to piece together what it said. “No. No, my friend. I do not see the wisdom in it.”

The man who replied, surely, was Ganelon. Ganelon, who pretended to no more Greek than the king had, which was just enough to understand an ambassador’s speech, never sufficient for speech of his own, Ganelon, speaking Greek with ease and, as far as Oliver’s untutored ears could tell, hardly a trace of Frankish accent. “Then, my friend” - irony there, but without overt malice - “you do not know the king, Yes, he withdraws from Saragossa. Yes, he seems by that to favour our cause. But the king is never a simple man. Nor should you take him for such, because his complexity is never Byzantine complexity.”

The Greek was silken, which meant that he was angry. “I have yet to make the mistake of underestimating your king. Yet still I see no utility in what you propose. Saragossa has done nothing to advance the cause of its caliph, by casting out the ally who won it from the rebels. His departure is prudence, and anger. Best to foster that, yes. But to embellish it - that is not necessary, and if it fails, it is folly; it may lose us all that we have gained. There are times when even a Byzantine can see the value in simplicity.”

“Simple, yes. As that nephew of his is simple. There is a man who will never rest until he has a war to fight. He sees this withdrawal not as strategy but as cowardice. Let him work on the king, let him bring in his toadies and their warmongering, and the king well may change his mind. More: he may turn from our cause altogether, and embrace Islam. You may not see it, but I am all too well aware of it. He is attracted to the faith of Muhammad. It speaks to the heart of him. The sacredness of war. The allurements of the flesh both in this life and in the next. The dreams of empire. And what have we to offer in return?”