[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  Slowly, by excruciating inches, the rear came in sight. The men who had been guarding it were pleased to move up, away from the lumbering wagons, the oxen groaning and labouring, the drivers cursing in an endless half-chant. Roland’s Bretons fell in behind. They had all, uncommanded, shifted to remounts.

  “You scent trouble, too, then?”

  Oliver started, stared. Not all of the former rearguard had gone ahead. The Count of the Palace was there, watching over his charge, which was all here but the king himself; and Ekkehard, the king’s seneschal, riding on the wain with the royal plate. And, on a horse that had been bred in Roland’s own pastures, Turpin the high priest of Mithras in Rheims. As befit the priest of a warrior creed, he rode armed and armoured and his acolytes were also his armour-bearers. He grinned at Oliver, old warhound that he was, and breathed deep of the thin air. “There’ll be an ambush ahead. Do you remember this way, when we came out of Gaul? It narrows and steepens, and where it’s narrowest and steepest, the gorge they call Roncesvalles—they’ll strike there, if they strike at all.”

  “‘They’?” asked Oliver.

  “Basques, most likely: savages of these mountains. Pamplona is theirs, you know; it’s not Saracen, though sometimes it suits them to dance to Córdoba’s tune. I expect they’ll want to claim back what we took from them.”

  He seemed remarkably undismayed at the prospect. Oliver eyed his greying beard and his eager face, and castigated himself for a fool. If there was a battle, it would be one that they could easily win. If it aimed chiefly at Roland, then his men would make themselves a wall about him. There was nothing to fret over but a few words spoken in a tongue he barely knew, and which he might well have misunderstood.

  The steeper the way grew, the closer the walls drew in, the slower the baggage train travelled. The clamour of the army, echoing in the gorges, began little by little to fade. They had drawn ahead. Too far, Oliver began to suspect. There were only their small company, and the drivers, and such of the women and servants as had not gone ahead with their masters; and the wains lurching and struggling up the mountainside. Behind, there was nothing to see but stone and scree and steep descent. Ahead, Oliver remembered dimly, was a bit of almost level, then another bitter ascent, little more than a roofless corridor, to the summit of the pass. Already it was growing dim below, though the sky was bright still. If night found them on the mountain…

  Roland had sent scouts ahead and, while the cliffs were still scalable, to the side. None of them had come back.

  A signal went down the line. Dismount and lead your horses. Oliver obeyed it, but struggled forward, to draw level with Roland. For a long while he could do nothing but breathe. Roland climbed in silence, not even cursing when his horse stumbled.

  “You might,” said Oliver between hard breaths, “sound your horn. Just for prudence. So that the king knows how far back we are.”

  Roland’s hand found the horn where it hung at his side: a beauty of a thing, an olifant bound with gold and hung on a gold-worked baldric; the only adornment he would wear, whose sword and armour were as plain as a trooper’s. But he did not move to raise the horn.

  Roland,” said Oliver, “brother, sound the horn. If we’re caught here we’re too few, the pass is too steep; we’ll barely hold till the king can come back.”

  “No,” said Roland.

  Oliver drew breath once again, and flung all his passion into it. “Roland, brother, sound the horn! It’s I who beg you. I’ll bear the shame if shame there is, and no army waits for us above.”

  “No one will bear the shame for me,” Roland said. “How large an army can a pack of savages muster? We’ll fight them off. Or don’t you think I’m strong enough for that?”

  “I think your stepfather has something hidden here, and that is your death.”

  “Are you calling my mother’s husband a traitor?”

  Mad, thought Oliver in despair. God-mad, as they said men were when they were chosen to be sacrificed: going to their deaths willingly and even with joy. And gods help the man who spoke ill of the man he hated.

  Oliver shut his mouth and set himself to climb and watch, both at once, as much as his struggling body would allow. He kept close to Roland’s side, his battle-station, though his wonted place on the march was well apart from the count.

  At the level they paused, a moment only, to replenish their strength. The cliff-walls closed in above. There was still no sign of the scouts. Roland did not mention them; Oliver did not want to. When they moved on again, Turpin was beside them, leading his fine warhorse, whistling tunelessly between his teeth.

  The creaking of wains echoed and re-echoed from the walls. The lead ox threw up its head and snorted, balking in the gate of the defile. Its driver cursed and thrust in the goad. The ox lowed in pain, but stood fast.

  Through the echoes of its cry, Oliver heard thunder.

  Not thunder. Stones. Great boulders, roaring and tumbling down the cliffsides, and men howling behind them. Howling in Arabic. Allah-il-allah!

  Saracens. They fell like hail out of the sky, bearded, turbaned, shrilling sons of Allah; they filled the pass behind, thick as locusts in the plains of Granada. The trap was sprung. The bait could not even cower in it. There was no room.

  Oliver almost laughed. So, then. That was what they had meant, the conspirators, when they spoke of turning the king against the enemies of Byzantium. It would not have been hard to win Córdoba to their cause, if it cost Baghdad its ally. Then the traitor need but see to it that Roland was given the rearguard and led to expect nothing worse than a pack of brigands; and leave the rest to the armies of Córdoba.

  They were, at most, fifty men. If there were less than a thousand about them, then Oliver had lost his ability to reckon armies. And the wagons to defend, and the way closed on all sides, and no escape but through the armies of Islam.

  Roland saw them and laughed. By some freak of fate and the army and the echoes about them, his laughter sounded light and clear in almost silence, the laughter of a man who loves a battle. It danced with mockery. It dared death to take him. He leaped up on a wain though darts rained down, and called out: “Here, men! Here’s a fight for us. Who’ll take first blood? Who’ll die for our king?”

  “I!” they shouted back. And in a rising roar, till even the echoes fled in terror: “Montjoie! Montjoie! Montjoie!”

  The enemy faltered. But they could count as well as Oliver, and they had seen how ill the train was disposed, sprawled all down the narrow pass, no room to draw together and make a stand. The small company that clustered in the rear, their horses useless on that steep and broken ground, the enemy all but ignored; they fell on the train itself, their howls drowning out even the shrieks of women and the death-cries of horses and cattle.

  The Bretons frayed at the edges. Hands reached for pommels, men braced to spring astride their horses. Roland’s voice lashed them back, away from the stumbling, hindering, helpless beasts, into a formation they all knew. Then, fiercely, forward.

  They drove like a lance into the column. And for a little while, no one resisted them. Oliver grinned in his helmet. There was a use after all for the Roman foot-drill that the king had inflicted on them—a game, he said; an idea he had, that Roland, always apt for mischief, was willing to try. Now it served them in this most impossible of places, drove them into the enemy, mowed the attackers down and swept them aside under the hoofs of panicked beasts.

  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.