[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  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.

  “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 p
ray 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.”

  HIS POWDER’D WIG,

  HIS CROWN OF THORNES

  Marc Laidlaw

  Grant Innes first saw the icon in the Indian ghettos of London, but thought nothing of it. There were so many gewgaws of native “art” being thrust in his face by faddishly war-painted Cherokees that this was just another nuisance to avoid, like the huge radios blaring obnoxious “Choctawk” percussions and the high-pitched warbling of Tommy Hawkes and the effeminate Turquoise Boys; like the young Mohawk ruddies practising skateboard stunts for sluttish cockney girls whose kohled black eyes and slack blue lips betrayed more interest in the dregs of the bottles those boys carried than in the boys themselves. Of course, it was not pleasure or curiosity that brought him into the squalid district, among the baggy green canvas street-teepees and graffitoed storefronts. Business alone could bring him here. He had paid a fair sum for the name and number of a Mr Cloud, dealer in Navaho jewellery, whose samples had proved of excellent quality and would fetch the highest prices, not only in Europe but in the Colonies as well. Astute dealers knew that the rage for turquoise had nearly run its course, thank God; following the popularity of the lurid blue stone, the simplicity of black-patterned silver would be a welcome relief indeed. Grant had hardly been able to tolerate the sight of so much garish rock as he’d been forced to stock in order to suit his customers; he was looking forward to this next trend. He’d already laid the ground for several showcase presentations in Paris; five major glossies were bidding for rights to photograph his collector’s pieces, antique sand-cast najas and squash-blossom necklaces, for a special fashion portfolio.

  Here in the slums, dodging extruded plastic kachina dolls and machine-woven blankets, his fine-tuned eye was offended by virtually everything he saw. It was trash for tourists. Oh, it had its spurts of cheap popularity, like the war bonnets which all the cyclists had worn last summer, but such moments were as fleeting as pop hits, thank God. Only true quality could ever transcend the dizzying gyres of public favour. Fine art, precious stones, pure metal: these were investments that would never lose their value.

  So much garbage ultimately had the effect of blinding him to his environment; avoidance became a mental as well as a physical trick. He was dreaming of silver crescents gleaming against ivory skin when he realized that he must have passed the street he sought. He stopped in his tracks, suddenly aware of the hawkers’ cries, the pulse of hide-drums and synthesizers. He spun about searching for a number on any of the shops.

  “Lost, guv?” said a tall young brave with gold teeth, his bare chest ritually scarified. He carried a tall pole strung with a dozen gruesome rubber scalps, along with several barristers’ wigs. They gave the brave the appearance of a costume merchant, except for one morbid detail: each of the white wigs was spattered with blood … red dye, rather, liberally dripped among the coarse white strands.

  “You look lost.”

  “Looking for a shop,” he muttered, fumbling Mr Cloud’s card from his pocket.

  “No, I mean really lost. Out of balance. Koyaanisqatsi, guv. Like the whole world.”

  “I’m looking for a shop,” Grant repeated firmly.

  “That all, then? A shop? What about the things you really lost? Things we’ve all lost, I’m talking about. Here.”

  He patted his bony hip, which was wrapped in a black leather loincloth. Something dangled from his belt, a doll-like object on a string, a charm of some sort. Grant looked over the brave’s head and saw the number he sought, just above a doorway. The damn ruddy was in his way. As he tried to slip past, avoiding contact with the rubbery scalps and bloodied wigs, the brave unclipped the charm from his belt and thrust it into his face.

  Grant recoiled, nearly stumbling backward in the street. It was an awful little mannequin, face pinched and soft, its agonized expression carved from a withered apple.

  ‘Her
e—here’s where we lost it,” the brave said, thrusting the doll up to his cheek, as if he would have it kiss or nip him with its rice-grain teeth. Its limbs were made of jerked beef, spread-eagled on wooden crossbars, hands and feet fixed in place with four tiny nails. It was a savage Christ—an obscenity.

  “He gave His life for you,” the brave said. “Not just for one people, but for everyone. Eternal freedom, that was His promise.”

  “I’m late for my appointment,” Grant said, unable to hide his disgust.

  “Late and lost,” the brave said. “But you’ll never catch up—the time slipped past. And you’ll never find your way unless you follow Him.”

  “Just get out of my way!”

  He shoved the brave aside, knocking the hideous little idol out of the Indian’s grasp. Fearing reprisal, he forced an apologetic expression as he turned back from the hard-won doorway. But the brave wasn’t watching him. He crouched over the filthy street, retrieving his little martyr. Lifting it to his lips, he kissed it gently.

  “I’m sorry,” Grant said.

  The brave glanced up at Grant and grinned fiercely, baring his gold teeth; then he bit deep into the dried brown torso of the Christ and tore away a ragged strip of jerky.

  Nauseous, Grant hammered on the door behind him. It opened abruptly and he almost fell into the arms of Mr Cloud.

  He next saw the image the following summer, in the District of Cornwallis. Despite the fact that Grant specialized in provincial art, most of his visits to the colonies had been for business purposes, and had exposed him to no more glorious surroundings than the interiors of banks and mercantile offices, with an occasional jaunt into the Six Nations to meet with the creators of the fine pieces that were his trade. Sales were brisk, his artisans had been convinced to ply their craft with gold as well as silver, supplanting turquoise and onyx with diamonds and other precious stones; the trend towards high-fashion American jewellery had already surpassed his highest expectations. Before the inevitable decline and a panicked search for the next sure thing, he decided to accept the offer of an old colonial acquaintance who had long extended an open invitation to a tour of great American monuments in the capital city.