Simon the shoemaker’s shop stood close to the southwestern corner of the Athenian agora, near the boundary stone marking the edge of the market square and across a narrow dirt lane from the Tholos, the round building where the executive committee of the Boule met. Inside the shop, Simon pounded iron hobnails into the sole of a sandal. His son worked with an awl, shaping bone eyelets through which rawhide laces would go. Two grandsons cut leather for more shoes.

Outside, in the shade of an olive tree, a man in his mid-fifties strode back and forth, arguing with a knot of younger men and youths. He was engagingly ugly: bald, heavy-browed, snub-nosed, with a gray beard that should have been more neatly trimmed. “And so you see, my friends,” he was saying, “my daimon has told me that this choice does indeed come from the gods, and that something great may spring from it. Thus, though I love you and honor you, I shall obey the spirit inside me rather than you.”

“But, Sokrates, you have already given Athens all she could want of you,” exclaimed Kritias, far and away the most prominent of the men gathered there and, next to Sokrates, the eldest. “You fought at Potidaia and Delion and Amphipolis. But the last of those battles was seven years ago. You are neither so young nor so strong as you used to be. You need not go to Sicily. Stay here in the polis. Your wisdom is worth more to the city than your spear ever could be.”

The others dipped their heads in agreement. A youth whose first beard was just beginning to darken his cheeks said, “He speaks for all of us, Sokrates. We need you here more than the expedition ever could.”

“How can one man speak for another, Xenophon?” Sokrates asked. Then he held up a hand. “Let that be a question for another time. The question for now is, why should I be any less willing to fight for my polis than, say, he is?”

He pointed to a hoplite tramping past in front of Simon’s shop. The infantryman wore his crested bronze helm pushed back on his head, so the cheekpieces and noseguard did not hide his face. He rested the shaft of his long thrusting spear on his shoulder; a shortsword swung from his hip. Behind him, a slave carried his corselet and greaves and round, bronze-faced shield.

Kritias abandoned the philosophic calm he usually kept up in Sokrates’ company. “To the crows with Alkibiades!” he burst out. “He didn’t ask you to sail with him to Sicily for the sake of your strong right arm. He just wants you for the sake of your conversation, the same way as he’ll probably bring along a hetaira to keep his bed warm. You’re going for the sake of his cursed vanity: no other reason.”

“No.” Sokrates tossed his head. “I am going because it is important that I go. So my daimon tells me. I have listened to it all my life, and it has never led me astray.”

“We’re not going to change his mind now,” one of the young men whispered to another. “When he gets that look in his eye, he’s stubborn as a donkey.”

Sokrates glanced toward the herm in front of Simon’s shop: a stone pillar with a crude carving of Hermes’ face at the top and the god’s genitals halfway down. “Guard me well, patron of travelers,” he murmured.

“Be careful you don’t get your nose or your prong knocked off, Sokrates, the way a lot of the herms did last year,” somebody said.

“Yes, and people say Alkibiades was hip-deep in that sacrilege, too,” Kritias added. A considerable silence followed. Kritias was hardly the one to speak of sacrilege. He was at least as scornful of the gods as Alkibiades; he’d once claimed priests had invented them to keep ordinary people in line.

But, instead of rising to that, Sokrates only said, “Have we not seen, O best one, that we should not accept what is said without first attempting to learn how much truth it holds?” Kritias went red, then turned away in anger. If Sokrates noticed, he gave no sign.

In the real world, Sokrates did not accompany the Athenians’ expedition to Sicily in 415 B. C. E. As told in the story, Alkibiades’ political foes in Athens did arrange his recall. In real history, he left the expedition but fled on the way to Athens. He eventually wound up in Sparta, the Athenians’ bitter foe in the Peloponnesian War, and advised the Spartans to aid Syracuse and to continue the war against Athens. (He also, incidentally, fathered a bastard on King Agis’ wife, whose bed Agis was avoiding due to religious scruples.)

The Athenian expedition, despite substantial reinforcements in 413 B. C. E., was a disastrous failure. It did not take Syracuse, and few of the approximately 50,000 hoplites and sailors sent west ever saw Athens again. Nikias, who headed the force after Alkibiades’ recall, was executed by the Syracusans. Alkibiades returned to the Athenian side, then abandoned Athens’ cause after further political strife and was murdered in 404 B. C. E. In that same year, the Spartans decisively defeated the Athenians and, at a crushing cost, won the Peloponnesian War.

In the aftermath of the war, Sokrates’ pupil Kritias became the head of the Thirty Tyrants, and was killed during the civil war leading to the restoration of Athenian democracy in 403 B. C. E. Sokrates himself, convicted on a charge of bringing new gods to Athens, drank hemlock in 399 B. C. E., refusing to flee, though many might have wished he would have gone into exile instead. His pupil Aristokles-far more often known as Platon because of his broad shoulders-survived for more than half a century; it is through the writings of Platon, Xenophon, and Aristophanes that we know Sokrates, who himself left nothing in writing.

In real history, the assault on Persia waited until the reign of Alexander the Great (336–323 B. C. E.), and occurred under Macedonian domination, not that of the Hellenic poleis.

“I told you not to eat him!” the man in the black robe said. “Come out!”

He was alone, standing on a slight hillock amid the low marshy ground. The log canoe behind him held more-three Cossack riflemen, their weapons ready, a young woman lying bound at their feet, and a thick-muscled man with burn scars on his hands and arms. He whimpered and cowered and muttered pajalsta — please, please-over and over until he was cuffed into silence by one of the soldiers.

Beyond them the tall gloom of the cypresses turned the swamp into a pool of olive-green shadow, in which the Spanish moss hung in motionless curtains. There was little sound; a plop as a cottonmouth slipped off a rotting log and into the dark water, and muffled with distance the dull booming roar of a bull alligator proclaiming his territory to the world. The air was warm and rank, full of the smell of decay…and a harder odor, one of crusted filth and animal rot.

“Come out!” the one in black snapped again; he was a stocky man in his middle years, black-haired, with a pale high-cheekboned face and slanted gray eyes.

They did; first one, then a few more, then a score, then a hundred. The man laughed in delight at the sight of them: the thickset shambling forms, the scarred faces and filed teeth, the roiling stink. One with a bone through his broad nose and more in his clay-caked mop of hair came wriggling on his belly like a snake through the mud to press his forehead into the dirt at the man’s feet.

“Master, master,” the figure whined-in his language it was a slightly different form of the word for killer, and closely related to the verb to eat.

“He sickened,” the savage gobbled apologetically. “We only ate him when he could not work.”

The robed man drew back a foot and kicked him in the face; the prone figure groveled and whimpered.

“A likely story! But the Black God is good to His servants. I have brought you another blacksmith…and weapons.”

He half turned and signaled. Most of the men in the canoes kept their rifles ready and pointed; a few dragged boxes of hatchets and knives out and bore them ashore. A moaning chorus came from the figures, and hands reached out eagerly. The man in black uncoiled a whip from his belt and lashed them back.

“Who do you serve?” he asked harshly.

“The Black God! The Black God!” they called.

“Good. See you remember it. Keep this man healthy! Set more of your young to learning the smelting and working of the iron! No one is to hunt or kill or eat such men, for they are valuable! It is more pleasing to the Black God when you eat His enemies than when you prey on each other-”

He let the moaning chorus of obedience go on for a moment while he lashed them with words, then signaled; the young woman was pushed forward. She was naked, a plump swarthy Kaijan girl trying to scream through the gag that covered her mouth. There would be a time for her to scream, but not quite yet.

“And the Black God has brought you food, tender and juicy!” the robed man called, laughing and grabbing her by the back of the neck in one iron-fingered hand. She squealed like a butchered rabbit through the cloth as the eyes of the watchers focused on her.

A moment’s silence, and another cry went up, hot and eager: “Eat! Eat!”

“We shall eat, my children,” he laughed. “But the killing must be as the God desires, eh? Prepare the altar!”

They scurried to obey. When the work was done, the man who commanded their service drew a long curved knife from his girdle; the rippling damascened shape was sharp enough to part a hair, unlike the crude blades of the savages.

“If you want the Black God to favor you, you must kill his enemies-kill them in fight, on the altar, by ambush and stealth. Kill them! Take their lands! Hunt them down!”

“Kill! Kill all Tall Ones! Kill and eat!” A vicious eagerness was in the words, and an ancient hate.

“And on that good day, I shall return to bring you His blessing! Now we shall make sacrifice, and feast.”

He reached down and flicked off the gag, and the sacrifice gave the first of the cries prescribed in the rite, as he swept the blade of the khindjal from throat to pubis in an initial, very shallow cut. The man sighed with pleasure and swept his arms open and up, invoking the Peacock Angel.

“Eat!” the swamp-men screamed. “Eat!”

Technically, they should be chanting the Black God’s name at this point in the ritual. But it was all the same, in the end. For would not Tchernobog eat all the world, in time? He cut again, again…

“Eat! Eat!”

Robre-Robre sunna Jowan, gift-named the Hunter, of the Bear Creek clan of the Cross Plains tribe-grunted as he strode southward past the peeled wands that marked the boundaries of the Dannulsford Fair. There were eleven new heads set on tall stakes in the scrubby pasture outside the stockade, fresh enough with the fall chill that the features could still be seen under the flies. One was of his own people, to judge from the yellow beard and long flaxen hair; that color wasn’t common even among the Seven Tribes and rare as hen’s teeth among outlanders. He thought he recognized Smeyth One-Eye, an outcast from the Panthers who lived a little north and west of here.

Finally caught him lifting the wrong man’s horses, he supposed with idle curiosity. One-Eye had needed shortening for some time, being a bully and a lazy, thieving one at that. Or maybe it was lifting the wrong woman’s skirts.

The other heads were in a clump away from One-Eye’s perch, and their features made him look more closely, past the raven damage-they weren’t as fresh as the outlaw’s. They were darker of skin than his folk, wiry-haired, massively scarred in zigzag ritual patterns that made them even more hideous in death than they had been in life, several with human finger-bones through the septums of their noses. The lips drawn back in the final rictus showed rotting teeth filed to points.

Man-eaters, Robre thought, and spat.

He waved greeting to the guards at the gate-Alligator clansmen, since Dannulsford was the seat of their Jefe. The Bear Creek families had no feud with the Alligators just at the moment, but he would have been safe within the wands in any case. A Fair was peace-holy; even outright foreigners could come here unmolested along the river or trade roads, when no great war was being waged.

Two of the Alligator warriors stood and leaned on their weapons, a spear and a Mehk musket, wearing hide helmets made from the head-skins of their totem and keeping an eye on the thronging traffic. They wouldn’t interfere unless fights broke out or someone blocked the muddy path, in which case they could call for backup from half a dozen others who crouched and threw dice on a deerhide. Those warriors kept their weapons close to hand, of course, and one had an Imperial breech-loading rifle that the Bear Creek man eyed with raw but well-concealed envy. The Alligators were rich from trade with the coastlands, and inclined to be toplofty.

One of the gamblers looked up and smiled, gap-toothed. “Heya, Hunter Robre,” he said in greeting.

“Heya, Jefe’s-man Tomul,” Robre said politely in return, stopping to chat. “A raid?” He jerked his thumb at the stakes with the ten heads. “Wild-men?”

The hunter stood aside from a string of pack mules that was followed by an oxcart heaped with pumpkins; axles squealed like dying pigs, and the shock-headed youth riding the vehicle popped his whip. The three horses that carried Robre’s pelts were well trained and followed him, bending their heads to crop at weeds when their master stopped.

“Yi-ah, swamp-devils, right enough.” The Alligator chieftain’s guardsman nodded. “Burned a settler’s cabin east of Muskrat Creek-old Stinking Pehte.”

“Not Stinking Pehte the Friendless? Pehte sunna Dubal?”

“Him ’n’ none other; made an ax-land claim there ’n’ built a cabin two springs ago, him ’n’ his wife ’n’ younglings. Set to clearing land for corn. Jefe Carul saw the smoke ’n’ called out the neighborhood men in posse. Caught ’em this side of the Black River. Even got a prisoner back alive-a girl.”

Robre’s eyebrows went up. “Surprised they didn’t eat her,” he said.

“They’d just started in to skin her. Ate her kin first. ’S how we caught ’em-stopped for their fun.”

Stinking Pehte must have been an even bigger fool than everyone thought, to settle that far east, Robre thought, but it wouldn’t do to say it aloud. Men had to resent an insult to one of their own clan and totem, even if they agreed with it in their hearts.

“Where’s ol’ Grippem ’n’ Ayzbitah?” the guard asked, looking for the big hounds that usually followed the hunter.

Robre cleared his throat and spat into the mud of the road, turning his head to cover a sudden prickle in his eyes. “Got the dog-sickness, had to put ’em down,” he said.

The guards made sympathetic noises at the hard news. “Good hunting?” Tomul went on, waving toward the rawhide-covered bundles on the Bear Creek man’s pack saddles.

“Passable-just passable,” Robre replied, with mournful untruth. He pushed back his broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat to scratch meditatively at his raven-black hair. “Mostly last winter’s cure, the second-rate stuff I held back in spring. Hope to do better this year.”

“Jefe Carul killed two cows for God-thanks at sunrise,” Tomul said; it was two hours past dawn now. “Probably some of the beef left if you’ve a hunger.”

Robre snorted and shook his head. Sacrificial beef was free to any man of the Seven Tribes, but also likely to be old and tough. Lord o’ Sky didn’t care about the quality of the cattle, just their number, it being the thought that counted. He wasn’t that short of silver.

Tomul went on: “See you around, then; we’ll drink a mug. Mind you don’t break the Fair’s peace-bans while you’re here, or it’s a whuppin’ from the Jefe.”

“I’m no brawler,” Robre said defensively.

“Then give me these back,” Tomul chuckled in answer, pulling down the corner of his mouth with a little finger to show two missing molars.

The other warriors around the deerskin howled laughter and Robre laughed back, taking up the lead rein of his forward pack horse and leading the beasts under the massive timber gateway, between hulking log blockhouses. The huge black-oak timbers that supported the gate on either side were carved and painted; Coyote on the left grinning with his tongue lolling over his fangs and a stogie in the corner of his mouth, the Corn Lady on the right holding a stalk of maize in one hand and a hoe in the other, and God the Father on the lintel above. Robre bowed his head for an instant as he passed beneath the stern bearded face of the Lord of Sky, murmuring a luck-word.

The pack horses followed him into the throng within, shying and snorting and rolling their eyes a bit. Robre sympathized; the crowds and stink were enough to gag a buzzard. Nearly a hundred people lived here year-round; Jefe Carul in his two-story fort-mansion of squared timbers, and his wives, his children; his household men and their wives and children in ordinary cabins of mud-chinked logs; a few slaves and landless, clanless laborers in shacks; plus craftsmen and tinkers and peddlers who found Dannulsford a convenient headquarters, and their dependents.

Now it swarmed with twenty times that number; the Dannulsford Fair got bigger every year, it seemed. This year’s held more people than Robre had ever seen in one place before, until only narrow crowded lanes were left between booths and sheds and tents and more folk still spilled over into camps outside the oak logs of the stockade. The air was thick with wood smoke, smells of dung and frying food and fresh corn bread, man’s sweat, and the smells of leather, horses, mules and oxen, and dogs. The Fair came after the corn and cotton were in but before hard frost and the prime pig-slaughtering season; a time for the Jefe to kill cattle for the Lord o’ Sky and to preside over disputes brought for judgment, and for the assembled free men of the clan to make laws.

And, he thought with a grin, to make marriages and chase girls and swap and dicker and guzzle popskull, boast, and tell tales. Robre was a noted tale-teller himself, when the mood was on him. Time to trade with outland men, too.

Dannulsford was as far north on the Three Forks River as you could float anything bigger than a canoe; that meant the Fair of the Alligators was far larger than most. There were Kumanch come down over the Westwall escarpment with strings of horses and buffalo pelts; Cherokee from the north with fine tobacco, rock-oil to burn in lamps, and bars of wrought iron for smiths; Dytchers from the Hill Country with wine and applejack and dried fruits; and black-skinned men from the coast with sugar and rum, rice and cinnamon and nutmeg.

Some from even farther away. A Mehk trader rode by, wearing a broad sombrero and tight jacket and tooled-leather chaps over buttoned knee-breeches, his silver-studded saddle glistening. The great wagons behind him were escorted by a brace of leather-jacketed lancers, short stocky men with brown skins and smooth cheeks, bandannas on their heads beneath broad-brimmed hats, gold rings in their ears, machetes at their belts, sitting their horses as if they’d grown there.

Say what you like about Mehk, they can ride for certain sure, Robre thought: or at least their caballeros and fighters could. Among the Seven Tribes every free man was a warrior, but it was different beyond the Wadeyloop River.

The merchant the lancers served was crying up his wares as he went; fine drink distilled from the maguay cactus, silks and silver jewelry and bright painted pots, tools and sundries, dried hot peppers and gaudy feathers and cocoa and coffee in the bean. He had muskets and powder and round lead balls for sale, too; Robre’s lip curled.

A smoothbore flintlock didn’t have the range or accuracy of a good bow, and it was a lot slower to use-slower even than the crossbows some favored. A musket was useful for shooting duck with birdshot, or for a woman to keep around the cabin for self-defense, but he didn’t think it was a man’s weapon.

All the foreigners stood out, among his own folk of the Seven Tribes-the fearless free-striding maidens in shifts that showed their calves or even their knees, wives more decorous in long skirts and headscarves, men much like himself in thigh-length hunting shirts of linsey-woolsey or cotton, breechclouts and leggings of deer hide, soft boots cross-laced to the knee, their long hair confined by headbands and topped by broad-brimmed leather hats often decorated by a jaunty feather or two, their beards clipped close to the jaw.

Robre returned waves and calls with a polite heya, but stopped to talk with none, not even the children who followed him calling Hunter! Robre the Hunter! Story, story, story!

Partly that was a wordless shyness he would never confess at the sheer press of people; he was more at home in the woods or prairies, though he knew he cut a striking figure, and had a fitting pride in it, and in the fact that many men knew his deeds. He was tall even for his tall people, his shoulders and arms thick, chest deep, legs long and muscular, a burly blue-eyed, black-haired young man who kept his face shaved in an outland fashion just spreading among some of the younger set. His hunting shirt of homespun cotton was mottled in shades of earth brown and forest green; at his waist he bore a long knife and a short sword in beaded leather sheaths, with a smaller blade tucked into his right boot-top. Quiver and bow rode at his shoulder-he preferred the shorter, handier recurved horn-and-sinew Kumanch style to the more usual wooden longbow-and a tomahawk was thrust through a loop at the small of his back.

The man he sought should be down by the levee on the riverbank, where the flatboats and canoes clustered. And where…

Yes. That’s it, and no other.

The boat from the coast was huge, for all its shallow draft, like a flat tray fifty feet long and twenty wide. At its rear was an odd contraption like a mill’s wheel, and amidships was a tall thin funnel; a flag fluttered red and white and blue from a slender mast, a thing of diagonal crosses-the Empire’s flag. Somehow a fire made the rear wheel go round to drive the boat upstream Robre made a covert sign with his fingers at the thought, and whistled a few bars of the Song Against Witches. The steamboat was an Imperial thing. Imperials were city folk, even more than the Mehk, and so to be despised as weaklings. Yet they were also the masters and makers of all things wonderful, of the best guns, of boats pushed by fire and of writing on paper, of fine steel and fine glassware and of cloth softer than a maiden’s cheek. And they told tales wilder than any Robre had made around the fire of an evening, about lands beyond the eastern seas and a mighty queen who ruled half the world from a city with a thousand thousand dwellers and stone houses taller than old-growth pines.

Robre snorted and spat again. The Imperials also claimed their Queen-Empress ruled all the land here, which was not just a tall tale but a stupid, insulting one. The Seven Tribes knew that they and none other ruled their homes, and they would kill any man among them who dared call himself a king, as if free clansmen were no better than Mehk peons.

I figure the Imperials come from one of the islands in the eastern sea, Robre thought, nodding to himself. Everyone knew there were a mort of islands out there: England, Africa, the Isle of Three Witches. Past Kuba or Baydos, even, maybe. They puff it up big to impress gullible folk down along the coast.

The clansman pushed past an open-fronted smithy full of noise and clamor, where the blacksmith and his apprentices hammered and sweated, and on to a big shack of planks. The shutters on the front were opened wide, and he gave an inward sigh of relief. He’d have had to turn round and go home, if the little Imperial merchant hadn’t been here; he usually stopped first at Dannulsford Fair on his yearly rounds, but not always.

“Heya, Banerjii,” he said.

Banerjii looked up from the gloom inside the store, where he sat cross-legged on a cushion with a plank across his lap holding abacus and account book.

“ Namaste, Hunter Robre, sunna Jowan,” he said, and made an odd gesture, like a bow with hands pressed palm-to-palm before his face, which was his folk’s way of saying heya and shaking hands.

“Come in, it being always wery good to see you,” the trader went on, in good Seven Tribes speech but with an odd singsong accent that turned every v to a w.

Odd, Robre thought, as he sat and a few local boys hired by the trader saw to his baggage and beasts.

But then, the merchant was odd in all ways. He looked strange-brown as a Mehk, but fine boned and plump, sharp featured and clean shaven. His clothing was a jacket of loose white cotton, a fore-and-aft cap of the same, and an elaborately folded loincloth he called something like dooty. Even odder was his bodyguard, who was somehow an Imperial, too, for all that he looked nothing at all like his employer, being three shades lighter for starters; there were men of the Seven Tribes who were darker of skin. The guard was nearly as tall as Robre, and looked near as strong; and unlike his clean-shaved employer, he wore a neat spade-shaped beard. He also tucked his hair up under a wrapped cloth turban, wore pants and tunic and belt, and at that belt carried a single-edged blade as long as a clansman’s short sword. He looked as if he knew exactly what to do with it, too, while Banerjii was soft enough to spread on a hunk of cornpone.

A young man who looked like a relative of the merchant brought food, a bowl of ham and beans, the luxury of a loaf of wheaten bread, and a big mug of corn beer. All were good of their kind; the cooked dish was full of spices that made his eyes water and mouth burn. He cleared it with a wad of bread and a draft of the cool lumpy beer, which tasted like that from Jefe Carul’s own barrels. Banerjii nibbled politely from a separate tray; another of his oddities was that he’d eat no food that wasn’t prepared by his own kin, and no meat at all. Some thought he feared poison.

They made polite conversation about weather and crops and gossip, until Robre wiped the inside of the bowl with the heel of the bread, belched, and downed the last of the beer. During the talk his eyes had kept flicking to the wall. Not to the shimmering cloth printed with peacock colors and beautiful alien patterns, though he longed to lay a bolt of it before his mother, or to the axes and swords and knives, or to the medicines and herbs, or to the tools. You could get cloth and cutlery and plowshares, needles and thread anywhere, if none so fine. It was the two rifles that drew his gaze, and the bandoliers of bright brass cartridges. No other folk on earth made those.

“So,” Banerjii said. “Pelts are slow this year, but I might be able to take a few-for friendship’s sake, you understand.”

“Of course,” Robre said. “I have six bearskins-one brown bear, seven feet ’n’ not stretched.”

The contents of the packs came out, all but one. They dickered happily, while the shadows grew longer on the rough pine planks of the walls; the prices weren’t much different from the previous season. They never were, for all that Banerjii always complained prices were down, and for all that Robre kept talking of going to the coast and the marts of fabled Galveston on his own-that would be too much trouble and danger, and both men knew it. Robre smiled to himself as the Imperial’s eyes darted once or twice to the last, the unopened, pack.

“Got some big-cat skins,” he said at last.

Banerjii’s sigh was heartfelt, and his big brown eyes were liquid with sincerity. “Alas, my good friend, cougar are a drug on the market.” Sometimes his use of the language was a little strange; that made no sense in Seven Tribes talk. “If you have jaguar, I could move one or two for you. Possibly lion, if they are large and unmarked.”

Robre nodded. Jaguar were still rare this far north, though more often seen than in his father’s time. And there were few lion prides east of the Westwall escarpment. Wordlessly, he undid the pack and rolled it out with a sweeping gesture.

Banerjii said something softly in his own language, then schooled his face to calmness. Robre smiled as the small brown hands caressed the tiger-skins. And not just tiger, he thought happily. Both animals were some sort of sport, their skins a glossy black marked by narrow stripes of yellow gold. And they were huge, as well, each nine feet from the nose to the base of the tail.

“Got ’em far off in the east woods,” he said. That was a prideful thing to say; those lands weren’t safe, what with ague and swamp-devils. “You won’t see the likes of those any time soon.”

“No,” Banerjii said. “And so, how am I to tell what their price should be?”

Robre kept his confident smile, but something sank within his gut. He would never get the price of what he craved. He was an only son, his father dead and his mother a cripple, with no close living kin-and his father had managed to quarrel with all the more distant ones. Most of what he gleaned went to buy his mother’s care and food; oh, the clan would not let her starve even if Robre died, but the lot of a friendless widow was still bitter, doubly so if she could not do a woman’s work. The price of the rifle was three times what he made in a year’s trapping and trading…and if he borrowed the money from the merchant, he’d be the merchant’s man for five years at least, probably forever. He’d need ammunition, too, not just for use but for practice, if the weapon was to do him any good.

The Imperial smiled. “But perhaps there is another thing you might do, and-” He dipped his head at the rifles. “I think, my good friend, you have put me in the way of something even more valuable than these pelts.” He rubbed his hands. “Another of my countrymen has arrived. A lord — a Jefe-not a merchant like me, and a hunter of note. He will need a guide…”

“And I thought Galveston was bad,” Lt. Eric King of the Peshawar Lancers said to his companion, laughing. “This-what do they call it, Dannulsford? — is worse.”

Both were in the field dress of the Imperial cavalry: jacket and loose pyjamy trousers of tough khaki-colored cotton drill, calf-boots, leather sword-belts around their waists supported by a diagonal strap from right shoulder to left hip; their turbans were the same color, although the other man’s was larger and more bulbous than his officer’s, which was in the pugaree style with one end of the fabric hanging loose down his back.

“Han, sahib,” Ranjit Singh grunted in agreement as they stood at the railing of the primitive little steamboat. “It is so, lord. These jangli-admis ”-jungle-dwellers-“live like goats.”

The lands along the river had been pretty enough to his countryman’s eye, in a savage fashion; swamp and forest on the banks, giving way to a patchwork of wood and tall-grass savannah to the west, with the occasional farm and stretch of plowed black soil. The settlements of the barbarians were few and scattered, crude log cabins roofed in mossy shingles, surrounded by kitchen gardens and orchards of peach and pecan, and farther out, patches of maize and cotton and sweet potatoes surrounded by zigzagging split-rail fences. Corrals were numerous, too, for they seemed to live more by their herds than their fields; the grasslands were full of long-horned, long-legged cattle and rough hairy horses, and the woods swarmed with sounders of half-wild pigs.

Woods stood thicker on the eastern bank, wilder and more rank. The air over the Three Forks River was full of birds, duck and geese on their southward journey, and types he didn’t recognize. Some were amazing, like living jewels of jade and turquoise and ruby, darting and hovering from flower to flower with their wings an invisible blur. That sight alone had been worth stopping here, on his way back from the European outposts of the Empire to its heartland in India.

“Sahib,” grumbled Ranjit Singh, “this wasteland makes England look like a cultivated garden-like our own land in Kashmir.”

King nodded. England remained thinly peopled six generations after the Fall. Still, after long effort from missionaries and settlers you could say it was civilized again in a provincial sort of way; farms and manors, towns, and even a few small cities growing again in the shadow of the great ruin-mounds overgrown by wildwood. Four millions dwelt there now, enough to give a human presence over most of such a small island. The countryside here had the charm of true wilderness, if nothing else.

This little settlement called Dannulsford, on the other hand… Squalid beyond words is too kind, he thought. The stink was as bad as the worst slum in Calcutta, which was saying a good deal; smoke, offal, sewage, hides tacked to cabin walls or steeping in tanning pits, sweat and packed bodies. The water smelled for a mile downstream, as well.

“Probably they’re not as bad when they’re not jammed in together like this,” he said. “And we won’t be here long. Off to the woods as soon as we can.”

“Of woods we have seen enough, this past year and more, sahib,” Ranjit Singh said, as he dutifully followed Eric down the gangplank. “Europe is full of them.”

“And the woods there full of danger,” Eric chaffed. He’d just spent six months as part of the escort for a party of archaeologists, exploring the ruins amid the lost cities of the Rhine Valley and points east. “We’ve earned a holiday.”

“In more woods?” the Sikh said sourly.

“For shikari, not battle,” Eric said. “Some good hunting, a few trophies, and then back home.”

“After this, even Bombay will feel like home,” the Sikh said. “When we leave the train in Kashmir, I shall kiss the dirt in thankfulness.”

King shrugged, a wry turn to his smile. “Well, daffadar, you’re free to spend your leave as you please.”

Ranjit Singh snorted. “Speak no foolishness, sahib,” he said. “If you wish to hunt, we hunt.”

The Imperial officer shrugged in resignation. King’s epaulettes bore the silver pips of a lieutenant; Ranjit’s arm carried the three chevrons of a daffadar, a noncommissioned man. Besides being his military subordinate, Ranjit Singh was the son of a yeoman-tenant on the King estate, and his ancestors had been part of the Kings’ fighting tail ever since the Exodus, martial-caste jajmani- clients who followed the sahib into the Peshawar Lancers as a matter of course. That mixture of the feudal and the regimental was typical of the Empire’s military, and it made discipline a very personal thing. Ranjit Singh would obey without question, as long as the order didn’t violate his sense of duty-by letting his sahib go off into the wilderness without him, for example.

They climbed log steps in the side of the natural levee and strolled up the rutted muddy street that led from the stretch of riverbank. The Imperial cavalrymen walked with their left hands on the hilts of their curved tulwar- sabers; besides those they carried long Khyber knives, and holstered six-shot revolvers, heavy man-killing Webley. 455’s. Otherwise they were alike in their confident straight-backed stride with a hint of a horseman’s roll to it, and not much else.

Eric King was an inch over six feet, broad-shouldered and long-limbed, with a narrow high-cheeked, straight-nosed face, glossy dark-brown sideburns and mustache, and hazel eyes flecked with amber. Ranjit Singh was a bear to his lord’s hunting cat, four inches shorter but thicker in the chest and shoulders, broad in the hips, as well, and showing promise of a kettle belly in later years. He was vastly bearded, since his faith forbade cutting the hair on head or face, and the black bush of it spilled from his cheekbones down to his barrel chest. His eyes were black, as well, moving swiftly despite the relaxed confidence of his stride, alert for any threat.

Mostly the mud is a threat to our boots, Eric thought. Either sucking them off, or just eating them.

Someone had laid small logs in an attempt to corduroy a sidewalk, but heels had pressed them into the blackish mud; passing horses and feet kicked up more, and a small mob of shouting children followed the two foreigners, pointing and laughing.

A wooden scraper stood at the door of their destination, the small building with BANERJII amp; SONS on the sign above, and they used it enthusiastically before pulling off their footwear and putting on slippers.

“ Namaste, Lieutenant King sahib,” the little Bengali merchant said. “I received your note. Anything I may do for the Queen-Empress’s man…”

“ Namaste, Mr. Banerjii,” King replied, sinking easily cross-legged on the cushion and gratefully taking a cup of tea laced with cardamom, a taste of home. Sitting so felt almost strange, after so long among folk who used chairs all the time.

He handed over a letter. The merchant raised his brows as he scanned it. “From Elias and Sons of Delhi!” he murmured in his own language.

Bengali was close enough to King’s native Hindi that he followed it easily enough for so simple a matter. “They’re my family’s Delhi men-of-business,” he said modestly, keeping his wry smile in his mind.

Every trade has its hierarchy, he thought. And in some circles, it’s we who gain status from being linked to them, not vice versa.

“I will be even more happy to assist an associate of so respectable a firm,” Banerjii went on, in the Imperial dialect of English; that was King’s other mother-tongue, of course. “As I understand it, you wish to see something of the country? And to hunt?”

King nodded. And to make a report to the military intelligence department in the Red Fort in the capital; likely nothing would come of it, but it couldn’t hurt. North America was part of the British Empire in theory, even if Delhi’s writ didn’t run beyond a few enclaves on the coast in actual fact. Eventually it would have to be pacified, brought under law, opened up and developed; when that day came any information would be useful. That might be a century from now, but the Empire was endlessly patient, and the archives were always there.

“You will need a reliable native guide, servants, and bearers,” Banerjii said.

“Are any available? The garrison commander in Galveston lent me a few men. Locally recruited there, but reliable.”

And you should have asked for more, radiated from Ranjit Singh.

Banerjii shook his head. “Oh, most definitely you must hire locally,” he said. “Coastal men would be of little use guiding and tracking here-” He gave a depreciatory smile. “-as useless as a Bengali in Kashmir. But the natives have some reliable people. They are savages, yes, indeed, but they are a clean people here, all the Seven Tribes and their clans. From the time of the Fall.”

King nodded in turn; that was one of the fundamental distinctions in the modern world, between those whose ancestors had eaten men in the terrible years after the hammer from the skies struck, and those who hadn’t. The only more fundamental one was between those who still did, and the rest of humanity.

“And they are surprisingly honest, I find, particularly to their oaths-oh, my, yes. But proud-very proud, for barbarians. There is one young man I have dealt with for some years, a hunter by trade, and-”

With a gesture, he unrolled the tiger-skins. King caught his breath in a gasp.

Sonjuh dawtra Pehte thrust her way into the beer shop through the swinging board doors, halting for a second to let her eyes adjust to the bright earth-oil lamps and push back her broad-brimmed hat. The dim street outside was lit only by a few pine-knots here and there.

There were a few shocked gasps; a respectable girl didn’t walk into a man’s den like this unaccompanied. Some of the gasps were for her dress-she’d added buckskin leggings and boots, which made her maiden’s shift look more like a man’s hunting shirt, and so did the leather belt cinched about her waist, carrying a long bowie and short double-edged toothpicker dagger and tomahawk. A horseshoe-shaped blanket roll rode from left shoulder to right hip, in the manner of a hunter or traveler.

One man sitting on the wall-bench, not an Alligator clansman and the worse for corn-liquor, misinterpreted and made a grab for her backside. That brought the big dog walking beside her into action; her sharp command saved the oaf’s hand, but Slasher still caught the forearm in his jaws hard enough to bring a yelp of pain. The stranger also started to reach for the short sword on his belt, until the jaws clamped tighter, tight enough to make him yell.

“You wouldn’t have been trying to grab my ass uninvited, would you, stranger?” Sonjuh said sweetly. “’Cause if you were, after Slasher here takes your hand off, these clansmen of mine will just naturally have to take you to the Jefe for a whuppin’. ’Less they stomp you to death their own selves.”

The man stopped the movement of right hand to hilt, looked around-a fair number of men were glaring at him now, distracted from their disapproval of Sonjuh-and decided to shake his head. A sensible man was very polite out of his own clan’s territory. If he wasn’t…well, that was how feuds started.

“No offense, missie,” he wheezed.

“Loose him,” Sonjuh commanded, and the dog did-reluctantly.

The man picked up his gear and made for the door; several of the others sitting on stools and rough half-log benches called witticisms or haw-hawed as he went; Sonjuh ignored the whole business and walked on.

The laughter or the raw whiskey he’d downed prompted the man to stick his head back around the timber door-frame and yell, “Suck my dick, you whore!”

Sonjuh felt something wash from face down to thighs, a feeling like hot rum toddy on an empty stomach, but nastier. She pivoted, drew, and her right hand moved in a chopping blur.

The tomahawk pinwheeled across the room to sink into the rough timber beside the door, a whirr of cloven air that ended in a solid chunk of steel in oak. The out-clan stranger gaped at his hand, still resting on the timber where the edge of the throwing-ax had taken a coin-size divot off the end of the middle finger, about halfway down through the fingernail. Then he leapt, howling and dancing from foot to foot and gripping the injured hand in the other as the mutilated digit spattered blood; after a moment he ran off down the street, still howling and shouting bitch! at the top of his lungs.

Most of the men in the beer shop laughed at that, some so loud they fell to the rush-strewn clay floor and lay kicking their legs in the air. She went and pulled the tomahawk out of the wood, wiped it on her sleeve, and reslung it; Slasher sniffed at something on the floor, then snapped it up. The roaring chorus of guffaws and he-haws was loud enough to bring curious bypassers to the door and windows, and send more hoots of mirth down the street as the tale spread; several men slapped her on the back, or offered drinks-offers she declined curtly. The older men were quiet, she noticed, and still frowning at her.

Instead she pushed through the long smoky room toward the back, where the man she sought was sitting. The air was thick with tobacco smoke-and the smell of the quids some men chewed and spat, plus sweat and cooking and sour spilled beer and piss from the alley out back. Still, she thought he’d probably seen all there was to see; those smoldering blue eyes didn’t look as if they missed much.

“Heya,” she said, and to her dog, “Down, Slasher.”

“Heya, missie,” he replied formally, as the big wolfish-looking beast went belly-to-earth.

“You Hunter Robre? Robre sunna Jowan?” The form of a question was there, but there was certainty in her voice.

“Him ’n’ no other,” the young man said. “You’d be Sonjuh dawtra Pehte, naw?”

His brows went up a little as she sat uninvited, pulling over a stool that was made from a section of split log, flat side sanded and the other set with four sticks. The rushes on the hard-packed clay floor rustled and crackled as she plunked it down and straddled it.

“Yi-ah.” She nodded, a little mollified that he hadn’t used her father’s gift-names. Nobody wanted to be called the daughter of the Stinker or the Friendless. “There’s no feud between the Alligators ’n’ the Bear Creek people, or quarrel between our kin.”

“No feud, no quarrel,” he acknowledged; both clans were of the Cross Plains folk, which meant they didn’t have to assure each other that there was no tribal war going on either. It was more than a little unorthodox for a woman to go through the ritual, anyway.

“How’d you know who I was?” she added, curious, as she tore off some of the wheat-and-injun bread he had before him, dipped it in the salt and ate it; that satisfied courtesy, in a minimal sort of way.

He was supposed to be a sharp man, but as far as she knew they’d never met-her family had lived solitary. Robre was famous, after a fashion: Sonjuh dawtra Pehte had begun acquiring a little notoriety only in the last few weeks.

“Figured. Old Pehte had red hair like yours before he went bald, ’n’ ’sides that, you favor him in your looks.” He ate a piece of the bread himself, which meant he had at least to listen to her; then he went on: “He was a dab hand with a tomahawk, too; saw him win the pig ’n’ turkey here at Dannulsford once when my father brought me, must be ten years ago now.”

Sonjuh tossed her head, sending the long horse-tail of her hair swishing. Being unmarried-likely she would be anyway at nineteen, even were her father someone else-she wore her hair down and tied back with a snakeskin band, in a torrent the color of mahogany reaching to between her shoulder blades; a thick band of freckles ran across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Any man of the Seven Tribes would have accounted her comely, snub-nosed face and red lips and the long smooth curves of her figure as well, until he saw the wildness in those haunted leaf-green eyes.

“Nice throw, too, missie,” Robre continued. “Pehte must’ve taught you well.”

“I missed, ” she snapped. “Wanted to split his ugly face!”

Robre laughed, a quieter sound than most men’s mirth, then stopped when he realized she wasn’t even smiling.

“Welcome to a share,” he said a little uneasily, indicating the pitcher of corn beer and clay jug of whiskey.

“Didn’t come to drink,” she said, after taking a token sip from the beer jug; refusing a man’s liquor was a serious insult. “I came to talk business.”

The young man’s black brows went up farther. “Shouldn’t your…oh.”

Sonjuh nodded. “My father’s dead.” Oh, merciful God, thank You he died first of all. “So’s my mother. So’s my three sisters. I saw-”

Of itself, her hand shot out and grabbed Robre’s glass. She tossed back the raw spirits and waited with her eyes clenched shut until the sudden heat in her stomach and a wrenching effort of will stopped the shaking of her hands and pushed away the pictures behind her eyelids. When she looked back up, Robre was frowning at her left forearm, where a bandage had slipped from a healing wound. A patch of skin had been removed-neatly, the way a skinning knife would do it in skilled hands.

She tugged the sleeve down over the rawness and went on: “Didn’t come for sympathy, either. Like I said, I’ve got business to talk with you, Robre Hunter.”

He took a pull at his mug of beer, wiped the back of one big calloused hand across his mouth, and nodded. “I’m listening, missie.”

That was more than she’d expected, if less than she’d hoped. “I didn’t have brothers. My pa didn’t hold with hiring help, either, so from my woman-time I’ve been doing a son’s work for him. Hunting, too.” She took a deep breath. “I know my pa wasn’t well liked-”

Across the table, a polite lack of expression said as plainly as words: He was about as disliked as a man can be and not be outlawed. Or just plain have his gizzard cut out.

More than one had tried, too, but Stinking Pehte had been a good man of his hands, and it had always gone the other way. All fair fights and within the letter of the law, but killing within the clan didn’t make you any better liked either. One or two was to be expected, in a hot-blooded man, but public opinion thought half a dozen excessive; the clan needed those hands and blades.

“-but he was a good farmer, ’n’ no one ever called him lazy. We got our crop in before we were hit. Not much, but we sold most here in Dannulsford. Deer hides ’n’ muskrat, too, ’n’ ginseng, and potash from the fields we were clearing, ’n’ soap ’n’ homespun me ’n’ my ma ’n’ sisters made. The posse got back most of our cabin goods ’n’ tools, ’n’ our stock; then there’s the land, that’s worth something.”

Not as a home-place; too ill-omened for that, and too exposed, as her family’s fate proved. But someone would be glad to have the grazing, plus there was good oak-wood for swine fodder, and the Jefe would see that they paid her a fair share. That would probably amount to enough ham, bacon, and cow to put her meat on the table half the year.

“Glad to hear you’re not left poor,” Robre said.

“What it means is I can pay you,” she said, plunging in. This time his eyes widened, as well.

“Pay me for what, missie Sonjuh?” he said.

She reached into the pouch that hung at her hip, supported by a thong over the shoulder; it was the sort a hunter wore, to carry tallow and spare bowstrings and a twist of salt, pipe or chaw of tobacco and a whetstone and suchlike oddments. What she pulled out of it was a scalp. The hair was loose black curls, coarser and more wiry than you were likely to find on a man of the Seven Tribes.

Robre whistled silently. Taking scalps was an old-timey, backwoods habit; Kumanch and Cherokee still did it, but few of their own folk except some of the very wildest. These days you were supposed to just kill evildoers or enemies, putting their heads up on a pole if they deserved it. And for a woman…

“I expect that’s not some coast-man out of luck,” he said.

“Swamp-devil,” she said flatly. “Not no woman nor child, neither. That was a full-grown fighting man. Slasher ’n’ I took him, bushwhacked him.”

“Well…good,” Robre said, with palpable uneasiness, blinking at the tattered bit of scalp-leather and hair. “One less swamp-devil is always good.”

“That’s what I want to hire you for,” Sonjuh went on in a rush. “I can’t…I swore ’fore God on my father’s blood I’d get ten for my ma, ’n’ ten for each of my sisters. I can’t do it alone.”

“Jeroo!” Robre exclaimed, and poured himself another whiskey. “Missie, that’s unlucky, making that sort of promise ’fore the Lord o’ Sky! Forty scalps!”

“Or that I’d die trying,” she said grimly. “I need a good man to help. All the goods I’ve got is yours, if you’ll help me. Jeroo! Everyone says you’re the best.”

“Missie…” There was an irritating gentleness in his tone. “A feud, that’s a matter for a dead man’s clansmen to take up. It wouldn’t be right or fitting for me to interfere.”

Her hand slammed the table, enough to make jug and bottle and cup rattle, despite the thick weight of wood. “The gutless hijos won’t call for a war party! They say the ten heads they took were enough for honor! Well, they aren’t! I can hear my folks’ spirits callin’ in the dark, every night, callin’ for blood-wind to blow them to the After Place.”

Some of those nearby exclaimed in horror at those words; many made signs, and two abruptly got up and left. You didn’t talk openly of ghosts and night-haunts, not where the newly dead were concerned. Naming things called them. A ripple of whispers spread throughout the beer shop, and bearded faces turned their way.

“It’s all because nobody liked my pa, ’n’ because they’re all cowards!” Her voice had risen to a shout, falling into the sudden silence.

“That’s a matter for your Jefe, missie,” Robre said. The soothing, humor-the-mad-girl tone made the blood pound in her ears. “’N’ the gathering of your clan’s menfolk.”

“I came to offer you two Mehk silver coins each, if you’ll come with me ’n’ help me,” she said, in a tone as businesslike as she could manage. “’N’ you can show these gutless, clanless bastards that a girl ’n’ an out-clan man can do what they can’t.”

“Sorry,” he said; the calm finality shocked her more than anger would have. “Not interested.”

“Then damn you to the freezing floor of hell!” she screamed, snatching up his mug and dashing the thick beer into his face. “Looks like I’m the only one in this room with any balls!”

That made him angry; he was up with a roar, cocking a fist-then freezing, caught between the insult and the impossibility of striking a freewoman of the Seven Tribes, and a maiden of another clan at that.

Shaking, Sonjuh turned on her heel, glad that the lanterns probably weren’t bright enough to show the tears that filled her eyes. She stalked out through the shocked hush, head down and fists clenched, not conscious of the two weird foreigners who blocked the door until she was upon them. One twisted aside with a cat’s gracefulness; the other stood and she bounced off him as she would off an old hickory post; then he stepped aside at the other’s word.

Sonjuh plunged past them into the night and ran like a deer, weeping silently, with Slasher whining as he loped at her heel.

“Sah!”

The corporal in charge of the squad he’d borrowed from Galveston’s garrison commander gave a crackling stamp-and-salute; Eric King returned the gesture. The noncom and his squad were natives, too, stalwart muscular men, dark brown of skin, with kinky hair and broad features. They’d been recruited from the farming and fishing tribes who were spread thinly over the central Texas coast, it being policy to raise local levies where possible, since they were always cheaper and often hardier than imported regulars.

But Imperial discipline puts down deep roots, King thought, as the man wheeled off to supervise his squad; they struck the tents and folded them for pack-saddle carriage with practiced efficiency.

An ox wagon had brought the gear this far from the steamboat; two tents, a large and a small-military issue-and a fair pile of boxed weapons, ammunition, equipment, and supplies-the latter including brandy from France-outre-mer, distilled in the hills near Algiers, and whiskey from New Zealand. Robre Hunter had raised his brows and smacked his lips over a small sample of each, and King made a mental note to advise Banerjii to keep some in stock. Being teetotal as well as a vegetarian, it probably hadn’t occurred to the Bengali that booze came in different qualities and prices.

The native guide looked at the pile of equipment. “Lord o’ Sky!” he said. “If you Empire men take this much on a hunting trip, what do you drag along on a war-party?”

“Considerably less,” King said dryly, remembering fireless bivouacs in the Border hills, rolled in his cloak against blowing snow and gnawing a piece of stale chapatti while everyone listened for Pathan raiders creeping up on their bellies under cover of the storm.

“I’m hunting for pleasure and I’m not in a hurry. Why not be comfortable as possible? When we of the Angrezi Raj fight, all we care about is winning.”

Robre nodded slowly. “Makes sense,” he said. “Let’s get on about it, then.”

The Imperials had camped in the pasture of an outlying farm owned by the Jefe of the Alligators, a few acres of tall grass drying toward autumn surrounded by oak and hickory and magnolias and trees he couldn’t identify. It had a deep stillness, broken by the whicker of horses and the trilling of unfamiliar birds, and the smells were of sere grass and wet leaves and dew on dust. King smiled in sheer pleasure as he stood with hands on hips looking about him; an owl flew past him, out late or early, with a cry like who-cooks-for-you.

“What’s that called?” he asked Robre.

The native guide blinked at him in astonishment. “You don’t have ’em? That’s a barred owl-come out in daylight more ’n most of their kind.”

“That’s the point of traveling,” he said. “To see things you haven’t got at home. Now, to business.”

He sat in a folding canvas chair, Ranjit Singh on one side and Robre on the other. A table before him bore a register book, pen, ink bottle, and a pile of little leather bags cinched tight with thongs around their store of Imperial silver rupees. The natives here, he’d noticed, were fascinated and impressed by writing; very conveniently, they were also quite familiar with the concept of coined money as a store of value. Stamped silver came up in trade from the city-states farther south, although the Seven Tribes minted none themselves. He’d been in places where everything was pure barter, and the simplest transaction took forever.

“Step up,” he said, in the local tongue, then sighed as they crowded around, yelling; the concept of standing quietly in line was not part of the local worldview.

About two dozen men had applied for the eight wrangler-muleteer-guard-roustabout positions; Robre knew some of them personally, and most by reputation. In fact, two slunk off immediately when they saw his face. Most were young, given leave by their fathers in this slack part of the farming year and eager for the rare chance to earn hard money.

Robre put them through their paces, checking their mules’ and horses’ backs for sores and their tack for cracked leather, watching them pack and unpack a load, follow a track, shoot at a mark, run and jump and wrestle.

King had Ranjit Singh handle the hand-to-hand testing. It was a good way to teach these wild natives a little respect, and none of them lasted more than a minute before finding themselves immobilized and slammed to the ground. The local style was catch-as-catch-can, the men strong and quick and active, quite oblivious of pain, but utterly unsophisticated. He wasn’t surprised; it was often that way, with warrior groups like this. They put so much into their weapons that they neglected unarmed combat, and the style the Imperial military used drew on ancient Asian traditions.

The Sikh rose grinning from the wheezing, groaning body of the last, dusted his hands, beat dirt and bits of grass and weed off his trousers; sweat glistened on his thick hairy torso, where iron muscle rippled in bands and curves.

“Not bad,” he said jovially. “For a man who knows nothing.”

The Sikh said it in Hindi, which took the sting out, although the object of it could probably guess the meaning of the words as he sat up and rotated a wrenched shoulder; the other candidates laughed at his discomfort. He was older than most of them-in his thirties, a tall rawboned swarthy man.

“All right,” the local said to the Sikh as he rose and rubbed his bruises. “You got some fancy wrasslin’ there-’n’ you’re strong as a bear with a toothache ’n’ twice as mean. Now, Jefe,” he went on to King, “who’s going to be your trail-boss on this trip?”

“I’m in command,” King said. “After me, my man Ranjit Singh here; after him, Robre sunna Jowan. Any problems with that-” He glanced down at the register. “-Haahld sunna Jubal?”

“You bet there is, by God. Robre is a good man of his hands ’n’ a fine hunter, no dispute. But it’s not fitting he should be trail-boss over older men, him so young ’n’ not having wife nor child nor land of his own and all.”

The rest stood silent; one or two seemed to agree. Robre flushed, but King put out a hand to restrain him. “In that case, you’re free to go,” he said cheerfully.

The face of the native standing before him turned darker. “That’s a mighty high-top way to speak, stranger, considering you’re far from home ’n’ alone here. Who’d you think you are?”

King rose, still smiling slightly, but the other man took a step back. “I know I’m an officer of the Empire,” he said calmly. “Which means that I’m an automatic majority wherever I go.” He gestured to the moneybags. “If you take my silver, you take my orders. If you won’t, get out.”

His body stayed loose, but his hands were tinglingly aware of the position of saber and pistol and knife. He’d met men like these before, from peoples whose ways demanded that a man be prickly and quick to take offense and forever ready to fight. You had to begin as you meant to go on, and be ready to back it up, like the head wolf in a pack. The air crackled between them, and the native’s eyes shifted slightly.

Just then the drumming sound of hooves turned heads. A ridden horse, a remount and a mule, all sweating a bit. And the rider…

Well, well, it’s the little redhead, King thought. He’d gotten most of her story out of Robre, and felt a certain sympathy-it was a hard world, and harder still for an orphan. Well, well, not so little, either.

In sunlight and flushed with exertion she looked even better than the other night’s tantalizing glimpse. She kicked a leg over the pommel of her saddle and slid to the ground, bosom heaving interestingly under the coarse cotton shift as she came toward him with her dog panting at her heel.

“Heya, Empire-Jefe King,” she said bluntly.

“Hello, miss,” he answered, amused. I am an Imperial chieftain, I suppose.

“Hear you’re hiring,” she said. “I want work.” At a snicker from the crowd of clansmen, she turned around and glared. “And not as no bedwarmer, either!” Turning back to King, “I can carry my load, ’n’ I know the eastern woods. Hunted east of the Three Forks since I was a girl, ’n’ with my pa east of the Black River twice.”

Beside King, Robre stirred, surprise on his face. Evidently that’s some claim; but she’s not lying, I’d think. Intriguing!

Haahld sunna Jubal snorted. “You got to be a fightin’ man for this trip, missie, able to carry a man’s load. Want me to test your wrasslin’?” The clansman roared with laughter.

Sonjuh’s face flushed red, and her foot moved in a blur while Haahld sunna Jubal was still holding his sides and hooting. There was a meaty thump as the toe of the girl’s boot slammed into the native’s groin.

King’s lips quirked upward; he thought he’d have been better prepared than the luckless Haahld, but then he’d stopped thinking of women as necessarily helpless when he was an ensign leading a patrol to break up a brawl in a military brothel in Peshawar Town. An Afghan tart crouching under a table had nearly cut his hamstrings with a straight-razor, and he’d never forgotten the raw terror of the moment.

The haw-hawing laughter turned into a strangled shriek of pain as the man doubled over and fell to the ground, clutching himself and turning brick red. Ouch. That hard a kick in the testicles was no joke-something might have been ruptured; the girl’s long legs were slender, but muscled like a temple acrobat’s from running and riding and tree-climbing. Now, there’s native talent, he thought, grinning and wincing slightly.

She stood back in the sudden silence, then seemed to lose a little of her bristling aura as most of the company guffawed and slapped their thighs; even Robre, who seemed like a sobersided young man, grinned openly.

Haahld was puking helplessly now, and moaning. Someone threw a bucket of water over him, which seemed to give him a little strength, and he crawled away to haul himself upright along a tree trunk, still nursing his crotch with one hand. He got a good deal of witty medical advice about poultices from the crowd, although a few of the older and more respectable looked shocked and disapproving.

“Well, miss, generally if I want to kick a man in the groin, I handle it myself rather than hiring it done,” King said, smiling. “Although I concede that was good work of its kind. What else can you do?”

“Ride. Rope. Run like a deer. Handle a pack mule. Track meat-game or big cat-or a man-through brush country; we lived aside in deep woods. I’m a pretty good shot, too.”

She turned, unslung the crossbow from her saddle and fired it at the target eighty yards away. The snap of the string and the thunk of the bolt striking the magnolia came almost instantly, and the octagonal steel head sank deep into the midriff of the human figure chalked out on the bark. King raised a brow, impressed despite himself, and at the speed with which she reloaded. Then she slid the tomahawk from where it rested across the small of her back and threw; that went home in the center of the X they’d carved in a dead pine twenty paces away. Haahld winced away-he’d used that trunk to regain his feet-and fell again.

“Your man Robre there can look at my beasts,” she said. “Sound backs ’n’ feet, ’n’ kept proper.”

“Well and good,” King said calmly, as Robre did just that, picking up hooves to check their shoeing and seeing that no bare gall-marks or sores hid beneath the tack.

King continued: “But why do you want to go on a dangerous expedition?”

“You’re going into the east woods,” she said. “Mebbe as far as the Black River, naw? I can’t go that far by my own self; too dangerous.”

King frowned; he’d heard of her obsession. “I’m not taking a…what’s your term? War party? I’m going to hunt, not fight.”

For the first time Sonjuh smiled, although it wasn’t a particularly pleasant expression: “Mebbe not, but that won’t be much of a never mind to the swamp-devils. If your trail-boss there-” She used her chin to indicate Robre. “-has told you it’s unlikely, he’s a mite too cheerful about the prospect, to my way of thinking.”

“Well then, miss: can you cook?”

She flushed again, and opened her mouth, then closed it. When she spoke, it was with tight calm. “I’m not looking to hire on as kitchen help, Empire-Jefe.”

“When I’m in the field, usually my man Ranjit does for both of us,” King said. “But I need him for other work now. You can carry our provisions on your mule and do our cooking and Robre’s; same daily rate for your work and your animals as the rest. Take it or leave it.”

Their eyes locked, and after a long moment she nodded. And you can control your temper somewhat, my red-haired forest nymph, he thought, inclining his head slightly. He wasn’t going to take a complete berserker along, no matter how attractive and exotic. Stalking the wild Sonjuh will add a little spice to our expedition, eh, what?

One of the pieces of advice his father had given him when he got his commission was that excitable women were wearing, but often worth the trouble.

A shout brought their heads around. Haahld had recovered enough to pull Sonjuh’s tomahawk out of the dead pine. He’d also recovered enough to start shrieking again, a torrent of curses and threats. His first throw was erratic but vigorous; not only Sonjuh but also half a dozen others went flat as it pinwheeled by. The handle struck a mule on the rump, and the beast flung both heels back and plunged across the meadow braying indignantly, knocking Robre down and nearly stepping on him. Haahld wrenched at another throwing-ax stuck in the tree, froth in his beard; several men shouted, and Sonjuh did a rapid leopard-crawl toward her crossbow.

King wasted no time. His Khyber knife was slung at the back of his belt with its hilt to the right. He drew it, and threw with a hard whipping overarm motion; like many who’d served on the North West Frontier, he’d spent some time learning how to handle the versatile Pathan weapon.

His had a hilt fringed with tiny silver bells, but the business part was eighteen inches of pure murder, a thick-backed single-edged blade tapering to a vicious point, like an elongated meat-chopper from the kitchens of Hell. It turned four times, flashing in the bright morning sun, then pinned Haahld’s arm to the stump like a nail, standing quivering with his blood running down the wood. The silver bells chimed…

Another silence, and Haahld’s eyes turned up in his head; his fall tore the chora- knife out of the wood, and the thump of his body on the ground was clearly audible.

“Somebody see to him,” King said. “And to that mule.”

Sonjuh was staring at him, in a way that made him stroke his mustache with the knuckle of his right hand in a quick sleek gesture; Robre was giving him a considering look, evidently reconsidering first impressions. Knife-throwing was more of a circus trick than a real fighting technique, but there were occasions when it was impressive, without a doubt.

“No trouble with your local laws?” King asked, sotto voce.

Robre shook his head. “ Naw. Haahld fell on his own doings.” A grin. “Couldn’t hardly do anything right, after that she-fiend hoofed him in the jewels. He’d been beat by a woman-’n’ beatin’ her back would just make him look mean as well as weak.”

“Well, their customs have the charm of the direct and simple,” King muttered to himself, in Hindi.

Sonjuh had gone to investigate his supplies after she retrieved her tomahawk and beasts, unpacking her mule beside the boxes and sacks. She returned leading her riding horse.

“Four o’ them ru pees,” she said, holding out a hand. “The stuff you need, I can get it in Dannulsford ’n’ be back in about an hour.”

King blinked in mild surprise; he’d left purchasing trail supplies to Robre, who seemed unlikely to miss anything important. When he said so, Sonjuh snorted.

“You’ve got enough cornmeal ’n’ taters ’n’ bacon and such,” she said contemptuously. “Plain to see a man laid it in. Men don’t live like people on their ownesome; they live like bears with a cookfire. If I’m going to cook, I’m going to do it right-I have to eat it, too, don’t I?”

King handed her the money and stood shaking his head bemusedly as she galloped off. Her dog sat near the pile of supplies she’d set him to guard, giving a warning growl if anyone approached them too closely.

“Hoo,” Robre said, looking south down the pathway that led to the Alligator Jefe’s steading. “Taking Sonjuh Head-on-Fire with us…ought to make the trip right interesting, Jefe King.”

“My thought exactly,” King said, and laughed.

Alternate history has many uses. One of them is to revive literary worlds that time has rendered otherwise inaccessible to us. Writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs or A.A. Merritt could, with some small degree of initial plausibility, litter the remoter sections of the world with lost races and lost cities; their models, writing a generation earlier, had a broader canvas to work with, as exploration wasn’t nearly so complete.

By the 1930s, Burroughs was taking his heroes to other planets and to a putative world within the hollow core of ours, and the last lost races were tribes in the interior of New Guinea. Even Mars and Venus were taken from us a little later, their six-armed green men, canals, and dinosaurs replaced with a boring snowball of rust and a sulphuric-acid hell…although alternatives to that are another story, one which I hope to tell someday.

Likewise, the supply of exploits available to a dashing young cavalry officer became sadly limited after 1914. Being machine-gunned at the Somme just isn’t up to the standards of the sort of exploit conveyed by Kipling, Henty, or (in nonfiction) the young Winston Churchill, who participated in one of the last quasi-successful charges by British lancers in 1898, against the Mahdists at Omdurman. Dervish fanatics tend to use plastique these days, rather than swords. Pirates are rather ho-hum Third World extortionists and sneak thieves, rather than characters like Henry Morgan-who was sent home in chains and ended up as governor of Jamaica, after a private audience with Charles II!

In short, by the second decade of the last century the gorgeous, multicolored, infinite-possibility world that opened up with the great voyages of discovery of the sixteenth century was coming to an end. So was the fictional penumbra that accompanied, mirrored, and even inspired it-for the Spanish conquistadors were themselves quite consciously emulating the feats of literary heroes, of the knights of the Chanson du Roland or the fantastic adventures of Amadis of Gaul.

From a literary point of view, this was a terrible misfortune. It’s often forgotten in these degenerate times how close to the world of the pulp adventurers the real world could be in those days.

Allan Quatermain, of H. Rider Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines, was based fairly closely (fantasy elements like immortal princesses aside) on the exploits of Frederick Selous, explorer and frontiersman.

What writer could come up unaided with a character like Richard Francis Burton, the devilish, swashbuckling swordsman-adventurer who fought wild Somalis saber-to-spear, once escaped certain death on an African safari when he ran six miles with a spear through his face, snuck into at least two “forbidden” cities (Mecca and Medina) in native disguise, and translated the Thousand and One Nights to boot, after writing a firsthand account of the red-light district of Karachi?

Or Mary Kingsley, who went singlehanded into the jungles of Gabon and did the first field enthnography among the cannibal Fang. In her books, she recommended from personal experience a nice thick set of petticoats, which was exactly what was needed when falling into a pit lined with pointed stakes, and noted that said skirts should contain a convenient pocket for a revolver, “which is rarely needed, but when needed is needed very badly.”

Who could devise adventures more unlikely and fantastic than the real life of Harry Brooks in the 1830s, who sailed off to the East Indies in a leaky schooner with a few friends, fought pirates and headhunters, and made himself independent raja of Sarawak? And he was at the tail end of a tradition that began with Cortes and Pizzaro setting off on private-enterprise quests to overthrow empires at ten thousand-to-one odds.

That world is still available to us through historical fiction, of course, but that is sadly limiting in some respects; the “end” of the larger story is fixed and we know how it comes out. The Western Front and the Welfare State are waiting down at the end of the road.

Like many another, I imprinted on the literature of faraway places and strange-sounding names at an early age, and never lost the taste for it-or for the real-world history and archaeology to which it led. Fortunately, I also discovered alternate history, a genre within the larger field of speculative fiction, which allows a rigorous yet limitless ringing of changes.

Alternate history can give writer and reader a breath of fresher air, of unlimited possibility, of that world where horizons are infinite and nothing is fixed in stone; where beyond the last blue horizon waits the lost city, the people of marvels, the silver-belled caravan to Shamballah and the vacant throne…

“Shikari in Galveston” springs from the backbone of my novel The Peshawar Lancers. The universe of The Peshawar Lancers stems from an alteration in the history of the nineteenth century: a catastrophic strike by a series of high-velocity heavenly bodies. We know that this sort of thing actually happens, and that a similar (though larger) impact ended the dinosaurian era 65 million years ago.

Being fictional, my impacts could be precisely controlled by authorial fiat, within the boundaries of the physically possible. What they did was to derail “progress” by taking out the most technologically advanced part of the world, and by drastically reducing the world’s overall population.

And so the twentieth and twenty-first centuries see a world where the most advanced regions are only just surpassing the Victorian level of technology and social development, and much remains sparsely inhabited by a wild variety of cultures at a very low level of technology.

In other words, a world larger and better suited to the classic adventure story than ours.

The Peshawar Lancers took place mostly in India, the center of the British Empire and the most advanced state of its day; “Shikari in Galveston” is set on the Imperial frontiers, in the wilds of a re-barbarized Texas. Both put people in situations that suit the definition of “adventure”: somebody else in very bad trouble, very far away.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!

I have put this document together from the different sources included in the Ash papers, and have again translated the languages into modern English. Where necessary, I have substituted colloquial obscenities to give a flavor of the medieval original. Let the casual reader, expecting the Hollywood Middle Ages, abandon hope here.

“Most women follow their husbands to the wars… I followed my son.”

Yolande Vaudin’s voice came with the grunt and exhalation of physical effort. Guillaume Arnisout looked at her down the length of the corpse they were carrying.

He grinned. “Your son? You ain’t old enough to have a grown-up son!”

She appeared a wonderfully perverse mix of male and female, Guillaume thought. The clinging of her belted mail shirt, under her livery jacket, showed off the woman’s broad hips. Her long legs seemed plump in hose, but were not: were just not male. Shapely and womanly…He got a kick out of seeing women’s legs in hose: entirely covered, but the shape so clearly defined-and hers were worth defining.

She had her hair cut short, too, like a page or young squire, and it curled sleekly onto her shoulders, uncovered, the rich yellow of wet straw. She had been able to slip her helmet off before the sergeant noticed: it was buckled through her belt by the chin strap. That meant he could see all of her wise and wicked face.

She’s willing to talk, at least. Can’t let the opportunity go to waste.

He put his back against the Green Chapel’s doors and eased them open without himself letting go of the corpse’s ankles. Yolande held her end of the dead woman’s body tightly under the arms, taking the weight as he backed through the door first. The blue-white flesh was chill against his palms.

Not looking down at what she held, Yolande went on. “I had Jean-Philippe when I was young. Fifteen. And then, when he was fifteen, he was called up in the levy, to be a soldier, and I followed.”

The partly open door let in the brilliant sunlight from the barren land outside. It glittered back off the white walls of the monastery’s other buildings. Guillaume twisted his head around to look inside the chapel, letting his eyes adjust, unsure of his footing in the dimness. “Didn’t he mind you being there?”

Her own sight obviously free of the morning glare, Yolande pushed forward. The legs of the body were stiff with rigor, and they shoved against him. Bare feet jabbed his belly. There was black dirt under the toenails.

He backed in, trying to hold one door open with his foot while Yolande maneuvered the dead woman’s shoulders and head through it.

“He would have minded, if he’d known. I went disguised; I thought I could watch over him from a distance… He was too young. I’d been a widow five years. I had no money, with his wages gone. I joined the baggage train and dyed my hair and whored for a living, until that got old, and then I found I could put a crossbow bolt into the center of the butts nine times out of ten.”

The chapel’s chill began to cool the sting of sunburn on the back of his neck. His helmet still felt excruciatingly hot to wear. Guillaume blinked, his sight adjusting, and looked at her again. “You’re not old enough.”

Her chuckle came out of the dimness, along with the shape of the walls and tiled floor.

“One thing a woman can always look like is a younger man. There’s her,” Yolande said, with a jerk of her head downward at the rigid dead body between them. “When she said her name was Guido Rosso, you’d swear she was a beardless boy of nineteen. You take her out of doublet and hose and put her in a gown, and call her ‘Margaret Hammond,’ and you’d have known at once she was a woman of twenty-eight.”

“Was she?” Guillaume grunted, shifting the load as they tottered toward the altar. He walked backward with difficulty, not wanting to stumble and look stupid in front of this woman. “I didn’t know her.”

“I met her when she joined us, after the fall.” Yolande’s fingers visibly tightened on the dead woman’s flesh. There was no need to specify which fall. The collapse of Constantinople to the Turks had echoed through Christendom from East to West, four years ago.

“I took her under my wing.” The woman’s wide, lively mouth moved in an ironic smile. Her eyes went to the corpse’s face, then his. “ You wouldn’t have noticed her. I know what you grunts in the line fight are like-‘Archers? Oh, that’s those foulmouthed buggers hanging around at the back, always saying “fuck” and taking the Lord their God’s name in vain…’ I dunno: give you a billhook and you think you’re the only soldier on the battlefield.”

Guillaume liked her sardonic grin, and returned it.

So…is she flirting with me?

They staggered together across the empty interior of the Green Chapel. Their boots scraped on the black and white tiles. He could smell incense and old wood smoke from the morning’s prayers. Another couple of steps…

“I used to help her back to the tents, drunk. She was never this heavy. There!” Yolande grunted.

Just in time, he copied her, letting the stiff ankles of the body slide down out of his dirty grip. The body thunked down onto the tiles at his feet. No one had cleaned it up. The bones of her face were beaten in, the mess the same color as heraldic murrey: purple red.

His skin retained the feel of hers. Stiff, chill, softening.

“He Dieux!” Guillaume rubbed at his back. “That’s why they call it dead weight.”

He saw the dead Rosso-Margaret-was still wearing her armor: a padded jack soaked with blood and fluids. Linen stuffing leaked out of the rips. Every other piece of kit from helmet to boots was gone. Either the jacket was too filthy and slashed up to be worth reclaiming, or else the charred and bloodstained cloth was all that was still holding the body’s intestines inside it.

Yolande squatted down. Guillaume saw her try to pull the body’s arms straight by its sides, but they were still too stiff. She settled for smoothing the sun-bleached, blood-matted hair back. She wiped her hands on her peacock blue hose as she stood.

“I saw her get taken down.” The older woman spoke as if she was not sure what to do next, was talking to put off that moment of decision-even if the decision was, Guillaume thought, only the one to leave the corpse of her friend.

The light from the leaf-shaped ogee windows illuminated Yolande’s clear, smooth skin. There were creases at her eyes, but she had most of the elasticity of youth still there.

“Killed on the galley?” he prompted, desperate to continue a conversation even if the subject was unpromising.

“Yeah. First we were on one of the cargo ships, sniping, part of the defense crew. The rag-heads turned Greek fire on us, and the deck was burning. I yelled at her to follow me off-when we got back on our galley, it had been boarded, and it took us and Tessier’s guys ten minutes to clear the decks. Some Visigoth put a spear through her face, and I guess they must have hacked her up when she fell. They’d have been better worrying about the live ones.”

“Nah…” Guillaume was reluctant to leave the Green Chapel, even if it was beginning to smell of decomposing flesh. He felt cool for the first time in hours, and besides, there was this woman, who might perhaps be an impressed audience for his combat knowledge. “You never want to leave one alive under your feet. Somebody on the ground sticks a sword or dagger up and hits your femoral artery or your bollocks-Ah, ’scuse me.”

He stopped, flustered. She gave him a look.

Somewhere in his memory, if only in the muscle-memory of his hands and arms, is the ferocity with which you hack a man down, and follow it up without a second’s hesitation- bang-bang-bang-bang! — your weapon’s thin, sharp steel edges slamming into his face, throat, forearms, belly; whatever you can reach.

He looked away from the body at his feet, a woman to whom some soldier in the Carthaginian navy has done just that. Goose pimples momentarily shuddered over his skin.

“Christus Viridianus! I couldn’t half do with a drink.” He eased his visored sallet back on his head, feeling how the edge of the lining band had left a hot, sweaty indentation on his forehead. “Say, what did happen to your son? Is he with the company?”

Yolande’s fingers brushed the Griffin-in-Gold patch sewn onto the front of her livery jacket, as if the insignia of their mercenary company stirred memories. She smiled in a way he could not interpret. “I was a better soldier than he was.”

“He quit?”

“He died.”

“Shit.” I can’t say a thing right! “Yolande, I’m sorry.”

Her mouth quirked painfully. “Four months after he went to war. What was I thinking, that I could protect him? He was carrying shot in the first siege we were at, and a culverin inside the castle scored a direct hit on the powder wagon. When I found him he’d had both his hands blown off, and he’d bled to death-before his mother could get to him.”

“Jeez…” I wish I hadn’t asked.

She’s got to be ten years older than me. But she doesn’t look it.

He guessed Yolande had not, like “Guido Rosso,” even temporarily tried to pass as a man.

Because she’s a woman, not a girl.

“Why did you stay with the company?”

“My son was dead. I wanted to kill the whole world. I realized that if I had the patience to let them train me, the company would let me do just that.”

In his stunned silence, Guillaume could hear goat bells jingling outside and some shuffling noises closer to hand. A warm breeze blew in through the Green Chapel door, which had lodged open on a pebble. The smell of death grew more present now, soaking into the air. Like the back of a butcher’s shop in a heat wave.

“Shit.” He wiped at his mouth. “It’s going to get hot later in the morning. By evening…she’s going to be really ripe by Vespers.”

Yolande’s expression turned harsh. “Good. Then they can’t ignore her. She’s going to smell. That should get the bloody rag-heads moving. The captain’s right. This is the only thing to do.”

“But-”

“I don’t care what the fucking priests say. She’s going to be buried here like the Christian soldier she is. ”

Guillaume shrugged. For himself, he would as cheerfully have chucked all the bodies overboard, to go with the Carthaginian Visigoths and feed the fish; evidently this wasn’t the thing to say to Yolande right now. Especially not if you want to get into the crossbow woman’s knickers, he reminded himself.

“If the abbot can ignore the stink she’s going to make…” He let his grin out, in its different context. “What do you bet me he’ll send for the captain before Sext? Hey, tell you what…I bet you a flagon of wine she’s buried by midday, and if I lose, I’ll help you drink it tonight. What do you say?”

What she would have answered wasn’t clear from her expression, and he didn’t get to hear a reply.

The scuffling noise that had impinged on his consciousness earlier grew louder, and he spun around and had his bollock dagger out of its sheath at his belt and pointing at the altar a full second before a boy rolled out from under the altar cloth and sat staring down at the woman soldier’s corpse.

“Aw-shit!” Guillaume swore, exasperated.

He saw the thin iron ring welded around the boy’s throat. Some slave skiving off work. Or hiding from the big bad Frankish mercenaries- not that I blame him for that.

“Hey, you — fuck off out of here!”

The youth looked up, not at Guillaume, but at Yolande. There was a quiver about him that might have been fear or energy. He looked to be anywhere in his early or middle teens, a pale-skinned Carthaginian Visigoth with dark hair flopping into his eyes. Guillaume realized instantly, She’s thinking he’s fifteen.

“I wasn’t listening!” He spoke the local patois, but it was plain from his ability to answer that he understood one Frankish language at least. “I was foreseeing.”

Guillaume flinched, thought, Were we saying anything I don’t want to hear back as gossip? No, I hadn’t got round to asking her if she fucks younger men-And then, replaying the kid’s remark in his head, he queried: “Foreseeing?”

Silently, the young man pointed.

Above the altar, on the shadowed masonry of the wall, there was no expected Briar Cross. Instead, he saw a carved face-a Man’s face, with leaves sprouting from the creepers that thrust out of His open mouth.

The carving was large: perhaps as wide as Guillaume could have spanned with his outstretched hands, thumb to thumb. There is something intimidating about a face that big. Vir Viridianus: Christ as the Green Emperor, as the Arian Visigoths prefer, heretically, to worship Him. The wood gleamed, well polished, the pale silvery grain catching the light. Holm oak, maybe? The eyes had been left as hollows of darkness.

“I dream under the altar,” the young man said, as hieratic as if he had been one of the monastery’s own priests, and not barefoot and with only a dirty linen shirt to cover his arse.

Guillaume belatedly realized the scrabbling noise hadn’t ceased with their stillness. The hilt of his bollock dagger was still smooth in his hand. He stepped back to give himself room as the altar cloth stirred again.

An odd, low, dark shape lifted up something pale.

Guillaume blinked, not processing the image, and then his mind made sense both of the shape and of the new smell that the odor of the corpse had been masking. A pale flat snout lifted upward. A dark hairy quadruped body paced forward, flop ears falling over bright eyes…

The young man absently reached out and scratched the pig’s lean back with grimy fingers.

A pig-boy asleep under the Green Man’s altar? Guillaume thought. Sweet dead Jesus on the Tree!

“I had a seeing dream,” the young man said, and turned his face toward the living woman in the chapel; toward Yolande. “I think it is for you.”

Sellars and Yeatman’s wonderful book 1066 and All That says that History is all you can remember from your schooldays. Ash: A Secret History, of which “The Logistics of Carthage” is a piece of flotsam, says that History is all you can remember… and it’s wrong.

The links between alternate history and secret history fiction run deep. With Ash, I wanted not only to consider a moment at which history as we think we know it might have turned out differently, but to think about the nature of history itself. History as narratives that we make up-aided, of course, by things we take to be evidence-to tell ourselves, for one or another reason. “History” as distinct from “the past,” that is.

The past happened. It’s just that we can’t recover it. History is what we can recover, and it’s a collection of fallible memories, inconvenient documents, disconcerting new facts, and solemn cultural bedtime stories.

I went a stage further with Ash — the past didn’t happen, either, not as we’re told it did, and the scholar Pierce Rat-cliff uses history to work that out. Well, history plus those inconvenient things upon which history is based: memoirs, archaeological artifacts, fakes, scholarship tussles, and quantum mechanics. It’s different for a writer, thinking of an alternate history point of departure in these terms. History is not a road on which we can take a different turning. The road itself is made of mist and moonbeams.

And then there’s A. D. 1477. And A. D. 416. And between the two of them is A. D. 1453, which is where “The Logistics of Carthage” got its genesis, even though the story itself takes place four years later in A. D. 1457.

In A. D. 1477, Burgundy vanished.

This is straightforward textbook history. The country that had been Burgundy-a principality of France, according to France; an independent country, according to the princely dukes of Burgundy-vanishes out of history in January of 1477–1476 in the pre-Gregorian calendar. Duke Charles the Bold (or “Rash,” as 20:20 hindsight has it) lost a battle to the Swiss, was inconveniently found dead without leaving a male heir, and, to cut a short story shorter, France swallowed Burgundy with one gulp.

And rich and splendid and powerful Burgundy vanishes instantly from the history books. You would never know that for large periods of medieval history, Western Europe was not solely divided between the power blocs of Germany, Spain, and France. I’m not the only writer to be fascinated by this phenomenon. M. John Harrison’s splendid and non-alternate-universe novel The Course of the Heart, for example, revolves around it in an entirely different way. Tropes of history and the past and memory are endlessly valid. But it was my starting point for Ash: A Secret History, which is, of course, the real story of why Burgundy vanished out of history in A. D. 1477, and what took its place.

Of course it’s the real story: would I lie to you?

I am shocked-shocked! — that you think I would…

And then there’s A. D. 429. In history as we know it, this is the start of Gothic North Africa. A Vandal fleet sails over from mainland Europe under Gaiseric, who kicks the ass of the Roman inhabitants, and-becoming pretty much Roman himself in the process-establishes the rich and powerful kingdom of Vandal North Africa, with its capital established in Carthage by A. D. 439. In A. D. 455, Gaiseric sails east and sacks great Rome itself.

For Ash, I thought it would be neat if it hadn’t been the Vandals who invaded North Africa.

I preferred the Visigoths-a rather different Gothic people who had ended up conquering the Iberians and running Spain, and whose elective-monarchy system by the early medieval period is, as one of the characters in Ash says, “election by assassination.” I decided I’d have a Visigoth North Africa instead.

Then, while wandering through a book on post-Roman North Africa, I discovered there had indeed been a vast Visigoth invasion fleet that set off toward North Africa. Thirteen years before the Vandals.

It was sunk by a storm.

So I had A. D. 416, a concrete and inarguable point of departure for an alternate universe that I would have been perfectly happy to set up as a hypothetical what-if. History plays these wonderful tricks, always. I love it.

And then we come to A. D. 711, when in our timeline the Muslims decided, quite reasonably as they thought, to invade Visigoth Spain. This resulted in a long occupation of chunks of Spanish kingdoms, a number of taifa buffer states that were part-Christian and part-Muslim, and a self-defined “entirely beleaguered and all-Christian” north. It’s a story that doesn’t end until A. D. 1492, when the last of the Moors leave Granada, and one of the most fascinating mixed cultures of Western Europe goes belly-up.

However, for Ash, having had my earlier point of departure set up as a non-Arabic North Africa, I ended up with a Visigoth Arian Christian invasion of a Spain that was part of the Church of the Green Christ. That rumbled along nicely from A. D. 711 until the 1470s, with the North African Visigoths largely taking the place of the Byzantines in our history. It may say in the KJV that nations have bowels of brass, but we know that history is endlessly mutable…

And then there’s “The Logistics of Carthage.” Which I had not intended to write, after Ash. No way! When a 500,000-word epic is over and done, trust me, you do not want to see any more of it. Two walk-on characters tugging at one’s elbow and remarking that they, too, have their story that they would like to tell, is something guaranteed to have the writer running off gibbering.

So I gibbered, and I decided I wouldn’t write it, because the story of Ash is over. Over over, not here-is-a-sequel over. Not nearly over, but really sincerely over.

Ah yes, they said to me: but this isn’t a sequel. For one thing, it’s set twenty years before the main action of the book. For another, one of the people whose story it is was a minor character, and the other appears solely for a half sentence in one place in the book. And it’s set somewhere we didn’t get to in Ash. And, and…

And there’s the Fall of Constantinople, you see.

A. D. 1453, and one of the defining points of Western European history. The great capital of the Byzantine empire, Constantinople, falls to the Turks and becomes Istanbul. Among the things that come out of the city with the flood of refugees are all the Hermetic writings of Pico and Ficino, who themselves have what amounts to an alternate-universe history of what the world is really like. The fall of Constantinople (in some theories) turbo-charges the Italian Renaissance, which kicks off the Renaissance in the rest of Europe, and leads to the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and hello modern world.

But “The Logistics of Carthage” isn’t about that.

It’s about the war after A. D. 1453, when the Turks move on the next obvious enemy in the Ash history: the Gothic capital of Carthage, under the Visigoth king-caliphs. A war taking place on the coast of North Africa, where a troop of European mercenaries heading toward Carthage in the pay of the Turks find themselves with a corpse they cannot bury because of a religious dispute, and we start to get a look at a love story-and pigs-and the mechanisms of atrocity.

Carthage, you will note, is another entity that vanishes out of history. Frequently. There isn’t anything particularly mysterious about it. The Punic city of Carthage gets flattened by the Romans in 146 B. C., in a very marked manner, and sown with salt. Roman Carthage gets sacked, in turn; Gothic Carthage is taken by the Arabs in A. D. 698. Tunis grows up in the same area, and has its own troubles. History has a way of happening to cities.

But, mystery or not, Carthage has fascinated me for rather the same reasons as Burgundy does: here is something completely gone, its people do not remain, and how do we know that the history we hear is anything like what really happened?

In “The Logistics of Carthage,” one of the soldiers has what she takes to be dream visions, sent by God. It wasn’t possible to bring on stage, in a novella, the reasons why they’re not dreams-they are glimpses of the real future, five hundred years ahead from where she is-but the rationale is present in Ash, and for the purposes of these people, it doesn’t matter whether what Yolande sees is scientific or theological. What she feels about it is real.

And I get to push the history that runs from these points of departure on a stage further, which I naturally couldn’t do in Ash, and am therefore glad to have the chance. Yolande sees future-Carthage, future-North Africa, and they are not our twenty-first-century Carthage and North Africa, just the up-to-date version of what the history would become, if it was to become our time.

But the alternate-universe story isn’t always about “Cool, a POD!” Stories of people’s experience are only rarely about seeing history turn. This story, which wouldn’t let me go until I wrote it, is about a woman who followed her son to the wars, and how it feels to her then to be working for the worshipers of the child-eater goddess Astarte (which is where, in this history, the Turks get their red Crescent Moon flag). Military history gives short shrift to mothers-but then, Guillaume, finding himself with a reluctant appreciation of a woman’s usual role in history, is as much a mother as Yolande.

And pigs. Never forget the pigs.

They don’t know a damn thing about history, pigs.

They just become its victims-as people without power tend to.

And for those readers who have read Ash…yes, you do recognize a few names. And, yes, this is the early life of those particular people. I didn’t know it either, until I came to write the story.

Oh, and the baby is precisely who you think she is. But she isn’t important to this narrative. For these people, it could have been any nameless baby at all.

For most of us, after all, names are the first thing lost by history.

“Ecce homo,” said German Freddie with a smile. “That is your man, I believe.”

“That’s him,” Brocius agreed. “That’s Virgil Earp, the lawman.”

“What do you suppose he wants?” asked Freddie.

“He’s got a warrant for someone,” said Brocius, “or he wouldn’t be here.”

Freddie gazed without enthusiasm at the lawman walking along the opposite side of Allen Street. His spurred boots clumped on the wooden sidewalk. He looked as if he had somewhere to go.

“Entities should not be multiplied beyond what is necessary,” said Freddie, “or so Occam is understood to have said. If he is here for one of us, then so much the worse for him. If not, what does it matter to us?”

Curly Bill Brocius looked thoughtful. “I don’t know about this Occam fellow, but as my mamma would say, those fellers don’t chew their own tobacco. Kansas lawmen come at you in packs.”

“So do we,” said Freddie. “And this is not Kansas.”

“No,” said Brocius. “It’s Tombstone.” He gave Freddie a warning look from his lazy eyes. “Remember that, my friend,” he said, “and watch your back.”

Brocius drifted up Allen Street in the direction of Hafford’s Saloon while Freddie contemplated Deputy U.S. Marshal Earp. The man was dressed like the parson of a particularly gloomy Protestant sect, with a black flat-crowned hat, black frock coat, black trousers, and immaculate white linen.

German Freddie decided he might as well meet this paradigm.

He walked across the dusty Tombstone street, stepped onto the sidewalk, and raised his gray sombrero.

“Pardon me,” he said. “But are you Virgil Earp?”

The man looked at him, light eyes over fair mustache. “No,” he said. “I’m his brother.”

“Wyatt?” Freddie asked. He knew that the deputy had a lawman brother.

“No,” the man said. “I’m their brother, Morgan.”

A grin tugged at Freddie’s lips. “Ah,” he said. “I perceive that entities are multiplied beyond that which is necessary.”

Morgan Earp gave him a puzzled look. Freddie raised his hat again. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I won’t detain you.”

It is appropriate that Friedrich Nietzsche be the subject of an alternate-worlds story, as his theory of Eternal Recurrence posited an infinity of universes, though these worlds were not, strictly speaking, alternate: instead the theory insisted on all the universes being alike, with the same people repeating the same actions again and again. It is not within my competence to judge whether Nietzsche actually believed this, or whether he used the theory as a metaphor to make the larger point that we should do nothing that we would regret doing over and over again, unto infinity.

“The Last Ride of German Freddie” sprang fully armed from my head in a discussion on the online forum Duelling Modems, in which I suggested that it might be fun if someone wrote an alternate history story in which Nietzsche went West and tested his theories of destruction at the O.K. Corral. No sooner had I suggested this than I realized that I should be the one to attempt the story.

All the characters actually existed, from German Freddie and Josie to Fellehy the Laundryman. Aside from introducing Freddie as a witness and eliminating some characters (like Bat Masterson and Texas John Slaughter) who had no effect on the action, I have followed history very precisely up till the moment of Freddie’s intervention in the O.K. Corral gunfight.

In creating this story, I found that the chief obstacle was not in overcoming history but in overcoming the cinema. Most people gain their knowledge of the Old West from the movies, and the movies are romances, not history. Gunfights are presented at the climax of films, but the O.K. Corral fight was in reality the beginning of a war, not the end. Even the name “The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” is the title of a film: until the film’s release, the battle was known more simply as “the streetfight in Tombstone.”

Another conception given us by the movies is that “gunfighter” was a job description: in reality, no one was ever paid for being a gunfighter. John Holliday was a gambler; Billy the Kid a ranch hand; Wyatt Earp a lawman; John Ringo an outlaw; Bat Masterson a sports writer and entrepreneur. I have chosen to make German Freddie a gambler, on the theory that a teetotaler with a good mind could earn a good living playing poker in saloons with drunks.

The story does not solve the central mystery of Wyatt Earp: why he is remembered and revered when others, equally well known in their day, are forgotten. Bill Tilghman was a more successful lawman; Clay Allison a deadlier shot; and Dirty Dave Rudabaugh more colorful. But only Wyatt Earp rides forever in the movies. Everyone who knew Wyatt Earp seems to have agreed that he was an extraordinary man, but none of them bothered to record why.

I have no answers to the question of Earp’s fame, and so I have transferred my own lack of understanding to Freddie, making it a part of Freddie’s character and an element in what motivates him.

For anyone whose knowledge of the events in Tombstone is limited to the movies, I include a brief summary of the lives of the principal characters.

Friedrich Nietzsche left the University of Basel in 1879 as a result of ill health, and devoted himself to writing, producing most of the works for which he is famous, including Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Anti-Christian, The Genealogy of Morals, and Ecce Homo. He suffered a breakdown in Turin in 1889, probably as a result of an old syphilitic infection, and remained insane until his death in 1900. His unpublished works fell into the hands of his sister, the notorious anti-Semite Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who edited and altered his works and who controlled access to his manuscripts. As a result of Elisabeth’s tampering, Nietzsche’s works gained a reputation that made him the intellectual darling of Imperial Germany and Hitler’s Third Reich.

Josephine “Sadie” Marcus left Tombstone in the aftermath of the Earp-Clanton feud and lived briefly with her family until she again encountered Wyatt Earp. Though there is no record that they ever married, Josie lived with Wyatt until his death. She died in 1944.

Virgil Earp was ambushed after the O.K. Corral fight by the Cowboy faction, as a result of which his arm was paralyzed. Despite the handicap he lived a full, adventurous life, and died in 1905.

Morgan Earp was ambushed in a Tombstone pool hall by the Cowboy faction, and died within hours. It is possible that his killers thought they were shooting Wyatt. His death prompted the Vengeance Ride by the Earp faction, in which their posse killed or drove the principal Cowboy leaders from Tombstone.

Curly Bill Brocius remained the leader of the Cowboy faction until he and his gang attempted to ambush Wyatt Earp and a group of his friends at Iron Springs, near Tombstone. Wyatt Earp killed him with a shotgun.

John Ringo may have been the last victim of the Earp-Clanton feud. “The Hamlet among Outlaws,” as Walter Noble Burns called him, was found dead near Tombstone with a pistol in his hand and a bullet in his brain. The wound may have been self-inflicted-there is evidence Ringo was a depressive. Wyatt Earp, however, claimed to have killed him, though Wyatt may have been in Colorado at the time. Ringo left behind a small library of classic works, including some in Latin, giving him a posthumous reputation as a frontier intellectual. It is unlikely that he ever attended university, and he seems to have been self-educated.

Ike Clanton fled Tombstone in the aftermath of the war he had done so much to start, but did not alter his belligerent, drunken ways, and was killed by detective J. V. Brighton in 1887.

John Behan, unable or unwilling to stop the violence in Tombstone, failed to win reelection as sheriff. Thanks to his political contacts he became warden of the Yuma prison, though there were those who claimed he should have been on the other side of the bars.

John Holliday continued to roam the West, usually with his Hungarian companion “Big Nose Kate” Elder, until his death from tuberculosis in 1887. Despite his long illness and hazardous life, he outlived all the men who wanted him dead.

Wyatt Earp never acted as a lawman after his spell in Tombstone, and instead became a gambler and entrepreneur. Traveling from one Western boom town to the next, he made and lost many fortunes, and in his later years became the friend of Jack London, William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Charlie Chaplin, and the film director John Ford. He lived happily with Josie Marcus until his death in 1929, and was buried in a Jewish cemetery near San Francisco.