Worlds That Weren't

by Walter Jon Williams

  Alkibiades stepped back and waved King Agis forward. The Spartan said, “Alkibiades has spoken well. We owe our forefathers revenge against Persia. We can win it. We should win it. We will win it. So long as we stand together, no one can stop us. Let us go on, then, on to victory!”

  He stepped back. More cheers rang out. In his plain way, he had spoken well. An Athenian would have been laughed off the platform for such a bare-bones speech, but standards were different for the Spartans. Poor fellows, Alkibiades thought. They can’t help being dull.

  He eyed Agis. Just how dull was the Spartan King? So long as we stand together, no one can stop us. That was true. Alkibiades was sure of it. But how long would the Hellenes stand together? Long enough to beat Great King Dareios? Fighting a common foe would help.

  How long after beating the Persians would the Hellenes stand together? Till we start quarreling over who will rule the lands we’ve won. Alkibiades eyed Agis again. Did he see that, too, or did he think they would go on sharing? He might. Spartans could be slow on the uptake.

  I am alone at the top of Athens now, Alkibiades thought. Soon I will be alone at the top of the civilized world, from Sicily all the way to India. This must be what Sokrates’ daimon saw. This must be why it sent him to Sicily with me, to smooth my way to standing here at the pinnacle. Sure enough, it knew what it was doing, whether he thought so or not. Alkibiades smiled at Agis. Agis, fool that he was, smiled back.

  THE REAL HISTORY BEHIND “THE DAIMON”

  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.

  Harry Turtledove was born in Los Angeles in 1949. After flunking out of Caltech, he earned a Ph.D. in Byzantine history from UCLA. He has taught ancient and medieval history at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State L.A., and has published a translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle and several scholarly articles. He is, however, primarily a full-time science fiction and fantasy writer; much of his work involves either alternate histories or historically based fantasy.

  Among his science fiction are the alternate history novel The Guns of the South; and Worldwar series (an alternate history involving alien invasion during World War II); How Few Remain, a Nebula finalist; and Ruled Britannia, set largely in the theaters of Shakespeare’s London in a world where the Spanish Armada was successful.

  His alternate history novella, “Down in the Bottomlands,” won the 1994 Hugo Award in its category. An alternate history novelette, “Must and Shall,” was a 1996 Hugo and 1997 Nebula finalist. The science-fiction novella “Forty, Counting Down” was a 2000 Hugo finalist, and is under option for film production.

  He is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos Turtledove. They have three daughters, Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.

  SHIKARI IN GALVESTON

  S. M. STIRLING

  PROLOGUE: A FEASTING OF DEMONS

  “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 g
irdle; 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!”

  I: THE BEAR IN HIS STRENGTH

  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 du
ng 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.