Worlds That Weren't

by Walter Jon Williams

  King shook his head, suddenly aware of how glorious the young morning sunlight was. “He’d have killed the dog,” he said.

  They were close. Suddenly the clan-girl was in his arms, and their lips met. The moment went on…

  …until Robre cleared his throat. Sonjuh jumped back, two spots of red in her cheeks. King straightened, suddenly conscious that he’d lost his turban. The Bear Creek man was leaning on his spear beside the body of the other boar, scowling and brushing at a trickle of blood from his nostrils.

  Eric King laughed, smoothing back his mustache with the knuckle of his right hand. “Looks like we’re having pork tonight,” he said gaily.

  “I left a turkey just back there,” Sonjuh blurted, and ran off after it.

  ’N’ when the snow-winds lifted

  Then summer came again;

  Three summers of snow ’n’ ice

  Then the warmth once more;

  Olsatyn, he cursed ’n’ fled

  No more he held the Sun enslaved

  Black hammer that broke the Sun,

  Broke on the sword of Lord o’ Sky;

  He called the tribes out!

  Out from where they sheltered

  Blessed them for staying clean

  Not eating of man’s-flesh,

  When hunger was bitter;

  Gave them His blessing

  Gave seed corn ’n’ stock

  Set the bounds ’n’ the bans

  Named clan ’n’ tribe ’n’ law;

  But those others who’d fallen

  Who’d eaten of man’s-flesh;

  Them did God curse forever

  Lord o’ Sky gave us their lands;

  With steel ’n’ fire we drove them out

  Drove the devils east into the swamps

  Festering land of evildoers—

  Eric King leaned back in his canvas chair and gnawed the last of the savory meat from a rib as he listened—one of the yearling piglets, to be precise, slathered with a fiery-hot tomato-based sauce full of garlic and peppers before grilling. Sonjuh dawtra Pehte had outdone herself, from the stuffed turkey to the pudding of cornmeal, molasses, and spices.

  Hunter Robre sat on a log on the other side of the fire, his fingers moving on an instrument he called a gittah—surprisingly like the sitar in both form and name—as he half sang, half chanted his people’s creation-myth. The flickering of the low fire showed a ring of rapt bearded faces. And one beardless one, her chin propped in a palm and the other scratching in the ruff of the great gray dog lying beside her, the firelight bringing out the ruddy color of her hair as she puffed meditatively on a corncob pipe.

  A huge crimson oak stood over the campsite, and its leaves took fire as well from the yellow flames, shifting in a maze of scarlet and gold amid the rising column of sparks. The stars above were bright and many, if you let your eyes recover from the fire glow a little. The air had turned soft and a little cool, with wisps of mist drifting over the little stream to the south; it smelled pleasantly of cooking and hickory smoke and horses. Somewhere a beast squalled in the distance, and an owl hooted.

  King tossed the bone into the coals as Robre finished. Well, that’s another, he thought. I’ve heard worse. I’ve definitely heard sillier ones.

  Every folk he knew of had some sort of legend attached to the Fall; even the Empire had Kipling’s great Exodus Cantos, about St. Disraeli and the evacuation that had taken his own ancestors from England to India. He smiled wryly to himself. Kipling had made it all sound very heroic, but the Kings had a tradition of scholarship as well as Imperial service, and lived near refounded Oxford. From what he’d read in sources of the time, it had been more of a panic flight, teetering on the brink of chaos, with only the genius of Disraeli and Salisbury and the others to make it possible at all. A lucky few had made it out to India and the Cape and Australia before the final collapse; the other nine-tenths of the population had stayed perforce, and starved, and died.

  Robre’s version of his people’s origins made the founders of the Seven Tribes a host of saintly warriors, when they’d probably been a handful of scruffy but successful bandits; the great battles against the “devils” were probably bloody little skirmishes with a few hundred, or perhaps a few score, on each side.

  Still, the epic had a certain barbaric vigor; much like the people who had made it. They’d certainly done well over the past few generations, pushing their borders back on all sides…from what Banerjii and the garrison commander at Galveston had told him.

  “Heya, Jefe,” one of the clansmen said. “Tell us some more ’bout the Empire.”

  He did; a rousing tale of raid and counter-raid along the North West Frontier courtesy of the great Poet Laureate, and described the mountains in his own home province, Kashmir. They were even more eager for stories of the great cities and oceangoing steamships, locomotives and flying machines, but those they took as fables, more so than their own tales of haunts and witches and Old Man Coyote, evidently some sort of minor godlet-trickster. Their own bogies frightened them, but foreign marvels were merely entertainment.

  Although I think Miss Head-on-Fire believes me somewhat, because she wants to, King thought, conscious of her shining eyes. And you, as well, Robre Hunter, because you’re no fool and can listen and add two and two.

  The clansman had noted the direction of Sonjuh’s eyes, as well, and was half-scowling. Jealous? King thought. The big clansman hadn’t shown much interest in the girl himself…but a man often didn’t discover he wanted a woman until she turned to another, and that was as true among natives as among the sahib-log, as natural in a nighted forest about an open fire as in the blazing jeweled halls of the Palace of the Lion Throne in Delhi.

  King smiled again, and had one of the kegs of New Zealand whiskey brought and set out on a stump near one of the other cooking fires. It was a bit of a waste, being finest Dunedin single-malt, but such gestures never hurt; and what was the point of being wealthy if you couldn’t indulge yourself now and then? The local hirelings clustered about it eagerly; it was enough like their own raw corn-liquor to be familiar, and enough better that they recognized the difference. Robre brought three mugs over to where King sat and Sonjuh sprawled beside her villainous-looking guardian. He handed one to the girl—for a barbarian, his manners were almost courtly, in a rough-hewn way—and one to King.

  “Sounds like a place worth seeing, your Empire,” the clansman said.

  “It’s not a place, it’s a world,” King replied.

  “Jeroo,” Sonjuh said with a sigh. “Seems the world’s a bigger place than we thought. Went to San Antwoin oncet with Pa, ’n’ that was a wonder—stone walls, ’n’ twice a hand of thousands within ’em. Sounds like that’s no more than Dannulsford Fair next to your home, Empire-Jefe. But I’d like to see it.”

  King thought of her alone and bewildered and friendless on the docks of Bombay, or worse, Capetown, and winced slightly. Furthermore, she was just crazy enough to try getting passage on some tramp windjammer out of Galveston. She’d be a sensation at court if some wild chance took her that far, but that was no fate for a human being.

  “That…that really wouldn’t be a very good idea, my dear,” he said. “A foreign land is more dangerous than these forests.”

  Robre nodded. “Bare is your back without clan to guard it,” he said, with the air of someone quoting a proverb, which he probably was. “Cold is a heart among strangers.”

  The redhead pouted slightly, and he went on a little hastily: “They’ll be a lot of sore heads tomorrow, if you were thinkin’ of moving on, Jefe.”

  His nod took in the rowdy scene around the keg. Not everyone was there, of course; Ranjit Singh and the garrison troopers were standing picket tonight by turns. King might have trusted that duty to Robre, if none of the others, but the Sikh wouldn’t hear of anyone not in the Queen-Empress’s service doing guard duty.

  “I was thinking of moving on,” King said, taking a little more of the whiskey and sighing satisfactio
n. The transplanted Scots of the South Island’s bleak Antarctic-facing shores had kept their ancestors’ skills alive. “I want a crack at those tigers before I go. But we can’t take the full caravan with us there.”

  “No, true enough,” Robre said. “Not enough fodder for that many horses, either. And”—he flicked his eyes to Sonjuh—“that’s mighty close to the Black River. Swamp-devils prowl there.”

  “Hmmm,” King said, stroking his mustache. “How much of a problem are they likely to be?”

  “Not so bad, if you’re careful,” Robre said. “Mostly they live farther south ’n’ east, down in the Big Thicket country ’n’ the Sabyn river swamps. You mostly won’t see more ’n three, four of ’em together, grown bucks, that is, for all that there’s a lot of them down there. Also they’re short of real weapons, not hardly; they hate each other poison-bad, ’n’ who’d trade with them?”

  King nodded. That was the common way of things, with those who’d kept up the cannibal ways that brought their ancestors through the terrible years of hunger and death after the Fall. When men hunted each other to eat, there could be no trust, and trust was what let even the wildest men work together. Usually man-eaters had no groupings larger than an extended family, and often they barely retained the use of speech and fire. Human beings were not meant to live like that; only the hammer from the skies and the planetwide die-off could have warped so many of the survivors so bitterly.

  Sonjuh stirred. “There was twenty in the gang that hit our place,” she said. “Pa ’n’ me ’n’ the others, we killed four—they caught us by surprise. The posse got most of the rest, but a few escaped. ’N’ they all had iron.”

  Of course, they can change, King thought. A lot of the European savages are organized enough to be dangerous. Not to mention the Russians, who are deadly dangerous.

  Robre shook his head. “That was a freak, Head-on-Fire. There’s not been a raid that size in…well, not since Fast-Foot Jowan ’n’ his sons were killed, what, three years ago?”

  “And the Kinnuh fam’ly, four before that. Before that, never, just bushwhacking by ones or twos. I tell you, they’re learning, ’n’ have been for years. If they ever learn to make big war parties—”

  “Mebbe,” Robre said dubiously. He turned his head back to King. “We needn’t take more ’n four, five altogether,” he said. “More ’n’ you’re not likely to see the big cats. I went in alone, myself ’n’ never saw sign of the swamp-devils ’tall.”

  “Four, then,” King said. “Ranjit Singh I’ll leave here to run the camp; he’ll complain, but someone has to do it. You, of course, and me, and two of the garrison soldiers with their rifles just in case—”

  “And me!” Sonjuh said, rising. Robre began to say something; King cut him off with a negligent gesture. The redhead went on: “I won’t do anything hog-wild, I swear it by God. But you’ve seen I can take care of myself ’n’ carry my load. ’N’ if you do run into swamp-devils…this is what I came for!”

  King thought for a long moment, tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair. “All right, then, true enough. I don’t expect we’ll be gone more than four or five days—I can’t spend much more time than that anyway, my furlough is long but not indefinite. And you will not go haring off on your own. Understood?”

  “I swear it, Empire-Jefe,” she said.

  Robre sighed. “You’re the man payin’ for this,” he said unwillingly. “’N’ she’s right, Coyote nip her, she is as good a hunter as anyone on this trail but you ’n’ me.”

  “Excellent,” King said. “Well, time to—”

  “I’m for a walk,” Sonjuh said. She had relaxed from her cat-tense quiver, and smiled as she looked at him. “Care to walk along with me for a spell, Empire-Jefe?”

  King smiled back; Robre gave a disapproving grunt and stalked away. Sonjuh tossed her head. “It’s our law, an unwed girl can walk out with a man if she pleases,” she said. “’N’ if her Pa ’n’ brothers don’t object.”

  “What if her pa and brothers do object?” King asked, when they’d strolled far enough to be out of easy sight and hearing of the campfires.

  Sonjuh looked up at him out of the corners of her eyes. “Why, they warn him off,” she said slyly. “Then beat ’n’ stomp him if he doesn’t listen.”

  Good thing you’re an orphan, King thought but carefully did not say aloud, as he slid an arm around her supple waist. The girl leaned toward him, her head on his shoulder, smelling pleasantly of wood smoke and feminine flesh.

  Some time later, Sonjuh gave a moan and pushed herself up on her elbows, looking down to where he kneeled between her legs, a dazed expression on her face.

  “Jeroo!” she panted. “Corn Lady be my witness, I didn’t think there was so many ways of sporting!”

  King grinned at her. “Benefits of a civilized education,” he said.

  He’d been given an illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra at twelve, and had never had much trouble finding someone to practice with; when you were young, handsome, well spoken, athletic, rich, and the eldest son of a zamindar, you didn’t. From Sonjuh’s surprise and artless enthusiasm, he gathered that the native men here went at things like a bull elephant in musth.

  “But I’ve been having more fun than you,” she said, and laughed. “And looks like you’re ready for some.”

  His grin went wider, and he put a hand under each of her thighs, lifting them up and back.

  She chuckled lazily: “Remember what I said about walkin’ out?” He nodded, reaching for the pocket of his uniform jacket; the girl had tossed it when she ripped it off his back. “Well,” she went on, “if the man gets her with child, then her Pa ’n’ brothers—’n’ the rest of the clan, too—see to it he takes her to wife. Just so you’d know, Empire-Jefe.”

  “Behold another wonder of civilization,” he said, busy with fingers and teeth on one of the foil packets; being an optimist and no more modest than most young men, he’d slipped half a dozen into his pocket earlier that evening. “Vulcanized rubber.”

  Sonjuh stared for a moment, then burst into a peal of laughter. “Looks like it’s wearin’ a rain-cloak!”

  King growled and seized a shin under each arm—

  V: THE PEOPLE OF THE BLACK GOD

  Hunter Robre spread his hands. “I can’t make the cats come where they don’t have a mind to,” he said reasonably, then slapped at a late-season mosquito. Dawn had brought the last of them out, to feed before full sunlight.

  The blind where they’d been waiting all night was woven of swamp-reeds, on a hillock of drier ground. The wild-cow yearling they’d staked out was beginning to smell pretty high, and all their night had gotten them was the sight of a couple of cougars sniffing around, and two red wolves who’d had to be shooed off. Forest stood at their back beyond the swamp, tupelo and live oak and cypress knotted into an impenetrable wall by brush and vines, the trees towering a hundred feet and more overhead. Even on a cool autumn morning the smell was heavy and rank, somehow less cleanly than the forests where he spent most of his time. Wisps of mist drifted over the surface of the Black River where it rolled sluggish before them; the other bank was higher than this, and thick with giant pine higher than ship’s masts.

  “No, you can’t,” Eric King said, infuriatingly reasonable. He sighed. “I don’t expect that tigers of any sort are too numerous here, although it’s perfect country for them.”

  “They aren’t common,” Robre agreed. “Weren’t never seen until my pa’s time, when he was my age.” Then he puzzled at the way the Imperial had said it. “Why shouldn’t there be more tigers here, if it’s such good tiger-country? And how would you know?”

  King pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket—that cloth coat had a hunting shirt beat all hollow, and Robre had decided to have a seamstress run him up one—and offered one to his guide. Robre accepted; they were tastier than a pipe, and a lot less messy than a chaw. For a moment they puffed in silence, blowing plumes of smoke at lingering mosquitoes:
it didn’t matter now if the scent warned off game.

  “There weren’t any tigers here before the Fall—before the time when Olsaytn stole the Sun, you’d say.”

  Robre’s brows went up. Odd, he thought. When he thought of the Before Time, it was simply as very long ago, the time of the songs and the heroes; certainly before his grandsire’s grandsire’s time. The Imperial seemed to think of it more as a set date, as if it were something that had happened in his own lifetime. Odd way to think. Mebbe it’s all that writing they do.

  “Why not?” Robre said. “Plenty of beasts a tiger can tackle that a cougar or wolf can’t. What were those fancy words you used last night…ecological niche?”

  King shrugged. “I don’t know. There just weren’t, or so our books say. Why are there elephants in India, and not here? Nobody knows.”

  Robre grunted noncommittally; he wasn’t quite sure if he believed in elephants yet.

  King went on: “No lions either. When the fall came, they—the ancestors of the ones you’ve got now—probably escaped from circuses, or zoos.”

  They thrashed out the meaning of those words. Robre rubbed his chin, feeling stubble gone almost silky and reminding himself to shave soon. “Wouldn’t folks have eaten them?” he said.

  “They probably did eat the elephants in the menageries.” King grinned. “But a few predators would have been turned loose before people realized how bad things were going to get. Then, in the chaos, when every man’s hand was against every other’s…well, hungry tigers used to being around people, they’d be good at picking off stragglers, wouldn’t they? And most of the dying happened fast; by the third or fourth year, people were scarce again in these lands, very scarce. Other things—game and feral livestock that survived in out-of-the-way corners, or country farther south—bred back faster than humans, spreading over the empty lands as the vegetation recovered, and so gave the big cats plenty to hunt. They breed quickly themselves, so even a few pairs could produce a lot of offspring. Eventually they’ll fill all the land humans haven’t taken over again, but that will need another century or two.”