The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (76 page)

Dexter said, “This ID says he’s under mech care.”

“How come?” Angel asked.

“Says he’s mentally deficient. These’re medical care mechs.” Dexter pushed one of the mech carcasses and it rolled, showing H-caste insignia.

“Damn, how’d they get mixed in with these reb mechs?” Nelson asked irritably, the way people do when they are looking for something or someone to blame.

“Accident,” Dexter said simply. “Confusion. Prob’ly thought they were doing the best thing, getting their charge away from the fighting.”

“Damn,” Nelson said again. Then his lips moved but nothing came out.

Bradley knelt down and brushed some flies away from the boy’s face. He gave the boy some water but the eyes were far away and the lips just spat the water out. Angel was trying to find the wound and stop the bleeding but she had a drawn, waxy look.

“Damn war,” Nelson said. “Mechs, they’re to blame for this.”

Bradley took a self-heating cup of broth from Paul and gave a little to the boy. The face was no more than fifteen and the eyes gazed abstractly up into a cloudless sky. Bradley watched a butterfly land on the boy’s arm. It fluttered its wings in the slanting yellow-gold sunlight and tasted the drying brown blood. Bradley wondered distantly if butterflies ate blood. Then the boy choked and the butterfly flapped away on a breeze and when Bradley looked back the boy was dead.

They stood for a long moment around the body. The road was a chaos of ripped mech carapaces and tangled innards and the wreck of the exploded transport. Nobody was going to run into an ambush here any more today and nobody made a move to clear the road.

“Y’know, these med-care mechs, they’re pretty smart,” Paul said. “They just made the wrong decision.”

“Smarter than the boy, probably,” Bradley said. The boy was not much younger than Bradley but in the eyes there had been just an emptiness. “He was human, though.”

The grand opening elation he had felt all morning slowly began to seep out of Bradley. “Hell of a note, huh?” he said to no one in particular. Others were doing that, just saying things to the breeze as they slowly dispersed and started to make order out of the shambles.

The snap and sparkle of the air was still with him, though. He had never felt so alive in his life. Suddenly he saw the soft, encased, abstract world he had inhabited since birth as an enclave, a preserve - a trap. The whole of human society had been in a cocoon, a velvet wrapping tended by mechs.

They had found an alternative to war: wealth. And simple human kindness.
Human
kindness.

Maybe that was all gone, now.

And it was no tragedy, either. Not if it gave them back the world as it could be, a life of tangs and zests and the gritty rub of real things. He had dwelled in the crystal spaces of the mind while beneath such cool antiseptic entertainments his body yearned for the hot raw earth and its moist mysteries.

Nelson and Mercer were collecting mech insignia. “Want an AB? We found one over here. Musta got caught up and brought along by these worker mechs?” Nelson asked Bradley.

“I’ll just take down the serial numbers,” Bradley said automatically, not wanting to talk to Nelson more than necessary. Or to anyone. There had been so much talk.

He spent time getting the numbers logged into his comm and then with shoving mech carcasses off the road.

Dexter came over to him and said, “Sure you don’t want one of these?” It was a laser one of the reb mechs had used. Black, ribbed, with a glossy sheen. “Angel’s keeping one. She’ll be telling the story of her wound and showing the laser that maybe did it, prob’ly for rest of her life.”

Bradley looked at the sleek, sensuous thing. It gleamed in the raw sunlight like a promise. “No.”

“Sure?”

“Take the damned stuff away.”

Dexter looked at him funny and walked off. Bradley stared at the mechs he was shoving off the road and tried to think how they were different from the boy, who probably was indeed less intelligent than they were, but it was all clouded over with the memory of how much he liked the rifle and the sweet grass and shooting at the targets when they came up to the crossfire point in the bright sun. It was hard to think at all as the day got its full heat and after a while he did not try. It was easier that way.

<>

* * * *

The Sleeping Serpent

Pamela Sargent

1

Yesuntai Noyan arrived in Yeke Geren in early winter, stumbling from his ship with the unsteady gait and the pallor of a man who had recently crossed the ocean. Because Yesuntai was a son of our Khan, our commander Michel Bahadur welcomed the young prince with speeches and feasts. Words of gratitude for our hospitality fell from Yesuntai’s lips during these ceremonies, but his restless gaze betrayed his impatience. Yesuntai’s mother, I had heard, was Frankish, and he had a Frank’s height, but his sharp-boned face, dark slits of eyes, and sturdy frame were a Mongol’s.

At the last of the feasts, Michel Bahadur seated me next to the Khan’s son, an honor I had not expected. The commander, I supposed, had told Yesuntai a little about me, and would expect me to divert the young man with tales of my earlier life in the northern woods. As the men around us sang and shouted to servants for more wine, Yesuntai leaned towards me.

“I hear,” he murmured, “that I can learn much from you, Jirandai Bahadur. Michel tells me that no man knows this land better than you.”

“I am flattered by such praise.” I made the sign of the cross over my wine, as I had grown used to doing in Yeke Geren.

Yesuntai dipped his fingers into his cup, then sprinkled a blessing to the spirits. Apparently he followed our old faith, and not the cross; I found myself thinking a little more of him.

“I am also told,” Yesuntai went on, “that you can tell many tales of a northern people called the Hiroquois.”

“That is only the name our Franks use for all the nations of the Long House.” I gulped down more wine. “Once, I saw my knowledge of that people as something that might guide us in our dealings with them. Now it is only fodder on which men seeking a night’s entertainment feed.”

The Noyan lifted his brows. “I will not ask you to share your stories with me here.”

I nodded, relieved. “Perhaps we might hunt together sometime, Noyan. Two peregrines I have trained need testing, and you might enjoy a day with them.”

He smiled. “Tomorrow,” he said, “and preferably by ourselves, Bahadur. There is much I wish to ask you.”

Yesuntai was soon speaking more freely with the other men, and even joined them in their songs. Michel would be pleased that I had lifted the Noyan’s spirits, but by then I cared little for what that Bahadur thought. I drank and thought of other feasts shared inside long houses with my brothers in the northern forests.

* * * *

Yesuntai came to my dwelling before dawn. I had expected an entourage, despite his words about hunting by ourselves, but the Khan’s son was alone. He gulped down the broth my wife Elgigetei offered, clearly impatient to ride out from the settlement.

We saddled our horses quickly. The sky was almost as grey as the slate-colored wings of the falcons we carried on our wrists, but the clouds told me that snow would not fall before dusk. I could forget Yeke Geren and the life I had chosen for one day, until the shadows of evening fell.

We rode east, skirting the horses grazing in the land our settlers had cleared, then moved north. A small bird was flying towards a grove of trees; Yesuntai loosed his falcon. The peregrine soared, a streak against the grey sky, her dark wings scimitars, then suddenly plummeted towards her prey. The Noyan laughed as her yellow talons caught the bird.

Yesuntai galloped after the peregrine. I spied a rabbit darting across the frost-covered ground, and slipped the tether from my falcon; he streaked towards his game. I followed, pondering what I knew about Yesuntai. He had grown up in the ordus and great cities of our Frankish Khanate, been tutored by the learned men of Paris, and would have passed the rest of his time in drinking, dicing, card-playing, and claiming those women who struck his fancy. His father, Sukegei Khan, numbered two grandsons of Genghis Khan among his ancestors, but I did not expect Yesuntai to show the vigor of those great forefathers. He was the Khan’s son by one of his minor wives, and I had seen such men before in Yeke Geren, minor sons of Ejens or generals who came to this new land for loot and glory, but who settled for hunting along the great river to the north, trading with the nearer tribes, and occasionally raiding an Inglistani farm. Yesuntai would be no different; so I thought then.

He was intent on his sport that day. By afternoon, the carcasses of several birds and rabbits hung from our saddles. He had said little to me, and was silent as we tethered our birds, but I had felt him watching me. Perhaps he would ask me to guide him and some of his men on a hunt beyond this small island, before the worst of the winter weather came. The people living in the regions nearby would not trouble hunters. Our treaty with the Ganeagaono, the Eastern Gatekeepers of the Long House, protected us, and they had long since subdued the tribes to the south of their lands.

We trotted south. Some of the men watching the horse herds were squatting around fires near their shelters of tree branches and hides. They greeted us as we passed, and congratulated us on our game. In the distance, the rounded bark houses of Yeke Geren were visible in the evening light, wooden bowls crowned by plumes of smoke rising from their roofs.

The Great Camp - the first of our people who had come to this land had given Yeke Geren its name. “We will build a great camp,” Cheren Noyan had said when he stepped from his ship, and now circles of round wooden houses covered the southern part of the island the Long House people called Ganono, while our horses had pasturage in the north. Our dwellings were much like those of the Manhatan people who had lived here, who had greeted our ships, fed us, sheltered us, and then lost their island to us.

Yesuntai reined in his horse as we neared Yeke Geren; he seemed reluctant to return to the Great Camp. “This has been the most pleasant day I have passed here,” he said.

“I have also enjoyed myself, Noyan.” My horse halted at his side. “You would of course find better hunting away from this island. Perhaps—”

“I did not come here only to hunt, Bahadur. I have another purpose in mind. When I told Michel Bahadur of what I wish to do, he said that you were the man to advise me.” He paused. “My father the Khan grows even more displeased with his enemies the Inglistanis. He fears that, weak as they are, they may grow stronger here. His spies in Inglistan tell him that more of them intend to cross the water and settle here.”

I glanced at him. All of the Inglistani settlements, except for the port they called Plymouth, sat along the coast north of the long island that lay to the east of Yeke Geren. A few small towns, and some outlying farms - I could not see why our Khan would be so concerned with them. It was unfortunate that they were there, but our raids on their westernmost farms had kept them from encroaching on our territory, and if they tried to settle farther north, they would have to contend with the native peoples there.

“If more come,” I said, “then more of the wretches will die during the winter. They would not have survived this long without the aid of the tribes around them.” Some of those people had paid dearly for aiding the settlers, succumbing to the pestilences the Inglistanis had brought with them.

“They will come with more soldiers and muskets. They will pollute this land with their presence. The Khan my father will conquer their wretched island, and the people of Eire will aid us to rid themselves of the Inglistani yoke. My father’s victory will be tarnished if too many of the island dogs find refuge here. They must be rooted out.”

“So you wish to be rid of the Inglistani settlements.” I fingered the tether hanging from my falcon. “We do not have the men for such a task.”

“We do not,” he admitted, “but the peoples of these lands do.”