Worlds That Weren't

Robre frowned. “ England is part of your Empire? In the old songs, we spent a powerful amount of time fighting England.” He threw back his head and half chanted

“Fired our guns ’n’ the English stopped a-comin’ Fired again, ’n’ then they ran away-”

“Ah…well, that was before the Fall, you see.”

Local notions of geography were minimal; evidently these people had lost all literacy and most sense of the past during the Fall. Not surprising, since this area was on the southern fringe of the zone where total crop failure for three freezing-cold summers in a row had killed nearly everyone but a few cannibals who survived by eating their neighbors. These Seven Tribes might well be descended from no more than a handful of families. Small numbers meant fewer memories and skills passed down, and the older people who might remember most were most likely to die.

The lands farther south, what the old maps called Mexico, had preserved some remnants of civilization, with gunpowder and writing and a few small cities atop a peasant mass. India and the Cape and Australia had done much better, thanks be to Christ and Krishna and St. Disraeli…

There was no sense in stretching poor Robre’s idea of the world too far-and for that matter, King’s own schooling hadn’t covered the Pre-Fall history of the Americas in much detail. The Mughals and the East India Company had taken up a good deal more space, and so had the Romans. He did know that there had been a temporarily successful rebellion against the Old Empire here in North America by British colonists just about a century before the Fall, and that the New Empire had only started to make good its claim to the continent in the last couple of generations.

There’s so much else to do, he thought wistfully.

The growing tension with Dai-Nippon, for example, or the chronic menace of the Czar in Samarkand, hanging over the North West Frontier, and the Caliphate of Damascus in the west. It was a shame that the Powers spent so much time hampering each other, when the world was so wide and vacant, but such seemed to be the nature of man, chained to the Wheel and prey to maya, illusion.

“I’m sorry if I, ah, interrupted,” King went on, nodding back toward the door where the redhead had made her spectacular exit.

“Naw,” Robre said. “That was Sonjuh dawtra Pehte. Pretty girl, hey?”

“Indeed. Hope I wasn’t queering your pitch,” King said cautiously. He’d gotten the impression that the locals were more free-and-easy about such matters than most higher-caste Indians or other Imperials, but making assumptions about women was always the easiest way to get yourself into killing trouble in a strange land.

It required a little back-and-forth before his meaning was plain. Robre shook his head. “Coyote’s dong, I’d sooner sport with a she-cougar. She’s pretty, but mad as a mustang on loco-weed, or ghost-ridden, or both. Well, no wonder, seein’ as she saw all her kin killed ’n’ eaten by the swamp-devils, ’n’ they held her captive for two, three days. ’S too bad. Not just pretty; she’s got guts, too. Probably get herself killed some hard, bad way, mebbe some others with her.”

King listened to the story with a frown: keeping the peace and putting down feud and raid was his hereditary caste duty, and such lawlessness irked him even in a place only theoretically under the Imperial Pax.

“Well, no wonder she’s not looking for a man, then,” he said.

That took another bout of struggling with the language, and then Robre shook his head. “Oh, swamp-devils don’t force women. Kill ’em and eat ’em, yes; that, no.”

“That’s…extremely odd,” King said, conscious of his eyebrows rising. Unbelievably odd, he thought. Perhaps it’s some sort of make-believe to protect the reputations of rescued women?

Robre frowned, as if searching for some memory. “Near as I can recall, they questioned a swamp-devil ’bout it once, a whiles back. He wasn’t quite dead when they caught him, ’n’ he could talk-not all of ’em can. Anyways, story is he said our women didn’t smell right.” He shrugged. “Now, ’bout this hunt-outfit you want-”

Apparently there was a long-established etiquette for setting up a caravan, for trade or hunt. After an hour or two, they could talk well enough to exchange hunting stories. Robre enjoyed the one about the elephant in musth hugely, while obviously not believing a word of it-drawing the long bow was another local custom, in fact an art form, from what the merchant had said… King found the story of the yellow-striped black tigers even more fascinating, and the circumstantial detail very convincing indeed. Killing those beasts, alone and on foot and with only bow and spear…that took a man. He’d already bought both pelts, for what he suspected was several times the sum Banerjii had paid-not that he’d queer the little Bengali’s pitch by telling the natives, Imperials should stick together-but that wasn’t the same thing at all as a trophy brought down on his own.