Worlds That Weren't

“Fortuna,” Guillaume said, prodding the baby’s naked round belly. The infant laughed. “The chain of choices? It’s not a chain, I think. Choices are free. I believe.”

The baby yawned, eyes and nose screwing up in the sunshine. Feeling self-conscious, Guillaume brought the infant to his chest and held her against his doublet, with both his arms around her.

The weight of her increased-becoming boneless, now, with sleep, and trust. She began a small, breathy snore.

“It’s not all sitting around in the gunners, you know,” Guillaume lectured in a whisper, watching Italy appear from the mist. “I’ll be busy. But I’ll keep an eye on you. Okay? I’ll keep a bit of a watch. As long as I can.”

1477 AND ALL THAT

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.