Worlds That Weren't

And then we come to A. D. 711, when in our timeline the Muslims decided, quite reasonably as they thought, to invade Visigoth Spain. This resulted in a long occupation of chunks of Spanish kingdoms, a number of taifa buffer states that were part-Christian and part-Muslim, and a self-defined “entirely beleaguered and all-Christian” north. It’s a story that doesn’t end until A. D. 1492, when the last of the Moors leave Granada, and one of the most fascinating mixed cultures of Western Europe goes belly-up.

However, for Ash, having had my earlier point of departure set up as a non-Arabic North Africa, I ended up with a Visigoth Arian Christian invasion of a Spain that was part of the Church of the Green Christ. That rumbled along nicely from A. D. 711 until the 1470s, with the North African Visigoths largely taking the place of the Byzantines in our history. It may say in the KJV that nations have bowels of brass, but we know that history is endlessly mutable…

And then there’s “The Logistics of Carthage.” Which I had not intended to write, after Ash. No way! When a 500,000-word epic is over and done, trust me, you do not want to see any more of it. Two walk-on characters tugging at one’s elbow and remarking that they, too, have their story that they would like to tell, is something guaranteed to have the writer running off gibbering.

So I gibbered, and I decided I wouldn’t write it, because the story of Ash is over. Over over, not here-is-a-sequel over. Not nearly over, but really sincerely over.

Ah yes, they said to me: but this isn’t a sequel. For one thing, it’s set twenty years before the main action of the book. For another, one of the people whose story it is was a minor character, and the other appears solely for a half sentence in one place in the book. And it’s set somewhere we didn’t get to in Ash. And, and…

And there’s the Fall of Constantinople, you see.

A. D. 1453, and one of the defining points of Western European history. The great capital of the Byzantine empire, Constantinople, falls to the Turks and becomes Istanbul. Among the things that come out of the city with the flood of refugees are all the Hermetic writings of Pico and Ficino, who themselves have what amounts to an alternate-universe history of what the world is really like. The fall of Constantinople (in some theories) turbo-charges the Italian Renaissance, which kicks off the Renaissance in the rest of Europe, and leads to the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and hello modern world.

But “The Logistics of Carthage” isn’t about that.

It’s about the war after A. D. 1453, when the Turks move on the next obvious enemy in the Ash history: the Gothic capital of Carthage, under the Visigoth king-caliphs. A war taking place on the coast of North Africa, where a troop of European mercenaries heading toward Carthage in the pay of the Turks find themselves with a corpse they cannot bury because of a religious dispute, and we start to get a look at a love story-and pigs-and the mechanisms of atrocity.

Carthage, you will note, is another entity that vanishes out of history. Frequently. There isn’t anything particularly mysterious about it. The Punic city of Carthage gets flattened by the Romans in 146 B. C., in a very marked manner, and sown with salt. Roman Carthage gets sacked, in turn; Gothic Carthage is taken by the Arabs in A. D. 698. Tunis grows up in the same area, and has its own troubles. History has a way of happening to cities.

But, mystery or not, Carthage has fascinated me for rather the same reasons as Burgundy does: here is something completely gone, its people do not remain, and how do we know that the history we hear is anything like what really happened?

In “The Logistics of Carthage,” one of the soldiers has what she takes to be dream visions, sent by God. It wasn’t possible to bring on stage, in a novella, the reasons why they’re not dreams-they are glimpses of the real future, five hundred years ahead from where she is-but the rationale is present in Ash, and for the purposes of these people, it doesn’t matter whether what Yolande sees is scientific or theological. What she feels about it is real.

And I get to push the history that runs from these points of departure on a stage further, which I naturally couldn’t do in Ash, and am therefore glad to have the chance. Yolande sees future-Carthage, future-North Africa, and they are not our twenty-first-century Carthage and North Africa, just the up-to-date version of what the history would become, if it was to become our time.