PARADOX EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV User Manual

WHAT IF?

THE ANTHOLOGY OF

ALTERNATE HISTORY

by

Harry Turtledove and Others

Pressname: Paradox Books

Copyright © 2014 Paradox Interactive AB

All rights reserved

Authors: Harry Turtledove, Janice Gable Bashman,

Lee Battersby, Luke Bean, Raymond Benson, Felix
Cook, Aidan Darnell Hailes, Jordan Ellinger, James
Erwin, Anders Fager, David Parish-Whittaker, Rod

Rees, Aaron Rosenberg

Editor: Tomas Härenstam

Cover Art: Ola Larsson

ISBN: 978-91-87687-50-1

www.paradoxplaza.com/books

CONTENTS

Introduction – Troy Goodfellow ................................... 1

Company – Luke Bean .................................................... 4

The More it Changes – Harry Turtledove ................. 24

A Single Shot – Rod Rees ............................................ 43

The Buonapartes – Anders Fager ............................... 64

Let No Man Put Asunder – Aaron Rosenberg ......... 84

Roaring Girl – David Parish-Whittaker ................... 106

Defeat of the Invincible – Janice Gable Bashman . 132

Rising Sun – James Erwin .......................................... 153

Écureuils – Aidan Darnell Hailes .............................. 171

English Achilles – Jordan Ellinger ............................ 185

The Great Work – Felix Cook................................... 206

To Be Or Not To Be – Raymond Benson .............. 227

The Emperor Of Moscow – Lee Battersby ............. 249

Afterword ..................................................................... 268

Other Titles by Paradox Books ................................. 269

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

There is an ongoing debate in academic history
about the value of what they call “counterfactual”
history—the idea that we can learn about how we got
where we are by asking ourselves how things might
have changed if the past took a different road. The

plague doesn’t get to Byzantium. The Germans do
get across the Marne. China doesn’t stop the treasure

fleets. These puzzles ask us to examine what we

mean when say that an historical event was “caused”

by one factor or another.

Academic debate aside, alternate histories undoubt­edly provide as much entertainment as they do illumi­nation. Whether it’s a question of seeing how far a

writer can push the “want of a horseshoe nail” or

simply imagining how all of our lives would be differ­ent in a world where, say, Hitler stuck to art school, the
possibilities generated by an infinite range of stories
can tickle the imagination.

This is not to say that writing a good alternate his­tory is easy. You must have an interesting starting
point, you must have plausible connections between

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

events, and you must have an intuitive understanding
of the motivations of men and women, great and small.

Paradox grand strategy games are where history
starts going off the rails the moment you press PLAY,

and, for as long as we’ve made these games, fans have

entertained us with After Action Reports (AARs); de­scriptions of their experiences in the game, sometimes
with decisions up for community vote. An AAR can be
either a straight summary of what happened on screen
or a deeper meditation on what it is like to live in this
new, computer-generated world, sometimes told from
the perspective of a leader or citizen in this newly gen­erated past. Both approaches have their advocates, but
both are best done with a strong eye to how the past is
always a foreign country.

This anthology is a celebration of the story-telling
power of our games, especially Europa Universalis, a se­ries that launched Paradox Development Studio (and
Paradox Interactive). Strategy games like ours make for
good stories because there are never two experiences
that are remotely identical to each other. Thuringia re­places Austria as the ruler of Central Europe in one
game, in another France bulldozes through the Holy
Roman Empire, and in a third Vienna pulls it all to­gether to rebuild the empire of Charlemagne.

Now imagine an alternate timeline where there is no
Europa Universalis; a dark timeline where an experi­mental title did not find a global audience willing to
embrace the uncertainties of history and the challenges
of the greatest of men and women. There are still
games, of course, and even strategy games. But they are
likely both less grounded in our common love for our
history and less celebratory of the wonderful improvi­sational nature of gamers.

2

INTRODUCTION

Enough sadness. We bring you stories—tales of
great deeds, small heroisms and how everything could
have been different.

Troy Goodfellow

Assistant Developer

Paradox Interactive

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

COMPANY

By Luke Bean

I first met Duckie Wooler when I was sixteen. He had
come to Mecklenburg to start a war, and I figured I
could get a pack or two of cigarettes out of it. The idea
of being invaded didn’t worry me much. War, as far as
my town was concerned, was the natural state of af­fairs. Indeed, it was the idea that the invaders might
bring peace that troubled the locals. So when this
strange American showed up waving around a camera
and talking of an age of peace to come, he found noth­ing but closed doors and pursed mouths. I took pity on
this lonely man, and I do not think it is an exaggeration
to say we saved each other’s lives. Today, of course,
Silas “Duckie” Wooler is the New York Journal’s fa­bled international correspondent, the man who built
the case for the Pacification of Germany. And though
my name, Erich Kalb, is little remembered, I too am
famous: I am the subject of Mr. Wooler’s most iconic
photograph, “The Boy and the Banner.”

4

COMPANY – LUKE BEAN

In 1950, Mr. Wooler asked me to write a short fore­word for the 20th anniversary edition of Duckie in Ger-
many. (It is a fascinating work of journalism, and I strongly
encourage you to read it.) I found it difficult to bottle my

feelings on the topic. The story of my travels as Duckie’s

translator meant little to me without the context of how
I had arrived at that point in my life. Soon my short fore­word had exploded into a hundred pages of anecdotes,

arguments, and explanations. “If you want to make me
look like an idiot,” Duckie eventually told me, “You can
do it in your own damn book.”

With all respect to Mr. Wooler, I believe there is an
error at the heart of his reporting on Germany. My world
was not divided into predatory mercenaries and innocent
victims. The companies maintained their grip on Ger­many by making everyone an accomplice to their crimes.
At some point, we had all housed them, fed them, traded
with them, fought for them. Everyone knew their local
company men, and counted family and friends among

them. When a boy turned thirteen, Mecklenburg’s largest
company, the Duke’s Rifles, would come to their door.
“Fight with us,” the sergeant would say, “You’ll come
home rich or you’ll come home in a box, but either way
you’ll be a man.” They wouldn’t actually waste effort car-

rying your coffin home, but you understood. Duckie
once asked me why people didn’t turn on the companies.
The question made me laugh. Who was there to turn? We
were the companies, every last one of us.

1. The Balloon

One of my earliest memories is of a hot air balloon. I
was in town with my mother when it appeared in the
distance. She lifted me onto her shoulders to see. We

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

walked around like that, Mother going about her busi­ness and me craning my neck to always keep an eye on
the distant balloon, as if it was waiting for a chance to
slip away. When the balloon came closer, Mother took
me off her shoulders and told me not to look at it an­ymore, but I looked anyway, and she didn’t stop me.
Three men dangled from nooses tied to the basket.
Mother needn’t have worried about me. I thought they
were just taking a ride.

I still don’t understand this. It’s clear the hangman
wanted everyone to see his handiwork. If it could be

read as a threat, that I could accept. “This is what hap-
pens if you resist conscription!” “These men collabo­rated with Wehrwolves.” Cause and effect. But if the

balloon knew who hung those men, or who they were,
or what they did, then it wasn’t telling. Maybe someone
just wanted death to remain familiar to us, so we would
not recoil from its touch.

2. The Lübeck Watch

I grew up near Grevesmühlen, on the very edge of
company lands. To the east was Hansestadt Wismar, to
the west Hansestadt Lübeck. The Hanseatic Cities
were an object of fear and fascination for me, lands of
unimaginable debauchery. It was held as unimpeacha­ble fact at my school that the merchant princes of the
Hansa considered the flesh of children a fine delicacy,
and nearly everyone had a friend whose cousin had
been sold to Lübeck to be devoured. But alongside the
lurid stories, there was the recognition that these
strangers were somehow like us. People from Russia or
England or the United Kingdoms seemed unimagina­bly alien, but our wayward brothers talked like us and

6

COMPANY – LUKE BEAN

traded with us. They sung foreign tunes in our native
tongue. This combination of strangeness and familiar­ity excited me. Lübeck was a wicked and dangerous
place, and I wanted desperately to see it, to slouch be­tween cinemas and cabarets and strangers’ bedrooms
through streets foggy with cigar smoke.

But nobody was allowed into the Hanseatic Cities.
The Rifles didn’t want us getting seduced by their dec­adent ways. Thinking too much about the outside
world was discouraged. We were told history had
ended with Wallenstein, and outside Germany nothing
of interest had happened ever again. When the Duke’s
Rifles raided beyond Germany, they would target rich
Dutch cities, weak Polish towns—some companies
braver and more foolish than the Rifles even crossed
west into the United Kingdoms before the wall went
up—but the Hanseatic Cities were untouchable. They
bought the companies’ plunder, processed our pop­pies, and made the money flow. We were expected to
hate and fear them, but not to live without them.

There was a lieutenant in the Rifles, Erich Gersten,
who spent time with my mother. She often had men
over; it kept her in good standing with the Rifles. Most
of them ignored me, but Erich was kind to me, and I
think Mother loved him a little bit for it. He acted like
it was terribly significant that we had the same first

name. “We Erichs have to stick together,” he would
tell me. “Listen to your mother and fight bravely for

your company and you’ll do our name proud.” Some-
times I liked to imagine he was my father, and I was
named after him, but my mother said that wasn’t true.

Erich was more pretty than handsome, and could
have almost been mistaken for a woman without his
sleek red beard. He often tried to keep his face from

7

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

smiling, but it always found a way. I’d seen Mother get
angry with him for laughing when she banged her head
on a doorframe, things like that—he wasn’t a sadist, he
just couldn’t help but find things funny. Erich loved
boasting about his adventures, and I loved listening to
him. He was proud to be a member of the Rifles. This
gentle, happy man was surely responsible for more
deaths than he could remember, but that was just part
of the job. When he paced back and forth making up
stories about daring raids and desperate escapes, I
didn’t doubt for a moment that I was going to be a
company man with the Rifles, and I was going to fol­low him into battle.

One of Erich’s most sacred duties was the Lübeck

Watch. Once a year he would gather together a band of
fifteen trusted men from all over Mecklenburg. They
would meet in the Hart’s Head Tavern and speak in whis­pers just loud enough to make sure everyone knew they
had secret business. When night fell, they would buy eve­ryone a round of drinks, swear them to secrecy, and
march off towards Lübeck. They would return the next
day, nodding grimly to each other. I could only imagine
they were infiltrating Lübeck to some unknown (but pre-

sumably exciting) end. I couldn’t get Erich to tell me an­ything about the Lübeck Watch. “I was making sure
Lübeck’s still there,” he said blandly. “It is.”

When I was thirteen I was short for my age, with a

young face. If I couldn’t look like a man, I was deter-

mined to at least act like one, which to my mind mostly
involved fighting over imagined insults. The Rifles
weren’t shy about wasting boys my age as cannon fod­der, but I was regarded as officer material. I was just
annoyed that it meant they would not take me with
them into combat. So when Erich Gersten came to my

8

COMPANY – LUKE BEAN

door in full uniform and announced that he was enlist­ing me for the Lübeck Watch, I was giddy. I expected
Mother to set her jaw and growl her disapproval, but
she nodded calmly.

Erich gave me a uniform. I didn’t care that the
sleeves covered my hands. I trailed his band of men,
trying to match their gait and catch their jokes. I
couldn’t do either very well, so I ended up spending
most of the journey to Lübeck petting the pack mule.
We left the road before reaching the city and stopped
in a grove of trees. The sloping fortifications in the dis­tance marked the end of company lands.

Erich’s men began unpacking the mule’s bags. They
contained folding wooden chairs. Everyone took one,
and we marched out of the trees, straight towards the
walls of Lübeck. I had no idea what was going on, but
I followed along. We unfolded our chairs and sat them
in a line at the base of the wall. One of the men opened
his backpack and spilled a small pile of rocks on the
ground. Another passed around bottled beer.

Guards started pooling at the top of the fortifica­tions. They were armed, but seemed more curious than
hostile. Erich picked up a stone and flung it up at the
guards. It fell short, scuttling down the wall into the
trench at the bottom. The guards laughed. Some peeled
away to go back to patrols, but others stayed to watch.
Erich handed me a stone and grinned. I flung it as hard
as I could. And so fifteen company men and I sat and
spent hours drinking and flinging stones at the walls of
Lübeck. The guards shouted insults down and we
shouted insults back. Soon my hand was sore and my
elbow numb. I loved it.

It was about an hour before someone managed to
actually hit one of the guards, but the stone struck him

9

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

square in the face, splitting the guard’s lip and drawing
an audible yelp of pain. We all hooted and cheered and
lifted the soldier who made the throw into the air like
he’d just taken the city singlehandedly. The crack of ri­fle fire interrupted our celebration, and one of the fold­ing chairs was split open by a bullet. I wanted to run,
but Erich stopped me. “They’re aiming around us.
Those cowards know what will happen to them if they

provoke the Rifles.” Sometimes the men would wander

off to find more stones, or spend a few minutes swap­ping jokes and stories, but always they returned to
throwing stones, until late until the night.

We had picked the area clear of stones. Some of the
soldiers had gone to sleep or passed out drunk. I
helped Erich start a campfire. Erich looked away from
the wall and into the fire and was quiet. He smiled to
himself, and for a moment the man who told me ad­venture stories was replaced with the man who looted
cities for a living. “It’s all well to play at war with them.
But we’re going to do it one of these days. I know peo­ple have been saying that for years, but we’re really go­ing to do it. I’m going to reach down those fat bastards’
throats and pull the food right out of their bellies. I’m
going to get myself a Bernardi Autocycle, and I’m go­ing to get your mother a radio.”

That was in 1925. The next summer was the Sack
of Lübeck, and Erich Gersten got his wish.

3. The Brown Banner

The Brown Banner was a tradition handed down to the
Duke’s Rifles from the Sixty Years’ War. When the Ri­fles wanted to punish someone, they would peel a strip
of skin off of them, tan it into leather, and sew it onto

10

COMPANY – LUKE BEAN

the Banner. Stealing from the Rifles might lose you a
square of skin the size of your hand; betray them and
they’d take every inch of skin. You could tell exactly
how each square of skin was forfeited, because the of­fender’s name and a short description of their crimes
were etched into every patch. When old Banners grew
too heavy to carry they were retired to the Great Bar­racks in Schwerin, where they hung from every rafter
like sagging folds on an old woman’s bones.

This is one of Erich Gersten’s stories, most of
which were pure fantasy, but something about the way
he told this one made me believe it. The Duke’s Rifles
were skinning a man for the Banner. He’d murdered
his wife, and if you wanted to murder someone in
Mecklenburg, you’d damn well better belong to the Ri­fles. When Erich took him from his cage and led him
to the Tannery he was quiet, almost bored-looking.
They laid him on the table and he went limp. The mo­ment the knife touched his back he giggled. As it sliced
his flesh he started laughing. It wasn’t that he didn’t
feel the pain; he was crying and clenching his fists so
tight his fingernails broke skin. But the more the flay­ing hurt, the more he laughed, cackling so loud it
started to frighten Erich’s men. Erich gagged him, and
that stopped the noise, but they could still see his face
contorted in laughter. In the end they killed him to
make him stop. They took the rest of his skin, but they
didn’t add it to the Banner. The cut was too sloppy—
from the laughing, and from Erich’s hands trembling.

4. History

Schooling was sparse in Grevesmühlen, and ended at a
young age, but my school made sure we took pride in

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

the parts of our history they were willing to tell us
about. I assume my readers have been raised on the
Western history of Germany: three hundred years of
anarchy and bloodshed. Here is the version I was
taught.

The age of the companies began with the Sixty
Years’ War. Sometimes books called it the Fifty Years’
War, or the Ninety Years’ War, or basically any number
they felt like. It was confusing because the war hadn’t
really remembered to end properly. I suppose one day
nobody showed up to battle, and then it was over.

Every town had its own local heroes from the Sixty
Years’ War, lords or generals or mercenaries who had
taken the town under their wing. Grevesmühlen’s pa­tron savior was none other than the Father of our
Country himself, Albrecht von Wallenstein. Some
called him the First Captain, or the Great Liberator, or
the King Who Broke His Crown. He’d held a hundred
titles from Admiral to Emperor, but he was the Duke
of Mecklenburg, so to us he was the Good Duke. He
led the first companies to war for the Emperor to drive
out the foreigners. But as Wallenstein grew strong, the
Emperor came to fear him, until he tried to have Wal­lenstein killed. Wallenstein evaded the assassins, and
when the companies saw how the Emperor betrayed
his most loyal servant, they proclaimed Wallenstein the
only man they’d ever kneel to again. Even the compa­nies that fought for the foreigners were impressed by
his promises of land, wealth, and freedom. He deposed
the tyrannical Emperor and drove off the wicked for­eigners, and from that day all the people of Germany
grew strong and free. The Duke’s Rifles were directly
descended from Wallenstein’s armies. Plenty of com­panies could make the same claim, but Grevesmühlen

12

COMPANY – LUKE BEAN

had few enough things to be proud of, so we took
whatever we could get.

Among company men, the reverence for Wallen­stein was genuine. He had liberated us from the tyranny
of the state. Only in Germany was a man free to do as
he pleased. If you and your brothers were strong
enough, you could take what you wanted. And if you
were weak, well, Germany had no patience for weak­ness—as it should be. You could pay a company if you
wanted protection, and if you didn’t, it was your loss.
Everyone wanted protection. Once in a while you’d
hear rumors of a town that had the audacity to try to
elect a mayor and govern themselves. This kind of Stat­ist corruption inevitably met swift justice.

Change came slow to Germany. Old companies grew
strong, upstart companies toppled them, and the Duke’s
Muskets started using rifles, but the German way of life

changed little over the centuries between the Sixty Years’

War and my birth. This was by design. The Maxim War
was a typical example of how the companies reacted to
change. In 1889 the Redshanks Company returned from
a contract in Swedish West Africa with ten Maxim ma­chine guns. Within a month, a coalition of twenty-eight
companies had formed to oppose the Redshanks, and by
the end of the year the Redshanks Company had been
wiped out, their company towns sacked, and their Maxim
guns smashed to pieces. There was no point, the captains
all agreed, in turning war into slaughter. One did not need
machine guns to prey on the weak.

But progress whittled away at Germany. Not five
years after the Maxim War, a gunsmith with the Würt­temberg Knights invented the Daimler Automated Ri­fle. Unlike the Redshanks, the Knights were willing to
share. The Daim-Aut could be finicky, and if it broke

13

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

you might not be able to find the parts to fix it, but it
was a treasured status symbol and a viciously effective
weapon. During the Sack of Lübeck a platoon of Quar­tered Men with Daim-Auts held off a Swedish landing
force outnumbering them eight to one.

As long as the companies spent all their energy on
raiding and backbiting, they were regarded as a benign
tumor, more harm to operate on than to tolerate. Na­poleon had tried to excise the tumor, and look how
that turned out for him! But the Sack of Lübeck
changed everything. Too many companies had coop­erated to make it possible, their new automatic wea­ponry was too powerful, and it was a violation of the
implicit accord between the companies and the Hansa.
But worst of all, nobody had seen the Sack of Lübeck
coming. The companies were no longer predictable.
The West began building the case for surgery.

5. The Wehrwolf

When I was eleven, I came in from the poppy fields
one night and found my mother talking with a man.
This man was different from most of the company
men who buzzed around my mother—filthy and un­shaven, but with a preacher’s voice and urgent eyes.
Mother told me to go upstairs, but the man said no, I
should hear this. He spoke to us of a land of freedom
to the south, where a woman did not have to give her
body to the companies, where a boy would only be
called to war to defend his home, not to burn someone
else’s. He didn’t spell it out, but I knew enough to fig­ure out that he was a Wehrwolf.

We ate with him, and then Mother sat with him for
hours, nodding and letting him talk. I had a thousand

14

COMPANY – LUKE BEAN

questions, but Mother grabbed my arm, telling me to
close my mouth and open my ears for once. Eventually
she sent me to bed. She came upstairs with me, and
told me to stay in my room until she came for me in
the morning, and to never breathe a word of what hap­pened that night to anyone.

In the morning, the Rifles came to our house. They
thanked my mother and added the man’s skin to the
Brown Banner.

The present German government would have you
believe the Wehrwolves were virtuous liberators. Don’t
believe a word of it. They were no better than the com­panies. They looted towns, raped women, and con­scripted boys just the same; they just did it with Jus­tice’s name on their lips, as if one more blasphemy
could turn their sins to virtue. Whichever Wehrwolf
band sent that man to Grevesmühlen was looking to
expand their turf, not set us free. But even if he was
lying, that man was the first person to tell me about a
world without companies. The second was Duckie.

6. My Hand

The air itself seemed to vibrate with excitement before
a raid departed. We wanted the wealth. We wanted the
food. We wanted the victory. Every indignity the Rifles
ever inflicted on Mecklenburg was forgiven in the
weeks before and after a raid. I practiced my aim until
my trigger finger blistered, popped, and blistered again.
I going to see Lübeck, and I was going to bring back
whatever I could carry. It took hours of staring at the
ceiling before I fell asleep.

I woke to unbearable pain. I tried pushing myself
out of bed, but my right arm collapsed under me. I

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

dragged my right hand onto my chest to look. It was a
bulging, purple mess of swelled meat and jumbled
bones. A brief glimpse of my mother standing at the
door with a hammer was all I needed to understand
what had happened.

I screamed every foul word I knew until I ran out
of words and then I screamed incoherent gibberish and
then my tongue gave up and I just screamed. By the
time I’d worked up the strength to stand, Mother was
long gone. I raced into town without even pausing to
tend to my hand. I don’t know what I intended to do.
Would I have reported my mother? I’m not sure. But
by the time I got to Grevesmühlen the Rifles had al­ready left for Lübeck. It didn’t matter. I’d never be able
to fire a rifle, let alone be one.

Mother had never spoken ill of the companies, or
argued when I talked about joining them. She was loyal
to the Rifles and they were loyal to her. But I thought
I understood. I thought my mother didn’t want me to
grow up, that she was scared to let her son risk his life,
that she wanted me to be a coward so I could be her
boy forever. We didn’t talk about it properly until years
later, when she joined me in Philadelphia. It wasn’t that
she was scared of me dying. She was scared of me dying
for a company. Quietly but fervently, she hated them
with every fiber of her being.

7. The Radio

Two days after the Rifles set out for Lübeck, a small
group of recruits rode back into town, and with them
was every horse the Rifles had brought. I was with the
crowd waiting for our company to return. Word rushed
through the crowd that these were the only survivors,

16

COMPANY – LUKE BEAN

then in the very next breath, the story changed. The
men were on their way, they just didn’t need to ride
their horses home.

The Duke’s Rifles drove into town four hours later,
and every last one of them at the wheel of a Bernardi
Autocycle. Most of them kept on driving to Schwerin,
but our local Rifles were heroes like never before. Eve­ryone wanted to drive an autocycle, or ride in one, or
at least just honk the horn. By the time people started
creeping home to sleep, three cycles were stuck in
ditches, one had crashed through the wall of a house,
and nearly half of them were out of fuel. Throughout
the night and into the next morning, Rifles trickled in
on foot from the road to Schwerin, having also crashed
their cycles or run out of gas. The men had brought
back several barrels of petrol, but it quickly became
clear that it wasn’t enough to keep the cycles fuelled
for long, and within a year or so the last of them had
run dry. They remained chained up outside houses as
rusting monuments, testifying that the men who lived
here’d had their way with the Queen of the Hansa.

Erich got Mother her radio. He pulled up at our
house the morning after the Rifles returned with this
huge cabinet radio taking up the driver’s seat and him
leaning out the side, barely keeping control of the au­tocycle. Just a week before I’d have laughed my head
off. Mother still hadn’t come home after breaking my
hand, and I wasn’t able to help him carry it, so he had
to nudge the radio into our house inch by inch. Erich
was disappointed that Mother wasn’t home to greet
him, and probably a little worried. He said what a
shame it was about my hand, but he didn’t ask for an
explanation, and we never really talked about the Rifles
anymore after that.

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

My mother came home the next day. We didn’t talk,
but she found the radio, and she read the note Erich
had left, and they seemed to cheer her up a little. With
my broken hand, I couldn’t train to join the Rifles an­ymore, and it was weeks before I could work the poppy
fields. The radio became the new center of my life. At
first, every broadcast was about Lübeck. It amused me
to hear Rostock and Hamburg lamenting our victory.
When the Swedes tried and failed to relieve Lübeck
from the companies that had stayed to pick it clean, the
radio wept and I cheered. At night I stayed quiet to see
if I could hear gunfire, but it was too far away.

After a few days some of the pleasure went out of
the constant coverage of Lübeck. Grevesmühlen was
raided only rarely, and not as harshly as a town without
company protection would have been, but even so
Lübeck’s plight was not impossible for me to relate to.
Sometimes they would broadcast lists of survivors who
had been separated from their loved ones, and I turned
off the radio for that. But eventually the mournful trib­utes to Lübeck waned, and my love affair with radio
began in earnest.

I became a hermit and a man of the world at the
same time. I listened to American jazz and English
marches and Hansa cabaret and strange atonal Russian
music and just about anything else they’d put on the
air. Mother took up some of the slack in the poppy
fields, partly in penance for my hand and partly on a
condition: I was to learn English. The Hanseatic Cities
had a significant population of refugees who had fled
England when the Leveller Party took power, enough
to have English-language radio stations. They played
detective stories and Westerns brought over from the

18

COMPANY – LUKE BEAN

US, and even before I understood what they were say­ing I understood the sound of a gruff man and a sultry
woman and a gunshot. This was my life for two years:
hunched over a radio, listening to a world I’d never
known.

As young love often does, my relationship with the
radio came to an end. The radio was hidden in a storage
cellar. It was a treasured item, and it was better not to
attract attention to it. This worked for a time, but Erich
could not be kept from boasting about how he’d
brought his woman a radio. Eventually, the Rifles were
contracted to go off and fight in some foreign war (I’d
stopped keeping track) and Grevesmühlen was raided.

The Stranger’s Band was led by a man named Hein­rich Robledo. He was not born to the life of a company
man. He had chosen it. He was from the United King­doms—his real name was Enrique—and had fought
with the Spanish separatists for a long time. They got
tired of fighting before he did, so he came to Germany
so he could keep fighting forever. The captain of the
Rifles had offended him somehow, and we suffered the
consequences.

Robledo came to our door himself with a small
group of men. He’d heard we had a radio. My mother
had made sure to be far away by the time the Stranger’s
Band arrived, but I had remained behind to help them
find anything they needed. It was best not to let raiders
look for things on their own, because if they couldn’t
find them they got frustrated, and that could put them
in a destructive mood.

I led Robledo to the cellar. He took one look at the
radio and spat. “It’s too big. Why’s it so big?” he said,
as if I’d somehow enlarged it to spite him. I said I didn’t
know. His men tied a rope around it and hauled it out

19

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

of the cellar. It banged against the wall as it rose,
knocking off a chip of its sleek casing with each strike.
And then Robledo didn’t know what to do with it.
He’d imagined a newer, smaller model of radio. His
wagons were with the main force, looting Schwerin.
His men could lift it, but couldn’t carry it far. They tried
tying it to a horse and the horse collapsed. They
dragged the radio out in front of our house. Robledo
smashed it to pieces with his rifle butt so that if he
couldn’t have it, at least we couldn’t either. By the time
the Quartered Men arrived to reinforce Grevesmühlen,
Heinrich Robledo was long gone.

8. Duckie

The wreckage of the radio was still outside my house
when Duckie Wooler arrived in Grevesmühlen. It had
been there for nearly a month, but neither Mother nor
myself had the heart to get rid of it. He was taking a
photograph of the broken radio, and I accidentally

stepped into the back of the shot. He made an “out of
the way” gesture, and I told him to fuck off, and he
said “What?” in English, and I told him to fuck off in

English, and he offered to hire me as a translator, and
I told him to fuck off again, and off he fucked.

Duckie lingered in town, and quickly became a local
laughingstock. He had not yet grown fat, but already
he gave the impression of one destined for fatness.
People tolerated his pictures at first, then let him take
pictures if he paid them in cigarettes. He was some­times flanked by two blank-faced men that everyone
assumed, probably correctly, were Hansa agents. It was
thanks to these men, whose names I’ve forgotten, that
I came to work for Duckie. I happened to be in the

20

COMPANY – LUKE BEAN

Hart’s Head on an errand, and I overheard him intro­ducing them as the Duck’s Rifles. The pun didn’t work
in German, but I couldn’t help but bark a quick laugh.
He noticed.

As I left the tavern, I found Duckie matching my
stride. He explained his situation to me. Grevesmühlen
had sucked Duckie in like mud. He had spent all his
money bribing his way past the Hanseatic border, and
now he had an escort but no translator and no way of
getting around. He said he needed someone to provide
a local touch. But more than that, I think he needed
someone to care. He thought his photographs could
set us free from the companies. He was starting to re­alize that we were our own prisoners. He needed just
one person to ask to be free.

Duckie walked me all the way home. He gave
speeches about liberty, and when those made my eyes
glaze over he told horror stories he’d heard about the
companies, and when that didn’t move me he gave me
a box of cigarettes and promised me two whole car­tons. Something about him reminded me of the Wehr­wolf. Not just the things he said, but the way he talked,
even the way he carried himself. Maybe that’s why I
told him I’d think about it, as a way of apologizing. I
don’t know. He didn’t want to let me go before I’d
agreed to help him, but I insisted I was going to sleep.
He scrunched up his face like a wounded dog and said
“Don’t you want to do something about all this?”

I manipulated the question in my head as I lay in

bed. “Don’t you want to do something about all this?”

It shocked me that I’d never considered the question.
I dreamt of the men hanging from the balloon, and
throwing rocks at the walls of Lübeck, and laughing at
Erich’s jokes so hard I cried, and that man laughing as

21

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

they peeled his skin off, and the joy that ran through
the town after a successful raid, and my beloved radio,
and the look on the Wehrwolf’s face as they dragged
him away, and in the morning, I knew my answer.

***

IN ACTUAL HISTORY

Albrecht von Wallenstein was the commander of the
Habsburg armies in the Thirty Years’ War. His forces
were largely made up of mercenaries, who were sup­ported by looting the countryside. Though a highly ca­pable general, Wallenstein was erratic, ambitious, and
untrustworthy, traits that eventually lead to his assassi­nation on the orders of his own Emperor. Company
imagines a world in which the 1634 attempt on Wal­lenstein’s life fails, and his conspirators depose Em­peror Ferdinand II.

The Thirty Years’ War—known to the characters of
Company as the Sixty Years’ War—was devastating to
Germany in real life, but the Holy Roman Empire sur­vived as a patchwork of states rather than devolving
into a no-man’s-land ruled by mercenary companies.
The Holy Roman Empire helped defeat France in the
War of Spanish Succession and Spain in the War of the
Quadruple Alliance, averting the Franco-Spanish un­ion known in Company as the United Kingdoms. In real
life, of course, the United Kingdom refers to the union
of the English and Scottish thrones, which here has
been divided by a powerful France’s support of the Jac­obite Rebellions.

The 1910 book Der Wehrwolf, about peasants de­fending their town from raiders in the Thirty Years’

22

COMPANY – LUKE BEAN

War, inspired a very different guerrilla organization in
real life: the Nazis’ Wehrwolf commando force. And
Gottlieb Daimler, inventor of the Daimler Automated
Rifle, abandoned gunsmithing at 18 to focus on me­chanical engineering. Instead of the first assault rifles,
he would go on to create the first modern cars. Cars
are replaced in Company by the more rudimentary auto-
cycle, a motorized tricycle descended from the designs
of Enrico Bernardi.

ABOUT LUKE BEAN

Luke Bean is an aspiring screenwriter and a recent
graduate from New York University’s Tisch School of
the Arts, where he majored in Film & Television and
History. He currently works at the Gilder Lehrman In­stitute of American History. Luke Bean is one of the
three winners of the Paradox Short Story Contest 2014.

23

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

THE MORE IT CHANGES

By Harry Turtledove

Yitzkhak the cobbler loosened the vise and checked to
see whether the glue had set between the half-dozen
thicknesses of leather. Finding it had, he let out a small
grunt of satisfaction. On the topmost layer, he drew an
outline of the rears on the pair of boots that needed re­heeling. The knife he reached for was sharp but sturdy.
Sturdy it had to be, to cut through that much leather.

He bore down with the knife, using all the strength
in his right arm. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right
hand forget her cunning. The verse from Psalm CXXXVII
was seldom far from the Jew’s thoughts.

He muttered to himself as he cut. Too many people
had forgotten too many things over the course of too
many years. To Yitzkhak, it seemed as though more
people had forgotten more things lately. That might
have been because his rusty beard had more white in it
than he cared to remember. Or, on the other hand, it
might not. The way things were these days, you never
could tell. And no one ever seemed to forget trouble.

24

THE MORE IT CHANGES – HARRY TURTLEDOVE

After cutting the new boot heels, he used brass nails
to fix them in place. Iron nails would have been
cheaper, and would have served just as well…till
Chaim the butcher walked in mud or splashed through
a puddle. After that, they would have started to rust.
Do it right the first time was one of the rules Yitzkhak’s
father had beaten into him. The habit was too deeply
ingrained now for him to lose it, or even to remember
he’d once had to acquire it.

Warm, sweet summer air and light came through
the open door and the narrow window of the cobbler’s
shop. So did the exciting, almost intoxicating gabble of
trade. Monday was market day in Kolomija—the
town’s name could be spelled at least half a dozen dif­ferent ways in at least three different alphabets. The
same was true for Yitzkhak’s own name. This was a
debatable part of the world in all kinds of ways.

It was summer, yes. Just what the date was was as
debatable as the spelling of Kolomija. By the calendar
the Catholics used, it was August 24, 1772. To the Or­thodox, it was August 13 of the same year. In the Jews’
system, which reckoned from the creation of the
world, it was the twenty-fifth of Av in the year 5532.
The Ottoman Empire lay not far to the south—just on
the other side of the Carpathians. To Muslims, it was
the twenty-fourth of Jumaada al-awal, 1186. And, by
the new reckoning that threatened to swallow all the
others, it was the twenty-fifth day of the eleventh
month in the year 95.

Even the frontiers in these parts rippled and shifted
like a river. Until a few months before, the Jews of Ko­lomija had paid taxes to a nobleman who mostly didn’t
send them to the King of Poland. Now, though, Ko­lomija—and that nobleman—owed allegiance to the

25

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Emperor of Austria. If the nobleman held out on Jo­seph, Yitzkhak suspected he would regret it.

The cobbler looked at the boots he’d just fixed. He
looked under the counter. He had to patch a torn up­per for Shmuel the rope-maker. That could keep,
though. Shmuel was down in Jablonow, fifteen miles
to the south, tending his sick mother. Unless the poor
woman took a turn for the worse and died (God forbid,
Yitzkhak thought), he wouldn’t come home for a week
or two.

Yitzkhak didn’t have anything he needed to do right
this minute. It was gloomy and stuffy inside the
cramped shop. It smelled of leather and sweat and glue.
Under that, it smelled musty.

Outside, the sun shone. Outside, the market square
would be packed. Kolomija had a fine market day. It
wouldn’t just be peasants bringing in chickens and
white radishes and peas from the countryside. Mer­chants came call the way from Czernowitz, sometimes
all the way from Rowne, to buy and sell and trade.
Rowne was on the other side of the border now, but
nobody yet had fussed about it.

He closed and latched the shutter, stepped outside,
and put a big iron padlock on the front door. The lock
was ancient and rusty. A half-witted child could pick it
or force it. So far, no burglar had figured that out. With
luck, none would till Yitzkhak got back. “Alevai oma-
nyn,” he murmured as he started for the market square.

His own well-made boots kicked up dust at every
step. It was hot outside. The broad brim of his fox­trimmed black hat kept the sun off his face, but sweat
sprang out on his forehead.

He wasn’t the only man who might have been work­ing but was heading for the market instead. He called

26

THE MORE IT CHANGES – HARRY TURTLEDOVE

greetings to Jews and to Catholic Poles. Like most peo­ple in Kolomija, he could get along in Yiddish or
Polish, German or Little Russian, or even Slovak in a
pinch. He talked to his God in Hebrew, as the Poles
talked to theirs in Latin.

Czeslaw the tavern-keeper had a bottle of plum
brandy under each arm. He was on his way back from
the square. His red nose and the veins that tracked his
cheeks said he drank up some of his profits. He and
Yitzkhak nodded to each other. Kolomija wasn’t such
a big town that everyone didn’t know everyone else, at
least by sight.

“How’s the square?” Yitzkhak asked.

“Busy. Busiest I’ve seen it for a while. With the roads

dry, people from a long way off can get here.” Czeslaw
frowned. His ice-gray eyes narrowed. “I’m not so sure

that’s a good thing, not the way it is nowadays. They’ll
go home and remind their neighbors we’re around.”

Yitzkhak made an unhappy noise. “I’m not so sure
it’s good, either. Sometimes—a lot of the time—the
most you can hope for is that everybody forgets about

you and leaves you alone.”

“Too right, it is!” Czeslaw said. “There was talk that

haidamacks are gathering.” He crossed himself to turn
aside the evil omen.

“God forbid!” Instead of thinking it, Yitzkhak said
it aloud. He wanted to give the Lord a better chance of
hearing it. Haidamacks meant rioters. They were Cos­sacks and other ne’er-do-wells who swarmed like lo­custs every so often, killing and looting and burning for
the greater glory of their notion of God—and for the
fun of it. Yitzkhak went on, “I hope the talk is wrong.
The last time they came through was only—what?—
four years ago?”

27

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

“Yes, that’s when it was,” the taverner said. “Before
that, we didn’t see them for fifteen or twenty years, and
then another fifteen before that. We were both little

boys back then.”

“I remember.” Yitzkhak touched the brim of his hat

once more. “Well, I’d better head on to the square my-
self and hear it with my own ears. May the Lord bless
you and keep you, Czeslaw.”

“And you, Jew. And you.” Bobbing his head, the
Pole headed up the street toward his place of business.

On to the market square trudged Yitzkhak. The joy,
the anticipation, were gone from his step. The only
thing he had to look forward to now was bad news.
The day felt darker, as if clouds covered the sun. They
didn’t, but the cobbler saw with his heart as much as
with his ears.

Wagons and carts filled the square. Women in em­broidered head scarves sat on the ground, selling eggs
or mushrooms or turnips from baskets they’d made
themselves. A donkey brayed. Stray dogs skulked,
looking for food they could steal.

Peddlers who’d come to Kolomija from bigger
towns shouted their wares: plates; big, clunky clocks
with gilded wooden cases; books in German and
French and Latin and Hebrew; the brandy Czeslaw had
bought; carved meerschaums from Vienna; singing
finches in brass cages; and almost anything else some­one thought he might be able to sell.

Yitzkhak eyed the meerschaums with longing, espe­cially one in the shape of a bare-breasted mermaid—
you smoked through her tail. His current pipe was
baked clay. It worked, but it was ugly as the mud it
came from. He asked the trader what a meerschaum
cost. The answer made him retreat in a hurry. The best

28

THE MORE IT CHANGES – HARRY TURTLEDOVE

haggling in the world wouldn’t bring the price down to
anything he could afford.

He did buy a bagel for a copper. His jaw worked at
the chewy dough as he went through the square,
though not before he recited the brukha over bread. A
sausage-seller held up a link. Yitzkhak politely shook
his head. Tadeusz used pork in his sausages; it wasn’t
forbidden him.

The cobbler wished he had ears like a cat’s or a
fox’s, ears that could swivel and track things he partic­ularly wanted to hear. But he turned out not to need
anything like that. People were talking about haidamacks
in several different languages. They would have talked
about a rising storm the same way when clouds were
still low on the horizon.

He wasn’t the only man from Kolomija whose face
got glummer the longer he stayed in the market square.
Alter the druggist and Casimir the stonecutter were
talking when Yitzkhak came up to them. Alter touched
his hatbrim; Casimir bobbed a token bow.

“It doesn’t sound good,” the stonecutter said.

“They’re coming, sure as sure,” the druggist agreed
sadly. “For our sins, they’re coming.”

“We must have done something awful, to make
God hate us so much,” Yitzkhak said. “Another pog­rom, so soon after the last one . . .”

As Czeslaw had before, Casimir made the sign of
the cross. “I’m a good Catholic—well, as good a Cath­olic as an ordinary man can be,” he said. “All I want to
do is to worship God the way my father and my grand-

fathers and all my ancestors did before me.”

“That’s all I want, too.” Yitzkhak and Alter said the

same thing at the same time. The two Jews looked at
each other and laughed. It was that or burst into tears.

29

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Casimir glowered at them from under bushy eye­brows. “That miserable . . .” The stonecutter growled

a Polish obscenity, adding, “He was just a rotten Zhyd
himself.”

“Nu?” Yitzkhak shrugged an expressive—and nerv-

ous—shrug. He didn’t want to tangle with Casimir; the
man’s trade had given him shoulders broad as a bull’s
and upper arms bulging with muscle. He tried simple
truth instead: “So was the one you go to church for.”

“It’s not the same,” Casimir said, but he stopped

glowering.

“Besides,” Yitzkhak added, “would it make any dif­ference if he’d been a Turk? He still would have
been…what he was. What they say he was, I mean.”

“What they say he was, eh?” Casimir seemed to like

that. He nodded. “Maybe the God-cursed haidamacks
will be afraid of the Austrian Emperor. This is his land
now. Maybe they won’t come. Maybe the town can
fight them off if they do.” He lumbered away. He’d
talked himself into feeling better, anyhow.

Softly, so the stonecutter wouldn’t hear, Alter said,

“And maybe I’ll grown like an onion, with my head in
the ground.”

“Maybe you will,” Yitzkhak said. “You never can
tell.” They both laughed again. Again, Yitzkhak heard

the sorrow under the mirth.

***

Summer slipped toward fall. The High Holy Days
came and went. The Jewish year 5532 gave way to

5533. Yitzkhak fasted and prayed through Yom Kip­pur, the Day of Atonement. He begged forgiveness of
everyone he’d offended the past year, and did his best

30

THE MORE IT CHANGES – HARRY TURTLEDOVE

to forgive everyone who apologized to him. It wasn’t
always easy, but on that day of days a man had to try.

The fall rains held off long enough to let the peas­ants bring in a good harvest of barley and wheat. The
winter would be hungry—winters usually were. But no
one seemed likely to starve.

As soon as the rains came, roads went from dusty
tracks to rivers of mud. Travel slowed, or else stopped
altogether. The roof in Yitzkhak’s shop leaked. He put
a chipped bowl under one drip and a dented tin cup
that had lost its handle under another. Every so often,
he would toss the water into the muddy street.

He didn’t mind one bit, not that autumn (during
which the new reckoning passed from year 95 to 96).
Every time a drop plinked into the tin cup, he would
smile. Forty days and forty nights, Lord, he thought. The
longer it rained, the longer before the haidamacks could
come, if the haidamacks did come. They swept out of
the east when they came, and the rains were usually
worse in that direction. Everybody said so.

But the rainy season didn’t last forever, no matter
how much Yitzkhak wished it would. Snow whitened
the upper slopes of the Carpathians. Frost traced magic
patterns on the glass windowpanes of rich men’s
houses. Yes, the rich—mostly Poles—in Kolomija had
glass windows, as if it were Czernowitz or Kiev or War­saw.

And the cold weather hardened the ground, as it did
toward the end of fall every year. The muddy roads
turned to something more like rock. With the crops in,
the worst of the year’s work was done. Some men out
in the countryside lay up through the winter like sleepy
bears—though bears didn’t have vodka to help make
time spin by.

31

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Yitzkhak didn’t mind the men who stayed in their
houses and drank their way through winter. They were
harmless. Oh, they might beat their wives and children,
but they might do that sober, too. The trouble was,
vodka also inflamed other men, the kind who loaded
their muskets and pistols, climbed into the saddle, and
went riding in the name of the Messiah—and in the
name of kicking up as much trouble as they could.

Haidamacks torched the synagogue in Zastawna.
They burned the rabbi in it, and howled with laughter
at his screams. Zastawna lay between Czernowitz and
Kolomija, west of the one but east of the other. It
wasn’t nearly far enough away to let anyone in Ko­lomija feel safe, in other words.

Snyatyn was a smaller town a little southwest of
Zastawna—even closer to Kolomija, that is. Two days
after people fleeing Zastawna came to Kolomija, peo­ple fleeing Snyatyn got there.

“God have mercy on us!” a Catholic woman from

Snyatyn screamed in the street as she stumbled past
Yitzkhak’s house. “Christ have mercy on us! They mur-
dered the priest, the holy father! They cut his throat on
the altar in the church, as if he were a hog! Their horses
drank from the holy-water fount! Oh, Christ have
mercy!”

Yitzkhak’s wife was a small, dark woman named
Rivka. She was quiet and steady. He could see that
those shrieks shook her even so. “They’ll be here next,
won’t they?” she said, her voice not much above a
whisper.

“I’m afraid so,” he answered.

“They went away the last time,” his son Aaron said.
“They went away, and we’re still here, and we’re still

32

THE MORE IT CHANGES – HARRY TURTLEDOVE

Jews.” He was fifteen. He thought he was a man. Un­der religious law, he was. Otherwise . . . less so. He did
have a certain gift for the Talmud, which made Yitz­khak proud. An open volume sat on the table in front
of him.

“It’s like a bad storm,” Yitzkhak said heavily. “It
blows for a while. Then it eases back, and you think
maybe it’s over. But it blows some more, stronger than
ever. And before this one is done, if it ever is, it’s liable

to blow all our houses down.”

“What will you do, then, Father?” Aaron asked.
“Will you bend to the storm?”

Yitzkhak understood what that meant. He shook
his head. “A lot of people have, but I won’t. I’ll stay a
Jew, a proper Jew, as long as I live. Hear, O Israel, the
Lord our God, the Lord is one. That was the first prayer I
learned, and those will be the last words that ever pass

my lips.”

“Some of the Catholics want to fight the haidam-
acks,” Aaron said, his voice cracking with excitement.
Talmud or no Talmud, he added, “I want to fight
alongside them.”

“What do they say about that?” the cobbler asked.

His wife looked horrified. He understood; that was
what mothers were for. He knew horror, too, but also
a grim determination.

“They say every man with a knife or a hatchet in his
hands can help,” Aaron answered. “If we don’t fight,

we’ll go under.”

No Jew in Kolomija owned anything much more
dangerous than a knife or a hatchet. The Catholics had
firearms. Some had gone to war; others hunted. That
they were willing, even happy, to have Jews stand with
them was a telling measure of how desperate they were.

33

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Well, by the woman from Snyatyn’s cries, they had rea­son to be desperate. Time was when they’d looked
down their noses at Jews. They still did, some; goyim
were like that. But the passage of Kolomija from Po­land to Austria was the least of their worries.

Poland, Austria, Russia, Turkey—even, from what
Yitzkhak had heard, Prussia . . . The same storm was
blowing through all of them, and showed no sign of
blowing itself out. If anything, it was spreading. Where
it touched, nothing was the same again. Would the
proud Catholic Poles of Kolomija want Jews at their
side if things were the same as they used to be?

Tell him no. Tell him he’s too young—Rivka’s eyes
begged Yitzkhak. But the cobbler could see that the
only way to keep Aaron from doing something like that
would be to tie him up and sit on him. Easier to ride a
horse in the direction it was already going.

Besides… “Enough is enough. If nobody stands up
to the haidamacks, they’ll ride roughshod over every­thing,” Yitzkhak said. “And if the Catholics will take
one Jew who doesn’t know much about this fighting
business, chances are they’ll take two.”

“Vey iz mir!” Rivka said. Yitzkhak could hardly hear
her through his son’s war whoop. He didn’t feel like a
warrior himself. Unlike Aaron, he didn’t want to fight.
But he didn’t think things would turn out any worse
for him if he did than if he didn’t. There was even some
small chance they might turn out better.

He got something better than a hatchet. The Cath­olics gave him a spear. A spear of sorts, anyhow: an old
scythe blade lashed to a staff. He had Rivka’s longest
knife on his belt, and a small one from his shop stuck
in one boot for a holdout weapon. Aaron hefted a
makeshift spear, too.

34

THE MORE IT CHANGES – HARRY TURTLEDOVE

Casimir carried a stout wooden club with nails
driven through it. Yitzkhak wouldn’t have wanted to
be on the wrong end of a buffet from that, especially
not with the stonecutter swinging it. But the haidamacks
were horsemen. A spear at least gave you extra reach.
How much good could a club do?

A couple of Poles had iron helmets. One even wore
a back-and-breast that must have come down from his
great-grandfather. It might keep out a musket ball. It
would surely make the man very slow. Several Catho­lics shouldered muskets. One was a businesslike mod­ern flintlock. The rest looked at least as old as the
corselet: wheel-locks and an ancient matchlock.

Czeslaw had a pistol. A taverner needed something
to keep himself safe. He surveyed the ragtag militia.
“We’re a fine bunch, aren’t we?” he said. “Maybe the
haidamacks will get a good look at us and laugh them­selves to death. Christ, it’s our best hope!”

“If you feel that way—” Yitzkhak began.

“Why don’t I pack it in?” Czeslaw finished for him.
“Because I’m a stubborn son of a bitch, that’s why. We
all are, or we wouldn’t fight back. We’d do what the

haidamacks want, and that would be that. Only then
we’d hate our own reflections for the rest of our lives.”

Yitzkhak nodded. He felt the same way. He
wouldn’t have stood there shivering in the cold if he
hadn’t. So many, though, had gone over to the new
reckoning without so much as a backward glance at
what they’d once believed.

One of the Poles who’d done some real soldiering
before his hair grayed took command of the fighters.
He stationed them on the streets just inside the east
end of town. “We’ll make things crowded for the

35

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

haidamacks, anyway,” he said. “We’ll run up what barri­cades we can and hope for the best.”

“What if they swing around to the west side?” Aa-

ron asked him.

The veteran scowled. “You’re one of those damn
smart Jews, are you? If they go over there, they screw
us up the ass, that’s what. But they won’t. They aren’t
long on tactics, the haidamacks. They just charge on in
and start smashing things.”

Townswomen brought the fighters soup and stew in
big, steaming kettles. After a hurried brukha, Yitzkhak ate
whatever got ladled into his bowl without worrying much

about breaking dietary laws. He’d atone for his sins later,

if he had a later. When you went to war, you dispensed
with a lot of the formalities anyhow.

As night fell, Casimir pointed out into the gathering
gloom. “Look! You can see their fires!”

Yitzkhak cocked his head to one side. “Yes, and you
can hear them howling, too. If they aren’t already plas­tered, they will be soon.”

A drum began to pound out there. The first thud
was so deep and sudden, for a panicky moment Yitz­khak took it for a cannon firing. But it thumped again
and again and again. The haidamacks’ drunken shouts
coalesced into a chorus that rang out between the
drumbeats: “Sabbatai! Sabbatai!”

“God damn Sabbatai,” Casimir said in Polish at
Yitzkhak’s left hand. He spat on the ground.

“God curse Sabbatai,” Aaron said in Yiddish at
Yitzkhak’s right hand. He spat on the ground,

too.

“God’s already done whatever He chose to do with
Sabbatai Tzevi,” Yitzkhak said, first in the one lan-

guage and then in the other, though Aaron followed

36

THE MORE IT CHANGES – HARRY TURTLEDOVE

Polish perfectly well. “It’s here on earth that we’re still

sorting things out.”

“God damn Sabbatai,” Casimir repeated. “God
damn him and the Devil broil him black!”

Sabbatai Tzevi had been dead for almost a century;
the date of his death marked the first day of the new
reckoning his followers used. He’d been born an ordi­nary Jew in Turkey, but he had messianic ambitions
and pretensions. He also had the kind of spellbinding
character that made people who heard him take those
ambitions and pretensions seriously.

They said he worked miracles. Yitzkhak didn’t
know the details; he didn’t want to know the details.
Sabbatai had preached in Asia Minor, and in the Holy
Land, and in Egypt. Some from Europe who’d heard
him believed his claims as firmly as the folk in the Ot­toman Empire.

Finally, in the year the Christians called 1666, Sultan
Mehmet IV summoned Sabbatai to Istanbul to hear at
first-hand what he had to say. The canny Turk listened
to the man who called himself the Messiah . . . and de­clared that he was changing his name to Sabbatai I.

The new faith exploded through the vast Ottoman
domain, and out into Europe as well. Sabbatai Tzevi
lived another ten years after converting Mehmet to his
cause. Mullahs, cardinals, patriarchs, rabbis—every re­ligious authority called curses down on his head. It did
them little good. When people were ready for some­thing, they grabbed at it whether their leaders approved
or not. Christianity and Islam had spread the same way.

And when people were ready for something, they
were also ready—eager!—to ram it down their neigh­bors’ throats, regardless of whether the neighbors were
ready, too.

37

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

“Sabbatai!” the haidamacks roared. “Sabbatai!” They
danced around the fires like…like Yitzkhak didn’t
know what. He vaguely knew there was a New world
beyond the ocean far to the west (he only vaguely knew
there was an ocean far to the west), but tales of its na­tives had never reached his ears.

He turned to the grizzled veteran who ordered the
defenders around. “We ought to go out there while
they’re drinking and yelling and carrying on—take

them by surprise.”

“Another Jew who thinks he’s a general.” The Pole

sounded more amused than annoyed. He waved to­ward the fires. “Go ahead, Jew—be my guest. If you
guys were real soldiers, not odds-and-sods, I might try
it. But they’d chop you to bits if I did. You don’t know
how to hold together. No, our best chance is staying
where we’re at and making them come to us.”

“All right.” Yitzkhak had no idea whether it was or not.
But the gray-haired Pole understood more of war than he
did. He pulled his black coat tighter around him, lay down
on the ground behind a barrel, and tried to sleep.

He didn’t think he would, but he managed a light,
on-and-off doze. He was dozing when a haidamack rode
out of the gray predawn light in the east and shouted,
“You misbelievers there! Give your souls to Sabbatai
Tzevi, God’s great light on earth, and we’ll leave you
alone! Otherwise, you’ll pay for your wickedness in this
world and the next!” He sounded like a Little Russian
trying to speak Polish, but no one in Kolomija would
have trouble following him.

“Go away! Leave us alone! Let us worship the way
we want to!” Yitzkhak shouted as he grabbed his spear

and scrambled to his feet. Other men yelled variations
on the same theme.

38

THE MORE IT CHANGES – HARRY TURTLEDOVE

“On your heads be it—and it will.” The haidamack
turned his horse and rode back to his encampment.
Sabbatai’s followers, like those of Muhammad and Je­sus before them, were sure they knew the one right an­swer and had the right, even the duty, to inflict it on
everyone else. Jews didn’t proselytize—which was, no
doubt, why there were so few of them.

The drums began to pound again. When the sun
rose, the haidamacks came trotting toward the town and
its homemade barriers. Some bore lances, some short
muskets, some pistols. They wore fur hats; their capes
streamed out behind them. As they came, they shouted
Sabbatai’s name.

One of the defenders steadied his musket on a
board and fired. The shot missed anyhow. Yitzkhak
was too excited to be afraid—till a pistol ball smashed
Casimir’s face. The burly stonecutter wailed and gob­bled at the same time. Bright blood poured out be­tween his fingers as he clapped his hands to the wound.
Then he fell, and it puddled and steamed under him.
He never got to use his fearsome club.

A raider’s horse went down. The haidamack howled—his
leg was broken or crushed beneath the thrashing animal.
The others kept pushing forward, though. They had more
guns and less fear than Kolomija’s amateur defenders.

Yitzkhak awkwardly thrust his improvised spear at a

horse. The rider didn’t get close enough to let the weapon

bite. He shot at Yitzkhak, missed, and cursed horribly.

Another haidamack skewered a Jew with his lance at
the same time as his comrade shot the Catholic next to
that Jew. Their horses chested planks aside. Whooping,
the haidamacks poured through the breach in the miser­able barricade and into Kolomija. A couple of them
went down, but most rode on.

39

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Some made for the Catholic church, others for the
synagogue. That split the defenders: the Poles tried to
save the one, the Jews the other. The fire in the syna­gogue started first.

Aaron lay in the street, bleeding from the head.
“No!” Yitzkhak shouted. He tried to skewer on of the
raiders. Laughing, the man yanked the spear from his
startled hands. “No!” he shouted again. “Your Sabba-

tai, he was a Jew, the same as we are!”

“He got over it.” The haidamack aimed a musket at

Yitzkhak’s belly. “Will you, fool? Admit that Sabbatai
was the Lord’s chosen, the Messiah, and you can have
your worthless life.”

Yitzkhak grabbed for the kitchen knife on his belt.
“It isn’t true,” he said. Even as the words came out of
his mouth, he wished he had them back. Why would
you condemn yourself like that? Because I am a Jew, he
thought. Because I can’t be anything else.

Laughing still, the raider pulled the trigger. Maybe
the gun would misfire. If it didn’t, maybe he would
miss. Maybe—

Flame and smoke burst from the muzzle. The bullet
caught Yitzkhak square in the chest. It didn’t hurt.
Then it did, horribly. He crumpled, blood filling his
mouth. Through it, he managed to choke out, “Hear,

O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one” before

darkness swallowed him.

The synagogue burned. A couple of hundred yards
away, so did the church. “Sabbatai!” the haidamacks
cried, over and over again. “Sabbatai!” Like the smoke
from the houses of God, the name mounted to the un­caring heavens.

***

40

THE MORE IT CHANGES – HARRY TURTLEDOVE

IN ACTUAL HISTORY

The real career of Sabbatai Tzevi (1626–1676) is the
same as that described in the story up to the point
where he met Mehmet IV. The Jewish mystic began to
preach that he was the Messiah in 1648, and was aided
by a man in Istanbul who said that he had heard a pro­claiming that Sabbatai was truly the Redeemer. He was
a man of rare personal magnetism. He always fasci­nated children, and the way he sang the Psalms helped
draw men to him. He travelled to Jersualem and to
Cairo, where he married a beautiful young girl. From
the Middle East, the belief in Sabbatai’s Messianic na­ture spread to the leading trading cities of Western Eu­rope through merchants, many of them Jews. Most of
the turmoil he created, though, was centered in the Ot­toman Empire, where he lived. In early 1666, the Ot­toman sultan, Mehmet IV, summoned him to Istanbul
for questioning. In September of that year, he was
brought before the sultan and, instead of being ac­cepted as the Messiah as he was in the story, was of­fered the choice of conversion to Islam or death. He
converted. Naturally, that threw his movement into a
tailspin from which it never recovered. Sabbatai Tzevi
lived out the rest of his life in obscurity in Albania,
abandoned by most of those who had followed him. A
handful of believers refused to accept his apostasy, and
continued to think he truly was the Messiah. A tiny
remnant of them survives to this day.

41

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

ABOUT HARRY TURTLEDOVE

Harry Turtledove lives in Los Angeles, California. He
earned a doctorate in Byzantine history from the Uni­versity of California, Los Angeles, and taught at UCLA,
Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State Los Angeles. At
about the same time, he began selling science fiction
and fantasy. Because of his training and interests, much
of what he has written is based on history. He worked
as a technical writer to support himself and his growing
family until 1991, when he began to write full-time. He
has won the Hugo, the Sidewise for alternate history
(twice), the John Esthen Cook award, and the Hal
Clement award for young-adult science fiction, and has
been a Nebula finalist. His books include the four nov­els of The Videssos Cycle (modeled after the history of
the Byzantine Empire), The Guns of the South (set in the
American Civil War), the Worldwar books (in which al­iens invade in 1942), Ruled Britannia (set in a world
where the Spanish Armada succeeded and Shakespeare
is brought into an English uprising), and In the Presence
of Mine Enemies (in which the last Jews in Berlin struggle
to survive a lifetime after a German victory). He is mar­ried to fellow writer Laura Frankos. They have three
daughters, one granddaughter, and the inevitable writ­ers’ cat.

42

A SINGLE SHOT – ROD REES

A SINGLE SHOT

By Rod Rees

September 11, 1777: Brandywine Creek, near

Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

“That’s a Frog ‘Ussar, that is, Captain,” whispered Ser-
geant Hopkins.

A cautious Captain Ferguson eased back a branch of
the bush he was cowering behind to give himself a better
sighting of the two horsemen who were taking such an
infernally close interest in the disposition of the British
Army. Hopkins was right: the flamboyant uniform of
the nearer of the two men was unmistakable. Only
French Hussars favoured so much gold braid.

“The other bloke’s a Yankee.”

Ferguson nodded. The blue and buff uniform and
tricorn hat were typical of those sported by Colonial
officers.

“Shall we let ‘em ‘ave it, Captain?’ Hopkins asked as
he brought his rifle up to his shoulder. ‘Easy pickings
at this distance.”

43

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

That was true. The horsemen were only fifty yards
from where Ferguson and his three men were hidden,
well within range of their rifles. And they were enemy
officers…

Something made Ferguson hesitate. In truth he was
sick of how brutish the war in the American Colonies
had become, disgusted by the atrocities he had seen
perpetrated by both sides. He judged himself to be a
gentleman, possessed of Christian sensibilities, and
Christian gentlemen did not sneak up on their enemies
and blast them in ambuscade. Anyway, there was a
family tradition of Fergusons—all staunchly Episcopa­lian—sympathising with rebels: his father had been a
resolute supporter of the Jacobite cause.

“Hold your fire,” Ferguson ordered and with that
he rose to his feet and hallooed the two horsemen.

“Gentlemen, I am Captain Patrick Ferguson, officer

commanding the Rifle Corps attached to the army of
Sir William Howe. I would most respectfully request
you to surrender yourselves—”

The Colonial didn’t even have the courtesy to
acknowledge Ferguson’s demand, instead he hauled
the head of his bay around and made to gallop away.
There was a crack of a rifle to Ferguson’s left. Hopkins
had fired.

“Damn your eyes! I said hold your fire,” snarled
Ferguson as he watched the American stiffen in his
saddle and then tumble from his horse to the ground.

“Beggin’ your pardon, Captain, but ‘e wos disobey­ing your order,” answered an unapologetic Hopkins.
“Got the bugger anyways, and like the General says,
the best sort ov Reb is a dead Reb, wot wiv them all
bin traitors to the King and such.”

Biting back a rebuke, Ferguson fired a warning shot

44

A SINGLE SHOT – ROD REES

over the head of the hussar who had dismounted to
tend to his fallen comrade. The hussar, seeing the four
British riflemen advancing towards him, decided that
discretion was the better part of valour, climbed back
on his horse and rode away.

When they came up to the fallen man, Ferguson
could see that Hopkins’s shot had taken the Colonial
square in the back and now he lay, dead as mutton, in
a puddle of blood. In life he must have been an impos­ing individual, lean of build and topping six feet in
height; a man, if Ferguson wasn’t mistaken, more used
to giving orders than receiving them. Trying to disguise
his distaste of such an unnecessary death, Ferguson
watched in silence as Hopkins searched the dead man’s
pockets. The sergeant, not having any letters, handed
the packet of papers he found to Ferguson who quickly
scanned them.

Then he read them again more carefully hardly dar­ing to believe what was written there.

“It seems, Sergeant,” he said finally, “the body we
see before us is none other than that of General
George Washington, commander of the rebel army.”

***

July 4, 1978: Carleton Building, at 5th and Chest-

nut Streets, Pennsylvania, the United States of

New England. Co-Dependence Day Bicentennial

Celebrations

Andy Hidell knew the key to successfully executing his
mission turned on being able to bluff his way into the
office of Rayborough Securities on the tenth floor of
the Carleton Building, the office which overlooked Old

45

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Parliament Hall…the office where the rifle was hidden.
Whilst he had been assured that the false papers he was
carrying were nigh-on perfect there were hundreds of
EBI agents patrolling the building and it would take
just one radio call—one un-intercepted radio call—made
to check his bona fides and the whole masquerade
would be revealed.

As Hidell approached the building’s front door he
fortified himself against the trials to come with the
thought that he was doing God’s work…that God was
watching over him.

“Papers,” snapped the EBI agent guarding the
building’s entrance. He had to be EBI given the grey
pin-striped, English-style three-piece suit and the bow­ler hat he was wearing: J. Edgar Hoover, the man who
had established the Empire Bureau of Investigation,
had been a fervent anglophile who liked his agents to
dress like English gentlemen.

Hidell clicked his heels and saluted. “Pavel Andre­yevich Pronin,” he answered as he proffered his faux-

identity card, inflecting his intonation with a cod-Rus-

sian accent, “Captain in the Okhrana, charged with act-

ing as security liaison with the New England EBI. I have
been assigned to surveil the ceremony and be on the
look-out for any potential trouble-makers and known
Commune-ist agitators.” For emphasis Hidell patted the
binocular case he had slung over his shoulder.

The EBI agent gave Hidell the once-over, taking in
the Russian cut of his suit and the Poljot watch ticking
on his wrist: Hopkins, the mission’s mastermind, had
been obsessive about the details needed to make
Hidell’s disguise convincing. Satisfied, the agent turned
his attention to the identity card and from the way his
brow furrowed it was obvious he was flummoxed by

46

A SINGLE SHOT – ROD REES

the Cyrillic script but then this was the first time the
Okhrana—the Tsar’s secret police—had been given
permission to operate on American soil.

“I thought you Ruskis were leaving security in the
hands of us Yanks.”

“Change of plan,” Hidell answered in what he
hoped was a suitably careless manner. “The Okhrana
has received information that known terrorists are in­tent on using the Bicentennial celebrations to perpe­trate a political assassination and with Grand Duke
Gorbachev being in attendance…”

The EBI agent nodded. “Yeah, I guess with Philly
awash with big-wigs from all parts of the Empire—and
from the European Commune—it’s all hands to the
pump. Can’t have anything untoward spoiling the fes­tivities, especially as Her Majesty is gracing us with her
presence.” The agent handed back Hidell’s documents.

“You armed?”

“No. I was advised that police in New England do
not bear arms.”

“You were advised right, Captain, no one in the

Empire carries a gun. Even so, with this being a maxi­mum security area, I’ll have to get clearance from MI5
before I can give you admittance. If you’ll bear with
me.” The EBI agent turned away from Hidell and
spoke into his walkie-talkie.

This was the moment of maximum danger. If the
call wasn’t correctly intercepted then the game would
be up.

“MI5 confirms your clearance is genuine, Captain
Pronin, and that I am to provide you with full assistance.”

Trying desperately to hide the feeling of relief that
washed over him, Hidell smiled a reply. “Excellent. I’d

47

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

like to be afforded a position overlooking the cere­mony. I thought somewhere on the tenth floor…”

***

Once snug in the tenth floor office and with the door
locked firmly behind him, Hidell used his binoculars to
scan the dignitaries taking their seats on the stage
erected in front of the Old Parliament Building, Prime
Minister Gerald Ford glad-handing for all he was
worth, milking every morsel of publicity from the Bi­centennial celebrations. Hardly surprising, Hidell sup­posed, given the world’s press was gathered to cover
the event and there was an election scheduled for next
year. Ford bowed to the Queen; shook hands with
Prime Minister Jimmy Carter, there to represent the
Confederation of Southern States; kissed that hateful
harridan Prime Minister Thatcher on both cheeks;
hugged Grand Duke Mikhail Gorbachev, Tsar Alexan­der’s Foreign Minister; and then, in what had been
billed as the Great Rapprochement, welcomed Erich
Honecker, President of the European Commune, to
the stand and ushered him to his seat.

The press photographers jostled to record this sem­inal moment, the first official visit a President of the
Commune had ever made to the British Empire. Not
that Hidell approved of this show of détente: the Com­mies—Satan-led atheists to a man—were the intracta­ble and uncompromising enemies of the God-fearing
Empire, and hence all of them would be cast into the
everlasting fire on the Day of Judgement. Studying Ho­necker through his binoculars, Hidell decided he
looked every inch the devil-worshipper, his thin face
and narrow eyes signalling to all good Christians that

48

A SINGLE SHOT – ROD REES

he was a man without pity or compassion. As such he
deserved to die, to be struck down by a bullet fired in
the name of the Lord. The bullet Hidell would fire.

Honecker took his seat next to Gorbachev, the two
of them exchanging smiles and by doing so confirming
the rumours that soon the Commune and Holy Russia
would join forces in opposing the British Empire. War
was coming … the final war between God and Satan.

Unfortunately, by the reckoning of the Warriors of
Christ—the group of fundamentalist Christians Hidell
was honoured to belong to—it was a war that wasn’t
coming quickly enough. The sooner Satan was de­feated the better, history needing the shove which
Hidell would provide: the assassination of Honecker
on American soil would be an insult the Commune
would be unable to ignore. It would be the spark that
would ignite Armageddon.

As he pulled the rifle from its hiding place behind the
wall panel, Hidell saw Prime Minister Ford walk towards
the microphone. Hidell turned on his transistor radio.

Your Majesty; Mayor Rizzo; reverend clergy; Members of
Parliament; distinguished guests; lords, ladies and gentlemen, I
welcome you all to Philadelphia.

Gerald Ford spoke in the elevated, cut-glass, Eng­lish public-school accent Hidell so detested. If his
memory served him right Ford had been educated in
Eton and then Oxford, the same path to the top fol­lowed by most of those who made up the Empire’s es­tablishment, the effete, liberal elite who had so readily
espoused sinfulness and apostasy and had legalised the
deviant activity of homosexuality. They didn’t seem to
realise that the Manifest Destiny of the British Empire
was to be God’s bulwark against Satan. But he and the

49

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

other Warriors of Christ knew it and they were deter­mined not to stand watching helplessly while the Em­pire’s godless, spineless leaders brought the Christian
nations of the West floundering to the brink of death.

We are especially honoured to have Her Majesty, Queen
Elizabeth II, with us today as she is a direct descendant of King
George III who, following the defeat and surrender of the rebel
forces at Saratoga, displayed the statesmanship and the virtue of
Christian forgiveness ‘to know the right time, and the manner of
yielding, what is impossible to keep’.

Saratoga, the battle in which the British had routed
Horatio Gates’s rebel army and sealed the end of the
rebellion…but only just. Hidell agreed with Burgoyne’s
assessment that it had been ‘a damned close-run thing’.
Maybe if Washington had been alive…maybe if Bene­dict Arnold hadn’t been ordered to assist Nathanael
Greene after Washington’s death and had been there
in Saratoga to stiffen Gates’s resolve…maybe then the
Colonials would have won. Unfortunately for the Co­lonials, history was awash with ‘maybes’.

King George realised that all nations have the right to govern
themselves in their own ways and his magnanimity in victory was
the first step in healing the differences which had threatened to
tear the English race asunder. Thus the British and the Coloni­als came to work together as brothers, friends and allies, the five
nations making up British North America imbued with the
principles of Magna Carta and the Christian faith, this laying
the foundation of what would become the mightiest empire the
world has ever seen.

A trifle sycophantic, decided Hidell: it had been Lord

North’s Conciliation Plan, rather than King George’s

munificence, that had placated the defeated Colonials.
But then, he supposed, Queen Elizabeth was attending
the ceremony so Ford had to be diplomatic.

50

A SINGLE SHOT – ROD REES

He began to assemble the rifle—a Russian Dra­gunov sniper’s rifle. Hidell would have preferred to use
a good, honest American rifle but Hopkins had insisted
and Hidell had conceded. After all, Hopkins was the
one who had so skilfully planned the assassination, the
man who had conjured up the false identity papers, the
man who was privy to all Honecker’s movements, the
man sent by God to initiate the Cleansing.

Sycophantic or no, Ford’s rhetoric was rewarded by
applause from the Prime Ministers of Canada, the
Southern Confederation, Greater Mexico, and Califor­nia, the nations which, together with New England,
formed British North America. That had been the Brit­ish master-stroke: never to allow the Colonies to coa­lesce into one nation, a nation too big and powerful for
even Great Britain to handle. Divide and conquer had
been the philosophy followed by Westminster, one car­ried through with typical English cunning.

In 1833, on the birthday of the first Prime Minister of the
United States of New England, Benedict Arnold…

A cheer from the crowd at the mention of Arnold,
the father of the American nations, the Great Patriot,
the man, who, following the defeat at Saratoga, had
been charged with making peace with the British.

…just a fortnight after the six southern states had formed a
renegade confederacy in protest of the passing of the Slavery Abo­lition Act in Westminster…

Hidell saw Jimmy Carter shuffle awkwardly in his seat.
The Second Rebellion of 1833 had led to a bloodbath,
with four hundred thousand killed or wounded before
the Rebel States were subdued. The one good thing was
that as the French and the Spanish had backed the losing
side—the Confederacy—and this had given Britain an
excuse to take over their possessions in North America.

51

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Not that the Frogs had been in any position to resist: they
were too busy bickering about who should lead the Com-

mune following Bonaparte’s death in 1834. Nevertheless,

Redcoats marching into New Orleans was why the Eu­ropean Commune and the British Empire had been at
loggerheads ever since.

…Prime Minister James Brinley came here to Parliament
Hall knowing that he faced the greatest national crisis in our
country’s 55-year history. “I am filled with deep emotion,” he
said, “at finding myself standing here in the place where collected
together the wisdom, the loyalty, the devotion to principle, from
which sprang the institutions under which we live.”

Today, we can all share these simple, noble sentiments. Like
Brinley, I feel both pride and humility, rejoicing and reverence as
I stand in the place where two centuries ago the United States of
New England was conceived in liberty, transatlantic brother­hood, loyalty to the Crown and dedication to the proposition that
all men are created equal. From this small but beautiful building,
then the most imposing structure in the Colonies, came the great
document—the Declaration of Co-Dependence—that underpins
the moral and intellectual power of all the nations enjoined in the
British Empire. It is to celebrate the signing of the Declaration
of Co-Dependence that we are met here today.

After easing open the window he’d be shooting
through, Hidell stepped back into the shadows and fit­ted the rifle’s telescopic sight to the slide rail atop the
barrel. He had to be careful not to be seen handling a
rifle by the sharpshooters stationed on the roof of the
Old Parliament Building and this would necessitate
him shooting from the very back of the office. To get
a sight line of the stage from there he would have to
have an elevated firing position. He began to rearrange
the office furniture and as he worked he pondered on
the Declaration of Co-Dependence.

52

A SINGLE SHOT – ROD REES

What this generation of politicians seemed to have
forgotten was that whilst the Declaration had settled
the modus vivendi of Britain and the Colonies it had also
stipulated that the religion of the Colonies would be
Protestant Christianity. Hidell knew this part of the
Declaration by rote. Whilst the Parliament of the United

States of New England shall make no law prohibiting the free
exercise of religion it is acknowledged that the King’s most excel­lent Majesty has supreme authority over all persons in matters
ecclesiastical. This power is exercised through the Church of Eng­land, a congregation of faithful men in which the pure word of
God is preached and the sacraments duly ministered to Christ’s
ordinance in all things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

The pure word of God…not this evolutionary non-

sense…not the blasphemy that men could lie with
men…not the pornography spewed out by the film

studios in Elstree. The Empire had to be brought back
to God, Cleansed in the fire of Holy War. The fools
leading the Church of England espoused peace be­tween nations—they wanted rain with no thunder—
and as the Warriors of Christ knew, a church that
claims to hold the cause of right, yet condemns con­frontation, is little more than a social club. The British
Empire had become a realm populated by idolaters,
adulterers, homosexuals, thieves, drunkards, drug-tak­ers…and wanton women.

Hidell gave an exasperated shake of his head. Yes,

women were the cause of so many of the Empire’s woes,

women like that termagant, Margaret Thatcher. That the
First Minister in the Empire should be a woman signalled
that the Empire had turned its back on God. Women had
forgotten that the Bible told them to submit to their hus­bands, as is fitting in the Lord. Just as Marina had refused

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

to submit, leaving him for another man. His wife had be­trayed him…humiliated him. But he would forgive her:

when he had visited Holy Russia back in 1959 he’d not
only found a wife, he’d found God, and it would be God

who would punish her for her lack of respect. After the
Cleansing…

Trying to still his anger at the memory of his wife’s
lack of respect, Hidell turned his attention back to the
radio and Ford’s speech.

The American settlers faced many, many hardships, but they
had more liberty than any other people on Earth. That is what
they came to America for and what they meant to keep. And
though the British government and the Colonials differed and
warred, less than a year after the rebellion was settled, on the 4th
July 1778, they united as brothers.

As a symbol of this freedom, before me stands the famous
Liberty Bell. It came here over 200 years ago when Philadelphia,
after London, was the largest English-speaking city in the world.
Inscribed on the bell is the message, “Let Freedom Ring”: this is
a message in which all peoples of the Empire can join and which
I hope will be heard around the world for centuries to come.

Hidell snorted: Ford didn’t know the true meaning
of the word “liberty”. Liberty didn’t flow from Parlia­ments, it flowed from God. Didn’t the Bible say that
only “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty”.
Better for Ford to talk about liberating the people from
the seductive, corruptive wiles of women, from the lies
of science and from the pernicious influence of those
who had embraced a life of sin.

Of course there were nay-sayers, those who preferred the bullet
to the ballot-box and we still struggle with the consequences of
their wrong-headedness.

As he set one table on top of another to make his
firing platform, Hidell found himself marvelling at this

54

A SINGLE SHOT – ROD REES

piece of understatement. When the so-called War of
Independence was lost, its leaders—the cabal of trai­tors who had gone down in history as “the Seditious
Six”: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin
Franklin, John Adams, Robert R. Livingston and Roger
Sherman—had decamped to France in order to avoid
the hangman’s noose. What they had got up to there
still echoed around the world. The failure of their rev­olution in America had persuaded them that the fault
lay in their not having being radical enough in their de­mands and the upshot was the spawning of that foul
creed of secular humanism that became the creed of
the Commune. Those who fought against King Louis
XVI during the French Revolution of 1795 didn’t just
demand “Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité” but also the com­plete remodelling of the economic structure of
France—of the world!—whereby all the means of pro­duction were owned by the people and managed on
their behalf by elected Communes.

Following the success of the French Revolution this
perverse philosophy swept across Europe—helped, of
course, by the military successes of that Commune-ist
extraordinaire, Napoleon Bonaparte—such that, on
Bonaparte’s death in Paris in 1834, the European Com­mune stretched from Gibraltar all the way to the bor­der of Holy Russia, the countries of the Commune
welded together by one language, one currency, one le­gal code, one uniform system of weights and measures,
and a single-minded belief in the ultimate triumph of
the sans-culottes…of the proletariat.

There had been great hopes within Empire that
when Napoleon died the Commune would crumble
and for some years it did, indeed, totter, but then came
the man who would reforge and remodel the European

55

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Commune such that it would challenge the British Em­pire for hegemony over the world…President Otto
von Bismarck. Hidell loathed Bismarck, Satan’s Chief
Lieutenant on Earth.

Because of Bismarck, the people of Continental Eu­rope became finally and fatally in thrall to the perverse,
atheistic doctrine of Commune-ism, trapped behind
what Disraeli called “the Iron Curtain”. Because of Bis-
marck, Commune-ism had grown until today it threat­ened to subsume the world. Now only the British Em­pire stood against this realm of Satan—backward, in­trospective Holy Russia was of no real consequence in
the world—and it was Hidell’s mission to provoke the
Empire to war against it. Armageddon beckoned.

The members of that first Parliament met here in 1778 to
form a more perfect inter-dependency of nations, a permanent legal
mechanism that would translate the principles and purposes of
the Conciliation Plan into effective self-government for the Colo­nies. The Declaration of Co-Dependence which resulted from this
constitutional debate was hailed by William Gladstone, a great
British Prime Minister, as “the most wonderful work ever struck
off by the brain and purpose of man.”

This notion of corrected wrongs and expanded rights en­shrined in the Declaration has brought two centuries of a Pax
Brittanica, the British Empire becoming a beacon of hope for all
those struggling to secure their liberty.

As Hidell settled himself on his makeshift firing
platform he used the rifle’s telescopic sights to focus
on Honecker’s face and to watch the emotions stimu­lated by Ford’s speech. The smirk told him that Ho­necker knew the final cataclysmic struggle for the soul
of humankind was fast approaching.

The thought of world war didn’t discomfort Hidell.
He was pleased that soon all Christians would have to

56

A SINGLE SHOT – ROD REES

find the courage to put on the armour of God and
stand firm against the forces of the devil. Soon all
Christians must be ready to beat their ploughshares
into swords and their pruning hooks into spears. Soon

even the weakest must be ready to say, “I am a war­rior”.

But the struggle for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
is never truly won. Each generation of those of us who are citizens
of the British Empire must strive to achieve these aspirations
anew. Liberty is a living flame to be fed, not dead ashes to be
revered, even in a Bicentennial Year. So it is fitting that, on a
glorious day like today, we ask ourselves are our God-given rights
secure, our hard-won liberties protected?

Hidell loaded ten bullets into the magazine of his
Dragunov. He doubted that he would need more than
one to kill Honecker but over-confidence smacked of
hubris, and pride was a sin. As he pushed the bullets
home he pondered on the question Ford had posed to

his audience. It was obvious to him that Americans’

hard-won rights were far from secure. His reading of the
Bible told him all Christians must flee immorality and
abstain from fleshy lusts which wage war against the
soul. And in this regard it was the responsibility of
women not to lead men into temptation with their fe­male wiles. Women had to shun provocative clothes and
make-up, and marry while still young, it being better to
marry than to burn with passion. But as Hidell looked
around modern America he saw that women had sur­rendered to lust and perversion, and were seemingly in­capable of practicing temperance and self-control.

Women had been duped by the Satan-inspired cult
of feminism. Just as Marina had, rejecting his teachings,
scorning him as a husband, ridiculing his beliefs, belit­tling him as a man.

57

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Another reason why there had to be a Cleansing.

The British Empire has always been a defender of liberty. In
1914 the American nations and Britain stood shoulder to shoul­der to protect Holy Russia against the illegal and avaricious de­mands of its enemies. Then Prime Minister William Howard
Taft, said, “We, the nations of the Empire, were born to freedom
and, believing in freedom, are willing to fight to maintain that
freedom. We, and all others who believe as deeply as we do, would
rather die on our feet than live on our knees.”

Hidell slammed the magazine home, disgusted that
Ford had seen fit to remind his audience of the piece
of cowardice that had been the Nearly War of 1914.
When the European Commune had threatened to in­vade Russia in support of the Mensheviks who were
trying to oust the Tsar, instead of declaring war on the
Commune, Taft had listened to that arch-appeaser, Da­vid Lloyd George, and opted for peace rather than con­frontation. The signing of the British-Russian Com­mon Defence Pact, whereby the British Empire guar­anteed military assistance in the event of Russia being
attacked, had deterred the Commune-ists…and had
given the armies of Satan another sixty years to prepare
for Armageddon.

Damn Taft to Hell! Now though there would be no
shrinking back from war.

Hidell hauled the walkie-talkie out of his coat pocket,
tuned it to the wavelength Hopkins had given him, took
a deep breath and then pressed the “Transmit” button.
“Agent Ferguson in position and ready.” Hidell had cho-
sen his code-name in honour of that other patriot who
had changed history with a single shot.

A second’s delay and then the walkie-talkie crackled
into life. “Message received and understood. No action
to be taken until you have my command.”

58

A SINGLE SHOT – ROD REES

Just minutes remained. Again Hidell peered through
the telescopic sight, zeroing in on the podium. Accord­ing to the rangefinder he was only one hundred and
fifty yards from the target and hence had no need to
make any bullet-drop compensation. With the Dra­gunov having a muzzle velocity of almost three thou­sand feet per second it would take just a blink of an eye
for the bullet to strike Honecker. Given the short range
Hidell had decided to go for the luxury—and the kill
certainty—of a head-shot.

The Declaration of Co-Dependence is formulated in a
common conviction that the source of our blessings is a loving
God, in whom we trust. Therefore I ask all members of the
Empire and our guests and friends, to join me now in a mo­ment of silent prayer and meditation in gratitude for all we
have received and to ask continued safety and happiness for
each and every one of us and for all the nations of the British
Empire.

Thank you and God bless you all. Long live the Queen.

Hidell prayed for God to make his shot true. When
he opened his eyes he saw Prime Minister Ford raise
his hand to acknowledge the applause and the cheers
and then turn and gesture President Honecker to the
podium. Hidell settled the Dragunov against his shoul­der, sighted through the telescopic sight, flicked off the
safety and then cocked the rifle. He was ready, his con­centration so intense he didn’t hear the office door be­ing unlocked and then eased open.

Honecker came to stand at the podium, placed his
notes carefully in front of him and then gazed out over
the hushed and expectant audience. He began speaking
in French, the official language of the European Com­mune, and it took a moment for the radio station’s in­terpreter to get up to speed.

59

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

I bring you fraternal greetings from the citizens of the
European Commune and congratulate you on your two hun­dredth birthday.

A theatrical pause and then Honecker gave a half-smile.

My puzzlement is that by my reckoning this is only your
forty-seventh birthday. I had understood that the nations com­prising British North America were only granted their independ­ence courtesy of the Westminster Act passed by the British Par­liament in 1931: before that you were nothing more than…col­onies. I think it is symbolic of the duplicity of the reactionary,
capitalist government based in London that it can dupe a people
into believing they are free whilst keeping them firmly under their
thumb. It is for this reason the European Commune so strenu­ously opposes the expansionist tendencies of the British govern­ment, a crusade in which we have been joined by Holy Russia.
A non-aggression pact will be signed—

“Execute!” came the order from the walkie-talkie.

Hidell squeezed the trigger, the rifle’s butt jolted
back into his shoulder, there was a “phutt”—the sound
of the bullet muffled by the silencer—and then he saw
Honecker’s head explode in a miasma of blood and
blasted brain. There would be no need for follow-up
shots. Now all he had to do was get out of the building
as quickly as possible. He was just levering himself up­right when he felt the muzzle of a pistol pressed against
the side of his head.

“Excellent shot, but then I guess being an ex-
Marine it’s to be expected you’d be handy with a
rifle.”

“Hopkins? What’re you doing here? And why the
gun? You’re one of us! You’re a Warrior of Christ!”

“Not really. My day job’s running counter-intelli-

gence in MI5. I’ve been charged with putting a spoke
in the Commune’s wheels and making sure they don’t

60

A SINGLE SHOT – ROD REES

get too pally with the Russians. An ambition you’ve
been remarkably helpful in furthering.”

With that Hopkins shot Hidell through the head.

***

The brouhaha caused by Honecker’s assassination
was enormous, but that a British MI5 agent had come
within seconds of thwarting the deed went some way
towards mollifying the Commune-ists, who turned
their ire on the perfidious Russians. Which they had
every right to do: after all the official word was the gun­man had been a Ruski and a card-carrying member of
the Okhrana to boot. The speculation was that Captain
Pavel Pronin was part of a faction in the Russian Court
which was less than enamored by the thought of Tsar­ist Russia climbing into bed with a bunch of Com­mune-ist madmen who for the last hundred years had
been plotting to overthrow the Romanovs and install a
dictatorship of the proletariat. It got so acrimonious
there was even a suggestion that the Commune and
Russia might go to war. The non-aggression pact was
dead in the water.

Of course, there were rumours flying around that
this was all a set-up by MI5, that a lone-gunman
couldn’t have penetrated EBI security, but these had
been dismissed as the ranting of deranged conspiracy
theorists.

Which, Hopkins decided, was all very satisfactory.
To persuade Andy Hidell—one of the more lunatic of
the lunatic Christian reconstructionists who populated
the Warriors of Christ cult—to do the deed had been
a stroke of genius, as had the decision to have him mas­querade as an Okhrana agent, Hidell having bought

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Hopkins’s story that this was necessary in order to
dupe New England’s EBI hook, line and sinker.

Everything had gone exactly as Hopkins had
planned, so much so that the word from on high was
there might be recognition for his “skillful and resolute
action in thwarting the attempt of the European Com­mune to elicit an alliance with Holy Russia”…sotto voce
recognition, of course, but recognition never the less.
Which just showed how a single bullet could change a
man’s career prospects...could change history.

***

IN ACTUAL HISTORY

On September 11, 1777, at Brandywine Creek, Penn­sylvania, Captain Patrick Ferguson, the officer com­manding a Rifle Corps attached to the British Army
fighting the rebel Colonists in the American War of In­dependence, encountered two horsemen reconnoitring
the British deployment. When challenged, the two men
rode away and Ferguson’s sensibilities regarding shoot­ing men in the back prevented him ordering his men
to fire. One of the men fleeing was General George
Washington.

If Ferguson had fired, if Washington had been
killed that day, the Americans could have lost the
War of Independence. There is a strong possibility
that command of the Colonial Army would have
passed to Horatio Gates, a man who was to prove
himself inept, timid and decidedly skittish under fire.
Gates could have lost the war for the Americans and
as a consequence the speech made by President Ger­ald Ford to celebrate the Bicentennial of the signing

62

A SINGLE SHOT – ROD REES

of the Declaration of Independence would have
been radically different…

ABOUT ROD REES

Rod Rees came to writing late in life after spending a
career roaming the world. En route Rod has lived in
Iran, Qatar and Russia, and has travelled extensively in
Africa and the Middle East. He’s built pharmaceutical
factories in Bangladesh, set up a satellite telecommuni­cations system in Moscow, and established a successful
countertrade operation in Africa. Rod has spent the last
four years writing the Demi-Monde series of books the
action set in the counter-intuitive virtual world of the
Demi-Monde, the fourth and final instalment of which,
The Demi-Monde: Fall was published in August 2013.
Rod’s latest book, a semi-graphic novel entitled Invent-
10n, was published in December 2013, the story fol­lowing twenty-year old jive-talking, nuBop singer and
angry young lady, Jenni-Fur as she struggles against the
suffocating strictures of the surveillance society that is
the Britain of 2030. Rod lives and writes in Daventry
in the UK and worries that one day he will wake up to
find that what’s happening in the world isn’t just a bad
dream.

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

THE BUONAPARTES

By Anders Fager

I. Under the Bridge at Arcole

It felt like being kicked in the groin. He fell forward, dropped
the colour and his sword. The din and thunder of the world faded.
The last thing he saw was Colonel Murion. He lay on his back,
some distance away on the riverbank. Blood trickled out of his
mouth.

“This is not going well”, thought Napoleon Bonaparte, com-

mander of the Republic’s Army of Italy.

Then all went dark.

Napoleon Bonaparte didn’t remember hitting the ground.
Didn’t remember the bodies falling on top of him. They must
have rolled down the ravine together. He and whoever they were.
The water was cold. That’s what woke him up. That and the
pain in his gut. He tried to crawl, but couldn’t move his legs.
Napoleon Bonaparte resigned himself to his fate. Didn’t bother
opening his eyes. He was as good as dead. That much he knew.
A shot in the gut and paralysis—there was nothing to be done.
How miserable. He had just turned twenty-seven. He had been

64

THE BUONAPARTES – ANDERS FAGER

married, and army commander, for eight months. He had only
gotten eight lousy months to make his mark on history. It felt
petty.

The pain in his stomach wasn’t too bad. Yet. It would get
worse soon. When the shock wore off. He had seen men live for
days after a shot in the gut. In horrible pain. It dawned on him,
in a haze, that no one had come for him. That meant his army
was losing. General Augereau’s troops must have been completely
routed. Such rabble. Augereau and his bandits. You lead them
to all the world’s glory. Let them sack Lombardy. And they
cannot even drag you to the surgeon. How miserably petty.

He thought of Caesar. Caesar, who always wore a red mantle
on the battlefield. Who always threw himself into battle where his
men wavered. And the legionnaires who saw his red mantle knew
that Caesar was with them. That he saw their courage and shared
their fate. Napoleon Bonaparte had read the old texts so many
times. In his room at Brienne. Fourteen years old and cheeks
flushed with excitement. Even then he wanted to be like Caesar.
And he had heard it time and time again. “If you want to be
like Caesar—act like Caesar”. When he got the chance he really
tried. He had been bold and resolute. Taken risks on the front
line. Seen the bravery of his men and shared their fate. They had
cheered at his bravado. And now he was lying by a creek in a
ravine, waiting to die.

It wasn’t even a glorious death. Just a gloomy end to a gloomy
week. Uninspiring misery in the cold and rain. The Austrians’
third attempt to retake Mantua had started out just the same as
the first two. They had come slogging again, but this time, every­thing had gone their way. Field Marshal Alvinczi der Borberek,
sickly and ancient, had beaten Napoleon Bonaparte. Twice. Na­poleon Bonaparte, who in a few months had conquered Piedmont
and Milan. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had brought the Pope to
his knees and won two dozen battles, had been beaten back at
Bassano and Caldeiro. It was embarrassing. Now only Verona

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

stood in the way of Alvinczi becoming the savior of Mantua.
And Napoleon Bonaparte lay bleeding in a ravine.

He thought of his mother. And coughed. One of the bodies
on top of him twitched. In the distance, he heard shouts. Muskets.
Were they yelling orders in German or French? No matter. Soon
the pain would really come. Would he call for Mother then? Se­vere, composed Letizia Buonaparte who refused to speak French.
What would she do after he died? Would she stay in Marseilles?
Who would take care of her? His younger siblings? Luigi, who
served in his headquarters? Angry Elisa, his eldest sister? Paola?
Twelve-year-old Girolamo? Little Carolina who fell in love every
time she met a man in uniform? The last time it had been the
charming Major Murat. Big brother Giuseppe and little brother
Lucien? They were in France, in love with Paris and politics.

Napoleon Bonaparte coughed. It hurt like hell. His thoughts
drifted back to his big brother. Giuseppe Buonaparte, who had

married Julie Clary, Desirée Clary’s older sister. Desirée had been

engaged to him. General Bonaparte. He almost laughed, despite
the pain. That would have been something, him marrying Desirée
at the same time as Giuseppe married her sister. How very Corsi­can. Mother would have liked it. If you can name four new-born
baby girls Marie Anne you have to be wonderfully stubborn. The
fourth had lived. They called her Elisa now. As if she had out-

grown being “Marie Anne who soon will die”. She was eighteen,

testy and stubborn. Far too much like her mother. Rural, snappy
and unsophisticated. And she hated Josephine just as much as
Mother did. Perhaps because she would never get a man of the
same caliber as her big brother. Because she had to settle for Cap­tain Bacciocchi. A captain. Of decent Corsican ancestry. Nobility
with goats and herdsmen in the pedigree. How wretchedly petty.

It felt like a wolf was tearing at his guts. Soon he would start
to scream. He thought of Josephine again. Of their passion. Of
her body. The thought made him smile. Even lying in a ravine
underneath some grenadiers. Josephine. After the wedding they

66

THE BUONAPARTES – ANDERS FAGER

had had two days together before he went to join the Army of
Italy. He had written to her almost every day. Wise, beautiful
Josephine. She was all Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to be. Ur­bane, sophisticated, erotic, exotic. He loved her company. Her
world. The doors opened by her many friends and old lovers. He
should thank Barras. Member of the Directory and responsible
for matters of internal security. It was this horny idiot who had
paired up the young general with his discarded mistress. It was
scabrous, but now Napoleon Bonaparte was one of them. And
Barras and Carnot and the others in the Directory depended on
him. When he saved them from the riots on the 13th of Vendé­miaire they gave him the Army of Italy. And he had married
Josephine. Barras never got to do that.

Josephine had laughed when he changed the spelling of his
name and got rid of the provincial Buonaparte. She had called
him vain. It was the first time he had ever been angry at her.
Napoleon Bonaparte hated it when people made jokes at his ex­pense. He had always hated it. He hated everything that didn’t
go his way. Everything.

After the setback at Caldeiro they held council in Verona.
General Massena proposed another attack and General Auge­reau—as usual—had no opinion at all. The two best divisional
commanders in the world. Men Caesar would have been proud
to lead. An old smuggler and a former dancing teacher and de­serter. They were confident. Hardened, experienced men, hungry
for money and glory. Napoleon decided on a flanking maneuver.
Massena listened absentmindedly and immediately understood
the plan. To Augereau, one had to explain like a schoolmaster.
We are here on the map. They are there. While Alvinczi is busy
at Verona we move east. Here. In behind him. We cross the
Adige here and Massena moves north. Behind Alvinczi. You,
Augereau, march to the Alpone, the next river. Further in be­hind him. If you cross the Alpone you can cut off Alvinczi’s
supply lines, and he’ll be doomed.

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

It was a mediocre plan. Bold, if it made Alvinczi nervous
about what they were doing behind his back. Idiotic, if Alvinczi
didn’t care about them at all and advanced on Mantua. At first,
all went according to plan. They crossed the Adige and Massena
marched north through the bogs. Then Augereau reached the
Alpone. At a village called Arcole. That’s where everything went
wrong. The weather was miserable. The Alpone was a ravine.
The bridge was thirty yards long and crumbling. Arcole was full
of stubborn Croats with a couple of cannons. As if that wasn’t
enough, Augereau had had a lousy day. His brigadiers too. Both
Lannes and Verdier had been wounded in vain, no one could
find a ford and Augereau’s grenadiers were hiding in ditches.
Napoleon Bonaparte had scolded Augereau, looked down on him
despite being the shorter man.

And Augereau had done what he did best: led a charge across
the bridge. He was followed by a few dozen men from Bon’s bri­gade. The Croats gunned down every single man except Auge­reau, who was left standing alone on the middle of the bridge. He
stood there, tall and majestic, and made no attempts to run or
seek cover. He danced a few steps and saluted the Croats. Then
he turned and walked back. Not a shot was fired after him. Both
the Croats and his own men cheered. Napoleon Bonaparte saw
the whole thing and hated it. Stupid antics. He sat hunkered
down behind the embankment for a long while. Heard Auge­reau’s voice in the distance. Guns firing from both sides of the
creek. Little brother Luigi chattering away with the other adju­tants. Nothing happened. No one was taking charge. He thought

of Caesar. “If you want to be like Caesar—act like Caesar.”

“A colour”, he had heard himself shout. “Get me a colour.

Let’s show them how it’s done.”

Luigi, Marmont and the others had stared at him. Murion
rose and called for a colour. A colour, damn it. A sound, like
the beating of a carpet, then Jean-Baptiste Murion fell forward
across the embankment.

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THE BUONAPARTES – ANDERS FAGER

A lieutenant called out, waving a colour. They ran toward him,
heads down. Slipped in the mud and crawled on hands and knees
along the embankment. All those studies. All that knowledge. All
those years in school among spoiled brats. All that hard work at
the Topographic Bureau. All that groveling to Barras and Carnot.
All that work for the Directory. This is where one ends up. In the
mud. Far from any glory. Behind an earth wall in the middle of
nowhere. Ogled by a pack of grenadiers.

“Are you the victors from Lodi?” he had yelled. They stared

at him. Remembered the day when he had led them across another
bridge. In a meaningless charge against a fleeing enemy. That was

the day when he had won their hearts. Became “our little cor­poral” and “Bonaparte” with a proper French spelling.

“Follow me, grenadiers.”

Some of them got to their feet, still crouching. Grabbed their
muskets. He saw more and more of them tense up. They got that
look in their eyes. The will to conquer. The hunger for glory.
Caesar saw them. It was time. He drew his sword.

Napoleon Bonaparte roared “forwards!” and took a few steps

up the embankment. He heard the men cheer. Heard them call
out his name. Josephine should see him now. Mother should see
him. Caesar should see him. He took a few more steps. Heard
the men rise. They were with him. They chanted about him, about

the Republic and: “We are the winners from Lodi. Forwards!
Forwards!”

He posed like he had practiced so many times. When he was
Caesar. Fourteen years old in his room at Brienne. With the
colour in his left hand, resting in the bend of his arm. His sword
pointed toward the enemy. The Croats over there. Let’s run them
off.

He took one step. One more step. And was shot.

It was miserably petty.

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II. The Sun of Belfiore

Late in the afternoon General of Division Massena got
word that Bonaparte had fallen, and assumed command
over the Army of Italy. He asked for Bonaparte’s body.
Augereau snapped that he had forgotten it. He had been
busy getting his damn division in order and getting the

wretches across the creek, he didn’t have time to look

for the damn little general who had given the damn or­der to cross the damn creek. Surely Berthier and all other
little adjutants must be good for something? Augereau
had not realized that two of the little adjutants had fallen

trying to retrieve the general’s body. Bonaparte’s little

brother Lieutenant Luigi Bounaparte and Major Au­guste Marmont both lay in the mud under the bridge.
Eighteen and twenty-two years old. Along with the sol­diers who had followed them over the embankment.
Men who would soon be forgotten.

He woke up at dusk. There was no shooting. Only shouts some
distance away. The pain in his stomach came and went. He
should let go. But he wanted to know. Would the two pompous

fools of generals be capable of carrying out his plan? It wasn’t

that brilliant. But it would work. If they only stuck to it. Would
they? Did they understand that the whole plan hinged on pressing
on so stubbornly that Alvinczi was forced to react? Because no
general in his right mind would attack through the marches at

Arcole if he didn’t have a grand plan. That’s what we must make

Alvinczi believe. That we are doing something clever. You cannot
stop attacking.

His stomach turned into a fire of pain. Napoleon Bona­parte’s mind drifted. Josephine. Mother. All the brothers and
sisters he had planned to take care of. What would they say about
him in Paris? Would Luigi tell the story of his last battle to the

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Directory? Would they be moved to tears, say that the flame that
burns half as long burns twice as bright? That sounded good.
Some flames burn like a fire in the stomach. The pain was terri­ble now. Someone should come by and shoot him. And would
Massena be up to it? Would he carry out the plan and make it
seem so obvious that only Massena could? The spoiled child of
victory, to whom everything came naturally. Had Massena only
bothered to read a book every now and then he could have been
the one to lead the Army of Italy. But he was only interested in
women and money. Neither housemaids nor countesses were safe
from him. Neither monasteries nor churches.

Napoleon Bonaparte never got to hear about the tri­umph. On November 15 at Belfiore, five miles from
where he lay bleeding to death, Massena had torn apart
three Austrian brigades that had been set against him.
He crushed them one by one and kept his position in
the little village. When the night fell, the Croats at Ar­cole searched the Alpone’s ravine for wounded troops.
They found the dying general and dragged him out. By
the time they had found a medic he was already dead.
It would take a few days before his body was returned
to his army. The bodies of his little brother and his ad­jutant no one cared about. They were thrown into a
mass grave together with everyone else who had fallen
at the bridge that day.

If only they would remember whose plan it was. He thought of
Mother again. Of Josephine naked. Now she was a widow again.
He hoped she would inherit what he had sent home. And that
Barras would take care of her. And that his brothers and sisters
would get along without him. And Mother. He succumbed to the
pain. Mother, Massena and Josephine. Deep down, into the
abyss. In a ditch at Arcole. It was a lousy death in a lousy place.

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Massena’s division spent the night at Belfiore. Slept in
battle order. Ten miles away, Alvinczi tried to decide
what to do. Marching on Mantua was out of the ques­tion as long as the French in Belfiore threatened his
rear. Should he destroy them and then march on Man­tua? Late in the night he made his decision. The decid­ing factor was the French setback at Arcole and the
news that the young general Bonaparte had fallen. The
more of his generals he spoke to, the more confident
Alvinczi became. The French were in disarray and
Massena’s men at Belfiore were covering the retreat.
An Italian Jew disguised as a general stood between
him and victory. Now he would teach the little rascal a
lesson. Alvinczi ordered his brigades to march on Bel­fiore at dawn. The French would be hunted like dogs.

Massena had a sleepless night. Later, in his court in
Milan, he would tell his retinue about those hours be­fore dawn. How he had eaten for the first time in over
a day and how he had dried his socks. How he had lain
down for a while on a cart, but wasn’t left in peace. The
chief of staff Berthier needed his attention. Augereau
wanted to know what to do. Vaubois and Macquard
reported from afar. The questions never ended. He had
to get used to it. He was the commander now. Com­mander of the Army of Italy. And he wasn’t about to
give up that position. It would take months for the Di­rectory to find a replacement for Bonaparte. And who
would they send? Moreau and Jourdan were fighting in
Germany, and Hoche was busy with an expedition to
Ireland. Surely they couldn’t call on Schérer or some of
the other old fossils who Massena had endured during
the years. Perhaps they would force Kléber back into
active duty? Or Peichegru? Or they would finally real­ize ability was more important than having shared a

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THE BUONAPARTES – ANDERS FAGER

mistress with Barras or being Carnot’s obedient serv­ant. Granted, Bonaparte was talented, but he was a kid.
Grumpy and not even thirty. Peace be with him.

A lousy death in a lousy place.

Massena made up his mind, lying there on the cart.
With Berthier at his side, he would be as successful as
Bonaparte. He had spoiled the Directory with victories,
and Massena would continue to do so. Carnot would
be so busy reading victory reports that he wouldn’t
have time to replace him. And Massena would con­tinue to send money. He would grease Paris like no
other. Italy was rich. It was enough for both himself
and the Directory.

The sun rose a little after seven. In Belfiore, drums
thundered and men fell in line. Massena’s troops were
starving and freezing like dogs. He rode among them.
Encouraged them, scolded them. Explained, again and
again, that Bonaparte had fallen and that they would
now avenge him. The cheers were tired. By eight, Mas­sena got word from Augereau. He was on his way.
Massena set his division in motion.

It was a triumphant day. The sun broke forth at nine

and later people would talk of how “the sun at Belfiore”

shone that day, when the war against the Coalition was

won. Alvinczi’s brigades came chasing stragglers but ran

into two of the best divisions in the world that were not
retreating a bit. Massena and Augereau tore the Austrian
units apart wherever they met them. Late at night, when
the sun had already set, Massena took Villanova and cut
the Austrian army in half. Alvinczi and his officers were
chased through the city by French hussars. The night
was an orgy of wine and food, when the Austrian stores

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were plundered. Massena rode around in his division
and saluted men who had distinguished themselves. The
triumph was complete.

The next day Massena sent Dumas’ cavalry to hunt

down the remains of Alvinczi’s forces. The Black Devil
chased the Austrians to Vicenza and captured Alvinczi
himself. Augereau cleared the way to Verona and
pushed some Austrians into the already overcrowded
Mantua. Almost eight thousand prisoners were rounded
up outside Villanova. Massena sent word to Paris that
the young Bonaparte had fallen but that he, André Mas­sena, had taken charge of the situation and won a great
victory. Alvinczi was captured and his army routed. The
message of victory was delivered by Rampon and Murat,
who brought with them some coffins laden with silver
and a carriage full of conquered colours.

On the twenty-second of November 1796, Massena
defeated the last remaining Austrian forces in Italy. In a
blizzard he attacked Davidovich’s divisions at Rivoli,
and when darkness fell another two thousand Austrian
prisoners were marched south. There were now no Aus­trians between Massena and the Tyrol, and along the
way to Vienna only a few thousand men remained. The
Army of Italy could at any time wipe them out and cross
the Carinthian Alps. There was near-panic in Vienna.

Three weeks later Mantua surrendered and another
twenty-two thousand Austrians were taken prisoner.
Massena sent carriage after carriage laden with guns
and colours to Paris, where the Directory argued over
who would replace Bonaparte. Barras thought Massena
was not to be trusted. He was too devious, and Italian.
A dog of war, to be kept on a short leash. Murat and
Rampon made sure the arguments took time. Financed
demonstrations and held court.

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THE BUONAPARTES – ANDERS FAGER

It was wretchedly petty.

Meanwhile, they celebrated young Bonaparte’s memory.

His body was brought to Marseilles by oxcart. His
mother took his coffin to Corsica and buried him in
Ajaccio. His little brother got a tombstone next to him.
It was said her heart was broken by losing two sons in
one day, and that she considered joining a convent. She
never left Corsica again. She died in 1806.

III. A Family of the Republic

Letizia Buonaparte’s youngest daughter, Carolina, fol­lowed her mother to Corsica but left her six months
later to join Joachim Murat in Paris. Carolina and Joa­chim got a few months together before Massena broke
with the Directory and Barras ordered every disloyal
officer to be arrested. But while Rampon was impris­oned and guillotined, Murat and his Carolina managed
to escape. After many adventures they ended up in Ca­diz, where they were married. The next few years Mu­rat served in the Spanish army, before the couple
moved to Naples and then on to Constantinople. In
1807 they came to the Viceroyalty of the Río de la
Plata, where officers were recruited to the army the
King of Spain was sending to the Louisiana War. A
year later the couple arrived in New Orleans, in the
company of their three children and 3,000 horsemen.
They spent four years taking part in the slow war be­tween Spain and the United States before Joachim Mu­rat fell in battle near Birmingham, Alabama. Even to­day he is considered a freedom fighter in the Spanish
parts of North America and the capital of the Republic
of Texas is named after him. Carolina Murat stayed in

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Louisiana until 1819, when she moved to London with
an English cotton trader. For the rest of her life she
would deeply resent “all countries with presidents”.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s brothers and sisters man­aged fine without him. His older brother Giuseppe
stayed in Paris, eventually changing his name to Joseph
and started spelling his family name like his little
brother had. He was a member of the Council of El­ders through the Civil War and the War of 1803, serv­ing the Republic and six presidents. Both as minister
and as envoy to the United States and Austria. During
Czar Alexander’s War in 1826 his skillful diplomacy
helped avoid a great European war and united Prussia,
Austria and France in the European Central Pact that
came to play such a big role during the latter part of
the 19th century. He retired after the Imperial Elections
of 1832. He had two daughters with the older sister of
his little brother’s fiancée. Both were to name their
sons after their dead uncle, the general.

While the Directory spent the New Year of 1797
arguing, Massena sent an olive branch to Vienna. Had
they not fought enough? Archduke Charles had man­aged to hold off Moreau and Jourdan on the Rhine, but
soon the threat to Vienna would force him to retreat
toward Bavaria and the Tyrol. His army would face
three French ones when spring came. Shouldn’t they
rather talk?

The young general’s younger brother Lucien Buo­naparte also remained in the politics of Paris. He was
one of those in favor of giving the Italian command to
Hoche. The young, handsome Hoche, who had beaten
down royalist rebellions and just come back from an
expedition to Ireland, was the people’s choice. But the

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THE BUONAPARTES – ANDERS FAGER

men in the Directory were suspicious of him, and Mas­sena’s agents Rampon and Murat obstructed all at­tempts to come to a decision.

At the end of January 1797 Archduke Charles and
Massena met in Trent to discuss a truce. Massena
spoke for France without actually having the mandate
to do so, but army commanders Jourdan and Moreau
had secretly let both him and the archduke know that
they supported the negotiations. It had been a long war
and both France and Austria were weary. Austria’s
brother-in-arms Britain was kept out of the talks, a fact
that would distance Austria from the British and set the
stage for the Central Pact thirty years later. In many
ways, the idea of the Central Pact was born there in
Trent. In a meeting between an emperor’s resolute lit­tle brother and three self-indulgent French generals.

On the first of March 1797, Archduke Charles and
Massena signed the truce, which stipulated that the par­ties should meet for proper peace negotiations in Bol­zano two months later. Massena presented the Direc­tory with a fait accompli. A peace with the arch-enemy
and the coalition against France was no more. The Di­rectory, that had just agreed to replace Massena with
old Kellerman, was left with a peace it never asked for.
It was Massena the traitor’s great political moment.
And the only one.

For the Directory the peace was a disaster. The al­most bankrupt state lived off the spoils from Italy and
in May, Massena cut off the flow of silver. At the same
time, he called his generals to a meeting in Mantua. For
once, he had read a book. About Caesar. A passage
about casting a die had made a great impression on
him, and he had spoken to the rulers of the North Ital­ian city-states. Piedmont, Milan, Venice. The idea of a

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union was discussed. A union that evolved the Trans­padane Republic that Bonaparte had founded.

Barras and old Kellerman went to Italy to sort out
the situation. When Barras met Massena in Milan he
had already cast his die, and he was arrogant. Why
should the most feared legions in Europe, led by Eu­rope’s best general, bow to a bumbler like Barras? Es­pecially when he had the Pope, the Doge of Genoa and
the King of Sardinia on his side?

Josephine never got to see her husband’s remains
and never visited his grave. She was busy saving what
she could of the inheritance she was entitled to. And in
the spring of 1797 she fell for another handsome of­ficer, the General of Brigade Bernadotte who Jourdan
had sent to Paris to defend the interests of the Rhine
armies. But Bernadotte, who would become a leading
figure of French 19th century politics, wasn’t interested.
Some say Napoleon Bonaparte’s little sister Elisa
spread malicious rumors about Josephine. Others say
Elisa herself seduced Bernadotte to keep him busy.

In Milan, Barras and Massena couldn’t agree on a
single point and the atmosphere was hostile. Kellerman
declared that he was uninterested in politics and left
them both to argue, and went home to retire. Barras
too soon left Milan, and Berthier, Kilmaine and some
other lower officers decided to follow him. At the city
gates of Milan, stones and rotten vegetables were
thrown after them. The Army of Italy split in two.
Some battalions marched on Milan. Others on Nice.
There were rumors of mutiny in the Army of the Alps.
That it too was siding with Massena. That Barras had
been killed. That British troops had landed in Genoa
to support Massena. So far, there was no open fighting.
But it was in the air. On the sixth of June, Massena

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formally took power in the Transpadane Republic and
declared his right to the iron crown of Lombardy. The
schism with the Directory was complete and Barras
sentenced Massena to death in his absence.

Spurned by her husband’s family and penniless, Jo­sephine went to Italy to seek help from her husband’s
allies. She lived through the Civil War at the court in
Milan and then went into exile with Massena. First in
Rome and then in Naples. After Massena’s murder in
1802 she moved to Spanish New Orleans, which had
become a popular haunt for exiled French nobility. She
died a pauper in 1810. It is said that she, on her death­bed, laughed at the news that Bernadotte had been
elected the third president of France. Her nemesis
Elisa Bounaparte-Bacciocchi remained in Paris for
some years before moving with her husband to Mar­seilles, exporting wines. She had eight children, and it
is unclear how many of them her husband had fa­thered. The Bacciocchi family is to this day one of
France’s leading wine exporters. And still the Elisa
grape is said to rouse the passion of married women.

In Paris, Lucien Buonaparte supported making

Hoche “dictator until the war is over”, but after the

Civil War he was one of the first to warn that the Re­public’s savior could easily become its next enemy.
Lucien hated how all attempts to fight oppression led
to more oppression. When the murder of Massena
could be traced to circles close to Hoche, Lucien re­signed from all offices and moved to Georgia with his
two young daughters and a maid. Not even when his
older brother Joseph, Barras and Bernadotte forced
Hoche to resign, he came back home. He lived for a
time in Savannah, engaged in the struggle to free the
Louisiana Territory from Spanish oppression.

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After the war the family moved to New York, where
Lucien worked as a lawyer and a teacher. He died in
1836 without ever considering changing the spelling of
his family name. In 1861, his granddaughter Elise be­came the first female doctor in America.

When Barras reached Nice at the end of May 1797,
he gave the command of the newly formed Army of
the Riviera to Berthier. He immediately set to work to
make sure Massena wouldn’t cross the Alps. Fréron,
the proconsul in Marseilles, helped Berthier. They
ruled with an iron fist and quashed all attempts to join
Massena. The coastal fortifications remained French.
The mountain passes to Piedmont did too. It would
take months for the Directory to gather an army
around Nice, but France was secure. The rebellion
would not spread.

In all this, it was an ironic twist of fate that Fréron
had just been engaged to marry Napoleon Bonaparte’s
little sister Paola Buonaparte. She was twenty-eight
years younger than Fréron, beautiful and pleasure-lov­ing. In the fall of 1797, a year after her older brother’s
death, she married the man who by then was known as

“the Butcher of the Riviera”. It was said that she en-

joyed watching him work.

The Civil War, as it came to be called despite actu­ally being a war between Massena’s Lombardic Repub­lic with the support of Spain and Britain on one side
and France supported by Austria on the other, had
reached a critical stage. Set upon by four armies, Mas­sena tried to protect his union, but his Italian allies de­serted him and his French elites grew doubtful. To
whore and pillage one’s way through Italy was one
thing—to die for Italy was quite another. Massena de­serted the council he had formed in Milan and left it to

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Don Giovanni, a bombastic nobleman from Milan
who had become his chancellor.

It was a grand drama. Massena and his retinue
avoided combat and tried to negotiate. Negotiation
had always been Massena’s weakness. He should have
fought. Too late he realized only General Massena
could save King André. At Alessandria, Augereau de­serted him on the battlefield and let his men, cheering,
go to the forces of Archduke Charles and General Mo­reau. At Moreau’s headquarters Augereau was cut
down by a hussar colonel by the name of Michel Ney.
The battle of Alessandria was over before it had even
started, and at dusk Massena fled south with a few fol­lowers, mistresses and servants.

Fréron died in 1829 after a long career in the Re­public’s security committee. It was said that his dead
enemies could be heard uttering a collective sigh of re­lief when he died. Paola Buonaparte survived her
greedy husband by only two years. She died in a fire at
the old harbor of Marseilles. It was said the ghost of
Hoche had found her. Hoche, who had been forced by
her husband to confess his plans to declare himself
Emperor.

The last of the young general’s siblings was Girolamo

Buonaparte. He turned twelve on the same day that his
older brother fell at Arcole. He stayed in France under
the protection of Fréron and Paola, and studied to be­come a naval officer. Lieutenant Jerome Bonaparte
served onboard the frigate Uranie in the War of 1803,
and distinguished himself in the battle of Cadiz. In 1807
he became the youngest captain ever in the navy, when
he at age twenty-three took command of the frigate
Hortense. He distinguished himself again during the
Louisiana Wars and led a French-American frigate-

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squadron. He was seriously wounded at the Keys, but
continued leading his squadron. In 1816 he was named
vice admiral and became the ambassador to Washing­ton. As one of those who had saved the United States
from a blockade during the Louisiana Wars, Jerome was
incredibly popular in the country. When it became
known that the charming Frenchman was a bachelor he
was inundated by letters from brash American women.
He was married in 1818 to the beautiful widow Elisa­beth Patterson-Franklin, and the couple became the
center of Washington high society. During Czar Alex­ander’s War Jerome returned to France for a while and
led the French-Prussian navy in the Baltic Sea. After the
war he worked for a few years with the development of
the joint Central-European navy, before leaving Europe
for his love in Washington.

Jerome’s final deed in Europe was to make sure the
navy’s new and advanced steam frigate was named

“Napoleon Bonaparte” after his brother. The promis-

ing young general who fell in battle on the same day
that the traitor Massena triumphed at Belfiore.

***

IN ACTUAL HISTORY

The Battle of Arcole was fought between the 15 and
17 of November 1796, during the third Austrian at­tempt to raise the French siege of Mantua. The battle
consisted of three days of repeated French attacks
against the Austrian position at Arcole. The attacks
were carried out with none of the usual French finesse
or skill, but were determined enough to get across and
make the Austrian commander Alvinczi take notice

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THE BUONAPARTES – ANDERS FAGER

and stop his advance on Mantua. After the battle Al­vinczi lost heart and retreated, despite having lost less
troops than the French.

There have been several spectacular paintings made

of Napoleon’s dash across the bridge at Arcole. Napo­leon’s aide Muiron gets shot in most of the paintings

and that is about the only true part in them. In real life
Napoleon seem to have gotten up a bit away from the
bridge to wave his men on and then either slipped and
fell into a ditch or got knocked over by Murion who
got shot seconds later.

ABOUT ANDERS FAGER

Anders Fager is aging well while living in Stockholm.
He writes mostly horror and has to this day written two
novels and three collections of short stories, all set in a
contemporary Lovecraftian universe. He has so far
been published in Swedish, French and Finnish and the
short story you have just read is his first try at historical
fiction as well as his first published short story in Eng­lish. The fall of 2014 will see him writing a play called
the Queen in Yellow for a major Swedish theatre.

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

LET NO MAN PUT ASUNDER

By Aaron Rosenberg

Villa Belvedere, Rome, 1513

Strong hands. Deft hands. Masterful hands, even now.
They shifted fluidly across the page, lines forming from
their motion and that of the small ink brush one held,
an object rapidly taking shape upon the vellum and
then growing in definition and detail as the hands re­turned again and again, hovering here and there before
skipping into motion once more. It was wedge-like, the
object, but with antennae or segmented legs extending
from the front before curving back around. They
crossed at the top, like oars at rest, though it was clear
even from this drawing that they were intended to
swivel and move independently but in tandem. The
hands added an additional shading here, a bracket
there, and then stopped and fluttered down to rest on
either side of the page, finished at last.

Until, a minute later, they darted in like starving
wolves, latching onto the paper and thrashing it

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LET NO MAN PUT ASUNDER – AARON ROSENBERG

soundly, rushing toward each other with the helpless
page trapped between them, its delicate surface crum­pling under the pressure. The hands touched, over­lapped, circled each other, then sprang apart again,
leaving only a wadded-up ball where the proud page
had lain instants before. Then one hand scooped up
the offending sphere and hurled it off to the side.

“Garbage!” their owner cried out. “Rubbish! Utter
nonsense!” A thoughtful pause. “And yet…” The

hands selected a fresh sheet, laid it carefully out atop
the table, lifted the brush, dipped its pointed tip in ink,
and began to sketch once more.

London, England, 1527

“This will not stand!” The heavy, jewel-encrusted goblet
hurtled across the table, narrowly missing the pudgy,
scarlet-clad man. A second object, this one a tall, grace-

ful pitcher, followed the goblet’s path, and again the
man barely evaded the awkward missile. “One task I
gave you, Wolsey! One! How hard can that be?”

“Very, your Majesty,” Thomas Wolsey answered,

mopping his brow with a cloth from his sleeve. Sweat
was dripping from beneath his red cap, less from the
draft in the great dining hall than from nerves and fear
of the man shouting at him. A man who ruled all of

England, and who had been Wolsey’s own patron for
many a year—but might not remain so disposed for
much longer. “It was a daunting task, and I have per-

formed it as best I could, but even your brother king

was unable to change his Holiness’s opinion. I would
that it were not so.” Which was certainly true, he re-

flected somberly. He had tried his utmost to persuade
King Francis I of France to use his influence on Pope

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Clement, but either Francis’s words lacked power now

or Clement was simply too determined to be swayed.
Though of course the recent actions of Charles V, the
Holy Roman Emperor, might have something to do
with that as well—Charles had attempted to imprison
the Pope in order to bend the holy man to his will, but

the papal forces had rousted Charles’ army and driven

them from Rome entirely. Unfortunately, this victory
had given Clement the courage to resist the demands
of any and all monarchs, and he had rebuffed Wolsey’s
request almost out of hand.

Sadly, none of these things mattered much to the

man before Wolsey now. “Perhaps you did not try hard
enough,” he suggested, eyes narrowing beneath red-

gold curls and the crown that held them in place. He
stroked his short, neatly trimmed beard in apparent

thought. “Perhaps your true intent when you visited

France was not to drive this matter toward my desired
conclusion but instead to prevent such.”

Wolsey did his best to avoid rolling his eyes. He also

deliberately avoided glancing to the king’s left, or the

woman who sat there, pretending dismay and disap­pointment even as her dark eyes flashed barely con­cealed mirth. This was all her fault! Wolsey had warned
the king that this was a terrible idea, fraught with diffi­culties, but she had worked her wiles on him and the
king would not be gainsaid. If only he had chosen
someone else!

“Your Majesty,” Wolsey tried again, “I swear to you,

upon my honor, upon my faith, and upon your crown,
that I am your true and loyal servant and that I am do-

ing my utmost to bring about that which you desire.”
He sighed and bowed. “I will send to his Holiness and
request yet again that he grant me legacy.” If appointed

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a Papal Legate, Wolsey would have the authority to try

the king’s suit for divorce here in England, and to de­termine the matter once and for all on the Pope’s be-

half. Unfortunately, given how obstinate Clement had
been thus far Wolsey doubted very much that his re­quest would be granted. Still, he had to try.

As if reading his thoughts, the king grunted but

nodded, grudgingly it seemed. “Yes, make the request,”

he agreed, reaching for the goblet a servant had re­trieved, wiped clean, replaced on the table, and refilled
for him while they talked. His massive hand closed

about its base and raised the heavy drinkware. “If that

fails, however, we must be prepared to try other ap-

proaches.”

“Of course, your Majesty.” Wolsey bowed again,

deeper this time, accepting the obvious hint of dismis­sal. He knew it was beneath his dignity to be sent away
like an errant dog—he was the Archbishop of York,
after all!—and yet, at this moment, he knew it was far
safer for him to accept the snub and depart quickly,

before the king’s ire could return and fasten upon him

once again.

Even when in his cups, Henry VIII was a danger­ous, dangerous man. And never more so than when
Anne Boleyn sat by his side, whispering evil thoughts
in his ear and guiding him by the power of her dark,
seductive gaze. Wolsey shuddered picturing that, and
quickened his pace. The sooner he was away from her,
the better.

Villa Belvedere, Rome, 1514

“Closer, closer.” He cackled to himself as he sketched

again, his brush flying across the sheet of parchment,

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

his vision taking form there upon the page in lines and
daubs of ink. A wing, with joints like those of a bird

for flexibility and rods and narrow beams like a ship’s

hull for strength. A frame upon which to lay, with
hoops about the waist and neck, smaller loops about
the ankles controlling the tail. Hands working controls
for the wings themselves, via more rods linked to the
collar and then up to those joints. It would require
crouching, perhaps, the knees to either side of the plat­form, weight upon pelvis and chest, the head straining
to stay up. Launching would be difficult in such a
curled-in posture, no chance to run and leap, either a
fall or an assisted elevation would be required, but it
might work. He paused, sprinkled sand atop the paper
to dry the ink, and studied the images he had etched
there.

Yes, it might work.

With one last cackle, he rose to his feet, shook his
robes back into place, and scurried off to find his as­sistants. They would begin constructing a model im­mediately. If that performed well, they would then pro­ceed to a full-size version. He grinned as he half ran,
half walked, his long beard and equally long hair
streaming out behind him. He loved this part, challeng­ing the old notions, building something new, and then
using it to shatter those ancient ideas and drag the peo­ple around him into the light of the new day.

Whether they wanted to be there or not.

London, England, 1528

“It is not ideal, I grant you,” Wolsey began, keeping his
voice low and even, friendly and nonthreatening. “Yet
it is a step in the right direction.”

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“The right direction?” Henry sneered down at him.

The king was atop his favorite horse—he had been
about to go hunting when Wolsey had found him and

delivered the latest news from Rome. “By hosting

some trumped-up little priest with delusions of gran­deur, and having to flatter him and pamper him so that
he will find in our favor and report back to the Pope?

I fail to see how that improves matters for us.” Alt-

hough it was only mid-morning the king was already
flushed from exertion, his curls sweat-dampened and
clinging to his forehead, cheeks, and neck. At least he
was keeping his temper this time, though.

For now.

“Cardinal Campeggio has the authority to try the
case with me, on the Pope’s behalf,” Wolsey pointed
out. “If he has been granted full plenary power, he can
in fact pass judgment on the matter.”

Henry frowned, considering this. “And do you

think that likely? That the Pope sent his lapdog and
gave it permission to bite if it chooses?”

Wolsey chose to ignore the slight to his fellow cler­gyman, which was in its way an insult to him as well.

“It is a possibility we must be prepared to take ad­vantage of, if it were so,” he answered. “And if it be

not so, then at least we will still have the ear of the

Pope’s representative, whose word might carry some

weight with his Holiness. Convince him and we are

that much closer to convincing Clement himself.”

The king nodded. “Very well. Do what you must to
make this foreign Cardinal feel at home and admired.”
He pinned Wolsey with his gaze. “He should feel every

inch the honored guest, and of course the holy man.
But do not let him mistake himself for the king.” With
that Henry clicked his tongue to his teeth and backed

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his horse up several steps before wheeling the hand­some steed about and then into a mighty gallop toward
the waiting woods, all his servants hurrying to pack up
and follow him as quickly as possible.

Wolsey watched them go. He had not missed the

point of the king’s comment. Campeggio would be an

honored guest, but it might become necessary to re­mind the Italian priest that he was now in England, and
here Henry VIII was the only monarch worth watch­ing. Or obeying.

Villa Belvedere, Rome, 1514

“No, no, no!” He wrung his hands together and then

tugged at his beard and at his sideburns as he watched
the contraption flutter, tilt, and then spiral down out of
control. He leaned forward as if the sheer force of his
will might keep the device aloft, but even his powerful
mind was no match for the forces of Nature, and there
was little he could do as his invention plummeted to
earth. The crash echoed all the way up to his tower bal­cony, as did the splintering of wood and the screams
of pain, but he turned away. Servants were already run­ning toward the disaster, equipped with bandages and
medicines to tend the hapless pilot as best they could.
There was little else he would be able to do for the
man, other than be grateful for his courage and sad that
it had ended so badly.

Why, why, why? He asked himself, stepping back
into his study and crossing to his drafting table, where
the latest design still lay flattened by lead weights at ei­ther end. What had gone wrong? It had worked so well
as a model, why had it failed so utterly now? Was it the

pilot’s fault? But the man had been not only brave but

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strong, swift, and agile, with good reflexes and dexter­ous hands. If he could not work the device, no one
could. No, there was something else wrong. Perhaps it
was the balance? The wind had tipped it, and the pilot
had been unable to regain control afterward. If he
spread the weight more evenly, and removed that bot­tom so that there was nothing to drag it down, or for
the wind to catch . . .

Excited again, he brushed the old design aside,
snatched up a clean page, placed it in the now empty
space, and began to sketch again. He was getting closer,
of that he was sure. Surely, with a few more attempts,
he would get it right! And then, oh, the possibilities!

London, England, 1529

“You cannot do this to me!” Wolsey raged as the

guards took him, one at each arm. They pulled his
hands back behind him, none too gently, and locked
heavy iron manacles about his wrists, the chains slap­ping against his backside like a stern taskmaster scold­ing an errant schoolboy. Which is exactly how they
were trying to make him feel, he knew, but he kept his
head up and his back straight. They would not cow
him, not now!

“I have done everything you asked!” he continued,
addressing the stern monarch before him. “I have been

your servant, your Majesty! You cannot dismiss me
simply because I have not been able to obtain the out-

come you desire!”

“Can I not?” Henry snapped back, leaving his

stance by the hearth to loom over Wolsey. The king
was a powerful man, and right now, with his face dark­ened by anger, his hands clenching and unclenching,

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Wolsey felt the same primal fear as any boy bullied by
his elders. He was a man of the church, the highest­ranking clergy in England, and yet he still felt as if the
king might strike him at any second, ignoring all pro­priety and boxing him about the ears like a common
thug. It would certainly not be the first time the king
had loosed his anger through physical violence, though
Wolsey himself had never before been the intended
target of such crude behavior.

But for now the king reined in his response. “You
serve at my pleasure,” he reminded Wolsey instead,
loudly, eyes wild. “At the pleasure of your king! And it

no longer pleases me to have you serve, with your fail-

ures and your excuses. ‘It is a step in the right direc­tion,’ you told me! ‘Campeggio can pass judgment in
the Pope’s name, or at least carry a favorable opinion
back to him!’ And has he?” The king grabbed up a ran-

dom item off the nearby table, a heavy golden candle­stick, and broke it over his knee, tossing the shattered

halves aside. “Now he has fled, vanished into the night

by some unholy art, and we are left only with his part­ing remarks: ‘You do yourself no service with this suit,
nor do you honor your faith. Leave off this foolishness
or know the wrath of the Lord God, and the censure

of his servant on Earth, his Holiness the Pope.’” An-

other grab and the second candlestick soon followed
its fellow into destruction, one half flying dangerously

close to Wolsey’s eye as it was hurled away.

The bitter note had been waiting in Campeggio’s

room when Wolsey had arrived to escort his fellow car­dinal to the docks to take ship back to Italy. No one
had witnessed the Cardinal’s departure, though there
had been reports of a strange noise near his quarters
that night, as of a giant bird taking flight. None of it

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made much sense, unless the strange rumors Wolsey
had heard whispered in seminary were in fact true, but
that was hardly their greatest concern right now.

Henry’s was still trying to obtain his divorce from
Catherine so that he could marry Anne, and Wolsey’s

was even simpler: he was trying to maintain his office,
and with it his life.

It seemed, however, that the divine was not with

him this day. “Take him away,” Henry ordered the
guards. “Keep him under house arrest until he can be
tried for his crimes. For treason,” he added pointedly

with a glare at Wolsey, who shuddered. Treason was
one of Henry’s favorite charges, and its sentence his
favorite punishment: death by beheading.

“You will never win Rome’s support this way!” Wol-

sey shouted as the guards half-escorted, half-dragged him
from the rooms that had until now been his, the hem of
his carmine robes marred as they slid along the floor.
“The Pope will never grant your request!”

Henry stared after the man who had been his friend
and confidant even after Wolsey had been taken from

the room and the door had shut behind him. “No, I
will not,” the king agreed softly, all of his anger drain-

ing out of him at once. He stroked his chin as he fully

considered that fact. “I will never have Rome’s permis­sion,” he said again, slowly. “Yet why should I need it?

Am I not the king? What right does even the Pope have
to issue me orders in my own house?” Looking up, he

caught the eye of the man who had been Wolsey’s as­sistant. “Is that not so, Master Cromwell?” he asked.

The man beamed at being addressed directly by the
king, clearly relieved at not having been dismissed like

his former mentor, then bowed deeply. “It is, your
Majesty,” he agreed, his voice deep and low, the perfect

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picture of religious authority. “You are the supreme

ruler of these lands and its people, the defender of the
faith, and the source of our spiritual power. What could
faraway Rome know of England, that it can dictate our
actions? God speaks to you, and through you to us, and
that is all that need be said.”

Henry smiled and clapped his new favorite minister

on the shoulder. “Well said, my good man,” he assured
the slightly dazed Cromwell. “Well said indeed. Now
let us make plans.”

And as they talked, those plans took form. Bold
plans, and dangerous ones. But ones that would, if suc-

cessful, cement England’s independence once and for

all.

Villa Belvedere, Rome, 1515

It soared overhead like an enormous bird, and he
laughed as he watched from his balcony. Yes, yes! The
new design was lighter than the old one but better bal­anced—the wind could move it but not toss it about in
the same way, guide it but not batter it, aid it but not
flip it end over end. The pilot hung from the frame like
a fish from a hook, suspended only by the harness he
wore and the sturdy poles linking that to the wings
themselves, yet that granted his body the freedom to
shift with the wind, taking advantage of its currents,
angling the wings so that they could adjust and adapt
and keep him aloft. Yes, yes!

The pilot circled about once more, then, at the old

man’s impatient gesture, turned and made for the clear-

ing beyond. Another circle but this time a narrower
one, transforming into a downward spiral, as the pilot

used his weight to bring the craft down and the wings’

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buoyancy to keep it from simply crashing, drifting gen­tly to earth instead. He landed a little hard, stumbling
as his feet struck grass and dirt once more, but recov­ered quickly, crouching to let the full weight of the de­vice settle to the ground around him. It had an impres­sive wingspan, over twenty feet across, and despite be­ing made of wood and leather and silk and canvas there
was still enough weight there to crush a man if it all
struck him at once. But no matter—the important
thing was that it had worked! And even landed success­fully! Up in his tower, the old man allowed himself to
smile, even to chortle a bit with relief. He had finally
done it!

Idly he watched servants rush to help the pilot from
the device so that they could then haul it back to the
tower. Already he was pondering ways to make it
smaller, lighter, more portable. But those were merely
refinements. He had proven it would fly, that was the
important thing. Proven it to his own satisfaction, at
least.

Now there was another he would have to prove it
to. But he was confident that would not pose a prob­lem. Not anymore.

Calais, France, 1532

“We cannot take to the water this eve,” Henry declared
angrily, slapping one hand into the other. “We must
needs stay the night.”

Anne eyed him carefully, trying to gauge his mood
and his intentions. That the weather was foul she could
judge for herself by the sound of the wind howling past
the windows, and the clatter of the heavy shutters, and

the pelting of the rain as it lashed against the palace’s

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

roof and walls and the balcony beyond. And she was
sure her love truly did wish to be gone from here, for
Henry hated being in the debt of others, and this storm
meant they would be forced to prevail upon their host,
Francis I, for the night. Yet was he truly as displeased
about this turn of events as he appeared? Because the
French king had placed them in adjoining chambers—
ah, the refreshing audacity of the French!—and Anne
suspected the king hoped that this night he might find
the connecting door open, and her in her bed waiting
to receive him.

Before, Anne would have scoffed at such a notion.
And had, many a time. The king had tried for years to
bed her, ever since he had first clapped eyes upon her
and fallen for her. But she had resisted at every turn.
She did not want to be just another royal dalliance. She
wasn’t even willing to settle for the role of mistress, as
her sister had done. No, she was determined to be his
lawful queen, and nothing less. And since her favor was
her greatest weapon, it was that she would continue to
wield until he acquiesced.

Although…he had been trying. She had to grant
him that. She had seen the efforts her love had gone to

these past few years, working to win Rome’s approval

and then more recently working to distance himself

from Rome so that the Pope’s condemnation would

not matter. And although he had certainly entreated
her to yield many times, Henry had never tried to force
her. He had always taken her refusal as final, and had
simply redoubled his efforts on her—on their—behalf.

And now here they were, in France, away from the
prying eyes of his subjects and the resentful glares of
his advisors. Here they were, trapped by the storm as
if God Himself had chosen to grant them a night of

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