History shows that leadership is crucial in war, but there are other factors at work. What if history were given a twist or two, and great commanders on land and sea fought their greatest battles under different circumstances? Suppose General Douglas MacArthur had been captured before he could escape from Manila and became a prisoner of war? Suppose Joan of Arc had not been burned for heresy and had gone on to lead France to very different victories? Suppose Genghis Khan had been a convert to Judaism and his horde fought for a different cause than in our universe? Turtledove and his colleagues turn the past upside down and inside out, and the possibilities are endless. . . .

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A new collection of alternate history stories speculates about how world history would have been changed if the great battles, from the battle for the Philippines during World War II to Joan of Arc's campaign to free France, had been fought under different circumstances.

Alternate Generals III

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By Harry Turtledove Roland J. Green

Baen Publishing Enterprises

Copyright © 2005 Harry Turtledove & Roland J. Green
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7434-9897-6

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Chapter One

Key to the Illuminated Heretic

A. M. Dellamonica

Frontispiece: Joan of Arc stands chained in a horse-drawn wagon, wearing a black gown. Leaning against a pair of nuns, she seems almost to swoon. Her right arm is portrayed as bones without flesh. The horses' ornate curls and gleaming teeth lend a ghastly note, and blackened angels border the image.

The scene is easily recognized: the Maid's debilitation, the nuns, and especially the cloud of larks above serve to identify it as Joan's journey to the trial that ended her thirteen-year imprisonment for heresy. It was at this "Exoneration Trial" that she encountered Dulice Aulon, the Jehanniste artist responsible for the holy pictures on which the codex illuminations are based.

* * *

"We mustn't face the king in battle." Joan had the light, clear voice of a young woman, even after her years in prison and the hard decade since her release. She'd asked one of the new archers, a girl of perhaps seventeen, to cut her hair, and a few broken strands of silver hair clung to her neck. The rest lay at her feet, bright in the glow of dying fire.

"Not fight Charles?" Hermeland was incredulous. He was a badger of a man, with a dramatic, pointy face and remarkable speed with a sword. "We must turn his army back before it unites with the force of mercenaries coming up from Rome. If you can't see that-"

"Can't see it? Who ordered us to turn north, days before anyone knew the king had pursued us into Burgundy?"

"You-" he began, and as her brow came up he corrected, "your Voices."

They were nearly of a height, less than perfect subjects for a drawing. From her seat in the shadowed corner of the tent, Dulice tried to capture the dirt on Joan's blue tunic and leggings, her sheathed knife of a body. She was all deadly intent, a knight with a lined face and too many scars. Her eyes blazed-it was a wonder Hermeland did not flinch from the heat there!

"What I do not see is why Charles is coming at all," she said. "He's an old man. He never led men-at-arms before."

"Politics," he replied. "So says Marcel Renard."

"He would bring that filthy word into it." She waved off the archer gently, shaking out her shorn locks as the girl left.

"We can win this battle, Joan," Hermeland said.

"We would win." She dismissed the issue as she took up her sword. "But God did not have me crown this king only to tear him down."

She had no doubt at all, and it was plain Hermeland was surprised. Misunderstanding Joan as usual, Dulice thought-he thinks she fears defeat, but it is victory that worries her.

Dulice herself didn't share their belief in the small Jehanniste army-or even, sometimes, in the Maid's heretical faith. Her uncle had been Joan's squire, years ago, in the fight against England and Burgundy. He had brought Dulice with him to the Maid's Exoneration Trial, and Joan spotted her in the crowd. She'd been drawing the scene on a scrap of vellum. Perhaps because Joan couldn't read, the image had captured her as firmly as the making of it gripped young Dulice.

Joan had adopted the girl on the spot, keeping her close ever since. Her need for a record of her doings was so strong she never questioned whether her handmaiden's truest love was for God or merely for pen and page.

"If we stay this course we will meet Charles," Hermeland pressed. "Then we'll fight, ready or not."

"I'm telling you, we must pray for-"

"Joan, an army that does nothing but pray is just a moving monastery!" he thundered.

Her chin came up. "And an army that never prays-"

"Emerges victorious, probably." He strode from the tent, stomping off into the sound of men breaking camp-low conversations, the snorts of horses and the groans of wagons being loaded. Birdsong rose above the murmur of preparation. The air was mild and damp; it had rained the night before.

"No time for Mass this morning," Dulice said, making herself noticed for the first time.

"We'll say a quick one now, just us two." Stretching, Joan raised her sword in an attack pose, spearing an invisible enemy through the chest. "Will there be churchbells ahead?-"

"We might hear Autun. And there's a monastery east of there ... Saint Benoit? If we keep this direction, you might hear one or the other ringing Vespers tonight." She was happy to give the answer-Joan loved bells, for they often brought her Voices to her.

"Of course we will march," Joan said. For just an instant she sagged, and the younger woman saw the chasm of years between them. "God set us on this path, not me."

Dulice teased out the piece of paper, translated the words into Latin, and wrote them at the bottom of the page as Joan gathered up the cut hair on the ground and tossed it into the fire. The tent filled with black, stinking smoke, making them both cough.

Joan smiled apologetically. "It's the only way to keep the soldiers from making talismans of it."

Or selling it to relic makers, Dulice thought, nodding her understanding as she roughed in the lines of a portrait. There would be time to add the details later.

* * *

"First Communion." The Maid emerges from a shop, wearing men's clothing and carrying bread and wine. A faintly sinister Saint Catherine hovers behind her, seeming to whisper in her ear. The passersby surrounding Joan all have their eyes turned in her direction.

The inscription and the spires of Saint Ouen in the background make it apparent that Joan has just suffered her famous rejection at that church, turned away on her first attempt to celebrate Mass as a free woman. Now she will perform her own variaton of the sacrament. Contemporary accounts differ on the issue of whether Joan knew, in that moment, that she was about to create a new faith that would shatter Rome's hold over Europe.

* * *

Hermeland raised a crumb of bread and his glass of wine. "This is my body," he intoned in Latin with the other worshippers. "This is my blood."

Riding all day had blackened his mood. In the months since Pope Calixtus had decided to expunge the Maid's followers from the soil of France, Joan had kept them moving, choosing small battles and defending Jehanniste villages against mobs from neighboring Catholic towns. They might have kicked out the Pope's teeth earlier if they'd moved with more certainty. Now his jaws were closing on them.

"... in remembrance that Christ died for me. I feed on him in my heart." His eyes roamed the congregation, looking for Dulice. She fancied she could make herself invisible, but he found her easily enough. There-wearing the gray dress and standing in the corner. She was between two of the men, praying unobtrusively and watching Joan. Her voice did not carry to his ears, but seeing her warmed him. She was beautiful and passionate both, an irresistable lure to his thoughts.

"The body of Christ, the bread of life." Prayer complete, Hermeland laid the bread on his tongue. It was no great surprise that the Host still felt like what it was-a lump of bread. There were times when it was subtly different, exalted somehow; those were the moments that bound him to this faith bone and sinew. As for today ... he shrugged inwardly. This was hardly his first failure to transubstantiate mere bread into the body of Christ. Perhaps tomorrow he would find the peace of mind required for true piety.

Ahead in the field they had blessed as a temporary church, Joan swallowed her Host, face lit with joy. There was nothing of the warrior about her now. As far as he knew, the miracle had worked for her every time since she had remade the sacraments for them all.

Today's Latin lesson had been given by a wounded former monk from Bordeaux. Now, at his urging, Joan strode to the front of the assembly and they repeated the words she spoke at her heresy trial. It was their movement's signature prayer: "If I am not in God's Grace, may he put me there. If I am, may he keep me there."

The congregants' voices rang with conviction. They all believed that clergy could block the path to Heaven. Even so, it strengthened their faith when their Maid led them in prayer. Here in church she was a holy woman, a mystic-you would never believe that come dawn she would strap on a sword and ride to war.

As the crowd broke up, she sank to her knees in the turf, face turned toward the churchbells tolling in the distance. She would be there for hours, and in the morning rise as if she had slept heartily.

I should ask her Voices where to trap the coming army, Hermeland thought sourly, and turned away.

Young Marcel Renard fell into step beside him. "I've been thinking about our problem," he declared.

"I wasn't aware that we had one."

Marcel was the younger son of one of the army's sponsors, a merchant-born knight with finer armor and manners than the few nobles who had been swept up in the Conversion. He was a great friend of the Maid's scheming brother, Jean, and perhaps the closest thing to a courtier that Hermeland had encountered in the ranks of his new church.

Marcel's thoughts moved as if they were oil, always seeking the easiest path to what he wanted. It was a turn of mind Hermeland sometimes admired.

"Of course we have a problem, you old skunk! We cannot fight Charles."

"I see no way to avoid it."

"You look for no way. Come, Hermeland, it'll just toss him into the Pope's lap."

"Your pardon, but he is already there."

"So far all he's done is march. Charles hasn't molested any of the Jehanniste-"

"Listener," Hermeland corrected urgently. They were still close enough that Joan might overhear.

"Listener towns, yes. They've passed through several now without burning them."

"A king can't afford to massacre his subjects at will."

"I think Charles is undecided, my friend. He may not mind having the Pope's hand on France's shoulder ... but he doesn't want it around her neck, either."

"Pretty words," Hermeland grunted. "Do they mean anything?"

Marcel pointed at the moonlit figure of their praying leader. "Why did the English want the Church to condemn her? To prove the king illegitimate, that's why. Why did Charles have her retried?"

"He thought her all but dead." He didn't try to keep resentment out of his voice.

"To prove his rightful claim to the throne!" Marcel's face was aglow with excitement, the certainty of youth that everything could be fixed, that great fires could be put out-like candles-with breath alone. "If Charles opposes her now, he makes himself a bastard again."

"What would you have us do-convert him?"

"Give him a way to come to us honorably. Dispense with teaching Latin to farmers and translate the Bible into French. Let that be the text we preach from. The crown prince will strengthen ties with Rome when Charles dies. But if the old king has established an independent church ..."

Hermeland stared at the merchant's son.

"You think it is impractical," Marcel said finally, a hint of uncertainty in his voice.

"I think it is obvious and elegant. It could solve, as you say, our problems." He said it with funereal solemnity.

Marcel scratched his head. "You do not think she will agree?"

"Her Voices tell her to say the Mass in Latin, to teach us to memorize the Bible as it is written."

"She didn't think that part through. This is much easier, and God won't mind ..."

"There is no chance, my son," Hermeland said. "Not in heaven, not on this earth, and not in hell."

* * *

"Follow God, not me." A young girl kneels before Joan, who tries to raise her to her feet. Behind the Maid's shoulder a winged infant with a halo hovers, its whole being outlined in silver light. Larks nest in the grass in the bottom corners.

Most scholars analyze this scene in the context of Joan's characteristic rejection of special status within her own cult. It should also be noted, however, that the kneeling girl is said to be the sister of a stillborn infant Joan allegedly revived from death in a village called Lagny. (The child survived just long enough to be baptized.) Unlike the many conflicting accounts of Joan's miracles during the Jehanniste holy war, this earlier event was well documented, and Joan spoke of it herself at the heresy trial in 1431.

* * *

There were only six soldiers in the maidens' tent this evening, one merry farmgirl-turned-lancer having been crushed by a cannonball in their last battle. The new archer tried hard to fill the hole in their chatter, but she was better suited to the crossbow than conversation. Every time she spoke up, she merely drew attention to the loss.

Dulice was sitting with them when she heard Joan return, soft footsteps and a rustle of fabric that should have been imperceptible, was she not as attuned to it as a mother was to the faintest movements of her babe.

She excused herself, stepping carefully over muddy ground toward the tent she shared with Joan. Low fires burned across the camp. The smells of wood smoke and cooking pork teased her nostrils, spiced-when the wind shifted-with a hint of latrine. The breeze made the night cold, even for springtime. Hunching her shoulders and hugging herself, Dulice quickened her pace.

Joan was sitting on her pallet, cross-legged in a plain shirt and breeches, as unaffected by the chill as she was by all other bodily complaints. A single candle burned beside her, playing golden light over the sword resting across her knees. She gave no sign that she knew Dulice was there.

Dulice touched the bottle of ink she kept on a chain at her throat. "I have been thinking about drawing a picture of you in prison," she said. "Marcel says nobody will prefer a plain picture-"

"They will if his father stops selling the one with the angels."

Dulice licked her lips. "You said you had visions, when you were locked up in the castle of Philipe Auguste."

"Hush." Joan's face hardened.

"Your story brings people to our faith. Joan, if you had visions ..."

"When I talk of such things, Dulice, they get bent into tales I don't recognize."

"You can't control what people say," Dulice wheedled. "All you can do is make the truth known."

She was sure she had gone too far, that she would get nothing. But Joan shifted slightly, expelling a long breath. "Two visions, yes. In the first, I never recanted. Cauchon took me to the stake and they lit the fire ... and can you guess? It wouldn't catch. They tried so hard they burned the ropes binding me. I stepped away from the pyre. The crowd there had come to cheer me off to Hell, but when the ropes fell away from the stake the people's hearts opened. They spirited me away and I went back to war. I drove the English out of France ..."

Dulice reached for her pen, but a look from Joan stopped her. The Maid patted the ground at her hip and she sat, conscious of the knotted muscles of her heroine's shoulder pressing against her shawl, of Joan's heat against her cold skin.

"You said there were two-"

"In the second vision, I recanted," Joan said. "My jailers did all the things you heard: took away the dress I was to wear, so I was naked. Sent that soldier to rape me. Left my men's clothing handy as a temptation to relapse."

Dulice's teeth clenched. The ordeals had gone on for months before the false priests had put out their torches and resigned themselves to having the Maid as a prisoner instead of firewood.

"In my dream I bore it for three days. Then I found my courage, put on my clothes, and told them I was done. They burned me in Rouen, as they'd planned all along." Her voice was matter-of-fact. "I was brave, I think, at the execution."

"You're always brave."

"I gave in to fear when I recanted, didn't I?" She darted her hand through the candle flame, leaving a fat smear of soot on her fingers. "But fire burned away that sin. It hurt terribly-"

"You felt it?" Dulice interrupted.

"Like I was there. Oh, don't look like that. All suffering passes, is it not so?" Despite her words Joan shuddered faintly.

"It's still suffering."

"It was a faster penance than prison. And when I was purified, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret carried me away. Up."

Dulice's breath hitched. "You saw Heaven?"

"A glimpse. So wonderful I sometimes can't believe I have remained down here so long."

"But how unfair to feel the fire, and not to fully taste the reward!"

"It's a pleasure delayed, that's all." Joan pinched wax drippings off the candle and smeared them on her fingers. "If I'd burned then, I'd be forgotten now, don't you think?"

"No! You crowned Charles."

"Pah. People could say anything once I was gone. They made me a witch at my trial, when I was standing right there!" She scowled. "You guard me from those lies now, Dulice. You take what's real and pin it to the page. If I'm tried again ..."

"God forbid!"

"It's all caught in pictures, just as it happens. No lies, no foolish rumors ..."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Alternate Generals III by Harry Turtledove Roland J. Green Copyright © 2005 by Harry Turtledove & Roland J. Green. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Hugo-winner and historian Harry Turtledove is equally renowned in science fiction for his rigorously thought-out alternate history novels and in fantasy for his tales of the supernatural placed in historically accurate settings. For Baen, he has written The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, and the popular "Gerin the Fox" series, Wisdom of the Fox and Tale of the Fox. He has also authored the Ingram bestseller Guns of the South and the genre bestsellers in the "World War" series for Del Rey.

With its dual portrait of generals Grant and Lee on opposing sides of the Roman Civil War, the jacket of editor Turtledove's solid third alternative military history anthology neatly evokes this popular subgenre. While there's no such story, Robert E. Lee must decide, as the ambassador to Britain of a victorious but ostracized Confederacy, where his true loyalties lie in Lee Allred's provocative "East of Appomattox." Similarly, Roland J. Green's " `It Isn't Every Day of the Week' " shows how altering the outcome of a few minor incidents can turn history on its head, making General "Old Hickory" Jackson and the Cherokee Nation allies when the U.S. is drawn into the Napoleonic wars. Chris Bunch's "Murdering Uncle Ho" vividly demonstrates the wisdom of "be careful what you wish for" in the book's most intensely drawn battle sequences; this tale of an alternative Vietnam War draws some disturbing parallels with Iraq, as does Turtledove's own "Shock and Awe." Esther M. Friesner's "First, Catch Your Elephant" may not tell us much about Hannibal, but it succeeds marvelously as comedy. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.