Free Story from Alt Hist Issue 8 – A Sword by Andrew Knighton

The second story from Alt Hist Issue 8, is a short but powerful one by Andrew Knighton, set in the Middle Ages. Enjoy!

A Sword

by Andrew Knighton

 

Manon dashed through the woods, slashing at monsters with her sword. She could see them all around – dragons in the treetops, Englishmen in the undergrowth, ogres behind the trees. None would stand before the trusty blade she had broken off an oak on the way out of the village. The world smelled of autumn—leaf mould, the fresh air after rain, and more smoke than usual.

Bold as any knight she darted between the bushes and ran into a man squatting against a tree. His hose were down around his ankles and his expression on seeing her was a mixture of surprise and pain.

“You stink!” Manon said, holding her nose against what he’d been doing.

The man also shouted something, though she couldn’t understand it. The words sounded hard and clumsy, like his tongue was wrapped around itself.

Other men burst from the bushes, huge bows pointed at Manon. She held her sword out in trembling terror, but they laughed and lowered their weapons.

One of them crouched in front of her. He wore a leather jack and a chainmail hood drooped around his shoulders. He had a nice smile.

“That is a fine sword you have, little boy.” The man spoke slowly, and he had a strange accent, like the tinker who came down from Calais mending pots and selling needles.

“I’m a girl,” Manon replied.

“That’s a fine sword you have, my lady. Are you defending your village?”

“Yes.”

“Could you show us where it is?”

Manon hesitated. Something didn’t seem right. These men weren’t local and there bows were longer than any she’d seen used for hunting. But they wore red crosses stitched to their clothes so they must be godly men, and their smiling leader recognized a good sword.

“Yes,” she said firmly.

 

 

They tramped through the fields and orchards, following hedgerows between narrow fields full of grain and vegetables. Soon the harvest would be in and they’d all go into town to pay their tithes to the Lord of Agincourt. Papa said she could come with him this year, to see all the people and the castle. She hoped there would be knights.

There was a commotion as they approached the village, the small cluster of windowless, sloping huts that she called home. Everyone must be as excited as her to see these strangers. They all came rushing out, pitchforks and carving knives in their hands as if straight from their work, some barefoot in the mud.

Her father pushed through the crowd, sparks still smouldering on his leather apron, almost kicking a chicken in his hurry to get past. He stopped twenty paces from them and his face made Manon worry that she was in trouble.

“Please don’t hurt her,” Papa said.

“Why would I hurt her?” the smiling man replied, stroking Manon’s hair. “We are all going to be friends.”

Manon would have stopped him stroking her but she was suddenly afraid. Why was Papa talking about her being hurt?

There was a creak. She looked round to see the other men raising their longbows, arrows pointed at the villagers. Even Hob, the one she’d caught by the tree, looked scary as he squirmed in his filthy hose.

“Bring us your grain and your animals,” the smiling man said.

“We have little grain,” Papa replied, “but you can have it.”

“The animals?” the man asked. “You have pigs and goats.”

“Odo and Henri took them away,” Papa said, “when we heard that the armies were coming.”

Something cold pressed against Manon’s throat.

“Where are they?” The man didn’t sound friendly now.

“Please no! I swear I don’t know! None of us do.”

“Where are the animals little girl?” The man leaned close to her now, the dagger hurting her neck. He stank of sweat and blood and too many cabbages for dinner.

“I don’t know,” she whimpered, tears running down her face. This was the most terrible thing since Mama died. Even Papa looked scared.

How could Papa be scared?

“Tell me.”

The blade pressed harder against her throat. She was suddenly very aware of the mud between her toes, of the woollen tickling of her tunic, of the horrified faces of her neighbours.

“I can’t,” Papa repeated, sinking to his knees. “Please, me instead. Anything.”

The man yanked Manon’s head to one side.

“I’m sorry your friend is sick,” she said, “and I know he needs better food, but please don’t hurt me.”

The man shook and she closed her eyes, prayed to God to accept her into his arms.

Then she realised he was laughing. He said something in their ugly words and shoved her away from him, into Papa’s rough embrace.

“Bring the corn,” the man said. “Try nothing with those knives—we have bows.”

 

 

Once the soldiers were gone everyone rushed to the stream, filling buckets and cauldrons to put out the burning buildings. Everyone except Manon.

She stood in front of the bonfire that had been Henri’s house, where the man had ruffled her hair one last time before throwing a torch through the door.

“Maybe next time you will have a real sword,” he had said with that wicked grin.

Then he was gone.

Manon held up her sword. Though clearly a stick it still reminded her of the ones the men had worn at their belts, with its curving blade and its space for her hand.

She flung it into the flames and went to fetch water.

To read more from Alt Hist Issue 8 why not order a copy?

About the Author

Andrew Knighton is a freelance writer based in Yorkshire, where the grey skies provide a good motive to stay inside at the word processor. When not writing he battles the slugs threatening to overrun his garden and the monsters lurking in the woods. His collection of historical and alternate history stories, From a Foreign Shore, is available as an e-book from Amazon and Smashwords. You can find out more about his writing at andrewknighton.com and follow him on Twitter where he’s @gibbondemon.

Dewey Defeats Truman by Mark Devane – Free Extract

We will be posting free extracts from each story of Alt Hist Issue 8. First up is Mark Devane’s “Dewey Defeats Truman”. This is an alternate history story with a classic what if theme: what would have happened if the atomic bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? “Dewey Defeats Truman” by Mark Devane was inspired by the erroneous headline printed the day after Truman was supposed to have lost the 1948 election. In reality the newspapers got it wrong and Truman was a surprise victor, but what if he had made different decisions in the war against Japan?

Dewey Defeats Truman

by Mark Devane

October 1948

Monday Morning – Japan

Ashes from the burning town drifted from an orange sky and settled on the sleeve of Lieutenant Dan McClay. He crouched at dawn in a binjo ditch along the road into Iwakuni, just short of the military crest of the hill.

Two scouts slushed down the muddy ditch from the town.

“Burned clear, Lieutenant.”

“The fly boys missed one,” said the other scout. General Curtis Lemay’s 20th Air Force fire-bombed all buildings in the path of advancing American troops.

“The fire department,” said the first scout. “Couldn’t save anything but their own garage.”

McClay had crouched in the urine drainage canal all night, listening to the Air Corps pound the town. Roaring waves of B-29s, skirting the tree tops like an aluminum overcast, raining incendiaries. The sky, a mixture of clouds and smoke, as always, glowed orange from the fires below. Darkness never fell.

Snow would be falling back home, in Vermont, by now. McClay brushed the ashes from his sleeve. He turned back to his platoon sergeant, Sergeant Steven Pulaski, a grizzled tough guy from Chicago, a few yards behind him. “Stand by to move up.”

An emaciated figure emerged from the brush across the road. Dressed in a filthy white kimono, it shouted a guttural threat and brandished a bamboo spear. It was impossible to tell if it was a man or woman and its jaundiced skin was the color of a ripe banana. The apparition lurched forward in slow motion, trying to charge.

As the zombie stepped on the road, a fusillade knocked it down. Writhing on the pavement, it spun and flailed in its own gore.

MacArthur’s orders were to bury all Japanese corpses but there was no time and no strength and no way they were going to dig in the heavily-mined earth. A binjo ditch was the safest place to be.

McClay turned again to Sergeant Pulaski. “Flame-thrower up.”

Mountains rising out of the sea. That was Japanese terrain. The fighting was confined to narrow strips along the coast, which had to be taken foot-by-bloody-foot from a nation of crazed, starving kamikazes. Like this thing, smoking and crackling in the road.

Japan. The mud. The roasted human smell. The chilling rain. The constant killing. They ate as they could and slept in the open.

McClay’s 3rd battalion, 307th Regiment, 77th Infantry Division, Tenth Army, was the point of Douglas MacArthur’s spear, advancing up the southeast coast of Honshu. They faced well-prepared, mutually supporting battlements constructed into a skillful defense-in-depth, including trenches, tunnels and honey-combed caves. All of it elaborately fortified. Anywhere you chose to attack along the narrow avenues of approach, you’d get shot at from other positions.

Yesterday, a well-trained gunner with a Nambu machine gun had kept McClay’s platoon pinned down until a shattered blossom with an anti-tank mine strapped to his back had run into their position and wiped out half of first squad. Shumacher, Frenelli, Shapiro, and a replacement he never got to know. Gone. Somehow, it was his fault. They never found the gunner or even where he had been firing from. The phantom Japanese took everything from the battlefield, even their spent brass, leaving only their corpses and the tracks of their split-toe tabi sandals.

Yesterday’s casualties bought McClay’s battalion a quarter-mile of Japanese road. Another day in Japan, an afterlife in a Stygian region bristling with suffering and death. The bravest were the weariest because they had seen the most horror. A week ago, they had been attacked at night. A figure loomed out of the melee, swinging something heavy. The lanky McClay had partially blocked the blow with the forestock of his M-1, but the tip of a finger was cut off and he was hit in the helmet, knocking him out. In the morning, he came to next to a Japanese officer on his back in his dress uniform. Polished riding boots with leather leggings, shiny Sam Brown belt and bloody white gloves, still clutching his samurai sword. His skull had been blown off above the nose and flies were feasting on the mushy porridge pouring out of it.

McClay grasped the probability. Each such encounter diminished his chances of escaping alive.  How he had survived Shuri Castle on Okinawa was a mystery to McClay. That battle now seem liked cucumber sandwiches with afternoon tea. McClay was a fugitive from the law of averages and knew he couldn’t escape the iron law forever. But he wasn’t as frightened as he had been on Okinawa. Death seen every day becomes a familiar face. Why wouldn’t he visit you?

He ached to go home. Home might still be the same but he realized Dan McClay would never be. As he gritted his teeth in the morning for each day’s nightmare, he clutched his scapular and breathed, “St. Michael, defend us in battle.”

 

Monday morning – Washington

“Mr. President, we’re making exciting progress in Japan!” said an Army major.

Harry Truman was having a rough morning. It started with his campaign staff. His challengers for President, Governor Thomas Dewey, as well as Senator Strom Thurmond of the Dixiecrats, demanded answers to questions about casualties. Dewey said America was a last bastion of civilization and the enemy of the American people, indeed of mankind, was not in Tokyo, but Moscow.

Thurmond, running strong in the Democratic stronghold of the South, claimed Truman had squandered the legacy of FDR. Polling well behind Dewey, the campaign staff worried Truman might finish behind Thurmond.

DJ-Day had been the most glorious episode in the legendary history of the Marine Corps. All six Marine divisions had gone ashore on southern Honshu, line abreast and facing a typhoon of lead. The American people did not know that the Marine Corps was no longer a functioning organization, much less a combat formation. Off the beachhead, the heavy slugging then fell to the Army.

Truman’s White House classified the casualty lists in the interests of national security and impounded all mail from the Far East. But the families of those who would never come back had to be notified eventually. The pace of notification, soldiers solemn on the doorstep, had been staggered to deaden the shock, but the American people harbored a growing suspicion something calamitous had befallen them in Japan, as well as a darkening distrust of the White House.

Truman sat now with General George Marshall and Admiral Chester Nimitz, their aides and briefing officers, all of them hanging on Truman’s tortured facial expressions and wounded body language, as he absorbed the shock of his weekly briefing on Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu. Truman’s face was haggard and pinched, his movements awkward and crabbed, like a man with chronic back pain. There was a tremor in his left hand.

Truman turned to Nimitz. “Joe Kennedy called me again. He’s looking for his second son. What’s his name?”

“Jack,” answered Nimitz. “Lieutenant, junior grade.”

“Well?”

“I told you three months ago. Lt. Kennedy’s PT Boat went missing off Kagoshima. I ordered a two-day sea-and-air search, at your request. Not something we do for every missing PT Boat. Nothing turned up. He and his crew are listed as lost at sea. The families haven’t been notified yet.”

“Change that to missing in action,” Truman said. “And no more family notifications until after the election.” He looked around the room. “Everybody clear on that? Now, go ahead, Major.”

There were other well-known names on the secret casualty lists. The movie star Tyrone Power. A promising young baseball player named Ted Williams. As well as the long list of the anonymous dead, the brave that Americans would never know: Captain Ed McMahon, Private JD Salinger, 1st Lt. John Glenn, Corporal Rod Serling, Staff Sgt. Charlton Heston.

“We’re on the outskirts of Iwakuni, an important gateway to Hiroshima,” the enthusiastic major continued. His brass buttons gleamed as he pointed at a map with multi-colored pins.

“Hiro-what?” asked Truman.

“Hiroshima. An industrial city. Sort of a Japanese Detroit.”

“One year later, over a thousand casualties a day, and we’re approaching the Japanese Detroit. That is exciting,” said Admiral Nimitz, who had succeeded Ernie King as Chief of Naval Operations. The Navy was dead-set against Coronet. King had resigned when MacArthur had cancelled Operation Olympic, an attack on the southern island of Kyushu, and gone straight to Honshu.

The defense of the Home Islands was led by General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, who had captured 130,000 British troops, with 30,000 Japanese, at Singapore. MacArthur had counted on surprise but Yamashita, a samurai of the old school, was familiar with his tactics of bypassing strongholds and on the day of the landing, the Imperial Japanese Army was locked and loaded.

“Chester,” said General Marshall, US Army Chief of Staff, “what choice did we have? Your blockade starved the Japanese, but they didn’t surrender, like you promised. It only gave them time to fortify.” Marshall, a bearish man, was the brains behind the destruction of the Third Reich. Truman had already decided to replace his Secretary of State, a squishy fellow named Byrnes, with Marshall as soon as the war was over. Western Berlin had been blockaded by the Russians, the Berlin Airlift was underway and Byrnes was still talking about ways to compromise with the Kremlin.

“We didn’t give the blockade long enough,” growled Nimitz. Nimitz, a lean man who spoke with a Texas twang, was the hero of the Battle of Midway, upon which had hinged the fate of the nation.

“Two years was plenty,” Marshall retorted. “While we fiddled with your blockade, the Russians took Hokkaido.”

As the Army-Navy game kicked off, Truman’s chief-of-staff, Admiral William Leahy, entered the room. Leahy, not only an Admiral but a former ambassador to France, had been called out of military retirement by President Roosevelt to serve as his wartime chief-of-staff. Truman asked the gruff and experienced hand to stay on until the war was over. The weary look he gave Truman told him his day was not going to get any sunnier.

Leahy took a seat at the end of the room, against the wall. He closed his eyes and massaged his forehead. “Leave us, please.” The aides and briefing officers gathered their papers and left. Leaving Truman, Leahy, Nimitz and Marshall.

“Mr. President,” said Leahy, “Art Sulzberger of the New York Times called me. He knows about the Manhattan Project and he is going to print on Sunday.”

END OF FREE EXTRACT

Don’t forget to order your copy of Alt Hist Issue 8 to read the rest of this story and others.

Alt Hist Issue 8 is Published!

Alt Hist Issue 8 - eBookCoverThe latest issue of the bestselling historical fiction magazine

Alt Hist Issue 8 has now been published!

You can purchase eBook and Print copies from:

Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Barnes & Noble

And eBook copies from:

Smashwords | Kobo | iBooks

The eighth issue of the popular magazine of historical fiction and alternate history contains six great new short stories. Alt Hist Issue 8 includes new stories in the Battalion 202 series set in the aftermath of a successful German invasion of Britain, as well as tales featuring bridge burning in the American Civil War, a secret mission against the Suez Canal in the World War One, a story that speculates what if the atom bomb hadn’t been dropped on Japan, and taking us back to the Middle Ages, a story that follows the dreams and reality of a peasant girl caught up in the brutal Hundred Years War.

Stories include:

  • Dewey Defeats Truman by Mark Devane
  • A Sword by Andrew Knighton
  • The Retreat Proceeded Orderly, at Least    by Kenan Orhan
  • The Fullness and the Hollowness by Jonathan Doering
  • Small Miracles by Jonathan Doering
  • His Last Day by Richard Buxton

Kicking off the eighth issue of Alt Hist is an alternate history story with a classic what if theme: what would have happened if the atomic bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? “Dewey Defeats Truman” by Mark Devane was inspired by the erroneous headline printed the day after Truman was supposed to have lost the 1948 election. In reality the newspapers got it wrong and Truman was a surprise victor, but what if he had made different decisions in the war against Japan?

“A Sword” by Andrew Knighton takes us back to the Middle Ages and the brutal Hundred Years War between England and France. A young peasant girl dreams of fighting fantastic beasts with her trusty sword as she plays in the forest, but what does she do when real enemies appear?

A little known action of the First World War is the subject of “The Retreat Proceeded Orderly, at least” by Kenan Orhan. In 1915 the Turkish army mounted raids on the Suez Canal. This short story follows a Turkish special forces mission made up of diverse nationalities as it attempts to blow up one of the ships assigned to protect the Canal.

The next two stories are from the Battalion 202 series. “Small Miracles” focuses on the women left behind in Pontefract by Christopher Greenwood: his girlfriend and his mother. In “The Fullness and the Hollowness” Christopher and Tommy have escaped the clutches of the SS and head for a rendezvous with other members of the British Battalion 202 units and a briefing by the mysterious government representative known only as DEM.

The last story of Issue 8, Richard Buxton’s “His Last Day”, is set soon after the end of the American Civil War and follows a railway conductor’s last day in his job before he retires. But an encounter during the journey stirs up old memories from during the war and a decision is made on whether and how to settle some unfinished business.

Alt Hist Issue 8 – eBook on Kindle publishes on 31st October 2015

Just a reminder that Alt Hist Issue 8 will publish on 31st October 2015 for Kindle – the pre-order price is cheaper than the published price will be – so go and grab a copy now. eBooks from other retailers and Print issues will be available about a week later.

Stories include:

  • Demons and the Deep Blue Sea by Andrew Knighton
  • Dewey Defeats Truman by Mark Devane
  • His Last Day by Richard Buxton
  • The Retreat Proceeded Orderly, at Least    by Kenan Orhan
  • The Fullness and the Hollowness by Jonathan Doering
  • Small Miracles by Jonathan Doering

Pre-order now via Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Barnes & Noble | Smashwords

Alt Hist Issue 8 – Pre-orders Available

Alt Hist Issue 8 - Provisional Cover copyOrder your copy of Alt Hist Issue 8 now before the official release date and benefit from special pre-order pricing!

I am very pleased to announce that Alt Hist Issue 8 is now available for pre-ordering in eBook format. Currently its available on Amazon and also Barnes & Noble. Details of pre-ordering via other retailers will follow soon – hopefully next week. The publication date is 31st October. The running order below may change as may the cover image.

The price for pre-orders is $2 cheaper than the price will be once published – so well worth placing your order now!

The eighth issue of the popular magazine of historical fiction and alternate history contains six great new short stories, including two new stories in the Battalion 202 series and tales featuring the American Civil War, the First World War, Second World War alternate history and the Middle Ages.

Stories include:

  • Demons and the Deep Blue Sea by Andrew Knighton
  • Dewey Defeats Truman by Mark Devane
  • His Last Day by Richard Buxton
  • The Retreat Proceeded Orderly, at Least    by Kenan Orhan
  • The Fullness and the Hollowness by Jonathan Doering
  • Small Miracles by Jonathan Doering

Pre-order now via Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Barnes & Noble | Smashwords

Others to follow.

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