Chapter 61: A Different History
With this atlas, I finally held a key. A key to understanding the shape of this new reality. But the names, the labels, were still a meaningless scrawl to me. I could only rely on my old world knowledge of geography to make sense of it all, and the political borders were so wrong, so fundamentally different, that it made my head spin. And that was just the first page, which showed the world as the great empires wished it to be—vast, unified swathes of color. But the next page told a more complicated story, a fractured reality of competing kingdoms. The Iberian Peninsula, which had been a single, uniform yellow, was now divided into four distinct realms. The pale yellow territory, I guessed, was my own current location: the Kingdom of Castile. Though the letters were stylized, written in a heavy, gothic script, I could just make out the word: Castilla. The spelling was slightly different, a quirk of this world's language or perhaps just an older form, but it was unmistakable. The other three kingdoms… the one to the west, a strange, garish purple, had to be Portugal. And the one to the east… after a moment of study, I deciphered the name. Aragon.
“Have you ever heard of Aragon?” I asked Jared. “The Kingdom of Aragon?”
“Of course,” he said. “I’ve heard the merchants talk of it. Goods from Aragon, they say. Don’t know where it is, though.” He’d heard of it, but didn’t know where it was.
I pointed to the eastern part of the map. “It’s here,” I said. “And we are here. And this, to the west, is Portugal.”
“You know so much, Parula,” he said, a note of awe in his voice. “I’ve never heard of Portugal. But I have heard of Portuguesa. The Queen’s husband, they say he’s the king of that land.” He had pronounced the name in its native form, a name that matched the script on the map. And a flicker of Parula’s memory confirmed it; she had heard the word before. It was a constant, frustrating puzzle. My knowledge was a powerful tool, but it was also a flawed one, its edges blunted by the subtle, maddening drift of a divergent history.
There was one last territory on the map, a swathe of green across the southern coast. I didn't recognize the name. But if I could sound it out, perhaps Jared would know it. “Gra… na… da?” I said, trying my best to approximate the pronunciation from the strange script. “Granada. Have you heard of it?”
“Aye, I’ve heard of it,” he said, and his face darkened, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “The priests talk of it all the time. They say it's a heathen land, a savage place. Full of Moors. They say we should never go to Granada.”
I understood. A Moorish kingdom. A kingdom of the crescent moon, still holding on in the south of Spain. The words hit me with a sense of historical vertigo. In my world’s history, the Reconquista, the great crusade to drive the Moors from Iberia, was ancient history, completed long before the age of exploration, let alone the industrial revolution. By the time of steam and iron, Castile and Aragon should have been united, should have been a single, powerful nation called Spain. But here, in this twisted reflection of my world, the crusade had failed, or had never been completed. The Moors remained. The timeline was shattered. History itself was broken, and I was a ghost living in its ruins.
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