Chapter 62: The Americas
My mind reeled. The discrepancy was a dizzying, impossible conundrum. How could a world have steam engines and printing presses—the fruits of an industrial revolution—yet a political map that belonged to the 15th century? Granada still stood, Castile and Aragon were not yet united, and the nation of Spain itself didn't even exist. How was this possible?
And then it hit me, a sudden, chilling thought that made the hairs on my arms stand up. The Baron's proclamation. The crier's bellow. The Iberian Empire. I remembered the first map in the atlas, the one that showed the entire peninsula as a single, uniform yellow… Wait. Had the peninsula already been unified under a single banner? Was that the meaning of it? Were the four kingdoms—Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and even the Moorish kingdom of Granada—all just subordinate states, fiefdoms of this so-called Iberian Empire? I vaguely recalled a brief period in my own world's history where Spain and Portugal had been united under a single monarch, Philip II. But this… this was different. A unified empire that included a Moorish kingdom? It seemed impossible. Was it just propaganda? A cartographer's lie, meant to project an image of unity that didn't exist in reality?
“Brother Jared,” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady, “do you know who the King is?”
“The Queen, you mean,” he corrected. “Everyone knows her. They mention her at the end of every proclamation. Queen Isabella the Fifth. They say she’s a great beauty.”
Isabella the Fifth? Another name I didn't know. Another piece that didn't fit. “And the Emperor?” I pressed. “If it’s an empire, there must be an emperor.”
“Him too,” Jared said, nodding. “The crier mentions him when it’s a big decree, from the capital. I think his name is Philip the Twelfth.” The Twelfth? The names were ghosts, echoes of a history that had never happened in my world. Every new piece of information only served to deepen the mystery, to push my old world further and further away. And besides, Jared’s knowledge was all secondhand, scraps of information overheard in the street. I couldn't be sure of its accuracy. I had to rely on the atlas.
I turned the page. Africa. It was a chaotic patchwork of colours, a mess of small, warring states. I recognized none of the names, and I knew Jared wouldn't either. But the broader strokes were familiar. A vast swathe of North Africa was coloured a pale blue, the colour of the Frankish Empire. And the southern tip of the continent was a familiar crimson: a British colony.
The heart of the continent was a chaotic patchwork of unnamed territories, a cartographer's nightmare, but dotted across it were small, ominous red flags. Warnings? Unexplored territories? Zones of plague or sorcery? The map offered no answers. That was all I could glean. I turned the page again. The Americas. So, the New World had been discovered. In my world, it was Castile, under Isabella I, that had sponsored Columbus's voyage. But the map before me was wrong. The United States, the nation that should have dominated the northern continent, did not exist. Instead, the land was carved up into a patchwork of colonies, their colours a familiar, unsettling sight. There was a large blue territory belonging to the Franks, a smaller red one to the British, and… my blood ran cold. A vast swathe of land, where the United States should have been, stretching across the heart of the continent, was coloured a familiar, sickly imperial yellow. And its label was a single, chilling, impossible word: Iberia.
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