Empire of Lies

77

Kamal stood outside the museum, unable to move. The beauty of the building was doing nothing to calm his nervousness about the emotions that entering might stir.

The kebab chef had told him that the museum held large displays devoted to the wars against the Ottomans. Of those, the siege of 1683 was the most renowned. He even said that there was so much on display that viewing it almost felt like being there, a comment Kamal had to resist rebutting, even if he could summon up the detachment to do it playfully.

The memories had nothing playful about them.

He watched as throngs of tourists stepped off buses and made their way to the entrance. Taking a deep breath, he finally pushed ahead and strode through the open gates.

The museum was a nineteenth-century building, built in a grand, neo-Byzantine style with a distinctly oriental flavor. Its two-tone brick façade was decorated with geometric terracotta ornaments and was topped by a crown of stone crenellations peppered with turrets. Three majestic arches led inside.

He had difficulty understanding what the cashier was saying. She eventually pointed at the price on a pamphlet, and he paid for an entrance ticket with six of the euro coins he had taken from the church. She asked where he was from, to which he replied, “Turkey.” The cashier pointed him to an adjacent counter and said something to the woman looking after it. He stepped across, and the woman handed him a curious kit comprised of a small electronic box with a lanyard clipped onto it and a cable that led to a set of earphones. After a bit of give-and-take, Kamal finally understood what she was giving him: it was an audio guide to the museum, and she had selected Turkish on it.

He put the earphones on and pressed the play button.

Curiously, it seemed to come alive at specific times, referring to whatever exhibit he was standing in front of, the first of which was the Feldherrnhalle—the hall of fame.

The space was magnificent, a forest of gloriously decorated columns arrayed in clusters of four that soared to a series of gilded rib vaults. Four life-sized marble statues nestled around each set of columns, fifty-six in all, depicting almost a millennium’s worth of Austria’s most famous warlords and military heroes, their names carved into plates mounted above each statue.

It was there that Kamal got his first jolt.

For there, perched on his podium and staring down at him, was Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg.

The statue was remarkably lifelike. Better than lifelike, for it depicted a healthy Starhemberg, not the dysentery-racked and injured survivor Kamal had met during the siege.

Kamal stood there, unable to look away as a horde of images and sensations stampeded through him. He edged right up to the statue, hesitantly, as if scared that he might somehow wake Starhemberg up. Seeing the statue took him right back to that fraught meeting in the debris-strewn room. It also reignited painful memories of Nisreen, not alive and vibrant, but dead in Rasheed’s wretched tent.

When he was finally able to tear himself away, he recognized another of the men immortalized in marble. The man, then much younger, had been at the meeting with Sobieski outside Tulln. The audio guide told him he was Prince Eugene of Savoy, who, after playing a supporting role in liberating Vienna, Kamal learned, had gone on to become one of Austria’s most celebrated war heroes.

Kamal left the hall of fame and ventured deeper into the museum. As the chef had told him, the halls devoted to the Ottoman campaigns were substantial. Huge arrays of weapons were on display, from recurve bows to all kinds of swords to muskets, cannon, and mortars. One hall contained a vast collection of suits of armor and helmets alongside statues of musketeers and pikemen that were eerily lifelike. There was even a great tent on show, one of the Ottoman dignitaries’ given its richly detailed fabric; next to it, a display case housed the captured horsetails of the enemy’s commanders.

Walking through the halls, Kamal learned that there had been many further wars against the Ottomans after the rescue of Vienna: Zenta in 1697, Peterwardein in 1716, Belgrade in 1717. The Turks had been pushed all the way back to Constantinople, but the great Byzantine capital had never even come close to being liberated.

The scale of it all, however, was unsettling. There were still many halls to explore, but he’d finished walking through the ones devoted to the Ottoman wars. What else was there?

A feeling of deep unease rose inside him.

The first jolt happened when he stopped in front of a curious exhibit, one that seemed out of place in a museum of military history. It was a classic car, a huge black convertible limo, very old, even older than the cars he’d seen in Paris on that first fateful jump he did with Nisreen.

He stepped closer to allow the audio guide to explain.

He learned that it was a Gräf & Stift automobile that Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been traveling in when he was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914.

The guide then went on to explain that this was the event that triggered the outbreak of the First World War.

A bolt of dread shot through him.

World war?

The first world war?

Meaning there were others?

His veins throbbing, he sat patiently through the guide’s entire presentation, his heart sinking with each word. When it was over, he staggered into the next room, which only made things worse. It chronicled, in unflinching, gory detail, the fall of the Habsburg monarchy and the First World War.

The next hall was even worse.

It was an entire wing dedicated to the Anschluss and the rise of the Nazis.

It wasn’t the displays of weapons that shocked him, not the huge siege howitzers or the tanks from different nations displayed in the Panzergarten outside the museum. It was the unending collection of dizzying films and photographs displayed on flat screens.

Kamal felt as if he’d been pummeled.

He left the museum in a daze and walked around, unsure about what to do. All he knew was that he needed to know more.

Once he did, he regretted it.

He managed to find an internet café and began catching up on what had happened in the intervening centuries—no easy task, since he discovered that the Turkish language was no longer written using the Turko-Persian script he had always used. It was now written in Latin script. But once he found the right website, the information was debilitating.

There had been many, many wars in the years since Vienna had been saved. Wars that hadn’t happened in his world, after the Ottoman conquest of Europe.

There had been countless conflicts pitting one European nation against another. There had been bloody revolutions in many countries, notably in France, America, and, most disastrously, Russia. The subsequent rise of communism had brought on a whole new onslaught of death and suffering. In Ukraine alone, four million people had died in the early 1930s as a result of Stalin’s campaign to crush its people’s nationalist aspirations. Deaths under communism were even higher in China and Cambodia.

The Great Terror and the purges. Two world wars. The Holocaust. The Armenian genocide. Vietnam. Nuclear bombs—he had to look up what they were—in Japan.

He felt numb as the number of deaths just kept rising. How many had died since he buried Nisreen? Fifty million? A hundred million? More?

It was staggering, and it left Kamal almost unable to breathe.

He reeled with regret and a hollowness that wanted to suck him into it and wipe him off the face of the earth.

One question battered him repeatedly: Had he made a gargantuan and unspeakably tragic mistake?

He knew the Ottoman campaign to conquer Europe hadn’t been without bloodshed. Many had died as the sultan’s army had swept across the continent. The war with Russia decades later had also been bloody, and everyone knew that a war with the Americans, especially given the sparring over energy, was certainly a possibility. But it didn’t lessen the sense of horror Kamal felt at what had befallen the planet in this timeline, after the Ottomans had failed to take Vienna.

And it was all his fault.