"We need a better story," Kolya said.
"What do these people know of geography? Do they even know what shape the world is?"
"Damned if I know."
Briskly Sable got to her knees and pulled aside a felt mat, exposing dusty earth. With a fingertip she began to sketch a rough map: Asia, Europe, India, Africa. She stabbed her finger into the heart of it. "We are here..."
Kolya remembered that the Mongols always oriented themselves to the south, while Sable's map had north at the top; with that simple inversion things became much clearer.
"Now," said Sable. "Here's the World Ocean." She dragged her fingers through the dust beyond the continents, making a ridged circle. "We come from far away—far beyond the World Ocean. We flew over it like birds, on our orange wings..." It wasn't quite true, but was close to the truth, and Yeh-lü seemed to accept it for now.
Basil said, "Yeh-lü is asking about the yam. He has ordered riders out along all the main routes. But some are broken. He says he knows the world has undergone a great disturbance. He wants to know what you understand about this strangeness, and what it means for the empire."
"We don't know," said Sable. "That's the truth. We are just as much victims of this as you are."
Yeh-lü seemed to accept this. He stood languidly, and spoke again.
Basil gasped with excitement. "The Emperor himself is impressed by your gift, the orange cloth, and wants to see you."
Sable's eyes hardened. "Now we're getting somewhere."
They stood, and a party quickly formed up, headed by Yeh-lü, with Sable, Kolya and Basil at the center, surrounded by a phalanx of tough-looking guards.
Kolya was rigid with fear. "Sable, we have to be careful. We're the Emperor's property, remember. He will speak only to members of his family, perhaps a few key aides like Yeh-lü. Everybody else just doesn't count."
"Yeah, yeah. Even so. We've done well, Kolya. Just a few days here and we've got this far already... Now we just have to figure the angles."
* * *
They were taken into a much grander chamber. The walls were hung with rich embroidery and tapestry, the floors covered with layers of rugs and carpets so thick they were soft to walk on. The place was crowded. Courtiers milled and beefy-looking soldiers stood around the walls, laden with weapons, glaring at the cosmonauts and everybody else—even each other. In one corner of the yurt an orchestra played softly, a harmony of lutes. All the instrumentalists were beautiful, all very young girls.
And yet for all its opulence this was still just a yurt, Kolya thought, and the prevailing stink, of greasy flesh and stale milk, was just as bad as in Scacatai's humble home. "Barbarians," he muttered. "They didn't know what towns and farms were for save as sources of booty. They plundered a world, but they still live like goatherds, their tents piled with treasures. And in our time their descendants will be the last nomads of all—still trapped by their barbaric roots—"
"Shut up," Sable hissed.
Following Yeh-lü, they walked slowly to the center of the yurt. Around the throne that was the focus of this wide space stood a number of smooth-faced young men. They looked similar: perhaps the Emperor's sons, Kolya thought. There were many women here, sitting before the throne. All were handsome, though some looked as old as sixty; the younger ones were quite stunningly beautiful. Wives, or concubines?
Yeh-lü stepped aside, and they stood before the Emperor.
He looked about sixty. Sitting on his ornately carved throne, he was not tall. But he was slim, upright; he looked very fit. His face was full, his features small—very Asiatic—with only a trace of grey in his hair and neatly groomed beard. He held a swatch of parachute cloth in his hand, and he regarded them steadily. Then he turned aside and muttered something to one of his advisors.
"He has eyes like a cat's," said Sable.
"Sable—you know who this is, don't you?"
"Of course." To his astonishment she grinned, more excited than fearful.
Genghis Khan watched them, his black eyes unreadable.
21. Return to Jamrud
AT DAWN BISESA WAS woken by the peals of trumpets. When she emerged from the tent, stretching, the world was suffused with blue-gray. All across the river delta the trumpet notes rose up with the smoke of the night's fires.
She really was in the camp of Alexander the Great; this was no dream—or nightmare. But mornings were the times she missed Myra the most, and she ached for her daughter, even in this astonishing place.
While the King and his advisors decided what to do, Bisesa, de Morgan and the others had spent the night at the Indus delta camp. The moderns were kept under guard, but they were given a tent of their own to sleep in. The tent itself was made of leather. Battered, scuffed, it stank, of horses, food, smoke, and the sweat of soldiers. But it was an officer's tent, and only Alexander and his generals had more luxurious accommodation. Besides, they were soldiers, and used to roughing it, all save Cecil de Morgan, and he had learned better than to complain.
De Morgan had been quiet all night, in fact, but his eyes were alive. Bisesa suspected he was calculating how much leverage he could apply in his new role as an irreplaceable interpreter. But he grumbled about the Macedonians' "barbaric" Greek accent. "They turn ch into g and th into d. When they say 'Philip' it sounds like 'Bilip'..."
As the day gathered, Eumenes, the Royal Secretary, sent a chamberlain to Bisesa's tent to communicate the King's decision. The bulk of the army would stay here for now, but a detachment of troops—a mere thousand!—would make their way up the Indus valley to Jamrud. Most of them would be Shield Bearers, the shock troops who were used on such ventures as night raids and forced marches—and who were entrusted with Alexander's own safety. The King himself was to make the journey, along with Eumenes and his favorite and lover, Hephaistion. Alexander was evidently intrigued by the prospect of seeing these soldiers from the future in their bastion.
Alexander's army, tempered by years of campaigning, was remarkably well disciplined, and it took only a couple of hours for the preparations to be completed, and the orders for the march to be sounded.
Infantrymen formed up with weapons and light packs on their backs. Each unit, called a dekas, although it typically contained sixteen men, had a servant and a pack animal to carry its gear. The animals were mostly mules, but there were a few foul-smelling camels. A couple hundred of Alexander's Macedonian cavalry would ride along with the infantry. Their horses were odd-looking little beasts; Bisesa's phone said they were probably of European or central Asian stock, and they looked clumsy to eyes used to Arabian breeds. The horses had only soft leather shoes and would surely have quickly been ruined by being over-ridden on rocky or broken ground. And they had no stirrups; these short, powerful-looking men gripped their horses' flanks hard with their legs and controlled their mounts with vicious-looking bits.
Bisesa and the British would travel with the Macedonian officers, who walked like their troops—as did even the King's companions and the generals. Only the King was forced by his injuries to ride, on a cart drawn by a team of horses. His personal physician, a Greek called Philip, rode with him.
But after they had set off Bisesa realized that the thousand troops, with their military gear, their servants, pack animals and officers, were only the core of the column. Trailing after them was a rabble of women and children, traders with laden carts, and even a couple of shepherds driving a flock of scrawny-looking sheep. After a couple of hours' marching, this ragged, uncoordinated train stretched back half a kilometer.
Hauling this army and its gear across the countryside involved an enormous amount of labor, unquestioned by everybody concerned. Still, once they had entered the rhythm of the march, the troopers, some of whom had already marched thousands of kilometers with Alexander, simply endured, setting one hardened foot before the other, as foot-slogging soldiers had always done. Marching was nothing new to Bisesa and the British troops either, and even de Morgan endured it in silence with a fortitude
and determination Bisesa grudgingly admired. Sometimes the Macedonians sang odd, wistful songs, in strange keys that sounded out of tune to Bisesa's modern ears. These people of the deep past still seemed so odd to her: short, squat, vivid, as if they belonged to a different species altogether.
When she got the chance, Bisesa studied the King.
Seated on a gloriously heavy-looking golden throne, being hauled across India by animal-power, Alexander was dressed in a girdle and striped tunic, with a golden diadem around the purple Macedonian hat on his head, and held a golden scepter. There wasn't much of the Greek to be seen about Alexander. Perhaps his adoption of Persian ways was more than just diplomatic; perhaps he had been seduced by the grandeur and wealth of that empire.
As he traveled his tame prophet Aristander sat at his side, a bearded old man in a grimy white tunic and with sharp, calculating eyes. Bisesa speculated that this hand-waver might be concerned about the impact of people from the future on his position as the King's official seer. Meanwhile the Persian eunuch called Bagoas leaned nonchalantly against the back of the throne. He was a pretty, heavily made-up young man in a kind of diaphanous toga, who from time to time stroked the back of the King's head. Bisesa was amused by the weary glares Hephaistion shot at this creature.
Alexander, though, slumped on his throne. It hadn't been hard for Bisesa to figure out, with the help of the phone, just when in his career she had encountered him. So she knew he was thirty-two, and though his body was powerful, he looked exhausted. After years of campaigning, in which he led his men into the thick of it with a self-sacrificing bravery that must have sometimes bordered on folly, Alexander bore the results of several major injuries. He even seemed to have difficulty breathing, and when he stood it was only through extraordinary willpower.
It was strange to think that this still-young man had already come to rule more than two million square kilometers, and that history was a matter of his whim—and stranger yet to remember that in the timeline of Earth his campaign had already passed its high-water mark. His death would have been only months away, and the proud, loyal officers who followed him now would have begun the process of tearing apart Alexander's domains. Bisesa wondered what new destiny awaited him now.
In the middle of the afternoon the march broke, and the traveling army quickly organized itself into a suburb of the sprawling tent city of the Indus delta.
Cooking, it seemed, was a slow and complicated process, and it took some time before the fires were lit, the cauldrons and pots bubbling. But in the meantime there was plenty of drinking, music, dancing, even impromptu theatrical performances. Traders set up their stalls, and a few prostitutes shimmered through the camp before disappearing into the soldiers' tents. Most of the women here, though, were the wives or mistresses of the soldiers. As well as Indians, there were Macedonians, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians—even a few exotic souls whose origin Bisesa barely knew, like Scythians and Bactrians. Many of them had children, some as old as five or six, their complexions and hair colors betraying their complicated origins, and the camp was filled with the incongruous noise of wailing babies.
In the night Bisesa lay in her tent trying to sleep, listening to the crying of babies, the laughing of lovers, and the mournful, drunken wailing of homesick Macedonians. Bisesa had been trained for missions where you were flown in over a few hours, and that usually didn't last more than a day away from base. But Alexander's soldiers had walked out of Macedonia and across Eurasia, traveling as far as the North-West Frontier. She tried to imagine how it must have been to have followed Alexander for years, to have walked to places so remote and unexplored that his city-army might as well have been campaigning on the Moon.
* * *
After a few days of the march, there were complaints of peculiar sicknesses among the Macedonians and their followers. These infections hit hard, and there were some deaths, but the crude field medicine of Bisesa and the British was able to diagnose them and to some extent treat them. It was obvious to Bisesa that the British, and she, had brought bugs from the future to which the Macedonians had no immunity: the Macedonians had been subject to many novel plagues during their odyssey, but the far future was a place even they hadn't breached. It was probably lucky for all concerned that these infections quickly died out. There was no sign of reverse infections, of the British by bugs carried by the Macedonians; Bisesa imagined an epidemiologist could work up an academic paper about that chronological asymmetry.
Day by day the march went on. Guided by Alexander's own scouts, and the careful surveys he had had made of the Indus valley, they followed a different route back to Jamrud than that taken by Bisesa on the way down.
One day, no more than a couple of days out of Jamrud, they came to a city that none of them recognized. The march halted, and Alexander sent a party of scouts to investigate, accompanied by Bisesa and some of the British.
The city was well laid out. About the size of a large shopping mall, it was based on two earth mounds, each walled by massive ramparts of hard-baked mud brick. It was a well-planned place, with broad, straight avenues set out according to a grid system, and it looked to have been recently inhabited. But when the scouts passed cautiously through its gates, they found nobody within, no people at all.
It wasn't old enough to be a ruin; it was too well preserved for that. Such features as wooden roofs were still intact. But the abandonment was not recent. The few remaining bits of furniture and pottery were broken, if any food had been left behind the birds and dogs had long taken it away, and everything was covered by rust-brown, drifting dust.
De Morgan pointed out a complicated system of sewers and wells. "We'll have to tell Kipling," he said with dry humor. "A big fan of sewers, is Ruddy. The mark of civilization, he says."
The ground was heavily trampled and rutted. When Bisesa dug her hand into the dust she found it was full of flotsam: bits of broken pottery, terra-cotta bangles, clay marbles, figurine fragments, bits of metal that looked like a trader's weights, tablets inscribed in a script unknown to her. Every square centimeter of the ground seemed to have been heavily trodden, and she walked on layers of detritus, the detritus of centuries. This place must be old, a relic of a time deeper than the British, deeper even than Alexander's foray, old enough to have been covered by the drifting dirt by her own day. It was a reminder that this bit of the world had been inhabited, indeed civilized, for a long, long time—and that the depths of time, dredged by the Discontinuity, contained many unknowns.
But the town had been emptied out, as if the population had just packed up and marched away across the stony plain. Eumenes wondered if the rivers had changed their courses because of the Discontinuity, and the people had gone in search of water. But the abandonment looked too far in the past for that.
No answers were forthcoming. The soldiers, Macedonian and British alike, were spooked by the empty, echoing place, this Marie Celeste of a town. They didn't even stay the night before moving on.
* * *
After several days' march, Alexander's train arrived at Jamrud, to astonishment and consternation on all sides.
Still on crutches, Casey hobbled out to meet Bisesa and embraced her. "I wouldn't have believed it. And Jeez, the stink."
She grinned. "That's what a fortnight eating curry under a leather tent does for you. Strange—Jamrud seems almost like home to me now, Rudyard Kipling and all."
Casey grunted. "Well, something tells me it's all the home you and I are going to have for a while, for I don't see any sign of a way back yet. Come on up to the fort. Guess what Abdikadir managed to set up? A shower. Goes to show heathens have their uses—the smart ones anyhow..."
At the fort Abdikadir, Ruddy and Josh crowded around her, eager for her impressions. Josh was predictably glad to see her, his small face creased by smiles. She was pleased to get back to his bright, awkward company.
He asked, "What do you think of our new friend Alexander?"
Bisesa said heavily, "We have to live with
him. His forces outnumber ours—I mean, Captain Grove's—by maybe a hundred to one. I think for now that Alexander is the only show in town."
"And," said Ruddy silkily, "Bisesa undoubtedly thinks that Alexander is a fine fellow for his limpid eyes and his shining hair that spills over his shoulders—"
Josh blushed furiously.
Ruddy said, "What about you, Abdi? It's not everybody who gets to confront such a deep family legend."
Abdikadir smiled, and ran his hand over his blond hair. "Maybe I'll get to shoot my great-to-the-nth grandfather and prove all those paradoxes wrong after all..." But he wanted to get down to business. He was keen to show Bisesa something—and not just his patent shower. "I took a trip back to the bit of the twenty-first century that brought us here, Bisesa. There was a cave I wanted to check out..."
He led her to a storeroom in the fort. He held up a gun, a big rifle. It had been wrapped in dirty rags, but its metal gleamed with oil. "There was an intelligence report that this stuff was here," he said. "It was one of the objectives for our mission in the Bird that day." There were flashbang grenades, a few old Soviet-era grenades. He bent and picked one up; it was like a soup can mounted on a stick. "Not much of a stash, but here it is."
Josh touched the barrel of the gun cautiously. "I've never seen such a weapon."
"It's a Kalashnikov. An antique in my day—a weapon left over from the Soviet invasion, which is to say maybe fifty years before our time. Still works fine, I should imagine. The hill fighters always loved their Kalashnikovs. Nothing so reliable. You don't even have to clean it, which many of those boys never bothered to do."
"Twenty-first-century killing machines," Ruddy said uneasily. "Remarkable."
"The question is," Bisesa said, "what to do with this stuff. Could we justify using twenty-first century guns against, say, an Iron Age army—no matter what the odds?"
Time's Eye Page 16
