Every three days or so the ships had to put into shore for provisioning. The shore-based troops were expected to live off the land, providing for themselves and for the crews and passengers of the ships. That became increasingly difficult away from the Indus delta, as the land grew more barren.
So the sailors would vary their rations with the contents of tidal pools: razor clams, oysters and sometimes mussels. Once, as Bisesa took part in one of these enjoyable scavenging expeditions, a whale broke the surface of the water, its blowhole plume erupting perilously close to some of the anchored ships. At first the Macedonians were terrified, though the Indians laughed. A troop of foot soldiers ran into the sea, yelling and hammering at the water with their shields and spears and the flats of their swords. The next time the whale surfaced it was a hundred meters further away from shore, and it was not seen again.
Where the army passed, its scouts surveyed the land and made maps, as Alexander’s army had always done. Mapmaking had also been a crucial tool for the British in establishing and holding their own empire, and now the Greek and Macedonian scouts were joined by British cartographers armed with theodolites. Everywhere they went they drew new maps and compared them with the old, from before the Discontinuity.
They encountered few people, however.
Once the army scouts found a crowd of around a hundred, men, women and children, they said, dressed in strange, bright clothes that were nevertheless falling to rags. They were dying of thirst, and they spoke in a tongue none of the Macedonians could recognize. None of the British or Bisesa’s party got a firsthand glimpse of this crowd. Abdikadir speculated that they could have come from a hotel from the twentieth or even twenty-first centuries. Cut off when their home vanished into the corridors of time, left to wander, such refugees were like negative-image ruins, Bisesa thought. In a normally flowing history the people would vanish and leave their city slowly to decay into the sand; here it was the other way round … Alexander’s troops, ordered to protect the baggage train, had killed a couple of refugees as an example, and driven the rest off.
If people were rare, the Eyes were a continual presence. As they worked along the coast, they found Eyes hovering like lamps along the shoreline, one every few kilometers, and in a loose array covering the interior.
Most people ignored them, but Bisesa remained queasily fascinated by the Eyes. If an Eye had popped into existence in the old world—if it had come to hover over that old favorite of UFO dreamers, the White House lawn—it would have been an extraordinary event, the sensation of the century. But most people didn’t even want to talk about it. Eumenes was a notable exception; he would stare at the Eyes, hands on hips, as if challenging them to respond.
***
Despite the attrition of the march, Ruddy’s spirits seemed to rise as the days passed. He wrote when he could, in a tiny, crabbed, paper-preserving hand. And he speculated on the state of the world, expounding to whoever would listen.
“We should not stop at Babylon,” he said. He, Bisesa, Abdikadir, Josh, Casey and Cecil de Morgan were sitting under the awning of an officers’ ship; the rain rattled on the awning, and hissed on the surface of the sea. “We should go on—explore Judea, for example. Think about it, Bisesa! The ethereal eye of your space boat could make out only scattered settlements there, a few threads of smoke. What if, in one of those mean huts, even now the Nazarene is taking His first lusty breath? Why, we would be like ten thousand magi, following a strange star.”
“And then there is Mecca,” Abdikadir said dryly.
Ruddy spread his hands expansively. “Let’s be ecumenical about it!”
Bisesa asked, “So, after your complicated origins, you’ve ended up a Christian, Ruddy?”
He stroked his mustache. “Put it this way. Believe in God. Not sure about the Trinity. Can’t accept eternal damnation—but there must be some retribution.” He smiled. “I sound like a Methodist! My father would be pleased. Anyhow I’d be delighted to meet the chap who started it all.”
But Josh said, “Be careful what you wish for, Ruddy. This is not some vast museum through which we travel. Perhaps you would find Christ in Judea. But what if not? It’s unlikely after all—in fact it’s far more likely that all of the Judea we find here has been ripped out of a time before Christ’s birth.”
“I was born after the Incarnation,” Ruddy said firmly. “There is no doubt about that. And if I could summon up one grandfather after another in a great chain of predecessors I could have them attest to that fact.”
“Yes,” said Josh. “But you are not in the history of your grandfathers any more, Ruddy. What if there has been no Incarnation here? Then you are a saved man in a pagan world. Are you Virgil, or Dante?”
“I—ah.” Ruddy fell silent, his broad brow furrowed. “It would take a better theologian than I to puzzle that out. Let’s add it to the itinerary—we must seek Augustine, or Aquinas, and ask them what they think. And what about you, Abdikadir? What if there is no Mecca—what if Muhammad has yet to be born?”
Abdikadir said, “Islam is not time-bound, as Christianity is. Tawhid, unicity, remains true: on Mir as on Earth, in the past as in the future, there is no god but God, and every particle of the universe, every leaf on every tree, is an expression of His immanence. And the Quran is the unmediated word of God, in this world as in any other, whether His prophet exists here to speak it or not.”
Josh nodded. “It’s a comforting point of view.”
“As salaam alaikum,”said Abdikadir.
“Anyhow it may be even more complicated than that,” Bisesa said. “Mir didn’t come from one time-frame, remember. It is a patchwork, and that surely applies in Mecca and Judea. Perhaps there are bits of Judea dating from before Christ’s birth—but bits later, where He once walked. So does the Incarnation apply to this universe, or not?”
Ruddy said, “How strange it is! We are each granted twenty-five thousand days of our lives, say. Is it possible that we too are fragmented—that each day has been cut out of our lives like a square from a quilt?” He waved a hand at the ash-gray sky. “Is it possible there are twenty-five thousand other Ruddys out there somewhere, each picking up his life where he can?”
“One of you mouthy assholes is enough for me,” Casey growled, his first contribution to the debate, and he took a pull from his skin of watered-down wine.
Cecil de Morgan listened to such talk, mostly silently. Bisesa knew he had formed a loose alliance with Alexander’s Greek Secretary, Eumenes, and de Morgan reported back such speculations to his new partner. They were both in it for themselves, of course: Eumenes’ priority was his own jostling with Alexander’s other courtiers, notably Hephaistion; and Cecil was, as always, playing both ends against the middle. But everybody knew that. And Bisesa saw no harm in information flowing through Cecil to Eumenes. They were all in this together, after all.
The fleet sailed on.
26. The Temple
When Mongols broke camp, the first task was to round up horses.
Mongol horses lived semiwild, in herds that were allowed to roam around the plains until needed. There had been some concern that the time slips might have magicked away many of the herds Genghis Khan’s plans relied on, but riders were sent out into the field to bring them in, and after a day great clouds of horses came thundering across the plain toward the metropolis of yurts. The men closed around the horses brandishing long poles with lassos on the end. As if they knew that a march of thousands of kilometers lay ahead of them, the horses bucked and darted defiantly. But once bound, they allowed themselves to be led away stoically.
Kolya thought it was typical of the Mongols’ whole uncivilized enterprise that even the greatest campaign should have to start with a rodeo.
After the spectacle of the roundup, the preparations for the march were rapid. Most of the yurts were collapsed and loaded onto carts or baggage animals, but some of the larger tents, including those that had made up Genghis’s pavilion, were loaded onto broad-based ca
rts drawn by teams of oxen. Even the Soyuz capsule was to be dragged along. It had been brought here at Genghis’s orders from the village of Scacatai; Kolya understood that a siege engine had been adapted to lift it. Sitting on a heavy-duty cart, strapped on by horsehair ropes, it looked like a metal yurt itself.
For his march on Babylon Kolya estimated that Genghis Khan would be accompanied by around twenty thousand warriors—most of them cavalrymen, and each of these accompanied by at least one attendant, and two or three spare horses. Genghis organized his traveling force into three divisions: armies of the left wing, and of the right, and of the center. The center, commanded by Genghis Khan himself, included the elite imperial guard, including Genghis’s own thousand-strong bodyguard. Sable and Kolya would travel with the center, in the retinue of Yeh-lü.
Some forces were left behind to garrison Mongolia itself, and to continue the task of piecing together what had become of the empire. The garrison would be left under the command of one of Genghis Khan’s sons, Tolui. Genghis Khan was not significantly weakened by leaving Tolui behind. As well as his chancellor Yeh-lü he had with him another son, , and his general Subedei. Considering that was the man who would have succeeded Genghis Khan in the old timeline, and that Subedei was perhaps Genghis’s most able general—the man who would have masterminded the invasion of Europe after Genghis’s death—it was a formidable team indeed.
Kolya witnessed the moment when Genghis Khan took leave of his son. Genghis drew Tolui’s face to his own with his two hands and touched his lips to one of Tolui’s cheeks, inhaling deeply. Sable dismissed it as an “Iron Age air-kiss.” But Kolya was oddly moved.
At last Genghis’s standard was raised, and with a clamor of shouts, trumpets and drums, the force set off, followed by long baggage trains. The three columns, under the command of Genghis, and Sabutai, were to travel independently, perhaps diverging hundreds of kilometers from each other, but they would keep in touch daily, through fast riders, trumpet blasts and smoke signals. Soon the great clouds of kicked-up dust were separating across the plains of Mongolia, and by the second day the forces were out of each other’s sight.
***
Traveling west from the region of Genghis Khan’s birthplace, they followed a tributary of the Onon river through a country of rich meadows. Kolya rode in a cart with Sable, Basil and other subdued-looking foreign traders, and some of Yeh-lü’s staff. After the first couple of days, they entered a country of gloomy, somewhat sinister forests, broken by boggy valleys that were frequently difficult to ford. The skies remained leaden, and the rain beat down. Kolya felt oppressed in this dismal, gloomy place. He warned Yeh-lü about acid rain, and the administrator passed on orders that the soldiers should ride with their caps on and collars raised on their coats.
Genghis’s troops were no more hygienic than the common Mongols. But they took pride in their appearance. They rode on saddles high at the back and front, with solid stirrups. They wore conical felt caps, lined with fur from fox, wolf or even lynx, and long robe-like coats that opened from top to bottom. The Mongols had worn such garments since time immemorial, but these were a wealthy people now, and some of the officers wore coats embroidered with silk or gold thread, and silken underwear from China. But even Genghis’s generals would wipe their mouths on their sleeves, and their hands on their trousers.
The Mongols’ field craft was slick and practiced—but then it was the product of centuries of tradition. The march was broken each night, and rations distributed: dried milk curd, millet meal, kumis, an alcoholic drink made from fermented milk curd, and cured meat. In the morning a rider would put a bit of dried curd and water into a leather bag, and the shaking as he rode along would soon turn it into a kind of yogurt, consumed with great relish and much belching. Kolya envied the Mongols’ skills: how they made rawhide from cow skin, even how they used a distillate of human urine as a purgative when one man had a fever.
Genghis’s army moved efficiently, and orders and changes of plan were transmitted rapidly and without confusion. The army was rigidly governed by a hierarchy based on rules of ten. That way, the chain of command was simplified, with each officer having no more than ten subordinates. The Mongols empowered their local commanders as much as possible, which enhanced the army’s flexibility and responsiveness. And Genghis made sure that all units of his army, down to the poorest platoon, was made up of a mix of nationalities, clans and tribes. He wanted nobody to have any loyalty, save to the Khan himself. It was, Kolya thought, a remarkably modern way of structuring an army: no wonder these Mongols had overwhelmed the ragbag forces of medieval Europe. But the system relied heavily on efficient and loyal staff. The officer corps was ruthlessly weeded out in training, through such tests as the battue— and, of course, in battle.
After a few days, still deep in the heart of Mongolia, the army crossed a grassy plain toward Karakorum. This city had once been the power center of the Uighurs, and Genghis Khan had established it as his own permanent seat of power. But even from a distance Kolya could see the city’s walls were ruined. Inside the walls a few abandoned temples huddled in one corner, but the rest of the city had been conquered by the eternal grass.
Genghis Khan himself, accompanied by burly guards, stalked with around this place. To Genghis it was only a few years since he had established the city, and now here it was, eroded to rubble. Kolya saw him return to his traveling yurt, his face like thunder, as if he was angry with the very gods who would make such a mockery of his ambitions.
***
In the days that followed the army passed through the valley of the Orkhon river, an immense walled plain bounded to the east by blue mountains. It was almost like a Martian vallis, Kolya thought idly. The earth here was gray and flaking, the river languid. Sometimes they had to ford tributaries and river channels. At night they camped on islands of bare mud, and made huge aromatic fires of dead willow wood.
They crossed one last river, and the country began to rise. Sable said they were leaving the modern Mongolian province of Arhangay, and crossing the Hangay massif. Behind Kolya, the country folded up into a complex patchwork of forests and valleys, but beyond the massif he could see a more elemental landscape of yellow grassland stretching away.
At the massif’s broad summit there were many small ridges and folds, littered by shattered pebbles, as if many time slices had crisscrossed. But a cairn stood here, a heap of stones that had somehow survived the time shocks. As the army passed each man added a pebble or rock to the cairn. Kolya saw that by the time they had all gone by it would be a mighty mound.
They descended at last to the steppe. The massif receded over the horizon, leaving nothing but flatness, and they walked across a treeless plain where the long grass rippled around the horses like parting water. As the world opened up around him, the immense scale of central Asia at last diminishing even Genghis Khan and his ambitions, Kolya felt a huge relief.
But they encountered no people. In this huge place there could sometimes be seen the circular shadows of yurts, the scars of fires, the ghosts of small villages packed up and moved on to another pasture. The steppe was timeless, people always lived here much the same way, and these scars could have been made by Huns, Mongols or even Soviet-era Communists—and those who left these shadows might have walked across the plain and into another time entirely. Maybe, Kolya thought, when the last shreds of civilization wore away, when the Earth was forgotten and nothing was left but Mir, they would all become nomads, drawn into this great pit of human destiny.
But no people. Sometimes Genghis would send out search parties, but nobody was found.
Then, lost in the middle of the steppe, the scouts unexpectedly came upon a temple.
***
A party was sent ahead to investigate. Yeh-lü included Kolya and Sable, hoping that their perspective might be of use.
The temple was a small, boxlike building with tall doors, ornately carved and decorated with lion-head knockers. Out front was a porch framed by lacquere
d pillars, and the beams at the top were decorated by gold skulls. Kolya, Sable and some of the Mongols stepped cautiously inside. On low tables manuscript rolls had been set out amid the debris of a meal. The walls were wooden, the air full of strong incense, and the feeling of enclosure was powerful.
Kolya found himself whispering. “Buddhists, you think?”
Sable had no qualms about raising her voice. “Yes. And at least some of them are still around. No telling when this place is from. Buddhists are as timeless as nomads.”
“Not quite,” Kolya said grimly. “The Soviets tried to purge Mongolia of the temples. This place must predate the twentieth century …”
Two figures came shuffling forward from the shadows at the back of the temple. The Mongol soldiers drew their daggers, to be stopped by a sharp word from Yeh-lü’s advisor.
At first Kolya thought they were two children, they seemed so similar in size and build. But as they came into the light he saw that one of them was indeed a child, but the other an old man. The old one, evidently a lama, wore a red satin robe and slippers, and he carried a string of amber prayer beads. He was astonishingly thin, his wrists protruding from his sleeves like the bones of a bird. The child was a boy, no older than ten, as tall as the old one, and nearly as skinny. He wore some kind of red robe too—but on his feet were sneakers, Kolya noted with a start. The lama had one skinny arm wrapped around the boy, but the lama was so frail his weight could have been no burden even to a child.
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