Orion o-1

by Ben Bova

  We were stopped at the entrance to the tent, where two of the biggest guards I had seen searched me swiftly and perfunctorily for weapons. These men were almost my height, but were still as lean and wiry as the other Mongols. Men who live in the saddle and cross deserts and mountains on their way to battle do not have the time to get fat.

  Finally I was ushered inside the tent. I had expected oriental splendor, fine silks and Persian carpets, wine goblets of gold encrusted with jewels, and beautiful slave girls dancing for the conqueror of the world. Strangely, the Orkhon’ was indeed sitting on a magnificent carpet. The tent was hung with silks and brocades. The men gathered there were drinking from goblets heavy with precious stones. Four women sat at the left of the Orkhon, each of them young and slim and, I suppose, beautiful in the eyes of the Mongols. But the impression that all this gave me was not one of sybaritic magnificence; the tent had the look of pragmatic utility to it. The carpets and hangings kept out the cold. The golden cups the men drank from were booty from their battles; it seemed to me that they were just as accustomed to drinking from leather canteens. The women — well, they too were the spoils of battle.

  There was no air of decadence about the Orkhon’s court. These were warriors, temporarily at rest. They had sacked and burned a city this day; tomorrow they would be on the march again, heading for the next city.

  “You are called Orion?” said a tall, slim Oriental who stood at the Orkhon’s right hand. He looked more Chinese than Mongol, and he wore a silk robe that covered him from neck to foot.

  The officer at my side gave me a slight nudge. I took a step forward. “I am Orion,” I said.

  “Come forward so that my lord Hulagu may see thee more closely.”

  I walked slowly toward the Orkhon, who sat calmly on the silks and cushions that were his by right of conquest. He was a small man, even shorter than most of the others. His long hair was still jet black, and his body was just as slim and hard as any warrior’s. I judged him to be no more than thirty-five years old. His face was utterly impassive, expressionless, his eyes fixed on me as I approached.

  The Chinese raised one hand slightly and I stopped.

  “You are an emissary from the West?” he asked, his voice still slightly sing-song, even though he spoke in the Mongol language.

  “That is true,” I answered.

  “From where in the West?” asked the Mongol seated next to the Orkhon. He was older, graying, but even sitting upon the silken cushions, he vibrated eagerness and restless energy.

  “From far beyond the western mountains,” I said, “and beyond the seas that are beyond the mountains.”

  “From the land where the earth is black and crops grow as thick as the hairs of your head?” he asked, his eyes gleaming.

  I guessed that he meant the Ukraine, the black-earth granary of what would someday be Russia.

  “From beyond even there, my lord,” I replied, thinking of space and time. “I come from a land that is as distant from this place as we are distant from Karakorum. Much, much farther.”

  The Mongol smiled. Distance meant nothing to him. “Tell us of your distant land,” he said.

  But the Orkhon interrupted. “Enough talk of distant lands, Subotai. The report says that this man is a warrior of incredible strength.”

  Subotai. That was the name of a Mongol general, I recalled. But the name that the Chinese gave for the Orkhon, Hulagu, I did not recognize.

  The energetic little general looked me up and down. “He is a big one. But we were told he claims to be an emissary, not a warrior.”

  “Still,” said Hulagu, “the report is that he bested a mounted warrior while he himself was afoot and weaponless. And then he caught an arrow in his bare hands when the tuman tried to kill him.”

  As usual, the report of my prowess had been exaggerated. But Hulagu was obviously impressed and looking forward to a demonstration. He ordered a bowman to stand across the tent from me. The other warriors and officers cleared away from the area behind me.

  “My lord,” I protested, “I did not catch an arrow in my bare hands, I merely deflected…”

  “Deflect it, then,” said Hulagu. And he nodded to the bowman. The arrow sprang from the bowstring and my reflexes went into overdrive. The world around me slowed and I could see the arrow, flexing almost like a dolphin dipping in and out of the water, as it flew languidly toward me. I knew the kinetic energy it carried, and that attempting to catch it would be folly. So I stepped slightly to one side when it reached me and slapped it away with the edge of my hand against its shaft.

  The Mongols gasped. Subotai half rose from the cushions he sat upon. Hulagu managed a slight smile.

  Next he ordered a wrestler, a huge brute of a man with shaved head and oiled body. I stripped to the waist and took off my sandals, then chopped the monster down with a kick that took out his left knee and a karate blow to the back of his neck.

  I bowed to Hulagu. “Truly, my lord, I am an ambassador, not a warrior. I fight only to protect myself.”

  The Orkhon did not seem pleased. “I have never seen any man, warrior or not, possess the strength and speed that you have shown.”

  “A race of such men,” said Subotai gravely, “would be a formidable enemy.”

  The other Mongols were muttering among themselves; they appeared to agree with the general.

  “I am merely an emissary from a far-distant land,” I said, raising my voice to still their hubbub. “I seek your ruler, Genghis Khan.”

  That stopped everything. The entire tent was instantly silent. Hulagu glared at me angrily.

  “He is a stranger among us,” Subotai said to the Orkhon. “He does not know that we do not speak the name of the High Khan.”

  “My grandfather has been dead for more years than the fingers of both my hands,” said Hulagu slowly, menacingly. “Ogotai now rules at Karakorum.”

  “Then it is Ogotai that I seek,” I replied.

  “Shall I send you to Karakorum,” he said, “as an emissary from a land so distant that you do not know who sits upon the golden throne? A man who can stop arrows with his bare hands and break the back of the strongest wrestler? Are you an emissary or a sorcerer? What business do you have with Ogotai?”

  I wish I knew, I said to myself. To Hulagu I stated, “My instructions are to speak to none but the High Khan in Karakorum, my lord. I would be unfaithful to my ruler if I failed to carry out my orders.”

  “I think you are a sorcerer. Or worse, an assassin.”

  I lowered my voice. “I am not, my lord.”

  Hulagu sank back into his cushions and extended his right hand as he gazed at me through narrowed eyes. It was impossible to tell from his expressionless face whether he was afraid, worried, or angry. A man with the high-arched aquiline nose of the true Arab and the air of gentility about him handed Hulagu a golden cup. He sipped from it, still eying me suspiciously.

  “Go,” he said at last. “The guard will find you a place to sleep. I will decide about you tomorrow.”

  Something about the way he said that made me think that he had already decided.

  I had enough presence of mind to bow. Then I picked up my shirt and jacket and, carrying them over my arm, followed my armed escort out of the tent. I took a last glance at Hulagu; he was staring at the arrow lying on the carpet where I had knocked it.

  It was outside in the dark coldness of the night, as I was pulling the lice-ridden shirt over my head, that they attacked me. There were six of them, although I didn’t know that at first. I was knocked to the ground, the shirt still tangled around my head and arms, and they were on top of me. I flailed and kicked, tore the shirt away and saw the glint of a dagger blade in the moonlight. I fought for my life without worrying that I might kill some of them as they kicked and beat me with clubs. Then the flaring pain of a knife slashing cut into my gut, again and again. I could feel my own hot blood spurting across my skin. A final blow to my head and I lost consciousness.

  When I awoke, a
few minutes later, the attackers had gone and I had been dragged behind a cart. I could see the cleared space that surrounded the Orkhon’s white tent and the two big bonfires in front of its entrance. I clamped down on my slashed blood vessels as hard as I could, and the bleeding slowed. But I could not stop it altogether. I felt very weak, and I knew that if I passed out again, my control over the severed vessels would fade and I would bleed to death.

  I heard voices from somewhere in the darkness behind me. I tried to turn, but even the effort to move my head left me giddy and sliding toward unconsciousness.

  “Here, my lord,” a man’s whispered voice said. “They dragged him here.”

  I heard another man make a huffing kind of grunt. “So he is not a demon after all. He bleeds just like any man.”

  It took a supreme effort of will to turn my head toward the voices. I could barely make out the shadowy silhouettes of two men standing against the moonlit sky.

  “Take him to Agla. Maybe the witch can keep him from dying.”

  “Yes, my lord Subotai.”

  The silhouettes melted into the darkness. The voices faded away. It seemed to me that I lay there for hours, forcing myself to remain awake. Then other men came and lifted me roughly from the ground by my shoulders and legs. The sudden flare of agony made me cry out, and then everything went blank.

  I came back to a sort of semi-consciousness. I felt warm, too hot to be comfortable. My head swam and my eyes refused to focus properly. I tried to sit up but did not have the strength.

  “No, no… lie back,” crooned a woman’s voice. “Be still.”

  I felt the touch of cool fingers against my burning cheek. “Sleep… go to sleep. Agla will protect you from harm. Agla will heal you.”

  Her voice was hypnotic. I drifted away, feeling somehow safe within the calming power of her words.

  I was told later that it was two days and two full nights before I opened my eyes again. I lay flat on my back, staring up at the sloping felt walls of a round yurt. I could see a bright blue sky through the smoke hole at the top. My whole body ached, and it pained me to take a breath, but I could raise myself up on my elbows and examine my midsection. The daggers had sliced deeply, but already the wounds were healing. Within a few days there would be nothing left of them except scars, and in time even the scars would disappear. I wrinkled my nose; the tent smelled of sour milk and human sweat. The Mongols were not much for bathing, I knew.

  She pushed aside the leather flap that covered the entrance to the yurt and stepped inside.

  “Aretha!” I gasped.

  Her skin was suntanned to a radiant golden brown, her dark hair braided and coiled in the Mongol fashion. She wore a long skirt and a loose blouse over it that reminded me of the buckskins of the old American West. Necklaces of shells and bones were strung around her neck, and a leather belt about her waist was hung with pouches and amulets.

  But I recognized that beautiful goddess-like face, her lustrous dark hair, those gray eyes that a man could lose himself in.

  “Aretha,” I said again, my voice nearly breaking with the wonder of her being here, being alive.

  She let the entry flap fall behind her and stepped to the straw pallet on which I lay. Sinking to her knees, she stared at me silently. I could feel my heart beating within my chest.

  “You have come back to us,” she said. It was Aretha’s voice.

  “You’ve come back to me,” I replied. “Across all these centuries. Across death itself.”

  She frowned slightly. Touching my forehead with the back of her cool hand, she said, “The fever is gone; yet you speak wildly.”

  “You are Aretha. I knew you in another time and place, far from here…”

  “My name is Agla,” she said. “My mother was Agla, and her mother was, also. It is the name for a healer, although some of the barbarians believe that I am a witch.”

  I sank back onto the straw. But when I reached out my hand, she took it in hers.

  “I am Orion,” I said.

  “Yes, I know. The lord Subotai brought you to me. The Orkhon, Hulagu, tried to have you killed. He fears you.”

  “Subotai does not?”

  She smiled at me, and the rancid, stuffy yurt seemed suddenly filled with sunshine.

  “Subotai is greatly interested in you. He gave me no uncertain orders. I am to heal you or lose my own life. He has no use for those who cannot carry out his commands.”

  “Why is he interested in me?”

  Instead of answering my question, she went on, “When they brought you here to my yurt, I was terrified. I tried not to show my fear to Subotai, but from the wounds they had inflicted upon you, I was sure that you would not live out the night. You were bleeding so!”

  “But I did live.”

  “Never have I seen a man with such powers,” she said. “There was little I could do for you except to keep your wounds clean and give you a potion to dull your pain. You have healed yourself.”

  I couldn’t get it out of my mind that she was Aretha, the woman I had known so briefly in the twentieth century, recreated here in the thirteenth. But either she had no memory of her earlier existence (or should I say later existence) such as I did, or she was truly a different person who looked and sounded exactly like Aretha. A clone? How could that be? If Ormazd could bring me through hell and death with all my memories of that other life intact in my mind, why doesn’t Agla recall being Aretha?

  “If the barbarians knew that you have healed yourself,” she went on, “they would think you are truly a sorcerer.”

  “Would that be an advantage for me?”

  She shuddered. “Hardly. Sorcerers die by fire. Either they are burned alive or they have molten silver poured into their eyes and ears.”

  I shuddered. “It doesn’t pay to be known as a sorcerer.”

  “Are you…?”

  “No, I’m not. Can’t you see that? I’m a man, like any other.”

  “I have never seen a man like you,” Agla said, her voice very low.

  “Perhaps so,” I admitted. “But what I do is not magic or supernatural. I merely have more strength than other men.”

  She seemed to brighten, happy to convince herself that I was not something monstrous or evil.

  “Once I saw how rapidly you were healing, I told lord Subotai that your wounds were not as deep as I had at first thought them to be.”

  “You don’t want to take credit for healing me?”

  “They call me a witch, but they don’t really mean it seriously. They endure me as a healer because they have need of me. But if they thought that I had used arcane powers to heal you, then I would be a sorceress, and I would face the fire or the molten silver.”

  We were both silent for a moment, two aliens in the camp of barbarian warriors. She was Aretha, but she didn’t know it. How could I bring back her memory of that other life?

  I thought of Ahriman, and of the reason why I had been brought to this time and place. Perhaps a recollection of him would stir her dormant knowledge.

  “There is another man, a dark and dangerous man,” I began, then went on to describe Ahriman as closely as I could.

  Agla shook her head, the motion making her bone and shell necklaces clatter softly. “I have never seen such a man.”

  He had to be here, somewhere. Why else would Ormazd have sent me here? Then a new thought struck me: Was it actually Ormazd who had sent me to this time and place? Might Ahriman have exiled me to this wilderness, centuries distant from where I was needed?

  But I had no time to worry about such a question. The entry flap was pushed open again, and the Mongol general called Subotai stepped into the yurt.

  CHAPTER 11

  Subotai entered the felt yurt alone, without guards or announcement, and without fear. Dressed in well-worn leathers, he bore only one weapon, the curved dagger at his belt. He was as lean and wiry as any warrior; only the gray of his braided hair betrayed his age. And although his round, flat face looked impassive
and inscrutable, his dark eyes glittered with the eagerness and restlessness of a boy. Agla bowed to him. “Welcome to my humble yurt, lord Subotai.”

  “You are the healer,” he said. “They tell me you are a witch.”

  “Only because I can heal illnesses and wounds that would slay a warrior who has not my aid,” Agla replied. She was slightly taller than the general when she stood straight.

  “I have Chinese healers who perform miracles.”

  “They are not miracles, lord Subotai. They are merely the result of knowledge. Your warriors are brave and have great skill in warfare. We healers have skills in other arts.”

  “Including magic?” he asked. “Divination?”

  Agla smiled at him. “No, my lord general. Not magic and not prophecy. Merely knowledge of herbs and potions that can heal the body.”

  He gave the same kind of huffing grunt I had heard the night I had been attacked. It seemed to indicate that he was satisfied that everything that could be was being done.

  Turning to me, Subotai said, “You seem to be healing with great speed. Soon you will be on your feet again.”

  “My wounds were not as deep as they seemed at first,” I lied.

  “So it appears.”

  I propped myself up on my elbows and Agla hurried to stuff a pair of cushions under me. “Did anyone catch the men who attacked me?”

  Subotai sat himself down cross-legged on the carpeted floor beside my pallet. But he said merely, “No. They escaped in the darkness.”

  “Then they are still in the camp somewhere, waiting to attack me again.”

  “I doubt it. You are under my protection.”

  I bowed my head slightly. “I thank you, lord Subotai.” I was about to ask him why he had decided to place me under his wing, but he spoke before I could.