Orion o-1

by Ben Bova

  “As easily as you murdered her?”

  “The girl?”

  “Her name was Aretha… in the twentieth century.”

  “I have not been there yet.”

  “You will be. And you will kill her. If there were no other reason for me to hate you, that would be enough.”

  He shrugged those massive shoulders. “You can hate; you can love. Ormazd has programmed you quite flexibly.”

  I was close enough to reach out and take him by the throat. But I had felt the strength of those mighty arms before, and I knew that even with all the powers I possessed, he could toss me about like a matchstick.

  “The Mongols make it difficult for us to do battle,” Ahriman said, breaking into my thoughts. “They have their laws, and they will do their best to see that we obey them.”

  “I will gain an audience with Ogotai and warn him against you. You will not succeed here.”

  His almost lipless slash of a mouth curled back in a hideous smile. “Succeed? I have already succeeded. And you have helped me!”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shook his head. “What do you expect of me? Do you think that I am here to assassinate Ogotai?”

  “You are the leader of the cult of the assassins, aren’t you?”

  The smile degenerated into a sneer. “No, my ancient adversary. I am not the Old Man of the Mountains. Only a true human would think of murdering his fellow humans for profit. The leader of the assassins is a Persian, as human as you are. He was a boyhood friend of someone you may have heard of — Omar Khayyam, the astronomer.”

  “I know the name as a poet.”

  “Yes, he scribbled some verses now and then. But as for the assassins, Hulagu will crush them — after he takes Baghdad and destroys the flower of Islamic culture.”

  “You said you have already succeeded here… and I helped you.”

  “Yes,” Ahriman said, his face becoming serious again. “Come. I will show you.”

  He turned and walked toward the solid stone wall that had been behind him. Remembering what he had done in the twentieth century, I hesitated only a moment, then followed him.

  I stepped through the wall, again feeling the chill of deepest space for an instant. And then we were in a forest, surrounded by tall, dark trees that sighed in the night wind. Wordlessly, Ahriman led me along a path that meandered through the underbrush. High above, through the leafy canopy, I could see a thin sliver of a moon racing through scudding clouds. An owl hooted in the darkness; crickets chirped ceaselessly.

  We stopped at the edge of the woods, where the ground slanted downward toward a wide grassy plain. Tents were pitched there; horses were tethered in long sleeping lines. But these tents were high-pitched and square in shape, not like Mongol tents. The carts were huge and heavy compared to those I had seen in Karakorum. And the horses also looked different from the ponies of the Gobi — bigger, heavier, slower.

  “The cream of Eastern Europe’s knighthood,” Ahriman whispered to me, “led by Bela, the King of Hungary. A hundred thousand men are camped there, knights fromCroatia,Germany, the Hungarian cavalry, of course, and even Knights Templar from France.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Down there is the plain of Mohi. Across the river is Tokay, the wine country. That is where Subotai and his Mongols are spending the night — or so Bela thinks.”

  By the wan light of the moon I could see guards standing around the edges of the huge camp, and more tents pitched on the other side of the river at the foot of a stone bridge that spanned it. Neither the guards nor I noticed anything amiss as the night slowly faded and the first gray fingers of dawn began to streak the sky.

  Ahriman pulled me down to a crouching position in the underbrush. I started to protest, but he silenced me with a massive hand on my shoulder.

  In the predawn dimness I heard the slight snuffle of a horse. Turning, I saw through the tangled undergrowth a pair of Mongol warriors nosing their ponies slowly, silently, through the woods. Behind them were more horsemen, each as quiet as a wraith. They stopped, bows in their hands, already notched with arrows. They waited for a signal.

  A shower of fire arched across the gray sky. Flaming arrows fell into the Europeans’ camp, setting tents afire and terrifying the tethered horses. A horrendous roaring scream arose from thousands of warriors as the Mongol horsemen spurred their mounts and dashed into the sleeping camp from three sides. Horsemen thudded past us as we crouched in the brush, spattering us with clods of earth, shrieking their hideous war cries, bending their little double-curved bows and firing arrows into the stumbling, barely awake Europeans.

  The slaughter was complete. All morning long the two armies battled, thousands upon thousands of maddened men furiously trying to kill one another. The Europeans fought with the strength of desperation; they were surrounded and had no hope of escape or mercy. The Mongols, though heavily outnumbered, remorselessly cut down their opponents with arrows, lances, and curved swords that drank the blood of nobleman and peasant equally. The Europeans never had a chance to mount their battle steeds or even don their armor. They were slaughtered in their nightclothes. The men on the far side of the stone bridge fought bravely, but soon enough the Mongols cut down the last of them and stormed across the bridge to complete the encirclement.

  The sun climbed higher in the sky as I stared, horrified, at the dust and blood of the battle. Men screamed; horses whinnied: confusion and terror were everywhere.

  “Here you see the human race at its finest, Orion,” gloated Ahriman. “Observe the energy and passion your kind puts into slaughtering itself.”

  I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. The stench of blood, the sight of severed limbs and slashed bodies was making me sick.

  “I have already won,” Ahriman told me. “Thanks to the knowledge you imparted to Subotai, the Mongols have crushed the European army. Nothing stands between them and the Rhine now. They will sweep westward, razing cities and slaughtering whole nations. The French will make a stand before them, just as they made a stand against the Moors under Charles the Hammer. But Subotai’s final moment of glory will come when he destroys the French army as thoroughly as he has destroyed Bela and his allies here today. All of Europe will be under Mongol sway — all of Eurasia, from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”

  “And that is what you seek?” I asked, turning away from the carnage. But I could not keep from hearing the screams of the dying.

  His powerful hand squeezed my arm. “That is what I seek, Orion. And nothing can prevent it from happening. Neither you nor Ormazd can stop me now.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment to blot out the horror of the battle. His grip on my arm eased somewhat, and the noise and reek of the battle seemed to fade away.

  I opened my eyes and it was Agla holding on to my arm, not Ahriman. We were back in the dark stone temple at Karakorum. Ahriman gave me a last parting smile, more a grimace than anything else, and disappeared once again into the shadows.

  Agla stirred and drew in a breath, as if a statue coming to life. “I can’t see a thing in here,” she said.

  “I’ve seen enough. More than enough.” I led her out into the daylight again.

  In a few weeks, maybe less, a post rider would gallop into Karakorum bearing news of Subotai’s victory. The Mongols would rejoice, but Subotai would not be called back to the capital for congratulations or reward. He and his army would press on, as Ahriman had said, to desolate the heart of Europe the way they had destroyed the heart of the Moslem world.

  Before the Mongols came,Persia and the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers had been the most heavily populated, most abundant land on Earth. Irrigation canals that had been dug in the misty time of Gilgamesh made Babylon, and later Baghdad, the center of civilization — no matter what the Chinese thought. But once the Mongols swept through that part of the world, they razed the cities, utterly destroyed the canal system, and slaughtered so much of the population that it was centuries be
fore the area could recover even a semblance of its former glory.

  Now Subotai had Europe open and defenseless before him. And his warriors would do to Poland, Germany and the Balkans what they had done to the Middle East. Maybe Italy would escape, guarded by the Alps. But I doubted it. Warriors who crossed the Roof of the World would not be deterred by mountains that could not stop Hannibal.Italy,Greece, the flower of Mediterranean civilization would be crushed as utterly as all the others.

  And I had helped Subotai to do this. Ahriman had much to gloat over.

  CHAPTER 16

  I tried to explain it all to Agla, but she could not seem to grasp the situation in its full implications. For hours I sat in our bare little hut, telling her of Ahriman and the other lives we had both lived, of Ormazd and the titanic struggle that spanned the centuries.

  “Ahriman seeks to destroy the continuum of space time itself,” I said, my voice rising to drive the point home, as if speaking louder would make everything clear to her.

  She listened patiently. She tried to understand. But despite the fact that she had lived in the twentieth century and in other times, Agla comprehended very little of what I told her. In this incarnation she was totally a child of the thirteenth century.

  “Ahriman is a dark wizard,” she said at last, giving me her explanation of how the world looked to her, “and he has powers that allow him to show you the past and the future.”

  “But what he showed me happened today,” I insisted. “And he didn’t merely show it to me; we were there — thousands of miles away.”

  “You never left my side.” She smiled faintly.

  “Yes, I did. But I moved in a different time reference. To you, no time elapsed at all. To me, I spent nearly twelve hours at the plain of Mohi.”

  “So it seems to you. He is a wizard of great powers, that much is certain.”

  I decided to agree with her on that and let it go. That night we made love fiercely, as if both of us feared we would never have another night together. It was close to dawn when I finally drifted into sleep. I dreamed of Ormazd, arrayed in golden armor and riding a golden palomino horse. I watched him canter along a path through a green, park-like forest. The sun shone brightly and the sky was a cloudless blue. But as I watched, the forest thickened, grew darker, and soon the sun was hidden behind thick, black boughs heavy with foliage. I knew what was going to happen and I cried out to warn Ormazd, but no sound issued from my throat. I was paralyzed, powerless to move or even speak, as tiny, dark reptiles slithered across Ormazd’s path and grew into lithe, wiry Mongol warriors who clambered over the palomino and pulled Ormazd down to the blood-soaked ground and stabbed again and again and again, over and over, blood spurting everywhere, arms and legs hacked off, throat ripped open, belly sliced apart so that I could see his living bowels being ripped by the filthy warriors of darkness.

  “Orion, help me!” Ormazd screamed, his voice shrieking despite his wounds. “Where are you, Orion? Help me! Help me!”

  All the world grew dark and cold and I remained paralyzed, frozen in deepest starless space while the entire planet Earth dwindled and disappeared into blackness.

  I awoke, sitting up on the bed. Agla lay beside me, sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the world.

  Think, Orion, think! I commanded myself. How can you defeat Ahriman if you don’t even understand what he is trying to accomplish?

  I closed my eyes again and considered the facts that I knew. Ahriman sought to destroy the fabric of space-time, to disrupt the continuum so completely that the entire universe would shatter. He claimed that we humans had annihilated his race, and he sought total revenge, the annihilation of the human race for all time and space. That meant that he must destroy Ormazd, whom Ahriman called our creator.

  There was much that I did not know, much that I could not understand. I shook my head, wondering how I could reach Ormazd and ask him for more information. But obviously he felt that I had all the knowledge I needed. He had sent me here, to this time and place, with all the powers of my mind and body, and even with an understanding of the Mongol language printed into my brain. He had also sent Agla here, as a sort of native guide, a barometer of the attitudes and understandings of the people of this era. That was her role, just as Aretha’s role in the twentieth century had been to awaken me to the task of finding Ahriman.

  Somehow, Ogotai was the key to everything here. I had blurted out, when the Mongol warriors had first captured me, that I was an emissary to the High Khan. Ormazd had put that into my mind. I did not know why, but I knew with utter conviction that everything depended on my meeting the High Khan face to face.

  As the rising sun slanted through the front room’s single window, filling the dusty bare chamber with dancing motes, I resolved to make Ye Liu Chutsai grant me an audience with the High Khan.

  Agla came with me as I sought out the mandarin. Dressed in her robes and beads, she served me as a sort of radiation meter, sensitive to the nuances of this strange world that I would never pick up for myself. But she was also the woman I loved and I wanted her by my side so that I could protect her from Ahriman and all other dangers.

  It took the best part of the morning for us to talk our way past the dour-faced guards and soft-spoken Chinese administrators of the ordu. We found ourselves at last in a small tent that stood to one side of Ogotai’s main pavilion. Inside, the tent was richly carpeted, and furnished with chests and cabinets decorated with intricate scrollwork and inlaid ivory and gold. Their motifs of dragons and pagodas showed them to be fromCathay.

  Liu appeared from behind a seven-foot-high ebony screen, moving as smoothly and mysteriously as ever in his floor-length robes to a cushioned chair set off to one side of a long table covered with scrolls and maps. He nodded to us and smiled; taking one hand from his wide sleeves, he gestured us to the smaller chairs near his own.

  After a few polite exchanges of greetings, the mandarin asked me why I sought his ear.

  “To beg you for an audience with the High Khan,” I said. “It is urgent that I meet Ogotai.”

  He toyed with his wispy white beard for a few silent moments. I focused every atom of my being, every flickering synapse along the myriad neurons of my brain, at the old man’s mind. He seemed to feel it; his body stiffened slightly, and he looked up, directly into my eyes. I saw confusion in his dark brown eyes, then a widening understanding of my purpose.

  “I have been protecting you from possible danger,” he said, almost apologetically. “If you meet Ogotai and he decides that you truly are the menace Ahriman prophesies you to be, he will have you killed.”

  “There is a greater danger in waiting,” I answered. “I must see him now.”

  “Yes,” Liu said, nodding his understanding. “I shall arrange an audience for you. Wait here.”

  He rose from his chair like a sleepwalker and glided behind the elaborate ebony screen once more. I turned to Agla and smiled at her.

  She was regarding me with a strange expression on her face. “You forced him to do your will,” she said.

  “I convinced him that it must be done.”

  She reached up to brush a stray hair back from her eyes and a snap of static electricity stung her fingers. “You are a wizard also.” Her voice was a whisper of awe. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m not a wizard.”

  “Yes, you are. Like Ahriman. A man of great powers. I should have known it when you healed your wounds so quickly…”

  “My powers are for good, not evil,” I said. “But I am not a wizard.”

  “You have no idea of how powerful you truly are,” Agla insisted. “What you did to my lord Chutsai… I could feel it!”

  I tried to downplay my little instinctive trick of hypnosis, but Agla knew better than I what was involved. “You must not let Ogotai or the guards around him see your powers. They are superstitious men, and they would kill you out of fear.”

  “But they allow Ahriman to live,” I said.

  “Yes,
because he prophesies victories in battle for them. I have listened to what the women say of Ahriman. He is feared for his dark powers, but the warriors are more afraid of displeasing him and having him prophesy defeat for the Mongols. These foolish men believe that Ahriman’s prophecies create victory or defeat.”

  “Doesn’t that put him in much danger? Wouldn’t they be likely to slit his throat one night and be rid of him?”

  She shook her head, tossing that stray lock of hair back over her eyes. Again she pushed it back, this time without a shock.

  “Ahriman has been very clever. He came to Karakorum, from what I hear, as a priest of a new religion. A warrior’s religion. The Mongols do not harm priests; they tolerate all religions. So, even though there is great fear of Ahriman’s powers, the High Khan will not allow him to be harmed — so long as his prophecies of victory continue to be true.”

  He was clever, I thought. More clever than I, to understand these people so thoroughly.

  “Besides,” Agla went on, a bit more lightly, “the Mongols do not shed the blood of important personages.”

  “Oh? Then what…”

  “They strangle them, or smother them beneath carpets. The Yassa forbids bloodletting among the Mongols, but it does not overlook the need for killing.”

  I sat in the stiff wooden chair, digesting all that Agla had told me. I could not help seeing Ahriman’s face, and his ghastly smile, as I considered the fact that not even Genghis Khan’s code of laws could prevent human beings from murdering one another.

  Ye Liu Chutsai returned at last, looking somewhat puzzled, as if he could not quite remember why he was doing what he was doing.

  “It is arranged,” he said to me. “You will be received by the High Khan tonight, before the evening meal. You will come alone.”

  I glanced at Agla.

  “The High Khan,” explained Liu, “would not respect a man who was accompanied by a woman. It is the way of the Mongols, and no insult to you, lady.”