Time's Eye (15 page)

It had been just as Philip was preparing for his great Persian adventure that he had been assassinated.

The new King was just twenty, but he had shown no hesitation in continuing where his father had left off. A series of rapid campaigns had consolidated his position in Macedonia and Greece. Then he had turned his attention to the prize that had been almost in Philip’s grasp. The Persian empire sprawled from Turkey to Egypt and Pakistan, and its Great King could field forces that could number a
million.
But after six years of a short, brutal and brilliant campaign, a King of Macedon had mounted the throne of Persepolis itself.

This King had not wanted simply to conquer, but to rule. He had sought to spread Greek culture through Asia: he had planted or rebuilt cities to the Greek model throughout his empire. And, more controversially, he had tried to weld together the disparate people who now came under his rule. He had adopted Persian dress and mannerisms, and shocked his men by kissing Bagoas the eunuch on the lips in their sight.

Meanwhile Eumenes’ own career had advanced with the King’s. His efficiency, intelligence and political subtlety had earned him the King’s undying confidence—and his responsibilities had swollen with the growing empire, until Eumenes felt as if he was carrying the burden of a world on his shoulders.

But a mere empire was not enough for this King. With Persia won he had launched his battle-hardened army, all fifty thousand of them, to the south and west, toward the rich, mysterious prize of India. They headed ever east into unexplored and unmapped country, heading for a coast that would, the King believed, be the shore of the Ocean that ran around the world. The country was strange: there were crocodiles in the rivers, and forests full of gigantic snakes, and there were rumors of empires nobody had ever heard of before. But the King would not stop.

Why did he go on? Some said he was a god in mortal flesh, and the ambitions of gods transcended those of men. Some said that he sought to ape the achievements of the great hero Achilles. There was curiosity too; a man who had been tutored by Aristotle could not help but grow up with a deep desire to know the world. But Eumenes suspected the truth was simpler. This King was his illustrious father’s creation, and it was no wonder that the new King had wanted to eclipse his father’s very ambitions, and so to prove himself the greater man.

At last, at the river Beas, the troops, exhausted from years of campaigning, had rebelled, and even the god-king could go no further. Eumenes believed that the men’s gut wisdom was sound. Enough was enough; they would do well to hold what had already been taken.

Besides, on a deep level of his sophisticated mind, Eumenes was subtly calculating his own advantage. He had always faced rivalries in the court: the Macedonian contempt for the Greek, the fighting man’s derision of mere “scribes,” and Eumenes’ very competence were enough to make him many enemies. Hephaistion particularly was notoriously jealous of anybody who had his lover’s confidence. Often the tensions among the King’s companions could be lethal. But Eumenes had survived—and he was not without his own ambitions. As the emphasis of the King’s reign turned from conquest to political and economic consolidation, Eumenes’ more subtle skills might find greater purchase, and he intended to be well placed to advance his own position beyond that of a mere Secretary.

After that reverse at the Beas, the King still had one grand ambition, though. Still deep in India, he built an immense fleet to be sailed down the Indus and then along the coast of the Persian Gulf, intending to establish a new trade route that might further unify his empire. He had split his forces: Hephaistion was to take the fleet to the mouth of the delta, followed by the baggage train and the King’s prized elephants; Eumenes and his staff had traveled with the fleet. The King himself stayed behind to campaign against rebellious tribesmen in his new Indian province.

All had gone well, until the King had taken on a people called the Malloi, and their fortress city of Multan. The King, with typical daring, had led the attack himself—but he had taken an arrow in the chest. The last dispatch Hephaistion had received had reported that the wounded King was to be placed on a ship and floated down the river to join the rest of the fleet, while his army followed later.

But that had been days ago. It was as if the world-conquering army upriver had utterly disappeared. And the sky had been full of unimaginably strange portents; some of the men muttered that they had seen the sun itself lurch across the sky. Such strange signs could only signify a huge and terrible event—and what could that be but the death of the god-king? Eumenes believed more in hard fact than any number of omens, but it was hard for him to decipher this information, or rather the lack of it, and unease grew steadily.

Still, the unrelenting routine of running the army was a distraction from the greater uncertainty of the situation. Eumenes and Hephaistion had to deal with contentious issues that could not be resolved at lower levels of the bureaucracy. Today they turned to the case of a commander of a division of Foot Companions who, on discovering his favorite prostitute in the bed of a fellow officer, had lopped off the man’s nose with his dagger.

“It’s a nasty little case,” said Eumenes, “which sets a bad example.”

“But it’s more complicated than that. This is a shameful act.” So it was; such disfiguring had been meted out, on the King’s orders, for example to an assassin of the defeated Darius, Great King of Persia. “And I know these men,” Hephaistion went on. “Rumor has it they were lovers too! Somehow this girl has come between them, perhaps hoping to profit by turning one against another.” He rubbed his long nose. “Who is the girl, by the by?”

It was a good question. It wasn’t impossible for members of resentful, defeated peoples to work their way into the command structure of the King’s army, to do as much damage as they could. Eumenes riffled through his scrolls.

But before he could find the answer Hephaistion’s usher came bustling in. “Sir! You must come . . . The strangest thing, the strangest people—”

Hephaistion snapped, “Is it news of the King?”

“I don’t know, sir. Oh, come, come!”

Hephaistion and Eumenes glanced at each other. Then they stood, carelessly toppling the table with its scrolls, and hurried out. Hephaistion snatched up his sword on the way.

Bisesa and de Morgan were brought to a grander collection of tents, though no less mud-spattered than the rest. Severe-looking guards armed with spears and stabbing swords stood at the entrance, glaring at them. Bisesa’s escort stepped forward and began to jabber in his fast Greek. One of the guards nodded curtly, stepped into the first tent and spoke to somebody within.

De Morgan was tense, edgy, excited—a state he got into, Bisesa had learned, when he sensed opportunity. She tried to keep herself calm.

More guards, in subtly different uniforms, came pouring out of the tent. They surrounded Bisesa and the others, their swords pointed at the travelers’ bellies. Then out came two figures, obviously more senior; they wore military-looking tunics and cloaks, but their clothes were clean. One of these commanders, the younger, came pushing through the guards. He had a broad face, a long nose, short dark hair. He looked them up and down and peered up into their faces—like his troops he was shorter than any of the moderns. He seemed tense, gaunt, unhappy to Bisesa, but his body language was so alien it was hard to be sure.

He stood before de Morgan and yelled in his face. De Morgan quailed, flinching from the rain of spittle, and stammered a reply.

Bisesa hissed, “What does he want?”

De Morgan frowned, concentrating. “To know who we are . . . I think. His accent is thick. His name is Hephaistion. I asked him to slow down. I said my Greek was poor—and so it is; the stuff I was taught to parrot at Winchester wasn’t much like
this.
”

Now the other commander stepped forward. He was evidently older, bald save for a frosting of silver hair, and his face was softer, narrow—shrewd, Bisesa thought. He put his hand on Hephaistion’s shoulder, and spoke to de Morgan in more measured tones.

De Morgan’s face lit up. “Oh, thank God—a genuine Greek! His tongue is archaic but at least he can speak it properly, unlike these Macedonians . . .”

So, with a double translation through de Morgan and the older man, who was called Eumenes, Bisesa was able to make herself understood. She gave their names and pointed back up the valley of the Indus. “We are with an army detachment,” she said. “Far up the valley . . .”

“If that is true we should have encountered you before,” snapped Eumenes.

She didn’t know what to say. Nothing in her life had prepared her for an incident like this.
Everything was strange,
everything about these people from the depths of time. They were short, grimy, vigorous, powerfully muscled—they seemed closer to the animal than the human. She wondered how they saw
her
.

Eumenes stepped forward. He walked around Bisesa, fingering the fabric of her clothes. His fingers lingered over the butt of Bisesa’s pistol, and she tensed; but happily he left it alone. “Nothing about you is familiar.”

“But everything is different now.” She pointed to the sky. “You must have seen it. The sun, the weather. Nothing is as it was before. We have been brought on a journey against our will, without our understanding. As have you. And yet we have been brought together. Perhaps we can—help each other.”

Eumenes smiled. “With the army of a god-king I have journeyed through strangeness these past six years, and everything we have encountered we have conquered. Whatever strange power has stirred up the world, I doubt it holds any fear for
us
. . .”

But now a cry went up, rustling through the camp. People started running to the river, thousands of them moving at once, as if a wind had run over a field of grass. A messenger ran up and spoke rapidly to Eumenes and Hephaistion.

Bisesa asked de Morgan, “What is it?”

“He’s coming,” the factor said. “He’s coming at last.”

“Who?”

“The King . . . ”

A small flotilla of ships sailed down the river. Most were broad flat-bottomed barges, or magnificent triremes with billowing purple sails. But the craft at the head of the flotilla was smaller and, without a sail, was pulled along by fifteen pairs of oarsmen. At its stern was an awning, stitched with purple and silver. As the boat neared the camp the awning was pulled back to reveal a man, surrounded by attendants, lying on what looked like a gilded couch.

A muttering ran through the watching crowd. Bisesa and de Morgan, forgotten by all but their guards, pressed with the rest toward the shallow bank. Bisesa said, “What are they saying now?”

“That it’s a trick,” de Morgan said. “That the King is dead, that this is merely his corpse being returned for burial.”

The boat put into the shore. Under Hephaistion’s command a team of soldiers ran forward with a kind of stretcher. But, to general astonishment, the figure on the couch stirred. He waved the stretcher-bearers away, and then, slowly, painfully, with the help of his white-robed attendants, he got to his feet. The crowds on the banks, all but silent, watched his painful struggle. He was wearing a long-sleeved tunic and a cloak of purple, and a heavy cuirass. The cloak was inlaid and edged with gold, and the tunic ornately worked with patterns of sunbursts and figures.

He was short, stocky, like most of the Macedonians. He was clean-shaven, and he wore his brown hair brushed back from a center parting and long enough to touch his shoulders. His face, if weather-beaten red, was strong, broad and handsome, and his gaze steady and piercing. And as he faced the gathering on the bank he held his head oddly, tilted a little to the left, so that his eyes were uplifted, and his mouth was open.

“He looks like a rock star,” Bisesa whispered. “And he holds his head like Princess Diana. No wonder they love him . . .”

A new muttering began to spread through the crowd.

“It’s him,”
de Morgan whispered. “That’s what they are saying.” Bisesa glanced at him and was startled to see tears in his eyes. “
It is him!
It is Alexander himself! By God, by God.”

The cheering started, spreading like fire through dry grass, and the men waved their fists and their spears and swords. Flowers were thrown, and a gentle rain of petals settled over the boat.

20: THE CITY OF TENTS

At dawn, two days after his departure, the Mongol envoy returned. The cosmonauts’ fate, it seemed, had been decided.

Sable had to be prodded awake. Kolya was already alert, his eyes gritty with sleeplessness. In the musty dark of the yurt, where children snored gently in their cots, the cosmonauts were given breakfast of a little unleavened bread, and a bowl of a kind of hot tea. This was aromatic, presumably made from steppe herbs and grasses, and was surprisingly refreshing.

The cosmonauts moved stiffly. They were both recovering quickly from their orbital sojourn, but Kolya longed for a hot shower, or even to be able to rinse his face.

They were led out of the yurt, and allowed a toilet break. The sky was brightening, and the customary lid of cloud and ash seemed comparatively light today. Some of the nomads were paying their respects to the dawn, with genuflections to the south and east. This was one of their few public displays of religious feeling; the Mongols were shamanists, eschewing public rituals for oracles, exorcisms and magic displays in the privacy of their yurts.

The cosmonauts were led to a small group of men. They had saddled up half a dozen horses, and had harnessed two more to a small wooden-wheeled cart. The horses were stocky and undisciplined-looking, like their owners; they looked around impatiently, as if eager to get this chore over with.

“At last we’re out of here,” Sable grunted earnestly. “Civilization here we come.”

“There is a Russian saying,” Kolya warned. “Out of the frying pan . . .”

“Russian my ass.”

The cosmonauts were prodded toward the cart. They had to climb aboard, hands still bound. As they sat down on the bare floor a Mongol man, strong-looking even by the standards of these people, approached them, and began to harangue them loudly. His leathery face was creased like a relief map.

Sable said, “What’s he saying?”

“No idea. But we’ve seen him before, remember. I think this is the chief. And his name is Scacatai.” The chief had come to inspect them during their first hours of captivity.

“This little asshole is going to try to make capital out of us. What were those words you used?”

“
Darughachi. Tengri.
”

Sable glared at Scacatai. “Did you get that?
Tengri, Tengri.
We’re ambassadors from God. And I’m not about to ride off to the Pleasure Dome with my arms tied behind my back. Let us loose, or I’ll fry your sorry butt with a thunderbolt.”

Scacatai, of course, understood nothing but the fragments of Mongolian, but Sable’s tone carried the day. After more mutually incomprehensible argument, he nodded to one of his sons, who cut Sable’s and Kolya’s bonds.

“Good work,” Kolya said, rubbing his wrists.

“Piece of cake,” Sable said. “Next.” She started pointing, at the
Soyuz
, and at the parachute silk stacked up against one of the yurts. “I want what’s mine. Bring that silk to the cart. And the stuff you stole out of the
Soyuz
. . .” It took much gesturing to get this point across, but at length, with much bad grace, Scacatai ordered his people to load up the parachute, and bits of kit were brought out of the yurt. Soon the cart was incongruously piled high with parachute, spacesuits and other gear. Kolya checked that the emergency medical supplies and flare guns were there—and the components of the ham radio gear, their only possible line to the outside world, and Casey and the others in India.

Sable rummaged through the gear and dug out a life raft. She handed it ceremonially to Scacatai. “Here you go,” she said. “A gift from Heaven. When we’ve gone, pull this toggle like
so.
You dig?” She mimed the action repeatedly until it was clear that the Mongol understood. Then she bowed, and Kolya followed suit, and they clambered onto the cart.

The horsemen set off, one of them leading the cart horses by a rope, and the cart lumbered into motion. “Thanks for the mutton, buster,” Sable called back.

Kolya studied her. Bit by bit, starting from a position of utter weakness and vulnerability, she was assuming control of the situation. In the days since the landing she seemed to have burned her fear out of herself by an effort of will—but her intensity of purpose made Kolya uneasy. “You have nerve, Sable.”

Sable grinned. “A woman doesn’t get to the top of the Astronaut Office without learning to be tough. Anyhow, it’s nice to leave with a little more style than when we arrived—”

There was a loud bang, a chorus of confused cries. Scacatai had pulled the ripcord on the raft. The Mongols stared in open-mouthed astonishment at this bright orange artifact that had exploded into existence out of nowhere. Before the village had receded into the distance, the children were starting to bounce on the raft’s inflated rim.

The party made remarkably rapid progress. For hours on end the riders kept their horses moving at a trot, a pace that Kolya was sure would quickly exhaust the animals, but the horses were obviously bred for such treatment. The Mongols ate in the saddle, and expected the cosmonauts to do the same. They didn’t even stop for toilet breaks, and Sable and Kolya learned to keep out of the way when a rider’s volley of urine was caught by the wind.

As they traveled on, Kolya would sometimes glimpse sparks in the distance, floating silently above the ground. He wondered if these were examples of the “Eyes” Casey had described in India. If so, were the Eyes a worldwide phenomenon? He would have welcomed the chance to study one, but their track never brought them close, and the Mongols showed no curiosity.

Before the sun had climbed to its highest, they arrived at a waystation. It was just a huddle of yurts, lost in the middle of the emptiness of the steppe, but several horses were tied up outside, and Kolya glimpsed a herd of others, moving with the silence of distance across the steppe. As they approached, the riders rang a bell, and the keepers of the station came running out. The riders quickly negotiated with the keepers, exchanged their horses, and were on their way.

Sable grumbled, “I could have done with a break. The suspension on this thing is a little stiff.”

Kolya gazed back at the station. “I think this must be the
yam
.”

“The what?”

“At one time the Mongols held all of Eurasia from Hungary to the South China Sea. They kept it all unified with fast communications—a system of routes and waystations where you could change your horses. The Romans had a similar system. A courier could cross two or three hundred kilometers in a day.”

“This isn’t exactly a road. We’re just riding over empty steppe. So how did these guys know how to find this place?”

“Mongols learn to ride before they can walk,” Kolya said. “Crossing this vast plain, they have to be expert navigators. They probably don’t even have to think about it.”

Even when night came the Mongols rode on. They slept in the saddle, with one or two of them leading the others. Sable found the jolting of the cart kept her awake. But Kolya, exhausted by two sleepless nights, overstressed, overwhelmed by the oxygen-rich air of the steppe, slept from sunset to dawn.

At times, though, the riders did hesitate. They had to cross peculiar straight-line boundaries between bare, baked-dry steppe and areas of bright green grass, and other places where flowers lay scattered, wilting—and other areas, stranger yet, where banks of snow lay half-melted in pools of shadow.

It was obvious to Kolya that these suspiciously straight borders were transitions between one time slice and another, and that this steppe was stitched together from a myriad fragments drawn from different times of the year—even different eras. But just as the snow was melting in the warmth, the spring flowers were quickly wilting, and the summer grass screeds were mottled and curled. Perhaps there would be some recovery, some knitting-together, Kolya thought, after a full cycle of seasons. But he suspected that it would take more than a single year to assemble a new ecology from these timeshifted bits of the old.

The Mongol nomads could understand none of this, of course. Even the horses bucked and whinnied as they crossed these disturbing transitions.

Once the riders, evidently baffled, stopped at a site that seemed as empty and undistinguished as the rest of the steppe. Perhaps, Kolya speculated, a waystation had been sited here, and the riders couldn’t imagine why they hadn’t found it. The station was lost, not in space, but in time. The nomads, evidently a practical people, took this in their stride. After a brief discussion marked with much shoulder-shrugging, they moved on, but at a slower pace; evidently they had decided that if they couldn’t rely on the waystations they should spare the horses.

In the afternoon of the second day, the character of the country began to change, becoming more broken and hilly. Now they rode through shallow valleys, sometimes fording streams, and passed copses of larch and pine. It was a much more human landscape, and Kolya felt relieved to be away from the oppressive unchanging immensity of the steppe. Even the Mongols seemed to be happier. As they pushed through one small stand of trees, one brute-faced young man leaned down to pluck handfuls of wild geraniums that he attached to his saddle.

The area was relatively densely populated. They passed many yurt villages, some of them large and sprawling, with smoke rising everywhere, the fine threads leaning in the prevailing wind. There were even roads, after a fashion, or at least heavily worn and rutted trails. This part of the Mongol empire seemed to have come through the Discontinuity almost intact, even though it was studded with time-slice incongruities.

They came to a broad, sluggish river. A ferry had been set up here, a platform guided by ropes slung across the river. The platform was big enough for the riders, cosmonauts, horses and even the cart to be loaded on and transferred in one go.

On the far bank they turned south, following the river. Kolya saw that a second great river snaked across the countryside, glistening; they were heading for a mighty confluence. Clearly the nomads knew where they were going.

But at the foot of a hill, close to a big oxbow loop of one of the rivers, they came to a slab of stone, closely inscribed. The nomads slowed and stared.

Kolya said grimly, “They haven’t seen this before, that’s clear. But
I
have.”

“You’ve been here?”

“No. But I’ve seen pictures. If I’m right this is the confluence of the Onon and Balj rivers. And that monument was set up in the 1960s, I think.”

“So this is a little teeny time slice. No wonder these guys are staring.”

“The script is supposed to be old Mongolian. But nobody knows for sure if they got it right.”

“You think our escorts can read it?”

“Probably not. Most of the Mongols were illiterate.”

“So this is a memorial? A memorial to what?”

“To an eight-hundredth birthday . . .”

They rode on and climbed over a last ridge. There, set out before them on a lush green plain, was another yurt village—no, not a village, Kolya realized, a
city.

There must have been thousands of tents, set out in a regular grid pattern, spanning hectares of ground. Some of the yurts seemed no more impressive than those in Scacatai’s village out on the steppe, but at the center was a much grander structure, a vast complex of interconnected pavilions. All this was enclosed by a wall, but there were outer “suburbs,” a kind of shantytown of cruder-looking yurts that huddled outside the wall. Dirt roads cut across the plain from all directions, leading to the gates in the wall. A lot of traffic moved on the roads, and inside the city itself smoke rose from the yurts, merging into a pale brown smog that hung over the city.

“Christ,” said Sable. “It’s a tent Manhattan.”

Perhaps. But on the green land beyond the city Kolya saw vast herds of sheep, goats and horses, grazing contentedly. “Just as the legends described,” he murmured. “They were never anything more than nomads. They ruled a world, yet cared only about having somewhere to graze their flocks. And when the time comes to move to the winter pastures, this whole city will be uprooted and moved south . . .”

Once more the horses jolted into motion, and the party rode down the shallow ridge toward the yurt city.

At the gate, a guard in a blue, star-spangled tunic and felt cap held them up.

Sable said, “You think our guys are trying to sell us?”

“Negotiating a bribe, perhaps. But in this empire everything is owned by the ruling aristocracy—the Golden Family. Scacatai’s people
can’t
sell us—the Emperor already owns us.”

At last the party was allowed to go ahead. The guard commander attached a detail of soldiers, and Sable, Kolya, and just one of their Mongol companions, along with the cart laden with their gear, were escorted into the city.

They made their way down a broad lane, heading directly for the big tent complex at the center. The ground was just churned-up mud. The yurts were grand, and some were decorated in rich fabrics. But the stench was Kolya’s overwhelming first impression—like Scacatai’s village, but multiplied a thousandfold; it was all he could do to keep from gagging.

Smell or not, the streets were crowded, and not just by Asian peoples. There were Chinese and perhaps even Japanese, Middle Eastern types, maybe Persians or Armenians, Arabs—even round-eyed west Europeans. The people wore finely made tunics, boots and hats, and many had heavy jewelry around their necks, wrists and fingers. The cosmonauts’ gaudy jumpsuits attracted some eyes, as did the spacesuits and other gear piled on their cart, but nobody seemed much interested.

“They are used to strangers,” Kolya said. “If we’re right about our location in time, this is the capital of a continental empire. We must be sure not to underestimate these people.”

“Oh, I won’t,” said Sable grimly.

As they neared the central complex of pavilions, the presence of soldiers became more obvious. Kolya saw archers and swordsmen, armed and ready. Even those off-duty glared at the party as it passed, breaking off from their eating, and gambling over dice. There must have been a thousand troops guarding this one big tent.