Time's Eye (20 page)

25: THE FLEET

Bisesa thought that Alexander’s fleet, gathered offshore, looked magnificent despite the rain. There were triremes with their banks of oars, horses whinnied nervously on flat-bottomed barges, and most impressive of all were the
zohruks
, shallow-draft grain-lighters, an Indian design that would persist to the twenty-first century. The rain fell in sheets, obscuring everything, washing out colors and softening lines and perspectives, but it was hot, and the oarsmen went naked, their brown, wiry bodies glistening, the water plastering their hair flat and running down their faces.

Bisesa couldn’t resist taking snaps of the spectacle. But the phone was complaining. “What do you think this is, a theme park? You’re going to fill my memory long before we get to Babylon, and then what will you do?
And
I’m getting wet . . .”

Alexander meanwhile was seeking the gods’ approval of the coming journey. Standing at the bow of his ship, he poured libations from a golden bowl into the water, and called on Poseidon, the sea-nymphs, and the spirits of the World Ocean to preserve and protect his fleet. Then he went on to make offerings to Heracles, who he supposed was his ancestor, and Ammon, the Egyptian god he had come to identify with Zeus, and indeed had “discovered” to be his own father at a shrine in the desert.

The few hundred nineteenth-century British troops, drawn up in rough order by their officers, watched with amazement, and some ribald comments, as the King did his divine duty. But Tommies and
sepoys
alike had been happy enough to accept the hospitality of the Macedonian camp; Alexander’s gestures today were the finale of days of sacrifices and celebration, of musical festivals and athletic contests. Last night the King had given a “sacrificial” animal, a sheep, cow or goat, to each platoon. It had been, Bisesa thought, like the mightiest barbecue in history.

Ruddy Kipling, standing with his broad face sheltered by a peaked cap, pulled irritably at his mustache. “What nonsense fills the minds of men! You know, as a child my
ayah
was a Roman Catholic, who would take us children to church—the one by the Botanical Gardens in Parel, if you know it. I liked the solemnity and dignity of it all. But then we had a bearer called Meeta who would teach us local songs and take us to Hindu temples. I rather liked their dimly seen but friendly gods.”

Abdikadir said dryly, “An interestingly ecumenical childhood.”

“Perhaps,” Ruddy said. “But stories told to children are one thing—and the ludicrous Hindu pantheon is little more than that: monstrous and inane, and littered with obscene phallic images! And what is it but a remote echo of this nonsensical crew on whom Alexander wastes good wine—indeed, of whom he believes himself to be a part?”

“Ruddy, when in Rome, do as the Romans do,” Josh said.

Ruddy clapped him on the back. “But, chum, hereabouts Rome probably hasn’t been built! So
what
am I to do? Eh, eh?”

The ceremonies finished at last. Bisesa and the others made for the boats that would transfer them to the ships. They and most of the British troops were to sail with the fleet, with about half of Alexander’s army, while the rump would follow the shore.

The army camp broke up, and the baggage train began to form. It was a chaotic scene, with thousands of men, women, children, ponies, mules, bullocks, goats and sheep, all milling around. There were carts laden with goods and tools for the cooks, carpenters, cobblers, armorers and other craftsmen and traders who followed the army. More enigmatic shapes of wood and iron were catapults and siege engines, broken down into kit form. Prostitutes and water-carriers worked the crowd, and Bisesa saw the proud heads of camels lifting above the crush. The noise was extraordinary, a clamor of voices, bells and trumpets, and the complaints of draft animals. The presence of the bewildered man-apes, confined in a lashed-up cage on their own cart, only added to the circuslike atmosphere of the whole venture.

The moderns marveled. “What a gagglefuck,” Casey said. “I have never seen anything like it in my life.”

But it was all somehow coming together. The coxes began to shout, and oars splashed in the water. And on land and on the sea, Alexander’s followers began to join in rhythmic songs.

Abdikadir said, “The songs of Sinde. A magnificent sound—tens of thousands of voices united.”

“Come on,” Casey said, “let’s get aboard before those
sepoys
grab the best deck chairs.”

The plan was that the fleet would sail west across the Arabian Sea and then into the Persian Gulf, while the army and baggage train would track its movements following the southern coasts of Pakistan and Iran. They would meet again at the head of the Gulf, and after that they would strike overland to Babylon. These parallel journeys were necessary; Alexander’s boats could not last more than a few days at sea without provisioning from the land.

But on land the going was difficult. The peculiar volcanic rain continued with barely a break, and the sky was a lid of ash-gray cloud. The ground turned to mud, bogging down the carts, animals and humans alike, and the heat remained intense, the humidity extraordinary. The baggage train was soon strung out over kilometers, a chain of suffering, and in its wake it left behind the corpses of broken animals, irreparable bits of equipment—and, after only a few days, people.

Casey couldn’t bear the sight of Indian women who had to walk behind the carts or the camels with great heaps of goods piled up on their heads. As Ruddy remarked, “Have you noticed how these Iron Age chaps lack so much—not just the obvious like gaslights and typewriters and trousers—but blindingly simple things like carthorse collars? I suppose it’s just that nobody’s thought of it yet, and once it’s invented it
stays
invented . . .”

That observation struck Casey. After a few days he sketched a crude wheelbarrow, and went to Alexander’s advisors with it. Hephaistion would not consider his proposal, and even Eumenes was skeptical, until Casey put together a hasty, toy-sized prototype to demonstrate the idea.

After that, at the next overnight stop, Eumenes ordered the construction of as many wheelbarrows as could be managed. There was little fresh wood to be had, but the timber from one foundered barge was scavenged and reused. In that first night, under Casey’s direction, the carpenters put together more than fifty serviceable barrows, and the next night, having learned from the mistakes of the first batch, nearly a hundred. But then, this was an army that had managed to build a whole fleet for itself on the banks of the Indus; compared to that, knocking together a few wheelbarrows wasn’t such a trick.

For the first couple of days after that the train happened to pass over hard, stony ground, and the barrows worked well. It was quite a sight to see the women of Alexander’s baggage train happily pushing along barrows that might have come from a garden center in Middle England, laden with goods, and with children balancing precariously on top. But after that the mud returned, and the barrows bogged down. The Macedonians soon abandoned them, amid much derision of the moderns’ newfangled technology.

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.