“What does any of this have to do with . . .” Mack stopped talking and began noticing certain things. For example, he noticed that all of the men in the room, like the men on horses, carried swords. And the tent was made of skins. And there was an open fire.
And he noticed that no one was on a smartphone. No one. When was the last time you saw a dozen people in a skin tent and no one was texting?
Then Mack noticed a person he’d missed at first. She was about his age. She had black hair down to her waist and was dressed in a long robe-like thing. Mack was not a fashion expert. It probably had some better name, but “robe-like thing” was all he could manage.
She was a beautiful girl. She had almond-shaped eyes and a tiny nose and high cheekbones, and her only possible beauty flaw was the fact that she had a noticeable underbite. In other words, her jaw stuck out just a bit too far.
This girl was also not texting. Nor did she have earbuds in.
She was looking hard at Mack.
Mack said, “OMG?”
No flicker of recognition in the girl’s eyes.
“BRB?” he said, testing her.
Nothing.
There was only one possible explanation, and it took Mack’s breath away. “What year is this?”
Valin laughed. “Very good, Mack. You aren’t stupid, I’ll say that. You have guessed right: this is not the twenty-first century. We have traveled back in time. This is the year 1634.”
Mack blinked. “What?”
“The year 1634. Where—when, I should say—you will witness the betrayal, the terrible humiliation visited on my family by yours. Do you see that girl?”
“The one with the underbite?”
“That’s not fair!” Valin cried. “They didn’t have orthodontists yet!”
The outburst drew the attention of Taras Bulba. He smelled trouble, and he liked trouble. Also leg of lamb.
“You dare to insult her?” Valin demanded.
“I didn’t mean to I was just—”
“That is Boguslawa Bulba, my great-great-great-great-great—”
“Can we just—”
“Silence! You made me lose count! She is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great . . . How many is that?”
“Seven.”
“Okay, nine more. Sixteen greats in all. Grandmother.”
Just then the tent flap opened and in walked a good-looking lad in breeches and a sheepskin jacket. He had skin as pale as milk, freckles, and curly brown hair.
Something about the curly brown hair seemed familiar to Mack. He felt as if he’d seen it somewhere before.
Like . . . in the mirror.
“And that is your great-great-great-etc.-grandfather,” Valin said poisonously. “Sean Patrick O’Flanagan MacAvoy!”
Taras Bulba spotted the young Irish boy and smiled. He waved him over and gave an affectionate rub to his hair. This had the useful side effect of cleaning some of the leg-o’-lamb grease from Bulba’s hands.
“What’s he doing here?” Mack asked.
“They’re engaged,” Valin said. “Your great-great-great-etc.-grandfather is engaged to marry my great-great-great-etc.-grandmother. But in two days he’s going to dump her. She will be so humiliated that she runs away and joins a group of traveling troubadours, jugglers, and actors. This will infuriate Taras Bulba, who will disown Boguslawa. She will end up marrying not Sean Patrick, whose own descendants will be famous warriors and distillers, but a mere performer. And thus will sixteen generations of my family be raised not as descendants of the famous Taras Bulba, Cossack royalty, but rather as the descendants of a random Cossack girl and . . . Izmir. Izmir the Clown.”
“Wait,” Mack said. “That’s the reason you’re trying to kill me and doom the entire human race to subjugation by the Pale Queen? Because some ancestor of mine dumped some ancestor of yours?”
“You make it sound trivial,” Valin said. “Sixteen generations of humiliation all caused by your family! But I should be Cossack royalty! I could have been a prince!”
MEANWHILE, MUCH, MUCH FURTHER BACK IN TIME
The grand opening of the Babylon temple of the Pale Queen was finally at hand. It was a gala day. Which was fine because a gal a day was about all Gil Gamesh could handle, especially when the gal in question was, shall we say, difficult.
“Did you check everything?” Risky demanded. She strode nervously up and down the main aisle of the temple, wringing her hands. “How about the blood gutter? Did you check the slope of the blood gutter? It’s really important: too steep and the blood flows by so fast we can’t really enjoy it.”
“Yes, yes, for like the tenth time, Risky, I checked the blood gutter. I tested it out. It worked great.”
She spun on her heel, which made her red hair flare out and caused his heart to skip a beat as it always did. “Did you test it with blood or water? Because the viscosity is totally different.”
Risky had figured this out centuries before Isaac Newton even started thinking about it. She was evil, but she was not dumb.
Gil listened patiently to this odd fantasy of Risky’s—he thought she often pretended to know things that were patently untrue. Just the other day she had talked about going around the world. Like you could go around a square dinner plate perched on the rear end of Marduk’s donkey. I mean, as if.
But even as Gil tried to be patient, Risky’s haranguing tone was grinding his last nerve. It had not been easy getting this temple built. Even simple things like measuring a slab of stone could be very difficult—the invention of the tape measure was still thousands of years in the future. They would measure in “feet,” but each foot was slightly different, and after a man’s foot had been cut off, it would shrivel up and the toes would curl, so that a “foot” measured with a fresh foot would be different from one measured with a more stale foot.
And with the invention of basic math still far in the future as well, no one could add beyond ten. The temple ended up having to be ten tens of ten feet. Of course in modern times we’d know this was a thousand feet, but back in those days, that would have meant a thousand people hobbling along on just one foot. Or five hundred people crawling without both feet, but that’s getting into multiplication and division, and believe me, Gil and the Babylonians were not up for that yet.
Hardest of all was the massive statue of the Pale Queen that would dominate the altar. And that was Gil’s special, personal responsibility.
Gil had assembled the finest sculptors from all over Babylon and the nearby kingdoms of Ur of the Chaldees, Um of the Chaldees, Mill Valley, and Hork-Bajir. But since the Pale Queen would not sit for them, they had to operate on Risky’s description of her. Risky was not good with descriptions and offered only that her mother was a controlling witch who never let Risky have any fun. As a result, the statue, which stood two hundred hands high (don’t even ask), looked a bit like Pikachu (who also would not be invented for thousands of years) but with white hair and a gown made of the tears of children. But Gil thought he’d managed the whole thing pretty well. Probably. And anyway, the Pale Queen would surely be understanding.
Right? he asked himself nervously. Right?
Risky had not seen the final product. It was covered with a cloth—a very big cloth—and awaited the unveiling before the Pale Queen herself.
Now the great day was at last at hand. A thousand sacrificial animals had been stocked in the fenced enclosure outside. Pigs, cows, sheep, unicorns,30 baboons, auks, rocs, hipsters, hippos, and ducks all waited to be ritually slaughtered for the glory of the Pale Queen.
If that seems harsh, bear in mind that it had taken all of Gil’s influence to keep humans out of it, and the truth was, even then, there were a few unfortunates who’d wandered too close and been reclassified as “goats” in order to round out the numbers.
Gil gave Risky a hug. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, your mother will love it.”
“I hope so. Because if she doesn’t, she’ll eat you,” Risky said, giving him a little
peck on the cheek.
“Say what now?” Gil asked.
“And did you finish the story you’ll be reading to her?”
“The epic?” Gil sighed. “I only hope it lives up to its name. I’m afraid there are some plot holes.”
“Try to clean those up. Mother is a stickler for plots that make sense.”
“Ah. And if she . . .”
“Yes, my love, she’ll probably eat you. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that even if everything goes perfectly, she’ll eat you.”
This was news to Gil, who was not happy. “Shouldn’t you have warned me about this?”
Risky made a pouty face and stabbed an angry finger at the murals that lined the walls. Each of them showed the Pale Queen in one fabulous outfit or another eating various legendary and historical figures: Adam, Eve, Zoroaster, Dagan, Astarte, Noah, and various pharaohs. “It’s like you didn’t even pay attention to your own artwork!”
“I didn’t think it was literal. I thought it was more metaphorical. I thought eating people symbolized, I don’t know, the state of a corrupt society.”
“No, she eats people.”
“Some family you have,” Gil snapped.
“Oh, do not go there,” Risky said, waving a scolding finger in his face. “Do not dis my family.”
“Let’s not squabble,” Gil said. He tried out his most winning smile, but the truth was, he was feeling a little sick to his stomach. What if it was his own blood in the blood gutter? Would that be irony?31 He had a lot of plans for the future, and none of them involved being chewed on by a malevolent, demonic goddess.
“Hey, look at the time!” he said, glancing at his wrist only to discover that watches had not been invented yet. “I, uh . . . There are some things . . . Hmm, I have a thing to do. Some, uh . . . writing. Yeah.”
“Is it a love poem?”
“What? Yeah, that’s right. You guessed it! I was going to write you a love poem. Aww, now you ruined the surprise, but I’m still going to write you, like, a fantastic poem.”
“Then get to it, silly,” Risky said.
Gil exited the temple with the intention of writing a poem, all right, but not a love poem. And also he would be writing it a long, long way from Babylon.
He raced to the holding pen full of sacrificial animals and yelled, “Are there any horses here?”
One of the humans reclassified as sacrificial “goats” said, “If it means getting out of here, I can pretend to be a horse!”
Which was how Gil Gamesh ended up riding for his life from Babylon on the back of a cheesemaker’s curd-skimmer slave named Enkidu.
They rested for a moment atop a nearby hill and looked back just in time to see a massive pillar of oily smoke rising from the desert on the other side of the city. Inside that greasy black smoke was a fell beast of incredible size—the world’s sole surviving apatosaurus. It walked with a slow, shambling gait. Atop that apatosaurus on a slightly unsteady canopied saddle rode the Pale Queen. An army of monsters walked before her and behind her.
“Okay,” Enkidu said brightly after seeing what was coming. “I’ve rested plenty!”
“Let’s get out of here,” Gil agreed.
Nine
Valin’s plan was obvious: he clearly wanted Mack to find some way to rewrite history. He would hold Stefan’s and Xiao’s lives hostage to ensure that Mack did not flee.
Mack definitely would have fled if given half a chance. For one thing, the Cossacks struck him as a bunch of guys who would just as soon cut your head off as say hello. In fact they were so heavily armed all the time that if you happened to just accidentally bump into one, you were in danger of losing a hand.
The other reason Mack wanted out was that he didn’t think it was a good idea to mess with time travel. Who knew what damage he might do? What if he did manage to convince Sean Patrick O’Flanagan MacAvoy to continue seeing Boguslawa? What if they got married? What if they had kids? What if those kids became evil and altered the course of history? Or for that matter, what if they were great and amazing geniuses who invented cars way too early?
On the other hand, obviously whatever he did couldn’t change the future too much, could it? After all, if he changed the future so much that he himself was not born, then he wouldn’t have existed to come back in time and cause himself not to be born. Would he?
These kinds of thoughts brought on headaches, and when he explained them to his friends, they were no help.
Xiao, who was constantly guarded by two Cossack warriors, simply said, “These things are unknowable. You must do what you feel in your heart is right.”
And Stefan, who was guarded by nine Cossack warriors, said, “Huh,” which in this case meant, “I don’t like paradoxes.” And he would threaten to punch Mack if Mack insisted on trying to talk metaphysics.32
Mack missed Sylvie. She totally would have talked about paradoxes with him.
Mack decided to focus on simply getting himself and his friends out of trouble. The easy way seemed to be to convince Sean Patrick O’Flanagan MacAvoy to remain true to Boguslawa.
All he had to do was change the future in such a way that Valin did not become the descendant of someone named Izmir the Clown.
So . . . change the future, but without changing the future.
Headache pills were still hundreds of years away from being invented, so Mack shrugged it off, said, “Whatever,” and at the first opportunity introduced himself to Sean Patrick O’Flanagan MacAvoy.
“Hey, my name’s Mack.”
It was a couple of days after Mack had been rudely shanghaied to the seventeenth century, and they were watching a game of polo. Polo is a game where men on horses hit a ball using long-handled hammers. In Cossack polo the ball was a head. Yes, they were a pretty tough bunch of guys, the Cossacks.
“Cad ba mhaith leat?” Sean Patrick replied. Because he was Irish and spoke only Irish, and just enough Russian to converse with his Cossack girlfriend.
Mack was reluctant to use up any of his enlightened puissance—after all, anything might happen—but he had no choice, so he used a Vargran spell that allowed him to understand what Sean Patrick was saying, and to be understood in return.
It turned out all Sean Patrick had said was, “What do you want?”
“Oh, um, just . . . hi.”
“Hello, fellow.”
“So. Your girlfriend. She’s hot, huh?” This was an amazingly stupid thing to say, and Mack was relieved that the Cossacks standing around didn’t stab him right then and there. This was, after all, the daughter of Taras Bulba he was calling “hot.”
“She should step outside if she’s hot,” Sean Patrick said. “It’s chilly outside.”
Having dodged that bullet, Mack wondered how to proceed. “So. Um. You two are tight, right? I mean, you’re totally going to marry Boguslawa. Right?”
Sean Patrick stuck his thumbs in his belt and puffed out his chest and said, “I have pledged my undying love.”
“Good. And nothing could possibly change that, right?”
“Why? What have you heard?”
There was a loud roar of approval as out on the polo field one of the Cossacks swung his mallet and sent the battered head-ball flying. The horses thundered toward the goal.
So far this was going badly for Mack. But things were about to go much worse. Because not all those thundering hooves were from Cossack polo ponies. There was a host of horsemen rushing from the south, and judging by the beards and turbans, they were not Cossacks.
Suddenly arrows were sprouting in the chests of Cossack polo players. Which is a poetic way of saying that they were getting killed by bows and arrows from the attacking army.
Valin rushed to Mack, grabbed his arm, and hissed, “We have to get out of here! Sean Patrick, get Boguslawa!”
But Sean Patrick was already beating feet toward the distant woods. An arrow passed so close to Boguslawa that the feathers smeared her lipstick.
“Ah!” Mack cried. He grabbe
d Boguslawa’s hand and yelled to Xiao and Stefan, “Let’s get out of here!”
Their Cossack guards had bigger problems than chasing them right then, so the four of them—a boy-hero and his bully-bodyguard from twenty-first-century Sedona and a dragon-girl from twenty-first-century China and a Cossack princess-babe from seventeenth-century Russia—all ran into the Punjabi woods just ahead of a guru-general’s army.
It was all very confusing, but when there are arrows and spears flying, it’s pretty easy to focus on fleeing.
Ten
Here’s what was going on. Mukhlis Khan was invading India and Guru Hargobind was trying to stop him. Taras Bulba was just there to see if he could get a job working for one side or the other. He was your average, hardworking savage warlord and he needed a job.
Valin was there helping Taras Bulba and trying to rewrite history.
Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout was there trying to get Valin to kill Mack.
None of this will be on the test. Just understand this: Valin would never join the Magnificent Twelve so long as he blamed Mack for being descended from Izmir the Clown.
Okay, that didn’t really explain much. One more try.
Mack, Xiao, Stefan, and some girl named Boguslawa were in the woods, scared, damp, and shoeless. No one knew what had happened to Valin.
Oh, and here’s where things go really bad:
Boguslawa, panting, breathless, her black hair blowing in the breeze, threw her arms around Mack’s neck and said, “Вы спасли мнe жизнь!”
Which, translated, means, “You saved my life!”
And then she kissed Mack on both cheeks.
Stefan and Xiao both stared.
“I weel not marry Sean Patrick MacAvoy,” Boguslawa said breathlessly. “He is run away. I weel marry you. My hero!”
“Huh,” Stefan said, meaning, “Uh-oh.”
“What. Wait. What?” Mack squeaked. “No. Wait.”
“I am wanting man who is strong and brave,” Boguslawa insisted. “Not frighten lady-boy Sean Patrick, run away poof!”