All over the world it rained. And rained, and rained.
In a sense, all of this was beneficial. A Frankenstein’s-monster of a world was trying to knit itself together, and a new equilibrium, in the air, the sea and the rocks, would eventually emerge. But the painful thrashing of that healing process was devastating for anything, plant or animal, struggling to survive.
Seeker had no long-term perspective. For her there was only the present, and her present was drenched in misery, confined in the humans’ cruel cage, and by the acid rain that lanced down at her from the sky. When the rain was at its worst Grasper huddled under her mother, and Seeker curled over her baby, taking the scalding downpour on her own back.
PART THREE
ENCOUNTERS AND ALLIANCES
18: EMISSARIES OF HEAVEN
Still wielding his sword, the Mongol yelled over his shoulder. More armed men came running out of the tents—no, Kolya thought, the yurts. Women and children followed. The children were little bundles in felt coats, wide-eyed with curiosity.
The men had classic Asiatic features, Kolya thought, with broad faces and small dark eyes, and jet-black hair that they wore tied back. Some had bands of cloth around their heads. They wore baggy dun-colored trousers, and went barefoot, or wore boots into which the trousers were tucked. If they weren’t bare-chested they wore simple light tunics, heavily mended.
They looked mean, and strong. And they gathered threateningly around the gravity-laden cosmonauts. Kolya tried to hold his ground. He was shaking; Musa’s headless corpse still lay against the side of the Soyuz, the last blood trickling from its neck.
Musa’s killer walked up to Sable, who glared back at him. Uncompromisingly he grabbed her breast and compressed it.
Sable did not flinch. “Holy crap, but this guy stinks.” Kolya could hear the brittleness in her voice, sense the fear under her resolve. But the warrior backed away.
The men talked rapidly, eyeing the cosmonauts and their spacecraft, and the parachute silk that lay sprawled across the dusty steppe.
“You know what I think they’re saying?” Sable whispered. “That they’re going to kill you. Me they’ll rape, then kill.”
“Try not to react,” Kolya said.
The tension was broken by a squeal. A little girl of about five, with a face round as a button, had touched the wall of the Soyuz and had come away with a burned hand.
The men growled as one. Musa’s killer pressed his sword against Kolya’s neck. His mouth was open, his eyes small, and Kolya could smell meat and milk on his breath. Suddenly the world was very vivid: the animal stink of the man before him, the rusty scent of the steppe, even the surge of blood in his ears. Was this to be his last memory, before he followed Musa into the dark? . . .
“Darughachi,” he said. “Tengri. Darughachi.”
The man’s eyes widened. He backed away, but he kept the sword raised, and the rapid conversation resumed, but now the men stared even harder.
Sable hissed, “What did you say?”
“Schoolboy memories.” Kolya tried to keep his voice level. “I was guessing. It mightn’t have been their language at all; we could have landed anywhere in time—”
“What language, Kolya?”
“Mongolian.”
Sable snorted. “I knew it.”
“I said we were emissaries. Emissaries of Eternal Heaven. If they believe it, they will have to treat us with respect. Hand us over to local officials, maybe. I’m bluffing—just bluffing—”
“Good thinking, Batman,” Sable said. “After all these guys saw us fall from the sky. Take me to your leader. Always works in the movies.” She actually laughed, a forced, ugly sound.
At last the circle around the cosmonauts began to break up, and nobody came to kill them. One man pulled on a jacket and felt hat, ran to a hobbled horse tied up beside a yurt, mounted it and rode briskly away.
The cosmonauts’ hands were tied behind their backs and they were prodded in the direction of one of the yurts. It would have been difficult to walk even without tied hands; Kolya felt as if he was encased in lead, and his head sang. Staring children, picking their noses, formed a sort of honor guard as they passed. One nasty-looking brat threw a rock that bounced off Kolya’s shoulder. It was hardly a dignified return to Earth, he thought. But at least they were alive; at least he had won them some time.
The door flap of the yurt was pulled open, and they were shoved inside.
Sable and Kolya were thrust down onto felt mats. In their stiff pressure suits the cosmonauts were huge in the yurt, and their legs stuck out comically in front of them. But it was a relief just to sit down.
The yurt’s single doorway faced south; Kolya could see the sun beyond a layer of haze. That was a Mongol tradition, Kolya knew; in their rudimentary theology there was a strand of sun-worship, and here on the plains of northern Asia the sun wheeled through its daily circles predominantly in the south.
Mongols came and went, apparently to inspect the newcomers, squat men and muscular-looking women. They stared at the cosmonauts, especially Sable, with greedy calculation.
Some of the cosmonauts’ gear was brought in from the Soyuz capsule. Much of this—emergency medical kits, an inflatable life raft—was incomprehensible to the Mongols. But Sable and Kolya were allowed to change out of their bulky spacesuits into the lighter orange jumpsuits they had worn on orbit. The Mongol children stared at their underwear, and the rubberized trousers they stripped off. The spacesuits were stacked up in a corner of the grubby yurt like abandoned cocoons.
The cosmonauts both managed to conceal the existence of their sidearms, tucked behind their backs, from the Mongols.
After that, to Kolya’s huge relief, they were left alone for a while. He lay against the yurt’s grimy wall, his limbs trembling, trying to still the beating of his heart and clear the fog in his head by sheer willpower. He should have been in the hospital right now, surrounded by state-of-the-art twenty-first-century technology, beginning a program of physiotherapy and recuperation, not stuck in the corner of this stinking tent. He was weak as an old man, and before these stocky, powerful Mongols he was utterly helpless; he was resentful as well as frightened.
He tried to think, to take stock of his surroundings.
The yurt was sturdy and well-worn. Perhaps it belonged to the chief of this little community. Its main support was a stout pole, and lighter wooden stakes and slats shaped a dome of felt. Grubby mats covered the floor, and metal pots and goatskins hung from hooks. Stacked around the walls were chests of wood and leather, the furniture of a traveling people. The yurt had no windows, but a hole in the roof had been cut over a fireplace of hearthstones, where lumps of dried dung burned continually.
At first Kolya puzzled about how the yurt could be taken down and reerected, as it must be at least twice a year as the nomads traveled between their summer and winter pastures. But he had noticed a broad cart, parked a short distance away. Its bed was easily wide enough to take the intact yurt, contents and all.
“But they didn’t always do that,” he whispered to Sable. “The Mongols. Only in the early thirteenth century. Otherwise they just dismantled the yurts like tents and carried them folded up. So that fixes us in time . . . We have landed in the middle of the Mongol Empire, at its peak!”
“Lucky for us you know so much about them.”
Kolya grunted. “Lucky? Sable, the Mongols came to Russia—twice. You don’t forget an experience like that, not even after eight centuries.”
After a time a meal was prepared. A woman hauled in a big iron pot. Half a sheep carcass was chopped up and thrown into the pot—not just flesh and bones, but lungs, stomach, brains, intestines, hooves, eyeballs; evidently nothing was wasted. The woman had a face like leather and arms like a shot-putter’s. As she worked steadily at the meat she paid absolutely no attention to Sable and Kolya, as if two humans from the future stacked in the corner of her yurt were an everyday occurrence.
The stranded cosmonauts d
id what they could to speed their adaptation to Earth’s ferocious pull, surreptitiously flexing their joints, shifting their posture to favor one muscle group over another. Aside from that they had nothing to do but wait, Kolya supposed, for that rider to return from his mission to the local official, at which point the decision about their fate would be made—a decision that could still, he knew, mean their deaths. But despite that grim prospect, as the afternoon wore by, Kolya, astonishingly, grew bored.
The mass of meat and offal in the pot was boiled for a couple of hours. Then more adults and children crowded into the yurt. Some of them brought in more meat for the pot, bits of what looked like foxes, mice, rabbits. These were roughly skinned but not cleaned; Kolya could see bits of grit and dried blood sticking to them.
When it was time to eat the Mongols just dived in. They scooped out chunks of meat with wooden bowls and ate with their fingers. They washed it down with cups of what looked like milk, poured from a sweating goatskin. Sometimes, if they didn’t like the flavor of a piece of meat after a few bites, they would throw it back, and they would spit bits of gristle back into the pot.
Sable watched this in horror. “And nobody washed their hands before lunch.”
“To the Mongols water has divine purity,” Kolya said. “You don’t sully it by using it to wash.”
“So how do they keep clean?”
“Welcome to the thirteenth century, Sable.”
The guests kept their distance from the cosmonauts, but otherwise their social life seemed unimpeded.
After a time one of the younger men approached the cosmonauts, carrying a bowl of meat. Kolya saw how the mutton fat that shone on the boy’s lips was only the topmost layer in a smear of fat and dirt that covered his face; there was even wind-dried snot under his broad nostrils, and his stink, like over-ripe cheese, was just overwhelming. The boy reached behind Kolya and released one of his hands. Then he picked out a piece of meat from his bowl and held it out to Kolya. His fingernails were black with dirt.
“You know,” Kolya murmured, “the Mongols would soften their meat by riding with it under their saddle. This bit of mutton might have spent days being pumped full of methane from some fat herdsman’s ass.”
“Eat it,” murmured Sable. “We need the peptides.”
Kolya took the meat, closed his eyes, and bit into it. It was leathery, and tasted of fat and butter. Later, the boy brought him a cup of milk. It actually had a kick, and he vaguely remembered that the Mongols would ferment mare’s milk. He drank as little as he could.
After the meal the cosmonauts were allowed out, separately, to relieve themselves, heavily watched all the time.
Kolya took the chance to look around. The plain stretched around him, huge and empty, an elemental sheet of yellow dust broken by splashes of green. Under an ashen sky fat clouds sailed, casting shadows like lakes. But the land, vast and flat and featureless, seemed to dwarf the sky itself. This was the Mongolian plateau—he knew that much from their navigation during the descent. Nowhere much less than a thousand meters above sea level, it was shut off from the rest of Asia by great natural barriers: mountain ranges to the west, the Gobi desert to the south, the Siberian forests to the north. From orbit, he remembered, it had been a vast blank, a faintly crumpled plain stitched here and there with the threads of rivers—barely there at all, like the preliminary sketch of a landscape. And now here he was, stuck in the middle of it all.
And in this vast emptiness the village huddled. The yurts, mud-colored, weather-beaten and rounded, looked more like eroded boulders than anything made by humans. The battered Soyuz descent compartment did not, somehow, look particularly out of place here. But children ran and laughed, and neighbors called from one yurt to the next. Kolya could see animals, sheep, goats and horses, moving in unfenced herds, their lows and bleating carrying in the still air. Though he might be as much as eight centuries out of time, and though there could hardly have been a greater contrast in his origins with these people’s—spaceman and nomad, the most technologically advanced humans put together with some of the most primitive—the basic grammar of human discourse was unchanged, he saw, and he had come to a little island of human warmth, in the midst of the huge silent emptiness of the plain. Somehow that was reassuring, even if he was a Russian fallen into the hands of Mongols.
That night, Kolya and Sable huddled together under a foul-smelling blanket of what smelled like horsehair. The snores of the Mongols were all around them. But whenever Kolya looked up one of them always seemed to be awake, his eyes gleaming in the dim firelight. Kolya didn’t believe he slept at all. Sable, on the other hand, just rested her head against Kolya’s shoulder and slept for hours at a time; he was astonished at her courage.
In the night the wind rose up, and the yurt creaked and rocked, like a boat adrift on the sea of the steppe. Kolya, relentlessly awake, wondered what had become of Casey.
19: THE DELTA
His breakfast over, Secretary Eumenes dismissed his pages. He pulled his purple cloak over his shoulders, and, pushing the heavy leather door flap out of his way, walked out of his tent.
The clouds had cleared away, revealing a washed-out blue sky, pale like faded paint, and the morning sun was hot. At least the rain had stopped for once. But when he looked west, to the sea, Eumenes could see more black clouds bubbling and boiling, and he knew that another storm was on its way. Even the natives who clustered around the army camp selling charms, and gewgaws, and the bodies of their children, claimed never to have known such weather.
Eumenes set off toward Hephaistion’s tent. It was difficult going. The ground had been turned to soft, yellow mud, churned up by the feet of men and animals, that clung to Eumenes’ cavalry boots.
Around him the smoke of a thousand fires rose to the pale sky. The men were emerging from their tents, hefting clothing and gear heavy with mud. Some of them shaved off their stubble: an order to be clean-shaven had been one of the King’s earliest initiatives when he had taken over the army from his assassinated father, ostensibly so that enemies would not be given an easy handhold in close quarters. The Macedonians moaned, as usual, about this fancy Greek practice, and about the wretched, barbarous state of this place the King had brought them to.
Soldiers always liked to grumble. But when the fleet had first arrived here in the delta, having sailed down the Indus from the King’s camp, Eumenes himself had been appalled by the heat, the stink, the clouds of insects that had hovered over the marshy ground. But Eumenes prided himself on his disciplined mind; a wise man got on with his business whatever the weather. It even rains on god-kings, he thought.
Hephaistion’s tent was a grand affair, far grander than Eumenes’, a sign of the favor with which the King regarded his closest companion. The living quarters were surrounded by a series of vestibules and antechambers, and were guarded by a detachment of Shield Bearers, the army’s elite infantry—reputed to be the finest foot soldiers in the world.
As Eumenes neared the tent he was challenged. The guard was a Macedonian, of course. He certainly knew Eumenes, yet he stood before the Secretary now, holding up his stabbing sword. Eumenes held his ground, his gaze unflinching, and eventually the soldier backed down.
The hostility of a Macedonian warrior for a Greek administrator was as inevitable as the weather—even if it was founded on ignorance, for how did these half-barbarians imagine that the great machinery of the army kept them all alive and provisioned, organized and directed, if not for the meticulous work of Eumenes’ Secretariat? Eumenes pushed his way into the tent without glancing back.
The vestibule was a mess. Chamberlains and pages righted tables, gathered up fragments of smashed crockery and bits of ripped clothing, and mopped up wine and what looked like blood-stained vomit. Last night Hephaistion had evidently once more been entertaining his commanders and other “guests.”
Hephaistion’s usher was a small, fat, fussy man with peculiar strawberry-blond hair. When he had kept Eumenes waiting in the vest
ibule for just the precise time required to reinforce his own position, he bowed and waved Eumenes forward into Hephaistion’s private chambers.
Hephaistion was on his couch, loosely covered by a sheet, and still in his nightshirt. He was the center of industry: chamberlains laid out clothes and brought in food, and a file of pages brought in jugs of water. Hephaistion himself, propped up on one elbow, picked languidly at a tray of meat.
There was a stirring under the sheet. A boy, eyes heavy with sleep, emerged and sat up, looking bewildered. Hephaistion smiled at him. He touched his fingers to his own lips, and then the boy’s, and patted his shoulder. “Go now.” The boy clambered off the couch, naked. A chamberlain pulled a cloak around him and led him from the chamber.
Eumenes, waiting by the entrance, tried not to show his disdain for all this. He had lived and worked with these Macedonians long enough to understand them. Under their Kings they had been welded into a force capable of conquering the world, but they were highland tribesmen only a couple of generations removed from their ancestral traditions. Eumenes would even strive to join in with their revels when it was politic to do so. But still, some of these pages were the sons of Macedonian nobility, sent to serve the King’s officers in order to complete their education. Eumenes could only imagine what impression it must make on such young men when they spent their mornings mopping up the stinking detritus of some barbarian-warrior in his cups—or spent their nights serving his needs in other ways.
At length Hephaistion acknowledged Eumenes. “You’re early today, Secretary.”
“I don’t think so—not unless the sun has begun to jump around the sky again.”
“Then I must be late. Hah!” He waved a meat-laden skewer at Eumenes. “Try some of this. You’d never think a dead camel could taste so good.”
“The reason the Indians spice their food so heavily,” Eumenes said, “is because they eat rotten meat. I’ll stick to fruit and mutton.”