De Morgan pointed out a complicated system of sewers and wells. “We’ll have to tell Kipling,” he said with dry humor. “A big fan of sewers, is Ruddy. The mark of civilization, he says.”
The ground was heavily trampled and rutted. When Bisesa dug her hand into the dust she found it was full of flotsam: bits of broken pottery, terra-cotta bangles, clay marbles, figurine fragments, bits of metal that looked like a trader’s weights, tablets inscribed in a script unknown to her. Every square centimeter of the ground seemed to have been heavily trodden, and she walked on layers of detritus, the detritus of centuries. This place must be old, a relic of a time deeper than the British, deeper even than Alexander’s foray, old enough to have been covered by the drifting dirt by her own day. It was a reminder that this bit of the world had been inhabited, indeed civilized, for a long, long time—and that the depths of time, dredged by the Discontinuity, contained many unknowns.
But the town had been emptied out, as if the population had just packed up and marched away across the stony plain. Eumenes wondered if the rivers had changed their courses because of the Discontinuity, and the people had gone in search of water. But the abandonment looked too far in the past for that.
No answers were forthcoming. The soldiers, Macedonian and British alike, were spooked by the empty, echoing place, this Marie Celeste of a town. They didn’t even stay the night before moving on.
After several days’ march, Alexander’s train arrived at Jamrud, to astonishment and consternation on all sides.
Still on crutches, Casey hobbled out to meet Bisesa and embraced her. “I wouldn’t have believed it. And Jeez, the stink.”
She grinned. “That’s what a fortnight eating curry under a leather tent does for you. Strange—Jamrud seems almost like home to me now, Rudyard Kipling and all.”
Casey grunted. “Well, something tells me it’s all the home you and I are going to have for a while, for I don’t see any sign of a way back yet. Come on up to the fort. Guess what Abdikadir managed to set up? A shower. Goes to show heathens have their uses—the smart ones anyhow . . .”
At the fort Abdikadir, Ruddy and Josh crowded around her, eager for her impressions. Josh was predictably glad to see her, his small face creased by smiles. She was pleased to get back to his bright, awkward company.
He asked, “What do you think of our new friend Alexander?”
Bisesa said heavily, “We have to live with him. His forces outnumber ours—I mean, Captain Grove’s—by maybe a hundred to one. I think for now that Alexander is the only show in town.”
“And,” said Ruddy silkily, “Bisesa undoubtedly thinks that Alexander is a fine fellow for his limpid eyes and his shining hair that spills over his shoulders—”
Josh blushed furiously.
Ruddy said, “What about you, Abdi? It’s not everybody who gets to confront such a deep family legend.”
Abdikadir smiled, and ran his hand over his blond hair. “Maybe I’ll get to shoot my great-to-the-nth grandfather and prove all those paradoxes wrong after all . . .” But he wanted to get down to business. He was keen to show Bisesa something—and not just his patent shower. “I took a trip back to the bit of the twenty-first century that brought us here, Bisesa. There was a cave I wanted to check out . . .”
He led her to a storeroom in the fort. He held up a gun, a big rifle. It had been wrapped in dirty rags, but its metal gleamed with oil. “There was an intelligence report that this stuff was here,” he said. “It was one of the objectives for our mission in the Bird that day.” There were flashbang grenades, a few old Soviet-era grenades. He bent and picked one up; it was like a soup can mounted on a stick. “Not much of a stash, but here it is.”
Josh touched the barrel of the gun cautiously. “I’ve never seen such a weapon.”
“It’s a Kalashnikov. An antique in my day—a weapon left over from the Soviet invasion, which is to say maybe fifty years before our time. Still works fine, I should imagine. The hill fighters always loved their Kalashnikovs. Nothing so reliable. You don’t even have to clean it, which many of those boys never bothered to do.”
“Twenty-first-century killing machines,” Ruddy said uneasily. “Remarkable.”
“The question is,” Bisesa said, “what to do with this stuff. Could we justify using twenty-first century guns against, say, an Iron Age army—no matter what the odds?”
Ruddy peered at the gun. “Bisesa, we have no idea what waits out there for us. We did not choose this situation, and whatever manner of creature or accident has stranded us here did not take much notice of our welfare. I would say nice moral questions are beside the point, and that pragmatism is the order of the day. Wouldn’t it be foolish not to preserve these muscles of steel and gunpowder?”
Josh sighed. “You’re as pompous as ever, Ruddy, my friend. But I have to agree with you.”
Alexander’s army unit set up its camp half a kilometer from Jamrud. Soon the fires were lit, and the usual extraordinary mixture of military base and traveling circus established itself. That first evening there was a great deal of suspicion between the two camps, and British and Macedonian troops patrolled up and down an implicitly agreed border.
But the ice began to break on the second day. It was Casey who started it, in fact. After spending some time in the border zone, facing down a short, squat Macedonian veteran who looked about fifty, Casey, with gestures, challenged him to a milling. Bisesa knew what this was about: a tradition among some military units where you joined in a one-minute, no-rules, no-holds-barred boxing match and simply tried to beat the living shit out of your opponent.
Despite his aggression, it was obvious to everybody that one-legged Casey was in no shape for such a contest, and Corporal Batson stepped into the breach. Stripped to trousers and braces, the Geordie might have been a twin of the squat Macedonian. A crowd quickly gathered, and as the contest was joined the baying of each side for its champion rose up. “Get stuck in, Joe!” “Alalalalai!” Casey timed the contest, breaking it up after its regulation minute, by which time Batson had taken a lot of blows to his body, while the Macedonian’s nose looked broken. There was no clear winner, but Bisesa could see a grudging respect had been established, the crude regard of one fighting soldier for another, just as Casey had intended.
There was no shortage of volunteers for the next match. When one sepoy came away with a broken arm, the officers stepped in. But a new sporting contest began at the Macedonians’ suggestion, this time a game of sphaira. This Macedonian tradition turned out to be a game played with a leather ball, a pick-up-and-run affair a bit like British rugby, or American football—but a lot more violent. Again Casey got involved, marking out the pitch, agreeing to rules, and acting as referee.
Later, some of the Tommies tried to teach the Macedonians the rules of cricket. Bowlers hurled a hard cork ball, battered by overuse, down a strip of dirt marked by sets of improvised stumps, and batsmen swung homemade bats with abandon. Bisesa and Ruddy paused to watch. The game went well, even if the rule of leg-before-wicket was a challenge to the Tommies’ miming skills.
All this went on right beneath a floating Eye. Ruddy snorted. “The human mind has a remarkable capacity to swallow strangeness.”
One wild drive sent the ball flying into the air, where it collided with the hovering Eye. It sounded as if the ball had hit a wall of solid rock. The ball bounced back into the hands of a fielder, who raised his hands in triumph at his dismissal of the batsman. Bisesa saw that the Eye was quite unperturbed by this clout.
The cricketers gathered into an arguing knot. Ruddy pulled his nose. “As far as I can tell, they are arguing about whether a bounce off the Eye constitutes a valid catch!”
Bisesa shook her head. “I never understood cricket.”
Thanks to all these initiatives, by the end of that second day much of the tension and mute hostility had bled away, and Bisesa wasn’t surprised to see Tommies and sepoys slipping into the Macedonian camp. The Macedonians were happy enoug
h to exchange food, wine and even souvenirs like boots, helmets and Iron Age weapons for glass beads, mouth organs, photographs and other trinkets. And, it seemed, some of the camp prostitutes were prepared to offer their services to these wide-eyed men from the future for no payment at all.
On the third day, Eumenes sent a chamberlain to the fort, who summoned Captain Grove and his advisors into the presence of the King.
22: THE MAP
It was the dirt that Kolya hated most. After a couple of days in the tent city he felt as filthy as a Mongol himself, and as lice-ridden—in fact he believed the parasites were homing in on him, a source of untapped, fresh meat. If the food poisoning didn’t kill him, he’d probably be bled to death.
But Sable said they had to fit in. “Look at Yeh-lü,” she said. “He’s a civilized man. You think he grew up covered in shit? Of course not. And if he can stand it, you can.”
She was right, of course. But it didn’t make life with the Mongols any easier.
Genghis Khan, it seemed, was a patient man.
Something incomprehensible had happened to the world. And whatever it was had fractured the Mongol empire, as was shown by the severing of the yam, the great empire-wide arteries of waystations and couriers. Well, Genghis Khan had built an empire once, and whatever the state of the world, he would do it again—he, or his able sons. Yeh-lü, however, was advising Genghis Khan to wait. It was always the Mongol way to allow information to be gathered before determining which way to strike, and Genghis Khan listened to his advisors.
During this period of deliberation, though, Genghis Khan was aware of the need to keep his troops fit and occupied. He set up a rigorous program of training, including long forced marches and rides. And he ordered a battue to be organized. This would be a mighty hunt spanning kilometers, and it would take a week to organize. It would be an exercise in maneuvering troops, using weapons, maintaining discipline, communications and hardship. It was a significant event; the hunt was at the core of the Mongols’ self-image as well as their military methods.
Sable, meanwhile, explored the yurt city. She particularly targeted the troops, hoping to learn how they fought.
The Mongol warriors saw Sable as an irritation. Kolya learned that, given that the usual pattern of courtship here was to kidnap your wife from the yurt of your neighbor, women had surprising influence in Mongol society—as long as they were members of the Golden Family anyhow. Genghis Khan’s first wife Borte, about the same age as the emperor, was a key voice in the decision-making of the court. But women didn’t fight. The warriors were wary of this strange Heaven-woman in her orange clothes, and they weren’t about to submit to her inspections.
The turning point came when one cavalryman, drunk on rice wine, forgot about the power of Heaven and tried to rip open Sable’s jumpsuit. He was a stocky, powerful man, a veteran of the Mongols’ first Russian campaign, and so probably personally responsible for hundreds of deaths—but he was no match for twenty-first-century martial arts disciplines. With one pale breast exposed, Sable floored him in seconds and left him screaming on the ground, with a leg broken in two places.
After that, Sable rapidly grew in stature and in aura. She was allowed to come and go where she pleased—and she took care to ensure that the tale of her victory, suitably embellished, found its way back to the court. But the Mongols were growing nervous of her, Kolya saw, and that surely wasn’t a good thing.
Come to that, he was nervous of her. Her fear had long burned away, and as the days wore by, and she pushed against one barrier or another with impunity, she grew in confidence and determination. It was as if her stranding in this bit of the thirteenth century had liberated something primeval inside her.
Kolya, meanwhile, spent his time with Yeh-lü, the empire’s chief administrator.
Born in one of the neighboring nations, Yeh-lü had been brought into the Mongol camp as a prisoner; an astrologer by training, he had quickly risen in this empire of illiterates. Yeh-lü and other educated men in the court had been appointed by a farsighted Genghis Khan to administer the growing empire.
Yeh-lü had used China as his model for the new state. He selected the most able of the prisoners the Mongols brought back from their raids into northern China to help him in this project, and extracted books and medicines from their booty. Once, he said modestly, he had been able to save many lives during an epidemic in Mongolia by using Chinese medicines and methods.
Yeh-lü sought to moderate the Mongols’ cruelty by appealing to higher ambitions. Genghis Khan had actually considered depopulating China to provide more pasture for his horses, but Yeh-lü had deflected him. “The dead don’t pay taxes,” he had said. Kolya suspected his long-term ambition was to civilize the Mongols by allowing the sedentary cultures they conquered to assimilate them—just as China had absorbed and acculturated previous waves of invaders from the northern wastes.
Kolya had no idea how his personal adventure would turn out. But if he was stuck here on Mir, in people like Yeh-lü he saw the best hope for the future. And so he was happy to consult with Yeh-lü about the nature of the new world, and to draw up plans for what to do about it.
Yeh-lü had been taken by Sable’s first attempt to sketch a world map on the dirt floor. He and Kolya now assembled a detailed map of the entire world, based on Kolya’s memories and charts from the Soyuz. Yeh-lü was an intelligent man who had no difficulty accepting that the world was a sphere—like the Greeks, Chinese scholars had long ago pointed out the curving profile of the Earth’s shadow, cast on the Moon during a lunar eclipse—and it was easy for him to grasp the mapping of a globe’s surface to a flat sheet.
After some preliminary sketching Yeh-lü assembled a team of Chinese scribes. They began work on an immense silk version of the world map. When finished it would cover the floor of one of the yurts in the emperor’s great pavilion.
Yeh-lü was fascinated by the emerging image. He was intrigued how little remained of Eurasia for the Mongols to conquer; from the Mongols’ continent-spanning point of view, it seemed a short step from Russia through the countries of western Europe to the Atlantic coast. But Yeh-lü worried about how he would present the map to Genghis Khan, with so many territories in the New World, the Far East and Australasia, Southern Africa and Antarctica, of which Genghis Khan had had no knowledge.
The scribes’ work was truly beautiful, Kolya thought, with the ice caps picked out in delicate white threads, spun gold following principal rivers, precious stones marking major cities, and the whole covered with careful Mongol lettering—although Kolya learned to his surprise that the Mongols had had no written script at all before Genghis Khan, who had adopted the script of his neighbors the Uighurs as his standard.
The laboring clerks clearly took pride in their work, and Yeh-lü treated them well, congratulating them on their prowess. But the clerks were slaves, Kolya learned, captured during the Mongols’ raids on the Chinese nations. Kolya had never met slaves before, and he couldn’t help but be fascinated by them. Their posture was always submissive, their eyes dropped, and the women especially cringed from any contact with the Mongols. Perhaps they were favored in the presence of Yeh-lü, but they were defeated, owned.
Kolya missed his home: his wife, his children, lost in the time streams. But each of these wretched slaves had been ripped from her home, her life trashed, and not by a godlike manipulation of time and space but simply through the cruelty of other human beings. The slaves’ plight didn’t make his own loss any easier to bear, but it warned him against self-pity.
If he found the presence of the slave clerks difficult to accept, Kolya took comfort in the civilized intelligence of Yeh-lü. After a time it seemed to him that he was finding it easier to trust Yeh-lü, a man from the thirteenth century, than Sable, a woman of his own time.
Sable grew impatient with the careful mapping sessions. And she was not impressed with the plans Yeh-lü was tentatively assembling to present to Genghis Khan.
The first priori
ty ought to be consolidation, in Yeh-lü’s view. The Mongols had come to rely on the import of grain, cloth and many other essentials, and so trade had become important to them. As there were few working links left with China, the first and richest part of Genghis Khan’s Asiatic empire ought to be explored first. At the same time, Kolya urged, a party should be sent to the valley of the Indus, to seek out Casey and the other refugees from his own time.
But this wasn’t bold enough for Sable. After a week she walked into Yeh-lü’s chamber and stabbed a knife into the world map. The slave clerks fluttered away like frightened birds. Yeh-lü regarded her with cold interest.
Kolya said, “Sable, we are still strangers here—”
“Babylon,” she said. She pointed to her knife, which quivered at the heart of Iraq. “That’s where the Khan should be directing his energies. Grain stores, trade routes, the cowing of Chinese peasants—all these are dirt compared to that. Babylon is where the true power behind this new world lies—as you know as well as I do, Kolya—a manifestation of a power that has torn up space and time themselves. If the Khan gets hold of that, then his divine mission to rule the planet might come about after all, even in his lifetime.”
In English, incomprehensible to any of their interpreters, Kolya said, “Power like that, in the hands of Genghis Khan? Sable—you’re crazy.”
She looked at him, eyes blazing. “We’re eight centuries ahead, remember. We can harness these Mongols.” She waved her hand over the world map, as if laying claim to it. “It would take generations for anything like a modern civilization to be built on the fragments of history we have inherited. With the Mongols behind us we could shortcut that to less than a lifetime. Kolya, we can do this. In fact it’s more than an opportunity. It’s a duty.”