“Yeah,” said Sable. “Ninety if he’s a day. But—look at the two of them, Kol. Put aside the age gap. Look at their eyes, the bone structure, the chin . . .”
Kolya stared, wishing the light were brighter. The shape of the boy’s skull was hidden by a mop of black hair, but his face, his pale blue eyes—“They look alike.”
“So they do,” Sable said dryly. “Kolya, when you come to a place like this, it’s for life. You arrive as a cadet at eight or nine, you stay here and chant and pray, and you’re still at it when you’re ninety, if you live that long.”
“Sable—”
“These two are one: the same man, the youthful cadet, the aged lama, brought together by faults in time. And the boy knows that when he grows old, he will one day see his own younger self come walking across the steppe.” She grinned. “They don’t seem fazed, do they? Maybe Buddhist philosophy doesn’t have to be stretched too far to accommodate what’s happened. It’s just a circle closing, after all . . .”
The Mongol soldiers searched desultorily for plunder, but there was nothing to be had save for a few scraps of food, and the petty treasures of worship: prayer-wheels, sacred texts. The Mongols made to kill the monks. They prepared for this without emotion, just a matter of routine; killing was what they did. Kolya plucked up his courage and interceded with Yeh-lü’s advisor to stop this.
They left the temple to its paradoxical slumber, and the army moved on.
27: THE FISH-EATERS
After three weeks of the journey along the coast of the Gulf, Eumenes let the moderns know that the scouts had found an inhabited village.
Driven by curiosity and a need for a break from the sea, Bisesa, Abdikadir, Josh, Ruddy and a small squad of British soldiers under Corporal Batson joined an advance party at the head of the sprawling train that Alexander’s army had become. All the moderns were discreetly equipped with firearms. As they disembarked, Casey, his leg still weak, watched from the boat with envy.
It was a day’s walk to the village, and it was a tough slog. Though Ruddy was the first to grumble, they were all soon suffering. If they walked too close to the shore there was nothing but salt and stony ground where nothing grew, but if they went inland, they hit sand dunes over which the going would have been tough even without the rain. There was always a danger of flash floods, as water came pouring down overloaded courses. And when the rain stopped falling, the horseflies would rise up like clouds.
Snakes were a constant hazard. None of the moderns was able to recognize the varieties they encountered here—but as they might have been drawn from a line of descent that spanned two million years or more, perhaps that wasn’t surprising.
Bisesa glared at the unmoving Eyes, effortlessly placed over the most difficult country, which watched her petty struggles as she passed.
At the end of the day the party came to the village. With the Macedonian soldiers, Bisesa and the others crept up the crest of a bluff to see. Close to the shore, it was a poor-looking place. Round-shouldered huts sat squat on the stony ground. A few scrawny sheep grazed the scrubby grass behind the village.
The natives weren’t prepossessing. Adults and children alike had long, matted, filthy hair, and the men trailed beards. Their main source of nourishment was fish, which they caught by wading into the water and casting nets made of palm bark. They went about their business dressed crudely in what looked like the treated skin of fish, or maybe even whale.
Ruddy said, “They are clearly human. But they are Stone Age.”
De Morgan said, “But they may have come from a time not much before now—I mean, Alexander’s era. One of the Macedonians has seen people like this before; he calls them Fish-Eaters.”
Abdikadir nodded. “We tend to forget how empty Alexander’s world was. A couple of thousand kilometers away you have the Greece of Aristotle—but here you have Neolithics, living as they have since the Ice Age, perhaps.”
Bisesa said, “Then perhaps this new world won’t seem so strange to the Macedonians as it does to us.”
The Macedonians treated the Fish-Eaters briskly, driving them off with a volley of arrows. Then the advance party marched into the deserted village.
Bisesa looked around curiously. The stink of fish permeated everything. She found a kind of knife on the ground—made of bone, perhaps the scapula of a small whale or dolphin. It had been finely carved, and dolphins danced over its surface.
Josh inspected the huts. “Look at this. The huts are just skins thrown over frames of whale bones, or—look here—banks of heaped-up oyster shells. Almost everything they have they get from the sea—even their clothes, tools and homes—remarkable!”
As an example of living archaeology, Bisesa thought, this was an unimaginably rich place, and she recorded as much as she could, despite the phone’s bleating. But she felt depressed at how much of the past was lost and forever unknowable; this shard of a vanished way of life, torn out of its context, was just another page ripped out of an untitled book, salvaged from a vanished library.
The soldiers were here for provision, not archaeology. But there was little here for them. A store of powdered fish-meal was dug up and taken away. The few wretched sheep were captured and quickly slaughtered, but even their meat turned out to taste dreadfully of fish and salt. Bisesa was dismayed at this casual destruction of the village, but there was nothing she could do about it.
A single Eye hovered over the village of the Fish-Eaters. It watched the Macedonians leave as it had watched them come, with no reaction.
They spent the night not far from the village, close to a stream. The Macedonians set up camp with their customary efficiency, stretching some of their leather tents out on poles as a rough awning to keep off the rain. The British soldiers helped with the work.
Bisesa decided it was time for some proper admin; the toilet facilities on Alexander’s ships weren’t exactly advanced. The relief at getting her boots off was huge. Briskly she treated her feet. Her socks crackled with sweat and dust, and the gaps between her toes were caked with dirt and what looked like the beginnings of athlete’s foot. She was sparing with what was left of her medical kit, which was after all just a small emergency pack, though out in the field like this she continued to use her Puritabs.
She stripped and dunked herself in the cold water of the stream. She wasn’t too concerned by the attentions of her male companions. Lusts were slaked easily enough in the Macedonian camp. Josh watched her, of course, as he always did—but boyishly, and if she caught him he would duck his head and blush. She rinsed out her clothes and left them to dry.
By the time she was done, the Macedonians had built a fire. She lay down on the ground close to the fire, slipped under her poncho, and set her pack as a pillow beneath her head. Josh, as always, maneuvered himself closest to her, and settled into a position where he could just stare at her when he thought nobody was looking. But behind his back Ruddy and Abdikadir mimed blowing kisses.
Ruddy started holding forth, as he always did. “We are so few. We’ve seen a great swath of the new world now, from Jamrud to the coast of Arabia. Humans are spread thin, and thinking humans thinner! But we keep seeing the emptiness of the land as an absence. We should regard it rather as an opportunity.”
Josh murmured, “What are you on about, Giggers?”
Ruddy Kipling took off his spectacles and rubbed eyes that looked small and deep. “Our English Empire has gone now, wiped away like a bridge suit in a card shuffle. Instead we have this—Mir, a new world, a blank canvas. And we, we few, might be the only source of rationality and science and civilization left in the world.”
Abdikadir smiled. “Fair enough, Ruddy, but there aren’t too many Englishmen here on Mir to translate that dream into reality.”
“But an Englishman always was a mongrel. And that’s not a bad thing. He is the sum of his influences, from the solemn might of the Romans to the fierce intelligence of democracy. Well, then, we must start to build a new England—and forge new Eng
lishmen!—right here in the sands of Arabia. And we can found our new state from the beginning on solid English principles. Every man absolutely independent, so long as he doesn’t infringe his neighbor’s rights. Prompt and equal justice before God. Toleration of religions and creeds of any shape or form. Every man’s home his castle. That sort of thing. It’s an opportunity to clear out a lot of clutter.”
“That all sounds marvelous,” said Abdikadir. “And who’s to run the new world empire? Shall we leave it to Alexander?”
Ruddy laughed. “Alexander achieved marvelous things for his time, but he is a military despot—worse, an Iron Age savage! You saw that display of idol-bothering by the sea. Perhaps he had the right instincts, buried under his armor—he did cart along the Greeks—but he’s not the chap. For the time being we civilized folk must guide. We are few—but we have the weapons.” Ruddy lay back, arm behind his head, and closed his eyes. “I can see it now. The forges will ring out! The Sword will bring peace—and peace will bring wealth—and wealth will bring the Law. It’s as natural as the growth of a sturdy oak. And we, who have seen it all before, will be there to water the sapling.”
He meant to inspire them, but his words seemed hollow to Bisesa, and their camp seemed a small and isolated place, a speck of light in a land empty even of ghosts.
The next day, during the walk back, Ruddy took ill with a severe dose of gut infection. Bisesa and Abdikadir dug into their dwindling twenty-first-century medical packs to give him antibiotics, and made up drinks of sugar and water. Ruddy asked for his opium, insisting it was one of the oldest analgesics in the Indian pharmacopoeia. Still the diarrhea weakened him, and his broad head looked too heavy on his neck. But he talked and talked.
“We need a new set of myths to bind us,” Ruddy wheezed. “Myths and rituals; that’s what makes a nation. That’s what America lacks, you know—a young nation—no time yet to grow tradition. Well, America is gone now, and Britain too, and the old stories won’t do—not any more.”
Josh said wryly, “You’re just the man to write new ones, Ruddy.”
“We are living in a new age of heroes,” he said. “This is the age when the world is built. That’s our opportunity. And we must tell the future what we did, how we did it and why . . .” On Ruddy talked, filling the air with his dreams and plans, until dehydration and breathlessness forced him to stop, and they walked slowly on through the huge, empty desert.
28: BISHKEK
The army of Genghis Khan skirted the northern edge of the Gobi desert.
The land was vast, a mirror of the dust-clogged sky. Sometimes they would see eroded, tired-looking hills, and once a herd of camels trotted by in the distance, stiff-backed and pompous. When the wind blew, a storm of yellow sand blocked out the light: sand that tasted of iron, sand that might have been formed a million years ago, Kolya thought, or a month. The Mongols, their heads wrapped in cloth, looked like Bedouins.
As the desert crossing wore on, Kolya sank within himself. His mind numbed, his senses dulled, he would sit in the back of the cart, never speaking, a cloth drawn across his face to keep out the dust. The land was so huge and still that sometimes it was as if they weren’t moving at all. He grudgingly admired the strength of spirit, the sheer bloody-minded resilience that enabled the Mongols to conquer the immense distances of their Asiatic stage. And yet he had flown in space; and once he would have spanned the distance he had traveled, so vast on the human scale, in fifteen minutes or less.
They came to a great mound of stone and earth, a barrow. It looked like some trapped chthonic beast struggling to escape the clutches of the bone-dry ground. Kolya thought this was a Scythian tomb, a relic of a people who had lived before the birth of Christ, but who had ridden horses and built yurts just like the Mongols. The mound looked fresh, the stones unworn—but the tomb had been broken open, robbed of whatever gold or other wealth it had contained.
And then they came to an almost modern relic. Kolya glimpsed it only from the distance: tin-roofed cement barns, silos, what looked like a convoy of rusted tractors. Perhaps it was a government agricultural project, abandoned apparently long before the Discontinuity. Perhaps as they moved away from central Mongolia, Kolya mused, they were leaving behind the center of gravity of this vast continent’s history, the terrible reign of Genghis Khan; perhaps here the shards of shattered time had been more free to settle as they willed, bearing refugees from wider expanses. The Mongol scouts inspected the site, pulled around a few sheets of rusted corrugated iron, abandoned it as worthless.
Slowly the country changed. They passed a lake—dry, a sheet of salt. At its edge lizards hopped between the rocks, and flies rose up, troubling the horses. Kolya was startled to hear the desolate cries of seabirds, for there could scarcely be a place in the world further from the sea than this desiccated heartland. Perhaps the birds had followed Asia’s complicated network of rivers and become lost here. The parallel with his own situation was obvious, the irony banal.
And still the journey wore on.
To leave modern Mongolia, they would have to pass through a range called the Altai Mountains. Day by day the ground rose, becoming more fertile and better watered. In places there were even flowers: once Kolya found primulas, anemones, orchids, stranded in a dying fragment of steppe spring. They crossed a wide, marshy plain, where plovers wheeled over sodden grass, and the horses plodded carefully through murk that rose to their ankles.
The ground became mountainous. The army squeezed through valleys, each higher and more narrow than the one before. The Mongols called to each other, and their voices echoed from the walls. Sometimes Kolya would see eagles high above, their unmistakable silhouettes painted against the lead-gray sky. Genghis’s generals muttered darkly about their vulnerability to ambush here.
At last the land opened up into a vast canyon bounded by walls of shattered rock that reared up toward the sky. Kolya found himself on the ridge at the head of the canyon. An enormous flat-topped mountain loomed over him, streaked by snow and ice like the droppings of immense birds. He looked back, and saw the army of Genghis Khan strung out along the canyon’s length, people and animals the color of mud, with here and there the sparkle of polished armor. But this thin line of people was dwarfed by the towering pinnacles of purple-red rock around them.
They moved on, tracking the northwestern border of modern China, heading southwest toward Kyrgyzstan. After that it was only a few more days’ ride until they came to the town.
The Mongols, great believers in intelligence, sent scouts and spies creeping around the town, and eventually envoys who walked boldly up its main streets. Citizens in flat caps and buttoned-up jackets marched out, hands extended in friendship to these rank-smelling strangers.
The place was obviously modern, or nearly so. The news of it seemed to jolt Kolya out of the trance into which the journey had plunged him. It was a shock when he heard that the army, and he, had been traveling for nearly three months.
And it was here, as it turned out, that the final stage of his own journey would begin.
Sable was taken forward to help check out the town. It was Bishkek, she thought, in the twenty-first century the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The place as they had found it was obviously from some preelectric age, but there were water mills and factories. “It could be late nineteenth century,” she said. Metaled roads led into the town, but they were truncated by time slips a kilometer or so outside town.
More scouts were sent in, and Kolya was taken to translate. The town was a pretty place, its streets lined with trees, wilting a little under the persistent acid rain. Reflecting a deeper history, its main thoroughfare was called Silk Road Street. The townsfolk, cut off and with no idea what had happened, were disturbed by the lack of visits by their tax inspectors, and wanted to know if there were any directives from Moscow, any news of the Tsar. Kolya longed to speak directly to them, but the Mongols wouldn’t allow it.
Kolya was excited by the town, the most modern place they had yet e
ncountered. Surely there was a base of equipment and expertise here that could be built on. He pressed Yeh-lü to make friendly contact. But his pleas went unheard, and he began to grow disturbed: the Mongols did not like towns, and knew only one way to deal with them. Sable wouldn’t back him up; she merely watched and waited, playing her own complicated game.
Kolya witnessed some of what followed.
The Mongols came in the night, riding in silence. When they charged they roared, and the sound of their voices and the horses’ hooves overwhelmed the little town. The killing began in the main street, and swept through the town, a wave of butchery with a bloody froth of slaughter at its leading edge. The townsfolk could put up no resistance save for a few futile potshots with antiquated firearms.
Genghis had ordered that the town’s ruler be brought out alive. The mayor tried to hide himself and his family in the town’s small library, and the building was taken apart brick by brick. His wife was killed before him, his daughters raped, and the man himself trampled to death.
The Mongols found little of value in the town. They broke up the newspaper office’s small printing press, bringing out the iron to melt down and reuse. It was the Mongols’ habit when taking a town to pick out artisans and other skilled folk who might serve their purposes later, but in Bishkek they were capable of recognizing little of what they found: the skills of a clockmaker or accountant or lawyer meant nothing to them. Few men were allowed to live. Most of the children and some of the younger women were taken prisoner, though many of the women were raped. All this was done mechanically, joylessly, even the rapes; it was just what the Mongols did.
When they were done, the Mongols torched the town systematically.
The surviving prisoners were driven out into the countryside towards Genghis’s encampment, where they huddled in desolate misery. To Kolya they looked like classic peasant stock, and their waistcoats and trousers, thick skirts and headscarves were the subject of stares from the Mongols. One beauty, called Natasha, the fifteen-year-old daughter of an innkeeper, was picked out for Genghis himself. He always took the most beautiful women, and impregnated many of them. Genghis had intended to drive the prisoners on with him, for there were always uses for such wretched souls—they could be driven into battle, for instance. But when he found that one of the Golden Family had been injured by the bullet of a wild-eyed solicitor, he ordered the prisoners to be slain. Yeh-lü’s weary pleas for leniency counted for nothing. The women and children submitted meekly.