Captain Grove nodded. “Indeed they do. What I think you’re telling us is that Alexander won’t be content to be the victim of a siege himself. He is going to want to ride out on the field and meet the Mongols in open battle.”
“Yes,” murmured Abdikadir, “but the Mongols, by comparison, were poor at siege warfare, and much preferred to meet their enemies on open ground. If we ride out we meet our enemies on the field of their choice.”
Eumenes growled, “The King has spoken.”
Grove said quietly, “Then we must listen.”
“But,” said Abdikadir, “Alexander and Genghis are separated by more than fifteen centuries, far longer than separates Genghis from us. We should exploit every advantage we have.”
Eumenes said smoothly, “Advantages. You mean your guns and grenades.” Again he used the English words.
Since meeting Alexander’s army, the British and the moderns had tried to keep back some secrets from the Macedonians. Now Casey jumped off his couch and reached across the table toward de Morgan. “Cecil, you bastard. What else have you given away?”
De Morgan cowered back out of his reach, and two of Eumenes’ guards hurried forward, their broad hands on their stabbing swords. Abdikadir and Grove grabbed Casey and pulled him back down.
Bisesa sighed. “Come on, Casey, what did you expect? You know what Cecil’s like by now. He’d offer Eumenes your testicles on a plate if he thought it would be to his advantage.”
Abdikadir said, “And Eumenes probably knew about it all anyhow. These Macedonians aren’t fools.”
Eumenes followed these exchanges with interest. He said, “You forget that Cecil may not have had a choice in what he told me.” De Morgan translated this hesitantly, his eyes averted, and Bisesa saw the dark side of the choice he had made. “And besides,” Eumenes went on, “my foreknowledge will save us time now we need it, won’t it?”
Captain Grove leaned forward. “But you must understand, Secretary, that our weapons, though formidable, are limited. We have only a small stock of grenades, and ammunition for the guns . . .” The most significant armament was nineteenth-century vintage, a few hundred Martini rifles brought from Jamrud. Such a number of weapons wouldn’t count for much against a fast-moving horde numbered in the tens of thousands.
Eumenes quickly grasped these ideas. “So we have to be selective about how we use these weapons.”
“Exactly,” Casey growled. “Okay—if we commit to this—we should use the modern weapons to blunt their first attack.”
“Yes,” said Abdikadir. “Flash-bang grenades will spook the horses—and the men, if they’re unused to firearms.”
Bisesa said, “But they have Sable. We don’t know what weapons came down in that Soyuz with her—surely at least a couple of pistols.”
“That won’t help her much,” said Casey.
“No. But if she’s thrown in her lot with the Mongols, she may have used them to familiarize the Mongols with firearms. And she has modern training. We have to plan for the possibility that they’ll come in anticipating what we might do.”
“Shit,” said Casey. “Hadn’t thought of that.”
“All right,” Captain Grove said. “Casey, what else do you suggest?”
“Prepare for firefights in the city,” Casey said. Quickly the moderns sketched out the discipline for Eumenes: how you could anticipate the enemy’s likely approaches, and set up interlocking firing positions, and so forth. “We’ll have to train up some of your men in using the Kalashnikovs,” said Casey to Grove. “The key will be not to waste ammo—not to fire until you have a clear target . . . If we draw the Mongols into the city it’s possible we could soak up a large proportion of their forces.”
Again Eumenes grasped the ideas quickly. “But Babylon would be destroyed in the process,” he said.
Casey shrugged. “Winning this war is going to be costly—and if we lose, Babylon dies anyhow.”
Eumenes said, “Perhaps this tactic should be a last resort. Anything else?”
Bisesa said, “Of course it’s not just guns we’ve brought with us from the future, but knowledge. We may be able to suggest weapons that could be built with the resources available here.”
Casey said, “What are you thinking, Bis?”
“I’ve seen those kit-form catapults and siege engines the Macedonians have. Maybe we could come up with some improvements. And then, how about Greek fire? Wasn’t that a primitive form of napalm? Just naphtha and quicklime, I think . . .”
They discussed such possibilities for a while, but Eumenes cut them short. “I only dimly grasp what you describe, but I fear there will not be enough time to implement such schemes.”
“I’ve got something that could be delivered quickly,” Abdikadir murmured.
“What?” Bisesa asked.
“Stirrups.” Sketching quickly, he described what he meant. “A kind of footrest for horsemen, attached by leather straps . . .”
When Eumenes understood that these devices, quickly and simply manufactured, could multiply a cavalry’s maneuverability, he became extremely interested. “But our Companions are men of tradition. They will resist any innovation.”
“But,” Abdikadir pointed out, “the Mongols have stirrups.”
There was a great deal to be put in place, and little time to do it; the meeting broke up.
Bisesa drew Abdikadir and Casey to one side. “You really think this battle is inevitable?”
“Yeah,” Casey growled. “Alternatives to war—nonviolent means of resolving disputes—depend on the willingness of everybody concerned to back down. Back in the Iron Age, these guys haven’t had the benefit of our experience of two thousand years of bloodshed, give or take a few Hiroshimas and Lahores, to learn that it is sometimes necessary to back down. For them, war is the only way.”
Bisesa studied him. “That’s surprisingly thoughtful for you, Casey.”
“Shucks,” he said. But he quickly relapsed into his jock act; he cackled and rubbed his hands. “But it’s fun too. You know, we’ve got ourselves in a crock of shit here. But, think about it—Alexander the Great versus Genghis Khan! I wonder what they’d charge on pay-per-view for that.”
Bisesa knew what he meant. She had trained as a soldier too; mixed in with her dread, and her wish that none of this was happening—that she could just go home—was anticipation.
They walked out of the throne room, talking, speculating and planning.
33: A PRINCE OF HEAVEN
After a day and night alone in the dark, Kolya was taken to Yeh-lü. His arms pinned behind his back by horsehair rope, he was thrown to the ground.
He had no desire to face torture, and he talked fast, telling Yeh-lü what he had done, as much as he could remember. At the end of it Yeh-lü walked out of the yurt.
Sable’s face loomed over him. “You shouldn’t have done it, Kol. The Mongols know the power of information. You saw that for yourself at Bishkek. You could hardly have committed a worse crime if you’d taken a swipe at Genghis himself.”
He whispered, “Can I have some water?” He’d had nothing since being discovered.
She ignored his request. “You know there’s only going to be one verdict. I tried to plead your case. I said you were a prince, a prince of Heaven. They’ll be lenient. They don’t spill royal blood—”
He found the phlegm to spit in her face. The last time he saw her, she was laughing down at him.
They took him outside, hands still behind his back. Four burly soldiers held him down at his shoulders, his legs. Then an officer emerged from a yurt, his hands heavily gloved, carrying a ceramic cup. The cup turned out to contain molten silver. They poured it into one eye, then the other, and then one ear, and the other.
After that he could feel them pick him up, carry him, throw him into a hole lined with soft, fresh dug earth. He could not hear the hammering as they nailed down the floorboards over his head, nor could he hear his own screams.
34: “DWELLERS ALL IN TIM
E AND SPACE”
Alexander threw his army into a strict regimen of training. Most of this followed traditional Macedonian methods, involving a lot of forced marching, running under weights, and hand-to-hand combat.
But there were attempts to integrate the British troops into the Macedonian force. After a few trials it was clear that no British rider or sowar was good enough to ride with Alexander’s cavalry, but the Tommies and sepoys were accepted into the heart of the Macedonian infantry, the Foot Companions. Given the language and culture clashes a unified chain of command was hardly possible, but the Tommies were trained to understand the Macedonian trumpeters’ key signals.
Abdikadir’s work with the cavalry made fast strides, even though, as Eumenes had predicted, the first attempts to have the Macedonians ride with Abdikadir’s prototype stirrups were farcical. The Companion cavalry, the army’s senior regiment, was recruited from the youth of Macedonian nobles; Alexander sported a version of their uniform himself. And when they were first offered stirrups the proud Companions just sliced off the dangling leather attachments with their scimitars.
It took a brave sowar to climb onto one of the Macedonians’ stocky horses and, inexpertly but effectively, show how tightly he was able to control even an unfamiliar horse. After that, and with some heavy pressure relayed from the King, the training began in earnest.
Even without stirrups, though, the Macedonians’ horsemanship was astonishing. The rider steadied himself by holding onto the horse’s mane, and steered his horse purely by the pressure of his knees. Even so, the Companions were able to skirmish and wheel sharply, a flexibility and agility that had made them the hardened cutting edge of Alexander’s forces. Now, with stirrups, their maneuverability was vastly improved, and a Companion could brace his legs against impact and support a heavy lance.
“They’re just remarkable,” Abdikadir said as he watched wedges of a hundred men wheel and dart as one across the fields of Babylon. “I almost regret giving them stirrups; a couple of generations and this kind of horsemanship will be forgotten.”
“But we’ll still need horses,” Casey growled. “Makes you think—horses would be the main engine of war for another twenty-three centuries—until World War I, for God’s sake.”
“Maybe it will be different here,” Bisesa mused.
“Right. We’re not the same half-insane bunch of squabbling, over-promoted primates we were before the Discontinuity. The fact that we’re immersed in a battle with the Mongols five minutes after arriving here is just an aberration.” Casey laughed, and walked away.
Grove arranged for the Macedonians to be given some exposure to gunfire. In squads of a thousand or more, the Macedonians watched as Grove or Casey sacrificed a little of their stock of modern weaponry—a grenade, or a few shots squeezed off a Martini or a Kalashnikov at a tethered goat. Bisesa had argued that this kind of conditioning was essential: let them piss their pants now but hold the line against the Mongols, in case Sable had similar surprises up her spacesuit sleeve. The Macedonians had no trouble in grasping the principles of firearms; killing at a distance with bows was familiar to them. But the first time the Macedonians saw a relatively harmless flashbang grenade go off they yelled and ran, regardless of the harangues of their officers. It would have been comical if not so alarming.
With Grove’s support, Abdikadir insisted that Bisesa shouldn’t take part in the fighting directly. A woman would be particularly vulnerable; Grove, quaintly, actually used the phrase “a fate worse than death.”
So Bisesa threw herself into another project: establishing a hospital.
She requisitioned a small Babylonian town house. Philip, Alexander’s personal physician, and the British Surgeon-Captain both assigned her assistants. She was grievously short of any kind of supplies, but what she lacked in resources she tried to compensate for in modern know-how. She experimented with wine as an antiseptic. She established casualty collection points across the likely battlefield, and trained pairs of Alexander’s powerful, long-legged Agrarian scouts to work as stretcher-bearers. She tried to set up trauma chests, simple packs of equipment to serve the basis of the most likely injuries they would encounter—even gunshot wounds. This was an innovation of the British army in the Falklands; you made a quick assessment of the injury, then just grabbed the most appropriate kit.
The hardest thing to impart was the need for hygiene. Neither Macedonians nor nineteenth-century Brits grasped the need even to wipe off the blood between treating one patient and another. The Macedonians were baffled by her vague talk of invisible creatures, like tiny gods or demons, attacking broken flesh or exposed organs, and the British were scarcely any the wiser about bacteria and viruses. In the end, she had to appeal to their respective command structures to enforce her will.
She gave her assistants what practice she could. She sacrificed more goats, hacking at the animals with a Macedonian scimitar, or shooting them in the gut or pelvis. There was no substitute for getting your hands in real gore. The Macedonians were not squeamish—to have survived with Alexander, most of them had seen enough terrible injuries in their time—but the notion of doing something about it was new to them. The effectiveness of even simple techniques like tourniquets startled them, and inspired them to work harder, learning all the time.
Once again she was changing the trajectory of history, Bisesa thought. If they survived—a big if—she wondered what new medical synthesis, two thousand years early, might develop from the rough-and-ready education she was struggling to impart: perhaps a whole new body of knowledge, functionally equivalent to the mechanical Newtonian models of the twenty-first century, but couched in the language of Macedonian gods.
Ruddy Kipling insisted on “joining up,” as he called it. “Here I stand at the confluence of history, as mankind’s two greatest generals join in combat, with the prize the destiny of a new world. My blood is up, Bisesa!” He had, he claimed, trained with the First Punjab Volunteer Rifles, part of an Anglo-Indian initiative to fend off the threats emanating from the rebellious North–West Frontier. “Granted I didn’t last very long,” he admitted, “after mocking my fellow recruits’ shooting skills in a little poem about having my carcass peppered with bullets while walking down a neighboring street . . .”
The British took one look at this broad-faced, pudgy, somewhat pompous young man, still pale from his lingering illness, and laughed at him. The Macedonians were simply baffled by Ruddy, but wouldn’t have him either.
After these rebuffs, and somewhat against Bisesa’s better judgment, Ruddy insisted on joining her makeshift medical corps. “I once had some ambition to be a doctor, you know . . .” Perhaps, but he turned out to be astoundingly squeamish, fainting dead away the first time he glimpsed a goat’s fresh blood.
But, determined to play his part in the great struggle, he stuck with it. Gradually he became inured to the atmosphere of a hospital, the stink of blood, and the bleating of wounded and frightened animals. Eventually he was able to apply a bandage to a goat’s hacked-open leg, all but finishing the job before fainting.
Then came his greatest triumph, when a Tommy came in with a gashed-open hand from a training accident. Ruddy was able to clean it out and bind it up without referring to Bisesa, although he threw up later, as he cheerfully admitted.
After that, Bisesa took his shoulders, ignoring the faint stink of vomit. “Ruddy, courage on the battlefield is one thing—but no less is the courage to face one’s inner demons, as you have done.”
“I will persuade myself to believe you,” he said, but he blushed through his pallor.
Though Ruddy became able to stand the sight of blood, suffering and death, he was still greatly moved by the spectacle—even by the death of a goat. Over dinner he said, “What is life that it is so precious, and yet so easily destroyed? Perhaps that wretched kid we shot to bits today thought himself the center of the universe. And now he is snuffed out, evanescent as a dewdrop. Why would God give us something so precious as life, only t
o hack it short with the brutality of death?”
“But,” de Morgan said, “it isn’t just God that we can ask now. We can no longer regard ourselves as the pinnacle of Creation, below God Himself—for now we have in our world these creatures whom Bisesa senses inside the Eyes, perhaps below God but higher than us, as we are higher than the kid goats we slaughter. Why should God listen to our prayers when they stand over us to call to Him?”
Ruddy looked at him with disgust. “That’s typical of you, de Morgan, to belittle your fellow man.”
De Morgan just laughed.
Josh said, “Or maybe there is no god of the Discontinuity.” He sounded unusually troubled. “You know, this whole experience, everything since the Discontinuity, is so like a terrible dream, a fever dream. Bisesa, you have taught me about the great extinctions of the past. You say this was understood in my time, but barely accepted. And you say that in all the fossil record there is no trace of mind—nothing until man, and his immediate precursors. Perhaps, then, if we are to die ourselves, it will be the first time an intelligent species has succumbed to extinction.” He flexed his hand, studying his fingers. “Abdikadir says that according to the scientists of the twenty-first century, mind is bound up with the structure of the universe—that mind somehow makes things real.”
“The collapse of quantum functions—yes. Perhaps.”
“If that is so, and if our kind of minds are about to be snuffed out, then perhaps this is the consequence. They say that when you face death your past life flickers before your eyes. Perhaps we as a race are undergoing a final psychic shock as we succumb to darkness—shards of our bloody history have come bubbling to the surface in the last instants—and perhaps in falling, we are smashing apart the structure of space and time itself . . .” He was talking rapidly now, disturbed.
Ruddy just laughed. “Not like you to brood so, Josh!”
Bisesa reached out and took Josh’s hand. “Shut up, Ruddy. Listen to me, Josh. This is no death dream. I think the Eyes are artifacts, the Discontinuity a purposeful act. I think there are minds involved—minds greater than ours, but like ours.”