Time's Eye (13 page)

17: A HARD RAIN

Grasper wasn’t troubled by her confinement. She was so young, perhaps she had forgotten that any other way of life had ever existed. She would roam around the cage floor or climb up the netting; she would swing from the shining object that held it all up; she explored her own ears and nostrils with ruthless efficiency.

As the days wore on the men beyond the netting seemed to be growing more agitated, but they never failed to bring the man-apes their food and water. Grasper would come clambering up the net walls and try to reach out to them, and the men would reward her with extra bits of food. Seeker, though, grew withdrawn. She hated this prison, and the strange creatures who had trapped her. Nobody praised
her
, or gave her extra bits of fruit; there was nothing cute about Seeker’s sullen hostility.

It got worse when the rains started.

The rains were sometimes so hard that the heavy drops pounded against your skin like a hundred tiny fists. The man-apes were always cold and sodden, and even Grasper’s bright curiosity was subdued. Sometimes the rain stung when it hit your bare flesh, your hands or feet or lips, and if it got in your eyes it could be very painful indeed.

The rain was full of acid because of events half a world away.

The new world had been stitched together from fragments of the old—but those fragments had been plucked from many different eras, across two million years. The mixing of air masses had caused the unstable weather that plagued those first days after the Discontinuity. In the oceans, too, the invisible Amazons of the great currents sought a new equilibrium.

And the land had been rent apart. In the Atlantic, a belt of volcanic mountains, stretching south from Iceland, marked the position of a mid-ocean ridge, a place where seabed was born, molten material welling up from the planet’s interior. This birthing zone had been ripped open by the Discontinuity. The Gulf Stream, which for millennia had delivered warm southern water to Europe, now faced a fresh obstacle, a new volcanic island that would eventually dwarf even Iceland, thrusting its way out of the ridge.

Meanwhile the “Ring of Fire” around the Pacific, where great tectonic plates jostled each other, lived up to its name. There was turmoil all down the western seaboard of North America, from Alaska to Washington State: most of the twenty-seven volcanoes in the Cascades were triggered.

Mount Rainier’s explosion was the worst. Its noise was a great shout that spread right around the planet. In India it sounded like distant artillery, and the survivors of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries stirred uneasily in their sleep. A vast mushroom cloud of ash and debris lifted high into the air’s upper layers, spreading at hurricane-force speeds. Most of the debris washed out quickly, but the thin stuff lingered, blotting out the sun. Temperatures dropped. As the air cooled, it could hold less water.

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 did 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.