Time's Eye (24 page)

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 TIME 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 to 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.”

“But,” de Morgan said grimly, “your creatures of the Eye can shuffle space and time themselves. What is that but the preserve of a god?”

“Oh, I don’t think they are gods,” Bisesa said. “Powerful, yes, far beyond us—but not gods.”

Josh said, “Why do you say that?”

“Because they have no compassion.”

They had four days’ grace. Then Alexander’s envoys returned.

Of the thousand men who rode out, only a dozen came back. Corporal Batson lived, but his ears and nose had been sliced off. And, in a bag on his saddle, he carried the severed head of Ptolemy.

When she heard the news, Bisesa shuddered, both at the imminent prospect of war, and the loss of another thread from history’s unraveling fabric. The news about Batson, the competent Geordie soldier, broke her heart. She heard that Alexander simply mourned the loss of his friend.

The next day, the Macedonian scouts reported much activity in the Mongol camp. The assault, it seemed, was close.

That afternoon, Josh found Bisesa in the Temple of Marduk. She was sitting against one scorched and blackened wall, a British blanket over her legs to keep out the gathering cold. She stared up at the Eye, which they had labeled the Eye of Marduk—although some of the Tommies called it “God’s Bollock.” Bisesa had taken to spending much of her spare time in here.

Josh sat down beside her, arms wrapped around his thin torso. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

“I am resting. Resting and watching.”

“Watching the watchers?”

She smiled. “Somebody has to. I don’t want them to think—”

“What?”

“That we don’t
know.
About them, and what they’ve done to us, our history. And besides, I think there is power here. There must be, to have created this Eye and its siblings across the planet, to have melted twenty tonnes of gold to a puddle . . . I don’t want Sable, or Genghis Khan come to that, to get her hands on it. If it all goes pear-shaped when the Mongols come I’ll be standing in that doorway with my pistol.”

“Oh, Bisesa, you are so strong! I wish I was like you.”

“No, you don’t.” He was holding her hand, very tightly, but she didn’t try to pull away. “Here.” She fumbled under the blanket and produced a metallic flask. “Have some tea.”

He opened the flask and sipped. “It’s good. The milk is a little, umm—not authentic.”

“From my survival pack. Condensed and irradiated. In the American army they give you suicide pills; in the British, tea. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion. What more special than this?”

He sipped the tea. He seemed turned in on himself.

Bisesa wondered if the shock of the Discontinuity was at last working its way through Josh. It had hit them all, she suspected, in different ways. She asked, “Are you okay?”

“Just thinking of home.”

She nodded. “None of us talks much about home, do we?”

“Perhaps it’s too painful.”

“Tell me anyhow, Josh. Tell me about your family.”

“As a journalist I’m following my father. He covered the War between the States.” Which was, Bisesa reflected, only twenty years in the past for Josh. “He took a bullet in the hip. Eventually got infected—took him a couple of years to die. I was only seven,” Josh whispered. “I asked him why he had become a journalist, rather than go fight. He said that somebody has to watch, to tell others. Otherwise it’s as if it never really happened at all. Well, I believed him, and followed in his footsteps. Sometimes I resented the fact that the pattern of my life was somewhat fixed before I was born. But I suppose that’s not uncommon.”

“Ask Alexander.”

“Yeah . . . My mother is still alive. Or was. I wish I could tell her I’m safe.”