Time's Eye (18 page)

23: CONFERENCE

Answering Alexander’s summons they headed for the King’s tent: Captain Grove and his officers, Bisesa, Abdikadir, Cecil de Morgan in his role as interpreter, and Ruddy and Josh, who would record this astonishing conference in their notebooks. On the Macedonian side there would be Alexander himself, Eumenes, Hephaistion, the King’s doctor Philip and an inordinate number of courtiers, advisors, chamberlains and pages.

The setting was magnificent. Alexander’s official tent, hauled all the way from the delta, was immense, supported by golden columns and roofed with spangled cloth. Silver-legged sofas had been set up before the King’s golden throne for the visitors. But the atmosphere was tense: there must have been a hundred troops standing alert throughout the tent, the infantrymen known as Shield Bearers dressed in scarlet and royal blue, and Immortals from Persia in beautifully embroidered, if impractical, tunics.

Eumenes, seeking to minimize unnecessary friction, had quietly briefed Bisesa on the protocol expected in the King’s presence. So, on entering, the visitors from the future paid the King
proskynesis
, a Greek name for a Persian form of obeisance that involved blowing a kiss at the King and bowing. Abdikadir was predictably uncomfortable with this, but Captain Grove and his officers were unfazed. Evidently these British, stuck out on the edge of their own empire and surrounded by petty princes, rajahs and amirs, were accustomed to respecting eccentric local customs.

Aside from that, Bisesa could see that Abdikadir was enjoying himself hugely. She had met few people as hard-headed as Abdikadir, but he was obviously indulging himself in a pleasant fantasy that these magnificent Macedonians were indeed his ancestors.

The party settled on the magnificent couches, pages and ushers circulated with food and drink, and the conference began. The translation, channeled by Greek scholars and de Morgan, was slow and sometimes frustrating. But they got there steadily, sometimes with the aid of maps, drawings or even lettering scrawled on Macedonian wax tablets, or on bits of paper Ruddy or Josh ripped out of their notebooks.

They started with a sharing of information. Alexander’s people were not surprised by Jamrud’s Evil Eye, which continued to hover over the parade ground. Since “the day on which the sun had lurched across the sky,” as the Macedonians put it, their scouts had seen such things all over the Indus valley. Like the British, the Macedonians had quickly become used to these silent, floating observers, and treated them just as disrespectfully.

Hardheaded Secretary Eumenes was less interested in such silent mysteries than in the politics of the future, which had brought these strangers to the Frontier. It took some time to make Eumenes and the others understand that the British and Bisesa’s party were actually from two different eras—though the gap between them, a mere hundred and fifty years or so, was dwarfed by the twenty-four centuries between Alexander’s time and Bisesa’s. Still, as Captain Grove sketched in the background to the nineteenth-century Great Game, Eumenes showed his quick understanding.

Bisesa had expected her twenty-first-century conflict to be less comprehensible to the Macedonians, but when Abdikadir talked about central Asia’s oil reserves Eumenes spoke. He remembered that on the banks of a river in what Bisesa gathered was modern-day Iran, two springs of a strange fluid had welled out of the ground near where the royal tent had been pitched. “It was no different in taste or brightness from olive oil,” said Eumenes, “though the ground was unsuited to olive trees.” Even then, he said, Alexander had mused on the profit to be made out of such finds if they were extensive—though his tame prophet Aristander had declared the oil an omen of hard labor ahead. “We come here in our different times for our different ambitions,” said Eumenes. “But still we come, even across millennia. Perhaps this is the cockpit of the world for eternity.”

Alexander himself spoke little. He sat on his throne with his head propped on one fist, eyes half-lidded, occasionally looking up with that odd, head-turned, beguiling shyness. He left the conduct of the meeting largely to Eumenes, who struck Bisesa as a very smart cookie, and to Hephaistion, who would interrupt Eumenes, seeking clarification or even contradicting his colleague. It was obvious that there was a lot of tension between Eumenes and Hephaistion, but perhaps Alexander was content for these potential rivals to be divided, Bisesa speculated.

Now the discussion turned to the meaning of what had happened to them all—how history could have been chopped up into pieces, and why.

The Macedonians did not seem as awestruck as Bisesa had naively imagined. They had absolutely no doubt that the time slips were the work of the gods, following their own inscrutable purposes: their worldview, which had nothing to do with science, was alien to Bisesa’s, but it was easily flexible enough to accommodate such mysteries as this. They were tough-minded warriors who had marched thousands of kilometers into strangeness, and they, and their Greek advisors, were intellectually tough too.

Alexander himself seemed entranced by the philosophical aspects. “Can the dead live again?” he murmured in his throaty baritone. “For
I
am long dead to
you
. . . And can the past be restored—old wrongs undone, regrets wiped away?”

Abdikadir murmured to Bisesa, “A man with as much blood on his hands as this King must find the notion of correcting the past appealing . . . ”

Hephaistion was saying, “Most philosophers view time as a cycle. Like the beating of a heart, the passing of the seasons, the waxing and waning of the Moon. In Babylon the astronomers assembled a cosmic calendar based on the motions of the planets, with a Great Year that lasts, I believe, more than four hundred thousand years. When the planets congregate in one particular constellation, there is a huge fire, and the ‘winter,’ marked by a planetary gathering elsewhere, marked by a flood . . . Some even argue that past events repeat
exactly
from one cycle to the next.”

“But that notion troubled Aristotle,” said Alexander—who, Bisesa recalled, had actually studied under that philosopher. “If I live as much before the fall of Troy as after it, then what
caused
that war?”

“But still,” Hephaistion said, “if there is something in the notion of cycles, then many strange things can be justified. For instance, oracles and prophets: if time cycles, perhaps prophecy is as much a question of a memory of the deep past as it is a vision of the future. And the strange mixing of times we endure now seems much less inexplicable. Do you agree, Aristander?”

The old seer bowed his head.

So the conversation continued, rattling between Alexander, Hephaistion and Aristander, often too rapidly for the creaky chain of translators to keep up.

Ruddy was entranced. “How marvelous these men are,” he whispered.

“Enough philosophy,” said Eumenes, practical as ever. He challenged the meeting about what they should do next.

Captain Grove replied that he had a proposal. The British officer had brought along an atlas—a rather antiquated thing, even by his standards, from a Victorian schoolroom—and he now displayed it.

The Macedonians were familiar with maps and mapmaking. Indeed, throughout his campaigns Alexander had brought along Greek surveyors and draftsmen to map the lands he explored and conquered many of them barely known to the ancient Greek world he came from. So the Macedonians were intrigued by the atlas, and crowded around the little book excitedly. They were intrigued by the quality of the printing, the regularity of the type and the pages’ bright coloring. The Macedonians seemed to have little trouble accepting that the Mediterranean-centered world they knew was only a section of the planet, and that the planet was a sphere, as predicted by Pythagoras centuries before Alexander’s time. In fact Aristotle, Alexander’s tutor, had written a whole book about the notion. For her part Bisesa was amused by the great swaths inked in pink, to show the territories of the British Empire at its zenith.

At last Alexander, in some exasperation, demanded that the atlas be brought up to his throne. But he was dismayed when the outline of his empire was sketched on a whole-Earth map. “I thought I had made a mighty footprint on the world—but there is so much I never even saw,” he said.

Using the atlas, Captain Grove said that his proposal was that the forces, combined, should make for Babylon.

Abdikadir tried to explain about the radio signals picked up by the
Soyuz.
This was predictably baffling, until Ruddy and Josh hit on happy metaphors. “Like the sound of inaudible trumpets,” Ruddy said. “Or the flash of invisible mirrors . . .”

Abdikadir said, “And the only signal we have found came from
here.
” He pointed to Babylon. “There is surely our best chance of determining what has happened to us, and to the world.” All this was transmitted to Alexander.

Babylon struck chords with the Macedonians too. There had been no news from Macedon or anywhere else beyond the Indus valley for many days now—and nor had the British received any messages from their own time. There was the question of where they should settle, if no news was forthcoming. Alexander had always planned to make Babylon a capital of an empire that might have stretched from the Mediterranean to India, united by sea and river routes. Perhaps even now that dream might be achievable, even with the resources the King had at hand, even if the rest of the world he had known had vanished.

For all these reasons the best path seemed clear. As the consensus emerged Ruddy was thrilled. “Babylon! By God—where will this adventure not take us?”

The meeting quickly got down to detailed questions of timetables and logistics. The light beyond the tent grew dimmer, circulating servants brought more wine and the assembly slowly grew more raucous.

When they could get away from the Macedonians, Josh, Abdikadir, Ruddy and Bisesa gathered.

Bisesa said, “We’ll have to leave something for Sable and Kolya, in case they ever make it here.” They discussed markers such as big stone arrows on the ground, cairns with messages, even leaving radios for the stranded cosmonauts.

“And are you happy,” said Abdikadir, “that we are throwing in our lot with Alexander and his crew?”

“Yes,” said Ruddy immediately. “Aristotle taught these fellows openness of mind and heart, and a curiosity about the world. Alexander’s journey was as much an exploration as an expedition of conquest—”

“Captain Cook with a fifty-thousand-man army,” Abdikadir mused.

“And surely,” Ruddy said, “it was this very openness that enabled them to accept the customs of unfamiliar peoples—and so to weld an empire that, if not for the untimely death of Alexander, might have endured for centuries, and advanced civilization by a thousand years.”

“But
here
,” Josh said, “Alexander isn’t dead . . .”

Bisesa was aware that Alexander was watching them. He leaned back and murmured something to the eunuch, and she wondered if he had heard what they said.

Ruddy finished, “I can think of no finer legacy than to have established a ‘British Empire’ in Asia and Europe two thousand years or more before its time!”

“But Alexander’s empire,” Josh said, “had nothing to do with democracy or Greek values. He committed atrocities—he burned Persepolis, for instance. He paid for each section of his endless campaign with the loot from the last. And he spent lives like matches—perhaps three quarters of a million, by some estimates.”

“He was a man of his time,” said Ruddy, stern and cynical as if he were twice his age. “What can you expect? In his world, order derived only from empire. Within the empire’s borders you had culture, order, a chance at civilization. Outside there were only barbarians and chaos. There was no other way to run things!
And
his achievement endured, even if his empire did not. He spread the Greek language from Alexandria to Syria like jam over toast. When the Romans pushed east they found, not barbarians, but Greek-speakers. If not for that Greek legacy, Christianity would have had a hard time spreading out of Judea.”

“Perhaps,” Abdikadir said, grinning. “But, Kipling—I’m not a Christian!”

Captain Grove joined them. “I suspect our business is done,” he said quietly. “I’m jolly pleased we came to such a quick agreement, and it’s remarkable how much we hold in common. I suppose nothing fundamental has changed in two thousand years when it comes to carting an army around the place . . . But look here: I think the gathering is starting to degenerate a bit. I’ve heard about Alexander and his debaucheries,” he said with a rueful grin, “and much as I’d rather give it a miss I fear it would be politic of me to stick around, and do a little getting-to-know-you with these chaps. Don’t worry; I can handle my wine! My lads will stay on too—but if you want to slip away . . .”

Bisesa accepted the excuse. Ruddy and Josh agreed to leave too, though Ruddy looked back with envy at the shimmering interior of the royal tent, where a curvaceous young woman dressed only in a floor-length veil was starting to dance.

Outside the tent Bisesa found Philip, Alexander’s Greek doctor, waiting for her. Bisesa hastily summoned de Morgan. The factor was half-drunk already, but able to translate.

Philip said, “The King knows you spoke of his death.”

“Ah. I’m sorry.”

“And he wants you to tell him how he will die.”

Bisesa hesitated. “We have a legend. A tale of what happened to him . . .”

“He will die soon,” Philip breathed.

“Yes. He would have.”

“Where?”

She hesitated again. “Babylon.”

“Then he will die young, like Achilles, his hero. That’s just like Alexander!” Philip glanced back at the King’s tent, where, judging from the noise, the debauch was gathering steam. He looked troubled, but resigned. “Well, it’s no surprise. He drinks as he fights, enough for ten men. And he was nearly killed by an arrow in his lung. I fear he will not allow himself time to recover, but—”

“He won’t listen to his doctor.”

Philip smiled. “Some things never change.”

Bisesa made a quick decision. She dug into her survival pack, under her jumpsuit, and pulled out a plastic sheet of malaria tablets. She showed Philip how to pop the pills out of their bubbles. “Have your King take these,” she said. “Nobody knows for sure how it happened. The truth was obscured, by rumor, conflict and false history. But some believe it will be of the sickness these tablets will prevent.”