Time's Eye (22 page)

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 encountered. 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.

By the time the army moved on the town was reduced to a smoking ruin, little left of the buildings above foundation level. The Mongols left a heap of severed heads, some of them heartbreakingly tiny. A few days later, Genghis ordered his rearguard to return to the town. A handful of citizens had escaped the slaughter, hiding in cellars and other hideaways. The Mongols rounded these up and put them to death, after enjoying a little more sport.

Sable showed no reaction to this, no emotion at all. But as for Kolya, after Bishkek, his mind seemed clear about what he must do.

29: BABYLON

It took two months of sailing to reach the head of the Gulf. From there, Alexander was anxious to move inland quickly. He formed up an advance party of a thousand troops, accompanied by Eumenes, Hephaistion and others. Bisesa and her companions made sure they were attached to the expedition.

Within a day of disembarking the party set off for the short march inland to Susa, in Alexander’s time the administrative center of his conquered Persian empire. Alexander was still too weak to ride or walk far, so he rode on a cart covered with purple awnings, a hundred Shield Bearers marching in step around him. They reached Susa without incident—but it was not the Susa Alexander remembered.

Alexander’s surveyors had no doubt about the site, at the heart of a sparsely greened plain. But there was no sign of the city, none at all. They might have been the first humans ever to set foot here—as perhaps they were, Bisesa thought.

Eumenes joined the moderns, his face grim. “I was here only a few years ago. This was a rich place. Every province of the empire contributed to its magnificence, from craftsmen and silversmiths from the Greek cities of the coast, to wooden pillars from India. The treasure here was remarkable. And now . . .” He seemed overcome, and Bisesa glimpsed again the rage she had sensed building in him, as if this intelligent Greek took the Discontinuity personally.

Alexander himself got out of his cart and walked around, peering at the earth, and kicking at clods of dirt. Then he retreated to his awning, and refused to emerge again, as if in disgust.

They camped that night near the vacant site of Susa. The next morning, guided by Alexander’s cartographers, they set off due west, making for Babylon, crossing a vast and echoing land. After Susa, everybody seemed subdued, as if the vast weight of time bore down on them all. Sometimes Bisesa would catch the Macedonians looking at her, and sensed what they were thinking—that here was a woman, living and breathing, who would not be born until everybody they knew, everything they had touched, had eroded to dust, as if she was a living symbol of the Discontinuity.

To everyone’s relief they had not gone many kilometers before they reached a junction in time where the surface of the ground dropped a few centimeters, and a road was revealed. It was crudely laid to Bisesa’s eyes, topped with coarsely cut stone blocks, but it was undoubtedly a road. In fact, Eumenes told them, it was a section of the Royal Road that had once united Persia—and which Alexander had found extraordinarily useful in his conquest of the empire.

Even on the road, the march took several more days. The land around the road was dust dry, colonized only by scrub vegetation. But it was marked here and there by anonymous mounds of rubble and scarred by great straight-line ditches—evidently artificial, but long abandoned, their purpose forgotten.

Each night, when the march broke to make camp, Casey would set up his radio gear and listen for any signals coming from the
Soyuz
crew, lost somewhere in the unknowable expanses of Asia. It was a time they’d agreed upon with the crew, but he’d heard nothing since the day of their attempted reentry. Casey also monitored the radio signal that continued to emanate from the unknown beacon that was presumed to lie in Babylon. Its content remained the same—just a “chirp,” a sweep up through the frequencies like an engineering test signal. But it continued to repeat, over and over. Casey kept a log of his observations, with position, time, signal strength and bearings, and his rough triangulations continued to predict a source inside Babylon.

And then there were the Eyes—or rather, the lack of them. As they walked west, the Eyes were fewer, more spaced out, until at last Bisesa realized she had marched through a whole day without seeing a single one. Nobody had any idea what to make of this.

At last they approached another transition. The advance party came to a line of green that stretched, dead straight, from the northern horizon to the south. The party hesitated on the desiccated side of the border.

To the west, beyond the line, the land was split up into polygonal fields, and striped by glistening canals. Here and there crude-looking wattle-and-daub shacks sat amid the fields, squat and ugly, like lumps of shaped mud. The shacks were clearly occupied, for Bisesa could see traces of smoke rising from some of them. A few goats and bullocks, tethered to posts, patiently chewed on grass or stubble. But there were no people.

Abdikadir stood with Bisesa. “Babylon’s famous irrigation canals.”

“I suppose they must be.” Some of the canals were extensions of the dry, worn-out ditches she had noticed before: the same bits of ancient engineering, severed by centuries. But this crude coupling of the eras obviously caused practical problems; the sections from later eras, ditches silted up by erosion, blocked off the canals from their riverside sources, and some of the farmers’ channels were drying up.

Abdikadir said, “Let’s show the way.” He took a deliberate step forward and crossed the invisible, intangible line between the two world slices.

The party crossed the disjunction and moved on.

The richness of the land was obvious. Most of the fields seemed to be stocked with wheat, of a tall, fat-headed variety farmer’s daughter Bisesa didn’t recognize. But there was also millet and barley, and, here and there, rich stands of date palms. Once, Cecil de Morgan said, the Babylonians would sing songs about these palms, listing their three hundred and sixty uses, one for every day of their year.

Whether the farmers were hiding or not, this obviously wasn’t an empty landscape—and it was on the produce of these fields that Alexander’s army was going to depend. There would have to be some gentle diplomacy here, Bisesa realized. The King had the manpower to take whatever he wanted, but the natives knew the land, and this vast and hungry army couldn’t afford a single failed crop. Perhaps the first priority ought to be to get Alexander’s soldiers and engineers to rebuild the irrigation system . . .

Abdikadir said, “You know, it’s impossible to believe this is Iraq—that we’re only a hundred kilometers or so southwest of Baghdad. The agricultural wealth of this place fueled empires for millennia.”

“But where is everybody?”

Abdi said, “Can you blame these farmers for hiding? Their rich farmland is sliced in half and replaced by semidesert. Their canals fail. A stinging rain withers their crops. And then, what looms over the horizon? Only the greatest army the ancient world ever saw . . . Ah,” he said.
“There.”
He stopped and pointed.

On the western horizon she saw buildings, a complicated wall, a thing like a stepped pyramid, all made gray and misty by distance.

“Babylon,” Abdikadir whispered.

Josh said, “And
that
is the Tower of Babel.”

“Holy crap,” said Casey.

The army and its baggage train caught up with its head, and spread out into a camp over the mudflats near the banks of the Euphrates.

Alexander chose to wait a day before entering the city itself. He wanted to see if the dignitaries of the city would come out to greet him. Nobody came. He sent out scouts to survey the city walls and its surroundings. They returned safe but, Bisesa thought, they looked shocked.

Time slices or not, Alexander was going to enter the ancient city in the grand style. So, early in the morning, wearing his gold-embroidered cloak and his royal diadem on his head, he rode ahead toward the city walls, with Hephaistion walking at his side, and a phalanx of a hundred Shield Bearers around him, a rectangle of ferocious muscle and iron. The King showed no sign of the pain the effort to ride must be causing him; once again Bisesa was astounded by his strength of will.

Eumenes and other close companions walked in a loose formation behind the King. Among this party were Captain Grove and his senior officers, a number of British troops, and Bisesa and the Bird crew. Bisesa felt oddly self-conscious in the middle of this grand procession, for she and the other moderns towered over the Macedonians, despite the finery of their dress uniforms.

The city’s walls were impressive enough in themselves, a triple circuit of baked brick and rubble that must have stretched twenty kilometers around, all surrounded by a moat. But there were no signs of life—no smoke from fires, no soldiers watching vigilantly from the towers—and the great gates hung open.

Eumenes muttered, “It was different last time, on Alexander’s first entry to the city. The satrap rode out to meet us. The road was strewn with flowers, and soldiers came out with tame lions and leopards in cages, and priests and prophets danced to the sound of harps. It was magnificent! It was fitting! But
this
. . .”

This, conceded Bisesa, was scary.

Alexander, per his reputation, led by example. Without hesitating he walked his horse over the wooden bridge that spanned the moat, and approached the grandest of the gates. This was a high-arched passage set between two heavy square towers.

The procession followed. Even to reach the gate they had to walk up a ramp to a platform perhaps fifteen meters above ground level. As Bisesa walked through it, the gate itself towered twenty meters or more above her head. Every square centimeter of its walls was covered in glazed brickwork, a haunting royal blue surface across which dragons and bulls danced.

Ruddy walked with his head tilted back, his mouth gaping open. Still a little “seedy” from his illness, he walked uncertainly, and Josh kindly took his arm to lead him. “Can this be the Ishtar Gate? Who would have thought—who would have thought . . .”

The city was laid out in a rough rectangle, its plan spanning the Euphrates. Alexander’s party had entered from the north, on the east side of the river. Inside the gate, the procession moved down a broad avenue that ran south, passing magnificent, baffling buildings, perhaps temples and palaces. Bisesa glimpsed statues, fountains, and every wall surface was decorated with dazzling glazed bricks and molded with lions and rosettes. There was so much opulence and detail she couldn’t take it all in.

The phone, peeking out of her pocket, tried to help. “The complex to your right is probably the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar. Babylon’s greatest ruler, who—”

“Shut up, phone.”

Casey was hobbling along. “If this is Babylon, where are the Hanging Gardens?”

“In Nineveh,” said the phone dryly.

“No people,” said Josh uncertainly. “I see some damage—signs of fires, looting, perhaps even earthquake destruction—but still
no people
. It’s getting eerie.”

“Yeah,” growled Casey. “All the lights on but nobody at home.”

“Have you noticed,” said Abdikadir quietly, “that the Macedonians seem overwhelmed too? And yet they were here so recently . . .”

It was true. Even wily Eumenes peered around at the city’s immense buildings with awe.

“It’s possible this isn’t their Babylon either,” said Bisesa.

The party began to break up. Alexander and Hephaistion, with most of the guard, made for the royal palace, back toward the gate. Other parties of troops were instructed to spread out through the city and search for inhabitants. The officers’ cries rang out peremptorily, echoing from the glazed walls of the temples; de Morgan said they were warning their men of the consequences of looting. “But I can’t imagine anybody will dare touch a thing in this haunted place!”

Bisesa and the others continued on down the processional way, accompanied by Eumenes and a handful of his advisors and guards. The way led them through a series of walled plazas, and brought them at last to the pyramid-like structure that Bisesa had glimpsed from outside the city. It was actually a ziggurat, a stepped tower of seven terraces rising from a base that must have been a hundred meters on a side. To Bisesa’s eyes, conditioned by images of Egyptian pyramids, it looked like something she might have expected to find looming above a lost Mayan city. South of the ziggurat was a temple that the phone said must be the
Esagila—
the Temple of Marduk, the national god of Babylonia.

The phone said, “The Babylonians called this ziggurat the
Etemenanki
—which meant ‘the house that is the foundation of Heaven and Earth.’ It was Nebuchadnezzar who brought the Jews here as slave labor; by bad-mouthing Babylon in the Bible the Jews took a long revenge . . .”

Josh grabbed Bisesa’s hand. “Come on. I want to climb that blooming heap.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the Tower of Babel! Look, there’s a staircase on the south side.” He was right; it must have been ten paces wide. “Race you!” And, dragging her hand, he was off.

She was intrinsically fitter than he was; she had trained as a soldier, and had come from a century far better provided for with food and health care. But he was younger and had been hardened by the relentless marching. It was a fair race, and they kept holding hands until, after a hundred steps or so, they took a break and collapsed on the steps.

From up here the Euphrates was a broad silver ribbon, bright even in the ashen light, that cut through the heart of the city. She couldn’t make out clearly the western side of the city, but on this eastern side grand buildings clustered closely—temples, palaces, presumably government departments. The city plan was very orderly. The main roads were all straight, all met at right angles, and all began and ended in one of the many gates in the walls. The palaces were riots of color, every surface covered with polychrome tiles on which dragons and other fantastic creatures gamboled.

She asked, “Where are we in time?”

Her phone said, “If this is the age of Nebuchadnezzar, then perhaps the sixth century
B.C
. The Persians took Babylonia two centuries before Alexander’s time, and they bled the area dry. When Alexander arrived it was still a vibrant city, but its best days were already far in the past. We, however, are seeing it at something close to its best.”

Josh studied her. “You look wistful, Bisesa.”

“I was just thinking.”

“About Myra—”

“I’d love her to be here—to be able to show her this.”

“Maybe someday you’ll be able to tell her about it.”