Time's Eye (23 page)

“Yeah, right.”

Ruddy, Abdikadir, Eumenes and de Morgan had followed more slowly up the ziggurat. Ruddy was wheezing, but he made it, and as he sat down Josh clapped him on the back. Eumenes stayed standing, apparently not winded at all, and gazed out at Babylon.

Abdikadir borrowed Bisesa’s night goggles and looked around. “Take a look at the western side of the river . . .”

The line of the walls crossed the river, to complete the city’s bisected rectangle. But on the far side of the river, though Bisesa thought she could make out the lines of the streets, there was no color but the orange-brown of mudstone, and the walls were reduced to ridges of broken rubble, the gates and watchtowers just mounds of core.

Josh said, “It looks as if half the city has been melted.”

“Or nuked,” said Abdikadir grimly.

Eumenes spoke. “It was not like this,” de Morgan translated. “Not like this . . .” While the eastern half of the city had been ceremonial and administrative, the western half had been residential, crowded with houses, tenement blocks, plazas and markets. Eumenes had seen it that way only a few years before, a vibrant, crowded human city. Now it was all reduced to nothing.

“Another interface,” Abdikadir said grimly. “The heart of a young Babylon, transplanted into the corpse of the old.”

Eumenes said, “I believed I was coming to terms with the strangeness of the faults in time which afflict us. But to see
this—
the face of a city rubbed away into sand, the weight of a thousand years descended in a heartbeat—”

“Yes,” Ruddy said. “The terrible cruelty of time.”

“More than cruelty,” Eumenes said. “Arrogance.” Bisesa was insulated from the Secretary’s emotions by translation and two millennia of different body language. But again she thought she detected a growing, cold anger in him.

A voice floated up from the ground, a Macedonian officer calling for Eumenes. A search party had found somebody, a Babylonian, hiding in the Temple of Marduk.

30: THE GATE OF THE GODS

The Macedonians’ captive was brought to Eumenes. He was clearly terrified, his eyes wide in a grimy face, and two burly troopers had to drag him. The man was dressed in fine robes, rich blue cloth inlaid with threads of gold. But the robes, ragged and dirty, hung off his frame, as if he hadn’t eaten for days. He might once have been clean-shaven and his scalp scoured bare, but now a stubble of black hair was growing back, and his skin was filthy. As he was brought close, Bisesa shrank from a stink of stale urine.

Prodded with a Macedonian stabbing sword, he gabbled freely, but in an antique tongue that none of the moderns recognized. The officer who had found him had had the presence of mind to find a Persian soldier who could understand this language, and so the Babylonian’s words were translated into archaic Greek for Eumenes, and then English for the moderns.

De Morgan, frowning, translated uncertainly. “He says he was a priest of a goddess—I can’t make out the name. He was abandoned when the others finally left the temple complex. He has been too frightened to leave the temple. He has been here for six days and nights—he has had no food—no water but that which he drank from the sacred font of the goddess—”

Eumenes snapped his fingers impatiently. “Give him food and water. And make him tell us what happened here.”

Bit by bit, between ravenous mouthfuls, the priest told his story. It had begun, of course, with the Discontinuity.

One night the priests and other temple staff had been woken by a dreadful wailing. Some of them ran outside. It was dark—
but the stars were in the wrong place.
The wailing came from a temple astronomer, who had been making observations of the “planets,” the wandering stars, as he had every night since he was a small boy. But suddenly his planet had disappeared, and the very constellations had swum around the sky. It had been the astronomer’s shock and despair that had begun to rouse the temple, and the rest of the city.

“Of course,” Abdikadir muttered. “The Babylonians kept careful records of the sky for millennia. They based their philosophy and religion on the great cycles in the sky. It’s a strange thought that a less advanced people mightn’t have been so terrified . . .”

But that first astronomical trauma, really perceptible only to a religious elite, was just the precursor. For at the end of that night the sun was late rising, by six hours or more. And by the time it did rise, a strange hot wind was washing over the city, and rain fell, hot salty rain of a type nobody had known before.

The people, many still dressed in their nightclothes, fled to the religious district. Some ran to the temples and demanded to be shown that their gods had not abandoned them on this, the strangest dawn of Babylon’s history. Others climbed the ziggurat, to see what other changes the night had brought. The King was away—it wasn’t clear to Bisesa whether the priest meant Nebuchadnezzar himself, or perhaps a successor—and there was nobody to impose order.

And then the first panicked reports came of the erasure of the western districts. Most of the city’s population had actually lived there; for the priests, ministers, court favorites and other dignitaries left on the eastern side, the shock was overwhelming.

The last vestiges of order quickly broke down. A mob had stormed the Temple of Marduk itself. As many as could force their way in had rushed to the innermost chamber, and when they saw what had become of Marduk himself, king of the ancient Babylonian gods—

The priest could not complete his sentence.

After that final shock, a rumor had swept through the city that the eastern half would be rubbed into dust as had the western. People flung open the gates and ran, screaming, out of the city and into the land beyond. Even government ministers, army commanders and the priests had gone, leaving only this poor wretch, who had huddled in his defiled temple.

Around mouthfuls of food the priest described the nights since, as he had heard looting, burning, drunken laughter, even screaming. But whenever he had dared to poke his head out of doors in the daylight he had seen nobody. It was clear that most of the population had vanished into the parched land beyond the cultivated fragment, there to die of thirst or starvation.

Eumenes ordered his men to clean up the priest and present him to the King. Then he said, “This priest says the old name of the city is ‘the gate of the Gods.’ How appropriate, for now that gate has opened . . . Come.” Eumenes strode forward.

The others hurried after him. Ruddy gasped, “Where are we going now?”

Bisesa said, “Why, to the Temple of Marduk, of course.”

The temple, another great pyramidal pile, was like a cross between a cathedral and an office building. Hurrying down corridors and climbing from level to level, Bisesa passed through a bewildering variety of rooms, each elaborately decorated, containing altars, statues, friezes, and obscure-looking equipment like crosiers, ornate knives, headdresses, musical instruments similar to lutes and sackbuts, even small carts and chariots. In some of the deeper rooms there were no windows, and the light came from oil lamps burning smokily in little alcoves in the walls. There was a powerful smell of incense, which de Morgan told her was frankincense. There was some evidence of minor damage: a door smashed off its heavy wooden hinges, broken pottery, a tapestry ripped off one wall.

Ruddy said, “More than one god is worshiped here, that’s for sure. This is a library of worship. More gaudy polytheism!”

De Morgan muttered, “I can barely make out the gods for the gold.
Look
at it—it’s everywhere . . .”

Bisesa said, “Once I visited Vatican City. It was like this—wealth plastered to every surface, so dense you could barely pick out details.”

“Yes,” Ruddy said. “And the same causes: the peculiar hold religion has on the mind of man—and the accumulation of wealth by an ancient empire.”

There was some evidence of looting, though: the smashed doors, a few sockets where gems might have been lodged. But it seemed to have been half-hearted.

Marduk’s own chamber was at the very apex of the complex. But it was ruined, and they stood at the doorway in shock.

Bisesa learned later that the great statue of Marduk that had stood here had consumed twenty tonnes of gold. The last time Eumenes had been in this temple the statue had gone: centuries before Alexander’s visit, the conqueror Xerxes had looted these buildings and had taken away the great golden statue. Well, the statue had been
here—
but it had been destroyed, melted to a puddle of gleaming slag on the floor. The walls had been reduced to bare brick, scorched by some intense heat; Bisesa saw ashen fragments, the remains of tapestry or carpet. Only the statue’s base remained, softened and rounded, with perhaps the faintest trace of two mighty feet.

And, hanging in the air at the center of the burned-out temple, mysterious, unsupported, perfect, was an Eye—immense, much bigger than any others they had seen, perhaps three meters across.

Josh whistled. “Abdi, you’re going to need a big bucket to dunk that.”

Bisesa walked toward the Eye. In the uncertain light from the oil lamps, she could see her own distorted reflection looming larger, as if the other Bisesa, contained in the Eye like a fish in a bowl, was swimming to the glass to see her. She felt no heat, no sign of the great energies that had gutted this chamber. She lifted her hand and held it close to the Eye. She felt as if she was pushing against some invisible but resilient barrier. The harder she pushed, the more she was repelled, and she felt a subtle sideways pull.

Josh and Abdikadir were both watching her with some concern. Josh came up to her. “Are you all right, Bis?”

“Can’t you feel it?”

“What?”

She looked into the sphere. “A—presence.”

Abdikadir said, “If this is the source of the electromagnetic signals we have been monitoring—”

“I can hear them now,” her phone whispered from her pocket.

“More than that,” she said. There was something here, she thought. An awareness—yes. Or at least a watchfulness, a huge cathedral-like watchfulness, which drew her up helplessly. But she didn’t even know how she knew this. She shook her head, and something of that mysterious sense of presence dissipated.

Eumenes’ face was like thunder. “So now we know how Babylon was destroyed.” To Bisesa’s astonishment he picked up a golden staff from the floor. He wielded it over his head like a club, bringing it down on the unresponsive hide of the Eye. The club was left bent over, the Eye unmarked. “Well, this arrogant god of the Eye may find Alexander, son of Zeus-Ammon, a tougher opponent than Marduk.” He turned to the moderns. “There is much to do. I will need your help and insight.”

Abdikadir said, “We should use the city as a base—”

“That much is obvious.”

“Move the army in. We have to think about the water supply, food. And we need to set up routines like fire watches, guard patrols, repair crews.”

Josh said, “If the residential half of the city has gone we’ve a lot of building to do.”

“I think we will all be under tents for a while yet,” Abdikadir said ruefully.

“We will send out scouts to map the countryside,” Eumenes said. “And we will coax the farmers from their mud huts—or we will take their farms and run them for them. I don’t know any more if it is summer or winter, but here in Babylonia we can grow crops all year round.” He gazed up at the impassive Eye. “Alexander was to make this his imperial capital. Well, so it will become—the capital of a new world, perhaps . . .”

Casey came bustling into the chamber. His expression was grim. “We’ve had a message.”

Bisesa remembered what time of day it was; he had been due to try to pick up the cosmonauts’ radio signals. “From Kolya and Sable?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s wonderful!”

“No, it isn’t. We’ve got a problem.”

31: HAM RADIO

In the luggage he had been allowed to bring on the Mongols’ transcontinental trek, Kolya had made sure he packed up the ham radio gear from the
Soyuz.
Some instinct had always made him keep this secret even from Sable, who had long lost interest in what had once been her project, and he was glad of that now. Once Genghis Khan established his base camp a few tens of kilometers from Babylon, he retrieved the gear and set it up.

Oddly this wasn’t difficult. In the retinue of Yeh-lü, the Mongol guards were watchful, but they had no idea what he was doing with his anonymous boxes and cables and spidery antennae. It was more difficult, in fact—but crucial—to keep what he was doing secret from Sable, at least for a few more hours.

He knew he would get only one chance at this. He prayed for a decent transmission path, and for Casey to be listening. Well, the path was poor—the post-Discontinuity ionosphere seemed to be suffering, and the signal was obscured by static, pops and whoops—but Casey was indeed listening, at the daily times they had agreed when Kolya was still orbiting the world in
Soyuz
, in the impossible and lost past. Kolya wasn’t surprised to know that Casey and the others had traveled to Babylon; it was a logical destination, and they’d discussed the possibility before he had left orbit. But he was stunned to learn who Casey had traveled with—stunned, yet hopeful; for perhaps there was after all a force in the world that could resist Genghis Khan.

Kolya longed to prolong the contact, to listen to this man from the twenty-first century, his own time. He felt that Casey, who he had never even met in person, had become his closest friend in the world.

But there was no time for that. There were no choices left, no more luxuries for Kolya. He talked, and talked, describing everything he knew about Genghis Khan, his army, his tactics; and he spoke of Sable, and what she had done—and what he suspected she was capable of.

He talked as long as he could. It turned out to be about half an hour. Then Sable showed up with two burly Mongol guards, who hauled him back from the radio, and briskly smashed up the gear with the butts of their lances.

32: COUNCIL OF WAR

Alexander’s scouts brought the news that the vanguard of the Mongol army was only a few days’ ride away. To his advisers’ surprise, the King ordered that a parley should be attempted.

Alexander was horrified by what the moderns had to tell him of the destruction that had been wrought by the Mongol expansion. Alexander might be a blood-stained conqueror himself, but he had ambitions beyond simple conquest: his intent was certainly more sophisticated than Genghis Khan’s, fifteen centuries after his own time. He was determined to oppose the Mongols. But Alexander was of a mind to build something new in this empty world, not to destroy. He said to his advisers, “We, and our red-coated comrades from beyond the ocean, and these horsemen from the wastes of Asia, are all survivors of dislocations in time and space, wonders beyond the anticipation of any man. Do we have no other response to all this than to slaughter each other? Is there nothing for us to learn from each other but weapons and tactics? . . .”

So he ordered a party of envoys to be sent out, with gifts and tributes, to open a dialogue with the Mongol leaders. It would travel with an impressive force of a thousand men, and was to be under the command of Ptolemy.

Ptolemy was one of the King’s closest companions, a Macedonian and a friend of Alexander from childhood. A hard-faced warrior, he was a dark, silent man, and evidently shrewd. Perhaps he was a good choice for such a delicate mission: Bisesa’s phone told her that in another reality Ptolemy would, in the carve-up of Alexander’s conquests after his death, have become Pharaoh of the ancient kingdom of Egypt. But as he prepared for the mission, Ptolemy stamped around the royal palace looking thunderous. Bisesa wondered if his appointment to this perilous, and highly likely fatal, mission had anything to do with the endless maneuverings and intrigues among Alexander’s inner circle.

At Abdikadir’s suggestion, Captain Grove attached the competent Geordie Corporal Batson and a few British troops to the party. It had been proposed that one of Bisesa’s group should go along, since Sable was believed to be at the heart of the assault they anticipated. But Alexander decreed that his three refugees from the twenty-first century were too few to be risked on such a venture, and that was that. Still, at Eumenes’ suggestion, Bisesa drafted a note for Batson to give to Kolya, in case he encountered the cosmonaut.

The party marched out of the gates of Babylon. They set off to the east, with the Macedonian officers in their dress uniforms with bright purple cloaks, and Corporal Batson and the other British in their kilts and their serge, all to the din of trumpets and drums.

Alexander was a hardened warrior, and while he hoped for peace, he prepared for war. In Babylon, Bisesa, Abdikadir and Casey, along with Captain Grove and a number of his officers, were summoned to a war council.

Like the Ishtar Gate, the royal palace of Babylon sat on a platform raised some fifteen meters above the riverside plain, so it loomed over the city and its surroundings.

The palace was staggering—if, to Bisesa’s modern perspective, it was an obscene demonstration of wealth, power and oppression. Walking toward the center of the complex, they passed terraced gardens built on the
roofs
of the buildings. The trees looked healthy enough, but the grass was a little yellow, the flowers sickly; the gardens had been neglected since the Discontinuity. But the palace was a symbol of the city and Alexander’s new reign, and there was a great flurry of activity as servants ran back and forth with jars of fresh water and nutrients. These were not slaves, Bisesa learned, but some of Babylon’s former dignitaries, who had come creeping back from the countryside where they had fled. In the aftermath of the Discontinuity, they had proved themselves cowardly; now, at Alexander’s orders, they were reduced to menial chores.

At the heart of the palace complex was the King’s throne room. This room alone was about fifty paces long, and every surface from floor to ceiling was coated with multicolored glazed bricks showing lions, dragons and stylized trees of life. The moderns walked in, their feet echoing on the glazed floor, trying not to be overwhelmed by the scale of it all.

A table had been set up in the middle of the room, bearing a giant plaster model of the city, its walls and the surrounding countryside. Perhaps five meters across, the model was brightly painted and full of detail, right down to the human figures in the streets and the goats in the fields. Toy canals glimmered, full of real water.

Bisesa and the others settled to their couches before the table, and servants brought them drinks. Bisesa said, “This was my idea. I thought a model might be easier for everyone to grasp than a map. I had no idea they would put together something on this scale—and so quickly.”

Captain Grove said levelly, “Shows what you can do when you can draw on an unlimited resource of human mind and muscle.”

Eumenes and his advisors entered and took their places. To his huge credit in Bisesa’s eyes, Eumenes showed little taste for elaborate protocols; he was far too intelligent for that. But as a member of Alexander’s court he couldn’t avoid some flummery, and his advisers fluttered around him as he grandly settled to his couch. These advisers now included de Morgan, who had taken to wearing elaborate Persian dress, like others in Alexander’s court. Today his face was bloated and red, his eyes marked by deep shadows.

Casey said bluntly, “Cecil, my man, you look like shit, despite that cocktail dress you’re wearing.”

De Morgan grunted. “When Alexander and his Macedonians get started on one of their debauches, they make British Tommies in the brothels of Lahore look like schoolboys. The King is sleeping it off. Sometimes he misses whole days, though he’s always awake for the evenings when it all starts again . . .” De Morgan accepted a goblet of wine from a servant. “And this Macedonian wine is like goat’s urine. But still—hair of the dog.” He took a deep draft, shuddering.

Eumenes called the meeting to order.

Captain Grove began to set out ideas on how to strengthen Babylon’s already formidable defenses. He said to Eumenes, “I know you already have crews out reinforcing the walls and digging out the moat.” That was especially important on the western side where the walls had been all but rubbed out by time; in fact the Macedonians had decided to abandon the western side of the city and use the Euphrates itself as a natural barrier, and were building up defenses on its bank. “But,” said Grove, “I would recommend setting up deeper defenses further out, especially to the east, where the Mongols will be coming from. I’m thinking of pillboxes and trenches—fortifications we can set up quickly.” Many of these concepts took a little translating, through Eumenes’ assistants and the hungover de Morgan.

Eumenes listened patiently for a while. “I will have Diades look into this.” Diades was Alexander’s chief engineer. “But you must know that the King is not mindful simply to defend. Of all the fields on which he has fought, Alexander is most proud of his victorious sieges—at Miletus and Tyre, and a dozen other examples—these are epic triumphs that will surely echo down the ages.”

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.