Time's Eye (26 page)

He had to wait for the right time to strike. That was why he had had to wait, in the dark and the agony.
Three days
—it was like surviving three days beyond his own death. But how odd that his body kept functioning, that he had to urinate and even defecate, as if the body thought his story had an epilogue. But these were like the twitches of a fresh corpse, he thought, of a manikin, meaningless in themselves.

Three days. But Russians were patient. They had a saying: that the first five hundred years are always the worst.

First light gathered. The Macedonians started to move around, coughing, rubbing their eyes, urinating. Abdikadir sat up. The pink-gray of the brightening sky was oddly beautiful, scattered sunlight against volcano ash clouds, like cherry blossom scattered on pumice.

But he had only moments of peace after waking.

First and last light are the most dangerous times for a soldier, when the eye struggles to adjust to fast-changing light. And, in that moment of maximum vulnerability, the Mongols struck.

They had approached the Macedonian positions in silence. Now the great
naccara
called out, their camel-borne war drums, and the Mongols surged forward, screaming wildly. The sudden eruption of noise was bloodcurdling, as if some immense force of nature was approaching, a flood or a landslide.

But the Macedonians’ trumpet peals followed only a heartbeat later. Soldiers rushed to their positions. There were brisk commands in the Macedonians’ harsh dialect:
Form up, hold your position
,
hold the line!
The Macedonian infantry, eight deep, made a wall of hardened leather and iron.

Alexander had, of course, been prepared. Anticipating this assault, he had let his foe approach as close as he dared. Now was the time to spring his trap.

Abdikadir took his place, three ranks back from the front. To either side were nervous Tommies. Catching their glances, Abdikadir forced a smile and raised his Kalashnikov.

He got his first good look at a Mongol warrior through a gun sight.

The Mongols’ heavy cavalry was at the center of the charge, with the light cavalry following behind. They wore body armor made of strips of buffalo leather, and metal helmets with leather guards over their necks and ears. Each man was loaded with weapons: two bows, three quivers, a lance with a vicious-looking hook on the end, an axe, a curved saber. Even the horses were armored, with broad leather sheets that guarded their sides, and metal caps on their heads. The Mongols, carapaced, bristling with weapons, looked more insectile than human.

But they weren’t having it all their own way. At a trumpet peal, archers popped up over the parapets of the walls of Babylon, and arrows hissed through the air, over Abdikadir’s head, thudding into the advancing Mongols. When a rider fell there would be a tangle, briefly disrupting the charge.

Now more arrows fell, ablaze, their tips dipped in pitch. They were aimed at flame pits, bales of hay soaked in pitch in the ground. Soon great pockets of flame and smoke were bursting up beneath the Mongols. Men screamed, and their horses shied and refused. But, though the grit of casualties slowed the Mongol advance, it did not halt it.

And once again the Mongol heavy cavalry slammed into the Macedonians.

All along the line the Macedonians fell back. The momentum of the Mongols’ charge, and the sheer ferocity with which the horsemen wielded their swords and maces, made that inevitable.

Abdikadir, now only a meter or so from the worst of the fighting, saw rearing horses, flat Mongol faces looming above the struggling crowd, men fighting and dying. He could smell blood, dust, the sweat of terrified horses—and, even now, a rank, buttery stink that could only be the Mongols themselves. The sheer density of men and animals, the roar of ten thousand voices, made it difficult to fight, even to raise a weapon. As blades hissed in the air, blood and body parts flew in scenes of almost absurd, impossible carnage, and gradually the screams of rage turned to howls of pain. More pressure came when the Mongol light cavalry followed up their heavy counterparts, pressing forward where the heavy cavalry had made room, jabbing with their swords and javelins.

But Alexander struck back. Brave infantrymen rushed from the back of the Macedonian line carrying long hooked lances; if the lance missed, the hook could dismount a warrior. Mongols fell, but the Macedonian infantrymen were cut down like flowers before a scythe.

Now, through the clamor, a Macedonian trumpet sounded a clear peal.

At the center of the field, just before Abdikadir, the surviving Macedonian front ranks pulled back, melting through the ranks behind them, leaving their wounded and dead. Suddenly there was nothing left, nothing between Abdikadir and the most ferocious horseback warriors who had ever lived.

The Mongols, startled, their horses shying, hesitated for a second. One immense man, short but wide like a bear, stared into Abdikadir’s eyes and raised a stubby mace that was already dripping with blood.

Captain Grove was at Abdikadir’s side. “Fire at will!”

Abdikadir raised his Kalashnikov and pulled the trigger. The Mongol’s head exploded into a mist of blood and bone, his metal cap hurled absurdly into the air. His horse bolted, the headless body sliding from the saddle into the pressing crowd.

All around Abdikadir the British fired into the mass of Mongols, antique British Martini-Henrys and Sniders making precise coughs against the clatter of the Kalashnikovs. Men and horses disintegrated before the withering hail of bullets. Grenades flew. Most of them were just flashbangs, but that was enough to terrify the horses and at least some of the warriors. But one exploded under a horse. The animal seemed to burst, and its rider, screaming, was hurled away.

One grenade landed too close to Abdikadir. The blast was like a punch to the stomach. He fell backward, his ears ringing, his nose and mouth filled with the sour, metal taste of blood, and the chemical tang of the ignition. He felt somehow dislocated, as if he had been knocked through another Discontinuity. But if he was down, a corner of his mind told him, there was a hole in the line before him. He raised his rifle, fired without looking, and struggled to his feet.

The order came to advance. The line of British strode forward, firing continually.

Abdikadir moved ahead with them, snapping a new magazine into his weapon as he did so. There was no open ground; he had to climb over earth littered by corpses and body parts, in places slippery with entrails. He even had to step onto the back of a wounded man, who screamed in agony, but there was no other way.

It was working, he thought at first. To left and right, as far as he could see, where they were not dying in their saddles, the Mongols were falling back, their weapons unable to match the firearms of six hundred years and more after their time.

But now Abdikadir heard a high-pitched voice—
a woman’s voice
—and some of the Mongols clambered off their horses. They actually advanced
toward
the gunfire, using the bodies of their comrades and their horses as cover. Abdikadir recognized the tactics—scan for threats, move, take cover, scan again. They were using their bows, the only weapon they had that could match the guns’ range, and took turns to cover each other as they made their way forward: a maneuver called pepperpotting. And as they fired, Macedonian screams and a torrent of fluent Geordie oaths told Abdikadir that some arrows were striking home.

These Mongols had been trained to withstand gunfire, he realized.
Sable
—it had to be, just as they had feared. His heart sank. He snapped in another magazine, and fired again.

But the Mongols were closing. Abdikadir and the other riflemen had been assigned a shield bearer each, but these were being brushed aside. One horseback rider almost got through to Abdi, and he had to swing the rifle, using the butt as a club. He got a lucky hit on the man’s temple, and the Mongol reeled back. Before he could recover Abdikadir had shot him dead, and was looking for the next target.

From his elevated position on the Ishtar Gate Josh could see the great sweep of the battle. Its bloody core was still the slab of struggling men and animals, directly before the gate, where the Mongol heavy cavalry had collided with Alexander’s Foot Companions. The Eyes were everywhere, like floating pearls above the heads of the struggling warriors.

The heavy cavalry was the Mongols’ most powerful instrument, designed to smash the enemy’s strongest forces in a single blow. It had been hoped that a sudden assault with gunfire would do enough damage to the heavy cavalry to blunt that blow. But for whatever reason the Mongols had not fallen back as had been hoped, and the armed troops were getting bogged down.

This was bad news. There had only been three hundred British troops in Jamrud, after all. Their numbers were no match for the Mongols, and even if every single bullet took a Mongol life, Genghis’s troops would surely overwhelm them at last, through sheer numbers.

And now the Mongols threw more cavalry around the wings of the battlefield to envelop the enemy. This was again expected—it was a classic Mongol maneuver called the
tulughma—
but its sheer ferocity, as the new units smashed into the Macedonians’ flanks, was staggering.

But Alexander wasn’t done yet. Trumpets pealed out again from the city walls. With a great clang, gates were thrown open, and the Macedonian cavalry at last rode out into the field. Even as they emerged they were in their tight wedge formation. At a glance Josh could see how much more skillful these horsemen of ancient times were than the Mongols. And, at the head of the Companions who rode out from the right-hand side, Josh recognized the bright purple cloak and white-plumed helmet of Alexander himself, a panther skin thrown over his saddle cloth, as ever leading his men to glory or death.

The Macedonians, fast, agile, and tightly disciplined, wheeled to cut into the Mongol flank like a scalpel. The Mongols tried to turn, but, compressed now between the stolid Macedonian infantry and the Companions, their movements were constricted, and the Macedonians began to jab at their unprotected faces with their long wooden spears. It was another classic tactic, Josh knew—a battle formation perfected by Alexander the Great, yet inherited from his father before him, with cavalry on the right delivering the killer blow, and the central infantry following up with its dogged pressure.

Josh was no advocate of war. But he saw a kind of elation in the eyes of warriors on both sides as they hurled themselves into the fray: a kind of release that the moment in which all inhibitions could be shed was here at last, and a sort of joy. Josh felt a deep visceral thrill as he watched this ancient, brilliant maneuver unfold before his eyes—even as men fought and died in the dirt below, each one a unique life snuffed out. This is why we fight wars, we humans, he thought; this is why we play this game with the highest of stakes: not for profit, or power, or territory, but for this intense pleasure. Kipling is right: war is
fun
. It is the dark secret of our kind.

Perhaps that was why the Eyes were here—to enjoy the unique spectacle of the universe’s most vicious creatures dying in the dirt. Josh felt resentment, and a certain squalid pride.

Save for some reserves, nearly all the forces were in the field now. Apart from a few cavalry skirmishes on the fringe, the battle was concentrating into that tight, bloody mass of carnage at the center of the field, where men lashed at each other relentlessly. Still the fire pits burned, throwing up smoke that obscured the action, and still arrows rained down from the walls of Babylon.

Josh could no longer tell which way the advantage of the battle went. It wasn’t a time for tactics now, and the opposing generals, perhaps the greatest of all time, could do no more—save, like Alexander, to swing swords themselves. It was a time to fight, or die.

Bisesa’s medical station was overwhelmed. There was no other word for it.

Working alone, she struggled to save a Macedonian, sprawled unconscious on the table before her, dumped like a carcass in a butcher’s store. He was a boy, no more than seventeen or eighteen years old. But he had taken a javelin thrust to the stomach. She cleaned, padded and patched the wound as best she could, her hands trembling with fatigue. But she knew that what would finish the boy off was the infection caused by the garbage that spear point would have carried in with it.

And still, all around her, the bodies flowed in. Those selected by the triage teams were no longer carried to the town house she had designated as a morgue but were rudely dumped on the ground, where they were piling up, their dark blood staining the Babylonian dirt. Of those selected for treatment, a handful had been patched up and gone back out to fight, but more than half her patients had died on the treatment tables.

What did you expect, Bisesa? she asked herself. You’re no doctor. Your only experienced assistant is an ancient Greek who once shook hands with Aristotle himself. You’ve no supplies, you’re running out of everything from clean bandages to boiled water.

But she knew she had saved some lives today.

It might be futile—the great wave of Mongol aggression might break over the walls and destroy them all—but, for now, she found she really and truly didn’t want this boy with the punctured stomach to die. She dug into the guiltily hoarded contents of her twenty-first century medical kit. Trying to hide her actions from the others, she jabbed a shot of streptomycin into the boy’s thigh.

Then she called for him to be taken away, like all the others. “Next!”

Kolya believed that the Mongols’ expansion was pathological. It was a ghastly spiral of positive feedback, born of Genghis Khan’s unquestioned military genius and fueled by easy conquests, a plague of insanity and destruction that had spread across most of the known world.

Russians especially had reasons to despise the memory of Genghis Khan. The Mongols had struck twice. Great cities grown fat on trade, Novgorod, Ryazan and Kiev, were reduced to boneyards. In those dread moments the heart had been torn out of the country, forever.