Time’s Eye

Ruddy said, “This man shouldn’t have been let in here in the first place.”

Her hands soaked in blood, panting hard, Bisesa stepped back. “There’s nothing we can do for him anyhow. Get him out of here. Next! …”

It continued through the early afternoon, a flow of maimed and writhing bodies, and they all worked on until they felt they could work no more, and continued anyhow.

Abdikadir was with the forces outside the walls of Babylon. He had already come close to the fighting, when the Macedonian line had nearly buckled. But he and the British—and Casey, somewhere else in the line—had been kept in the reserves, their firearms concealed under Macedonian cloaks. Their moment would come, Alexander had promised them, but not yet, not yet.

Alexander and his modern advisers had the perspective of a different history to aid them. They knew the Mongols’ classic tactics. The first Mongol assault had been only a feint, intended to draw the Macedonians into a pursuit. They would have been prepared to withdraw for days if necessary, exhausting and dividing Alexander’s forces, until at last they were ready to snap closed their trap. The moderns had told Alexander how the Mongols had once broken an army of Christian knights in Poland by luring them in this way—and in fact Alexander himself had faced Scythian horsemen who used similar tactics. He would have none of it.

Besides, Alexander was playing his own game of concealment, with half his infantry and all his cavalry still hidden inside the walls of Babylon, and with the weapons of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries still unused. It might work. Though Mongol scouts had been spotted in the countryside around Babylon, it was scarcely possible for spies of Genghis Khan to penetrate the city undercover.

Despite the defenders’ tense anticipation, the Mongols did not come again that day.

As the evening gathered, a great line of campfires could be seen on the horizon, stretching from north to south, as if encircling the world. Abdikadir was aware of muttering among the men at the apparent awesome size of the Mongol force. They might have been more scared, he mused, if they had been told that among the long lines of the Mongols’ yurts had been spotted the unmistakable dome shape of a spacecraft.

But Alexander himself came walking through the camp, with Hephaistion and Eumenes at his side. The King was limping slightly, but his helmet and breastplate of iron gleamed like silver. Everywhere he walked he joked with his men. The Mongols were faking, he claimed. They had probably lit two or three fires for every man they had out in the field—why, they had been known to go into battle with stuffed dummies riding their spare horses, to addle the wits of their enemies. But Macedonians were too sharp to fall for such ruses! And meanwhile Alexander himself had allowed so few fires to be lit that the Mongols would seriously underestimate the strength of those opposing them, as well as never guessing at the Macedonians’ indomitable valor and will!

Even Abdikadir felt his spirit rise as the King passed. Alexander was a remarkable man, he thought—if, like Genghis Khan, a terrible one.

With his Kalashnikov at his side, curled up under his poncho and a coarse British blanket, Abdikadir tried to sleep.

He felt oddly at peace. This confrontation with the Mongols seemed to have focused his own determination. It was one thing to know of the Mongols in the abstract, as a page of long-dust history, and another to see their destructive ferocity in the flesh.

The Mongols had done huge damage to Islam. They had come to the rich Islamic state of Khwa—a very ancient nation, stable and centralized since the mid-seventh centuryB.C. In fact Alexander the Great, on his cross-Eurasian jaunt, had come into contact with it. The Mongols sacked its beautiful cities of Afghanistan and northern Persia, from Herat to Kandahar and Samarkand. Like Babylonia Khwa had been built on an elaborate underground irrigation system that had survived since antiquity. The Mongols destroyed this too, and with it Khwa; some Arab historians claimed the region’s economy had never recovered. And so on. The soul of Islam had been forever darkened by these events.

Abdikadir had never been a zealot. But now he discovered in himself a passion to put history right. This time Islam would be saved from the Mongol catastrophe, and be reborn. But this wretched war had to be won first—at any cost.

It was comforting, he thought, in the confusion left by the Discontinuity, to have something to do: a goal of unambiguous value to aim at. Or maybe he was just rediscovering his own Macedonian blood.

He wondered what Casey would say to all this—Casey the jock Christian, born in Iowa in 2004, now caught between armies of Mongols and Macedonians, in a time that had no date. “A good Christian soldier,” Abdikadir murmured, “is only ever a klick away from Heaven.” He smiled to himself.

Kolya had lain in his hole in the ground under Genghis’s yurt for three days—three days, blind and deaf and in agonizing pain. And yet he lived. He could even sense the passage of time by the vibration of the feet on the floorboards above him, footsteps coming and going like a tide.

If the Mongols had searched him they would have found the plastic bag of water under his vest, the sips of which had kept him alive so long—and the one other item that this great gamble had been all about. But they had not searched him. A gamble, yes, and it had paid off, at least so far.

He had known far more about the Mongols than Sable ever could, for he had grown up with their memory, eight centuries old yet still potent. And he had heard of Genghis’s habit of sealing enemy princes under the floor of his yurt. So Kolya had leaked what information he could to Casey, knowing he would be caught; and, once caught, he had let the treacherous Sable manipulate the Mongols into granting him this “merciful” release. All he had wanted was to be here in the dark, still alive, holding the device he had made, just a meter or so from Genghis Khan.

The Soyuz had not carried any grenades, which would have been ideal. But there were unused explosive bolts. The Mongols would not have recognized what he had brought out of the spacecraft, even had they been watching him carefully. Sable would have known, of course, but in her arrogance she had assumed Kolya was an irrelevance, not capable of hindering her own ambitions. Disregarded, it had been a simple matter for Kolya to rig up a simple trigger, and to conceal his improvised weapon.

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.