“But,” de Morgan said grimly, “your creatures of the Eye can shuffle space and time themselves. What is that but the preserve of a god?”
“Oh, I don’t think they are gods,” Bisesa said. “Powerful, yes, far beyond us—but not gods.”
Josh said, “Why do you say that?”
“Because they have no compassion.”
They had four days’ grace. Then Alexander’s envoys returned.
Of the thousand men who rode out, only a dozen came back. Corporal Batson lived, but his ears and nose had been sliced off. And, in a bag on his saddle, he carried the severed head of Ptolemy.
When she heard the news, Bisesa shuddered, both at the imminent prospect of war, and the loss of another thread from history’s unraveling fabric. The news about Batson, the competent Geordie soldier, broke her heart. She heard that Alexander simply mourned the loss of his friend.
The next day, the Macedonian scouts reported much activity in the Mongol camp. The assault, it seemed, was close.
That afternoon, Josh found Bisesa in the Temple of Marduk. She was sitting against one scorched and blackened wall, a British blanket over her legs to keep out the gathering cold. She stared up at the Eye, which they had labeled the Eye of Marduk—although some of the Tommies called it “God’s Bollock.” Bisesa had taken to spending much of her spare time in here.
Josh sat down beside her, arms wrapped around his thin torso. “You’re supposed to be resting.”
“I am resting. Resting and watching.”
“Watching the watchers?”
She smiled. “Somebody has to. I don’t want them to think—”
“What?”
“That we don’t know. About them, and what they’ve done to us, our history. And besides, I think there is power here. There must be, to have created this Eye and its siblings across the planet, to have melted twenty tonnes of gold to a puddle . . . I don’t want Sable, or Genghis Khan come to that, to get her hands on it. If it all goes pear-shaped when the Mongols come I’ll be standing in that doorway with my pistol.”
“Oh, Bisesa, you are so strong! I wish I was like you.”
“No, you don’t.” He was holding her hand, very tightly, but she didn’t try to pull away. “Here.” She fumbled under the blanket and produced a metallic flask. “Have some tea.”
He opened the flask and sipped. “It’s good. The milk is a little, umm—not authentic.”
“From my survival pack. Condensed and irradiated. In the American army they give you suicide pills; in the British, tea. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion. What more special than this?”
He sipped the tea. He seemed turned in on himself.
Bisesa wondered if the shock of the Discontinuity was at last working its way through Josh. It had hit them all, she suspected, in different ways. She asked, “Are you okay?”
“Just thinking of home.”
She nodded. “None of us talks much about home, do we?”
“Perhaps it’s too painful.”
“Tell me anyhow, Josh. Tell me about your family.”
“As a journalist I’m following my father. He covered the War between the States.” Which was, Bisesa reflected, only twenty years in the past for Josh. “He took a bullet in the hip. Eventually got infected—took him a couple of years to die. I was only seven,” Josh whispered. “I asked him why he had become a journalist, rather than go fight. He said that somebody has to watch, to tell others. Otherwise it’s as if it never really happened at all. Well, I believed him, and followed in his footsteps. Sometimes I resented the fact that the pattern of my life was somewhat fixed before I was born. But I suppose that’s not uncommon.”
“Ask Alexander.”
“Yeah . . . My mother is still alive. Or was. I wish I could tell her I’m safe.”
“Maybe she knows, somehow.”
“Bis, I know who you would be with, if—”
“My little girl,” Bisesa said.
“You never told me about her father.”
She shrugged. “A good-looking bum from my regiment—think of Casey without the charm and sense of personal hygiene—we had a fling, and I got careless. Drunkenness, against which there is no prophylactic. When Myra was born, Mike was—confused. He wasn’t a bad guy, but I didn’t care by then. I wanted her, not him. And then he got himself killed anyhow.” She felt her eyes prickle; she pressed the heel of her palm into their sockets. “I was away from home for months at a time. I knew I wasn’t spending enough time with Myra. I always promised myself I’d do better, but could never get my life together. Now I’m stuck here, and I have to deal with Genghis fucking Khan, when all I want is to go home.”
Josh cupped her face with his hand. “None of us wants this,” he said. “But at least we have each other. And if I die tomorrow—Bis, do you believe that we will come back? That if there is some new chopping-up of time, we will live again?”
“No. Oh, there may be another Bisesa Dutt. But it won’t be me.”
“Then this moment is all we have,” he whispered.
After that it seemed inevitable. Their lips met, their teeth touched, and she pulled him under her blanket, ripping at his clothes. He was gentle—and fumbling, a near-virgin—but he came to her with a desperate, needy passion, which found an echo in herself.
She immersed herself in the ancient liquid warmth of the moment.
But when it was over she thought of Myra, and probed at her guilt, like a broken tooth. She found only emptiness inside, like a space where Myra had once been, and was now vanished for good.
And she was always aware of the Eye, hovering above them both balefully, and the reflections of herself and Josh like insects pinned to its glistening hide.
At the end of the day Alexander, having completed his sacrifices in advance of the battle, gave orders that his army should be assembled. The tens of thousands of them drew up in their squads before the walls of Babylon, their tunics bright and shields polished, their horses whinnying and bucking. The few hundred British, too, were drawn up by Grove in parade order, their khaki and red serge proud, their arms presented.
Alexander mounted his horse and rode before his army, haranguing them with a strong, clear voice that echoed from Babylon’s walls. Bisesa would never have guessed at the wounds he carried. She couldn’t follow his words, but there was no mistaking the response: the rattle of tens of thousands of swords against shields, and the Macedonians’ ferocious battle cry: “Alalalalai! Al-e-han-dreh! Al-e-han-dreh! . . .”
Then Alexander rode to the small section of British. Holding his horse steady with his hand wrapped in its mane, he spoke again—but in English. His voice was heavily accented, but his words were easily comprehensible. He talked of Ahmed Khel and Maiwand, battles of the British Empire’s Second Afghan War that loomed large in the barrack-room mythology of these troops, and the memory of some of them. And Alexander said: “From this day to the ending of the world, but in it we shall be remembered; we few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother . . .”
The Europeans and sepoys alike cheered as loud as any Macedonian. Casey Othic bellowed, “Heard! Acknowledged! Understood!”
When the parade broke up Bisesa sought out Ruddy. He was standing on the platform of the Ishtar gate, looking out over the plain, where the fires of the soldiers’ camp were already alight under a darkling slate-gray sky. He was smoking, one of his last Turkish cigarettes—saved for the occasion, he said.
“Shakespeare, Ruddy?”
“Henry V, to be exact.” He was puffed up, visibly proud of himself. “Alexander heard I was something of a wordsmith. So he called me to the palace to concoct a short address for him to deliver to our Tommies. Rather than something of my own, I turned to the Bard—and what could be more fitting? And besides,” he said, “as the old boy probably never even existed in this new universe he can hardly sue for plagiarism!”
“You’re quite a package, Ruddy.”
> As the light faded, the soldiers had begun singing. The Macedonian songs were the usual mournful dirges about home and lost loved ones. But tonight Bisesa heard English words, an oddly familiar refrain.
Ruddy smiled. “Do you recognize it? It’s a hymn—‘Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven.’ Given our situation, I think one of those Tommies has a sense of humor! Listen to the last verse . . .”
“Angels, help us to adore Him / Ye behold Him face to face; / Sun and Moon, bow down before Him / Dwellers all in Time and Space. / Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him! / Praise with us the God of grace . . .” As they sang, the accents of London, Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool and the Punjab merged into one.
But a soft wind blew from the east, wafting the smoke of the fires over the walls of the city. When Bisesa looked that way she saw that the Eyes had returned, dozens of them, hovering expectantly over the fields of Babylonia.
35: CONFLUENCE
The dust: that was what Josh saw first, a great cloud of it kicked up by racing hooves.
It was about midday. For once it was a clear, bright day, and the rolling bank of dust, perhaps half a kilometer wide, was filled with smoky light, elusive shapes. Then, in Josh’s clear view, they emerged from the dusty glow, shadows at first, coalescing into figures of stocky menace. They were Mongol warriors, identifiable at a glance.
Despite all that had happened to him Josh had found it hard to believe that a Mongol horde, under the control of Genghis Khan himself, was really and truly approaching, intent on killing him. And yet it was so; he could see it with his own eyes. He felt his heart beat faster.
He was sitting in a cramped guard position on the Ishtar gate, looking out over the plain to the east, toward the Mongol advance. With him were Macedonians and a couple of British. The British had decent pairs of binoculars, Swiss-made. Grove had impressed on them the importance of keeping the lenses shielded: they had no idea how much information Genghis Khan had about their situation here in Babylon, but Sable Jones would surely understand the significance of a glinting reflection. The best-equipped of all was Josh, though, for Abdikadir—who had gone off to fight—had bequeathed him his precious NODs, the farsighted night-vision glasses that one wore like goggles.
At the first glimpse of the Mongols, among Macedonians and British observers alike there was an air of tension, and yet of excitement, a palpable thrill. On the next gate, Josh thought he saw the brightly colored chestplate of Alexander himself, come to view this first clash.
The Mongols came in a long line, and seemed to be grouped into units of ten or so. Josh counted the units quickly; the Mongol line was perhaps twenty men deep but two hundred wide—a force of four or five thousand men, just in this first approach.
But Alexander had drawn up ten thousand of his own men on the plain before Babylon. Their long scarlet cloaks billowed in the breeze, and their bronze helmets were painted sky blue, the spines of their crests marked with the insignia of rank.
It started.
The first assault was with arrows. The front ranks of the advancing Mongols lifted complicated-looking compound bows, and fired into the air. The bows were of laminated horn, and could strike accurately over hundreds of yards, as fast as a warrior could pull arrows from his quiver.
The Macedonians had been drawn up into two long files, with the Foot Companions at the center, and the elite Shield Bearers guarding either flank. Now, as the arrows flew, to brisk drumbeats and trumpet peals, they quickly regrouped into a close order, boxlike formation eight men deep. They raised their leather shields over their heads and locked them together, like the formation the Romans had called the turtle.
The arrows fell on the shields with audible thumps. The shell formation held, but it wasn’t perfect. Here and there men dropped, to sharp cries, and there would be a brief hole in the cover, a fast flurry as the wounded man was dragged from the formation, and the shell would close up again.
So men had already started to die, Josh thought.
Perhaps a quarter-mile from the city walls, the Mongols suddenly broke into a charge. The warriors roared, their war drums banged like a pulse, and even the clatter of the horses’ hooves was like a storm. The wave of noise was startling.
Josh didn’t believe he was a coward, but he couldn’t help but quail. And he was astonished at how calmly Alexander’s seasoned warriors held their places. To more trumpet peals and yelled commands—“Synaspismos!”—they broke up their turtle formation and formed their open lines once more, though some kept their shields raised to ward off arrows. They were in a line four deep now, with some troops held in reserve at the back. They were infantrymen facing the Mongols’ cavalry charge, a thin line of flesh and blood was all that stood between Babylon and the oncoming Mongols. But they locked their button shields together and rammed the butts of their long spears in the ground, and foot-long iron blades bristled at the oncoming Mongols.
In the last moments Josh saw the Mongols very clearly, even the eyes of their armored horses. The animals seemed crazed; he wondered what goads, or drugs, the Mongols used to induce their horses to attack packed infantry.
The Mongols fell on the Macedonian lines. It was a brutal collision.
The armored horses battered a way through the Macedonian front line, and the whole formation buckled at the center. But the Macedonians’ rear lines cut at the animals, killing or hamstringing them. Mongols and their horses began to fall, and their rear lines slammed into the stalled advance.
All along the Macedonian line now there was a stationary front of fighting. A stink of dust and metal, and the coppery smell of blood, rose up to Josh. There were cries of rage and pain, and the clash of iron on iron. There were no gunshots, no cannon roars, none of the dark explosive noises of the warfare of later centuries. But human lives were erased with industrial efficiency, all the same.
Josh was suddenly aware of a silvered sphere hovering before him, high over the ground, but almost at his own eye level. It was an Eye. Perhaps, he thought grimly, there were other than human observers here today.
The first assault lasted only minutes. And then, to a trumpet-call, the Mongols suddenly broke away. Those still mounted galloped back from the fray. They left behind a line of broken and writhing bodies, severed limbs, maimed horses.
The Mongols paused in loose order, a few hundred yards from the Macedonian position. They called insults in their incomprehensible language, shot off a few arrows, even spat at the Macedonians. One of them had dragged a wretched Macedonian foot soldier with him, and now, with mocking elaboration, began to carve a hole in the living man’s chest. The Macedonians responded with insults of their own, but when a unit ran forward, weapons raised, their officers roared commands for them to hold their positions.
The Mongols continued to withdraw, still taunting the Macedonians, but Alexander’s soldiers would not follow. As the lull continued, stretcher-bearers ran out from the Ishtar Gate.
The first Macedonian warrior to be brought into Bisesa’s surgery had suffered a leg wound. Ruddy helped her haul the unconscious figure onto a table.
The arrow had been broken and pulled out, but it had passed right through the calf muscle and out the other side of the leg. It didn’t look to have broken any bones, but flaps of muscle tissue spilled out of the raw wound. She stuffed the muscle tissue back into the hole, packed some wine-soaked cloth into it, and then, with Ruddy’s brisk help, bound it up tight. The soldier was stirring. She had no anesthetic, of course, but perhaps, if he woke, fear and adrenaline would keep the pain at bay a while.
Ruddy, working with both hands, wiped sweat from his broad, pale brow onto the shoulder of his jacket.
“Ruddy, you’re doing fine.”
“Yes. And this man will live, will he not? And walk out, scimitar and shield in hand, to die on some other battlefield.”
“All we can do is patch them up.”
“Yes . . .”
But there was no time, no time. The leg wound was just the first
of a flood of stretcher-bound invalids that suddenly flowed in through the Ishtar Gate. Philip, Alexander’s physician, ran to meet the flow and, as Bisesa had taught him, began to operate a brisk triage, separating those who could be helped from those who could not, and sending the invalids to where they could best be treated.
She had Macedonian porters take the leg wound away to a casualty tent, and grabbed the next stretcher in line. It turned out to be a fallen Mongol warrior. He had taken a sword blow to his upper thigh, and blood pumped from an artery. She tried to press the edges of the wound together, but it was surely too late, and already the flow was stilling of its own accord.
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.