Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

“What was in the box?”

“Pray let me outline the context first. Bactria occupied, approximately, the region between the Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya. North of it lay Sogdiana, bounded by the Syr Darya—today in the Soviet Union—also under the suzerainty of the Bactrian kings.

“They had broken away from the Seleucid Empire. In the year 209 before Christian reckoning, Antiochus III marched east across Asia to regain this rich territory. He defeated his rival Euthydemus in battle and besieged him in his capital, Bactra, but failed to take the city. After two years he gave up, made peace, and departed southward, to assert his power in India—although there, again, he concluded with a treaty rather than a conquest. While the siege of Bactra became as famous in its day as the siege of Belfort did in my France, no details about it have come down to later times.

“Well, the casket that the Russian soldier brought in held a papyrus, most of the text still legible. Radiocarbon tests, et cetera, established authenticity. It grew clear that this was a letter from Antiochus to someone south-westward. The courier and his presumed escort must have come to grief, perhaps victims of mountaineer footpads. Drifting soil buried the box, which the killers tossed aside after realizing it contained no treasure, and the dry climate preserved the document fairly well.”

Shalten finished his blueberry tea and pottered off to the kitchen and liquor cabinet to make another. Everard practiced patience.

“What did this dispatch say?”

“You shall have your opportunity to examine a copy. Briefly put, it describes how, soon after Antiochus arrived at the gates of Bactra, Euthydemus and his dashing son Demetrius led out a sally in force. It drove a deep salient into the Syrian ranks before it was beaten back and retreated behind the walls. Had it succeeded, the Bactrians might have ended the war then and there, victoriously. Yet it was a wild venture. The letter relates how Euthydemus and Demetrius themselves, in the vanguard of their army, were nearly killed when Antiochus counterattacked. A rousing story, which I imagine you will enjoy.”

Everard, who had seen men scream on the ground as blood and bowels spilled from them, asked merely, “Who was Antiochus writing to?”

“That part is missing. It may have been to a general of his, stationed as an ‘ally’ in the puppet realm Gedrosia on the Persian Gulf, or it may have been to a satrap in his own easternmost province—Whatever, he explains that this clash has convinced him the Bactrian war cannot be won quickly, and therefore plans for an attack on India from the west must be shelved. In the event, they were discarded.”

“I see.” Everard’s pipe had gone out. He tamped the bowl and struck a fresh match. “That sally, the fight that followed, was more than an incident, then.”

“Precisely,” Shalten said. “Professor Soloviev elaborates on the idea, in an article for the Literaturnaya Gazeta, and this is what has triggered general interest.”

He puffed, sipped, and went on: “Antiochus III is known to history as Antiochus the Great. Inheriting an empire in collapse, he hammered it back together and recovered most of what had fallen away. At the battle of Raphia he lost Phoenicia and Palestine to Ptolemy of Egypt, but eventually he was to win them back. He put the Parthians in check. He campaigned as far as Greece. He gave refuge to Hannibal after the Second Punic War. At last the Romans trounced him, and he left to his son less than he himself had ruled, but it still was an enormous domain. His cultural and legal innovations were no less important. A seminal figure.”

Everard suppressed a remark about Antiochus’ love life. “You mean, if he’d gotten killed at Bactra—”

“The dispatch gives no indication that he was ever in danger. His enemies Euthydemus and Demetrius were. And, obscure though their country later became, their resistance changed the course of Antiochus’ career.”

Shalten knocked the dottle from his pipe, laid it aside, clasped hands behind back, continued his parched lecture; and chill went up and down Everard’s spine.

“Professor Soloviev, in his article, speculates at some length, with the weight of authority. He has, for the moment, caught popular fancy around the globe. The thesis is intriguing. The circumstances of the discovery are romantic. And, to be sure, albeit subtly, the professor by implication questions Marxist determinism. He implies that sheer accident—whether a given man does or does not die in a battle—can decide the whole future. That this can be published, and prominently, is a minor sensation itself. It is an early example of the glasnost that M. Gorbachev is proclaiming. Widespread attention is very natural.”

“Well, I look forward to reading it,” Everard said, almost mechanically. Most of him stood in a wind down which blew the scent of tiger … man-eater. “Does the idea really stand up, though?”

“Imagine. Bactria falls to Antiochus, early on. That frees the resources he needs for an outright conquest in western India. This in turn strengthens him against Egypt and, more significantly, Rome. One can well visualize him retaining his gains north of the Taurus and assisting Carthage sufficiently that it survives the Third Punic War. Although he himself is tolerant, a descendant of his attempted to crush Judaism in Palestine, as you may read in First and Second Maccabees. Given total power in Asia Minor, that attempt may well succeed. If so, then Christianity never arises. Therefore the entire world that brought you and me into being is a phantom, a might-have-been, which, conceivably, an alternate Time Patrol keeps suppressed.”

Everard whistled. “Yeah. And Exaltationists who got themselves an in with Antiochus—and showed up again among later generations of the Seleucids—they’d have a pretty good shot at creating a world to suit themselves, wouldn’t they?”

“The thought should occur to them,” Shalten said. “First, we know, they will make their Phoenician effort. When that too fails, the remnants of them may remember Bactria.”

With a roar and a rattle that clamored for hours, the army of King Euthydemus re-entered the City of the Horse. Dust smoked over the land to the south, cast up by hoofs and feet, swirled by wind and human tumult. A cloud of it hazed that horizon, where the Bactrian rear guard staved off the foremost Syrians. Trumpets rang, drums boomed, mounts and pack animals neighed, men’s voices lifted raw.

Everard mingled with the throngs. He had bought a hooded cloak to obscure his features. In the heat and crowding, such a garment was as unusual as his size, but today nobody paid heed. He worked his way quietly through street and stoa, around the city— casing the joint, he told himself; shaping what plans he could, for every set of circumstances he could imagine, within the constraints of what he saw.

Whip-wielding riders cleared ways from gates to barracks. After them came the soldiers, gray with dust, slumped with weariness, mute with thirst. Nonetheless they moved smartly. Most went on horseback, in light armor, lanceheads nodding bright above pennons and regimental standards, ax or bow and quiver at the saddle. They were seldom used as shock troops, for the stirrup was unknown to them, but they sat like centaurs or Comanches, and their hit-run-hit tactics recalled an onslaught by wolves. The infantry that stiffened them was a mixed bag, mercenaries, no few from Ionia or Greece itself; a ripple went over their long, serried pikes, the cadence of their march. The officers riding in crested helmet and figured cuirass seemed mainly Greek or Macedonian.

Jammed against walls, leaning out of windows and over rooftops, folk watched them go past, waved, cheered, wept. Women held infants up, crying against all hope, “See! See your child,——” and a beloved name. Oldsters blinked, peered, shook their heads, more nearly resigned to the caprices of the gods. Boys shouted loudest, sure that the enemy’s doom would soon be upon him.