Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

At the fort Abdikadir, Ruddy and Josh crowded around her, eager for her impressions. Josh was predictably glad to see her, his small face creased by smiles. She was pleased to get back to his bright, awkward company.

He asked, “What do you think of our new friend Alexander?”

Bisesa said heavily, “We have to live with him. His forces outnumber ours—I mean, Captain Grove’s—by maybe a hundred to one. I think for now that Alexander is the only show in town.”

“And,” said Ruddy silkily, “Bisesa undoubtedly thinks that Alexander is a fine fellow for his limpid eyes and his shining hair that spills over his shoulders—”

Josh blushed furiously.

Ruddy said, “What about you, Abdi? It’s not everybody who gets to confront such a deep family legend.”

Abdikadir smiled, and ran his hand over his blond hair. “Maybe I’ll get to shoot my great-to-the-nth grandfather and prove all those paradoxes wrong after all …” But he wanted to get down to business. He was keen to show Bisesa something—and not just his patent shower. “I took a trip back to the bit of the twenty-first century that brought us here, Bisesa. There was a cave I wanted to check out …”

He led her to a storeroom in the fort. He held up a gun, a big rifle. It had been wrapped in dirty rags, but its metal gleamed with oil. “There was an intelligence report that this stuff was here,” he said. “It was one of the objectives for our mission in the Bird that day.” There were flashbang grenades, a few old Soviet-era grenades. He bent and picked one up; it was like a soup can mounted on a stick. “Not much of a stash, but here it is.”

Josh touched the barrel of the gun cautiously. “I’ve never seen such a weapon.”

“It’s a Kalashnikov. An antique in my day—a weapon left over from the Soviet invasion, which is to say maybe fifty years before our time. Still works fine, I should imagine. The hill fighters always loved their Kalashnikovs. Nothing so reliable. You don’t even have to clean it, which many of those boys never bothered to do.”

“Twenty-first-century killing machines,” Ruddy said uneasily. “Remarkable.”

“The question is,” Bisesa said, “what to do with this stuff. Could we justify using twenty-first century guns against, say, an Iron Age army—no matter what the odds?”

Ruddy peered at the gun. “Bisesa, we have no idea what waits out there for us. We did not choose this situation, and whatever manner of creature or accident has stranded us here did not take much notice of our welfare. I would say nice moral questions are beside the point, and that pragmatism is the order of the day. Wouldn’t it be foolish not to preserve these muscles of steel and gunpowder?”

Josh sighed. “You’re as pompous as ever, Ruddy, my friend. But I have to agree with you.”

Alexander’s army unit set up its camp half a kilometer from Jamrud. Soon the fires were lit, and the usual extraordinary mixture of military base and traveling circus established itself. That first evening there was a great deal of suspicion between the two camps, and British and Macedonian troops patrolled up and down an implicitly agreed border.

But the ice began to break on the second day. It was Casey who started it, in fact. After spending some time in the border zone, facing down a short, squat Macedonian veteran who looked about fifty, Casey, with gestures, challenged him to a milling. Bisesa knew what this was about: a tradition among some military units where you joined in a one-minute, no-rules, no-holds-barred boxing match and simply tried to beat the living shit out of your opponent.

Despite his aggression, it was obvious to everybody that one-legged Casey was in no shape for such a contest, and Corporal Batson stepped into the breach. Stripped to trousers and braces, the Geordie might have been a twin of the squat Macedonian. A crowd quickly gathered, and as the contest was joined the baying of each side for its champion rose up. “Get stuck in, Joe!” “Alalalalai!” Casey timed the contest, breaking it up after its regulation minute, by which time Batson had taken a lot of blows to his body, while the Macedonian’s nose looked broken. There was no clear winner, but Bisesa could see a grudging respect had been established, the crude regard of one fighting soldier for another, just as Casey had intended.

There was no shortage of volunteers for the next match. When one sepoy came away with a broken arm, the officers stepped in. But a new sporting contest began at the Macedonians’ suggestion, this time a game of sphaira. This Macedonian tradition turned out to be a game played with a leather ball, a pick-up-and-run affair a bit like British rugby, or American football—but a lot more violent. Again Casey got involved, marking out the pitch, agreeing to rules, and acting as referee.

Later, some of the Tommies tried to teach the Macedonians the rules of cricket. Bowlers hurled a hard cork ball, battered by overuse, down a strip of dirt marked by sets of improvised stumps, and batsmen swung homemade bats with abandon. Bisesa and Ruddy paused to watch. The game went well, even if the rule of leg-before-wicket was a challenge to the Tommies’ miming skills.

All this went on right beneath a floating Eye. Ruddy snorted. “The human mind has a remarkable capacity to swallow strangeness.”

One wild drive sent the ball flying into the air, where it collided with the hovering Eye. It sounded as if the ball had hit a wall of solid rock. The ball bounced back into the hands of a fielder, who raised his hands in triumph at his dismissal of the batsman. Bisesa saw that the Eye was quite unperturbed by this clout.

The cricketers gathered into an arguing knot. Ruddy pulled his nose. “As far as I can tell, they are arguing about whether a bounce off the Eye constitutes a valid catch!”

Bisesa shook her head. “I never understood cricket.”

Thanks to all these initiatives, by the end of that second day much of the tension and mute hostility had bled away, and Bisesa wasn’t surprised to see Tommies and sepoys slipping into the Macedonian camp. The Macedonians were happy enough to exchange food, wine and even souvenirs like boots, helmets and Iron Age weapons for glass beads, mouth organs, photographs and other trinkets. And, it seemed, some of the camp prostitutes were prepared to offer their services to these wide-eyed men from the future for no payment at all.

On the third day, Eumenes sent a chamberlain to the fort, who summoned Captain Grove and his advisors into the presence of the King.

It was the dirt that Kolya hated most. After a couple of days in the tent city he felt as filthy as a Mongol himself, and as lice-ridden—in fact he believed the parasites were homing in on him, a source of untapped, fresh meat. If the food poisoning didn’t kill him, he’d probably be bled to death.

But Sable said they had to fit in. “Look at Yeh-lü,” she said. “He’s a civilized man. You think he grew up covered in shit? Of course not. And if he can stand it, you can.”

She was right, of course. But it didn’t make life with the Mongols any easier.

Genghis Khan, it seemed, was a patient man.

Something incomprehensible had happened to the world. And whatever it was had fractured the Mongol empire, as was shown by the severing of the yam , the great empire-wide arteries of waystations and couriers. Well, Genghis Khan had built an empire once, and whatever the state of the world, he would do it again—he, or his able sons. Yeh-lü, however, was advising Genghis Khan to wait. It was always the Mongol way to allow information to be gathered before determining which way to strike, and Genghis Khan listened to his advisors.