Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

“A mammoth,” he breathed. “Genghis’s hunters, crossing the time slips, have trapped more than they bargained for—it is the dream of ages to witness this. If only we had a camera!”

But Sable was indifferent.

A little stiffly, Genghis Khan mounted his horse. He rode forward, with a couple of guards to either side. It was his privilege to make the first kill. He took position not twenty meters below Kolya, and waited for the prey to be shepherded to him.

Suddenly there were screams. Some of Genghis’ guards broke ranks and fled, despite the howls of their commanders. Through the billowing dust before Genghis, Kolya saw a red rag flung through the air—no, not a rag, it was a human being , a Mongol warrior, his chest ripped open, entrails dangling.

Genghis Khan held his ground, holding his horse steady, his lance and scimitar raised.

Kolya saw the beast coming, emerging from the dust. It was like a lion in its stealthy advance, but it was massively muscled, its shoulders more like a bear’s. And when it opened its mouth it revealed teeth that curved like Genghis Khan’s scimitar. In a moment of deadly stillness emperor and saber-toothed cat faced each other.

Then a single shot rang out, as unexpected as a clap of thunder from a clear sky. It was so close to Kolya his ears rang, and he heard the hiss of the bullet as it flew. Around Kolya the royal party and their attendants screamed and quailed. Suddenly the cat lay in the dirt, its hind legs twitching, its head exploded to a bloody mass. Genghis’s horse was shying, but the Emperor had not flinched.

It had been Sable, of course. But she had already hidden the pistol.

Sable spread her arms. “ Tengri! I am the emissary of Heaven, sent to save you, great one, for you are intended to live forever, and to rule all the world!” She turned to a whimpering Basil. In broken French she hissed, “Translate, you dog, or it will be your head I take off next.”

Genghis Khan stared up at her.

The slaughter of the animals inside the cordon took days. It was customary for some of the animals to be let loose, but on this occasion, as Genghis’s life had been threatened, none was allowed to live.

Kolya inspected the remains curiously. The heads and tusks of several mammoths were presented to Genghis, along with a pride of lions of a size nobody had seen before, and foxes with coats of a beautiful snowy whiteness.

And there were a strange kind of people, too, caught up in the Mongols’ net. Naked, fast-running but unable to escape, they were a small family, a man, woman and boy. The man was dispatched immediately, and the woman and child brought in chains to the royal household. The creatures were naked and filthy, and seemed to have no speech. The woman was given to the soldiers for their sport, and the child was kept in a cage for a few days. Without his parents, the child would not eat, and rapidly weakened.

Kolya saw him up close just once. Squatting on the ground inside his cage, the boy was tall—taller than all the Mongols, even taller than Kolya—but his face and body had the unformed look of a child. His skin was weather-beaten and his feet were callused. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on his body, but his muscles were hard. He looked as if he could run all day without a break. Over his eyes was a heavy ridge of bone. When he looked at Kolya his eyes were startling blue, clear as the sky. There was intelligence there, Kolya thought—but it wasn’t a human intelligence; it was a blank knowingness, without a center in self, like the eyes of a lion.

Kolya tried to talk about this with Sable. Perhaps this was some prehuman, a Homo erectus perhaps, haplessly caught up in the Discontinuity. But Sable was nowhere to be found.

When Kolya went back, the cage had gone. He learned the boy had died, his body removed and burned with the rest of the waste from the hunt.

Sable reappeared about noon the day after that. Yeh-lü and Kolya were in the middle of another of their strategy sessions.

Sable was wearing a Mongol tunic, of the expensive, embroidered sort the Golden Family sported, but she had bits of bright orange parachute silk in her hair and around her neck, a badge of her different origins. She looked wild, a creature neither of one world nor the other, out of control.

Yeh-lü sat back and watched her steadily, wary, calculating.

“What happened to you?” Kolya said in English. “I haven’t seen you since you pulled that gun.”

“Spectacular, wasn’t it?” she breathed. “And it worked.”

“What do you mean, it worked ? Genghis could have had you killed, for violating his priority in the hunt.”

“But he didn’t. He called me to his yurt. He sent out everybody, even the interpreters—there were just the two of us. I think he really believes now that I am from his Tengri. You know, when I went to him Genghis had been drinking for hours, so I cured his hangover. I kissed his cup of wine—I slipped in a few aspirins I’d put in my mouth. It was so easy. I tell you, Kolya—”

“What did you offer him, Sable?”

“What he wants. Long ago he was given a divine mission, via a shaman. Genghis is Tengri ’s representative on Earth, sent to rule over all of us. He knows his mission isn’t complete yet—and since the Discontinuity he’s actually gone backward—but he also knows he’s getting older. That Communist monument recording the date of his death spooked the bejesus out of him. He wants time to complete his mission— he wants immortality . And that’s what I offered him. I told him that in Babylon he will find the philosopher’s stone.”

Kolya gasped. “You’re crazy.”

“How do you know, Kolya? We’ve no idea what waits for us in Babylon. Who knows what’s possible? And who is to stop us?” she sneered. “Casey? Those dumb-ass Brits in India?”

Kolya hesitated. “Did Genghis take you to his bed?”

She smiled. “I knew he would be put off by clean flesh. So I took a little dung from his favorite horse, and rubbed it in my scalp. I even rolled around in the dirt a bit. It worked. And you know, he liked my skin. The smoothness—the absence of disease scars. He may not like hygiene, but he likes its results.” Her face darkened. “He took me from behind. The Mongols make love about as subtly as they wage war. Some day that hard-faced bastard will pay for that.”

“Sable—”

“But not today. He got what he wanted, and so did I.” She beckoned Basil. “You, Frenchie. Tell Yeh-lü that Genghis has decided. The Mongols would have reached Iraq anyhow, in a generation or so; the campaign won’t be a challenge for them. The quriltai , the council of war, has already been called.” She took a dagger from her boot, and thrust it into the map, where she had placed it before, into Babylon. This time nobody dared remove it.

Bisesa thought that Alexander’s fleet, gathered offshore, looked magnificent despite the rain. There were triremes with their banks of oars, horses whinnied nervously on flat-bottomed barges, and most impressive of all were the zohruks ,shallow-draft grain-lighters, an Indian design that would persist to the twenty-first century. The rain fell in sheets, obscuring everything, washing out colors and softening lines and perspectives, but it was hot, and the oarsmen went naked, their brown, wiry bodies glistening, the water plastering their hair flat and running down their faces.

Bisesa couldn’t resist taking snaps of the spectacle. But the phone was complaining. “What do you think this is, a theme park? You’re going to fill my memory long before we get to Babylon, and then what will you do? And I’m getting wet …”