Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

Perhaps that was why the Eyes were here—to enjoy the unique spectacle of the universe’s most vicious creatures dying in the dirt. Josh felt resentment, and a certain squalid pride.

Save for some reserves, nearly all the forces were in the field now. Apart from a few cavalry skirmishes on the fringe, the battle was concentrating into that tight, bloody mass of carnage at the center of the field, where men lashed at each other relentlessly. Still the fire pits burned, throwing up smoke that obscured the action, and still arrows rained down from the walls of Babylon.

Josh could no longer tell which way the advantage of the battle went. It wasn’t a time for tactics now, and the opposing generals, perhaps the greatest of all time, could do no more—save, like Alexander, to swing swords themselves. It was a time to fight, or die.

Bisesa’s medical station was overwhelmed. There was no other word for it.

Working alone, she struggled to save a Macedonian, sprawled unconscious on the table before her, dumped like a carcass in a butcher’s store. He was a boy, no more than seventeen or eighteen years old. But he had taken a javelin thrust to the stomach. She cleaned, padded and patched the wound as best she could, her hands trembling with fatigue. But she knew that what would finish the boy off was the infection caused by the garbage that spear point would have carried in with it.

And still, all around her, the bodies flowed in. Those selected by the triage teams were no longer carried to the town house she had designated as a morgue but were rudely dumped on the ground, where they were piling up, their dark blood staining the Babylonian dirt. Of those selected for treatment, a handful had been patched up and gone back out to fight, but more than half her patients had died on the treatment tables.

What did you expect, Bisesa? she asked herself. You’re no doctor. Your only experienced assistant is an ancient Greek who once shook hands with Aristotle himself. You’ve no supplies, you’re running out of everything from clean bandages to boiled water.

But she knew she had saved some lives today.

It might be futile—the great wave of Mongol aggression might break over the walls and destroy them all—but, for now, she found she really and truly didn’t want this boy with the punctured stomach to die. She dug into the guiltily hoarded contents of her twenty-first century medical kit. Trying to hide her actions from the others, she jabbed a shot of streptomycin into the boy’s thigh.

Then she called for him to be taken away, like all the others. “Next!”

Kolya believed that the Mongols’ expansion was pathological. It was a ghastly spiral of positive feedback, born of Genghis Khan’s unquestioned military genius and fueled by easy conquests, a plague of insanity and destruction that had spread across most of the known world.

Russians especially had reasons to despise the memory of Genghis Khan. The Mongols had struck twice. Great cities grown fat on trade, Novgorod, Ryazan and Kiev, were reduced to boneyards. In those dread moments the heart had been torn out of the country, forever.

“Not again,” Kolya whispered, unable to hear the words himself. “Not again.” He knew Casey and the others would resist the Mongol menace as hard as they could. Maybe the Mongols had made too many enemies in the old timeline; maybe in some transcendent way they were now facing payback.

Of course his own gamble was still to be played out—was his weapon powerful enough, would it even work? But he had confidence in his own technical abilities.

Reaching the target, though, was another matter. He had observed Genghis. Unlike Alexander, Genghis was a commander who had watched battles from the safety of the rear, and retired to his yurt at the close of the day; aged nearly sixty, he was predictable to that degree.

Could Kolya be sure, though, any longer, after three days, quite what time it was? Could he be sure that the heavy tread he sensed now was indeed the man he sought to destroy? His only real regret was that he would never know.

Kolya smiled, thought of his wife, and closed the trigger. He had no eyes, no ears, but he felt the earth lurch.

Abdikadir was back-to-back with a handful of British and Macedonians, fighting off Mongols who swirled around them, most still on horseback, lashing and cutting. His ammunition long exhausted, he had dropped the useless Kalashnikov and fought with bayonet, scimitar, lance, javelin, whatever came to hand, the detritus of dead warriors from ages separated by more than a thousand years.

As the battle had closed around him, at first he had felt as if he had become more alive—as if his life had been reduced to this instant, of blood, noise, intense effort and pain, and all that had gone before was a mere prologue. But as fatigue poisons built up, that sense of vividness had been replaced by a coppery unreality, as if he was on the point of fainting. He had trained for this—the “drone zone,” they called it, a place where the body ignored pain, grew impervious to hot or cold, and a new form of consciousness cut in, a kind of dogged autopilot. But that didn’t make it any easier to bear.

This little group was surviving where others had already been cut down, an island of resistance in a sea of blood across which the Mongols surged at will. He himself had taken blow after blow. But he knew he couldn’t take much more. The battle was being lost, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Over the carnage of the battlefield, he heard the cry of a trumpet, an uneven rhythm played on a war drum. He was briefly distracted.

A mace swung down from the sky, smashing the scimitar from his hand. Pain lanced; he had broken a finger. Unarmed, one-handed, he turned to face a Mongol cavalryman who reared above him, raising the mace again. Abdikadir lunged, his good hand stretched out stiff as a board, and stabbed at the Mongol’s thigh, aiming for a nerve center. The cavalryman stiffened and flopped backward, and his horse stumbled back. Abdikadir got to his knees, found his scimitar in the bloody dirt, and straightened up, panting hard, looking for his next assailant.

But there was none.

The Mongol cavalrymen were wheeling their horses around, turning back toward their distant encampment. As they galloped away, occasionally one would stop to pick up a dismounted comrade. Abdikadir, standing there panting, clutching his scimitar, simply couldn’t take it in. It was as surprising as if a tide had suddenly reversed.

He heard a snapping sound, close to his ear, almost insectile. He knew what that was, but his mind seemed to grind slowly, dredging up the memory. A sonic boomlet. A bullet. He turned to look.

Before the Ishtar Gate there was one exception to the general withdrawal. Perhaps fifty Mongols, packed tight on their horses, charged at the open gate. And somebody in there, somebody in the middle of the charge, was shooting at him.

He dropped the scimitar. The world wheeled, and he found the earth, sodden with blood, reaching up to him.

Bisesa heard the screams and roars, right outside her casualty point. She rushed out of the door to see what was happening. Ruddy Kipling, the whole front of his shirt sticky with blood, followed her.

A pack of Mongol warriors had smashed through the defenders’ lines and pushed into the gate. Macedonians were closing around them like antibodies around an infection, and their officers screamed orders. Though the Mongols slashed hard at those around them, already they were being pulled from their horses.

But a single figure burst from the struggling pack, and ran down Babylon’s processional way. It was a woman. The Macedonians hadn’t noticed her—or if they had, didn’t take her seriously enough to stop her. She was dressed in leather armor, Bisesa saw, but her hair was tied back by a strip of material, bright orange.