Harry Turtledove (Editor) - Alternate Generals III

The roof was on the fifth court, all but the last of it, a tracery of stone above the eastern edge. Abraham Han Li the architect stood beneath the soaring arches, frowning upward. "Perhaps after all," he said, "we should have built a dome. Nine domes in ascending order, sheathed in silver and gold, floating above the plain, would be a vision of divine sublimity."

"Surely, master," said Moishe his assistant, "that would be beautiful indeed, but these vaulted arches uplift the spirit in a way that even the most airy dome cannot quite manage."

The Great Khan's chief architect was in no way convinced, but whatever argument he might have begun was lost in sudden commotion. Moishe had felt the slight shift of the paving underfoot, as if the earth had shrugged in its sleep. An instant later, shouts and cries brought them all out of the court and running toward the western wall.

It was still standing, but long cracks ran through it. The earth had subsided visibly. Workmen milled about, babbling in a confusion of languages.

Abraham Han Li maintained a remarkable degree of calm. "You said," he said to the Great Khan's chief engineer, who stood gaping as foolishly as any of the rest of them, "that the caverns did not extend beneath that portion of the plain."

Moishe met the glance of the chief engineer's assistant. Buri was too circumspect to roll his eyes, but he could not quite control his expression. Whatever the chief engineer might have told the chief architect, the rest of the workmen and their overseers knew perfectly well how far the caverns extended. A river ran under the earth, cutting beneath the western corner of the Temple. The great ones refused to know it because their plans called for the Temple to be just such a shape and just such a size, oriented in just such a way, and that required the raising of a wall above the hidden river.

"Can it be salvaged?" the chief architect demanded. "Can the earth be shored up?"

"It can," said the chief engineer. "Certainly it can. It will be a great undertaking, but if we commandeer men, requisition supplies…"

"The Khan has said it," the chief architect said. "Whatever is needed, it shall be supplied. Give us walls that will stand. This is for the glory of the Lord God."

The chief engineer bowed to that Name. His assistant sighed just audibly.

So too did Moishe. Khans and princes demanded the impossible. Assistants then had to do it-and pay the price if they should fail.

Moishe stood in a cavern of immeasurable size. Even lit by lamps and torches beyond count, it stretched far away into gloom. Pillars and columns rose into vaults overhead, touched with rose and cream and gold. The river ran black and silent through them.

The Great Khan's engineers and miners stood in a hush of deep reverence, and not only because the river had been holy for time out of mind. Sound could break; sound could shatter. Sound could bring down the roof that groaned already under the weight of the Temple wall.

"We'll need timbers," Buri said in a barely audible whisper, "and stone. And years-but we'll be given months. Days, if I know our masters. This is no mine, to be shored up as we go. This is a temple as wide as the one above, and infinitely more fragile."

"It's a pity we can't worship here," murmured one of the lesser engineers. He was still a pagan, Moishe suspected, although those who had not accepted the Covenant were wise not to confess it too loudly. "Open a gate, raise up a few pillars, and here's a temple to make any god proud."

"The God of Hosts is a god of the open sky," said Buri. "But more to the point, the Khan has commanded that the Temple be built on the plain of Chengdu. Therefore it shall be built there. And we will make certain that the earth will hold it up."

The engineer shrugged. It made no difference to him, his manner said, if the great ones chose to be fools.

Moishe could not be as censorious as he should have been. The priests insisted that the Khan's vision had been true; that the Lord of Hosts had commanded the Temple to be built in this place, to glorify Him in this age of the world.

And yet in this temple to the gods below, he wondered if there was war in heaven. Not every god yielded peacefully to the rule of the One God. The gods of this country were very old and had been strong before the Khan's father cast them down. They might not in fact have yielded to the conquest. They might simply have been biding their time.

It was difficult to think such thoughts in this cavern, in the silence and the sense of age-old peace. The Khan's engineers would break that peace. They would desecrate the temple below for the sake of the Temple above.

Or maybe the Lord had something else in mind. Time would tell, as it inevitably did.

"When Temujin was a boy," the rabbi said, "even younger than you, he was reckoned the last and least of his brothers. But the Lord sent him a sign and a guide, a slave taken from far away, a woman of a people whose ways were utterly strange."

"The Honored Deborah!" cried one of his pupils.

The rabbi was young and his pupils were princes. He did not rebuke the child for speaking out of turn. "The Honored Deborah, yes," he said. "She taught him a way and a faith such as he had never dreamed of before. She showed him a path that made him strong. She made him a warrior of God. She helped him to see his destiny: not just to rule the world, but to take the name of the Lord of Hosts wherever he should go, and bring the nations of the world to the Covenant."

"Amen," said the circle of pupils in the colonnade of the Temple. Here on the eastward side, the wall was complete, and the courts to the fourth of them, where the school was. The chants of Torah and Talmud had paused, a brief moment of silence, in which these youngest scholars had time to reflect on their lesson.

Just as the chanting resumed farther down along the colonnade, the rabbi went on, "So Temujin became Judah, the lion of God. First his brothers, then his cousins, then his clan, were moved in their hearts to accept the One God and to follow His servant. The Lord God made them strong and gave them victory in battle, until Temujin rose to be the Great Khan, Genghis Khan, lord of the Golden Horde. The world lay down beneath his foot.

"After the Lord God had taken His servant to Himself, by the side of Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Joshua, Moses, and the rest of the fathers of the Covenant, the Great Khan's son woke from a dream to the knowledge of what he must do. The world was his to rule by the Lord's decree. It well pleased the Lord that his father, and now he, had spread the Covenant so far, but one more thing the Lord required of him.

" 'My Temple in the west of the world is fallen, He said. 'The people of My first Covenant are scattered to the winds of heaven. That is My will, and so I have ordained. Now are you My chosen, My beloved. Build Me a Temple. Build it high and make it beautiful. Consecrate it to the glory of My name.

"And the Khan, whose mother had named him Khubilai but whose father called him Solomon, bowed low before the Lord and consented to do His will. The Lord gave him the knowledge of the place in which the Temple was to be built, and the fashion of it, how broad and how tall, and what manner of beauty would adorn it. Two Temples there had been in Jerusalem, and both were long gone; but this would be greater than either, more holy and more beautiful. And so the Lord would be worshipped according to His will."

"This is it," said the prince who had spoken before. "This is the Temple that the Lord told Father to build. The Lord told him to build it in two times seven years, no more and no less-and now it's half done, and it's been ten years, and do you think the Lord is getting impatient?"