The Dance of Time

Throughout, there was no expression on his face. None at all. To the Pathan chieftains who stood there with him, the leaders of the allied clans, it did not even seem like a face at all. Just an unmoving, iron mask.

* * *

Those old men had been told that, in his palace in Peshawar, the new king of the mountains was known to show an expression, now and then. Not often, and usually only in the presence of his Greek wife.

That was possible, they thought, although they had their doubts. It was hard to imagine that inhuman mask of a face ever showing an emotion.

Still...

Maybe. The woman was known to be a sorceress, after all.

What the clan chieftains knew, however, was that with a king like this and his witch of a queen, rebellion was insane.

Any form of open resistance. The destroyed clan hadn't even rebelled. They'd simply thought to use the old and well-tested method of intimidating a new would-be ruler of the mountains by assassinating one of his officials.

* * *

The official had, indeed, been assassinated.

In return, Kungas had now proved that he was, indeed, the king of the mountains. The arithmetic of the equation was clear even to those illiterate clan leaders.

Clans assassinated officials.

Kings—real ones—assassinated clans.

* * *

So be it. The old men, no strangers to brutality themselves, chose to look on the bright side. The new king did not meddle with them much, after all, as long as they obeyed him. And trade was picking up a lot. Even the clans in the far mountains were getting richer.

* * *

When Kungas returned to Peshawar, he was in a very foul mood.

"That was a filthy business," he told his wife Irene. Scowling openly, now, in the privacy of their quarters in the palace. "It's your fault. If you hadn't stirred up those idiot clansmen letting their young women claim to be Sarmatians and join your idiot so-called 'queen's guard,' it wouldn't have happened."

The accusation was grossly unfair, and on many counts, but Irene kept silent. Until Kungas' mood lightened, there was no point arguing with him.

Yes, it was true that Irene's subtle undermining of Pathan patriarchalism irritated the clan chiefs. So what? Everything irritated those barbaric old men. They were to "conservative thinking" what an ocean was to "wet and salty." They practically defined the term.

And, again, so what? Irene and Kungas—with Belisarius, in times past, while they'd still been with him in Persia—had discussed the matter thoroughly. No one had ever ruled these mountains, in the sense that "ruled" meant in the civilized lowlands. Just as no one had ever "ruled" the great steppes to the north into which she and Kungas planned to expand their kingdom.

But if a king couldn't rule the mountains and the steppes, he could dominate them. Dominate them as thoroughly and as completely as, in a future era in another universe, the Mongol khans would dominate them.

There was one key difference, though, and Kungas understood it as well as she did. The new Kushan realm in central Asia would use the same methods as the Mongols, true enough. Methods which, in the end, amounted to the simple principle: oppose us and we will slaughter all of you, down to the babes and dogs.

But it did not have the same goal. In the future of that different universe, Genghis Khan and his successors had had no other purpose than simply to enjoy the largesse of their rule which came with the annual tribute. Kungas and Irene, on the other hand, intended to forge a real nation here in central Asia, over time. And that could not be done simply by dominating the ancient clans. The domination was itself but a means to an end—and the end was to undermine them completely, in the only way the human race had ever found it possible to do so.

"Civilization," in a word. Create a center of attraction in the new cities and towns, with their expanding wealth and trade and education and culture and opportunities for individuals from anywhere. And then just let the old clan chiefs rot away, while their clans slowly dissolved around them. Irene's "Sarmatian women's guard" that Kungas had just denounced was only one of a hundred methods that she and Kungas were using for that purpose.

It was not even the one that irritated the clan chiefs the most. That honor probably belonged to the new Buddhist monasteries that Kungas was starting to set up all over. In the end, for all their savage attitudes toward women, the old clan chiefs didn't really care what women did—as long as they did it outside their tightly-controlled villages.

Why should they? From their viewpoint, beyond the sexual pleasure they provided, women were simply domestic animals and beasts of burden. No different, really, from their other livestock. As long as they had enough women to keep breeding clansmen, who cared what wild women did somewhere else?