Time’s Eye

“But they didn’t always do that,” he whispered to Sable. “The Mongols. Only in the early thirteenth century. Otherwise they just dismantled the yurts like tents and carried them folded up. So that fixes us in time … We have landed in the middle of the Mongol Empire, at its peak!”

“Lucky for us you know so much about them.”

Kolya grunted. “Lucky? Sable, the Mongols came to Russia— twice. You don’t forget an experience like that, not even after eight centuries.”

After a time a meal was prepared. A woman hauled in a big iron pot. Half a sheep carcass was chopped up and thrown into the pot—not just flesh and bones, but lungs, stomach, brains, intestines, hooves, eyeballs; evidently nothing was wasted. The woman had a face like leather and arms like a shot-putter’s. As she worked steadily at the meat she paid absolutely no attention to Sable and Kolya, as if two humans from the future stacked in the corner of her yurt were an everyday occurrence.

The stranded cosmonauts did what they could to speed their adaptation to Earth’s ferocious pull, surreptitiously flexing their joints, shifting their posture to favor one muscle group over another. Aside from that they had nothing to do but wait, Kolya supposed, for that rider to return from his mission to the local official, at which point the decision about their fate would be made—a decision that could still, he knew, mean their deaths. But despite that grim prospect, as the afternoon wore by, Kolya, astonishingly, grew bored.

The mass of meat and offal in the pot was boiled for a couple of hours. Then more adults and children crowded into the yurt. Some of them brought in more meat for the pot, bits of what looked like foxes, mice, rabbits. These were roughly skinned but not cleaned; Kolya could see bits of grit and dried blood sticking to them.

When it was time to eat the Mongols just dived in. They scooped out chunks of meat with wooden bowls and ate with their fingers. They washed it down with cups of what looked like milk, poured from a sweating goatskin. Sometimes, if they didn’t like the flavor of a piece of meat after a few bites, they would throw it back, and they would spit bits of gristle back into the pot.

Sable watched this in horror. “And nobody washed their hands before lunch.”

“To the Mongols water has divine purity,” Kolya said. “You don’t sully it by using it to wash.”

“So how do they keep clean?”

“Welcome to the thirteenth century, Sable.”

The guests kept their distance from the cosmonauts, but otherwise their social life seemed unimpeded.

After a time one of the younger men approached the cosmonauts, carrying a bowl of meat. Kolya saw how the mutton fat that shone on the boy’s lips was only the topmost layer in a smear of fat and dirt that covered his face; there was even wind-dried snot under his broad nostrils, and his stink, like over-ripe cheese, was just overwhelming. The boy reached behind Kolya and released one of his hands. Then he picked out a piece of meat from his bowl and held it out to Kolya. His fingernails were black with dirt.

“You know,” Kolya murmured, “the Mongols would soften their meat by riding with it under their saddle. This bit of mutton might have spent days being pumped full of methane from some fat herdsman’s ass.”

“Eat it,” murmured Sable. “We need the peptides.”

Kolya took the meat, closed his eyes, and bit into it. It was leathery, and tasted of fat and butter. Later, the boy brought him a cup of milk. It actually had a kick, and he vaguely remembered that the Mongols would ferment mare’s milk. He drank as little as he could.

After the meal the cosmonauts were allowed out, separately, to relieve themselves, heavily watched all the time.

Kolya took the chance to look around. The plain stretched around him, huge and empty, an elemental sheet of yellow dust broken by splashes of green. Under an ashen sky fat clouds sailed, casting shadows like lakes. But the land, vast and flat and featureless, seemed to dwarf the sky itself. This was the Mongolian plateau—he knew that much from their navigation during the descent. Nowhere much less than a thousand meters above sea level, it was shut off from the rest of Asia by great natural barriers: mountain ranges to the west, the Gobi desert to the south, the Siberian forests to the north. From orbit, he remembered, it had been a vast blank, a faintly crumpled plain stitched here and there with the threads of rivers—barely there at all, like the preliminary sketch of a landscape. And now here he was, stuck in the middle of it all.