Time’s Eye

Alexander, though, slumped on his throne. It hadn’t been hard for Bisesa to figure out, with the help of the phone, just when in his career she had encountered him. So she knew he was thirty-two, and though his body was powerful, he looked exhausted. After years of campaigning, in which he led his men into the thick of it with a self-sacrificing bravery that must have sometimes bordered on folly, Alexander bore the results of several major injuries. He even seemed to have difficulty breathing, and when he stood it was only through extraordinary willpower.

It was strange to think that this still-young man had already come to rule more than two million square kilometers, and that history was a matter of his whim—and stranger yet to remember that in the timeline of Earth his campaign had already passed its high-water mark. His death would have been only months away, and the proud, loyal officers who followed him now would have begun the process of tearing apart Alexander’s domains. Bisesa wondered what new destiny awaited him now.

In the middle of the afternoon the march broke, and the traveling army quickly organized itself into a suburb of the sprawling tent city of the Indus delta.

Cooking, it seemed, was a slow and complicated process, and it took some time before the fires were lit, the cauldrons and pots bubbling. But in the meantime there was plenty of drinking, music, dancing, even impromptu theatrical performances. Traders set up their stalls, and a few prostitutes shimmered through the camp before disappearing into the soldiers’ tents. Most of the women here, though, were the wives or mistresses of the soldiers. As well as Indians, there were Macedonians, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians—even a few exotic souls whose origin Bisesa barely knew, like Scythians and Bactrians. Many of them had children, some as old as five or six, their complexions and hair colors betraying their complicated origins, and the camp was filled with the incongruous noise of wailing babies.

In the night Bisesa lay in her tent trying to sleep, listening to the crying of babies, the laughing of lovers, and the mournful, drunken wailing of homesick Macedonians. Bisesa had been trained for missions where you were flown in over a few hours, and that usually didn’t last more than a day away from base. But Alexander’s soldiers had walked out of Macedonia and across Eurasia, traveling as far as the North—West Frontier. She tried to imagine how it must have been to have followed Alexander for years, to have walked to places so remote and unexplored that his city-army might as well have been campaigning on the Moon.

***

After a few days of the march, there were complaints of peculiar sicknesses among the Macedonians and their followers. These infections hit hard, and there were some deaths, but the crude field medicine of Bisesa and the British was able to diagnose them and to some extent treat them. It was obvious to Bisesa that the British, and she, had brought bugs from the future to which the Macedonians had no immunity: the Macedonians had been subject to many novel plagues during their odyssey, but the far future was a place even they hadn’t breached. It was probably lucky for all concerned that these infections quickly died out. There was no sign of reverse infections, of the British by bugs carried by the Macedonians; Bisesa imagined an epidemiologist could work up an academic paper about that chronological asymmetry.

Day by day the march went on. Guided by Alexander’s own scouts, and the careful surveys he had had made of the Indus valley, they followed a different route back to Jamrud than that taken by Bisesa on the way down.

One day, no more than a couple of days out of Jamrud, they came to a city that none of them recognized. The march halted, and Alexander sent a party of scouts to investigate, accompanied by Bisesa and some of the British.

The city was well laid out. About the size of a large shopping mall, it was based on two earth mounds, each walled by massive ramparts of hard-baked mud brick. It was a well-planned place, with broad, straight avenues set out according to a grid system, and it looked to have been recently inhabited. But when the scouts passed cautiously through its gates, they found nobody within, no people at all.

It wasn’t old enough to be a ruin; it was too well preserved for that. Such features as wooden roofs were still intact. But the abandonment was not recent. The few remaining bits of furniture and pottery were broken, if any food had been left behind the birds and dogs had long taken it away, and everything was covered by rust-brown, drifting dust.

De Morgan pointed out a complicated system of sewers and wells. “We’ll have to tell Kipling,” he said with dry humor. “A big fan of sewers, is Ruddy. The mark of civilization, he says.”