The ground was heavily trampled and rutted. When Bisesa dug her hand into the dust she found it was full of flotsam: bits of broken pottery, terra-cotta bangles, clay marbles, figurine fragments, bits of metal that looked like a trader’s weights, tablets inscribed in a script unknown to her. Every square centimeter of the ground seemed to have been heavily trodden, and she walked on layers of detritus, the detritus of centuries. This place must be old, a relic of a time deeper than the British, deeper even than Alexander’s foray, old enough to have been covered by the drifting dirt by her own day. It was a reminder that this bit of the world had been inhabited, indeed civilized, for a long, long time—and that the depths of time, dredged by the Discontinuity, contained many unknowns.
But the town had been emptied out, as if the population had just packed up and marched away across the stony plain. Eumenes wondered if the rivers had changed their courses because of the Discontinuity, and the people had gone in search of water. But the abandonment looked too far in the past for that.
No answers were forthcoming. The soldiers, Macedonian and British alike, were spooked by the empty, echoing place, this Marie Celeste of a town. They didn’t even stay the night before moving on.
After several days’ march, Alexander’s train arrived at Jamrud, to astonishment and consternation on all sides.
Still on crutches, Casey hobbled out to meet Bisesa and embraced her. “I wouldn’t have believed it. And Jeez, the stink.”
She grinned. “That’s what a fortnight eating curry under a leather tent does for you. Strange—Jamrud seems almost like home to me now, Rudyard Kipling and all.”
Casey grunted. “Well, something tells me it’s all the home you and I are going to have for a while, for I don’t see any sign of a way back yet. Come on up to the fort. Guess what Abdikadir managed to set up?
At the fort Abdikadir, Ruddy and Josh crowded around her, eager for her impressions. Josh was predictably glad to see her, his small face creased by smiles. She was pleased to get back to his bright, awkward company.
He asked, “What do you think of our new friend Alexander?”
Bisesa said heavily, “We have to live with him. His forces outnumber ours—I mean, Captain Grove’s—by maybe a hundred to one. I think for now that Alexander is the only show in town.”
“And,” said Ruddy silkily, “Bisesa undoubtedly thinks that Alexander is a fine fellow for his limpid eyes and his shining hair that spills over his shoulders—”
Josh blushed furiously.
Ruddy said, “What about you, Abdi? It’s not everybody who gets to confront such a deep family legend.”
Abdikadir smiled, and ran his hand over his blond hair. “Maybe I’ll get to shoot my great-to-the-nth grandfather and prove all those paradoxes wrong after all …” But he wanted to get down to business. He was keen to show Bisesa something—and not just his patent shower. “I took a trip back to the bit of the twenty-first century that brought us here, Bisesa. There was a cave I wanted to check out …”
He led her to a storeroom in the fort. He held up a gun, a big rifle. It had been wrapped in dirty rags, but its metal gleamed with oil. “There was an intelligence report that this stuff was here,” he said. “It was one of the objectives for our mission in the Bird that day.” There were flashbang grenades, a few old Soviet-era grenades. He bent and picked one up; it was like a soup can mounted on a stick. “Not much of a stash, but here it is.”
Josh touched the barrel of the gun cautiously. “I’ve never seen such a weapon.”
“It’s a Kalashnikov. An antique in my day—a weapon left over from the Soviet invasion, which is to say maybe fifty years before our time. Still works fine, I should imagine. The hill fighters always loved their Kalashnikovs. Nothing so reliable. You don’t even have to clean it, which many of those boys never bothered to do.”
“Twenty-first-century killing machines,” Ruddy said uneasily. “Remarkable.”
“The question is,” Bisesa said, “what to do with this stuff. Could we justify using twenty-first century guns against, say, an Iron Age army—no matter what the odds?”
Ruddy peered at the gun. “Bisesa, we have no idea what waits out there for us. We did not choose this situation, and whatever manner of creature or accident has stranded us here did not take much notice of our welfare. I would say nice moral questions are beside the point, and that pragmatism is the order of the day. Wouldn’t it be foolish not to preserve these muscles of steel and gunpowder?”
Josh sighed. “You’re as pompous as ever, Ruddy, my friend. But I have to agree with you.”