Time’s Eye

Yeh-lü was fascinated by the emerging image. He was intrigued how little remained of Eurasia for the Mongols to conquer; from the Mongols’ continent-spanning point of view, it seemed a short step from Russia through the countries of western Europe to the Atlantic coast. But Yeh-lü worried about how he would present the map to Genghis Khan, with so many territories in the New World, the Far East and Australasia, Southern Africa and Antarctica, of which Genghis Khan had had no knowledge.

The scribes’ work was truly beautiful, Kolya thought, with the ice caps picked out in delicate white threads, spun gold following principal rivers, precious stones marking major cities, and the whole covered with careful Mongol lettering—although Kolya learned to his surprise that the Mongols had had no written script at all before Genghis Khan, who had adopted the script of his neighbors the Uighurs as his standard.

The laboring clerks clearly took pride in their work, and Yeh-lü treated them well, congratulating them on their prowess. But the clerks were slaves, Kolya learned, captured during the Mongols’ raids on the Chinese nations. Kolya had never met slaves before, and he couldn’t help but be fascinated by them. Their posture was always submissive, their eyes dropped, and the women especially cringed from any contact with the Mongols. Perhaps they were favored in the presence of Yeh-lü, but they were defeated, owned.

Kolya missed his home: his wife, his children, lost in the time streams. But each of these wretched slaves had been ripped from her home, her life trashed, and not by a godlike manipulation of time and space but simply through the cruelty of other human beings. The slaves’ plight didn’t make his own loss any easier to bear, but it warned him against self-pity.

If he found the presence of the slave clerks difficult to accept, Kolya took comfort in the civilized intelligence of Yeh-lü. After a time it seemed to him that he was finding it easier to trust Yeh-lü, a man from the thirteenth century, than Sable, a woman of his own time.

***

Sable grew impatient with the careful mapping sessions. And she was not impressed with the plans Yeh-lü was tentatively assembling to present to Genghis Khan.

The first priority ought to be consolidation, in Yeh-lü’s view. The Mongols had come to rely on the import of grain, cloth and many other essentials, and so trade had become important to them. As there were few working links left with China, the first and richest part of Genghis Khan’s Asiatic empire ought to be explored first. At the same time, Kolya urged, a party should be sent to the valley of the Indus, to seek out Casey and the other refugees from his own time.

But this wasn’t bold enough for Sable. After a week she walked into Yeh-lü’s chamber and stabbed a knife into the world map. The slave clerks fluttered away like frightened birds. Yeh-lü regarded her with cold interest.

Kolya said, “Sable, we are still strangers here—”

“Babylon,” she said. She pointed to her knife, which quivered at the heart of Iraq. “That’s where the Khan should be directing his energies. Grain stores, trade routes, the cowing of Chinese peasants—all these are dirt compared to that. Babylon is where the true power behind this new world lies—as you know as well as I do, Kolya—a manifestation of a power that has torn up space and time themselves. If the Khan gets hold of that, then his divine mission to rule the planet might come about after all, even in his lifetime.”

In English, incomprehensible to any of their interpreters, Kolya said, “Power like that, in the hands of Genghis Khan? Sable—you’re crazy.”

She looked at him, eyes blazing. “We’re eight centuries ahead, remember. We can harness these Mongols.” She waved her hand over the world map, as if laying claim to it. “It would take generations for anything like a modern civilization to be built on the fragments of history we have inherited. With the Mongols behind us we could shortcut that to less than a lifetime. Kolya, we can do this. In fact it’s more than an opportunity. It’s a duty. ”

Before this fierce woman, Kolya felt weak. “But this is a raging horse you’re trying to ride …”

Yeh-lü leaned forward. Through Basil he said, “You will speak in the common tongues.”

They both apologized, and Kolya repeated a sanitized version of the cosmonauts’ discussion.

Delicately Yeh-lü plucked the knife out of the gleaming map, and picked at the damaged threads. To Sable he said, “Your case is not made. Perhaps we could close our hand on the beating heart of the new world. But we cannot maintain that grip if we starve.”

She shook her head. “I will take this to the Khan. He would not be so timid as to pass by an opportunity like this.”

Yeh-lü’s face closed up, the nearest Kolya ever saw to him growing angry. “Emissary of Heaven, you do not yet have the ear of Genghis Khan.”

“Just wait,” Sable said in English, and she grinned defiantly, apparently without fear.

23. Conference