Time’s Eye

But on land the going was difficult. The peculiar volcanic rain continued with barely a break, and the sky was a lid of ash-gray cloud. The ground turned to mud, bogging down the carts, animals and humans alike, and the heat remained intense, the humidity extraordinary. The baggage train was soon strung out over kilometers, a chain of suffering, and in its wake it left behind the corpses of broken animals, irreparable bits of equipment—and, after only a few days, people.

Casey couldn’t bear the sight of Indian women who had to walk behind the carts or the camels with great heaps of goods piled up on their heads. As Ruddy remarked, “Have you noticed how these Iron Age chaps lack so much—not just the obvious like gaslights and typewriters and trousers—but blindingly simple things like carthorse collars? I suppose it’s just that nobody’s thought of it yet, and once it’s invented it stays invented …”

That observation struck Casey. After a few days he sketched a crude wheelbarrow, and went to Alexander’s advisors with it. Hephaistion would not consider his proposal, and even Eumenes was skeptical, until Casey put together a hasty, toy-sized prototype to demonstrate the idea.

After that, at the next overnight stop, Eumenes ordered the construction of as many wheelbarrows as could be managed. There was little fresh wood to be had, but the timber from one foundered barge was scavenged and reused. In that first night, under Casey’s direction, the carpenters put together more than fifty serviceable barrows, and the next night, having learned from the mistakes of the first batch, nearly a hundred. But then, this was an army that had managed to build a whole fleet for itself on the banks of the Indus; compared to that, knocking together a few wheelbarrows wasn’t such a trick.

For the first couple of days after that the train happened to pass over hard, stony ground, and the barrows worked well. It was quite a sight to see the women of Alexander’s baggage train happily pushing along barrows that might have come from a garden center in Middle England, laden with goods, and with children balancing precariously on top. But after that the mud returned, and the barrows bogged down. The Macedonians soon abandoned them, amid much derision of the moderns’ newfangled technology.

Every three days or so the ships had to put into shore for provisioning. The shore-based troops were expected to live off the land, providing for themselves and for the crews and passengers of the ships. That became increasingly difficult away from the Indus delta, as the land grew more barren.

So the sailors would vary their rations with the contents of tidal pools: razor clams, oysters and sometimes mussels. Once, as Bisesa took part in one of these enjoyable scavenging expeditions, a whale broke the surface of the water, its blowhole plume erupting perilously close to some of the anchored ships. At first the Macedonians were terrified, though the Indians laughed. A troop of foot soldiers ran into the sea, yelling and hammering at the water with their shields and spears and the flats of their swords. The next time the whale surfaced it was a hundred meters further away from shore, and it was not seen again.

Where the army passed, its scouts surveyed the land and made maps, as Alexander’s army had always done. Mapmaking had also been a crucial tool for the British in establishing and holding their own empire, and now the Greek and Macedonian scouts were joined by British cartographers armed with theodolites. Everywhere they went they drew new maps and compared them with the old, from before the Discontinuity.

They encountered few people, however.

Once the army scouts found a crowd of around a hundred, men, women and children, they said, dressed in strange, bright clothes that were nevertheless falling to rags. They were dying of thirst, and they spoke in a tongue none of the Macedonians could recognize. None of the British or Bisesa’s party got a firsthand glimpse of this crowd. Abdikadir speculated that they could have come from a hotel from the twentieth or even twenty-first centuries. Cut off when their home vanished into the corridors of time, left to wander, such refugees were like negative-image ruins, Bisesa thought. In a normally flowing history the people would vanish and leave their city slowly to decay into the sand; here it was the other way round … Alexander’s troops, ordered to protect the baggage train, had killed a couple of refugees as an example, and driven the rest off.

If people were rare, the Eyes were a continual presence. As they worked along the coast, they found Eyes hovering like lamps along the shoreline, one every few kilometers, and in a loose array covering the interior.