Time’s Eye

To everyone’s relief they had not gone many kilometers before they reached a junction in time where the surface of the ground dropped a few centimeters, and a road was revealed. It was crudely laid to Bisesa’s eyes, topped with coarsely cut stone blocks, but it was undoubtedly a road. In fact, Eumenes told them, it was a section of the Royal Road that had once united Persia—and which Alexander had found extraordinarily useful in his conquest of the empire.

Even on the road, the march took several more days. The land around the road was dust dry, colonized only by scrub vegetation. But it was marked here and there by anonymous mounds of rubble and scarred by great straight-line ditches—evidently artificial, but long abandoned, their purpose forgotten.

Each night, when the march broke to make camp, Casey would set up his radio gear and listen for any signals coming from the Soyuz crew, lost somewhere in the unknowable expanses of Asia. It was a time they’d agreed upon with the crew, but he’d heard nothing since the day of their attempted reentry. Casey also monitored the radio signal that continued to emanate from the unknown beacon that was presumed to lie in Babylon. Its content remained the same—just a “chirp,” a sweep up through the frequencies like an engineering test signal. But it continued to repeat, over and over. Casey kept a log of his observations, with position, time, signal strength and bearings, and his rough triangulations continued to predict a source inside Babylon.

And then there were the Eyes—or rather, the lack of them. As they walked west, the Eyes were fewer, more spaced out, until at last Bisesa realized she had marched through a whole day without seeing a single one. Nobody had any idea what to make of this.

At last they approached another transition. The advance party came to a line of green that stretched, dead straight, from the northern horizon to the south. The party hesitated on the desiccated side of the border.

To the west, beyond the line, the land was split up into polygonal fields, and striped by glistening canals. Here and there crude-looking wattle-and-daub shacks sat amid the fields, squat and ugly, like lumps of shaped mud. The shacks were clearly occupied, for Bisesa could see traces of smoke rising from some of them. A few goats and bullocks, tethered to posts, patiently chewed on grass or stubble. But there were no people.

Abdikadir stood with Bisesa. “Babylon’s famous irrigation canals.”

“I suppose they must be.” Some of the canals were extensions of the dry, worn-out ditches she had noticed before: the same bits of ancient engineering, severed by centuries. But this crude coupling of the eras obviously caused practical problems; the sections from later eras, ditches silted up by erosion, blocked off the canals from their riverside sources, and some of the farmers’ channels were drying up.

Abdikadir said, “Let’s show the way.” He took a deliberate step forward and crossed the invisible, intangible line between the two world slices.

The party crossed the disjunction and moved on.

The richness of the land was obvious. Most of the fields seemed to be stocked with wheat, of a tall, fat-headed variety farmer’s daughter Bisesa didn’t recognize. But there was also millet and barley, and, here and there, rich stands of date palms. Once, Cecil de Morgan said, the Babylonians would sing songs about these palms, listing their three hundred and sixty uses, one for every day of their year.

Whether the farmers were hiding or not, this obviously wasn’t an empty landscape—and it was on the produce of these fields that Alexander’s army was going to depend. There would have to be some gentle diplomacy here, Bisesa realized. The King had the manpower to take whatever he wanted, but the natives knew the land, and this vast and hungry army couldn’t afford a single failed crop. Perhaps the first priority ought to be to get Alexander’s soldiers and engineers to rebuild the irrigation system …

Abdikadir said, “You know, it’s impossible to believe this is Iraq—that we’re only a hundred kilometers or so southwest of Baghdad. The agricultural wealth of this place fueled empires for millennia.”

“But where is everybody?”

Abdi said, “Can you blame these farmers for hiding? Their rich farmland is sliced in half and replaced by semidesert. Their canals fail. A stinging rain withers their crops. And then, what looms over the horizon? Only the greatest army the ancient world ever saw … Ah,” he said. “There.” He stopped and pointed.

On the western horizon she saw buildings, a complicated wall, a thing like a stepped pyramid, all made gray and misty by distance.

“Babylon,” Abdikadir whispered.

Josh said, “And that is the Tower of Babel.”

“Holy crap,” said Casey.

***

The army and its baggage train caught up with its head, and spread out into a camp over the mudflats near the banks of the Euphrates.