Читаем Time’s Eye полностью

Bisesa and the others continued on down the processional way, accompanied by Eumenes and a handful of his advisors and guards. The way led them through a series of walled plazas, and brought them at last to the pyramid-like structure that Bisesa had glimpsed from outside the city. It was actually a ziggurat, a stepped tower of seven terraces rising from a base that must have been a hundred meters on a side. To Bisesa’s eyes, conditioned by images of Egyptian pyramids, it looked like something she might have expected to find looming above a lost Mayan city. South of the ziggurat was a temple that the phone said must be the Esagila— the Temple of Marduk, the national god of Babylonia.

The phone said, “The Babylonians called this ziggurat the Etemenanki—which meant ‘the house that is the foundation of Heaven and Earth.’ It was Nebuchadnezzar who brought the Jews here as slave labor; by bad-mouthing Babylon in the Bible the Jews took a long revenge …”

Josh grabbed Bisesa’s hand. “Come on. I want to climb that blooming heap.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the Tower of Babel! Look, there’s a staircase on the south side.” He was right; it must have been ten paces wide. “Race you!” And, dragging her hand, he was off.

She was intrinsically fitter than he was; she had trained as a soldier, and had come from a century far better provided for with food and health care. But he was younger and had been hardened by the relentless marching. It was a fair race, and they kept holding hands until, after a hundred steps or so, they took a break and collapsed on the steps.

From up here the Euphrates was a broad silver ribbon, bright even in the ashen light, that cut through the heart of the city. She couldn’t make out clearly the western side of the city, but on this eastern side grand buildings clustered closely—temples, palaces, presumably government departments. The city plan was very orderly. The main roads were all straight, all met at right angles, and all began and ended in one of the many gates in the walls. The palaces were riots of color, every surface covered with polychrome tiles on which dragons and other fantastic creatures gamboled.

She asked, “Where are we in time?”

Her phone said, “If this is the age of Nebuchadnezzar, then perhaps the sixth centuryB.C. The Persians took Babylonia two centuries before Alexander’s time, and they bled the area dry. When Alexander arrived it was still a vibrant city, but its best days were already far in the past. We, however, are seeing it at something close to its best.”

Josh studied her. “You look wistful, Bisesa.”

“I was just thinking.”

“About Myra—”

“I’d love her to be here—to be able to show her this.”

“Maybe someday you’ll be able to tell her about it.”

“Yeah, right.”

Ruddy, Abdikadir, Eumenes and de Morgan had followed more slowly up the ziggurat. Ruddy was wheezing, but he made it, and as he sat down Josh clapped him on the back. Eumenes stayed standing, apparently not winded at all, and gazed out at Babylon.

Abdikadir borrowed Bisesa’s night goggles and looked around. “Take a look at the western side of the river …”

The line of the walls crossed the river, to complete the city’s bisected rectangle. But on the far side of the river, though Bisesa thought she could make out the lines of the streets, there was no color but the orange-brown of mudstone, and the walls were reduced to ridges of broken rubble, the gates and watchtowers just mounds of core.

Josh said, “It looks as if half the city has been melted.”

“Or nuked,” said Abdikadir grimly.

Eumenes spoke. “It was not like this,” de Morgan translated. “Not like this …” While the eastern half of the city had been ceremonial and administrative, the western half had been residential, crowded with houses, tenement blocks, plazas and markets. Eumenes had seen it that way only a few years before, a vibrant, crowded human city. Now it was all reduced to nothing.

“Another interface,” Abdikadir said grimly. “The heart of a young Babylon, transplanted into the corpse of the old.”

Eumenes said, “I believed I was coming to terms with the strangeness of the faults in time which afflict us. But to see this— the face of a city rubbed away into sand, the weight of a thousand years descended in a heartbeat—”

“Yes,” Ruddy said. “The terrible cruelty of time.”

“More than cruelty,” Eumenes said. “Arrogance.” Bisesa was insulated from the Secretary’s emotions by translation and two millennia of different body language. But again she thought she detected a growing, cold anger in him.

A voice floated up from the ground, a Macedonian officer calling for Eumenes. A search party had found somebody, a Babylonian, hiding in the Temple of Marduk.

30. The Gate of the Gods

Перейти на страницу:

Похожие книги