Time’s Eye

The Macedonians’ captive was brought to Eumenes. He was clearly terrified, his eyes wide in a grimy face, and two burly troopers had to drag him. The man was dressed in fine robes, rich blue cloth inlaid with threads of gold. But the robes, ragged and dirty, hung off his frame, as if he hadn’t eaten for days. He might once have been clean-shaven and his scalp scoured bare, but now a stubble of black hair was growing back, and his skin was filthy. As he was brought close, Bisesa shrank from a stink of stale urine.

Prodded with a Macedonian stabbing sword, he gabbled freely, but in an antique tongue that none of the moderns recognized. The officer who had found him had had the presence of mind to find a Persian soldier who could understand this language, and so the Babylonian’s words were translated into archaic Greek for Eumenes, and then English for the moderns.

De Morgan, frowning, translated uncertainly. “He says he was a priest of a goddess—I can’t make out the name. He was abandoned when the others finally left the temple complex. He has been too frightened to leave the temple. He has been here for six days and nights—he has had no food—no water but that which he drank from the sacred font of the goddess—”

Eumenes snapped his fingers impatiently. “Give him food and water. And make him tell us what happened here.”

Bit by bit, between ravenous mouthfuls, the priest told his story. It had begun, of course, with the Discontinuity.

One night the priests and other temple staff had been woken by a dreadful wailing. Some of them ran outside. It was dark— but the stars were in the wrong place.The wailing came from a temple astronomer, who had been making observations of the “planets,” the wandering stars, as he had every night since he was a small boy. But suddenly his planet had disappeared, and the very constellations had swum around the sky. It had been the astronomer’s shock and despair that had begun to rouse the temple, and the rest of the city.

“Of course,” Abdikadir muttered. “The Babylonians kept careful records of the sky for millennia. They based their philosophy and religion on the great cycles in the sky. It’s a strange thought that a less advanced people mightn’t have been so terrified …”

But that first astronomical trauma, really perceptible only to a religious elite, was just the precursor. For at the end of that night the sun was late rising, by six hours or more. And by the time it did rise, a strange hot wind was washing over the city, and rain fell, hot salty rain of a type nobody had known before.

The people, many still dressed in their nightclothes, fled to the religious district. Some ran to the temples and demanded to be shown that their gods had not abandoned them on this, the strangest dawn of Babylon’s history. Others climbed the ziggurat, to see what other changes the night had brought. The King was away—it wasn’t clear to Bisesa whether the priest meant Nebuchadnezzar himself, or perhaps a successor—and there was nobody to impose order.

And then the first panicked reports came of the erasure of the western districts. Most of the city’s population had actually lived there; for the priests, ministers, court favorites and other dignitaries left on the eastern side, the shock was overwhelming.

The last vestiges of order quickly broke down. A mob had stormed the Temple of Marduk itself. As many as could force their way in had rushed to the innermost chamber, and when they saw what had become of Marduk himself, king of the ancient Babylonian gods—

The priest could not complete his sentence.

After that final shock, a rumor had swept through the city that the eastern half would be rubbed into dust as had the western. People flung open the gates and ran, screaming, out of the city and into the land beyond. Even government ministers, army commanders and the priests had gone, leaving only this poor wretch, who had huddled in his defiled temple.

Around mouthfuls of food the priest described the nights since, as he had heard looting, burning, drunken laughter, even screaming. But whenever he had dared to poke his head out of doors in the daylight he had seen nobody. It was clear that most of the population had vanished into the parched land beyond the cultivated fragment, there to die of thirst or starvation.

Eumenes ordered his men to clean up the priest and present him to the King. Then he said, “This priest says the old name of the city is ‘the gate of the Gods.’ How appropriate, for now that gate has opened … Come.” Eumenes strode forward.

The others hurried after him. Ruddy gasped, “Where are we going now?”

Bisesa said, “Why, to the Temple of Marduk, of course.”

***