Time’s Eye

“That we don’t know. About them, and what they’ve done to us, our history. And besides, I think there is power here. There must be, to have created this Eye and its siblings across the planet, to have melted twenty tonnes of gold to a puddle … I don’t want Sable, or Genghis Khan come to that, to get her hands on it. If it all goes pear-shaped when the Mongols come I’ll be standing in that doorway with my pistol.”

“Oh, Bisesa, you are so strong! I wish I was like you.”

“No, you don’t.” He was holding her hand, very tightly, but she didn’t try to pull away. “Here.” She fumbled under the blanket and produced a metallic flask. “Have some tea.”

He opened the flask and sipped. “It’s good. The milk is a little, umm—not authentic.”

“From my survival pack. Condensed and irradiated. In the American army they give you suicide pills; in the British, tea. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion. What more special than this?”

He sipped the tea. He seemed turned in on himself.

Bisesa wondered if the shock of the Discontinuity was at last working its way through Josh. It had hit them all, she suspected, in different ways. She asked, “Are you okay?”

“Just thinking of home.”

She nodded. “None of us talks much about home, do we?”

“Perhaps it’s too painful.”

“Tell me anyhow, Josh. Tell me about your family.”

“As a journalist I’m following my father. He covered the War between the States.” Which was, Bisesa reflected, only twenty years in the past for Josh. “He took a bullet in the hip. Eventually got infected—took him a couple of years to die. I was only seven,” Josh whispered. “I asked him why he had become a journalist, rather than go fight. He said that somebody has to watch, to tell others. Otherwise it’s as if it never really happened at all. Well, I believed him, and followed in his footsteps. Sometimes I resented the fact that the pattern of my life was somewhat fixed before I was born. But I suppose that’s not uncommon.”

“Ask Alexander.”

“Yeah … My mother is still alive. Or was. I wish I could tell her I’m safe.”

“Maybe she knows, somehow.”

“Bis, I know who you would be with, if—”

“My little girl,” Bisesa said.

“You never told me about her father.”

She shrugged. “A good-looking bum from my regiment—think of Casey without the charm and sense of personal hygiene—we had a fling, and I got careless. Drunkenness, against which there is no prophylactic. When Myra was born, Mike was—confused. He wasn’t a bad guy, but I didn’t care by then. I wanted her, not him .And then he got himself killed anyhow.” She felt her eyes prickle; she pressed the heel of her palm into their sockets. “I was away from home for months at a time. I knew I wasn’t spending enough time with Myra. I always promised myself I’d do better, but could never get my life together. Now I’m stuck here, and I have to deal with Genghis fucking Khan, when all I want is to go home.”

Josh cupped her face with his hand. “None of us wants this,” he said. “But at least we have each other. And if I die tomorrow—Bis, do you believe that we will come back? That if there is some new chopping-up of time, we will live again?”

“No. Oh, there may be another Bisesa Dutt. But it won’t be me.”

“Then this moment is all we have,” he whispered.

After that it seemed inevitable. Their lips met, their teeth touched, and she pulled him under her blanket, ripping at his clothes. He was gentle—and fumbling, a near-virgin—but he came to her with a desperate, needy passion, which found an echo in herself.

She immersed herself in the ancient liquid warmth of the moment.

But when it was over she thought of Myra, and probed at her guilt, like a broken tooth. She found only emptiness inside, like a space where Myra had once been, and was now vanished for good.

And she was always aware of the Eye, hovering above them both balefully, and the reflections of herself and Josh like insects pinned to its glistening hide.

***

At the end of the day Alexander, having completed his sacrifices in advance of the battle, gave orders that his army should be assembled. The tens of thousands of them drew up in their squads before the walls of Babylon, their tunics bright and shields polished, their horses whinnying and bucking. The few hundred British, too, were drawn up by Grove in parade order, their khaki and red serge proud, their arms presented.

Alexander mounted his horse and rode before his army, haranguing them with a strong, clear voice that echoed from Babylon’s walls. Bisesa would never have guessed at the wounds he carried. She couldn’t follow his words, but there was no mistaking the response: the rattle of tens of thousands of swords against shields, and the Macedonians’ ferocious battle cry: “Alalalalai!Al-e-han-dreh! Al-e-han-dreh! …”