Time’s Eye

But there was no time, no time. The leg wound was just the first of a flood of stretcher-bound invalids that suddenly flowed in through the Ishtar Gate. Philip, Alexander’s physician, ran to meet the flow and, as Bisesa had taught him, began to operate a brisk triage, separating those who could be helped from those who could not, and sending the invalids to where they could best be treated.

She had Macedonian porters take the leg wound away to a casualty tent, and grabbed the next stretcher in line. It turned out to be a fallen Mongol warrior. He had taken a sword blow to his upper thigh, and blood pumped from an artery. She tried to press the edges of the wound together, but it was surely too late, and already the flow was stilling of its own accord.

Ruddy said, “This man shouldn’t have been let in here in the first place.”

Her hands soaked in blood, panting hard, Bisesa stepped back. “There’s nothing we can do for him anyhow. Get him out of here. Next! …”

It continued through the early afternoon, a flow of maimed and writhing bodies, and they all worked on until they felt they could work no more, and continued anyhow.

***

Abdikadir was with the forces outside the walls of Babylon. He had already come close to the fighting, when the Macedonian line had nearly buckled. But he and the British—and Casey, somewhere else in the line—had been kept in the reserves, their firearms concealed under Macedonian cloaks. Their moment would come, Alexander had promised them, but not yet, not yet.

Alexander and his modern advisers had the perspective of a different history to aid them. They knew the Mongols’ classic tactics. The first Mongol assault had been only a feint, intended to draw the Macedonians into a pursuit. They would have been prepared to withdraw for days if necessary, exhausting and dividing Alexander’s forces, until at last they were ready to snap closed their trap. The moderns had told Alexander how the Mongols had once broken an army of Christian knights in Poland by luring them in this way—and in fact Alexander himself had faced Scythian horsemen who used similar tactics. He would have none of it.

Besides, Alexander was playing his own game of concealment, with half his infantry and all his cavalry still hidden inside the walls of Babylon, and with the weapons of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries still unused. It might work. Though Mongol scouts had been spotted in the countryside around Babylon, it was scarcely possible for spies of Genghis Khan to penetrate the city undercover.

Despite the defenders’ tense anticipation, the Mongols did not come again that day.

As the evening gathered, a great line of campfires could be seen on the horizon, stretching from north to south, as if encircling the world. Abdikadir was aware of muttering among the men at the apparent awesome size of the Mongol force. They might have been more scared, he mused, if they had been told that among the long lines of the Mongols’ yurts had been spotted the unmistakable dome shape of a spacecraft.

But Alexander himself came walking through the camp, with Hephaistion and Eumenes at his side. The King was limping slightly, but his helmet and breastplate of iron gleamed like silver. Everywhere he walked he joked with his men. The Mongols were faking, he claimed. They had probably lit two or three fires for every man they had out in the field—why, they had been known to go into battle with stuffed dummies riding their spare horses, to addle the wits of their enemies. But Macedonians were too sharp to fall for such ruses! And meanwhile Alexander himself had allowed so few fires to be lit that the Mongols would seriously underestimate the strength of those opposing them, as well as never guessing at the Macedonians’ indomitable valor and will!

Even Abdikadir felt his spirit rise as the King passed. Alexander was a remarkable man, he thought—if, like Genghis Khan, a terrible one.

With his Kalashnikov at his side, curled up under his poncho and a coarse British blanket, Abdikadir tried to sleep.

He felt oddly at peace. This confrontation with the Mongols seemed to have focused his own determination. It was one thing to know of the Mongols in the abstract, as a page of long-dust history, and another to see their destructive ferocity in the flesh.

The Mongols had done huge damage to Islam. They had come to the rich Islamic state of Khwa—a very ancient nation, stable and centralized since the mid-seventh centuryB.C. In fact Alexander the Great, on his cross-Eurasian jaunt, had come into contact with it. The Mongols sacked its beautiful cities of Afghanistan and northern Persia, from Herat to Kandahar and Samarkand. Like Babylonia Khwa had been built on an elaborate underground irrigation system that had survived since antiquity. The Mongols destroyed this too, and with it Khwa; some Arab historians claimed the region’s economy had never recovered. And so on. The soul of Islam had been forever darkened by these events.