They were taken into a much grander chamber. The walls were hung with rich embroidery and tapestry, the floors covered with layers of rugs and carpets so thick they were soft to walk on. The place was crowded. Courtiers milled and beefy-looking soldiers stood around the walls, laden with weapons, glaring at the cosmonauts and everybody elseeven each other. In one corner of the yurt an orchestra played softly, a harmony of lutes. All the instrumentalists were beautiful, all very young girls.
And yet for all its opulence this was still just a yurt, Kolya thought, and the prevailing stink, of greasy flesh and stale milk, was just as bad as in Scacatais humble home. Barbarians, he muttered. They didnt know what towns and farms were for save as sources of booty. They plundered a world, but they still live like goatherds, their tents piled with treasures. And in our time their descendants will be the last nomads of allstill trapped by their barbaric roots
Shut up , Sable hissed.
Following Yeh-l, they walked slowly to the center of the yurt. Around the throne that was the focus of this wide space stood a number of smooth-faced young men. They looked similar: perhaps the Emperors sons, Kolya thought. There were many women here, sitting before the throne. All were handsome, though some looked as old as sixty; the younger ones were quite stunningly beautiful. Wives, or concubines?
Yeh-l stepped aside, and they stood before the Emperor.
He looked about sixty. Sitting on his ornately carved throne, he was not tall. But he was slim, upright; he looked very fit. His face was full, his features smallvery Asiaticwith only a trace of grey in his hair and neatly groomed beard. He held a swatch of parachute cloth in his hand, and he regarded them steadily. Then he turned aside and muttered something to one of his advisors.
He has eyes like a cats, said Sable.
Sableyou know who this is, dont you?
Of course. To his astonishment she grinned, more excited than fearful.
Genghis Khan watched them, his black eyes unreadable.
21. Return to Jamrud
At dawn Bisesa was woken by the peals of trumpets. When she emerged from the tent, stretching, the world was suffused with blue-gray. All across the river delta the trumpet notes rose up with the smoke of the nights fires.
She really was in the camp of Alexander the Great; this was no dreamor nightmare. But mornings were the times she missed Myra the most, and she ached for her daughter, even in this astonishing place.
While the King and his advisors decided what to do, Bisesa, de Morgan and the others had spent the night at the Indus delta camp. The moderns were kept under guard, but they were given a tent of their own to sleep in. The tent itself was made of leather. Battered, scuffed, it stank, of horses, food, smoke, and the sweat of soldiers. But it was an officers tent, and only Alexander and his generals had more luxurious accommodation. Besides, they were soldiers, and used to roughing it, all save Cecil de Morgan, and he had learned better than to complain.
De Morgan had been quiet all night, in fact, but his eyes were alive. Bisesa suspected he was calculating how much leverage he could apply in his new role as an irreplaceable interpreter. But he grumbled about the Macedonians barbaric Greek accent. They turn ch into g and th into d. When they say Philip it sounds like Bilip
As the day gathered, Eumenes, the Royal Secretary, sent a chamberlain to Bisesas tent to communicate the Kings decision. The bulk of the army would stay here for now, but a detachment of troopsa mere thousand!would make their way up the Indus valley to Jamrud. Most of them would be Shield Bearers, the shock troops who were used on such ventures as night raids and forced marchesand who were entrusted with Alexanders own safety. The King himself was to make the journey, along with Eumenes and his favorite and lover, Hephaistion. Alexander was evidently intrigued by the prospect of seeing these soldiers from the future in their bastion.
Alexanders army, tempered by years of campaigning, was remarkably well disciplined, and it took only a couple of hours for the preparations to be completed, and the orders for the march to be sounded.
Infantrymen formed up with weapons and light packs on their backs. Each unit, called a dekas ,although it typically contained sixteen men, had a servant and a pack animal to carry its gear. The animals were mostly mules, but there were a few foul-smelling camels. A couple hundred of Alexanders Macedonian cavalry would ride along with the infantry. Their horses were odd-looking little beasts; Bisesas phone said they were probably of European or central Asian stock, and they looked clumsy to eyes used to Arabian breeds. The horses had only soft leather shoes and would surely have quickly been ruined by being over-ridden on rocky or broken ground. And they had no stirrups; these short, powerful-looking men gripped their horses flanks hard with their legs and controlled their mounts with vicious-looking bits.
Bisesa and the British would travel with the Macedonian officers, who walked like their troopsas did even the Kings companions and the generals. Only the King was forced by his injuries to ride, on a cart drawn by a team of horses. His personal physician, a Greek called Philip, rode with him.
But after they had set off Bisesa realized that the thousand troops, with their military gear, their servants, pack animals and officers, were only the core of the column. Trailing after them was a rabble of women and children, traders with laden carts, and even a couple of shepherds driving a flock of scrawny-looking sheep. After a couple of hours marching, this ragged, uncoordinated train stretched back half a kilometer.
Hauling this army and its gear across the countryside involved an enormous amount of labor, unquestioned by everybody concerned. Still, once they had entered the rhythm of the march, the troopers, some of whom had already marched thousands of kilometers with Alexander, simply endured, setting one hardened foot before the other, as foot-slogging soldiers had always done. Marching was nothing new to Bisesa and the British troops either, and even de Morgan endured it in silence with a fortitude and determination Bisesa grudgingly admired. Sometimes the Macedonians sang odd, wistful songs, in strange keys that sounded out of tune to Bisesas modern ears. These people of the deep past still seemed so odd to her: short, squat, vivid, as if they belonged to a different species altogether.
When she got the chance, Bisesa studied the King.
Seated on a gloriously heavy-looking golden throne, being hauled across India by animal-power, Alexander was dressed in a girdle and striped tunic, with a golden diadem around the purple Macedonian hat on his head, and held a golden scepter. There wasnt much of the Greek to be seen about Alexander. Perhaps his adoption of Persian ways was more than just diplomatic; perhaps he had been seduced by the grandeur and wealth of that empire.
As he traveled his tame prophet Aristander sat at his side, a bearded old man in a grimy white tunic and with sharp, calculating eyes. Bisesa speculated that this hand-waver might be concerned about the impact of people from the future on his position as the Kings official seer. Meanwhile the Persian eunuch called Bagoas leaned nonchalantly against the back of the throne. He was a pretty, heavily made-up young man in a kind of diaphanous toga, who from time to time stroked the back of the Kings head. Bisesa was amused by the weary glares Hephaistion shot at this creature.
Alexander, though, slumped on his throne. It hadnt been hard for Bisesa to figure out, with the help of the phone, just when in his career she had encountered him. So she knew he was thirty-two, and though his body was powerful, he looked exhausted. After years of campaigning, in which he led his men into the thick of it with a self-sacrificing bravery that must have sometimes bordered on folly, Alexander bore the results of several major injuries. He even seemed to have difficulty breathing, and when he stood it was only through extraordinary willpower.