It was strange to think that this still-young man had already come to rule more than two million square kilometers, and that history was a matter of his whimand stranger yet to remember that in the timeline of Earth his campaign had already passed its high-water mark. His death would have been only months away, and the proud, loyal officers who followed him now would have begun the process of tearing apart Alexanders domains. Bisesa wondered what new destiny awaited him now.
In the middle of the afternoon the march broke, and the traveling army quickly organized itself into a suburb of the sprawling tent city of the Indus delta.
Cooking, it seemed, was a slow and complicated process, and it took some time before the fires were lit, the cauldrons and pots bubbling. But in the meantime there was plenty of drinking, music, dancing, even impromptu theatrical performances. Traders set up their stalls, and a few prostitutes shimmered through the camp before disappearing into the soldiers tents. Most of the women here, though, were the wives or mistresses of the soldiers. As well as Indians, there were Macedonians, Greeks, Persians, Egyptianseven a few exotic souls whose origin Bisesa barely knew, like Scythians and Bactrians. Many of them had children, some as old as five or six, their complexions and hair colors betraying their complicated origins, and the camp was filled with the incongruous noise of wailing babies.
In the night Bisesa lay in her tent trying to sleep, listening to the crying of babies, the laughing of lovers, and the mournful, drunken wailing of homesick Macedonians. Bisesa had been trained for missions where you were flown in over a few hours, and that usually didnt last more than a day away from base. But Alexanders soldiers had walked out of Macedonia and across Eurasia, traveling as far as the NorthWest Frontier. She tried to imagine how it must have been to have followed Alexander for years, to have walked to places so remote and unexplored that his city-army might as well have been campaigning on the Moon.
After a few days of the march, there were complaints of peculiar sicknesses among the Macedonians and their followers. These infections hit hard, and there were some deaths, but the crude field medicine of Bisesa and the British was able to diagnose them and to some extent treat them. It was obvious to Bisesa that the British, and she, had brought bugs from the future to which the Macedonians had no immunity: the Macedonians had been subject to many novel plagues during their odyssey, but the far future was a place even they hadnt breached. It was probably lucky for all concerned that these infections quickly died out. There was no sign of reverse infections, of the British by bugs carried by the Macedonians; Bisesa imagined an epidemiologist could work up an academic paper about that chronological asymmetry.
Day by day the march went on. Guided by Alexanders own scouts, and the careful surveys he had had made of the Indus valley, they followed a different route back to Jamrud than that taken by Bisesa on the way down.
One day, no more than a couple of days out of Jamrud, they came to a city that none of them recognized. The march halted, and Alexander sent a party of scouts to investigate, accompanied by Bisesa and some of the British.
The city was well laid out. About the size of a large shopping mall, it was based on two earth mounds, each walled by massive ramparts of hard-baked mud brick. It was a well-planned place, with broad, straight avenues set out according to a grid system, and it looked to have been recently inhabited. But when the scouts passed cautiously through its gates, they found nobody within, no people at all.
It wasnt old enough to be a ruin; it was too well preserved for that. Such features as wooden roofs were still intact. But the abandonment was not recent. The few remaining bits of furniture and pottery were broken, if any food had been left behind the birds and dogs had long taken it away, and everything was covered by rust-brown, drifting dust.
De Morgan pointed out a complicated system of sewers and wells. Well have to tell Kipling, he said with dry humor. A big fan of sewers, is Ruddy. The mark of civilization, he says.
The ground was heavily trampled and rutted. When Bisesa dug her hand into the dust she found it was full of flotsam: bits of broken pottery, terra-cotta bangles, clay marbles, figurine fragments, bits of metal that looked like a traders weights, tablets inscribed in a script unknown to her. Every square centimeter of the ground seemed to have been heavily trodden, and she walked on layers of detritus, the detritus of centuries. This place must be old, a relic of a time deeper than the British, deeper even than Alexanders foray, old enough to have been covered by the drifting dirt by her own day. It was a reminder that this bit of the world had been inhabited, indeed civilized, for a long, long timeand that the depths of time, dredged by the Discontinuity, contained many unknowns.
But the town had been emptied out, as if the population had just packed up and marched away across the stony plain. Eumenes wondered if the rivers had changed their courses because of the Discontinuity, and the people had gone in search of water. But the abandonment looked too far in the past for that.
No answers were forthcoming. The soldiers, Macedonian and British alike, were spooked by the empty, echoing place, this Marie Celeste of a town. They didnt even stay the night before moving on.
After several days march, Alexanders train arrived at Jamrud, to astonishment and consternation on all sides.
Still on crutches, Casey hobbled out to meet Bisesa and embraced her. I wouldnt have believed it. And Jeez, the stink.
She grinned. Thats what a fortnight eating curry under a leather tent does for you. StrangeJamrud seems almost like home to me now, Rudyard Kipling and all.
Casey grunted. Well, something tells me its all the home you and I are going to have for a while, for I dont see any sign of a way back yet. Come on up to the fort. Guess what Abdikadir managed to set up? A shower. Goes to show heathens have their usesthe smart ones anyhow
At the fort Abdikadir, Ruddy and Josh crowded around her, eager for her impressions. Josh was predictably glad to see her, his small face creased by smiles. She was pleased to get back to his bright, awkward company.
He asked, What do you think of our new friend Alexander?
Bisesa said heavily, We have to live with him. His forces outnumber oursI mean, Captain Grovesby maybe a hundred to one. I think for now that Alexander is the only show in town.
And, said Ruddy silkily, Bisesa undoubtedly thinks that Alexander is a fine fellow for his limpid eyes and his shining hair that spills over his shoulders
Josh blushed furiously.
Ruddy said, What about you, Abdi? Its not everybody who gets to confront such a deep family legend.
Abdikadir smiled, and ran his hand over his blond hair. Maybe Ill get to shoot my great-to-the-nth grandfather and prove all those paradoxes wrong after all But he wanted to get down to business. He was keen to show Bisesa somethingand not just his patent shower. I took a trip back to the bit of the twenty-first century that brought us here, Bisesa. There was a cave I wanted to check out
He led her to a storeroom in the fort. He held up a gun, a big rifle. It had been wrapped in dirty rags, but its metal gleamed with oil. There was an intelligence report that this stuff was here, he said. It was one of the objectives for our mission in the Bird that day. There were flashbang grenades, a few old Soviet-era grenades. He bent and picked one up; it was like a soup can mounted on a stick. Not much of a stash, but here it is.