The setting was magnificent. Alexanders official tent, hauled all the way from the delta, was immense, supported by golden columns and roofed with spangled cloth. Silver-legged sofas had been set up before the Kings golden throne for the visitors. But the atmosphere was tense: there must have been a hundred troops standing alert throughout the tent, the infantrymen known as Shield Bearers dressed in scarlet and royal blue, and Immortals from Persia in beautifully embroidered, if impractical, tunics.
Eumenes, seeking to minimize unnecessary friction, had quietly briefed Bisesa on the protocol expected in the Kings presence. So, on entering, the visitors from the future paid the King proskynesis, a Greek name for a Persian form of obeisance that involved blowing a kiss at the King and bowing. Abdikadir was predictably uncomfortable with this, but Captain Grove and his officers were unfazed. Evidently these British, stuck out on the edge of their own empire and surrounded by petty princes, rajahs and amirs, were accustomed to respecting eccentric local customs.
Aside from that, Bisesa could see that Abdikadir was enjoying himself hugely. She had met few people as hard-headed as Abdikadir, but he was obviously indulging himself in a pleasant fantasy that these magnificent Macedonians were indeed his ancestors.
The party settled on the magnificent couches, pages and ushers circulated with food and drink, and the conference began. The translation, channeled by Greek scholars and de Morgan, was slow and sometimes frustrating. But they got there steadily, sometimes with the aid of maps, drawings or even lettering scrawled on Macedonian wax tablets, or on bits of paper Ruddy or Josh ripped out of their notebooks.
They started with a sharing of information. Alexanders people were not surprised by Jamruds Evil Eye, which continued to hover over the parade ground. Since the day on which the sun had lurched across the sky, as the Macedonians put it, their scouts had seen such things all over the Indus valley. Like the British, the Macedonians had quickly become used to these silent, floating observers, and treated them just as disrespectfully.
Hardheaded Secretary Eumenes was less interested in such silent mysteries than in the politics of the future, which had brought these strangers to the Frontier. It took some time to make Eumenes and the others understand that the British and Bisesas party were actually from two different erasthough the gap between them, a mere hundred and fifty years or so, was dwarfed by the twenty-four centuries between Alexanders time and Bisesas. Still, as Captain Grove sketched in the background to the nineteenth-century Great Game, Eumenes showed his quick understanding.
Bisesa had expected her twenty-first-century conflict to be less comprehensible to the Macedonians, but when Abdikadir talked about central Asias oil reserves Eumenes spoke. He remembered that on the banks of a river in what Bisesa gathered was modern-day Iran, two springs of a strange fluid had welled out of the ground near where the royal tent had been pitched. It was no different in taste or brightness from olive oil, said Eumenes, though the ground was unsuited to olive trees. Even then, he said, Alexander had mused on the profit to be made out of such finds if they were extensivethough his tame prophet Aristander had declared the oil an omen of hard labor ahead. We come here in our different times for our different ambitions, said Eumenes. But still we come, even across millennia. Perhaps this is the cockpit of the world for eternity.
Alexander himself spoke little. He sat on his throne with his head propped on one fist, eyes half-lidded, occasionally looking up with that odd, head-turned, beguiling shyness. He left the conduct of the meeting largely to Eumenes, who struck Bisesa as a very smart cookie, and to Hephaistion, who would interrupt Eumenes, seeking clarification or even contradicting his colleague. It was obvious that there was a lot of tension between Eumenes and Hephaistion, but perhaps Alexander was content for these potential rivals to be divided, Bisesa speculated.
Now the discussion turned to the meaning of what had happened to them allhow history could have been chopped up into pieces, and why.
The Macedonians did not seem as awestruck as Bisesa had naively imagined. They had absolutely no doubt that the time slips were the work of the gods, following their own inscrutable purposes: their worldview, which had nothing to do with science, was alien to Bisesas, but it was easily flexible enough to accommodate such mysteries as this. They were tough-minded warriors who had marched thousands of kilometers into strangeness, and they, and their Greek advisors, were intellectually tough too.
Alexander himself seemed entranced by the philosophical aspects. Can the dead live again? he murmured in his throaty baritone. For I am long dead to you And can the past be restoredold wrongs undone, regrets wiped away?
Abdikadir murmured to Bisesa, A man with as much blood on his hands as this King must find the notion of correcting the past appealing
Hephaistion was saying, Most philosophers view time as a cycle. Like the beating of a heart, the passing of the seasons, the waxing and waning of the Moon. In Babylon the astronomers assembled a cosmic calendar based on the motions of the planets, with a Great Year that lasts, I believe, more than four hundred thousand years. When the planets congregate in one particular constellation, there is a huge fire, and the winter, marked by a planetary gathering elsewhere, marked by a flood Some even argue that past events repeat exactly from one cycle to the next.
But that notion troubled Aristotle, said Alexanderwho, Bisesa recalled, had actually studied under that philosopher. If I live as much before the fall of Troy as after it, then what caused that war?
But still, Hephaistion said, if there is something in the notion of cycles, then many strange things can be justified. For instance, oracles and prophets: if time cycles, perhaps prophecy is as much a question of a memory of the deep past as it is a vision of the future. And the strange mixing of times we endure now seems much less inexplicable. Do you agree, Aristander?
The old seer bowed his head.
So the conversation continued, rattling between Alexander, Hephaistion and Aristander, often too rapidly for the creaky chain of translators to keep up.
Ruddy was entranced. How marvelous these men are, he whispered.
Enough philosophy, said Eumenes, practical as ever. He challenged the meeting about what they should do next.
Captain Grove replied that he had a proposal. The British officer had brought along an atlasa rather antiquated thing, even by his standards, from a Victorian schoolroomand he now displayed it.
The Macedonians were familiar with maps and mapmaking. Indeed, throughout his campaigns Alexander had brought along Greek surveyors and draftsmen to map the lands he explored and conquered many of them barely known to the ancient Greek world he came from. So the Macedonians were intrigued by the atlas, and crowded around the little book excitedly. They were intrigued by the quality of the printing, the regularity of the type and the pages bright coloring. The Macedonians seemed to have little trouble accepting that the Mediterranean-centered world they knew was only a section of the planet, and that the planet was a sphere, as predicted by Pythagoras centuries before Alexanders time. In fact Aristotle, Alexanders tutor, had written a whole book about the notion. For her part Bisesa was amused by the great swaths inked in pink, to show the territories of the British Empire at its zenith.
At last Alexander, in some exasperation, demanded that the atlas be brought up to his throne. But he was dismayed when the outline of his empire was sketched on a whole-Earth map. I thought I had made a mighty footprint on the worldbut there is so much I never even saw, he said.
Using the atlas, Captain Grove said that his proposal was that the forces, combined, should make for Babylon.