The moderns marveled. What a gagglefuck, Casey said. I have never seen anything like it in my life.
But it was all somehow coming together. The coxes began to shout, and oars splashed in the water. And on land and on the sea, Alexanders followers began to join in rhythmic songs.
Abdikadir said, The songs of Sinde. A magnificent soundtens of thousands of voices united.
Come on, Casey said, lets get aboard before those sepoys grab the best deck chairs.
The plan was that the fleet would sail west across the Arabian Sea and then into the Persian Gulf, while the army and baggage train would track its movements following the southern coasts of Pakistan and Iran. They would meet again at the head of the Gulf, and after that they would strike overland to Babylon. These parallel journeys were necessary; Alexanders boats could not last more than a few days at sea without provisioning from the land.
But on land the going was difficult. The peculiar volcanic rain continued with barely a break, and the sky was a lid of ash-gray cloud. The ground turned to mud, bogging down the carts, animals and humans alike, and the heat remained intense, the humidity extraordinary. The baggage train was soon strung out over kilometers, a chain of suffering, and in its wake it left behind the corpses of broken animals, irreparable bits of equipmentand, after only a few days, people.
Casey couldnt bear the sight of Indian women who had to walk behind the carts or the camels with great heaps of goods piled up on their heads. As Ruddy remarked, Have you noticed how these Iron Age chaps lack so muchnot just the obvious like gaslights and typewriters and trousersbut blindingly simple things like carthorse collars? I suppose its just that nobodys thought of it yet, and once its invented it stays invented
That observation struck Casey. After a few days he sketched a crude wheelbarrow, and went to Alexanders advisors with it. Hephaistion would not consider his proposal, and even Eumenes was skeptical, until Casey put together a hasty, toy-sized prototype to demonstrate the idea.
After that, at the next overnight stop, Eumenes ordered the construction of as many wheelbarrows as could be managed. There was little fresh wood to be had, but the timber from one foundered barge was scavenged and reused. In that first night, under Caseys direction, the carpenters put together more than fifty serviceable barrows, and the next night, having learned from the mistakes of the first batch, nearly a hundred. But then, this was an army that had managed to build a whole fleet for itself on the banks of the Indus; compared to that, knocking together a few wheelbarrows wasnt such a trick.
For the first couple of days after that the train happened to pass over hard, stony ground, and the barrows worked well. It was quite a sight to see the women of Alexanders baggage train happily pushing along barrows that might have come from a garden center in Middle England, laden with goods, and with children balancing precariously on top. But after that the mud returned, and the barrows bogged down. The Macedonians soon abandoned them, amid much derision of the moderns newfangled technology.
Every three days or so the ships had to put into shore for provisioning. The shore-based troops were expected to live off the land, providing for themselves and for the crews and passengers of the ships. That became increasingly difficult away from the Indus delta, as the land grew more barren.
So the sailors would vary their rations with the contents of tidal pools: razor clams, oysters and sometimes mussels. Once, as Bisesa took part in one of these enjoyable scavenging expeditions, a whale broke the surface of the water, its blowhole plume erupting perilously close to some of the anchored ships. At first the Macedonians were terrified, though the Indians laughed. A troop of foot soldiers ran into the sea, yelling and hammering at the water with their shields and spears and the flats of their swords. The next time the whale surfaced it was a hundred meters further away from shore, and it was not seen again.
Where the army passed, its scouts surveyed the land and made maps, as Alexanders army had always done. Mapmaking had also been a crucial tool for the British in establishing and holding their own empire, and now the Greek and Macedonian scouts were joined by British cartographers armed with theodolites. Everywhere they went they drew new maps and compared them with the old, from before the Discontinuity.
They encountered few people, however.
Once the army scouts found a crowd of around a hundred, men, women and children, they said, dressed in strange, bright clothes that were nevertheless falling to rags. They were dying of thirst, and they spoke in a tongue none of the Macedonians could recognize. None of the British or Bisesas party got a firsthand glimpse of this crowd. Abdikadir speculated that they could have come from a hotel from the twentieth or even twenty-first centuries. Cut off when their home vanished into the corridors of time, left to wander, such refugees were like negative-image ruins, Bisesa thought. In a normally flowing history the people would vanish and leave their city slowly to decay into the sand; here it was the other way round Alexanders troops, ordered to protect the baggage train, had killed a couple of refugees as an example, and driven the rest off.
If people were rare, the Eyes were a continual presence. As they worked along the coast, they found Eyes hovering like lamps along the shoreline, one every few kilometers, and in a loose array covering the interior.
Most people ignored them, but Bisesa remained queasily fascinated by the Eyes. If an Eye had popped into existence in the old worldif it had come to hover over that old favorite of UFO dreamers, the White House lawnit would have been an extraordinary event, the sensation of the century. But most people didnt even want to talk about it. Eumenes was a notable exception; he would stare at the Eyes, hands on hips, as if challenging them to respond.
Despite the attrition of the march, Ruddys spirits seemed to rise as the days passed. He wrote when he could, in a tiny, crabbed, paper-preserving hand. And he speculated on the state of the world, expounding to whoever would listen.
We should not stop at Babylon, he said. He, Bisesa, Abdikadir, Josh, Casey and Cecil de Morgan were sitting under the awning of an officers ship; the rain rattled on the awning, and hissed on the surface of the sea. We should go onexplore Judea, for example. Think about it, Bisesa! The ethereal eye of your space boat could make out only scattered settlements there, a few threads of smoke. What if, in one of those mean huts, even now the Nazarene is taking His first lusty breath? Why, we would be like ten thousand magi, following a strange star.
And then there is Mecca, Abdikadir said dryly.
Ruddy spread his hands expansively. Lets be ecumenical about it!
Bisesa asked, So, after your complicated origins, youve ended up a Christian, Ruddy?
He stroked his mustache. Put it this way. Believe in God. Not sure about the Trinity. Cant accept eternal damnationbut there must be some retribution. He smiled. I sound like a Methodist! My father would be pleased. Anyhow Id be delighted to meet the chap who started it all.
But Josh said, Be careful what you wish for, Ruddy. This is not some vast museum through which we travel. Perhaps you would find Christ in Judea. But what if not? Its unlikely after allin fact its far more likely that all of the Judea we find here has been ripped out of a time before Christs birth.
I was born after the Incarnation, Ruddy said firmly. There is no doubt about that. And if I could summon up one grandfather after another in a great chain of predecessors I could have them attest to that fact.
Yes, said Josh. But you are not in the history of your grandfathers any more, Ruddy. What if there has been no Incarnation here? Then you are a saved man in a pagan world. Are you Virgil, or Dante?