By the time the army moved on the town was reduced to a smoking ruin, little left of the buildings above foundation level. The Mongols left a heap of severed heads, some of them heartbreakingly tiny. A few days later, Genghis ordered his rearguard to return to the town. A handful of citizens had escaped the slaughter, hiding in cellars and other hideaways. The Mongols rounded these up and put them to death, after enjoying a little more sport.
Sable showed no reaction to this, no emotion at all. But as for Kolya, after Bishkek, his mind seemed clear about what he must do.
29. Babylon
It took two months of sailing to reach the head of the Gulf. From there, Alexander was anxious to move inland quickly. He formed up an advance party of a thousand troops, accompanied by Eumenes, Hephaistion and others. Bisesa and her companions made sure they were attached to the expedition.
Within a day of disembarking the party set off for the short march inland to Susa, in Alexanders time the administrative center of his conquered Persian empire. Alexander was still too weak to ride or walk far, so he rode on a cart covered with purple awnings, a hundred Shield Bearers marching in step around him. They reached Susa without incidentbut it was not the Susa Alexander remembered.
Alexanders surveyors had no doubt about the site, at the heart of a sparsely greened plain. But there was no sign of the city, none at all. They might have been the first humans ever to set foot hereas perhaps they were, Bisesa thought.
Eumenes joined the moderns, his face grim. I was here only a few years ago. This was a rich place. Every province of the empire contributed to its magnificence, from craftsmen and silversmiths from the Greek cities of the coast, to wooden pillars from India. The treasure here was remarkable. And now He seemed overcome, and Bisesa glimpsed again the rage she had sensed building in him, as if this intelligent Greek took the Discontinuity personally.
Alexander himself got out of his cart and walked around, peering at the earth, and kicking at clods of dirt. Then he retreated to his awning, and refused to emerge again, as if in disgust.
They camped that night near the vacant site of Susa. The next morning, guided by Alexanders cartographers, they set off due west, making for Babylon, crossing a vast and echoing land. After Susa, everybody seemed subdued, as if the vast weight of time bore down on them all. Sometimes Bisesa would catch the Macedonians looking at her, and sensed what they were thinkingthat here was a woman, living and breathing, who would not be born until everybody they knew, everything they had touched, had eroded to dust, as if she was a living symbol of the Discontinuity.
To everyones relief they had not gone many kilometers before they reached a junction in time where the surface of the ground dropped a few centimeters, and a road was revealed. It was crudely laid to Bisesas eyes, topped with coarsely cut stone blocks, but it was undoubtedly a road. In fact, Eumenes told them, it was a section of the Royal Road that had once united Persiaand which Alexander had found extraordinarily useful in his conquest of the empire.
Even on the road, the march took several more days. The land around the road was dust dry, colonized only by scrub vegetation. But it was marked here and there by anonymous mounds of rubble and scarred by great straight-line ditchesevidently artificial, but long abandoned, their purpose forgotten.
Each night, when the march broke to make camp, Casey would set up his radio gear and listen for any signals coming from the Soyuz crew, lost somewhere in the unknowable expanses of Asia. It was a time theyd agreed upon with the crew, but hed heard nothing since the day of their attempted reentry. Casey also monitored the radio signal that continued to emanate from the unknown beacon that was presumed to lie in Babylon. Its content remained the samejust a chirp, a sweep up through the frequencies like an engineering test signal. But it continued to repeat, over and over. Casey kept a log of his observations, with position, time, signal strength and bearings, and his rough triangulations continued to predict a source inside Babylon.
And then there were the Eyesor rather, the lack of them. As they walked west, the Eyes were fewer, more spaced out, until at last Bisesa realized she had marched through a whole day without seeing a single one. Nobody had any idea what to make of this.
At last they approached another transition. The advance party came to a line of green that stretched, dead straight, from the northern horizon to the south. The party hesitated on the desiccated side of the border.
To the west, beyond the line, the land was split up into polygonal fields, and striped by glistening canals. Here and there crude-looking wattle-and-daub shacks sat amid the fields, squat and ugly, like lumps of shaped mud. The shacks were clearly occupied, for Bisesa could see traces of smoke rising from some of them. A few goats and bullocks, tethered to posts, patiently chewed on grass or stubble. But there were no people.
Abdikadir stood with Bisesa. Babylons famous irrigation canals.
I suppose they must be. Some of the canals were extensions of the dry, worn-out ditches she had noticed before: the same bits of ancient engineering, severed by centuries. But this crude coupling of the eras obviously caused practical problems; the sections from later eras, ditches silted up by erosion, blocked off the canals from their riverside sources, and some of the farmers channels were drying up.
Abdikadir said, Lets show the way. He took a deliberate step forward and crossed the invisible, intangible line between the two world slices.
The party crossed the disjunction and moved on.
The richness of the land was obvious. Most of the fields seemed to be stocked with wheat, of a tall, fat-headed variety farmers daughter Bisesa didnt recognize. But there was also millet and barley, and, here and there, rich stands of date palms. Once, Cecil de Morgan said, the Babylonians would sing songs about these palms, listing their three hundred and sixty uses, one for every day of their year.
Whether the farmers were hiding or not, this obviously wasnt an empty landscapeand it was on the produce of these fields that Alexanders army was going to depend. There would have to be some gentle diplomacy here, Bisesa realized. The King had the manpower to take whatever he wanted, but the natives knew the land, and this vast and hungry army couldnt afford a single failed crop. Perhaps the first priority ought to be to get Alexanders soldiers and engineers to rebuild the irrigation system
Abdikadir said, You know, its impossible to believe this is Iraqthat were only a hundred kilometers or so southwest of Baghdad. The agricultural wealth of this place fueled empires for millennia.
But where is everybody?
Abdi said, Can you blame these farmers for hiding? Their rich farmland is sliced in half and replaced by semidesert. Their canals fail. A stinging rain withers their crops. And then, what looms over the horizon? Only the greatest army the ancient world ever saw Ah, he said. There. He stopped and pointed.
On the western horizon she saw buildings, a complicated wall, a thing like a stepped pyramid, all made gray and misty by distance.