The man’s eyes widened. He backed away, but he kept the sword raised, and the rapid conversation resumed, but now the men stared even harder.

Sable hissed, “What did you say?”

“Schoolboy memories.” Kolya tried to keep his voice level. “I was guessing. It mightn’t have been their language at all; we could have landed anywhere in time—”

“What language, Kolya?”

“Mongolian.”

Sable snorted. “I knew it.”

“I said we were emissaries. Emissaries of Eternal Heaven. If they believe it, they will have to treat us with respect. Hand us over to local officials, maybe. I’m bluffing—just bluffing—”

“Good thinking, Batman,” Sable said. “After all these guys saw us fall from the sky. Take me to your leader. Always works in the movies.” She actually laughed, a forced, ugly sound.

At last the circle around the cosmonauts began to break up, and nobody came to kill them. One man pulled on a jacket and felt hat, ran to a hobbled horse tied up beside a yurt, mounted it and rode briskly away.

The cosmonauts’ hands were tied behind their backs and they were prodded in the direction of one of the yurts. It would have been difficult to walk even without tied hands; Kolya felt as if he was encased in lead, and his head sang. Staring children, picking their noses, formed a sort of honor guard as they passed. One nasty-looking brat threw a rock that bounced off Kolya’s shoulder. It was hardly a dignified return to Earth, he thought. But at least they were alive; at least he had won them some time.

The door flap of the yurt was pulled open, and they were shoved inside.

Sable and Kolya were thrust down onto felt mats. In their stiff pressure suits the cosmonauts were huge in the yurt, and their legs stuck out comically in front of them. But it was a relief just to sit down.

The yurt’s single doorway faced south; Kolya could see the sun beyond a layer of haze. That was a Mongol tradition, Kolya knew; in their rudimentary theology there was a strand of sun-worship, and here on the plains of northern Asia the sun wheeled through its daily circles predominantly in the south.

Mongols came and went, apparently to inspect the newcomers, squat men and muscular-looking women. They stared at the cosmonauts, especially Sable, with greedy calculation.

Some of the cosmonauts’ gear was brought in from the Soyuz capsule. Much of this—emergency medical kits, an inflatable life raft—was incomprehensible to the Mongols. But Sable and Kolya were allowed to change out of their bulky spacesuits into the lighter orange jumpsuits they had worn on orbit. The Mongol children stared at their underwear, and the rubberized trousers they stripped off. The spacesuits were stacked up in a corner of the grubby yurt like abandoned cocoons.

The cosmonauts both managed to conceal the existence of their sidearms, tucked behind their backs, from the Mongols.

After that, to Kolya’s huge relief, they were left alone for a while. He lay against the yurt’s grimy wall, his limbs trembling, trying to still the beating of his heart and clear the fog in his head by sheer willpower. He should have been in the hospital right now, surrounded by state-of-the-art twenty-first-century technology, beginning a program of physiotherapy and recuperation, not stuck in the corner of this stinking tent. He was weak as an old man, and before these stocky, powerful Mongols he was utterly helpless; he was resentful as well as frightened.

He tried to think, to take stock of his surroundings.

The yurt was sturdy and well-worn. Perhaps it belonged to the chief of this little community. Its main support was a stout pole, and lighter wooden stakes and slats shaped a dome of felt. Grubby mats covered the floor, and metal pots and goatskins hung from hooks. Stacked around the walls were chests of wood and leather, the furniture of a traveling people. The yurt had no windows, but a hole in the roof had been cut over a fireplace of hearthstones, where lumps of dried dung burned continually.

At first Kolya puzzled about how the yurt could be taken down and reerected, as it must be at least twice a year as the nomads traveled between their summer and winter pastures. But he had noticed a broad cart, parked a short distance away. Its bed was easily wide enough to take the intact yurt, contents and all.

“But they didn’t always do that,” he whispered to Sable. “The Mongols. Only in the early thirteenth century. Otherwise they just dismantled the yurts like tents and carried them folded up. So that fixes us in time … We have landed in the middle of the Mongol Empire, at its peak!”

“Lucky for us you know so much about them.”

Kolya grunted. “Lucky? Sable, the Mongols came to Russia— twice. You don’t forget an experience like that, not even after eight centuries.”

After a time a meal was prepared. A woman hauled in a big iron pot. Half a sheep carcass was chopped up and thrown into the pot—not just flesh and bones, but lungs, stomach, brains, intestines, hooves, eyeballs; evidently nothing was wasted. The woman had a face like leather and arms like a shot-putter’s. As she worked steadily at the meat she paid absolutely no attention to Sable and Kolya, as if two humans from the future stacked in the corner of her yurt were an everyday occurrence.

The stranded cosmonauts did what they could to speed their adaptation to Earth’s ferocious pull, surreptitiously flexing their joints, shifting their posture to favor one muscle group over another. Aside from that they had nothing to do but wait, Kolya supposed, for that rider to return from his mission to the local official, at which point the decision about their fate would be made—a decision that could still, he knew, mean their deaths. But despite that grim prospect, as the afternoon wore by, Kolya, astonishingly, grew bored.

The mass of meat and offal in the pot was boiled for a couple of hours. Then more adults and children crowded into the yurt. Some of them brought in more meat for the pot, bits of what looked like foxes, mice, rabbits. These were roughly skinned but not cleaned; Kolya could see bits of grit and dried blood sticking to them.

When it was time to eat the Mongols just dived in. They scooped out chunks of meat with wooden bowls and ate with their fingers. They washed it down with cups of what looked like milk, poured from a sweating goatskin. Sometimes, if they didn’t like the flavor of a piece of meat after a few bites, they would throw it back, and they would spit bits of gristle back into the pot.

Sable watched this in horror. “And nobody washed their hands before lunch.”

“To the Mongols water has divine purity,” Kolya said. “You don’t sully it by using it to wash.”

“So how do they keep clean?”

“Welcome to the thirteenth century, Sable.”

The guests kept their distance from the cosmonauts, but otherwise their social life seemed unimpeded.

After a time one of the younger men approached the cosmonauts, carrying a bowl of meat. Kolya saw how the mutton fat that shone on the boy’s lips was only the topmost layer in a smear of fat and dirt that covered his face; there was even wind-dried snot under his broad nostrils, and his stink, like over-ripe cheese, was just overwhelming. The boy reached behind Kolya and released one of his hands. Then he picked out a piece of meat from his bowl and held it out to Kolya. His fingernails were black with dirt.

“You know,” Kolya murmured, “the Mongols would soften their meat by riding with it under their saddle. This bit of mutton might have spent days being pumped full of methane from some fat herdsman’s ass.”

“Eat it,” murmured Sable. “We need the peptides.”

Kolya took the meat, closed his eyes, and bit into it. It was leathery, and tasted of fat and butter. Later, the boy brought him a cup of milk. It actually had a kick, and he vaguely remembered that the Mongols would ferment mare’s milk. He drank as little as he could.