“Perhaps,” Abdikadir said, grinning. “But, Kipling—I’m not a Christian!”

Captain Grove joined them. “I suspect our business is done,” he said quietly. “I’m jolly pleased we came to such a quick agreement, and it’s remarkable how much we hold in common. I suppose nothing fundamental has changed in two thousand years when it comes to carting an army around the place … But look here: I think the gathering is starting to degenerate a bit. I’ve heard about Alexander and his debaucheries,” he said with a rueful grin, “and much as I’d rather give it a miss I fear it would be politic of me to stick around, and do a little getting-to-know-you with these chaps. Don’t worry; I can handle my wine! My lads will stay on too—but if you want to slip away …”

Bisesa accepted the excuse. Ruddy and Josh agreed to leave too, though Ruddy looked back with envy at the shimmering interior of the royal tent, where a curvaceous young woman dressed only in a floor-length veil was starting to dance.

Outside the tent Bisesa found Philip, Alexander’s Greek doctor, waiting for her. Bisesa hastily summoned de Morgan. The factor was half-drunk already, but able to translate.

Philip said, “The King knows you spoke of his death.”

“Ah. I’m sorry.”

“And he wants you to tell him how he will die.”

Bisesa hesitated. “We have a legend. A tale of what happened to him …”

“He will die soon,” Philip breathed.

“Yes. He would have.”

“Where?”

She hesitated again. “Babylon.”

“Then he will die young, like Achilles, his hero. That’s just like Alexander!” Philip glanced back at the King’s tent, where, judging from the noise, the debauch was gathering steam. He looked troubled, but resigned. “Well, it’s no surprise. He drinks as he fights, enough for ten men. And he was nearly killed by an arrow in his lung. I fear he will not allow himself time to recover, but—”

“He won’t listen to his doctor.”

Philip smiled. “Some things never change.”

Bisesa made a quick decision. She dug into her survival pack, under her jumpsuit, and pulled out a plastic sheet of malaria tablets. She showed Philip how to pop the pills out of their bubbles. “Have your King take these,” she said. “Nobody knows for sure how it happened. The truth was obscured, by rumor, conflict and false history. But some believe it will be of the sickness these tablets will prevent.”

Philip frowned. “Why do you give me these?”

“Because I think your King is going to be important for all our futures. If he dies, at least it won’t be this way.”

Philip closed his hand over the sheet of tablets, and smiled. “Thank you, lady. But tell me …”

“Yes?”

“Will they remember him, in the future?”

Again, the strange dilemma of too much knowledge—compounded for Bisesa by long sessions with her phone as she had researched Alexander’s story. “Yes. They even remember his horse!” Bucephalus had died in a battle on the river Jhelum. “More than a thousand years from now, in the land beyond the Oxus, the rulers will claim that their horses once all had horns on their heads, and were descended from Bucephalus, when Alexander passed there.”

Philip was enchanted. “Alexander had a headdress with golden horns made for Bucephalus in battle. Lady—if the King is ever close to death—”

“Tell him then.”

When he had gone, she turned on de Morgan. “And you keep that to yourself.”

He spread his hands. “Of course. We must keep Alexander alive—if we are stuck here, he may indeed be our best hope of salvaging something of our future. But by all the gods, Bisesa! Why not sell those pills to him? Alexander is a thousand times richer than any other man of his time! What a waste …”

Laughing, she walked away.

24. The Hunt

At last the battue was ready.

An enormous area of the steppe had been designated for the hunt, which was run as a military exercise. Army units were deployed in a great cordon, each with a full general in command. The beaters closed in toward the center, moving as if on maneuvers, with scouts in advance of the main body of troops, and flanking sections to either side. Trumpets and flags were used to communicate around this mass of troops, and once it was closed the circle was maintained with great precision.

When the beating began, Genghis Khan himself led the imperial procession to a low ridge, which would serve as a good viewpoint. All the Golden Family were required to be present, along with Genghis’s wives and concubines, chamberlains and servants. Yeh-lü traveled with the royal party, and brought Kolya, Sable and their interpreters with him.

The scale of the exercise was startling. When he took his place at the summit of the ridge Kolya could see only a couple of military units, drawn up in formation, standards flying, horses restless, on the plain below; the rest were somewhere over the horizon. And he was stunned by the opulence of the food, drink and other hospitality laid on for the royal party.

While they waited for the beating to be completed the Golden Family were kept amused by falconry displays. One man brought forward a mighty eagle, perched on a massive hawking glove. When the bird stretched its wings, their span was wider than the keeper was tall. A lamb was released, and the bird lunged with a ferocity that dragged the keeper off his feet, to the hilarity of the royal party.

The falconry was followed by horse races. Mongol races were conducted over kilometers, and only the finishing stages were visible from Kolya’s position. The child jockeys, surely no older than seven or eight, rode their full-sized mounts bareback and barefoot. The riding was ferocious, and the finishes, masked by a billowing cloud of dust, were close. The Golden Family threw gold and jewels at the victors.

As far as Kolya was concerned, all this was another example of the Mongols’ mixture of barbarity and vulgar ostentation—or, as Sable put it, “These people really don’t have any taste.” But Kolya could not deny the calm aura of Genghis Khan himself.

Militarily disciplined, politically astute, single-minded and incorruptible, Genghis Khan had been born the son of a clan chief. He was called Tem, which meant “smith”; his adopted name meant “universal ruler.” It took a decade of fratricidal conflict for Tem to unite the Mongols into a single nation for the first time in generations, and he became “the ruler of all tribes who live in felt tents.”

Mongol armies consisted almost entirely of cavalry, highly mobile, disciplined and fast-moving. Their fighting style had been honed over generations in hunting and warring across the plains. For the sedentary nations of farms and cities around the fringe of the steppe, the Mongols were difficult neighbors, but they weren’t exceptional. For centuries the great land-ocean of Asia had spawned armies of marauding horsemen; the Mongols were just the latest in that long and bloody tradition. But under Genghis Khan they became a fury.

Genghis Khan began his campaigns against the three nations of China. Rapidly growing rich on plunder, the Mongols next turned west, assailing Khwa-rezm, a rich and ancient Islamic state that stretched from Iran to the Caspian Sea. After that the Mongols pushed on through the Caucasus into the Ukraine and Crimea, and struck north in an outrageous raid on Russia. By the time of Genghis Khan’s death, his empire, built in a single generation, was already four times as extensive as Alexander’s, and twice as large as Rome’s ever became.

But Genghis Khan remained a barbarian, his only purpose the empowerment and enrichment of his Golden Family. And the Mongols were killers. Their ruthlessness derived from their own traditions: illiterate nomads, they saw no purpose in agriculture, no value in cities save as mines of plunder—and they placed no value on human life. This was the creed applied to each conquest.