28. Bishkek
The army of Genghis Khan skirted the northern edge of the Gobi desert.
The land was vast, a mirror of the dust-clogged sky. Sometimes they would see eroded, tired-looking hills, and once a herd of camels trotted by in the distance, stiff-backed and pompous. When the wind blew, a storm of yellow sand blocked out the light: sand that tasted of iron, sand that might have been formed a million years ago, Kolya thought, or a month. The Mongols, their heads wrapped in cloth, looked like Bedouins.
As the desert crossing wore on, Kolya sank within himself. His mind numbed, his senses dulled, he would sit in the back of the cart, never speaking, a cloth drawn across his face to keep out the dust. The land was so huge and still that sometimes it was as if they weren’t moving at all. He grudgingly admired the strength of spirit, the sheer bloody-minded resilience that enabled the Mongols to conquer the immense distances of their Asiatic stage. And yet he had flown in space; and once he would have spanned the distance he had traveled, so vast on the human scale, in fifteen minutes or less.
They came to a great mound of stone and earth, a barrow. It looked like some trapped chthonic beast struggling to escape the clutches of the bone-dry ground. Kolya thought this was a Scythian tomb, a relic of a people who had lived before the birth of Christ, but who had ridden horses and built yurts just like the Mongols. The mound looked fresh, the stones unworn—but the tomb had been broken open, robbed of whatever gold or other wealth it had contained.
And then they came to an almost modern relic. Kolya glimpsed it only from the distance: tin-roofed cement barns, silos, what looked like a convoy of rusted tractors. Perhaps it was a government agricultural project, abandoned apparently long before the Discontinuity. Perhaps as they moved away from central Mongolia, Kolya mused, they were leaving behind the center of gravity of this vast continent’s history, the terrible reign of Genghis Khan; perhaps here the shards of shattered time had been more free to settle as they willed, bearing refugees from wider expanses. The Mongol scouts inspected the site, pulled around a few sheets of rusted corrugated iron, abandoned it as worthless.
Slowly the country changed. They passed a lake—dry, a sheet of salt. At its edge lizards hopped between the rocks, and flies rose up, troubling the horses. Kolya was startled to hear the desolate cries of seabirds, for there could scarcely be a place in the world further from the sea than this desiccated heartland. Perhaps the birds had followed Asia’s complicated network of rivers and become lost here. The parallel with his own situation was obvious, the irony banal.
And still the journey wore on.
To leave modern Mongolia, they would have to pass through a range called the Altai Mountains. Day by day the ground rose, becoming more fertile and better watered. In places there were even flowers: once Kolya found primulas, anemones, orchids, stranded in a dying fragment of steppe spring. They crossed a wide, marshy plain, where plovers wheeled over sodden grass, and the horses plodded carefully through murk that rose to their ankles.
The ground became mountainous. The army squeezed through valleys, each higher and more narrow than the one before. The Mongols called to each other, and their voices echoed from the walls. Sometimes Kolya would see eagles high above, their unmistakable silhouettes painted against the lead-gray sky. Genghis’s generals muttered darkly about their vulnerability to ambush here.
At last the land opened up into a vast canyon bounded by walls of shattered rock that reared up toward the sky. Kolya found himself on the ridge at the head of the canyon. An enormous flat-topped mountain loomed over him, streaked by snow and ice like the droppings of immense birds. He looked back, and saw the army of Genghis Khan strung out along the canyon’s length, people and animals the color of mud, with here and there the sparkle of polished armor. But this thin line of people was dwarfed by the towering pinnacles of purple-red rock around them.
They moved on, tracking the northwestern border of modern China, heading southwest toward Kyrgyzstan. After that it was only a few more days’ ride until they came to the town.
The Mongols, great believers in intelligence, sent scouts and spies creeping around the town, and eventually envoys who walked boldly up its main streets. Citizens in flat caps and buttoned-up jackets marched out, hands extended in friendship to these rank-smelling strangers.
The place was obviously modern, or nearly so. The news of it seemed to jolt Kolya out of the trance into which the journey had plunged him. It was a shock when he heard that the army, and he, had been traveling for nearly three months.
And it was here, as it turned out, that the final stage of his own journey would begin.
Sable was taken forward to help check out the town. It was Bishkek, she thought, in the twenty-first century the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The place as they had found it was obviously from some preelectric age, but there were water mills and factories. “It could be late nineteenth century,” she said. Metaled roads led into the town, but they were truncated by time slips a kilometer or so outside town.
More scouts were sent in, and Kolya was taken to translate. The town was a pretty place, its streets lined with trees, wilting a little under the persistent acid rain. Reflecting a deeper history, its main thoroughfare was called Silk Road Street. The townsfolk, cut off and with no idea what had happened, were disturbed by the lack of visits by their tax inspectors, and wanted to know if there were any directives from Moscow, any news of the Tsar. Kolya longed to speak directly to them, but the Mongols wouldn’t allow it.
Kolya was excited by the town, the most modern place they had yet encountered. Surely there was a base of equipment and expertise here that could be built on. He pressed Yeh-lü to make friendly contact. But his pleas went unheard, and he began to grow disturbed: the Mongols did not like towns, and knew only one way to deal with them. Sable wouldn’t back him up; she merely watched and waited, playing her own complicated game.
Kolya witnessed some of what followed.
The Mongols came in the night, riding in silence. When they charged they roared, and the sound of their voices and the horses’ hooves overwhelmed the little town. The killing began in the main street, and swept through the town, a wave of butchery with a bloody froth of slaughter at its leading edge. The townsfolk could put up no resistance save for a few futile potshots with antiquated firearms.
Genghis had ordered that the town’s ruler be brought out alive. The mayor tried to hide himself and his family in the town’s small library, and the building was taken apart brick by brick. His wife was killed before him, his daughters raped, and the man himself trampled to death.
The Mongols found little of value in the town. They broke up the newspaper office’s small printing press, bringing out the iron to melt down and reuse. It was the Mongols’ habit when taking a town to pick out artisans and other skilled folk who might serve their purposes later, but in Bishkek they were capable of recognizing little of what they found: the skills of a clockmaker or accountant or lawyer meant nothing to them. Few men were allowed to live. Most of the children and some of the younger women were taken prisoner, though many of the women were raped. All this was done mechanically, joylessly, even the rapes; it was just what the Mongols did.
When they were done, the Mongols torched the town systematically.
The surviving prisoners were driven out into the countryside towards Genghis’s encampment, where they huddled in desolate misery. To Kolya they looked like classic peasant stock, and their waistcoats and trousers, thick skirts and headscarves were the subject of stares from the Mongols. One beauty, called Natasha, the fifteen-year-old daughter of an innkeeper, was picked out for Genghis himself. He always took the most beautiful women, and impregnated many of them. Genghis had intended to drive the prisoners on with him, for there were always uses for such wretched souls—they could be driven into battle, for instance. But when he found that one of the Golden Family had been injured by the bullet of a wild-eyed solicitor, he ordered the prisoners to be slain. Yeh-lü’s weary pleas for leniency counted for nothing. The women and children submitted meekly.