Time slices or not, Alexander was going to enter the ancient city in the grand style. So, early in the morning, wearing his gold-embroidered cloak and his royal diadem on his head, he rode ahead toward the city walls, with Hephaistion walking at his side, and a phalanx of a hundred Shield Bearers around him, a rectangle of ferocious muscle and iron. The King showed no sign of the pain the effort to ride must be causing him; once again Bisesa was astounded by his strength of will.

Eumenes and other close companions walked in a loose formation behind the King. Among this party were Captain Grove and his senior officers, a number of British troops, and Bisesa and the Birdcrew. Bisesa felt oddly self-conscious in the middle of this grand procession, for she and the other moderns towered over the Macedonians, despite the finery of their dress uniforms.

The city’s walls were impressive enough in themselves, a triple circuit of baked brick and rubble that must have stretched twenty kilometers around, all surrounded by a moat. But there were no signs of life—no smoke from fires, no soldiers watching vigilantly from the towers—and the great gates hung open.

Eumenes muttered, “It was different last time, on Alexander’s first entry to the city. The satrap rode out to meet us. The road was strewn with flowers, and soldiers came out with tame lions and leopards in cages, and priests and prophets danced to the sound of harps. It was magnificent! It was fitting! But this …”

This, conceded Bisesa, was scary.

Alexander, per his reputation, led by example. Without hesitating he walked his horse over the wooden bridge that spanned the moat, and approached the grandest of the gates. This was a high-arched passage set between two heavy square towers.

The procession followed. Even to reach the gate they had to walk up a ramp to a platform perhaps fifteen meters above ground level. As Bisesa walked through it, the gate itself towered twenty meters or more above her head. Every square centimeter of its walls was covered in glazed brickwork, a haunting royal blue surface across which dragons and bulls danced.

Ruddy walked with his head tilted back, his mouth gaping open. Still a little “seedy” from his illness, he walked uncertainly, and Josh kindly took his arm to lead him. “Can this be the Ishtar Gate? Who would have thought—who would have thought …”

The city was laid out in a rough rectangle, its plan spanning the Euphrates. Alexander’s party had entered from the north, on the east side of the river. Inside the gate, the procession moved down a broad avenue that ran south, passing magnificent, baffling buildings, perhaps temples and palaces. Bisesa glimpsed statues, fountains, and every wall surface was decorated with dazzling glazed bricks and molded with lions and rosettes. There was so much opulence and detail she couldn’t take it all in.

The phone, peeking out of her pocket, tried to help. “The complex to your right is probably the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar. Babylon’s greatest ruler, who—”

“Shut up, phone.”

Casey was hobbling along. “If this is Babylon, where are the Hanging Gardens?”

“In Nineveh,” said the phone dryly.

“No people,” said Josh uncertainly. “I see some damage—signs of fires, looting, perhaps even earthquake destruction—but still no people. It’s getting eerie.”

“Yeah,” growled Casey. “All the lights on but nobody at home.”

“Have you noticed,” said Abdikadir quietly, “that the Macedonians seem overwhelmed too? And yet they were here so recently …”

It was true. Even wily Eumenes peered around at the city’s immense buildings with awe.

“It’s possible this isn’t their Babylon either,” said Bisesa.

The party began to break up. Alexander and Hephaistion, with most of the guard, made for the royal palace, back toward the gate. Other parties of troops were instructed to spread out through the city and search for inhabitants. The officers’ cries rang out peremptorily, echoing from the glazed walls of the temples; de Morgan said they were warning their men of the consequences of looting. “But I can’t imagine anybody will dare touch a thing in this haunted place!”

Bisesa and the others continued on down the processional way, accompanied by Eumenes and a handful of his advisors and guards. The way led them through a series of walled plazas, and brought them at last to the pyramid-like structure that Bisesa had glimpsed from outside the city. It was actually a ziggurat, a stepped tower of seven terraces rising from a base that must have been a hundred meters on a side. To Bisesa’s eyes, conditioned by images of Egyptian pyramids, it looked like something she might have expected to find looming above a lost Mayan city. South of the ziggurat was a temple that the phone said must be the Esagila— the Temple of Marduk, the national god of Babylonia.

The phone said, “The Babylonians called this ziggurat the Etemenanki—which meant ‘the house that is the foundation of Heaven and Earth.’ It was Nebuchadnezzar who brought the Jews here as slave labor; by bad-mouthing Babylon in the Bible the Jews took a long revenge …”

Josh grabbed Bisesa’s hand. “Come on. I want to climb that blooming heap.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the Tower of Babel! Look, there’s a staircase on the south side.” He was right; it must have been ten paces wide. “Race you!” And, dragging her hand, he was off.

She was intrinsically fitter than he was; she had trained as a soldier, and had come from a century far better provided for with food and health care. But he was younger and had been hardened by the relentless marching. It was a fair race, and they kept holding hands until, after a hundred steps or so, they took a break and collapsed on the steps.

From up here the Euphrates was a broad silver ribbon, bright even in the ashen light, that cut through the heart of the city. She couldn’t make out clearly the western side of the city, but on this eastern side grand buildings clustered closely—temples, palaces, presumably government departments. The city plan was very orderly. The main roads were all straight, all met at right angles, and all began and ended in one of the many gates in the walls. The palaces were riots of color, every surface covered with polychrome tiles on which dragons and other fantastic creatures gamboled.

She asked, “Where are we in time?”

Her phone said, “If this is the age of Nebuchadnezzar, then perhaps the sixth centuryB.C. The Persians took Babylonia two centuries before Alexander’s time, and they bled the area dry. When Alexander arrived it was still a vibrant city, but its best days were already far in the past. We, however, are seeing it at something close to its best.”

Josh studied her. “You look wistful, Bisesa.”

“I was just thinking.”

“About Myra—”

“I’d love her to be here—to be able to show her this.”

“Maybe someday you’ll be able to tell her about it.”

“Yeah, right.”

Ruddy, Abdikadir, Eumenes and de Morgan had followed more slowly up the ziggurat. Ruddy was wheezing, but he made it, and as he sat down Josh clapped him on the back. Eumenes stayed standing, apparently not winded at all, and gazed out at Babylon.

Abdikadir borrowed Bisesa’s night goggles and looked around. “Take a look at the western side of the river …”

The line of the walls crossed the river, to complete the city’s bisected rectangle. But on the far side of the river, though Bisesa thought she could make out the lines of the streets, there was no color but the orange-brown of mudstone, and the walls were reduced to ridges of broken rubble, the gates and watchtowers just mounds of core.

Josh said, “It looks as if half the city has been melted.”

“Or nuked,” said Abdikadir grimly.

Eumenes spoke. “It was not like this,” de Morgan translated. “Not like this …” While the eastern half of the city had been ceremonial and administrative, the western half had been residential, crowded with houses, tenement blocks, plazas and markets. Eumenes had seen it that way only a few years before, a vibrant, crowded human city. Now it was all reduced to nothing.