“As Casey would say, bullshit. ”

“Casey is a bad influence.”

“Tell me,” he whispered.

“What?”

“What becomes of me … Or would have.”

“No time, Ruddy.” Exposed, the wound gaped, a bloody crater from which crimson liquid still flowed. “Here, help me.” She got hold of his hands and pushed them against the wound, and she pressed herself, pushing her fingers into the hole up to the knuckle.

He squirmed, but he didn’t cry out. He seemed terribly pale. His blood was forming a lake beneath him on the floor of the temple, a mirror to the melted gold of the god. “There’s time for nothing else, Bisesa. Please.”

“You become loved,” she said, still working frantically. “The voice of a nation, of an age. You’re internationally famous too. Wealthy. You refuse honors, but they’re repeatedly offered to you. You help shape national life. You win a Nobel prize for literature. They will say of you that your voice is heard around the world whenever it drops a remark …”

“Ah.” He smiled and closed his eyes. She shifted her fingers. Blood spurted out, as strongly as ever, and he grunted. “All those books I will never write.”

“But they exist, Ruddy. They’re in my phone. Every last damn word.”

“There’s that, I suppose—even if it makes no logical sense if the author doesn’t survive to write them … And my family?”

Trying to staunch the flow this way was like trying to stop up a broken pipe by pushing down on it through a pillow. The only thing she could do, she knew, was to find the femoral artery and tie it off directly. “Ruddy, this will hurt like hell.” She dug her fingers into the wound and ripped it wider open.

His back arched, his eyes closed. “My family. Please.” His voice was a flutter, dry as autumn leaves.

She dug into his leg, picking through layers of fat, muscle and blood vessel, but she couldn’t find the artery. It might have retracted when it was severed. “I could cut you open,” she said. “Search for the damn artery. But the blood loss …” She couldn’t believe how much blood had already poured from the young man; it was all over his legs, her arms, the floor.

“It hurts, you know. But it’s cold.” His words were labored. He was going into shock.

She pressed down on the wound. “You have a long marriage,” she said quickly. “Happy, I think. Children. A son.”

“Yes? … What is his name?”

“John. John Kipling. There is a great war, that consumes Europe.”

“The Germans, I suppose. Always the Germans.”

“Yes. John volunteers to fight in France. He dies.”

“Ah.” Ruddy’s face was almost expressionless now, but his mouth twitched. “At least he will be spared that pain, as will I—or perhaps not. That damn logic again! I wish I understood.” He opened his eyes, and she saw reflected in them the impassive sphere of the Eye of Marduk. “The light,” he said. “The light in the morning …”

She pressed a bloody hand to his chest. His heart fluttered, and stopped.

Refusing help, Alexander clambered stiffly to the top of the Ishtar Gate. He looked out to the east, over the plain, to where the fires of the Mongols still burned. The hovering spheres the men called Eyes, that had littered the air during the battle, had all evaporated now, all save the great monstrosity in the Temple of Marduk. Perhaps these new indifferent gods had seen all they wanted to see.

There were tribunals to arrange. It had turned out that the strange Englishman Cecil de Morgan had been feeding information to Mongol spies—information that included the route by which Sable Jones had reached the Eye of Marduk so quickly. The English commander Grove, and those others, Bisesa and Abdikadir, were demanding the right to try these renegades, de Morgan and Sable, according to their own customs. But Alexander was King, and he knew there was only one justice his men would accept. De Morgan and Sable would be tried before the whole army, drawn up on the plain outside the city; in his own mind their fate was assured.

This war was not done, he thought, even if this mighty figure Genghis was dead. He was confident he could destroy the Mongols eventually. But why should Macedonian and Mongol fight at the behest of the Gods of the Eye, like dogs thrown into a pit? They were men, not beasts. Perhaps there was another way.

It amused him that Bisesa and the others called themselves modern— as if Alexander and his time were pale stories from long ago, told by a tired old man. But from Alexander’s point of view these strange, spindly, gaudy creatures, from a far and uninteresting future, were a froth. There was only a handful of them, compared to the great crowds of his Macedonians, and of the Mongols. Oh, their gadgets had been briefly useful in the battle against the Khan, but they had soon been exhausted, and then it had been back to the most ancient weapons of all, iron and blood, discipline and raw courage. The moderns didn’t matter. It was clear to him that the beating heart of the new world lay here—with him, and these Mongols.

He had always known that his moment of hesitation at the river Beas had been an aberration. Now it was behind him. He decided he would instruct Eumenes to approach the Mongols once again and seek common ground. If he defeated the Mongols he would be strong; but if he combined with them stronger still. There was surely not a power in this wounded world that could match them. And then, armed with the knowledge that Bisesa and the others had brought, there was no limit to the possibilities of the future.

Thinking, planning, Alexander tasted the wind that blew from the east, the heart of the world continent, rich and full of time.

Part 5

Mir

37. Laboratory

You could hardly call it a cage.

Five years after the Discontinuity and their capture, the man-apes were still trapped under a bit of camouflage net, thrown loosely over a conveniently hovering Eye, and weighted down with boulders. Nobody had given any thought to putting together anything better—though some quirk of the military mind had ordered the boulders to be painted white; there was always somebody who needed his attitude adjusted with a bit of pointless work.

It was under this net that Seeker spent her days, alone save for the fast-growing Grasper. Grasper was nearly six years old now. Her young mind still forming, she had adjusted to the reality of their confinement. Seeker couldn’t adjust. But she had to accept it.

The soldiers came in once a day to give her food and water and scrape out her dung. Sometimes they held her down and pushed their fat penises into her body. Seeker didn’t care about that. She wasn’t hurt, and she had learned to let her captors do what they want, while she kept an eye on Grasper. She had no idea why the soldiers did what they did. But whether she knew or not didn’t matter, of course, for she had no power to stop them.

She could break out of here. On some level she still knew that. She was stronger than any of the soldiers. She could rip open that netting with her teeth and hands or even her feet. But she hadn’t seen a single other of her kind, save Grasper, since the day of her capture. Through the holes in the net she could see no trees, no welcoming green shade. If she did break out there was nowhere for her to go, nothing waiting for her but clubs, fists and rifle butts. She had had to be taught that brutal lesson.

Suspended between animal and human, she had only a dim grasp of future and past. Her memory was like a gallery hung with vivid images—her mother’s face, the warmth of her nest, the overwhelming scent of the male who first took her, the sweet agony of childbearing, the dreadful limpness of her first child. And her sense of the future was dominated by an inchoate vision of her own death, a fear of the blackness that lurked behind the yellow eyes of cats. But there was no sense of narrative about her memories, no logic or order: like most animals she lived in the present, for if the present could not be survived the past and future meant nothing anyhow. And her present, this helpless captivity, had expanded to encompass her whole consciousness.