Orion o-1

by Ben Bova

  “Yes,” she admitted, “I knew he was there.”

  “Then why did you lie to me?”

  Her chin went up a notch. “I did not lie. You asked me if I had seen him and I told you the truth: I had not. The Dark One stayed in the tent of Subotai. I never set eyes on him.”

  “But you knew he was there.”

  “And I knew that he had prophesied to Hulagu that you would come to the camp. And that he warned Hulagu that you were a demon and advised him to kill you,” Agla said. There was no shame in her expression, no guilt. “I knew that they had almost succeeded. And I knew that as long as you were under the lord Subotai’s protection, no further harm would come to you. Who do you think found you, dying in the dust behind the dung heap? Who do you think brought Subotai to you and convinced him that you were too valuable to be allowed to die?”

  “You did that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why? You didn’t know who I was or why I had come to…”

  “I knew enough,” Agla said, her gray eyes shining in the light of the fire that crackled in the hearth. “I had heard that a strange man of great power had been brought into the camp and that Hulagu was fearful enough to listen to the Dark One’s warning. I knew that you were the man I have waited for all my life.”

  “So you saved my life and protected me until I was well.”

  She nodded. “As I will protect you with all my power once we reach Ogotai’s court in Karakorum.”

  “Ahriman will be there,” I said.

  “Yes. And he will try to kill you again.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Karakorum was as strange a mixture of squalor and splendor, of barbarian simplicity and Byzantine intricacy, as ever existed on the face of the Earth.

  During the time of Genghis Khan this city of tents and yurts had become the capital of the world, where the conquered nobility of China and Islam came to serve the Mongols as slaves, where the treasures of all Asia flowed into the hands of men who had begun their lives as nomadic tribesmen.

  While he lived, Genghis Khan had forbade the building of permanent structures in his capital. The tents and carts and yurts of old were good enough for him, in this encampment by a serene river, where good grass grew to feed his most important treasure — the herds of horses that carried his warriors to the farthest corners of the world.

  It was the horses that marked the outskirts of Karakorum. Huge corrals ringed the Mongol capital, holding tens of thousands of the small, tough ponies of the Gobi. Their neighings could be heard for miles. Their stirrings raised clouds of dust that could be seen from two day’s ride away. It reminded me, as we approached the capital one chilly morning, of the smoke and smog that marked industrial cities in the twentieth century.

  Ogotai was the High Khan, and he ruled with the administrative aid of Chinese mandarins who understood writing and record-keeping. As Agla and I neared the city, we could see that buildings of sun-baked mud and even stone were rising around the ordu, the pavilion of tents that marked the headquarters of the High Khan. Most of these new buildings, I quickly learned, were churches or temples. The Mongols were tolerant toward religions, and priests of every type crowded the bursting city: Buddhist monks in their saffron robes, turbaned imams from the Moslem lands, Nestorian Christian priests, Chinese Taoists in their silks and brocades, and many others whom I could not recognize.

  We were stopped by the guards who stood on duty where the road entered the maze of buildings that marked the outskirts of Karakorum. A silk-robed Chinese examined the paper that Subotai had given me — a paper written by one of Subotai’s Chinese aides — and commanded a warrior to find us living quarters. The warrior mounted his pony and led us silently through the bustling hodgepodge of Karakorum. Treasure caravans were unloading; men and women milled about everywhere. There was no order to the layout of the buildings, no preplanned streets as such, merely meandering paths of hard-beaten earth between the haphazardly constructed buildings. Every language in the world was being spoken here, and often shouted or screamed, as merchants haggled over prices or offered wares ranging from pomegranates from China to swords of Damascus steel so fine that you could bend the blade over double without snapping it.

  We were installed in a small, one-story house made of adobe. Its door opened onto the broad empty space that surrounded the High Khan’s ordu. From the narrow window of the front room we could see the pavilion of white tents, hung with silk and cloth-of-gold, and the warriors who stood guard before the entrances. As they had in Hulagu’s camp, forty degrees of longitude to the west of here, the Mongols had two big bonfires blazing in front of the main entrance to the High Khan’s tent. To ward off evil spirits.

  There was an evil spirit already in this city, I knew. Ahriman must have arrived before us. Had he won the ear of the High Khan? Would I be the victim of another assassination attempt once I presented myself to Ogotai?

  But even those worries failed to keep me awake. After so many weeks of hard riding, Agla and I collapsed into the feather bed and slept for almost twenty-four hours.

  I awoke to a sense of danger.

  My eyes snapped open and every sense was instantly alert. Agla lay slumbering beside me, her head nestled against my shoulder. Without moving my head, I scanned the little bedroom. It had no windows and only one doorway, hung with a curtain of beads, about two feet to the left of the bed. It had been a slight rustling of those beads that had awakened me, I realized.

  I held my breath, listening. My back was turned to the doorway, so I couldn’t see it unless I turned my head, and I didn’t want to do that for fear of alerting whoever it was that was standing on the other side of the beaded curtain.

  The curtain rustled again and I saw, in the dim early morning light, a gray shadow slide against the far wall of the bedroom. Then another. Two men, wearing the conical steel helmets of Mongol warriors. The first shadow raised its arm and I saw the slim blade of a dagger in its hand.

  I rolled across the sagging bed and hit them both at the same time with a body block that sent them staggering into the other wall. Pushing myself up from the floor before they could gather their wits, I twisted the dagger out of the first one’s hand. As it fell clattering to the floor, I swung as hard as I could at the neck of the second assassin with a backhand chop. Behind me I heard Agla scream. The first warrior was scrambling to his feet now and reaching for the sword at his waist. I punched at his heart and felt ribs breaking. As he doubled over, I drove a knee into his face. He bounced off the wall and slid to the floor.

  Turning, I saw Agla standing naked on the far side of the bed, a dagger of her own in her left hand, her lips pulled back in a savage snarl.

  “Are you all right?” We both asked at the same instant. Then she laughed, shakily, and I took a deep breath and calmed my racing heart.

  She wrapped the bed quilt around her as I squatted down to examine the would-be assassins. Both were dead. I had driven a sliver of bone from the nose into the brain of the first one, and the second one’s neck was broken.

  Agla came around the bed and knelt beside me. Her eyes were round with awe.

  “You killed them both, with your bare hands!”

  Nodding, “I didn’t mean to. I wanted to find out who sent them.”

  “I can tell you that. It was the Dark One.”

  “Yes, I think so, too. But it would be better to know for certain.”

  A warrior burst through the open front door, sword in hand. “I heard a scream!” Then he saw the two dead men sprawled on the floor. He looked at me, then back at the would-be assassins.

  I expected that he would be angry that two of his fellow Mongols had been killed by an alien. I tensed myself for another attack. Instead, he gaped at me in wonder.

  “You did this?”

  I nodded.

  “Alone? Without weapons?”

  “Yes,” I snapped. “Now get them out of here.”

  Agla, still grasping the quilt around her shoulders, said, “Wait
. You wanted to make certain who has sent these killers.”

  Before I could reply, she dropped to her knees and peeled back the eyelid of one of the dead men. She stared into it intently, shuddered slightly, and then closed the man’s eye again. Then she turned to the other and did the same. As I watched her, I realized that I was standing stark naked. The heat of fighting and anger was subsiding inside me; I began to feel chilled.

  Agla got to her feet and clutched the quilt around her more tightly. “It was the Dark One. I saw it in their eyes.”

  “You can see that in the eyes of dead men?” It sounded ridiculous to me.

  But she said solemnly, “I can see their entire lives in their eyes. It is a gift of the gods.”

  I couldn’t believe that. Agla “saw” what she wanted to see. If she had believed that the assassins had been sent by Hulagu, or the High Khan, or the Man in the Moon, she would have seen that in their eyes, too.

  But the warrior believed her. Wide-eyed, both at my fighting ability and at her psychic power, he dragged the two corpses out of the house and shut the door — but not before he ordered us to remain inside until an officer came to speak with us.

  Barbarians they might have been, but the Mongols lived by strict laws and had much the same kind of police system that any civilized city did. Faster and more efficient than most, in fact. We had hardly finished dressing when a military officer rapped on the front door and opened it, without waiting for us to open it for him.

  He questioned me, ignored Agla. I told him exactly what happened, leaving out only Agla’s “examination” of the two corpses.

  “Who might have sent assassins against you?” the officer asked. He seemed truly concerned. Things like this did not happen often in the Mongol capital.

  I kept my opinion to myself. “I have no way of knowing,” I told him. “We arrived here only yesterday.”

  “Who are your enemies?”

  I shook my head. “I am a stranger here, from a faraway land. I did not think I had any enemies here. Perhaps they mistook me for another.”

  He looked unconvinced, but he said, “Perhaps. Stay here until notified otherwise. You will be guarded by my men.”

  House arrest is what it amounted to. The Mongols did not like trouble in their midst, and they intended to get to the bottom of this. Two warriors parked themselves outside our door. Servants brought food and fresh clothes to us. As usual, they could find no boots large enough to fit me. I kept my sandals. They had stood me in good stead all these weeks, even when I had had to wrap them with skins and furs as we rode through the high passes of the Tien Shan.

  “It is the Dark One,” Agla brooded, once we were alone. “He seeks your death.”

  She insisted on tasting the food that the servants brought before letting me eat it. She even inspected the clothing for hidden charms or potions.

  “A man can be poisoned through the skin,” she warned me. “I know of a poultice that can kill a strong warrior, once it touches his skin for a few moments.”

  Nerve poisons in the thirteenth century? I deferred to her superior knowledge of the time. My attention focused on another matter. I agreed with Agla that no one except Ahriman could possibly want to kill me. But why? Why were we both here? My mission was to kill him, I knew. Was he under the same compulsion? Was it our destiny to hunt each other through all of time, playing an eternal prey-and-predator game for the amusement of Ormazd and whatever other gods there be?

  I refused to believe that I was nothing more than an elaborate toy. Ahriman sought to kill me not merely for the sport of it, but to prevent me from thwarting his plans. He sought nothing less than the destruction of the whole human race, forever, for all of time and space, even if it meant destroying the very fabric of the continuum and demolishing the entire universe of space-time. My unalterable mission was to prevent him from doing that, and the only way I could accomplish it, unfailingly and permanently, was to kill Ahriman.

  I am not an assassin, I told myself. I am not a murderer. I am a soldier, fighting for the life of the entire human race against a ruthless alien who would snuff us out like a candle flame. If I must kill Ahriman, it is because only his death can ensure the life of humankind.

  But still I was troubled. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself, it still boiled down to what Ormazd had told me so long ago in the future: my mission is to find Ahriman and kill him.

  How many times? I suddenly wondered. When is a man finally, unquestionably dead? Ahriman had killed Aretha in the twentieth century, and yet Agla lived here beside me. I myself had died, but still breathed and moved and loved. Is the cycle endless?

  I sank onto the soft mattress of our bed, too soul-weary to contemplate an eternity of hunting Ahriman, of death after death, murder after murder. Agla, sensing my despair, tried to comfort me.

  Then someone knocked at our door. A polite but firm tapping, three distinct raps.

  I went to the door and opened it. It was night now, and the whole inner compound of the ordu was lit by the crackling flames of the twin bonfires. Ogotai’s silken tent swayed in a breeze that was not interrupted by hill or tree for hundreds of miles.

  Standing in front of me was an elderly, slender Chinese in exquisite robes of sky blue and silver. In his high, peaked hat he was almost my height. With the bonfires at his back, it was difficult for me to make out the features of his face.

  “I am Ye Liu Chutsai, advisor to the High Khan,” he said in the soft, high voice of an old man. “May I enter?”

  CHAPTER 14

  The mandarin stood patiently at the doorway. The two Mongol guards were squatting on the bare ground a few yards from the door, gobbling their supper from wooden bowls. Their lances and bows were on the ground next to them, their swords at their sides.

  “Yes, of course,” I said to the mandarin. “Please come in.”

  He had the trick of walking so smoothly that it looked as if he was standing on a small rolling cart, under his floor-length robes, and was actually being wheeled across the threshold. I introduced him to Agla, who bowed very low to him, then busied herself building the fire higher in the hearth.

  Ye Liu Chutsai looked older than any man I had seen among the Mongols. His wispy beard and mustache were completely white, as was the long queue that hung down his back. He stood in the middle of the bare little room, hands tucked inside his wide sleeves.

  I gestured to the only chair in the room, a heavy, stiff thing of wood. “Please sit down, sir.”

  He sat. Agla ducked into the bedroom and brought out two cushions. She offered them to the mandarin, who refused them with a slight shake of his head and a small smile. She and I sat on them, at the feet of the elderly Chinese.

  “I should begin by explaining who I am,” he said so softly that I had to strain slightly to hear him over the crackle of our fire. Its warmth felt good on my back.

  Agla said, “Your name is known as the right hand of the High Khan.”

  He bowed his head again in acknowledgment.

  “Since the original High Khan was still called by his birth name, Timujin, I have served the Mongols. I was only a youth when they swept through the Great Wall and ravaged Yan-king, the city where I was born. I was taken into slavery by the Mongols because I was a scribe. I could read and write. Although the Mongol warriors did not appreciate that, Timujin did.”

  “It was he who became Genghis Khan?” I asked.

  “Yes, but to use either of these names before the Mongols is not wise. He is called the High Khan. He was the father of Ogotai, the current High Khan. He was the man who directed the Mongol conquest of China, of High Asia, of the hosts of Islam. He was the greatest man the world has known.”

  It was not my place to contradict him. The elderly mandarin did not seem like the kind who would bestow praise foolishly or insincerely. He believed what he said, and for all I knew he may have been right.

  “Today the empire of the Mongols stretches from the China Sea to Persia. Hulagu is preparing t
o conquer Baghdad. Subotai is already on the march against the Russians and Poles. Kubilai, in Yan-king, dreams of subduing the Japanese on their islands.”

  “He should forego that dream,” I said, recalling that Kubilai’s invasion fleet was wrecked by a storm that the Japanese called The Divine Wind, Kamikaze.

  Ye Liu Chutsai looked sharply at me. “Why do you say that?” he demanded. “What do you prophesy?

  Agla gave me a warning glance. Prophets trod a dangerous path among these people.

  “I prophesy nothing,” I replied, as offhandedly as I could manage. “I merely made a comment. After all, the Mongols are horse warriors, not sailors. The sea is not their element.”

  The mandarin studied my face for long moments. At last he replied, “The Mongols are indeed the fiercest warriors in the world. They are not sailors, true. But neither are they administrators, or scribes, or artisans. They use captives for those tasks. They will find sailors enough among the Chinese.”

  I bowed my head to his superior wisdom.

  “The empire must continue to expand,” he went on. “That was the true genius of the original High Khan. He saw clearly that these barbarian tribes must continue to move outward, to find enemies that must be conquered, or else their empire will collapse. These horse warriors are utterly brave; they live for war. If there were no enemies beyond their borders, they would fall back to their old ways and begin fighting among themselves. That was the way they lived before Timujin welded the warring tribes of the Gobi into the mightiest conquering army the world has ever seen.”

  “That is why the empire continues to expand,” I said.

  “It must expand. Or collapse. There is no middle way. Not yet.”

  “And as the empire expands, the Mongols slaughter helpless people by the tens of thousands and burn cities to the ground.”

  He nodded his head.

  “And you help them to do it? Why? You are a civilized man. Why do you help the people who invaded your land?”