The Stone Man came after her with her pack, which he dumped on the floor, and clambered back up the stair, out of sight.
The house was as boxy inside as out. It was just a single room, without partitions. Descending the last steps, Emeline had to avoid a hearth set on slab-like stones, which smoldered under the ceiling hole that served as both chimney and doorway. Lamps and ornaments stood in wall alcoves: there were figurines of stone or clay, and what looked like busts, sculpted heads, brightly painted. There was no furniture as such, but neat pallets of straw and blankets had been laid out, and clothing and baskets and stone tools, everything handmade, were heaped up neatly.
The walls were heavy with soot, but the floor looked as if it had been swept. The place was almost tidy. But there was a deep dense stink of sewage, and something else, older, drier, a smell of rot.
A woman, very young, had been sitting in the shadows. She was cradling a baby wrapped in some coarse cloth. Now she gently put the baby down on a heap of straw, and came to Bloom. She wore a simple, grubby, discolored smock. He stroked her pale, dust-colored hair, looked into her blue eyes, and ran his hand down her neck. Emeline thought she could be no more than fourteen, fifteen. The sleeping baby had black hair, like Bloom’s, not pale like hers. The way he held her neck wasn’t gentle, not quite.
“Wine,” Bloom said to the girl, loudly. “Wine, Isobel, you understand? And food.” He glanced at Emeline. “You’re hungry? Isobel. Bring us bread, fruit, olive oil. Yes?” He pushed her away hard enough to make her stagger. She went clambering up out of the house.
Bloom sat on a heap of coarsely woven blankets, and indicated to Emeline that she should do the same.
She sat cautiously and glanced around the room. She didn’t feel like making conversation with this man, but she was curious. “Are those carved things idols?”
“Some of them. The ladies with the big bosoms and the fat bellies. You can take a look if you like. But be careful of the painted heads.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s exactly what they are. Isobel’s people bury their dead, right under the floors of their houses. But they sever the heads and keep them, and plaster them with baked mud, and paint them—well, you can see the result.”
Emeline glanced down uneasily, wondering what old horrors lay beneath the swept floor she was sitting on.
The girl Isobel returned with a jug and a basket of bread. Without a word she poured them both cups of wine; it was warm and a bit salty, but Emeline drank it gratefully. The girl carved hunks of bread from a hard, boulder-like loaf with a stone blade, and set a bowl of olive oil between them. Following Bloom’s example, Emeline dunked the bread into the oil to soften it, then chewed on it.
She thanked Isobel for her service. The girl just retreated to her sleeping baby. Emeline thought she looked frightened, as if the baby waking up would be a bad thing.
Emeline asked, “‘Isobel’?”
Bloom shrugged. “Not the name her parents gave her, of course, but that doesn’t matter now.”
“It looks to me as if you have it pretty easy here, Mr. Bloom.”
He grunted. “Not as easy as all that. But a man must live, you know, Mrs. White, and we’re far from Chicago! The girl is happy enough however. What kind of brute do you think would have her if not for me?
“And she’s content to be in the house of her ancestors. Her people have lived here for generations, you know—I mean, right here, on this very spot. The houses are just mud and straw, and when they fall down they just build another on the plan of the old, just where granddaddy lived. The Midden isn’t a hill, you see, it is nothing less than an accumulation of expired houses. These antique folk aren’t much like us Christians, Mrs. White! Which is why the city council posted me here, of course. We don’t want any friction.”
“What kind of friction?”
He eyed her. “Well, you got to ask yourself, Mrs. White. What kind of person hauls herself through such a journey as you have made?”
She said hotly, “I came for my husband’s memory.”
“Sure. I know. But your husband came from this area—I mean, from a time slice nearby. Most Americans don’t have any personal ties here, as you do. You want to know why most folks come here? Jesus.” He crossed himself as he said the name. “They come this way because they’re on a pilgrimage to Judea, where they hope against hope they’re going to find some evidence that a holy time slice has delivered Christ Incarnate. That would be some consolation for being ripped out of the world, wouldn’t it?
“But there’s no sign of Jesus in Judea—this Judea. That’s the grim truth, Mrs. White. All there is to see there is King Alexander’s steam-engine yards. What the unfortunate lack of an Incarnation in this world means for our immortal souls, I don’t know. And when the pious fools come up against the godless pagans who own Judea, the result is what might be called diplomatic incidents.”
But Emeline nodded. “Surely modern Americans have nothing to fear from an Iron Age warlord like Alexander…”
“But, Mrs. White,” a new voice called, “this ‘warlord’ has already established a new empire stretching from the Atlantic shore to the Black Sea—an empire that spans his whole world. It would serve us all well if Chicago were not to pick a fight with him just yet.”
Emeline turned. A man was clambering stiffly down the stairs, short, portly. He was followed by a younger man, leaner. They both wore what looked like battered military uniforms. The first man wore a peaked cap, and an astoundingly luxuriant mustache. But that facial ornament was streaked with gray; Emeline saw that he must be at least seventy.
Emeline stood, and Bloom smoothly introduced her. “Mrs. White, this is Captain Nathaniel Grove. British Army—formerly, anyhow. And this—”
“I am Ben Batson,” the younger man said, perhaps thirty, his accent as stiffly British as Grove’s. “My father served with Captain Grove.”
Emeline nodded. “My name is—”
“I know who you are, my dear Mrs. White,” Grove said warmly. He crossed the floor and took her hands in his. “I knew Josh well. We arrived here together, aboard the same time slice, you might say. A bit of the North–West Frontier from the year of Our Lord 1885. Josh wrote several times and told me of you, and your children. You are every bit as lovely as I imagined.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” she said sternly. “But he did speak of you, Captain. I’m pleased to meet you. And I’m very sorry he’s not here with me. I lost him a year ago.”
Grove’s face stiffened. “Ah.”
“Pneumonia, they said. The truth was, I think he just wore himself out. He wasn’t so old.”
“Another one of us gone, another one less to remember where we came from—eh, Mrs. White?”
“Call me Emeline, please. You’ve traveled far?”
“Not so far as you, but far enough. We live now in an Alexandria—not the city on the Nile, but at Ilium.”
“Where’s that?”
“Turkey, as we knew it.” He smiled. “We call our city New Troy.”
“I imagine you’re here because of the telephone call in Babylon.”
“Assuredly. The scholar Abdikadir wrote to me, as he wrote to Bloom, here, in the hope of contacting Josh. Not that I have the faintest idea what it all means. But one has to address these things.”
The baby started crying. Bloom, clearly irritated, clapped his hands. “Well, Babylon awaits. Unless you need to rest, Captain—”
“Let’s get on with it.”
“Mr. Batson, if you would lead the way?”
Batson clambered briskly back up the stair, and Grove and Emeline followed.
Emeline looked back once. She glimpsed Isobel frantically trying to hush the baby, and Bloom stalking over to her, visibly angry, his arm raised. Emeline had worked with Jane Addams in Chicago; she was repelled by this vignette. But there was surely nothing Emeline could do that would not make it worse for the girl.
She climbed the worn stairs, a
nd emerged blinking into the dusty Babylonian sunlight.
27: PHAETON
The passengers and their bits of luggage were loaded onto a crude, open phaeton. Bloom sent his “boy” off to find their draft animals.
Emeline was shocked when the Stone Man returned, not with horses as she had expected, but with four more of his own kind.
Where Bloom’s servant was dressed in his rags, these four were naked. Three of them were men, their genitalia small gray clumps in black hair, and the woman had slack breasts with long pink-gray nipples. Their stocky forms were thickly coated with hair, and that and their musculature and collapsed brows gave them the look of gorillas. But they looked far more human than ape, their hands hairless, their eyes clear. It was a shocking sight as they were settled into the phaeton’s harness, each taking a collar around the neck.
Bloom now took a whip of leather, and cracked it without malice across the backs of the lead pair. The Stone Men stumbled forward into a shambling job, and the phaeton clattered forward. Bloom’s servant was to walk alongside the carriage. Emeline saw now that the creatures all had stripes, old whip-scars, across their backs.
Bloom produced a clay bottle and made to pass it around. “Whiskey? It’s a poor grain but not a bad drop.”
Emeline refused; Grove and Batson took a nip each.
Grove asked Emeline politely about her journey from frozen America.
“It took me months; I feel quite the hardened traveler.”
Grove stroked his mustache. “America is quite different from Europe, I hear. No people…”
“None save us. Nothing came over of modern America but Chicago. Not a single sign of humanity outside the city limits has been found—not a single Indian tribe—we met nobody until the explorers from Europe showed up in the Mississippi delta.”
“And none of these man-apes and sub-men and pre-men that Europe seems to be thick with?”
“No.”
Mir was a quilt of a world, a composite of time slices, samples apparently drawn from throughout human history, and the prehistory of the hominid families that preceded mankind.
Emeline said, “It seems that it was only humans who reached the New World; the older sorts never walked there. But we have quite a menagerie out there, Captain! Mammoths and cave bears and lions—the hunters among us are in hog heaven.”
Grove smiled. “It sounds marvelous. Free of all the complications of this older world—just as America always was, I suppose. And Chicago sounds a place of enterprise. I was pleased for him when Josh decided to go back there, after that business of Bisesa Dutt and the Eye.”
Emeline couldn’t help but flinch when she heard that name. She knew her husband had carried feelings for that vanished woman to his grave, and Emeline, deep in her soul, had always been hopelessly, helplessly jealous of a woman she had never met. She changed the subject. “You must tell me of Troy.”
He grimaced. “There are worse places, and it’s ours—in a way. Alexander planted it along with a heap of other cities in the process of his establishment of his Empire of the Whole World. He calls it Alexandria at Ilium.
“Everywhere he went Alexander always built cities. But now, in Greece and Anatolia and elsewhere, he has built new cities on the vacant sites of the old: there is a new Athens, a new Sparta. Thebes, too, though it’s said that’s an expression of guilt, for he himself destroyed the old version before the Discontinuity.”
“Troy is especially precious to the King,” Bloom said. “For you may know the King believes he is descended from Heracles of Argos, and in his early career he modeled himself on Achilles.”
Emeline said to Grove, “And so you settled there.”
“I feared that my few British were overwhelmed in a great sea of Macedonians and Greeks and Persians. And as everybody knows, Britain was colonized in the first place by refugees from the Trojan war. It amused Alexander, I think, that we were closing a circle of causes by doing so, a new Troy founded by descendants of Trojans.
“He left us with a batch of women from his baggage train, and let us get on with it. This was about fifteen years ago. It’s been hard, by God, but we prevail. And there’s no distinction between Tommy and sepoy now! We’re something new in creation altogether, I’d say. But I leave the philosophy to the philosophers.”
“But what of yourself, Captain? Did you ever have a family?”
He smiled. “Oh, I was always a bit too busy with looking after my men for that. And I have a wife and a little girl at home—or did.” He glanced at Batson. “However Ben’s father was a corporal of mine, a rough type from the northeast of England, but one of the better of his sort. Unfortunately got himself mutilated by the Mongols—but not before he’d struck up a relationship with a camp follower of Alexander’s, as it turned out. When poor Batson eventually died of infections of his wounds, the woman didn’t much want to keep Ben; he looked more like Batson than one of hers. So I took him in. Duty, you see.”
Ben Batson smiled at them, calm, patient.
Emeline saw more than duty here. She said, “I think you did a grand job, Captain Grove.”
Grove said, “I think Alexander was pleased, in fact, when we asked for Troy. He usually has to resort to conscripts to fill his new cities, studded as they are in an empty continent; it seems to me Europe is much more an empire of Neanderthal than of human.”
“Empire?” Bloom snapped. “Not a word I’d use. A source of stock, perhaps. The Stone Men are strong, easily broken, with a good deal of manual dexterity. The Greeks tell me that handling a Stone Man is like handling an elephant compared to a horse—a smarter sort of animal; you just need a different technique.”
Grove’s face was a mask. “We use Neanderthals,” he said. “We couldn’t get by if not. But we employ them. We pay them in food. Consul, they have a sort of speech of their own, they make tools, they weep over their dead as they bury them. Oh, Mrs. White, there are all sorts of sub-people. Runner types and man-apes, and a certain robust sort who seem content to do nothing but chew on fruit in the depths of the forest. The other varieties you can think of as animals, more or less. But your Neanderthal is not a horse, or an elephant. He is more man than animal!”
Bloom shrugged. “I take the world as I find it. For all I know elephants have gods, and horses too. Let them worship if it consoles them! What difference does it make to us?”
They lapsed into a silence broken only by the grunts of the Stone Men, and the padding of their bare feet.
The land became richer, split up into polygonal fields where wattle-and-daub shacks sat, squat and ugly. The land was striped by glistening channels. These, Emeline supposed, were Babylon’s famous irrigation canals. Grove told her that many of them had been severed by the arbitrariness of the time-slicing, to be restored under Alexander’s kingship.
At last, on the western horizon, she saw buildings, complicated walls, a thing like a stepped pyramid, all made gray and misty by distance. Smoke rose up from many fires, and as they drew closer Emeline saw soldiers watching vigilantly from towers on the walls.
Babylon! She shivered with a feeling of unreality; for the first time since landing in Europe she had the genuine sense that she was stepping back in time.
The city’s walls were impressive enough in themselves, a triple circuit of baked brick and rubble that must have stretched fifteen miles around, all surrounded by a moat. They came to a bridge over the moat. The guards there evidently recognized Bloom, and waved the party across.
They approached the grandest of the gates in the city walls. This was a high-arched passage set between two heavy square towers. Even to reach the gate the Stone Men, grunting, had to haul the phaeton up a ramp to a platform perhaps fifteen yards above ground level.
The gate itself towered twenty yards or more above Emeline’s head, and she peered up as they passed through it. This, Bloom murmured, was the Ishtar Gate. Its surfaces were covered in glazed brickwork, a haunting royal blue surface across which dragons and bulls danced.
The Stone Men did not look up at this marvel, but kept their eyes fixed on the trampled dirt at their feet.
The city within the walls was laid out in a rough rectangle, its plan spanning the river, the Euphrates. The party had entered from the north, on the east side of the river, and now the phaeton rolled south down a broad avenue, passing magnificent, baffling buildings. Emeline glimpsed statues and fountains, and every wall surface was decorated with dazzling glazed bricks and molded with lions and rosettes.
Bloom pointed out the sights, like a tour guide at the world’s fair. “The complex to your right is the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar, who was Babylon’s greatest ruler. The Euphrates cuts the city in two, north to south. This eastern monumental sector is apparently a survival from Nebuchadnezzar’s time, a couple of centuries before Alexander. In fact this isn’t Alexander’s Babylon any more than it is ours, if you see what I mean. But the western bank, which had been residential, was a ruin, a time slice from a much later century, perhaps close to our own. Alexander has been restoring it for three decades now…”
The roads were crowded, with people rushing here and there, mostly on foot, some in carts or on horseback. Some wore purple robes as grand as Bloom’s, or grander, but others wore more practical tunics, with sandals and bare legs. One grand-looking fellow with a painted face proceeded down the street with an imperious nonchalance. He was leading an animal like a scrawny chimp by a rope attached to its neck. But then it straightened up, to stand erect on hind limbs very like human legs. It wore a kind of ruff of a shining cloth to hide the collar that enslaved it. Nobody Emeline could see wore anything like western clothes. They all seemed short, compact, muscular, dark, another sort of folk entirely compared to the population of nineteenth-century Chicago.
There was an air of tension here, she thought immediately. She was a Chicagoan, and used to cities, and to reading their moods. And the more senior the figure, the more agitated and intent he seemed. Something was going on here. If they were aware of this, Bloom and Grove showed no signs of it.
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