27: THE FISH-EATERS

After three weeks of the journey along the coast of the Gulf, Eumenes let the moderns know that the scouts had found an inhabited village.

Driven by curiosity and a need for a break from the sea, Bisesa, Abdikadir, Josh, Ruddy and a small squad of British soldiers under Corporal Batson joined an advance party at the head of the sprawling train that Alexander’s army had become. All the moderns were discreetly equipped with firearms. As they disembarked, Casey, his leg still weak, watched from the boat with envy.

It was a day’s walk to the village, and it was a tough slog. Though Ruddy was the first to grumble, they were all soon suffering. If they walked too close to the shore there was nothing but salt and stony ground where nothing grew, but if they went inland, they hit sand dunes over which the going would have been tough even without the rain. There was always a danger of flash floods, as water came pouring down overloaded courses. And when the rain stopped falling, the horseflies would rise up like clouds.

Snakes were a constant hazard. None of the moderns was able to recognize the varieties they encountered here—but as they might have been drawn from a line of descent that spanned two million years or more, perhaps that wasn’t surprising.

Bisesa glared at the unmoving Eyes, effortlessly placed over the most difficult country, which watched her petty struggles as she passed.

At the end of the day the party came to the village. With the Macedonian soldiers, Bisesa and the others crept up the crest of a bluff to see. Close to the shore, it was a poor-looking place. Round-shouldered huts sat squat on the stony ground. A few scrawny sheep grazed the scrubby grass behind the village.

The natives weren’t prepossessing. Adults and children alike had long, matted, filthy hair, and the men trailed beards. Their main source of nourishment was fish, which they caught by wading into the water and casting nets made of palm bark. They went about their business dressed crudely in what looked like the treated skin of fish, or maybe even whale.

Ruddy said, “They are clearly human. But they are Stone Age.”

De Morgan said, “But they may have come from a time not much before now—I mean, Alexander’s era. One of the Macedonians has seen people like this before; he calls them Fish-Eaters.”

Abdikadir nodded. “We tend to forget how empty Alexander’s world was. A couple of thousand kilometers away you have the Greece of Aristotle—but here you have Neolithics, living as they have since the Ice Age, perhaps.”

Bisesa said, “Then perhaps this new world won’t seem so strange to the Macedonians as it does to us.”

The Macedonians treated the Fish-Eaters briskly, driving them off with a volley of arrows. Then the advance party marched into the deserted village.

Bisesa looked around curiously. The stink of fish permeated everything. She found a kind of knife on the ground—made of bone, perhaps the scapula of a small whale or dolphin. It had been finely carved, and dolphins danced over its surface.

Josh inspected the huts. “Look at this. The huts are just skins thrown over frames of whale bones, or—look here—banks of heaped-up oyster shells. Almost everything they have they get from the sea—even their clothes, tools and homes—remarkable!”

As an example of living archaeology, Bisesa thought, this was an unimaginably rich place, and she recorded as much as she could, despite the phone’s bleating. But she felt depressed at how much of the past was lost and forever unknowable; this shard of a vanished way of life, torn out of its context, was just another page ripped out of an untitled book, salvaged from a vanished library.

The soldiers were here for provision, not archaeology. But there was little here for them. A store of powdered fish-meal was dug up and taken away. The few wretched sheep were captured and quickly slaughtered, but even their meat turned out to taste dreadfully of fish and salt. Bisesa was dismayed at this casual destruction of the village, but there was nothing she could do about it.

A single Eye hovered over the village of the Fish-Eaters. It watched the Macedonians leave as it had watched them come, with no reaction.

They spent the night not far from the village, close to a stream. The Macedonians set up camp with their customary efficiency, stretching some of their leather tents out on poles as a rough awning to keep off the rain. The British soldiers helped with the work.

Bisesa decided it was time for some proper admin; the toilet facilities on Alexander’s ships weren’t exactly advanced. The relief at getting her boots off was huge. Briskly she treated her feet. Her socks crackled with sweat and dust, and the gaps between her toes were caked with dirt and what looked like the beginnings of athlete’s foot. She was sparing with what was left of her medical kit, which was after all just a small emergency pack, though out in the field like this she continued to use her Puritabs.

She stripped and dunked herself in the cold water of the stream. She wasn’t too concerned by the attentions of her male companions. Lusts were slaked easily enough in the Macedonian camp. Josh watched her, of course, as he always did—but boyishly, and if she caught him he would duck his head and blush. She rinsed out her clothes and left them to dry.

By the time she was done, the Macedonians had built a fire. She lay down on the ground close to the fire, slipped under her poncho, and set her pack as a pillow beneath her head. Josh, as always, maneuvered himself closest to her, and settled into a position where he could just stare at her when he thought nobody was looking. But behind his back Ruddy and Abdikadir mimed blowing kisses.

Ruddy started holding forth, as he always did. “We are so few. We’ve seen a great swath of the new world now, from Jamrud to the coast of Arabia. Humans are spread thin, and thinking humans thinner! But we keep seeing the emptiness of the land as an absence. We should regard it rather as an opportunity.”

Josh murmured, “What are you on about, Giggers?”

Ruddy Kipling took off his spectacles and rubbed eyes that looked small and deep. “Our English Empire has gone now, wiped away like a bridge suit in a card shuffle. Instead we have this—Mir, a new world, a blank canvas. And we, we few, might be the only source of rationality and science and civilization left in the world.”

Abdikadir smiled. “Fair enough, Ruddy, but there aren’t too many Englishmen here on Mir to translate that dream into reality.”

“But an Englishman always was a mongrel. And that’s not a bad thing. He is the sum of his influences, from the solemn might of the Romans to the fierce intelligence of democracy. Well, then, we must start to build a new England—and forge new Englishmen!—right here in the sands of Arabia. And we can found our new state from the beginning on solid English principles. Every man absolutely independent, so long as he doesn’t infringe his neighbor’s rights. Prompt and equal justice before God. Toleration of religions and creeds of any shape or form. Every man’s home his castle. That sort of thing. It’s an opportunity to clear out a lot of clutter.”

“That all sounds marvelous,” said Abdikadir. “And who’s to run the new world empire? Shall we leave it to Alexander?”

Ruddy laughed. “Alexander achieved marvelous things for his time, but he is a military despot—worse, an Iron Age savage! You saw that display of idol-bothering by the sea. Perhaps he had the right instincts, buried under his armor—he did cart along the Greeks—but he’s not the chap. For the time being we civilized folk must guide. We are few—but we have the weapons.” Ruddy lay back, arm behind his head, and closed his eyes. “I can see it now. The forges will ring out! The Sword will bring peace—and peace will bring wealth—and wealth will bring the Law. It’s as natural as the growth of a sturdy oak. And we, who have seen it all before, will be there to water the sapling.”

He meant to inspire them, but his words seemed hollow to Bisesa, and their camp seemed a small and isolated place, a speck of light in a land empty even of ghosts.

The next day, during the walk back, Ruddy took ill with a severe dose of gut infection. Bisesa and Abdikadir dug into their dwindling twenty-first-century medical packs to give him antibiotics, and made up drinks of sugar and water. Ruddy asked for his opium, insisting it was one of the oldest analgesics in the Indian pharmacopoeia. Still the diarrhea weakened him, and his broad head looked too heavy on his neck. But he talked and talked.

“We need a new set of myths to bind us,” Ruddy wheezed. “Myths and rituals; that’s what makes a nation. That’s what America lacks, you know—a young nation—no time yet to grow tradition. Well, America is gone now, and Britain too, and the old stories won’t do—not any more.”

Josh said wryly, “You’re just the man to write new ones, Ruddy.”

“We are living in a new age of heroes,” he said. “This is the age when the world is built. That’s our opportunity. And we must tell the future what we did, how we did it and why . . .” On Ruddy talked, filling the air with his dreams and plans, until dehydration and breathlessness forced him to stop, and they walked slowly on through the huge, empty desert.