36: AFTERMATH

Hephaistion was dead.

Alexander had won a great battle in almost impossible circumstances, in a new world, against a foe more than a thousand years more advanced. But in doing so he had lost his companion, his lover—his only true friend.

Alexander knew what was expected of him, at this moment. He would retire to his tent, and drink himself to oblivion. Or else he would refuse to drink or eat at all for days on end, until his family and companions feared for his health. Or he would order the construction of an impossibly grandiose memorial: perhaps a carving of a majestic lion, he thought idly.

Alexander decided he would do none of those things. He would grieve for Hephaistion in private, true. Perhaps he would order that all the horses in camp should have their manes and tails clipped. Homer told of how Achilles had shorn his horses in honor of his dead, beloved Patroclus; yes, that was how Alexander might mourn Hephaistion.

But for now there was too much to do.

He walked over the blood-soaked ground of the battlefield, and through the tents and buildings that housed the wounded. His advisers and companions fluttered anxiously at his heels—and his doctor, for Alexander had taken more than a few more blows himself. Many of the men were glad to see him, of course. Some boasted of what they had done in the battle, and Alexander listened patiently and, straight-faced, commended them on their valor. But others were sunk in shock. He had seen this before. They would sit numbly, or they would tell their petty stories over and over. The men would recover, as they always did, as would this bloodied ground, when the spring came and the grass grew again. But nothing could erase the anger and guilt of those who had survived where companions had fallen, as their King would never forget Hephaistion.

Ruddy lay back against the wall, arms limp, palms up, fingers curled. His small hands, coated in blood, looked like two crabs, she thought. Blood was gushing from a puncture wound, just below his left hip. “We’re seeing a lot of blood today, Bisesa.” He was still smiling.

“Yeah.” She dragged Curlex from her pocket, and tried jamming it in the hole. But the blood was still pumping. Sable’s shot seemed to have ruptured a femoral artery, one of the primary avenues by which blood reached the lower half of the body. There was no way she could move him—no transfusions she could give him, no casevac she could call in.

No time for sentiment: she had to treat Ruddy as a broken machine, a truck with the bonnet up, that she had to fix. She thought desperately. She began to rip open his trouser leg. “Try not to talk,” she said. “Everything will be fine.”

“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.