Orion in the Dying Time Part 27

I understood. The empire of Alexander the Great had broken up in the same manner, general battling general to hold the territory already possessed or to steal territory from a former comrade in arms.

"What will you do, my lord Subotai?" I asked.

He drained his chalice and put it down beside him. Immediately one of the slaves filled it to the brim.

"I will not break the laws of the Ya.s.sa," he said. "I will not spill the blood of other Mongols."

"Not willingly," said one of the men sitting around us.

Subotai nodded, his mouth set in a tight grim line. "I will lead my warriors westward, Orion, past the river they call Danube. It is a difficult land, cold and filled with dismal forests. But it is better than fighting amongst ourselves."

If Subotai intended to march into Europe, he would devastate the civilization there that was just beginning to throw off the shackles of ignorance and barbarism that had followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. In another few centuries the Renaissance would begin, with all that it would eventually mean for human knowledge and freedom. But not if the Mongols laid waste to all of Europe, from Muscovy to the English Channel.

"My lord Subotai," I said slowly, "once you asked me to tell you all I knew of this land where you now camp, and of the lands further west."

Some of his old vigor returned to his eyes. "Yes! And now that you have returned to me, I am more eager than ever to learn about the Germans and Franks and the other powers of the lands to the west."

"I will tell you all I know, but as you already understand, their lands are cold and heavily forested, not good territory for a Mongol warrior."

He made a deep sigh. "But what other lands are there for my men?"

His question brought a smile to my lips. "I know a place, my lord, where open gra.s.sland stretches for as far as a man can ride in a whole year. A place of great cats with sabers for teeth and other beasts, even more ferocious."

Subotai's eyes widened and the warriors around him stirred.

"There are few people in this land, so few that you could ride for weeks without seeing anyone."

"We would not have to fight?"

"You will will have to fight," I said. "The land is ruled not by men, but by monsters such as no man has ever seen before." have to fight," I said. "The land is ruled not by men, but by monsters such as no man has ever seen before."

"Monsters?" blurted one of the warriors. "What kind of monsters?"

"Have you seen them yourself?"

"Are you spinning tales to try to frighten us, man of the west?"

Subotai hushed them with an impatient gesture.

I replied, "I have been there, my lords, and seen this land and the monsters who rule it. They are fierce and powerful and hideous."

I spent the next hour describing Set and his Shaydanian clones, and the dinosaurs that he had brought from the Mesozoic.

"What you speak of," said Subotai at last, "sounds much like the djinn of the Persians or the tsan goblins that the people of the high mountains fear."

"They are to be feared, that is true enough," I said. "And they have great powers. But they are neither ghosts nor goblins. They are as mortal as you or I. I myself have killed them with little more than a spear or a knife."

Subotai sank back on his silken cus.h.i.+ons, deep in thought. The others drank and held out their goblets for more wine. I drank, too. And waited.

Finally Subotai asked me, "Can you lead us to this land?"

"Yes, my lord Subotai."

"I would see these monsters for myself."

"I can take you there."

"How soon? How long a journey is it?"

Suddenly I realized that I was talking myself into a double-edged trap. To bring Subotai or any of the Mongols back to the Neolithic, I would have to reveal to them powers that would convince them that I was a sorcerer. The Mongols did not deal kindly with sorcerers: usually they put them to the sword, or killed them more slowly.

And once in the Neolithic they might very well take one look at Set's reptilians and decide that they were supernatural creatures. Although the Mongols feared no human, the sight of the Shaydanians might terrify them.

"My lord Subotai," I answered carefully, "the land I speak of cannot be reached on horseback. I can take you there tomorrow morning, if you desire it, but the journey will seem very strange to you."

He cast me a sidelong glance. "Speak more plainly, Orion."

The others hunched forward, more curiosity on their faces than fear.

"You know that I come from a far land," I said.

"From beyond the sea that stretches to the sky," Subotai said, recalling what I had told him years before.

"Yes," I agreed. "In my land people travel in very strange ways. They do not need horses. They can go across far mountains and seas in the blink of an eye."

"Witchcraft!" snapped one of the warriors.

"No," I said. "Merely a swifter way to travel."

"Like the magic carpets that the storytellers of Baghdad speak of?" asked Subotai.

I grabbed at that idea. "Indeed, my lord, very much like that."

His brows rose a centimeter. "I had always thought such tales to be nothing more than children's nonsense."

Bowing my head slightly to show some humility, I replied, "Children's nonsense sometimes becomes reality, my lord. You yourself have accomplished deeds that would have seemed impossible to your grandfathers."

He made that sighing noise again, almost a snort. The others remained silent.

"Very well," said Subotai. "Tomorrow morning you will take me to this strange land you describe. Me, and my personal guard."

"How many men will that be?" I asked.

Subotai smiled. "A thousand. With their horses and weapons."

The warrior sitting next to Subotai on his left said without humor, "You will need a large carpet, Orion."

The others burst into laughter. Subotai grinned, then looking at the surprise on my face, began to roar. The joke was on me. The others lolled back on the cus.h.i.+ons and howled until tears ran down their cheeks. I laughed, too. Mongols do not laugh at sorcerers and witchcraft. As long as they were guffawing they were not afraid of me. As long as they did not fear me they would not try to knife me in my back.

Chapter 35.

One of Subotai's tough, battle-scarred veterans led me to a stall in the loft of the church where a few blankets and pillows had been put together to make a serviceable bed. I slept soundly, without dreams.

The sun shone weakly through tattered scudding gray clouds the next morning. The rain had stopped but the streets of Kiev were rivers of gooey gray-brown mud.

Subotai's quartermaster had apparently spent the night hunting up equipment taken as spoils from the Muscovites big enough for me to wear. Obviously nothing made for the Mongols themselves would fit me.

I came down to the nave of the converted church decked in a chain-mail s.h.i.+rt, leather trousers, and boots that felt a little too snug but warm. A curved scimitar of Damascus steel hung at my side, its hilt sparkling with precious gems. The faithful old iron dagger that Odysseus had given me was now tucked into my belt.

A red-haired slave led me out into the watery sunlight, where a pair of Mongol warriors waited on their ponies. They held a third horse, slightly bigger than the other two, for me. Without a word we rode through the muddy streets and past the gate that I had entered the night before.

Out beyond the city wall waited Subotai's personal guard, a thousand hardened warriors who had beaten every army hurled against them from the Great Wall of China to the sh.o.r.es of the Danube River. Mounted on tough little ponies, grouped in precise military formations of tens and hundreds, each warrior was accompanied by two or three more horses and all the equipment he would need for battle.

At the head of the formation Subotai's magnificent white stallion pranced as impatiently as the great general himself must have felt.

"Orion!" he called as I approached. "We are ready to move."

It was a command and a challenge. I knew I had to translate the entire ma.s.s of them through s.p.a.cetime, but I feared to attempt doing it as abruptly as I myself moved through the continuum.

So, playacting a bit, I squinted up at the weak sun, turned slightly in my creaking saddle, and pointed roughly northward.

"That is the way, my lord Subotai."

He gave a guttural order to the warrior riding next to him and the entire formation wheeled around and followed us at a slow pace.

I led them into the dismal dark woods that began a bare half mile from the city's walls. Concentrating with an intensity I had never known before, I uttered a silent plea for help to Anya as I tried to focus all the energy I could tap for the translation through s.p.a.cetime.

The woods grew misty. A soft gray billowing fog rose from the ground and wrapped us in its chill tendrils. Our mounts trotted ahead slowly, Subotai at my side, his bodyguards behind me, close enough to slice me to ribbons at the slightest provocation. The fog grew thicker, blanketing sound as well as sight. I could hear the m.u.f.fled tread of the horse's hooves in the muddy ground, an occasional snort, the jangle of a sword hilt against a steel buckle.

I ignored all distractions. I even ignored Subotai himself as I gathered my mental strength and forced the entire group of us across the continuum. I felt the familiar moment of utter cold, but it was over almost before it began.

I realized that I had squeezed my eyes shut. Opening them, I saw that we were still in a forest. But the mist was dissolving, evaporating. The ground beneath us was firm and dry. The sunlight filtering through the tall leafy trees was strong and bright.

We were now in the forest of Paradise, I realized, riding north by east toward the edge of the woods. The time was the early Neolithic. This was the place and the time where Set had determined to make his stand: to wipe out the human race while it was still small and weak, to wreak vengeance upon me and the Creators for destroying his home world, to seize the planet Earth and make it his own forever.

I glanced at Subotai. He rode his pony quietly, his face impa.s.sive. But his eyes were darting everywhere. He knew we were no longer in the chill, dank land of the Muscovites. The sun was warm, even under the magnificent trees. He was noting every tree, every rock, every tiny animal that darted through the underbrush. He was building up a map inside his head as we rode through this land that was completely new to him.

At last he asked me, "You say there are no other men here?"

"There are a few scattered tribes, my lord. But they are small and weak. They possess no weapons except crude wooden spears and bows that have not the range of the Mongol bow."

"And few women, also?"

"Very few, I fear."

He grunted. "And the monsters? How are they armed?"

"They use giant lizards to do their fighting for them-dragons bigger than ten horses, with sharp claws and ferocious teeth."

"Animals," Subotai muttered.

I corrected, "Animals that are controlled by the minds of their masters, so that they fight with intelligence and courage."

He fell silent at that.

For most of the day we rode through the forest, the Mongol warriors behind us filtering through the trees as silently as wraiths. There was no pause for a meal, we chewed dried meat and drank water from our canteens while in the saddle.

It was nearly sundown when we reached the edge of the forest and saw the endless expanse of gra.s.s stretching out beyond the horizon.

Subotai actually grinned. He nosed his pony out from under the trees and rode a hundred yards or so onto the gra.s.sy plain.

"How far does this land extend?" he called back to me.

Making a quick mental calculation, I shouted back, "About the same as the distance between Baghdad and Karakorum!"

He gave a wild shout and spurred his mount into a gallop. His bodyguards, startled, went yowling and charging after him, leaving me sitting in my saddle, staring at the unusual sight of Mongols whooping like boys wild with joyful exhilaration.

Then I saw a pterosaur gliding against the bright blue sky, high above.

"I welcome your return, Orion." Set's cold voice rang inside my head. "You have brought more noisy monkeys to annoy me, I see. Good. Slaughtering them will please me very much."

I clamped down on my thoughts. The less Set knew about who these men were, the better. I had to fight him in the time and place of his choosing, but whatever element of surprise I could hold on to was vital to me.

Subotai returned at a trot after nearly half an hour of hard joyriding, his normally doughty face split by a wide grin.

"You have done well, Orion. This land is like the Gobi in springtime."

"It is like this all year round," I said. In a few thousand years it would become the most arid desert on Earth, as the ice sheets covering Europe in this era retreated and the nouris.h.i.+ng rains moved north with them. But for now, for as long as Subotai and his sons and his sons' sons lived, the gra.s.s would be green and abundant.

"We must bring the rest of the army here, and our families with their yurts and herds," Subotai said enthusiastically. "Then we can deal with these demons and dragons of yours."

I was about to agree when I spotted the lumpy brown shape of a four-legged sauropod on the horizon.

Pointing, I said, "There is one of the beasts. It is not a fighting dragon, but it can be dangerous."

Subotai immediately spurred his horse into a charge toward the sauropod. A dozen of his guard charged out after him. I urged my mount into a gallop, too, and we all dashed for the hump-backed brown and dun dinosaur as it plodded slowly away from us. I felt the wind in my face and the straining muscles of my pony beneath me; it was exhilarating.

As we neared the sauropod, its head turned on its long, snaky neck to look at us. I realized that Set was using the beast as a scout, examining us through the reptile's eyes. I could sense him hissing with his equivalent of amused laughter.

The animal lumbered off toward a small rise in the land, little more than a gra.s.sy knoll where some thick berry bushes grew.

"Be careful!" I shouted to Subotai over the pounding of our horses' hooves. "There may be others."