Orion

CHAPTER 9

I opened my eyes and found myself standing in the Middle of a flat, empty wasteland. The soil was sandy, with scrubby patches of grass scattered here and there. The sky was cloudless, although a pall of smoke rose far off on the horizon to my right, climbing into the clear blue sky and spreading its dirty fingers outward. Something was burning. Something the size of a city, judging from the huge bulk of the smoky cloud.

The sun burned hotly on my bare shoulders. I was wearing a short skirt and a pair of sandals, nothing more. Not for an instant did I marvel that I was still alive. I remembered dying in the fusion reactor. I knew that I had not survived that inferno. This was another life. I felt strong, totally in command of myself, although my knees trembled when I thought of what I had gone through during those last few seconds back in the twentieth century.

Back in the twentieth century? Somehow I was certain that I was in a different era, an earlier time. Ahriman had said that I was proceeding through time in reverse, back from The End to The War. Although I knew he was the Prince of Lies, somehow I believed him about that.

Where was I? The desert scrubland all about me gave me no clue. The only sign of human activity was that immense pyre smoldering on the horizon. I started walking toward the tower of smoke, the hot sun at my back throwing a lengthening shadow before me as the weary hours wore on.

It was difficult to control my thirst. If I prevented myself from sweating, my internal body temperature climbed to the point where I grew dizzy and faint. But if I let my sweat glands do their job and cool me, my body began to dehydrate. To some extent I could draw moisture from the plasma in my blood and from water stored in the cells of my visceral organs, but that was a dangerous game that could lead to further, fatal dehydration. Like any ordinary human being caught in the merciless heat of the desert, I needed water. And more desperately with each passing hour.

Off to my left I saw birds circling high in the brazen sky. Vultures. Something, somebody, was either dead or dying off in that direction. Animal or human, whatever it was might have water — or its corpse might be a source of it. I am no less squeamish than the next man, but the desert squeezes the fastidiousness out of you. A man dying of thirst gives up pity before his own life.

The vultures circled lower as I stumbled over rocks as hot as newly baked bread. Both of us were scavengers in the merciless oven of the desert. Finally I saw what the birds had seen before me: a family of refugees, stretched out dead on the dusty soil; an overturned ox-cart a few yards away, with a vulture perched on the rim of its useless wheel and eying its prospective meal. The other birds were swooping in low, spreading their angel-shaped wings as they landed, making obscene sounds as they waddled slowly toward the corpses.

I picked up a fist-sized rock, despite its searing heat, and pegged it at the vulture on the wheel. It hit him on the head like a rifle bullet, killing him instantly. The other birds hardly seemed to notice, until I threw three more rocks at them, hitting two more of their number and finally alarming the rest enough to make them flap angrily into the air, stirring up the dust as they departed.

The birds of death hovered above me, waiting with the patience of certainty, as I staggered toward the bodies. They had not died of thirst. The man was riddled with wounds, most of them in his back. The blood had barely congealed. It looked as if he had been shot with arrows, which his killers had then pulled out so that they could be used again. His wife and two children all had their throats sliced open. The woman, who could not have been much more than twenty years old, was stripped almost naked.

Whatever they had been carrying in the cart had been taken away; it was completely empty. The oxen were gone too. I could see the tracks of the animals in the dusty soil. Whoever had overtaken this pitiful little family placed more value on the beasts of burden than the human beings. There was no water, no possession of any kind among the four corpses. And I found that, despite my earlier certainty, I could not assault their wretched bodies any further to drink their blood, even though my life depended on it.

I squinted up at the glaring sky and saw the vultures still circling, watching silently. I wished I had the tools and the strength to bury these strangers. But I had neither. The vultures won. I turned back toward the pillar of smoke, stumbling across the stony desert, and left the filthy birds to their feast. The day seemed to go on interminably, each moment hotter than the one before it. I walked for many hours, and still the smoke seemed no closer than it had been when I had first noticed it. Something deep inside my mind found the situation ludicrous enough to be almost funny. Certainly Ormazd had sent me here. Certainly something was going to happen at this time and place that could alter the entire history of the universe; Ahriman was going to make another attempt at tearing space-time apart and destroying the continuum. And just as certainly, it seemed, I was doomed to die ignominiously of thirst before I ever got close to the task that Ormazd had sent me here to perform.

And then I saw them.

Five — no, six — horsemen moving slowly across the scrubland ahead of me. Their ponies were lean and haggard, the riders themselves seemed equally wiry. They wore pointed metal helmets and carried long slim lances. Each of them also had a small, double-curved bow and a curved sword clinking at his side.

They saw me at almost the instant I spotted them, stopped their ponies for a moment, then nosed them in my direction. They approached slowly, not out of wariness, but because they knew that a half-naked, unarmed man on foot was not going to escape them.

As they approached, I saw that they were oriental, with the high cheekbones and flattened face of the true Asian. Their skin, what little of it showed outside their leather and metal armor, was a light brownish tone, almost like the color of cured tobacco. Their eyes were narrow, but not particularly slanted. Mongol warriors, I thought, or perhaps some of the earliest Turks to invade the Middle East from their original homeland in high Asia, near Lake Baykal.

The six of them reined up about twenty yards in front of me and eyed me as curiously as I inspected them. Their leader, the second rider from the left, spoke to the others and I found, with a slight shock, that I could understand their language.

“He doesn’t look like the others.”

“Perhaps he was one of their slaves, taken from a different tribe.”

“I’ve never seen anyone like that before. Look at the size of him! And his skin is pink… like a pig’s, almost.”

The rider on the leader’s right gave a harsh laugh. “Maybe we should take him back to the Orkhon. He might reward us for finding such an unusual thing.”

“Such a freak, you mean.”

“He looks human enough, except for the strange color of him.”

“His blood is red, I’ll bet.”

And with that, the rider who said it, the one just to the right of the leader, kicked his skinny pony’s flanks and sprang into a gallop aimed right at me, swinging his lance down to aim it at my heart. The other horsemen sat calmly in their saddles to watch the sport, grinning.

My skin color might remind them of a pig’s, but I had no intention of being spitted like one. I stood stock-still as the horse and lance-wielding rider dashed toward me, drawing up the little strength left in me. I could feel adrenaline surging through my body, making every sense hyper-alert. The horse and rider seemed to slow down, and I had time to notice the pony’s wide eye staring fearfully at me, see its nostrils flaring as it sucked air. The tip of the rider’s lance rode without a waver straight toward my heart, the barbarian horseman hunched forward in his saddle, holding the reins with his left hand, his mouth half-open in which might have been a grimace or a grin of anticipation.

At the right instant I made a toreador’s sidestep, let the lance point slide harmlessly past me, grabbed the haft of the lance and jerked the astounded rider clean out of his saddle. He landed painfully on his shoulder as the horse, its head suddenly twisted around by the jerking of its reins, stumbled and thudded to the ground, raising a thick cloud of dust. The lance splintered, leaving me holding about three feet of its business end.

For a moment or two there was not a sound out of any of us. The dust drifted away and the horse scrambled to its feet and trotted a few yards away, its reins dragging in the dust. The other riders, I noticed, looked at the horse first, and only after they were satisfied that it was unhurt, did they return their attention to their companion, who got to his feet much more slowly than the pony did.

His left arm hung limply from the shoulder, but with a snarl he drew his curved saber and rushed at me before I could say anything to him. I parried his overhand cut with the shaft of the lance I still held, although his surprisingly powerful swing almost slashed all the way through the wood. As he raised his arm for another stroke, I kicked him in the midsection, doubling him over. Dropping the useless shaft of the lance, I wrested the sword from his hand and let him collapse to the ground, gasping for breath.

The leader of the little band wasted no words. He unslung his bow and notched an arrow to it. Pulling the string back to his chest, he let the arrow fly at me. I saw it all as if in slow-motion and used the sword to parry the steel-headed arrow in mid-air.

That stunned them. But not for long. They were hardened warriors, and they were not going to let an enemy escape them, no matter how well he fought. They simply began to edge their ponies around to form a circle around me. They knew as well as I did that I would not be able to parry arrows shot at me from five different directions.

“Wait!” I said. “I am not your enemy. I have come from a far place to see your Khan.”

The warrior at my feet had gotten his wind back somewhat by then, and lifted himself to his knees, still sucking air through his wide-open mouth.

“I have not killed your friend, even though I could have easily,” I said to their leader. “I come in peace. I am not a warrior.”

The leader eyed me suspiciously. “Not a warrior? Then god protect us from the warriors of your race!”

“I come in peace,” I repeated. But I kept a firm grip on the sword.

“You speak our tongue.”

“That is true. I seek your Khan, your leader.”

His narrow-eyed face pinched into a thoughtful frown. “The Khan? The High Khan?”

“Yes.”

“This man is a devil,” said one of the other warriors. “Let’s kill him.” He unlimbered his bow.

“No,” said the leader. “Wait.”

I could see he was struggling furiously within himself to decide what to do. Barbarian warriors are seldom faced with such choices. I wondered if these six horsemen were the ones who had ravaged and killed the family I had seen earlier in the day. They seemed to be carrying no loot.

“Where are you from, stranger? What is your name?”

“I am called Orion,” I said, “and I come from far to the west of here.”

“From beyond the western mountains?” asked one of the warriors.

I nodded. “And beyond the seas that are beyond those mountains.”

“You are an emissary, then?” the leader asked.

“Yes. An emissary from a distant land.” I hoped that even barbarians treated emissaries with some vestige of diplomatic immunity.

“And you wish to see the High Khan.” It was not a question.

“That is my mission,” I said.

The warrior at my feet slowly got up, on legs that were still wobbly. His left arm was useless; probably the shoulder was broken. The kick I had given him would have felled a man twice his size, I knew. His midsection must be very sore; it obviously hurt him to breathe. He stared at me for a moment, then held out his empty right hand. I debated within myself for a moment, then handed him back his sword.

He took it, hefted it, smiled at me, then raised the sword over his head for a vicious slash at my neck. I stood unflinching, staring into his eyes. I knew that I had plenty of time to block his swing once he started it. This might be merely a test, or his attempt to show that he was uncowed by me.

His eyes probed mine, searching for the slightest sign of uncertainty or fear. I held my ground. The warrior’s face was lean and hard; the thin white slash of a scar ran along his left cheek, down near the jaw. His leader, leaning both arms on the pommel of his high-peaked saddle, said nothing.

The warrior slowly brought his sword down until his arm hung at his side. Turning to the others, he shook his head. “He is a demon, not a true man.”

The leader laughed. “He is a strange one, that is true. We will take him to the Orkhon and see what comes of him.”

CHAPTER 10

They made me walk while they rode, but they were generous enough with their water. I drank from the leader’s leather canteen, and then from the canteens of two of the other warriors, as the long, hot day slowly dragged to its conclusion.

We were in Persia, I was certain of that. And from the way these tough, scarred warriors spoke, they were most likely Mongols of the horde of Genghis Khan. This was the twelfth or thirteenth century, then, and these wild barbarian horsemen were ravaging the civilized world from Cathay to the plains of Poland.

I tried to ask the leader of this small troop a few questions, but he had gone silent. Apparently he had made up his mind to deliver me to higher authority, and he wished to be drawn into no further talk. He was a warrior, not a diplomat. But he had spared my life, and that was a good enough decision for this day, as far as I was concerned.

The sun touched the flat horizon of the desert and within minutes it was night. And cold. I clamped down on my body’s surface capillaries and did what I could to keep myself warm, but I was not dressed for a desert night. The warriors took no notice of my shivering; they simply plodded along, with me walking beside the horse of their leader.

It was a city that had been burning all day long. I never found out its name, but I recalled that the Mongols had no use for cities; being nomads, they preferred the open grazing lands that fed their horses and cattle. In war, if a city surrendered to them, they left it in peace, merely installing a Mongol overlord to collect taxes. If the city resisted, it was besieged until it fell; then it was methodically destroyed and all its inhabitants either killed or sent into slavery. Twentieth-century people thought that city-destroying nuclear weapons were something new under the sun; the Mongols razed cities by hand — burned them or took them apart stone by stone and in some cases even diverted rivers across the blackened foundations. And they murdered the inhabitants one by one, with swords and lances and arrows, after raping the women and pillaging every home. Of course, they also tortured anyone who looked rich enough to have hidden gold or other treasure. Compared to what I saw with my own eyes of the barbarian conquests, nuclear weapons at least have the blessing of being swift and impersonal.

The Mongol encampment was huge, even in the flickering lights of the campfires. Tents and round, felt-covered yurts — which looked like teepees mounted on ox-carts — stretched for acre upon acre across the barren ground. Thousands of horses snuffled and neighed in huge, roped-in corrals. You could smell them miles away. Women cooked in front of most of the tents, stirring heavy, black iron pots. Smoke rose from the central holes of most of the yurts, telling me that they had at least a primitive form of central heating.

The warriors marched me through what seemed like miles of the camp, through the maze of tents and yurts that had been laid out with no apparent order whatsoever. But they knew exactly where they were heading. Suddenly I saw that there was a large open space, ringed by fully armed guards, the firelight glinting off their steel helmets and jeweled sword hilts. My captors reined in their horses here. The leader dismounted and spoke swiftly to one of the guards, who cast me an utterly disbelieving look. But he nodded, and the leader of the little band of horse warriors quickly remounted his pony, grinning. The six of them galloped off, happy to be relieved of the responsibility of their strange prisoner.

The guard was obviously an officer accustomed to giving commands that were obeyed instantly.

“I am told you speak the tongue of the Gobi,” he said. He was older, a trace of gray at his temples, but like the horsemen, he was almost fully a head shorter than I. Although his face was unmarred, across the back of his right hand there was a livid scar that disappeared beneath the leather cuff of his tunic. His voice was high; he would have made an excellent tenor.

“I understand your words,” I answered.

“Your name is Orion; you come from beyond the western mountains, and you are an emissary sent to make submission to the High Khan.”

“I have been sent to see the Khan, that is true.”

He looked me over disdainfully. “You carry no gifts for him.”

“The gifts I bear are here.” I tapped my temple. Then, seeing the faintest flicker of a smile curl his lips, I realized that I was dealing with a very literal man. I added, “They are gifts of wisdom and knowledge, not jewels or fine pearls.”

He almost looked disappointed. I believe he would have enjoyed splitting open my skull to examine it for hidden treasure. With a shake of his head, he told me, “You cannot approach the Orkhon looking like a naked beggar. Come with me.”

As I started to follow him, I said, “I have not eaten…” What should I say? I wondered. That I have had nothing to eat in eight centuries? “…for many days,” I concluded.

He was like a minor officer in any army; everything displeased him, except for those important things which made him angry. Grunting and mumbling to himself, he led me to a campfire and told the woman there to feed me. I gulped a steaming bowlful of unidentifiable stew, hot enough to scald my tongue, and swilled it down with sour-tasting milk. By the time I was finished, the guard came back and dumped an armful of clothes on the ground beside me. Gratefully, I pulled on a pair of loose-fitting trousers, a rough shirt that was tight across my shoulders, and a shaggy leather coat.

The woman at the cook-pot, a straggle-haired crone who had lost most of her teeth, looked me over and laughed. “The clothes are too small. And you’ll never find boots big enough for those feet.”

The guard grunted. “That’s his problem, not mine.”

It was true. I was taller and broader than any of the Asians I had seen so far. The trousers he had given me had obviously belonged to a fat man; they were more than wide enough, but they ended halfway between my knees and ankles. I agreed with the old woman; there were probably no boots in the camp big enough to fit me. I did not care, though. I had sandals, and my new clothes were warm enough to make me feel almost comfortable, despite the itching, crawling feeling that I was not the only one living in them. Too, the crone’s stew had warmed me. I was ready to face the Khan.

For more than an hour I was passed from one set of guards to another, questioned briefly by each new officer, and then sent on. The encampment, I was beginning to realize, was actually two separate camps, one within the other. In the center of the big, sprawling city of warriors and horses and camp followers was the true encampment of the Mongol leader. The ordu, as they called it, was a tent city within the larger camp where the staff officers and royal guard were quartered. And at the center of the ordu, in a huge tent of white silk decked with banners and lit by huge bonfires, was the tent of the Orkhon.

By the time I approached this magnificent central tent, I was flanked by two battle-hardened officers who wore as much gold as steel on their uniforms. A half-dozen warriors marched behind me. We passed between the two big bonfires that blazed into the dark sky as we neared the main entrance to the white tent. I learned later that all strangers are made to walk between those fires, on the superstition that the heat will burn out any devils that the stranger may harbor within him.

We were stopped at the entrance to the tent, where two of the biggest guards I had seen searched me swiftly and perfunctorily for weapons. These men were almost my height, but were still as lean and wiry as the other Mongols. Men who live in the saddle and cross deserts and mountains on their way to battle do not have the time to get fat.

Finally I was ushered inside the tent. I had expected oriental splendor, fine silks and Persian carpets, wine goblets of gold encrusted with jewels, and beautiful slave girls dancing for the conqueror of the world. Strangely, the Orkhon’ was indeed sitting on a magnificent carpet. The tent was hung with silks and brocades. The men gathered there were drinking from goblets heavy with precious stones. Four women sat at the left of the Orkhon, each of them young and slim and, I suppose, beautiful in the eyes of the Mongols. But the impression that all this gave me was not one of sybaritic magnificence; the tent had the look of pragmatic utility to it. The carpets and hangings kept out the cold. The golden cups the men drank from were booty from their battles; it seemed to me that they were just as accustomed to drinking from leather canteens. The women — well, they too were the spoils of battle.

There was no air of decadence about the Orkhon’s court. These were warriors, temporarily at rest. They had sacked and burned a city this day; tomorrow they would be on the march again, heading for the next city.

“You are called Orion?” said a tall, slim Oriental who stood at the Orkhon’s right hand. He looked more Chinese than Mongol, and he wore a silk robe that covered him from neck to foot.

The officer at my side gave me a slight nudge. I took a step forward. “I am Orion,” I said.

“Come forward so that my lord Hulagu may see thee more closely.”

I walked slowly toward the Orkhon, who sat calmly on the silks and cushions that were his by right of conquest. He was a small man, even shorter than most of the others. His long hair was still jet black, and his body was just as slim and hard as any warrior’s. I judged him to be no more than thirty-five years old. His face was utterly impassive, expressionless, his eyes fixed on me as I approached.

The Chinese raised one hand slightly and I stopped.

“You are an emissary from the West?” he asked, his voice still slightly sing-song, even though he spoke in the Mongol language.

“That is true,” I answered.

“From where in the West?” asked the Mongol seated next to the Orkhon. He was older, graying, but even sitting upon the silken cushions, he vibrated eagerness and restless energy.

“From far beyond the western mountains,” I said, “and beyond the seas that are beyond the mountains.”

“From the land where the earth is black and crops grow as thick as the hairs of your head?” he asked, his eyes gleaming.

I guessed that he meant the Ukraine, the black-earth granary of what would someday be Russia.

“From beyond even there, my lord,” I replied, thinking of space and time. “I come from a land that is as distant from this place as we are distant from Karakorum. Much, much farther.”

The Mongol smiled. Distance meant nothing to him. “Tell us of your distant land,” he said.

But the Orkhon interrupted. “Enough talk of distant lands, Subotai. The report says that this man is a warrior of incredible strength.”

Subotai. That was the name of a Mongol general, I recalled. But the name that the Chinese gave for the Orkhon, Hulagu, I did not recognize.

The energetic little general looked me up and down. “He is a big one. But we were told he claims to be an emissary, not a warrior.”

“Still,” said Hulagu, “the report is that he bested a mounted warrior while he himself was afoot and weaponless. And then he caught an arrow in his bare hands when the tuman tried to kill him.”

As usual, the report of my prowess had been exaggerated. But Hulagu was obviously impressed and looking forward to a demonstration. He ordered a bowman to stand across the tent from me. The other warriors and officers cleared away from the area behind me.

“My lord,” I protested, “I did not catch an arrow in my bare hands, I merely deflected…”

“Deflect it, then,” said Hulagu. And he nodded to the bowman. The arrow sprang from the bowstring and my reflexes went into overdrive. The world around me slowed and I could see the arrow, flexing almost like a dolphin dipping in and out of the water, as it flew languidly toward me. I knew the kinetic energy it carried, and that attempting to catch it would be folly. So I stepped slightly to one side when it reached me and slapped it away with the edge of my hand against its shaft.

The Mongols gasped. Subotai half rose from the cushions he sat upon. Hulagu managed a slight smile.

Next he ordered a wrestler, a huge brute of a man with shaved head and oiled body. I stripped to the waist and took off my sandals, then chopped the monster down with a kick that took out his left knee and a karate blow to the back of his neck.

I bowed to Hulagu. “Truly, my lord, I am an ambassador, not a warrior. I fight only to protect myself.”

The Orkhon did not seem pleased. “I have never seen any man, warrior or not, possess the strength and speed that you have shown.”

“A race of such men,” said Subotai gravely, “would be a formidable enemy.”

The other Mongols were muttering among themselves; they appeared to agree with the general.

“I am merely an emissary from a far-distant land,” I said, raising my voice to still their hubbub. “I seek your ruler, Genghis Khan.”

That stopped everything. The entire tent was instantly silent. Hulagu glared at me angrily.

“He is a stranger among us,” Subotai said to the Orkhon. “He does not know that we do not speak the name of the High Khan.”

“My grandfather has been dead for more years than the fingers of both my hands,” said Hulagu slowly, menacingly. “Ogotai now rules at Karakorum.”

“Then it is Ogotai that I seek,” I replied.

“Shall I send you to Karakorum,” he said, “as an emissary from a land so distant that you do not know who sits upon the golden throne? A man who can stop arrows with his bare hands and break the back of the strongest wrestler? Are you an emissary or a sorcerer? What business do you have with Ogotai?”

I wish I knew, I said to myself. To Hulagu I stated, “My instructions are to speak to none but the High Khan in Karakorum, my lord. I would be unfaithful to my ruler if I failed to carry out my orders.”

“I think you are a sorcerer. Or worse, an assassin.”

I lowered my voice. “I am not, my lord.”

Hulagu sank back into his cushions and extended his right hand as he gazed at me through narrowed eyes. It was impossible to tell from his expressionless face whether he was afraid, worried, or angry. A man with the high-arched aquiline nose of the true Arab and the air of gentility about him handed Hulagu a golden cup. He sipped from it, still eying me suspiciously.

“Go,” he said at last. “The guard will find you a place to sleep. I will decide about you tomorrow.”

Something about the way he said that made me think that he had already decided.

I had enough presence of mind to bow. Then I picked up my shirt and jacket and, carrying them over my arm, followed my armed escort out of the tent. I took a last glance at Hulagu; he was staring at the arrow lying on the carpet where I had knocked it.

It was outside in the dark coldness of the night, as I was pulling the lice-ridden shirt over my head, that they attacked me. There were six of them, although I didn’t know that at first. I was knocked to the ground, the shirt still tangled around my head and arms, and they were on top of me. I flailed and kicked, tore the shirt away and saw the glint of a dagger blade in the moonlight. I fought for my life without worrying that I might kill some of them as they kicked and beat me with clubs. Then the flaring pain of a knife slashing cut into my gut, again and again. I could feel my own hot blood spurting across my skin. A final blow to my head and I lost consciousness.

When I awoke, a few minutes later, the attackers had gone and I had been dragged behind a cart. I could see the cleared space that surrounded the Orkhon’s white tent and the two big bonfires in front of its entrance. I clamped down on my slashed blood vessels as hard as I could, and the bleeding slowed. But I could not stop it altogether. I felt very weak, and I knew that if I passed out again, my control over the severed vessels would fade and I would bleed to death.

I heard voices from somewhere in the darkness behind me. I tried to turn, but even the effort to move my head left me giddy and sliding toward unconsciousness.

“Here, my lord,” a man’s whispered voice said. “They dragged him here.”

I heard another man make a huffing kind of grunt. “So he is not a demon after all. He bleeds just like any man.”

It took a supreme effort of will to turn my head toward the voices. I could barely make out the shadowy silhouettes of two men standing against the moonlit sky.

“Take him to Agla. Maybe the witch can keep him from dying.”

“Yes, my lord Subotai.”

The silhouettes melted into the darkness. The voices faded away. It seemed to me that I lay there for hours, forcing myself to remain awake. Then other men came and lifted me roughly from the ground by my shoulders and legs. The sudden flare of agony made me cry out, and then everything went blank.

I came back to a sort of semi-consciousness. I felt warm, too hot to be comfortable. My head swam and my eyes refused to focus properly. I tried to sit up but did not have the strength.

“No, no… lie back,” crooned a woman’s voice. “Be still.”

I felt the touch of cool fingers against my burning cheek. “Sleep… go to sleep. Agla will protect you from harm. Agla will heal you.”

Her voice was hypnotic. I drifted away, feeling somehow safe within the calming power of her words.

I was told later that it was two days and two full nights before I opened my eyes again. I lay flat on my back, staring up at the sloping felt walls of a round yurt. I could see a bright blue sky through the smoke hole at the top. My whole body ached, and it pained me to take a breath, but I could raise myself up on my elbows and examine my midsection. The daggers had sliced deeply, but already the wounds were healing. Within a few days there would be nothing left of them except scars, and in time even the scars would disappear. I wrinkled my nose; the tent smelled of sour milk and human sweat. The Mongols were not much for bathing, I knew.

She pushed aside the leather flap that covered the entrance to the yurt and stepped inside.

“Aretha!” I gasped.

Her skin was suntanned to a radiant golden brown, her dark hair braided and coiled in the Mongol fashion. She wore a long skirt and a loose blouse over it that reminded me of the buckskins of the old American West. Necklaces of shells and bones were strung around her neck, and a leather belt about her waist was hung with pouches and amulets.

But I recognized that beautiful goddess-like face, her lustrous dark hair, those gray eyes that a man could lose himself in.

“Aretha,” I said again, my voice nearly breaking with the wonder of her being here, being alive.

She let the entry flap fall behind her and stepped to the straw pallet on which I lay. Sinking to her knees, she stared at me silently. I could feel my heart beating within my chest.

“You have come back to us,” she said. It was Aretha’s voice.

“You’ve come back to me,” I replied. “Across all these centuries. Across death itself.”

She frowned slightly. Touching my forehead with the back of her cool hand, she said, “The fever is gone; yet you speak wildly.”

“You are Aretha. I knew you in another time and place, far from here…”

“My name is Agla,” she said. “My mother was Agla, and her mother was, also. It is the name for a healer, although some of the barbarians believe that I am a witch.”

I sank back onto the straw. But when I reached out my hand, she took it in hers.

“I am Orion,” I said.

“Yes, I know. The lord Subotai brought you to me. The Orkhon, Hulagu, tried to have you killed. He fears you.”

“Subotai does not?”

She smiled at me, and the rancid, stuffy yurt seemed suddenly filled with sunshine.

“Subotai is greatly interested in you. He gave me no uncertain orders. I am to heal you or lose my own life. He has no use for those who cannot carry out his commands.”

“Why is he interested in me?”

Instead of answering my question, she went on, “When they brought you here to my yurt, I was terrified. I tried not to show my fear to Subotai, but from the wounds they had inflicted upon you, I was sure that you would not live out the night. You were bleeding so!”

“But I did live.”

“Never have I seen a man with such powers,” she said. “There was little I could do for you except to keep your wounds clean and give you a potion to dull your pain. You have healed yourself.”

I couldn’t get it out of my mind that she was Aretha, the woman I had known so briefly in the twentieth century, recreated here in the thirteenth. But either she had no memory of her earlier existence (or should I say later existence) such as I did, or she was truly a different person who looked and sounded exactly like Aretha. A clone? How could that be? If Ormazd could bring me through hell and death with all my memories of that other life intact in my mind, why doesn’t Agla recall being Aretha?

“If the barbarians knew that you have healed yourself,” she went on, “they would think you are truly a sorcerer.”

“Would that be an advantage for me?”

She shuddered. “Hardly. Sorcerers die by fire. Either they are burned alive or they have molten silver poured into their eyes and ears.”

I shuddered. “It doesn’t pay to be known as a sorcerer.”

“Are you…?”

“No, I’m not. Can’t you see that? I’m a man, like any other.”

“I have never seen a man like you,” Agla said, her voice very low.

“Perhaps so,” I admitted. “But what I do is not magic or supernatural. I merely have more strength than other men.”

She seemed to brighten, happy to convince herself that I was not something monstrous or evil.

“Once I saw how rapidly you were healing, I told lord Subotai that your wounds were not as deep as I had at first thought them to be.”

“You don’t want to take credit for healing me?”

“They call me a witch, but they don’t really mean it seriously. They endure me as a healer because they have need of me. But if they thought that I had used arcane powers to heal you, then I would be a sorceress, and I would face the fire or the molten silver.”

We were both silent for a moment, two aliens in the camp of barbarian warriors. She was Aretha, but she didn’t know it. How could I bring back her memory of that other life?

I thought of Ahriman, and of the reason why I had been brought to this time and place. Perhaps a recollection of him would stir her dormant knowledge.

“There is another man, a dark and dangerous man,” I began, then went on to describe Ahriman as closely as I could.

Agla shook her head, the motion making her bone and shell necklaces clatter softly. “I have never seen such a man.”

He had to be here, somewhere. Why else would Ormazd have sent me here? Then a new thought struck me: Was it actually Ormazd who had sent me to this time and place? Might Ahriman have exiled me to this wilderness, centuries distant from where I was needed?

But I had no time to worry about such a question. The entry flap was pushed open again, and the Mongol general called Subotai stepped into the yurt.

CHAPTER 11

Subotai entered the felt yurt alone, without guards or announcement, and without fear. Dressed in well-worn leathers, he bore only one weapon, the curved dagger at his belt. He was as lean and wiry as any warrior; only the gray of his braided hair betrayed his age. And although his round, flat face looked impassive and inscrutable, his dark eyes glittered with the eagerness and restlessness of a boy. Agla bowed to him. “Welcome to my humble yurt, lord Subotai.”

“You are the healer,” he said. “They tell me you are a witch.”

“Only because I can heal illnesses and wounds that would slay a warrior who has not my aid,” Agla replied. She was slightly taller than the general when she stood straight.

“I have Chinese healers who perform miracles.”

“They are not miracles, lord Subotai. They are merely the result of knowledge. Your warriors are brave and have great skill in warfare. We healers have skills in other arts.”

“Including magic?” he asked. “Divination?”

Agla smiled at him. “No, my lord general. Not magic and not prophecy. Merely knowledge of herbs and potions that can heal the body.”

He gave the same kind of huffing grunt I had heard the night I had been attacked. It seemed to indicate that he was satisfied that everything that could be was being done.

Turning to me, Subotai said, “You seem to be healing with great speed. Soon you will be on your feet again.”

“My wounds were not as deep as they seemed at first,” I lied.

“So it appears.”

I propped myself up on my elbows and Agla hurried to stuff a pair of cushions under me. “Did anyone catch the men who attacked me?”

Subotai sat himself down cross-legged on the carpeted floor beside my pallet. But he said merely, “No. They escaped in the darkness.”

“Then they are still in the camp somewhere, waiting to attack me again.”

“I doubt it. You are under my protection.”

I bowed my head slightly. “I thank you, lord Subotai.” I was about to ask him why he had decided to place me under his wing, but he spoke before I could.

“There are times when a man in a high place — say, the leader of a warrior clan such as Hulagu — must deal with a thorny problem. Some of those times, such a leader might express the hope that the problem will go away. Other men, loyal to such a leader, might interpret the leader’s words incorrectly and cause injury to the stranger who causes the problem. Do you understand?”

I could feel my forehead knit into a frown. “But what problem am I causing Hulagu?”

“Did I say I was speaking of Hulagu? Or of you?”

“No,” I replied quickly. “You did not.”

Subotai nodded, satisfied that I understood the delicacies of the situation. “But you yourself are a good example of what I mean. You appear out of nowhere; you are obviously an alien, and yet you speak our tongue. You say you are an emissary from a distant land, and yet you have the strength of ten warriors. You insist that you must see the High Khan in Karakorum. Yet Hulagu fears that you are not an emissary at all, but an assassin sent to murder his uncle.”

“Assassin?” I felt shocked. “But why…”

The wiry little general waved me down. “Is it true that you come from a land far to the west of here?”

“Yes.” I knew that of all crimes, the Mongols hated lying the most. Like most nomadic, desert-honed peoples, their very existence depended on hospitality and honesty among one another.

He hunched forward, leaning his forearms on his bent knees. “Years ago I led my men west of the larger of two great inland seas into a land where the earth was as black as pitch and so fertile that the people there grew crops of grain that stood taller than a man.”

“The Ukraine,” I said, half to myself.

“The men there had pink skin, such as you do.”

I glanced at Agla, who sat silent and still on her heels at the foot of my pallet.

“It is true,” I said. “Men of my coloring live there, and throughout those lands, westward to the great sea.”

“Farther to the west there are kingdoms that no Mongol has ever seen,” Subotai said, eagerness beginning to crack his impassive facade. “Kingdoms of great wealth and power.”

“There are kingdoms to the west,” I admitted. “The Russians and Poles, and farther westward still, the Hungarians, the Germans, and the Franks. And even beyond those lands, on an island as large as theGobiitself, are the Britons.”

“You are from that kingdom?” Subotai asked.

I shook my head. “From farther westward yet. From across a sea as wide as the march from here to Karakorum.”

Subotai leaned back a little, pondering that, trying to imagine such a vast stretch of water. I estimated, from the scraps of information I had heard so far and from the inner conviction that we were camped somewhere inPersia, that we were more than a thousand miles from the Mongol capital,Karakorum, on the northern edge of the Gobi Desert.

“I have placed you under my protection,” Subotai said at last, “because I believe that you are speaking the truth. I want to know everything you know about these western kingdoms — their cities, their armies, the strength and valor of their warriors.”

Agla gave me a barely perceptible nod, telling me that to refuse Subotai’s request, or even debate it, would be a fatal mistake.

The general gave no thought to my resisting his command. He went on, “But first you must satisfy me that Hulagu’s fears are groundless. Why do you wish to see the High Khan? You have no gifts with you, no tokens of obeisance. You told Hulagu that you have not been sent to offer the submission of your kingdom. What message have you for Ogotai?”

I hesitated. There was no message, of course. I had merely blurted out that I was an emissary to avoid being killed outright.

Subotai sat up straighter, and his voice became iron-hard. “I have spent my life serving the High Khans, Ogotai and his father, the Perfect Warrior whose name all Mongols revere. They have trusted me and I have never failed them.”

The implication was clear. If Genghis Khan trusted this man, who was I to hesitate?

“I have come,” I said slowly, thinking furiously as I spoke, “to warn the High Khan Ogotai against an evil that could destroy him and the entire Mongol empire.”

Subotai’s dark eyes searched my face, as if to find the truth by sheer force of will. “What evil is that?” he asked.

“There is a man, one who is unlike any other you have ever seen, a man of darkness with eyes that burn with hate…”

“Ahriman,” said the Mongol general.

“You know him?” The breath caught in my throat.

“It was he who prophesied our victory over Jelal ed-Din, and who told Hulagu that he will conquer Baghdad itself and crush the power of the Kalif forever.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, remembering from history the tales of Haroun al-Raschid and the fabulous Baghdad of the Thousand and One Nights. All were obliterated by the Mongol tide, the flower of Islam annihilated by the merciless destructive power of the Mongols. Cities burned, gardens trampled by the hardy little ponies of theGobi, millions massacred, an entire civilization gutted. While the knights of Europe fought their skirmishes against Islam in Spain and the Holy Land, the Mongol invaders were obliterating the heartland of the Moslems, turning the irrigated gardens of the ancient plain of Shinar into an everlasting desert.

“Ahriman is evil,” I said to Subotai. “He will bring destruction to the Mongols.”

The general gave no sign of alarm. Or belief. “Ahriman has brought us victory and good fortune so far.”

“He is in the camp, then?” Perhaps it was Ahriman’s men who had tried to kill me, and not over-zealous servants of the Orkhon Hulagu.

“No,” Subotai answered. “He left two weeks ago.”

“Where did he go?” I was afraid that I knew what the answer would be.

Sure enough, Subotai said, “Like you, he wished to go to Karakorum, to see the High Khan.”

I felt a surge of strength rise in me. “And he left two weeks ago? I must catch up with him.”

Subotai asked, “Why?”

“I told you. He is dangerous. I must warn the High Khan against him.”

The general tugged at the tip of his mustache, the only gesture of uncertainty that I had seen in him. I turned from him to Agla, who had not moved all through our conversation. She was staring at Subotai, waiting for him to come to some decision.

“I will send you to Karakorum,” Subotai said at last, “under my personal protection.”

“He cannot travel yet,” Agla interjected. “His wounds are not sufficiently healed.”

“I can travel,” I insisted. “I’ll be all right.”

Subotai raised his hand slightly. “You will remain here in camp until our healer is willing to let you go. And during this time I will come to you each day. You will tell me everything you know about the kingdoms of the West. I have a great need to learn of them.”

Before I could even start to answer, he got to his feet — a little stiffly. It was only then that I realized this man must have been close to sixty years old, if not older, and that most of those years had been spent in the saddle, winning battles and destroying cities.

Subotai left the yurt. I glared at Agla. “I must leave at once. I can’t let Ahriman reach Karakorum and get to the High Khan.”

“Why not?” she asked.

There was no way to explain it. “I’ve got to. That’s all.”

“But how can this one man be so dangerous?”

“I don’t know. But he is, and my task is to stop him.”

Agla shook her head. “Subotai won’t let you leave camp until you’ve told him everything he wants to know. And I don’t want you to leave either.”

“Are you afraid that your reputation as a healer will suffer if I go away?”

“No,” she said simply. “I… want you to stay with me.”

I reached out both hands to her and she came over and let me fold her in my arms. I held her gently and she leaned her head against my shoulder. I could smell the scent of her hair, clean and natural and utterly feminine.

“What was the name you called me?” she asked in a whisper. “The other name that you said was mine?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “That was far away.”

“What was it?”

“Aretha.”

“There was a woman of that name? You loved her?”

I took a deep breath and reveled in the luxury of her soft, warm body pressing close to me. “I hardly knew her… but, yes, I loved her. Ten thousand miles from here and almost eight hundred years away… I loved her.”

“Was she very much like me?”

“You are the same woman, Agla. I don’t know how it can be, or why, but you and she are the same.”

“Do you love me, then?”

“Of course I love you,” I said, without an instant’s hesitation. “I have loved you through all of time. From the beginning of the world I’ve loved you, and I will love you until the world crumbles into dust.”

She lifted her face up to mine and I kissed her. “And I love you, mighty warrior. I have loved you all my life. I have waited for you since I have been old enough to remember, and now that I have found you, I will never let you go away from me.

I held her tightly and felt both our hearts beating. Deep in the back of my mind, though, was the knowledge that Ahriman was on his way to Karakorum, where I must go, and that he had been living in this camp, even though Agla had told me that she had never seen him.

CHAPTER 12

For three days I told Subotai everything I knew about the Europe of the thirteenth century. Only gradually did I realize that his interest was neither esthetic nor academic, but strictly pragmatic. This general who had led conquering armies for his Khan from the windswept wastes of the Gobi across the grassy steppes all the way to the Ukraine was now intent on pushing farther west. He intended to sweep through Europe and plant the yak-tail standard of the Mongols on the shore of the great ocean that he had never seen.

“But why?” I asked him, at last. “You already share in an empire that stretches from Cathayto the Caspian Sea. Soon Hulagu’s army will take Baghdad and Jerusalem. Why go farther?”

Subotai was a plain, direct man, not given to pretenses. I could imagine the answers I would have gotten to that question if I had asked it of Caesar Augustus, Napoleon, Hitler, or any of the other conquerors whom the Europeans called “civilized.” But as he sat inside his own tent, dressed in leather pants, a rough shirt, and a leather vest studded with steel bolts, Subotai gave me the unvarnished answer of a barbarian.

“Since I was a young man and swore allegiance to the old High Khan, the Perfect Warrior, I have led armies in conquest, it is true. But always for him or for his sons. Now I am an old man and have not many years left. I have seen much of the world, but there is still more that I have not seen. I share in the empire, it is true, but no part of it is my own. The sons of the Perfect Warrior and his grandsons have inherited the lands that I have helped to conquer. Now I wish to have lands of my own, so that my sons will have a place within the empire that is equal to those of Hulagu and Kubilai and the other grandsons of the old High Khan.”

There was no trace of bitterness in his words, no hint of envy or anger. He was merely stating the situation clearly, and more succinctly than any politician ever would.

“Would not the ruling High Khan, Ogotai, give you a share of the empire for your own, so that you could pass it on to your sons?”

“He would, if I asked him for such. But that is not the best way. Better to find new lands and add them to the empire.”

I thought I understood. “That way there would not be jealousy or conflict among the Orkhons, such as Hulagu.”

He gave me a patient sigh. “We have no jealousy or conflict among ourselves. We are ruled by the Yassa, the laws of the High Khan. We are not dogs, to fight with one another over a bone.”

“I see,” I replied, bowing my head to show that I had not meant to insult him.

“It is necessary to add new lands,” Subotai went on, in a rare mood of explaining things to an outsider. “That is the wisdom of the old High Khan. That is why we have no jealousy or conflict among ourselves. The Yassa that he gave us instructs us to conquer other peoples. As long as we do so, we will not fight among ourselves.”

I was beginning to understand. The Mongols’ empire was the creation of Genghis Khan, who was so revered by these warriors that they would not willingly mention his name. It was a model of dynamic social stability: as long as it kept expanding, it would remain stable at its core. That was why Subotai was driven westward; everything to the east as far as the Pacific coast was already under Mongol sway.

“Besides,” Subotai added, as if able to read my thoughts, “it makes me happy to see new lands and strange sights. I yearn to see this western ocean you speak of, and the lands beyond it.”

It was difficult not to admire him. “But, my lord general, the kingdoms of Europe will raise huge armies to oppose you — thousands of knights and tens of thousands of men-at-arms…”

Subotai actually laughed, a rare loosening of his self-discipline. “Do not try to frighten me, Orion. I have seen armies against me before. Did I ever tell you the story of the Battle of the Carts? Or our first battle against the host of Kharesm?”

And so it went for three days and long into each night. In his simple and straightforward way, Subotai was gathering intelligence and planning his next campaign. I felt twinges of conscience in giving him the information he needed, but I knew from my memory of the twentieth century that the Mongols never conquered Europe.

As our third session seemed to peter out to its natural conclusion, close to midnight, I told him that now he knew as much about Europe as I did, and there was no point in delaying me here further.

“Ahriman has a long lead on me, and he will arrive in Karakorum to do his evil work before I have a chance to stop him.”

Subotai seemed unconvinced about Ahriman’s evil, but, practical soldier that he was, he appeared perfectly content to let Ahriman and me fight that battle between ourselves.

“Ahriman heads toward Karakorum with a treasure caravan,” he told me, “that is only as swift as its most heavily laden camel. How good a rider are you?”

As far as I knew, I had never been on a horse. But I had seen others ride, and I knew that what they could do I could train myself to do in a day or less.

“I can ride,” I said.

“Good. We can send you to Karakorum by the yam.”

I was unfamiliar with the word. Subotai explained that it was a horse-post system, almost exactly like the Pony Express that would be reinvented in the American West six and a half centuries later. Barbarians the Mongols might be, but their post system was the most efficient communications network in the world. And the safest. The law of the Mongols, the Yassa, ruled the empire with a grip of steel. It was said that a virgin carrying a sack of gold could ride from one end of the empire to the other without being molested. And, I found, it was true.

When I returned to Agla’s yurt that night and woke her to tell her that I was leaving in the morning, she nodded sleepily and lifted the quilted blanket that was covering her.

“Get to sleep, then,” she said drowsily. “We’ll have a long day ahead of us, tomorrow.”

“We?”

“I am riding to Karakorum with you, of course.”

“But… will Hulagu allow you to leave?”

If she hadn’t been half asleep she would probably have been indignant. “I’m not a slave. I can go as I please.”

“It will be a difficult journey. We’re riding the horse-post. We’ll be on horseback all day, every day, for weeks.”

She smiled, closed her eyes, and muttered, “I’m better padded for that than you are.” And went back to sleep.

It was a grueling trip. In the twentieth century, travelers thought themselves rugged to endure the ride across Asia on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok. Agla and I rode horseback the same distance, across a more difficult route, crossing deserts and high, ice-draped mountain passes as we made our way across the Roof of the World and into the vast wilderness of the Gobi. By ourselves, we would have perished in less than a week. But the entire route was marked by a chain of Mongol posts, each a hard day’s ride from the last one, where we could get hot food, good water, and fresh ponies. Old or crippled warriors kept each post, usually aided by a few local youths who tended the corrals of horses. It was a monument to the power of the Mongols that no one ever attacked these posts. There seemed to be no underground resistance to the empire. Probably the people, remembering the terrifying massacres that accompanied the Mongol armies, were cowed to passivity. But perhaps the laws of the Yassa, and the tolerant rule of the Mongols once they had conquered a territory, kept their empire peaceful.

I had hoped to catch up with the caravan that Ahriman had taken, but the horse-post generally used a different, more direct route. Swift ponies with expert riders could tackle terrain that a camel caravan would never dare try to cross. Here and there we crossed the ancient caravan route. Even from miles away we could see the well-marked path that millennia of camels, oxen, and asses had beaten into the grassland. Twice we met caravans, long strings of beasts of burden heaped with treasures looted from the West, tinkling and jingling as they made their slow, patient way to Karakorum. Only a handful of warriors rode along as guards. No one in his right mind attacked a Mongol caravan; whole tribes could be exterminated for such a crime.

I asked, I searched for Ahriman, but he was not in either caravan. Which meant that he was even farther ahead of me than I had feared.

One night, after we had come down from the icy passes of the Tien Shan mountains and were safely housed for the night in the rude hut that passed for guest quarters at one of the post stations, I asked Agla why she had denied seeing Ahriman in Hulagu’s camp.

“I did not see him,” she said.

“But you knew he was there, didn’t you? Even in a camp as large as Hulagu’s, the presence of such a man would be known to everyone.”

“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 to 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?”

Ye Liu Chutsai closed his eyes for a moment. It made his old, lined face look like a death’s mask in the flickering firelight.

When he opened his eyes again, he said, “There is but one true civilization in the world, the civilization of the land that you call Cathay, or China. I am a son of the Chin, the Chinese. I serve the Mongol High Khan so that civilization may be extended to the four corners of the world.”

I felt confused. “But the Mongols have conquered Cathay. Kubilai Khan rules in Yan-king now.”

The old man smiled. “Yes, and already Kubilai — who was born in a felt yurt on the grasslands not far from this very spot — already he is more Chinese than Mongol. He wears silk robes and paints beautiful landscapes and deals with the intrigues of the court as delicately as any grandson of a mandarin.”

His meaning became clear to me. I leaned back and drew in a deep breath of understanding. “The Mongols are the warriors, but the Chinese will be the true conquerors.”

“Exactly,” said Ye Liu Chutsai. “The Mongols are the sword arm of the empire, but the civilization of the Chin is its brain.”

Agla spoke up. “Then the Mongols are serving you, aren’t they?”

“Oh no, by my sacred ancestors, no, not at all!” He seemed genuinely upset by such an idea. “We are all serving the High Khan, Ogotai. I am his slave — willingly.”

“But only because the High Khan is paving the way for a Chinese empire that spans the world,” Agla insisted.

Ye Liu Chutsai went silent again, and I realized that he was arranging his thoughts so that he could present them to us as clearly as possible.

“Timujin,” he said softly, as if afraid someone would hear him use the revered name, “hit upon the idea of conquest as a means to keep the tribes of the Gobi from annihilating each other. It was a stroke of genius. But it requires that the Mongols constantly expand their empire.”

“Yes, you told us that,” Agla said.

“Of what use is all this bloodshed and misery, however?” the mandarin asked. “What purpose does it serve, other than keeping these nomadic warriors from each other’s throats?”

Neither Agla nor I had an answer for that.

“On the other hand,” he went on, “here is the civilization of the Chin, the highest civilization the world has ever seen. It is not warlike, so it has no way of spreading the fruits of its culture to other lands.”

“The Mongols invade Cathay,” I took up, “but the Chinese civilization conquers them, eventually.”

“It takes a generation or two,” Ye Liu Chutsai said, agreeing with me. “Sometimes longer.”

“So your task is to keep the Mongol empire growing, so it won’t collapse, for a long enough time to allow it to evolve into a Chinese empire, ruled by civilized mandarins who will control the entire known world.”

He nodded. “A single, unified empire that girdles the entire world, from sea to sea. Think of what that would mean! An end to war. An end to the bloodletting. A world of peace, ruled by law instead of the sword. It is the goal to which I have devoted my entire life.”

A Chinese empire, carved out by Mongol warriors, ruled by silk-robed mandarins. Ye Liu Chutsai saw the highest civilization in history creating a world of peace. I saw a stifling autocracy that would stamp out individual freedom.

“I share my vision with you,” the mandarin said, “because I want you to understand the problem you have raised for me.”

“Problem?” I asked.

He sighed. “Ogotai is not the man his father was. He is too amiable to be a good ruler, too content with the wealth he has today to understand the need to drive constantly onward.”

“But you said…”

“Fortunately,” he went on, stopping me with one upraised, slender, long-nailed finger, “the dynamics of the empire are still powerful. Hulagu, Subotai, Kubilai and the other Orkhons and princes along the periphery of the Mongol conquests still press onward. Ogotai stays here inKarakorum, content to let the others do the fighting while he enjoys the fruits of their conquests. It is not a healthy situation.”

“But what has that to do with us?” Agla asked.

“Ogotai is a superstitious man,” Ye Liu Chutsai answered. “And his soothsayers have been warning him, lately, to beware of a stranger from the West — because he will attempt to murder the High Khan.”

I said firmly, “I too have a warning for him.”

“You are from the West,” Ye Liu Chutsai said. “So is the one who calls himself Ahriman.”

“He is here!” I blurted.

“You know him?”

“Yes. It is he whom I must warn Ogotai against.”

The mandarin smiled vaguely. “Ahriman has already warned Ogotai against you, the fair-skinned man of great strength from beyond the western sea.”

I sat there on the cushion, wondering where this would lead. My word against Ahriman’s. How could I convince…

“There is something more,” Ye Liu Chutsai added. “Something that makes the problem acute.”

“What is it?”

“A threat to the empire has arisen.”

“A threat?” I echoed.

“What could possibly threaten an empire that has conquered half the world?” Agla asked.

“Earlier today you used the word ‘assassin’ when you spoke to the guards.”

“Yes, after those two men tried to kill me.”

“ ‘Assassin’ is a new word here. It comes from the land of Persia, where a cult — perhaps it is religious, I do not yet know — has sprung up. It is a murder cult, and its members are called assassins. I am told the word stems from a Persian name for a drug these men use: hashish.”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with me,” I said.

“The man who directs this murder cult is as clever as a thousand devils. He recruits young men and promises them paradise if they follow his bidding. He gives them hashish, and no doubt other drugs as well, to show them a vision of the paradise that will be theirs after their mortal bodies perish. Small wonder that the youths are willing to give up their lives to do their master’s will.”

“I know of these drugs,” Agla said. “They are so powerful that a man will do anything to have them.”

Ye Liu Chutsai dipped his head once in acknowledgment. “The addicts are ordered to kill a man. Even though they know that they themselves will be killed as a result, they do so gladly, believing that they will awaken in an eternal paradise.”

I said nothing, even though I knew that what appears to be death is not the end of existence.

“In Persia, thousands of merchants, noblemen, even imams and princes have been… assassinated. The cult has merely to warn a man that he has been marked for death and so great is the terror that the man is willing to pay any price to placate the assassins. Thus the cult grows rich and powerful.”

“In Persia,” I said. The land of Ahriman and Ormazd, and their ancient prophet Zoroaster.

“It has grown far beyond Persia,” replied Ye Liu Chutsai. “All of Islam is gripped by the terror. And I fear that assassins have made their way here, to Karakorum, to kill the High Khan,”

“Ahriman is from Persia,” I said.

“So he freely admits. But he says that you are, too. Which you deny.”

“Assassins nearly killed me today.”

The mandarin made a small shrug. “That could have been a clever ruse, to put us off our guard. The two dead men were not Mongols, despite their garb. They could easily have been Persians. You may have killed them to keep suspicion away from yourself.”

“But I did not. They tried to kill me.”

The mandarin’s wrinkled face looked truly troubled. “I want to believe you, Orion. But I do not dare to act naïvely. I am convinced that either you or Ahriman is an assassin, perhaps even the very leader of the cult, the man known to the Persians only as the Old Man of the Mountains.”

“How can I convince you…?”

With a shake of his head, Ye Liu Chutsai said, “In a problem such as this, the Mongols would act with wonderful simplicity. They would simply kill both you and Ahriman — and possibly you, too, my dear lady — and have done with it. I, with my civilized conscience, will endeavor to determine which of you is the assassin and which is the innocent party.”

“Then I have nothing to fear,” I said, wishing that I actually felt that way.

“Not from me. Not yet.” The mandarin hesitated, then added, “But Ogotai is not a patient man. He may apply the Mongol solution and be rid of the problem once and for all.”

CHAPTER 15

Agla and I were not exactly prisoners, but wherever we went in Karakorum, the same two Mongol warriors followed us. Ye Liu Chutsai said they were guards, for our protection, but they made me feel uneasy. Day and night they were never more than a few swift strides away. I learned that Mongol discipline was relentless: these men would guard us until they were ordered to stop. If we escaped their sight, they would be killed. If one of them died while guarding us, his son would take his place in such duty, if he had a son old enough to be a warrior. If not, his closest male relative would step in.

We had the freedom of the city, except for the one place I wanted to go — the pavilion of the High Khan, the ordu of silk-draped tents that I could see from the door of our quarters each morning. Ye Liu Chutsai would not permit me to see the Khan or to come any closer to Ogotai than the edge of the wide cleared space that marked the ordu. The mandarin still worried that I might be an assassin, or even the leader of the entire cult of assassins. So I was kept from seeing the High Khan while Chinese court intrigues began to weave their way through the ordu of the Mongols.

But there was nothing to prevent me from seeking out Ahriman. For days Agla and I wandered through the crowded, noisy lanes that meandered between yurts and buildings of stone and adobe, seeking the Dark One.Karakorum was a metropolis built by accident, without plan, without facilities. The Mongols saw it as merely another encampment, larger than any previous collection of yurts and carts that they had known. But they could not understand the differences that a change of scale makes. A nomad’s encampment of a thousand families with their tents and ponies and livestock could live beside a river for weeks on end before it had to move on. But a city of ten thousand families, or a hundred thousand, which remained fixed in one place, was beyond the ability of the Mongols.

Sanitation was nonexistent. To these nomadic warriors and herdsmen, who rubbed animal fat on their bodies to protect themselves from winter’s cold, bathing was almost unheard of. Garbage and human wastes were simply dumped on the ground, usually behind one’s tent. Water was carried to the city on the backs of slaves, taken from the same river into which the runoff from the waste dumps ran. That system worked for a temporary camp, but for a permanent city it meant disease, inevitably. I began to wonder how long it would take for Karakorum to be swept away by an epidemic of typhus. Perhaps that was what eventually ended the Mongol empire.

The noise of those twisting narrow streets rivaled twentieth-century Manhattan. Nobody spoke in tones lower than a shout. Ox-drawn carts creaked and groaned under heavy loads. Horsemen clattered by, scattering merchants, women, children and anyone else who happened to be in their way. It seldom rained, but when it did, thunder bursts poured torrents on the city. Almost every storm knocked down one flimsy adobe building or another, although the round felt yurts and the big tents of the ordu seemed to make it through the wind and rain better than the “permanent” buildings did. After each thunderstorm there were puddles everywhere, in which king-sized mosquitoes bred.

No one I spoke to admitted to knowing of the Dark One. Ye Liu Chutsai had met Ahriman, and told me that he had even spoken with Ogotai before I had arrived in Karakorum. But the mandarin would give me no hint as to where to find Ahriman.

So, day after day, Agla and I, trailed by our two faithful warrior guards, made our way through the bustling, noisy capital of the Mongols, shouldering and elbowing through the thick crowds, seeking one man in a city that must have numbered close to a million.

I tried every church we could find, from the foul-smelling hut of some Christian hermits to the golden magnificence of a Buddhist temple.

After nearly a week of searching, I finally saw what I had been looking for — a small, windowless, squat building made of gray stone, far off on the outskirts of the city, out near the corrals and barns where the stench of the animals and the droning buzz of the flies that lived off them were overpowering.

Agla’s face showed her disgust at the surroundings. “There’s nothing here but filth and smell,” she said.

“And Ahriman.” I pointed to the gray stone building.

“There?”

“I’m sure of it.” Turning to our guards, I asked, “What building is that?”

They glanced at each other before shrugging their shoulders and pretending not to know. Perhaps they were under orders to keep me away from Ahriman. Perhaps they were afraid of entering the Dark One’s domain. No matter. I headed straight for the low, wide door — the only opening in the building that I could see.

“That is not a good place to enter,” said one of our guards. It was the longest string of words I had ever heard him utter.

“You can wait outside,” I said, without breaking stride.

“Wait,” he said, hurrying to get in front of me.

“I’m going in. Don’t try to stop me.”

He was clearly unhappy with the idea, but equally unwilling to challenge me. He had been told what I had done to the two assassins. He sent his partner around to check on the building’s other entrances. There were none. Satisfied that he could watch the solitary door, he stepped aside.

“You must call me if there is danger,” he said.

Agla replied, “I will call, never fear.” But the warrior paid no attention to a woman.

I had to duck to get through the low doorway. Inside, the chamber was dark, gloomy. Agla pressed against me.

“I can’t see a thing,” she whispered.

But I could. My eyesight adjusted to the darkness immediately, and even though the chamber remained shrouded in murky shadows, I could make out a stone altar on a slightly raised platform, with strange symbols carved on stone above it.

“I’ve been expecting you,” Ahriman’s harsh, rasping voice rumbled.

I turned toward the sound and saw him, a darker presence among the deepest shadows in the far corner of the chamber.

“Come to me,” he said. “The girl will not be harmed; you can leave her there.”

Agla seemed to have frozen into lifelessness. She stood stock-still, clutching my arms, staring ahead blindly into the darkness.

“She will neither see nor hear anything,” Ahriman told me. “Leave her and come to me.”

I disengaged my arm from Agla’s grasp. She was still warm and alive, but I could detect no breath in her, no heartbeat.

“I have merely accelerated time for the two of us,” Ahriman said as I studied her. “This way we can talk without being overheard or interrupted.”

I stepped across the stone floor toward him. The stones felt solid and real. Ahriman looked as I had remembered him — a dark, brooding, powerful hulking body and red burning eyes. Agla remained as lovely and as still as a statue made of living flesh.

“When you return to her, she will not know that an instant has passed. And for her, no time will have elapsed.”

“You play many tricks with time,” I said.

He was standing straddle-legged, his huge fists planted on his hips. He wore fur-trimmed robes and high leather boots. I could see no weapons on him, but how paltry a sword or dagger would be to a man of his powers.

“You travel through time quite easily yourself,” Ahriman hissed. “And through space. It was a long journey from Hulagu’s camp.”

“You never rode in the camel caravan, did you?”

His broad, brooding face almost smiled. “No. I took a different mode of transport. I have been here in Karakorum for three months now. I am highly regarded as a priest of a new religion, a religion for warriors.”

“You sent those two assassins.”

“Yes,” he admitted easily. “I doubted that they would accomplish much, but I had to see if you still possessed the powers that you had the last time we met.”

“At the fusion reactor.”

His heavy brows knit in puzzlement for a moment. “Fusion rea…” Then he took in a deep breath. “Ah yes, of course. You are moving back toward The War. I haven’t reached that time yet.”

We were traveling across time in different directions, I remembered. We had met before, and we would meet again.

“Did you… kill me, then?” Ahriman’s labored voice almost sounded worried.

“No,” I answered. “You killed me.”

He seemed pleased. “Then I still may accomplish my task.”

“To destroy the human race.” He glowered at me. “Human. Look at the wonders that these Mongols have achieved. Observe how they slaughter their own kind by the hundreds of thousands, and how others who believe themselves to be civilized applaud such slaughter and benefit from it. Human, indeed.”

“Do you count yourself better because you plan to slaughter us by the billions?”

“I plan to correct a mistake that was made fifty thousand years ago,” Ahriman rasped. “For every life that is snuffed out, a life will be gained. My people will live; yours will die. And so, too, will your creator die — the one who calls himself Ormazd.”

“The War was fifty thousand years ago?”

“You will learn,” he said. “You will meet me then. You will see. Why else would Ormazd have you moving back from The End toward The War? To keep the truth from you.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to keep his lies from penetrating my consciousness. I formed a mental image of Ormazd, shining, glowing against the darkness of eternity. The Golden One, the giver of life and truth. Ahriman called him my creator and said that he would kill us both.

Opening my eyes, I said, “My mission is to kill you.”

“I know. And I would happily kill you, as easily as you would crush an insect beneath your heel.”

“As easily as you murdered her?”

“The girl?”

“Her name was Aretha… in the twentieth century.”

“I have not been there yet.”

“You will be. And you will kill her. If there were no other reason for me to hate you, that would be enough.”

He shrugged those massive shoulders. “You can hate; you can love. Ormazd has programmed you quite flexibly.”

I was close enough to reach out and take him by the throat. But I had felt the strength of those mighty arms before, and I knew that even with all the powers I possessed, he could toss me about like a matchstick.

“The Mongols make it difficult for us to do battle,” Ahriman said, breaking into my thoughts. “They have their laws, and they will do their best to see that we obey them.”

“I will gain an audience with Ogotai and warn him against you. You will not succeed here.”

His almost lipless slash of a mouth curled back in a hideous smile. “Succeed? I have already succeeded. And you have helped me!”

“What do you mean?”

He shook his head. “What do you expect of me? Do you think that I am here to assassinate Ogotai?”

“You are the leader of the cult of the assassins, aren’t you?”

The smile degenerated into a sneer. “No, my ancient adversary. I am not the Old Man of the Mountains. Only a true human would think of murdering his fellow humans for profit. The leader of the assassins is a Persian, as human as you are. He was a boyhood friend of someone you may have heard of — Omar Khayyam, the astronomer.”

“I know the name as a poet.”

“Yes, he scribbled some verses now and then. But as for the assassins, Hulagu will crush them — after he takes Baghdad and destroys the flower of Islamic culture.”

“You said you have already succeeded here… and I helped you.”

“Yes,” Ahriman said, his face becoming serious again. “Come. I will show you.”

He turned and walked toward the solid stone wall that had been behind him. Remembering what he had done in the twentieth century, I hesitated only a moment, then followed him.

I stepped through the wall, again feeling the chill of deepest space for an instant. And then we were in a forest, surrounded by tall, dark trees that sighed in the night wind. Wordlessly, Ahriman led me along a path that meandered through the underbrush. High above, through the leafy canopy, I could see a thin sliver of a moon racing through scudding clouds. An owl hooted in the darkness; crickets chirped ceaselessly.

We stopped at the edge of the woods, where the ground slanted downward toward a wide grassy plain. Tents were pitched there; horses were tethered in long sleeping lines. But these tents were high-pitched and square in shape, not like Mongol tents. The carts were huge and heavy compared to those I had seen in Karakorum. And the horses also looked different from the ponies of the Gobi — bigger, heavier, slower.

“The cream of Eastern Europe’s knighthood,” Ahriman whispered to me, “led by Bela, the King of Hungary. A hundred thousand men are camped there, knights fromCroatia,Germany, the Hungarian cavalry, of course, and even Knights Templar from France.”

“Where are we?”

“Down there is the plain of Mohi. Across the river is Tokay, the wine country. That is where Subotai and his Mongols are spending the night — or so Bela thinks.”

By the wan light of the moon I could see guards standing around the edges of the huge camp, and more tents pitched on the other side of the river at the foot of a stone bridge that spanned it. Neither the guards nor I noticed anything amiss as the night slowly faded and the first gray fingers of dawn began to streak the sky.

Ahriman pulled me down to a crouching position in the underbrush. I started to protest, but he silenced me with a massive hand on my shoulder.

In the predawn dimness I heard the slight snuffle of a horse. Turning, I saw through the tangled undergrowth a pair of Mongol warriors nosing their ponies slowly, silently, through the woods. Behind them were more horsemen, each as quiet as a wraith. They stopped, bows in their hands, already notched with arrows. They waited for a signal.

A shower of fire arched across the gray sky. Flaming arrows fell into the Europeans’ camp, setting tents afire and terrifying the tethered horses. A horrendous roaring scream arose from thousands of warriors as the Mongol horsemen spurred their mounts and dashed into the sleeping camp from three sides. Horsemen thudded past us as we crouched in the brush, spattering us with clods of earth, shrieking their hideous war cries, bending their little double-curved bows and firing arrows into the stumbling, barely awake Europeans.

The slaughter was complete. All morning long the two armies battled, thousands upon thousands of maddened men furiously trying to kill one another. The Europeans fought with the strength of desperation; they were surrounded and had no hope of escape or mercy. The Mongols, though heavily outnumbered, remorselessly cut down their opponents with arrows, lances, and curved swords that drank the blood of nobleman and peasant equally. The Europeans never had a chance to mount their battle steeds or even don their armor. They were slaughtered in their nightclothes. The men on the far side of the stone bridge fought bravely, but soon enough the Mongols cut down the last of them and stormed across the bridge to complete the encirclement.

The sun climbed higher in the sky as I stared, horrified, at the dust and blood of the battle. Men screamed; horses whinnied: confusion and terror were everywhere.

“Here you see the human race at its finest, Orion,” gloated Ahriman. “Observe the energy and passion your kind puts into slaughtering itself.”

I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. The stench of blood, the sight of severed limbs and slashed bodies was making me sick.

“I have already won,” Ahriman told me. “Thanks to the knowledge you imparted to Subotai, the Mongols have crushed the European army. Nothing stands between them and the Rhine now. They will sweep westward, razing cities and slaughtering whole nations. The French will make a stand before them, just as they made a stand against the Moors under Charles the Hammer. But Subotai’s final moment of glory will come when he destroys the French army as thoroughly as he has destroyed Bela and his allies here today. All of Europe will be under Mongol sway — all of Eurasia, from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”

“And that is what you seek?” I asked, turning away from the carnage. But I could not keep from hearing the screams of the dying.

His powerful hand squeezed my arm. “That is what I seek, Orion. And nothing can prevent it from happening. Neither you nor Ormazd can stop me now.”

I closed my eyes for a moment to blot out the horror of the battle. His grip on my arm eased somewhat, and the noise and reek of the battle seemed to fade away.

I opened my eyes and it was Agla holding on to my arm, not Ahriman. We were back in the dark stone temple at Karakorum. Ahriman gave me a last parting smile, more a grimace than anything else, and disappeared once again into the shadows.

Agla stirred and drew in a breath, as if a statue coming to life. “I can’t see a thing in here,” she said.

“I’ve seen enough. More than enough.” I led her out into the daylight again.

In a few weeks, maybe less, a post rider would gallop into Karakorum bearing news of Subotai’s victory. The Mongols would rejoice, but Subotai would not be called back to the capital for congratulations or reward. He and his army would press on, as Ahriman had said, to desolate the heart of Europe the way they had destroyed the heart of the Moslem world.

Before the Mongols came,Persia and the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers had been the most heavily populated, most abundant land on Earth. Irrigation canals that had been dug in the misty time of Gilgamesh made Babylon, and later Baghdad, the center of civilization — no matter what the Chinese thought. But once the Mongols swept through that part of the world, they razed the cities, utterly destroyed the canal system, and slaughtered so much of the population that it was centuries before the area could recover even a semblance of its former glory.

Now Subotai had Europe open and defenseless before him. And his warriors would do to Poland, Germany and the Balkans what they had done to the Middle East. Maybe Italy would escape, guarded by the Alps. But I doubted it. Warriors who crossed the Roof of the World would not be deterred by mountains that could not stop Hannibal.Italy,Greece, the flower of Mediterranean civilization would be crushed as utterly as all the others.

And I had helped Subotai to do this. Ahriman had much to gloat over.

CHAPTER 16

I tried to explain it all to Agla, but she could not seem to grasp the situation in its full implications. For hours I sat in our bare little hut, telling her of Ahriman and the other lives we had both lived, of Ormazd and the titanic struggle that spanned the centuries.

“Ahriman seeks to destroy the continuum of space time itself,” I said, my voice rising to drive the point home, as if speaking louder would make everything clear to her.

She listened patiently. She tried to understand. But despite the fact that she had lived in the twentieth century and in other times, Agla comprehended very little of what I told her. In this incarnation she was totally a child of the thirteenth century.

“Ahriman is a dark wizard,” she said at last, giving me her explanation of how the world looked to her, “and he has powers that allow him to show you the past and the future.”

“But what he showed me happened today,” I insisted. “And he didn’t merely show it to me; we were there — thousands of miles away.”

“You never left my side.” She smiled faintly.

“Yes, I did. But I moved in a different time reference. To you, no time elapsed at all. To me, I spent nearly twelve hours at the plain of Mohi.”

“So it seems to you. He is a wizard of great powers, that much is certain.”

I decided to agree with her on that and let it go. That night we made love fiercely, as if both of us feared we would never have another night together. It was close to dawn when I finally drifted into sleep. I dreamed of Ormazd, arrayed in golden armor and riding a golden palomino horse. I watched him canter along a path through a green, park-like forest. The sun shone brightly and the sky was a cloudless blue. But as I watched, the forest thickened, grew darker, and soon the sun was hidden behind thick, black boughs heavy with foliage. I knew what was going to happen and I cried out to warn Ormazd, but no sound issued from my throat. I was paralyzed, powerless to move or even speak, as tiny, dark reptiles slithered across Ormazd’s path and grew into lithe, wiry Mongol warriors who clambered over the palomino and pulled Ormazd down to the blood-soaked ground and stabbed again and again and again, over and over, blood spurting everywhere, arms and legs hacked off, throat ripped open, belly sliced apart so that I could see his living bowels being ripped by the filthy warriors of darkness.

“Orion, help me!” Ormazd screamed, his voice shrieking despite his wounds. “Where are you, Orion? Help me! Help me!”

All the world grew dark and cold and I remained paralyzed, frozen in deepest starless space while the entire planet Earth dwindled and disappeared into blackness.

I awoke, sitting up on the bed. Agla lay beside me, sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the world.

Think, Orion, think! I commanded myself. How can you defeat Ahriman if you don’t even understand what he is trying to accomplish?

I closed my eyes again and considered the facts that I knew. Ahriman sought to destroy the fabric of space-time, to disrupt the continuum so completely that the entire universe would shatter. He claimed that we humans had annihilated his race, and he sought total revenge, the annihilation of the human race for all time and space. That meant that he must destroy Ormazd, whom Ahriman called our creator.

There was much that I did not know, much that I could not understand. I shook my head, wondering how I could reach Ormazd and ask him for more information. But obviously he felt that I had all the knowledge I needed. He had sent me here, to this time and place, with all the powers of my mind and body, and even with an understanding of the Mongol language printed into my brain. He had also sent Agla here, as a sort of native guide, a barometer of the attitudes and understandings of the people of this era. That was her role, just as Aretha’s role in the twentieth century had been to awaken me to the task of finding Ahriman.

Somehow, Ogotai was the key to everything here. I had blurted out, when the Mongol warriors had first captured me, that I was an emissary to the High Khan. Ormazd had put that into my mind. I did not know why, but I knew with utter conviction that everything depended on my meeting the High Khan face to face.

As the rising sun slanted through the front room’s single window, filling the dusty bare chamber with dancing motes, I resolved to make Ye Liu Chutsai grant me an audience with the High Khan.

Agla came with me as I sought out the mandarin. Dressed in her robes and beads, she served me as a sort of radiation meter, sensitive to the nuances of this strange world that I would never pick up for myself. But she was also the woman I loved and I wanted her by my side so that I could protect her from Ahriman and all other dangers.

It took the best part of the morning for us to talk our way past the dour-faced guards and soft-spoken Chinese administrators of the ordu. We found ourselves at last in a small tent that stood to one side of Ogotai’s main pavilion. Inside, the tent was richly carpeted, and furnished with chests and cabinets decorated with intricate scrollwork and inlaid ivory and gold. Their motifs of dragons and pagodas showed them to be fromCathay.

Liu appeared from behind a seven-foot-high ebony screen, moving as smoothly and mysteriously as ever in his floor-length robes to a cushioned chair set off to one side of a long table covered with scrolls and maps. He nodded to us and smiled; taking one hand from his wide sleeves, he gestured us to the smaller chairs near his own.

After a few polite exchanges of greetings, the mandarin asked me why I sought his ear.

“To beg you for an audience with the High Khan,” I said. “It is urgent that I meet Ogotai.”

He toyed with his wispy white beard for a few silent moments. I focused every atom of my being, every flickering synapse along the myriad neurons of my brain, at the old man’s mind. He seemed to feel it; his body stiffened slightly, and he looked up, directly into my eyes. I saw confusion in his dark brown eyes, then a widening understanding of my purpose.

“I have been protecting you from possible danger,” he said, almost apologetically. “If you meet Ogotai and he decides that you truly are the menace Ahriman prophesies you to be, he will have you killed.”

“There is a greater danger in waiting,” I answered. “I must see him now.”

“Yes,” Liu said, nodding his understanding. “I shall arrange an audience for you. Wait here.”

He rose from his chair like a sleepwalker and glided behind the elaborate ebony screen once more. I turned to Agla and smiled at her.

She was regarding me with a strange expression on her face. “You forced him to do your will,” she said.

“I convinced him that it must be done.”

She reached up to brush a stray hair back from her eyes and a snap of static electricity stung her fingers. “You are a wizard also.” Her voice was a whisper of awe. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m not a wizard.”

“Yes, you are. Like Ahriman. A man of great powers. I should have known it when you healed your wounds so quickly…”

“My powers are for good, not evil,” I said. “But I am not a wizard.”

“You have no idea of how powerful you truly are,” Agla insisted. “What you did to my lord Chutsai… I could feel it!”

I tried to downplay my little instinctive trick of hypnosis, but Agla knew better than I what was involved. “You must not let Ogotai or the guards around him see your powers. They are superstitious men, and they would kill you out of fear.”

“But they allow Ahriman to live,” I said.

“Yes, because he prophesies victories in battle for them. I have listened to what the women say of Ahriman. He is feared for his dark powers, but the warriors are more afraid of displeasing him and having him prophesy defeat for the Mongols. These foolish men believe that Ahriman’s prophecies create victory or defeat.”

“Doesn’t that put him in much danger? Wouldn’t they be likely to slit his throat one night and be rid of him?”

She shook her head, tossing that stray lock of hair back over her eyes. Again she pushed it back, this time without a shock.

“Ahriman has been very clever. He came to Karakorum, from what I hear, as a priest of a new religion. A warrior’s religion. The Mongols do not harm priests; they tolerate all religions. So, even though there is great fear of Ahriman’s powers, the High Khan will not allow him to be harmed — so long as his prophecies of victory continue to be true.”

He was clever, I thought. More clever than I, to understand these people so thoroughly.

“Besides,” Agla went on, a bit more lightly, “the Mongols do not shed the blood of important personages.”

“Oh? Then what…”

“They strangle them, or smother them beneath carpets. The Yassa forbids bloodletting among the Mongols, but it does not overlook the need for killing.”

I sat in the stiff wooden chair, digesting all that Agla had told me. I could not help seeing Ahriman’s face, and his ghastly smile, as I considered the fact that not even Genghis Khan’s code of laws could prevent human beings from murdering one another.

Ye Liu Chutsai returned at last, looking somewhat puzzled, as if he could not quite remember why he was doing what he was doing.

“It is arranged,” he said to me. “You will be received by the High Khan tonight, before the evening meal. You will come alone.”

I glanced at Agla.

“The High Khan,” explained Liu, “would not respect a man who was accompanied by a woman. It is the way of the Mongols, and no insult to you, lady.”

“I am not insulted,” Agla said. “Merely afraid that Orion might not understand everything that happens in Ogotai’s court.”

“I will be there to guide him,” Liu said. “He is in enough peril, with Ahriman’s prophecy already working against him, to have him appear before the High Khan with a woman at his side, and a woman whom many in Karakorum know to be a healer — and perhaps something of a witch…” He let the thought dangle.

“I understand,” I told him. But, remembering what had happened to Aretha, I added, “I would like to have the guards protect Agla while I am away from her. Ahriman, or others, might try to strike at me through her.”

The mandarin bowed his head slightly. “It will be done. You are both under my protection, for whatever good that does. And you, Orion, still have Subotai’s recommendation to protect you.”

I smiled at him. “I value Subotai’s generosity, and I treasure your own, my lord Chutsai.”

That pleased him. But he warned, “A shield is only as strong as the arm on which it is worn. You have a powerful enemy here at Karakorum. Be careful.”

“Thank you, my lord. I will be.”

Late that afternoon, as Agla fussed nervously about our quarters and I tried to concentrate on understanding what I had learned thus far so that I could peer into the future and determine what I must say to Ogotai, a servant brought new clothes for me to wear for my appearance before the High Khan. A gift from Ye Liu Chutsai.

Agla marveled at the outfit of leather and fine cloth. “You look like a prince! A handsome, powerful prince.”

I smiled at her, although it hurt my newly shaven face. Shaving in cold water with a finely honed knife is a true test of courage. Agla beamed at me like a little girl and tried not to show how worried she was. We both knew that visitors to the High Khan’s pavilion sometimes came away with gifts of gold and slaves and even horses. But sometimes they came away with molten silver poured into their ears.

“You must be very careful,” she warned me, staring at me with somber, anxious eyes.

“I will be.”

“Let the mandarin guide you. Do not allow them to see your powers; that will frighten them, just as Hulagu was frightened.”

“Will Ahriman be there, do you think?”

Her gray eyes went even wider with fear. “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

Someone knocked at the door.

“Well, whether he is or not,” I said, “that must be the guards to escort me to the pavilion.”

Agla flung her arms around my neck. “I wish I were going with you!”

“I’ll be all right,” I said. I gave her a swift kiss and then went to the door and opened it. A quartet of warriors stood outside, their gleaming armor and burnished helmets making our two regular guards look scruffy and mangy by comparison.

I glanced over my shoulder at Agla, gave her a final smile, and closed the door. My escort marched me to the pavilion, but not before I looked back to see her standing at the door watching me, while the two guards looked back and forth from me to her.

I walked between the two bonfires and stood patiently while the guard at the entrance to the High Khan’s tent searched me for weapons. It was no perfunctory search; I have had medical examinations that were less thorough.

Finally I was allowed to enter the tent, my four escorts walking with me, two ahead and two behind. I was either an important guest or a dangerous captive; I imagined that Ogotai and his aides had not yet decided which.

The tent was much larger than Hulagu’s or any other I had seen. Carpets from China and Persia covered the ground. Silks and tapestries hung along the felt walls. To one side stood a long table of what appeared to be solid silver, laden with mare’s milk, fruit, meat and salt: a symbol of the nomad’s generosity to guests. Warriors stood at either end of the table, and more were posted at the various entrances to the wide, long tent. Up ahead of me, on a one-step-high platform, sat Ogotai, the High Khan, flanked on his left by half a dozen of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, and by twenty or more Mongols who could only be generals and other warriors, on his right. I recognized only Ye Liu Chutsai, standing in a splendid robe of sky blue and gold, to the High Khan’s immediate right and slightly behind him.

Ogotai reclined on cushions. He had no throne. He was a solid, chunky man, in his early fifties, I judged, with an open, curious expression on his round face. He was getting fat, but he did not seem to care about that. In one hand he held a wine goblet of gold, encrusted with jewels. Well behind him stood a Chinese boy, holding a gold pitcher — the Khan’s wine steward.

As I marched in step with my four escorts toward the Khan’s slightly raised dais, I scanned the big tent for a sign of Ahriman. I could not see him. That was all to the good, I thought.

The warriors brought me to a stop three paces in front of the High Khan. I bowed from the waist, then straightened up. I had no intention of falling on my face in obeisance. I was an emissary, not a slave.

“Most High Khan,” said Ye Liu Chutsai as I stood before Ogotai, “this is the man Orion, an emissary from the land far to the west, beyond the mountains and plains and even the wide sea.”

Ogotai glanced over his shoulder and the wine steward hurried forward to fill his goblet. The High Khan took a deep draft from it, then smacked his lips and gave me a long, careful study. He looked me up and down, then suddenly burst into uproarious laughter.

“Look!” he said, pointing at me. “He has no shoes!”

CHAPTER 17

The whole tent burst into shrieks of laughter, all except Ye Liu Chutsai, whose usually impassive face looked upset and embarrassed.

I was still wearing my travel-stained sandals, and they must have looked quite incongruous, in the eyes of the Mongols, with the handsome outfit that the mandarin had sent to me. Liu had included a pair of leather boots, but as usual they were too small for me. The shirt and vest were tight across my shoulders and short in the sleeve, but I had managed to get into them. The shoes had proved impossible.

Ogotai was almost hysterical with laughter, and the other Mongols joined in heartily. The High Khan might have been half drunk before I entered; I saw nothing so very funny about the condition of my footwear.

“I never saw a wizard walking around with his toes peeping out!” Ogotai gasped. And that sent him into another round of boisterous guffaws.

I felt both embarrassed and relieved. At least, it seemed to me, the High Khan was not terribly worried about me. A man does not laugh until the tears flow down his cheeks at a suspected assassin or supernatural danger.

At last Ogotai’s laughter subsided and the tent grew fairly quiet once more. The guards who had been pointing at me and doubling over with glee straightened up again and grew silent. Ye Liu Chutsai stared off into a distant nowhere. Ogotai raised his cup and the wine boy hastened to fill it.

“Baibars,” the High Khan called, after another draft of wine.

A young man rose from his pillows and bowed to Ogotai.

“Baibars, find a shoemaker and see to it that our guest gets a proper set of boots.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Now then, man from the West, come and share some wine with me. Your people do drink wine, don’t they?”

Half a dozen slaves sprang from behind the High Khan’s dais and arranged big, boldly colored pillows for me to sit at his right hand. A wine goblet appeared, almost as precious as the one Ogotai held. I sat, took the goblet, raised it in thanks to him, and sipped the deep red wine.

“The wine of Shiraz,” Ogotai said. “A country not far from where you encountered my nephew Hulagu.”

I said, “It is a rare treat. Even in my faraway land, the wine of Shirazis spoken of highly.” This was the wine, I knew from my twentieth century reading, that Omar Khayyam praised in his Rubaiyat.

Lazily, almost indifferently, the High Khan said, “I was warned against you. I was told that you are a powerful wizard — and an assassin.”

I glanced up at Liu, who remained standing two paces behind his Khan.

“I am a man, my lord High Khan, not a wizard. I am an emissary from a far-distant land, not an assassin. I carry no weapons…”

“But you need none,” Ogotai interrupted. “You kill armed warriors with your bare hands. You catch arrows with your teeth.” He grinned. “Or so I have been told.”

“I defend myself as best I can, O High Khan. But if a warrior shot an arrow at me, the chances are I would stop it with my flesh, the same as any other man.”

“That is not what I was told.”

I took a deep breath, stalling momentarily as I wondered how far I could trust his good humor.

Finally I answered, “Most High Khan, surely you have heard more wild tales of fabulous things than any man living. You know how the truth becomes exaggerated each time it is retold.”

He laughed. “Yes, yes. My own prowess in battle grows with every day that I sit here! The armies I beat are larger with each telling, and the numbers that I slaughtered grow like a column of smoke rising to the sky.”

“My lord High Khan,” said one of the Mongols seated a few places away from us, “let us not depend on this stranger’s words alone. Let us test him.”

He had the gruff look of a policeman to him; probably he was the Mongol responsible for Ogotai’s security.

“What do you propose, Kassar?” asked Ogotai.

“Stand him up,” the Mongol waved to the open area in the middle of the tent, “and let a few of the guards fire arrows at him. Then we will see if the tales we have heard are true or false.”

Ogotai looked at me before answering, “If the tales are false, we will have killed an emissary.”

“Better a dead emissary than a live wizard,” the man called Kassar muttered.

“Or give him a sword and let him fight Chamuka!” said another Mongol. “That would be lively.”

“Or a wrestling match!” called still another.

The High Khan listened and sipped at his wine. Ye Liu Chutsai stood over us impassively, gravely, and said nothing.

I knew that if they tried to shoot me with arrows or match me against a swordsman, I would have to defend myself. That would mean showing them that the tales they heard about me were not such exaggerations, after all. Then what would happen? A wrestling match might not be so bad, but I seemed to remember that a man might have his neck snapped or his back broken in a “friendly” Mongol match.

Ogotai looked into my eyes from over the rim of his goblet. I wondered how much of his wine drinking was a masquerade, a prop he used to give himself time to study the situation and think.

He put the empty goblet down on the carpet at his side. As the Chinese lad hastened to refill it, the High Khan silenced the tent with a single uplifted hand.

“The Yassa commands us to be hospitable to strangers who enter our camp,” he said, his voice suddenly firm and clear. “This man is an emissary from a distant land. He is not to be tested like a freshly broken pony or a newly forged blade of steel.”

Kassar was not satisfied. “But Ahriman warned us…”

“I have spoken,” said the High Khan.

That ended the discussion.

Ogotai leaned back into the mound of cushions. He glanced at the brimming wine goblet by his side but did not touch it. Nodding slightly toward the women at his left, he said, “I was told that you have a woman with you, a healer. Does she please you? Would you like another? Have you enough servants to take care of you?”

“I am quite satisfied, thank you, most generous one,” I replied.

He closed his eyes for a moment, as if a flash of pain had suddenly attacked him. When he opened them again, he said, “You are an emissary from the western lands. Subotai’s message said that you know much about the lands beyond the black-earth country. What is your mission here? Why have you come to me?”

Why, indeed? I knew it would be senseless to warn him against Ahriman and get into a finger-pointing contest. Ye Liu Chutsai had warned me that, when in doubt, the Mongols took the easiest way out — by chopping heads in both directions.

It was my turn to search deep into Ogotai’s eyes. I saw pain there, and understanding, and something I had not expected to find in the eyes of a barbarian emperor: friendship. This man who could direct the burning of cities and the slaughter of whole populations had decided, on the strength of my shabby footgear, that I was no threat to him. I liked him. He was willing to trust me, and he was not the drunken fool that Ye Liu Chutsai had led me to believe he would be.

What could I tell him, except the truth?

Lowering my voice, I said, “My lord High Khan, may we speak where others cannot hear? What I have to say to you is for your ears only.”

He thought in silence for several moments before nodding to me. “Later. I will send for you.” Then, raising his voice so that the others could easily hear him, he asked, “How did you make the trip across the Tien Shan in those ridiculous sandals?”

The Mongols laughed and joked among themselves as I launched into a description of riding from Persia without a pair of boots. The night wore on and they asked me about my country and the sea that separated it from Europe. I described the Atlantic Oceanas a wild and tempestuous sea, an unpassable gulf — which, for these horsemen, it truly was.

“Then how did you cross it?” Kassar suddenly asked. “By wizardry?”

The tent went absolutely silent. Even the High Khan looked at me keenly. I had talked myself into a trap.

“Not by wizardry,” I said, desperately trying to find an answer. “You have seen the sailing craft ofCathay, haven’t you?”

Some of the Mongols nodded. Kassar was among those who did not.

“Ships such as those could cross the ocean, if they were lucky enough not to be caught by storms.” I thought of the Vikings, who had made their voyages to Iceland, Greenland, and even Labrador in their open longboats.

“Then why can’t we cross in such vessels?” Kassar demanded.

“A small number of men could,” I said. “But to transport an army would take hundreds of ships. Many of them would be caught by storms or whirlpools or the monsters that come up from the deep.” I silently prayed that my words would not someday reach Spain and delay Columbus. “An entire army could never make the crossing without losing more men than it would lose in many battles.”

Ogotai frowned. “My nephew Kubilai dreams of sending an army across the water to conquer Japan. What do you prophesy about that?”

I hesitated, unwilling to step into another trap. “I make no prophecies, O High Khan. I am an emissary, not a prophet.”

He made a small, grudging grunt. He would have liked to have heard a prediction, but I had no intention of getting in the middle of court politics.

The talk went on for hours, and toward dawn, when even the unmoving Ye Liu Chutsai began to look weary, Ogotai clapped his hands and announced that he was going to his bed. The rest of us got to our feet, bowed, and drifted out of the tent. I noticed that three of the women accompanied Ogotai as he headed for his sleeping tent.

I had barely made it halfway back to my house, though, when a warrior ran up to me and told me that the High Khan wanted to see me. My escort and I made an about-face and followed the warrior to the High Khan’s private tent.

He was sitting on a high bed, his legs dangling over the edge. The tent was lit only by a few candles. The women were nowhere in sight.

The warrior stopped just inside the entrance and bowed. I did likewise.

“Man of the West,” said the High Khan, “I want you to know that there are six armed guards in this tent.”

I peered into the shadows and, sure enough, saw the glint of candlelight on steel helmets and jeweled sword hilts.

“They are my personal guards,” Ogotai went on, “and extremely loyal to me. Each of them is deaf and dumb: they cannot hear or speak. But, at the first sign of danger to me, they will fall upon you and slay you without hesitation or mercy.”

“Most High Khan, you are as wise as your position among men is lofty.”

“Spoken like a true emissary,” he replied, grinning at me. He dismissed the warrior who had accompanied me, and then, pointing to a stool next to the bed, he commanded me to sit.

“Now then, what is this message from the West that must not be heard by anyone except me?”

“My lord High Khan, the truth is that I was sent here to kill a man — the one known as Ahriman.”

“Then you are not an emissary?”

“Oh, I am an emissary. High Khan. I bring you a message from my distant land, a message that explains why I have been sent here. This message holds the key to the future of the great empire that you and your father have created.”

“And my brothers,” he murmured. “They have all done their share. More than I, truly.”

“Great Khan,” I said, “I come from a land that is not only far away in distance, but in time. I have traveled across many centuries to reach you. Seven hundred years from now, the name of the first High Khan will be known and praised throughout the world. The Mongol empire will be known as the greatest empire that ever existed.”

He took the time-travel idea without blinking an eye. “And will the empire still exist in that distant time?”

“In a way, yes. It will have given rise to new nations.Chinawill be strong because you have united the Cathayan kingdoms of the north and south.Russia will be powerful: the lands that you know as those of the Muscovites and the Cossacks, the black-earth country and much of what was once Karesm — all that will be welded together into a nation that calls itself Russia.”

“And the Mongols?” Ogotai asked. “What of the Mongols?”

How could I tell him that his descendants would be a minor satellite of the Soviet Union?

“The Mongols will live here, by the Gobi, on the grasslands that have always been their home. And they will live in peace, unthreatened by any foe.”

His head went back slightly and he made a barely audible hissing sound. I could not tell if he was in pain or if the sound meant satisfaction.

“The Mongols will live in peace,” he whispered, as if talking to himself. “At last.”

Sensing what he wanted to hear, I went on, “There will be no more war among the tribes of the Gobi, no more blood feuds between families. The law of the High Khan, the Yassa, will be revered and obeyed.”

Ogotai nodded happily. “It is good. I am content.”

I wondered what to tell him next, how to get back to the subject of Ahriman and my mission.

“You wonder why I am happy at the thought of peace?” Ogotai asked. “Why the High Khan of a race of warriors does not seek further conquests?”

“Your brothers and sons…”

“Yes, they still reach out. While there is land for a pony to tread upon, they will battle to possess it.” He took a deep breath, almost a sigh. “All my life I have spent in wars. Why do you think I spared you a test of your strength this night?”

I smiled at him. “Because I had no shoes?”

With a fleeting grin, he replied, “No, Orion. I have seen enough arrows flying through the air. I have seen enough swordplay. I yearn for peace, for an end to pain and battles.”

“Wise men prefer peace to war,” I said.

“Then wise men are more rare than trees on the Gobi.”

“Peace will come, in time. High Khan.”

“Long after I have returned to my ancestors,” he said without a trace of bitterness. It was merely a statement of fact.

“My lord High Khan,” I started, then hesitated.

“You want to speak about your enemy, Ahriman. What is the matter between you? A blood feud? A family quarrel?”

“Yes, you could call it that. He is an evil one, High Khan. He means you no good.”

“He has served me well in the short time he has been at Karakorum. The warriors fear him, but they like his prophecies of victory.”

“High Khan, anyone can predict victory for the Mongols. When have you known defeat?”

Ogotai’s tired face lit up briefly. With a laugh, he said, “That is true enough. But still, even my generals want to hear prophecies of success. It makes them feel better. And Ahriman has helped me to feel better as well. He is on his way here and should arrive shortly.”

“Here? To your tent?”

“I summon him almost every night. He has a potion that helps me to sleep. It’s better than the wine of Shiraz.”

My mind went into a spin, trying to digest this new information.

“It would be best if the two of you did not meet,” Ogotai said. “At the slightest threatening move, my guards would kill you both.”

That was my dismissal. With a bow I took my leave of the High Khan.

CHAPTER 18

I could not sleep that night, although to say “night” is misleading. The sky was already pearl-gray with the coming dawn when I returned to my house from Ogotai’s tent.

Agla was wide awake, waiting for me. We talked as the sky brightened into true morning. Finally she could keep her eyes open no longer and drifted into slumber, her head resting on my shoulder. I can get along with little sleep. I lay beside her, wondering what I should do next.

I had not been placed here by mistake or misdirection. Ahriman was here, working his plan for the destruction of the human race. He saw Ogotai nightly and gave him some sort of drink to help the High Khan sleep. Medicine? Liquor? Slow poison?

Why did Ogotai need help to sleep? Did his conscience bother him? He said he was tired of wars and slaughter, but yet he ruled an empire which had to keep expanding, or it would collapse into tribal wars. That was what Ye Liu Chutsai had told me.

I shook my head. It made little sense to me. Ogotai lived off the wealth of all Asia, longing for peace, while his brothers and nephews spread fire and havoc in the Middle East, Europe, and China. How can this be a nexus in the space-time continuum? What did Ahriman plan to do here? How could I stop him if I did not know what he was trying to accomplish?

There was one way, of course. Simply kill Ahriman. Lie in wait for him at his stone church and slit his throat. Kill him the way he killed Aretha, without mercy or hesitation.

But a countering idea struck me. Perhaps that is what Ahriman wants! He has made no secret of his presence here. He has not tried to harm me or Agla. He has not tried to prevent my learning that he visits Ogotai’s tent each night. Perhaps his murder would trigger a sequence of events that would accomplish his goal here, whatever that goal might be.

I felt suspended in midair, hanging on nothingness while two powerful forces pulled me in opposite directions. I was being torn apart, but there was nothing I could do about it. I could not move, could not take action, until I learned more about Ahriman’s plans.

My deliberations, and Agla’s sleep, were rudely shattered by an insistent pounding on our front door.

“What is it?” Agla wondered, instantly awake.

The pounding sounded like whoever it was would break the door down.

I pulled my robe around me as I got to my feet. Agla burrowed deeper under the bedclothes, looking frightened.

Opening the door — there were no locks in Karakorum — I saw a stumpy, wizened old man with skin that looked as tough as tree bark and fists almost the size of his shaved head. He wore shabby, stained clothes and had a huge leather satchel slung over one shoulder.

“So you’re awake!” he snapped at me.

I glared down at him. “I am now.”

He gave a disgusted snort. “I know how long those drinking bouts go on in the ordu. And while the High Khan is in his cups people get him to promise them things.”

“Who are you?” I demanded.

“The bootmaker, who else?” He pushed past me and entered the house. “A messenger from the High Khan ordered me to come to you and make you a pair of boots. As if I don’t have enough to do! But do they care? Not them! Make this stranger from the western lands a pair of boots! The High Khan himself has ordered it! Do it quickly or we’ll all lose our heads! So here I am, whether you like it or not. I may have spoiled your sleep, but by all the gods you’ll have a pair of boots that will please the High Khan, and you’ll have them before the drinking starts again this evening.”

He sat flat on the floor of the front room and began unpacking his satchel. I had my boots by that evening, all right, and fine and comfortable they were. But I never met a worse tyrant among all the Mongols than that bootmaker.

Ogotai had taken a liking to me, and he invited me to his pavilion frequently. One day he took me riding, out beyond the bedlam of the crowded, dirty, noisy lanes of the growing city, past the vast horse corrals and cattle barns, out into the endless, rolling grasslands.

“This is the true home of the Mongol,” he told me, turning in his saddle to survey the vast, empty, treeless grassland. He took a deep breath of air unpolluted by crowded buildings and people.

I told him, “Far to the west, in a land called Greece, when the natives there first saw men riding on horses — long ages ago — they thought that the man and horse were one creature. They called them Centaurs.”

Ogotai smiled in the sunlight. “Truly, a Mongol without a horse is not much of a man.”

We rode frequently together. At first Ogotai brought a guard of warriors with him, but soon enough he rode with me alone. He enjoyed my company and he trusted me. I told him about the lands and people ofEurope, of the great kings that were yet to be and of the glories of the ancient empires. He was especially interested in Rome, and disappointed when I spoke of the corruption and decay of its empire.

“We would not have High Khans such as Tiberius or Caligula — they can only exist when the Orkhons are spineless. That is not the way Mongols are.”

Agla did not trust the High Khan’s friendship. “You are playing with fire. Sooner or later the Dark One will put a spell on Ogotai, or he will get drunk and pick a quarrel with you.”

“He’s not that kind of man,” I said.

She fixed me with those luminous gray eyes of hers, as endlessly deep as an infinite ocean. “He is the High Khan, a man who has the power to slaughter whole cities and nations. Your life or mine does not matter to such a man.”

I started to tell her that she was wrong, but heard myself say, rather weakly, “I don’t think so.

Agla remained unconvinced.

The summer wore on with me still stranded on dead center, not knowing what to do or what Ahriman was planning. Messengers galloped in from the west, breathless with the news of Subotai’s victory over Bela on the plain of Mohi. Weeks later, long caravans of camels and mules arrived, heaped high with armor and weapons and jewelry, Subotai’s spoils from Hungary and Poland.

I never saw Ahriman. It was as if we operated in two different time-frames, two separate dimensions. He was there in Karakorum,. I knew. He knew I was there as well. We both saw Ogotai almost daily — or nightly. Yet, either by the High Khan’s adroit planning or Ahriman’s, we never met face to face in all those many weeks.

The wind sweeping down from the north began to have an edge to it. The grass was still green, but soon the storms of autumn would begin, and then the winter snows. In the old days the Mongols would move their camp southward and collide with other tribes who claimed the same pasture lands along the edge of the Gobi. Now, with Karakorum becoming more of a fixed city every day, the High Khan prepared to stay the winter and defy the winds and storms that were to come.

The Mongols organized a hunt each autumn, and Ye Liu Chutsai summoned me to his tent to tell me that the High Khan requested my company on the hunt.

The mandarin’s tent was a tiny slice of China transported to the Mongolian steppes. Solid, heavy furniture of teak and ebony, chests inlaid with ivory and gold, an air of quiet and harmony — unlike the boisterous, almost boyish energy of the Mongols. It was the tent in which I had asked him for my first meeting with Ogotai. I had not realized then that Liu lived in it. Now I could sense the philosopher’s stoicism all about me: Ye Liu Chutsai slept here, probably on that cherrywood bench covered with silks, but this tent was really a home for the books and parchment scrolls and stargazing instruments of the mandarin — more precious and rare than the body of an aging Chinese administrator.

“The High Khan has shown a great fondness for you,” Liu said, after sitting me down at his cluttered desk and offering me tea.

“I have a great fondness for him,” I admitted. “He is a strangely gentle man to be the emperor of the world.”

Liu sipped from his miniature teacup before replying, “He rules wisely — by allowing his generals to expand the empire while he maintains the law of the Yassa within it.”

“With your help,” I said.

“Behind every great ruler stand wise administrators. The way to determine if a ruler is great or not is to observe whom he has selected to serve him.”

Cardinal Richelieu came to my mind.

“Yet, despite your friendship,” Liu went on, speaking slowly, carefully, “the one called Ahriman is also close to the High Khan.”

“The High Khan has many friends.”

The mandarin placed his cup delicately on the lacquered tray next to the still-steaming teapot. “I would not say that Ahriman is his friend. Rather, the man seems to have become something of a physician to the High Khan.”

That startled me. “Physician? Is the High Khan ill?”

“Only in his heart,” said Liu. “He wearies of his life of idleness and luxury. Yet the alternative is to lead an army into the field and conquer new lands.”

“He won’t do that,” I said, remembering how Ogotai had told me he was sick of bloodshed.

“I agree. He cannot. Hulagu, Subotai, Kubilai — they lead the armies. Ogotai’s task is to remain in Karakorum and be the High Khan. If he began to gather an army together, what would the Orkhons think? There are no lands for him to conquer except those already being put to the sword by the Orkhons.”

I began to understand. Ogotai literally had no worlds left to conquer.Europe,China, the Middle East were all being attacked already. He would start a civil war among the Mongols if he went marching in any direction.

But then I thought of India.

“What about the land to the south of the great mountains, the Roof of the World?”

“Hindustan?” Ye Liu Chutsai came as close to scoffing as his cool self-restraint would allow. “It is a land teeming with diseased beggars and incredibly rich maharajahs. The heat there kills men and horses. The Mongols will not go there.”

Liu was wrong. I seemed to remember that the Mongols eventually did conquer India, or at least a part of it. They were called Moghuls by the natives, a name that became so associated with power and splendor that in the twentieth century it was cynically pinned on Hollywood executives.

The mandarin brought me out of my reverie by saying, “Fortunately, it is the season for the hunt. Perhaps that will cure the ache in the High Khan’s soul, and he will have no need of Ahriman’s sleeping draughts for a while.”

CHAPTER 19

A hunt by the Mongols was little less than a military campaign directed against animals instead of men. The Mongols had never heard of sportsmanship or ecology. When they went out to hunt, it was to provide food for the clan over the bitterly cold and long winter. They organized with enormous thoroughness and efficiency.

Young officers scouted out territories of hundreds of square miles and brought reports back to the ordu so that the elders could select the best location for the hunt. Once the place was selected, the Mongols got onto their ponies and rode out in military formation. They formed an immense circle, perhaps as much as a hundred miles in circumference. Every animal within that circle was to be killed. Without exception. Without pity.

The hunt took more than a week. No actual killing was allowed until the High Khan gave the signal, and he would wait until the noose of armed horsemen had been pulled to its tightest around the doomed animals.

Between the horsemen walked the beaters, clanging swords on shields, shouting, thrashing the brush all day long, driving the animals constantly inward toward the center of the circle. At night they lit bonfires that kept the beasts within the trap. All day long we rode, drawing closer and closer to each other as the circle tightened.

At first I could see no animals except our own horses. Nothing but slightly rolling grassland, with waist-high brush scattered here and there. By the third day, though, even I could spot small deer, rabbits, wolves darting through the high grass. An air of panic was rising among the animals as predator and prey fled side-by-side from the terrifying noises and smells of the humans.

I rode on the High Khan’s left, separated from him by two other horsemen, nephews of his. Ye Liu Chutsai had not been invited to the hunt, nor would he have been happy out here in the steppes. I could see that Ogotai loved it, even though the physical strain must have been hard on him. He was in the saddle at daybreak like the rest of us, but bymiddayhe grew haggard and quiet. He would fall out of the line then, and rest through the afternoon. At night he retired early, without the long drinking bouts he led at Karakorum. But even though his body seemed stiff with age and pain, Ogotai’s spirits remained high. He was free of the luxuries and cares of the court, breathing clean fresh air, away from the decisions that had weighed upon him at Karakorum.

And I felt free, too. Ahriman was far from my mind. I thought of Agla, especially at night as I drowsed off to sleep on the hard ground, wrapped in a smelly horse blanket. But all that could wait. They would still be in Karakorum when we returned: problems never go away; they simply wait or grow worse until you return. For the present I was enjoying myself hugely, and I recalled that the Persian word, paradise, originally meant a hunting ground.

It would ruin the whole strategy of the hunt if animals were allowed to break through the tightening circle of horsemen. For the first few days, the animals simply fled from us, but as the noose closed in on them, some of the terrified beasts tried to break out. There was no alternative but to kill them. To allow even one to escape was regarded as a disgrace.

The sour-faced Kassar was riding on my left the morning that a wolf, slavering with fear and hate, launched himself at the space between us. Kassar spitted him on his lance while I sat on my pony, too hesitant to beat him to the game. The wolf howled with agony and tried to reach around and gnaw at the lance, but three of the beaters rushed up and clubbed it to death.

Kassar laughed and waved his bloody lance high over his head, while I thought how strange it was that I could kill a man without an instant’s hesitation, yet allowed Kassar to move first on the brute animal.

Later that day I found myself riding next to Ogotai. His nephews had stopped for a quick meal of dried meat and a change of mounts. The afternoon sun felt warm, although the breeze was cool.

“Do you enjoy the hunt, man of the West?” he asked me.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s like a military campaign.”

He nodded. “True. It is a chance for the younger warriors to show their bravery and their ability to carry out orders. Many a general has been trained in battle against the beasts of the fields.”

So this was the Mongol version of the playing fields of Eton.

A servant rode up with some dried meat and fruits in a leather pouch, along with a silver flask of wine. Ogotai shared the meal with me as we kept on riding. Ahead of us, animals were scurrying, leaping, running in circles through the grass, more confused and terrified with each inexorable step our ponies took.

Ogotai was draining the last drop of wine, tipping the silver flask high and holding his head far back, when a boar broke out of a small thicket and started a mad dash directly toward us. The High Khan could not see the animal, but his pony did. Neighing wildly, it reared back on its hind legs.

Anyone but a Mongol would have been thrown out of the saddle. As it was, Ogotai lost the reins he was holding loosely in his left hand. The wine flask went flying, but he grabbed the pony’s mane and held on.

I saw all this out of the corner of my eye, because my attention was focused on the boar. I could see its hate-filled red eyes and flecks of saliva flying from its open mouth. The beast’s tusks gleamed like twin daggers, backed by a thickly muscled neck and a strong, compact body bristling with fury.

My own horse had swung around away from Ogotai’s, trying to avoid the boar’s rush, so that I could not shift the lance I carried in time to spit the charging animal. It was heading straight for Ogotai’s pony. Without even thinking, I dove from my saddle, pulling the dagger from my belt as I hit the boar’s flank like a football linebacker trying to stop a galloping fullback. We rolled over each other, the boar squealing and squirming, as I drove the dagger into its hide again and again, my left arm wrapped around its throat. I could hear the thudding of hooves around me — my own pony or Ogotai’s, I did not know which. I remember thinking, ludicrously, how foolish it would be to be killed by a horse’s kick while I thrashed around on the ground wrestling with a maddened boar.

Finally the tusker shuddered and went limp. I yanked my dagger from its hide with an effort and got slowly, shakily to my feet. A dozen Mongol warriors surrounded me, swords and lances ready to attack the now-dead animal. More warriors sat on horseback behind them, bows at the ready. Among them was Ogotai.

For long moments no one spoke. I spat grass and dirt from my mouth. My shoulder ached, but otherwise I seemed to be all right.

“Man of the West,” called Ogotai from his saddle, “is that the way you hunt boars in your country?”

The tension broke as they all laughed. I joined in, feeling suddenly foolish. If I had been a better horseman, I could have speared the animal and been done with it. Ogotai was right: I had made my kill the hard way.

A servant led my pony back to me and I swung into the saddle. Kassar grinned at me humorlessly; the wolf he had killed was tied behind his saddle. I saw that Ogotai’s nephews had returned, and began to lead my pony to my usual station, between the nephews and Kassar.

“No,” said the High Khan. “Stay here, beside me.” He reached out and gripped my arm. “You will ride at my side now — in case we meet more boars.”

I bowed my head at his compliment, then turned and gave Kassar a self-satisfied smile. He glowered at me.

Like friendships forged in the heat of battle, the bond between Ogotai and me became firm and lasting that day. We rode together for the rest of the hunt, and during the terrible day of carnage at the end, when we killed and killed and killed again until we were all delirious with blood lust, we never left each other’s side.

We rode side by side at the head of the troop on the return to Karakorum. Behind us stretched a mile-long column of mounted warriors and oxdrawn carts piled high with dead game — every kind of animal from squirrel to deer, from boar to wolf.

I was anxious to see Agla, to tell her of the adventure of the hunt, to hold her in my arms once more and feel her body against mine.

Ogotai became quieter as we neared Karakorum, more somber with every step we took. He looked almost as if he were in pain, and by the time we could see the dust clouds from the corrals that marked the city’s outskirts, he was obviously gloomy and depressed.

I began to think of Ahriman, and grew as downcast as Ogotai. The two of us had thrown off our problems and run away for more than a week, like schoolboys playing truant. But the problems were still there in Karakorum, waiting for us.

“My lord High Khan,” I said, swinging my pony so close to his that they almost touched, “it is time for me to deal with Ahriman.”

“What would you do, kill him?”

“If I must.”

Ogotai shook his head. “No. I will not allow blood to be shed, not even by you, my friend from the West. Ahriman has his place in Karakorum, as all men do.”

“He ministers to you,” I said.

If Ogotai was surprised to learn that I knew of Ahriman’s medications, he did not show it. “The man gives me a draught that helps me to sleep, nothing more.”

“Have you thought. High Khan, that his purpose may be to help you to sleep — permanently?”

“Poison?” Ogotai turned in the saddle, his eyes wide with surprise. Then he laughed. He did not answer my question; he merely laughed as if I had told the funniest joke in the world.

I puzzled over his reaction and tried to draw him into further conversation, but Ogotai was finished discussing the matter. He had made up his mind that Ahriman and I would not come into conflict; he had thrown his protection over us both and produced a stalemate between us.

At least that is what I thought as we rode into Karakorum.

It was almost nightfall by the time we had dismounted in the wide open area between the High Khan’s pavilion and the rest of the city to unload the tons of meat from the carts. A huge throng gathered, oohing and ahhing over the immense catch we had brought home. Ye Liu Chutsai appeared at Ogotai’s side, carrying a scroll from which he read to the High Khan. The affairs of state were already being poured into Ogotai’s ear, even before he had shaken the dust of the hunt from his shoulders.

I searched through the crowd and could not see Agla. She must be waiting at the house, I told myself. The boar that I had killed had been given to me by the High Khan, and now servants were hauling it off to be skinned and preserved. It would feed the two of us for many weeks.

Ahriman was nowhere to be seen, but I did not expect to find him rubbing shoulders with the mob. He was a creature of shadows and silences; he would seek out the High Khan later, when almost everyone else was asleep.

Finally the High Khan gave permission for his hunting companions to go off to their own quarters. I fairly sprinted for the house. I opened the door, expecting Agla to be waiting at the threshold for me.

She was not. I searched the two small rooms in vain. Agla was gone.

CHAPTER 20

I did not hesitate an instant. I knew what had happened as certainly as if I had witnessed it with my own eyes. Dashing out of the house, I ran through the dark, narrow, twisting pathways of the city toward the stonetempleofAhriman. Thunder rumbled overhead and streaks of lightning flicked across the dark sky. People were rushing to get indoors before the rain started. I pushed past them, seeing in my mind’s eye the filthy way he had murdered Aretha. My right hand tightened on the hilt of my dagger as I ran.

Even in the darkness I found Ahriman’s stone temple, as if an invisible beacon guided me to it. The night air smelled damp and crackled with electricity as I raced toward its low, dark entrance. A bolt of lightning cracked the sky in half, silhouetting the stone building for an eye-flash of a moment. Then thunder growled and rumbled across the heavens, ominously.

I burst inside, into the deeper darkness of Ahriman’s lair. He stood at the stone altar, his hands raised as if in prayer, his back to me. Without an instant’s hesitation, without even a thought, I launched myself at him.

He swung around, as fast as I drove at him, and batted me away as easily as a man swats at an annoying gnat. The blow sent me reeling across the stone floor. I thudded against the wall painfully and the dagger clattered out of my grasp.

“You are a fool,” Ahriman hissed at me, his eyes glowering in the shadows.

“Where is she? What have you done to her?”

He drew in a deep breath and eyed me calmly. “She is out on the grassland somewhere, searching for you. Someone told her that you had not come back with Ogotai and the others.”

“That’s a lie!”

“But she believed it. She is out there now, in the dark, trying to find you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He shrugged his powerful shoulders. “She is alone. Her brave escort of Mongol warriors are terrified of thunderstorms and have left her. They fear lightning, you know. Sitting atop a pony in a wide treeless plain while wearing a steel helmet — it makes them natural lightning rods.”

I had heard tales of warriors throwing themselves into rivers or lakes during lightning storms. And drowning.

“I have not harmed her, Orion,” said Ahriman, his back to the altar and the symbols carved into the stone wall above it. “I have no need to.”

I got slowly to my feet. “No, you’ve merely sent her out into the storm alone.”

“Then why don’t you take a pony and go out and find her? She will be overjoyed to see you once again.”

“That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want me to leave the city, so that you can go to Ogotai and finish your work.”

He did not answer.

“You’re poisoning him,” I accused. “And you want me out of the way so that you can kill him.”

For a long moment Ahriman made no reaction whatever. Then he lifted his face toward the ceiling and began to laugh — a harsh, labored, wheezing sound that was utterly without joy. It sounded as if he were in pain; it grated on my ears and made me wince.

“I was more right than I knew,” he said at last, gasping for breath. “You are a bigger fool than I thought. Kill Ogotai? Kill him?” He laughed again, and the sound was like fingernails rasping across rough stone.

Finally he grew serious and pointed to the door. “Go, find your woman. She is unharmed — by me. What may happen to her in this storm is another matter.”

I had no choice. I could not fight him; he was too powerful for me. And even though I did not trust his words, the thought of Agla alone out on the steppe in the storm drove me out of his temple and toward the horse corral at the city’s edge.

It began to spatter rain as I commandeered a horse from the old man tending the nearest corral. My clothing told him I was of high rank, and even in the lightning-punctuated darkness he could see that my size and strange skin color marked me as the strange emissary from the West. Theft was virtually unknown among the Mongols. If I failed to bring back the pony in a reasonable time, warriors would be sent after me. There was no place in the known world where I could hide from their relentless justice.

“But this is no time to ride out into the open land,” the old man insisted as I saddled the pony. “The storm can kill a man…”

I ignored him and swung up into the saddle. The rain was coming down strong now; we were both already soaked. Lightning forked down like fingers searching for prey. The thunder was shattering the night now, as the storm marched toward us.

“You’ll kill the pony!” the old man shouted at me. True Mongol that he was, he saved his strongest argument for last.

But he was too late. I kicked at the mount’s flanks and we galloped into the wild night.

It was utterly foolish, I knew. Riding out into that storm to find Agla was like searching for a particular flower in a jungle the size of Africa — blindfolded. Yet I had to do it. I had to find her before one of those probing fingers of lightning blasted the life out of her. Strangely, I was not afraid at all of my being hit by lightning. I should have been, but I was not.

My pony was skittish, frightened, and almost bolted when a flash of lightning flicked across the sky. The thunder did not seem to bother it, though; probably it had been trained to bear up under the noise of battle. The rain became torrential, and I could barely see beyond the pony’s mane. Squinting into the darkness, hunched against the icy, wet wind, I urged the animal onward, farther into the night and the storm.

But the back of my mind was churning, digesting information, sifting data. Overriding all else was my mission to prevent Ahriman from achieving his goal. But how could I stop him if I didn’t know what he was trying to accomplish?

Over and over again, as I rode through the blinding rain, I tried to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Ahriman had seemed genuinely surprised when I had accused him of attempting to murder Ogotai. Yet I knew he was giving the High Khan a potion of some kind, almost every night that Ogotai was in his ordu. If it was not slow poison, what could it be?

The pony’s pace slowed to a trot, and then to a slow walk, as we pushed on against the wind and rain. Not even the bravest Mongol warrior would try to ride through this storm, I knew. But I had to. I had to.

What was Ahriman trying to achieve? If he wanted to kill me, he could have done it right there in his temple. Why send me out into this maelstrom? So that I could be killed by a lightning bolt, rather than slain by his own hand? That seemed far-fetched.

To keep me away from the city? Yes, that made some sense. Keep me away from Ogotai. But why, if Ahriman had no desire to murder the High Khan? Why would he want to keep me away?

I closed my eyes, not so much against the driving rain, but to focus my memory on the bits and scraps I had read in the twentieth century about the Mongol empire. With the clarity of perfect recall I saw page after page of history. I could read the words just as clearly as if the books were in my hands. Yet I could not remember what I had never read! How much history had I studied in my earlier life? I knew that the Mongols had never conquered Europe ; Subotai had crushed the armies raised by Bela, true enough, but he had never gone further into Europe. Why?

The answer flashed before my eyes like a bolt of the lightning that was shredding the darkness of the night. I saw the line from a book I had read in the twentieth century:

“No victory in battle saved western Europe from inevitable disaster. Its armies, led by reigning monarchs as incapable as Bela or Saint Louis of France, were utterly incapable of standing against the rapidly maneuvering Mongols led by Subotai. But the war never came to a final issue. A courier from Karakorum caused Subotai to halt his victorious sweep westward and turn back toward the Gobi. The courier brought the tidings of Ogotai’s death.”

Ogotai’s death! When the High Khan dies, all the Orkhons and generals return to Karakorum to elect a new High Khan. Genghis Khan’s death had halted the Mongol expansion, for a year or so. Ogotai’s death stopped the Mongol invasion of Europe — permanently.

Ahriman was not out to murder Ogotai; he was in Karakorum to protect him, to keep him alive, so that Subotai could finish the work of conquering all of Europe. Because after Subotai would come the mandarins of Ye Liu Chutsai, bringing peace and order and the law of the Yassa to the enslaved inhabitants of Europe. Bringing the same immobility and eventual stagnation to Europe that their bureaucracies had brought to China itself and the Middle East.

Europe would be homogenized by the mandarins, under the sword arm of the Mongol conquerors. The petty, boisterous states of Europe would be stamped out of existence and blended into the iron despotism of the East. The great cities would wither — or be destroyed. The Renaissance would never happen. Europeans would never discover science, never build the high technology that allowed democracies and human freedom to flourish.America would be discovered by Chinese navigators, if it all.

At last I saw Ahriman’s plan clearly. By allowing the Mongols to conquer all of Eurasia, he guaranteed that the human race would stagnate and slowly, slowly die away, crushing itself under the changeless heel of Oriental tyranny. What Ye Liu Chutsai believed to be the highest civilization in the world was in fact a trap in which humankind would extinguish itself.

If Ahriman could achieve that, he would have altered the space-time continuum to such an extent that its very fabric would be ripped asunder. The continuum would shatter. Ormazd would be overthrown. The human race would perish utterly. The forces of darkness would win the long, eternal struggle.

If Ogotai lived. That is what Ahriman was trying to accomplish. That was what I had to prevent. My mission in this time and place was not to kill Ahriman. It was to kill Ogotai.

Cursing, crying out into the thunder-racked night, I turned my pony back toward the haphazard capital of the Mongols, leaving Agla alone and defenseless in the storm, heading back toward Karakorum to murder the man who had befriended me.

CHAPTER 21

I tethered the pony under the projecting eaves of the house the Mongols had given Agla and me. The rain still fell heavily, sweeping across the cleared space around the ordu in blustery waves. The twin bonfires were dark and cold. No one was in sight. Ogotai’s tent swayed and billowed in the gusting wind. I could hear the tent ropes creaking.

Every conscious thought in me urged me to ride back into the grassland to find Agla. She was searching for me there, risking her life to save mine, and I was here on a mission of murder while I left her to wander alone through the raging storm.

But something stronger than my conscious will was directing me now. Like a warrior who marches numbly into battle even though every fiber of his being wants to run away to safety, I walked toward Ogotai’s sleeping tent, stiff with the icy cold of the night, hunched over against the slashing rain and wind.

I was a clever assassin. Instead of heading straight for the sleeping tent, I crossed the open space surrounding the ordu on the far side of the High Khan’s main tent, away from the blackened embers of the two bonfires, where there would be no guards posted to observe my approach. I entered the big, swaying, creaking tent. It was dark and empty. The long silver table had been cleared. The cushions where the Mongols lounged while their slaves attended them had been removed.

Crossing the darkened tent swiftly, I crept along the shadows of the silken hangings that shielded the entrance which connected it to the High Khan’s sleeping tent. Two warriors stood at the entrance, erect, awake, and fully armed. I slid back behind the hangings and tried to gather my thoughts.

Whether Ogotai was awake or asleep, he would no doubt have those six deaf and dumb guards in his sleeping tent with him. My only chance to kill him would be to rush in and strike him down before the guards could react. What happened afterward did not matter. I told myself that several times, and I knew that I was prepared to do it. But the other side of my mind was begging me to run away, to find Agla and go far from here, find a place where death and murder were unknown, a place where we could live together in peace and love forever. While the Mongols conquered the rest of the world and inexorably snuffed out the flickering lights of learning and growth, I heard myself answer. While the human race sank into decay, despotism, and despair. While Ahriman won his eons-long battle and watched all of humanity wither away into extinction.

I shook myself the way a dog shakes water off its fur. “Agla,” I whispered so low that I myself could not truly hear the words, “perhaps we’ll meet again, somewhere, somewhen.”

Slipping my curved dagger from its sheath, I slowly, silently sliced a cut through the tough fabric of the tent wall and carefully stepped through it, into Ogotai’s sleeping tent. Another silk hanging was draped over the tent’s side so that I made my entrance unnoticed by those inside.

The tent was dimly lit. Through the silken fabric I could see nothing more than shadows. But I could hear men speaking. It was Ahriman’s voice that I heard first. I froze where I stood, not even daring to breathe for fear of moving the tapestry and revealing my presence.

“Sleep will come soon, my lord High Khan,” said the Dark One’s heavy, tortured voice.

“The pain is bad tonight,” Ogotai replied.

“It is the dampness,” Ahriman said. “Wet weather makes the pain worse.”

“And you make the potion stronger.”

“That is necessary, to keep the pain away.”

“But the pain is winning, Persian. Each night it grows stronger. I can feel it, despite your potions.”

“Did you suffer badly during the hunt, my lord?”

“Enough. Your draughts kept me going. But if it hadn’t been for Orion, I would be dead now.”

I could hear Ahriman give out a long, growling sigh.

“You still prophesy,” Ogotai asked, “that he will try to kill me?”

“He is an assassin, High Khan. He was sent here to murder you.”

“I cannot believe it.”

Ahriman’s rasping voice took on an air of complete certainty. “The next time you see him. High Khan, he will attempt to assassinate you. Be warned.”

“Enough!” Ogotai snapped. “If he had wanted to kill me, he could have let the boar do the job. He saved my life, wizard.”

“And won your confidence.”

Ogotai did not answer. For long moments I heard nothing but the keening of the wind outside and the creaking of the tent ropes.

“My lord High Khan,” Ahriman said, in his harsh whisper, “a month from now your general Subotai will gather the strength of his army once again and march farther west, across the lands of the German princes, across the broad river called the Rhine, and into the land of the Franks. These Franks are mighty warriors. It was they who turned back the Saracens many years ago. It is they who even today battle against the Ottomans near Jerusalem. But Ogotai will crush them utterly and destroy their cities. He will reach the wide sea and plant the yak-tail standard on its shore. You will rule all the lands between the two mighty oceans. All of Europe and Asia will be yours.”

“You have prophesied all this before,” said Ogotai. He sounded weary, dulled, sleepy.

“Indeed,” Ahriman admitted. “But none of this will come to pass if the High Khan dies and all the Orkhons and generals must return to Karakorum to elect a new High Khan. Orion knows this. That is why he must strike you down soon, within the next few days, if he is to save Europe from Subotai’s conquest.”

“I understand your words, wizard,” Ogotai said, slowly. “But I do not believe them.”

“My prophecies have never failed you, High Khan.”

“Leave me, wizard. Let me sleep in peace.”

“I am…”

“Leave,” Ogotai commanded.

I heard Ahriman’s heavy, lumbering tread cross the tent and disappear into the night. For several minutes I remained behind the tapestry while, one by one, the lamps in the tent were snuffed out. Finally there was only one dim light flickering. It stayed lit, and I decided that Ogotai was not going to have it put out.

I stepped out from behind the hanging. The High Khan was lying atop the quilts of his bed, wearing a rough robe of homespun. His face looked haggard. He was sweating. But he was still awake, and he saw me.

So did his guards. Six swords leaped from their scabbards.

Ogotai made a motion with his hands. The guards stood where they were, swords gripped tightly in their hands.

“They see the dagger in your hand, Orion,” said Ogotai, “and fear you are here to slay me.”

Only then did I realize that I still held the weapon. I opened my fingers and let it drop to the carpet. Ogotai gestured to the guards and they sheathed their swords and left the tent.

The two of us were alone.

The High Khan seemed drained of all strength. His eyes focused on me, and I could see agony in them.

“Have you come to fulfill Ahriman’s prophecy?” he asked. “Have you come to kill me?”

“If I must.”

He almost smiled. “It is not fitting for a Mongol warrior to take his own life. But I have a devil inside my body, Orion. It burns inside me like a red-hot coal. It is killing me slowly, inch by inch.”

Cancer. That was why Ahriman was providing him with pain-killers. But not even Ahriman’s skills could cure cancer once it was so far advanced.

“My lord High Khan…”

“Orion, my friend. I cannot be struck down in battle. I am too old for that. I barely made it through the hunt. But you can strike me down. You can give me a clean death, instead of this lingering foulness.”

The breath caught in my throat. “How can I kill a man who calls me friend?”

“Death always wins, in the end. It took my father, did it not? It will take me. The only question is when… and how much pain there will be. I am not a coward, Orion—” he swallowed hard and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment — “but I have had my share of pain.”

I stood there by his bed, unable to move.

“You are a loyal friend,” Ogotai said. “You hesitate because you know that if you kill me, the prophecy of Ahriman will not come to pass: the Mongols will not rule the entire world.”

How could I tell him that this was why I had to murder him?

“I like your own prophecy better, Orion. Let the Mongols live in peace. Let other nations struggle and war against one another. As long as we find peace… and rest…”

His eyes squeezed shut again and his whole body arched on the bed like a man being tortured on the rack.

When he opened his eyes again, there were tears in them. “Not even Ahriman’s potion is — helping tonight. I weep like a woman.”

My hand slid to the empty sheath at my belt.

Ogotai’s breathing had become shallow, gasping. “It would not be good for the others to see me so weak. The High Khan should not appear with tears in his eyes.”

I remembered that among the Mongols it was forbidden to shed blood. I turned and took a pillow from the chair beside his bed.

Ogotai actually smiled at me. “Good-bye, my friend from the western lands.”

I covered his face with the pillow. By the time I lifted it from him, there were tears in my eyes.

I walked slowly out of the tent, past the guards who still stood at the entrance. The storm had blown away. Dawn was turning the sky pink. I strode back to the house, to the pony tethered beside it, mounted up and rode out of the city. Agla was still there in the wilderness, somewhere. Perhaps I could reach her before the Mongols realized what I had done.

For two days and nights I searched the grassy open plain, wondering if Agla had survived the storm, wondering if the Mongols would come hunting for me, wondering what Ahriman was doing to revenge himself for my thwarting his plan.

On the morning of the third day I saw a pony, head drooping, reins dragging on the grass, its saddle askew and empty. I had been walking my horse, but I quickly mounted up and dug my heels into its flanks. I galloped along, following the trail that Agla’s mount had left in the grass, my heart racing faster than the pony’s drumming hooves.

And then I saw a figure sprawled on the ground as if it had fallen from its horse or dropped with exhaustion. I bent over my pony’s neck and raced toward her.

But suddenly the world seemed to drop away from me. I was falling — falling in a crazy, wild, spinning tunnel — my arms and legs flailing against emptiness as a flashing kaleidoscope of vivid colors battered at my senses. Just as suddenly I was floating in utter darkness, disembodied in a black pit of weightless, timeless suspension.

“Agla!” I screamed. But there was no sound.

How long I hung suspended, bodiless in that dark void, I have no way of knowing. Slowly I began to realize that this was Ahriman’s doing, his revenge upon me for thwarting him: I was sentenced to an eternity of nothingness.

But then I saw a tiny spark of light, a distant star glimmering against the vast, indifferent emptiness, and my heart leaped. The star grew, shimmering, into a golden sphere and slowly took the shape of a glowing golden man.

Ormazd.

You have done well, Orion. I could not hear his words, for no sound existed in this blankness. But I understood what he was saying. This was his doing, not Ahriman’s. Ormazd had taken me away from Agla, whisked me out of time once I had completed his bidding. This was my reward for stopping Ahriman once again.

But your work is far from finished, he was telling me Ahriman still threatens the continuum. You have only deflected his evil; you have not ended it.

I felt myself falling again and heard wind whistling past me. I opened my mouth in a long primal scream of anger — anger directed not against Ahriman, my enemy, but against Ormazd, my creator.