I’m very sorry he’s not here with me. I lost him a year ago.”
Grove’s face stiffened. “Ah.”
“Pneumonia, they said. The truth was, I think he just wore himself out. He wasn’t so old.”
“Another one of us gone, another one less to remember where we came from — eh, Mrs. White?”
“Call me Emeline, please. You’ve traveled far?”
“Not so far as you, but far enough. We live now in an Alexandria—
not the city on the Nile, but at Ilium.”
“Where’s that?”
“Turkey, as we knew it.” He smiled. “
“I imagine you’re here because of the telephone call in Babylon.”
“Assuredly. The scholar Abdikadir wrote to me, as he wrote to Bloom, here, in the hope of contacting Josh. Not that I have the faintest idea what it all means. But one has to address these things.”
The baby started crying. Bloom, clearly irritated, clapped his hands. “Well, Babylon awaits. Unless you need to rest, Captain—”
“Let’s get on with it.”
“Mr. Batson, if you would lead the way?”
Batson clambered briskly back up the stair, and Grove and Emeline followed.
Emeline looked back once. She glimpsed Isobel frantically trying to hush the baby, and Bloom stalking over to her, visibly angry, his arm raised. Emeline had worked with Jane Addams in Chicago; she was repelled by this vignette. But there was surely nothing Emeline could do that would not make it worse for the girl.
She climbed the worn stairs, and emerged blinking into the dusty Babylonian sunlight.
27: Phaeton
The passengers and their bits of luggage were loaded onto a crude, open phaeton. Bloom sent his “boy” off to find their draft animals.
Emeline was shocked when the Stone Man returned, not with horses as she had expected, but with four more of his own kind.
Where Bloom’s servant was dressed in his rags, these four were naked. Three of them were men, their genitalia small gray clumps in black hair, and the woman had slack breasts with long pink-gray nipples. Their stocky forms were thickly coated with hair, and that and their musculature and collapsed brows gave them the look of gorillas. But they looked far more human than ape, their hands hairless, their eyes clear. It was a shocking sight as they were settled into the phaeton’s harness, each taking a collar around the neck.
Bloom now took a whip of leather, and cracked it without mal-ice across the backs of the lead pair. The Stone Men stumbled forward into a shambling job, and the phaeton clattered forward.
Bloom’s servant was to walk alongside the carriage. Emeline saw now that the creatures all had stripes, old whip-scars, across their backs.
Bloom produced a clay bottle and made to pass it around.
“Whiskey? It’s a poor grain but not a bad drop.”
Emeline refused; Grove and Batson took a nip each.
Grove asked Emeline politely about her journey from frozen America.
“It took me months; I feel quite the hardened traveler.”
Grove stroked his mustache. “America is quite different from Europe, I hear. No people…”
“None save us. Nothing came over of modern America but Chicago. Not a single sign of humanity outside the city limits has been found — not a single Indian tribe — we met nobody until the explorers from Europe showed up in the Mississippi delta.”
“And none of these man-apes and sub-men and pre-men that Europe seems to be thick with?”
“No.”
Mir was a quilt of a world, a composite of time slices, samples apparently drawn from throughout human history, and the prehis-tory of the hominid families that preceded mankind.
Emeline said, “It seems that it was only humans who reached the New World; the older sorts never walked there. But we have quite a menagerie out there, Captain! Mammoths and cave bears and lions — the hunters among us are in hog heaven.”
Grove smiled. “It sounds marvelous. Free of all the complications of this older world — just as America always was, I suppose.
And Chicago sounds a place of enterprise. I was pleased for him when Josh decided to go back there, after that business of Bisesa Dutt and the Eye.”
Emeline couldn’t help but flinch when she heard that name.
She knew her husband had carried feelings for that vanished woman to his grave, and Emeline, deep in her soul, had always been hopelessly, helplessly jealous of a woman she had never met.
She changed the subject. “You must tell me of Troy.”
He grimaced. “There are worse places, and it’s ours — in a way.
Alexander planted it along with a heap of other cities in the process of his establishment of his Empire of the Whole World. He calls it Alexandria at Ilium.
“Everywhere he went Alexander always built cities. But now, in Greece and Anatolia and elsewhere, he has built new cities on the vacant sites of the old: there is a new Athens, a new Sparta. Thebes, too, though it’s said that’s an expression of guilt, for he himself destroyed the old version before the Discontinuity.”
“Troy is especially precious to the King,” Bloom said. “For you may know the King believes he is descended from Heracles of Argos, and in his early career he modeled himself on Achilles.”
Emeline said to Grove, “And so you settled there.”
“I feared that my few British were overwhelmed in a great sea of Macedonians and Greeks and Persians. And as everybody knows, Britain was colonized in the first place by refugees from the Trojan war. It amused Alexander, I think, that we were closing a circle of causes by doing so, a new Troy founded by descendants of Trojans.
“He left us with a batch of women from his baggage train, and let us get on with it. This was about fifteen years ago. It’s been hard, by God, but we prevail. And there’s no distinction between Tommy and sepoy now! We’re something new in creation altogether, I’d say. But I leave the philosophy to the philosophers.”
“But what of yourself, Captain? Did you ever have a family?”
He smiled. “Oh, I was always a bit too busy with looking after my men for that. And I have a wife and a little girl at home — or did.” He glanced at Batson. “However Ben’s father was a corporal of mine, a rough type from the northeast of England, but one of the better of his sort. Unfortunately got himself mutilated by the Mongols — but not before he’d struck up a relationship with a camp follower of Alexander’s, as it turned out. When poor Batson eventually died of infections of his wounds, the woman didn’t much want to keep Ben; he looked more like Batson than one of hers. So I took him in. Duty, you see.”
Ben Batson smiled at them, calm, patient.
Emeline saw more than duty here. She said, “I think you did a grand job, Captain Grove.”
Grove said, “I think Alexander was pleased, in fact, when we asked for Troy. He usually has to resort to conscripts to fill his new cities, studded as they are in an empty continent; it seems to me Europe is much more an empire of Neanderthal than of human.”
“Empire?” Bloom snapped. “Not a word I’d use. A source of stock, perhaps. The Stone Men are strong, easily broken, with a good deal of manual dexterity. The Greeks tell me that handling a Stone Man is like handling an elephant compared to a horse — a smarter sort of animal; you just need a different technique.”
Grove’s face was a mask. “We use Neanderthals,” he said. “We couldn’t get by if not. But we
Consul, they have a sort of speech of their own, they make tools, they weep over their dead as they bury
