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 from Croatia, 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.