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world. But we cannot maintain that grip if we starve.
She shook her head. I will take this to the Khan. He would not be so timid as to pass by an opportunity
like this.
Yeh-lü s face closed up, the nearest Kolya ever saw to him growing angry. Emissary of Heaven, you
do not yet have the ear of Genghis Khan.
Just wait, Sable said in English, and she grinned defiantly, apparently without fear.
23: CONFERENCE
Answering Alexander s summons they headed for the King s tent: Captain Grove and his officers,
Bisesa, Abdikadir, Cecil de Morgan in his role as interpreter, and Ruddy and Josh, who would record
this astonishing conference in their notebooks. On the Macedonian side there would be Alexander
himself, Eumenes, Hephaistion, the King s doctor Philip and an inordinate number of courtiers, advisors,
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chamberlains and pages.
The setting was magnificent. Alexander s official tent, hauled all the way from the delta, was immense,
supported by golden columns and roofed with spangled cloth. Silver-legged sofas had been set up before
the King s golden throne for the visitors. But the atmosphere was tense: there must have been a hundred
troops standing alert throughout the tent, the infantrymen known as Shield Bearers dressed in scarlet and
royal blue, and Immortals from Persia in beautifully embroidered, if impractical, tunics.
Eumenes, seeking to minimize unnecessary friction, had quietly briefed Bisesa on the protocol expected
in the King s presence. So, on entering, the visitors from the future paid the Kingproskynesis, a Greek
name for a Persian form of obeisance that involved blowing a kiss at the King and bowing. Abdikadir
was predictably uncomfortable with this, but Captain Grove and his officers were unfazed. Evidently
these British, stuck out on the edge of their own empire and surrounded by petty princes, rajahs and
amirs, were accustomed to respecting eccentric local customs.
Aside from that, Bisesa could see that Abdikadir was enjoying himself hugely. She had met few people
as hard-headed as Abdikadir, but he was obviously indulging himself in a pleasant fantasy that these
magnificent Macedonians were indeed his ancestors.
The party settled on the magnificent couches, pages and ushers circulated with food and drink, and the
conference began. The translation, channeled by Greek scholars and de Morgan, was slow and
sometimes frustrating. But they got there steadily, sometimes with the aid of maps, drawings or even
lettering scrawled on Macedonian wax tablets, or on bits of paper Ruddy or Josh ripped out of their
notebooks.
They started with a sharing of information. Alexander s people were not surprised by Jamrud s Evil Eye,
which continued to hover over the parade ground. Since the day on which the sun had lurched across
the sky, as the Macedonians put it, their scouts had seen such things all over the Indus valley. Like the
British, the Macedonians had quickly become used to these silent, floating observers, and treated them
just as disrespectfully.
Hardheaded Secretary Eumenes was less interested in such silent mysteries than in the politics of the
future, which had brought these strangers to the Frontier. It took some time to make Eumenes and the
others understand that the British and Bisesa s party were actually from two different eras though the
gap between them, a mere hundred and fifty years or so, was dwarfed by the twenty-four centuries
between Alexander s time and Bisesa s. Still, as Captain Grove sketched in the background to the
nineteenth-century Great Game, Eumenes showed his quick understanding.
Bisesa had expected her twenty-first-century conflict to be less comprehensible to the Macedonians, but
when Abdikadir talked about central Asia s oil reserves Eumenes spoke. He remembered that on the
banks of a river in what Bisesa gathered was modern-day Iran, two springs of a strange fluid had welled
out of the ground near where the royal tent had been pitched. It was no different in taste or brightness
from olive oil, said Eumenes, though the ground was unsuited to olive trees. Even then, he said,
Alexander had mused on the profit to be made out of such finds if they were extensive though his tame
prophet Aristander had declared the oil an omen of hard labor ahead. We come here in our different
times for our different ambitions, said Eumenes. But still we come, even across millennia. Perhaps this is
the cockpit of the world for eternity.
Alexander himself spoke little. He sat on his throne with his head propped on one fist, eyes half-lidded,
occasionally looking up with that odd, head-turned, beguiling shyness. He left the conduct of the meeting
largely to Eumenes, who struck Bisesa as a very smart cookie, and to Hephaistion, who would interrupt
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Eumenes, seeking clarification or even contradicting his colleague. It was obvious that there was a lot of
tension between Eumenes and Hephaistion, but perhaps Alexander was content for these potential rivals
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