The sheer force of him was astounding. It lay not so much in what he said, although that was sharp and fierce, as in the way he said it. I could feel the strength of the man in the velocity and impact of each syllable. Temujin hurled his words as if from a catapult. They arrived carrying a crackling electrical charge. Talking with him was like holding live cables in my hands.
Hedley, jigging and fidgeting around the lab, paused now and then to stare at me with what looked like awe and wonder in his eyes, as if to say, You really can make sense of this stuff? I smiled at him. I felt bizarrely cool and unflustered. Sitting there with some electronic thing on my head, letting that terrific force go hurtling through my brain. Discussing twelfth-century politics with an invisible Byzantine Mongol. Making small talk with Genghis Khan. All right. I could handle it.
I beckoned for notepaper. Need printout of world historical background late twelfth century, I scrawled, without interrupting my conversation with Temujin. Esp. Byzantine history, Crusades, etc.
The kings of England and France, said Temujin, were talking about launching a new Crusade. But at the moment they happened to be at war with each other, which made cooperation difficult. The powerful Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany was also supposed to be getting up a Crusade, but that, he said, might mean more trouble for Byzantium than for the Saracens, because Frederick was the friend of Byzantium’s enemies in the rebellious provinces, and he’d have to march through those provinces on the way to the Holy Land.
“It is a perilous time,” I agreed.
Then suddenly I was feeling the strain. Temujin’s rapid-fire delivery was exhausting to follow, he spoke Mongolian with what I took to be a Byzantine accent, and he sprinkled his statements with the names of emperors, princes, and even nations that meant nothing to me. Also there was that powerful force of him to contend with—it hit you like an avalanche—and beyond that his anger: the whipcrack inflection that seemed the thinnest of bulwarks against some unstated inner rage, fury, frustration. It’s hard to feel at ease with anyone who seethes that way. Suddenly I just wanted to go somewhere and lie down.
But someone put printout sheets in front of me, closely packed columns of stuff from the Britannica. Names swam before my eyes: Henry II, Barbarossa, Stephan Nemanya, Isaac II Angelos, Guy of Jerusalem, Richard the Lion-Hearted. Antioch, Tripoli, Thessalonica, Venice. I nodded my thanks and pushed the sheets aside.
Cautiously I asked Temujin about Mongolia. It turned out that he knew almost nothing about Mongolia. He’d had no contact at all with his native land since his abduction at the age of eleven by Byzantine traders who carried him off to Constantinople. His country, his father, his brothers, the girl to whom he had been betrothed when he was still a child—they were all just phantoms to him now, far away, forgotten. But in the privacy of his own soul he still spoke Khalkha. That was all that was left.
By 1187, I knew, the Temujin who would become Genghis Khan had already made himself the ruler of half of Mongolia. His fame would surely have spread to cosmopolitan Byzantium. How could this Temujin be unaware of him? Well, I saw one way. But Joe had already shot it down. And it sounded pretty nutty even to me.
“Do you want a drink?” Hedley asked. “Tranks? Aspirin?”
I shook my head. “I’m okay,” I murmured.
To Temujin I said, “Do you have a wife? Children?”
“I have vowed not to marry until Jesus rules again in His own land.”
“So you’re going to go on the next Crusade?” I asked.
Whatever answer Temujin made was smothered by static.
Awkkk. Skrrkkk. Tsssshhhhhhh.
Then silence, lengthening into endlessness.
“Signal’s gone,” someone said.
“I could use that drink now,” I said. “Scotch.”
The lab clock said it was ten in the morning. To me it felt like the middle of the night.
An hour had passed. The signal hadn’t returned.
Hedley said, “You really think he’s Genghis Khan?”
“I really think he could have been.”
“In some other probability world.”
Carefully I said, “I don’t want to get you all upset again, Joe.”
“You won’t. Why the hell not believe we’re tuned into an alternative reality? It’s no more goofy than any of the rest of this. But tell me this: is what he says consistent with being Genghis Khan?”
“His name’s the same. His age. His childhood, up to the point when he wandered into some Byzantine trading caravan and they took him away to Constantinople with them. I can imagine the sort of fight he put up, too. But his life-line must have diverged completely from that point on. A whole new world-line split off from ours. And in that world, instead of turning into Genghis Khan, ruler of all Mongolia, he grew up to be Petros Alexios of Prince Theodore Lascaris’ private guards.”
“And he has no idea of who he could have been?” Joe asked.
“How could he? It isn’t even a dream to him. He was born into another world that wasn’t ever destined to have a Genghis Khan. You know the poem:
“Very pretty. Is that Yeats?” Hedley said.
“Wordsworth,” I said. “When’s the signal coming back?”
“An hour, two, three. It’s hard to say. You want to take a nap, and we’ll wake you when we have acquisition?”
“I’m not sleepy.”
“You look pretty ragged,” Joe said.
I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
“I’m okay. I’ll sleep for a week, later on. What if you can’t raise him again?”
“There’s always that chance, I suppose. We’ve already had him on the line five times as long as all the rest put together.”
“He’s a very determined man,” I said.
“He ought to be. He’s Genghis fucking Khan.”
“Get him back,” I said. “I don’t want you to lose him. I want to talk to him some more.”
Morning ticked on into afternoon. I phoned Elaine twice while we waited, and I stood for a long time at the window watching the shadows of the oncoming winter evening fall across the hibiscus and the bougainvillea, and I hunched my shoulders up and tried to pull in the signal by sheer body english. Contemplating the possibility that they might never pick up Temujin again left me feeling weirdly forlorn. I was beginning to feel that I had a real relationship with that eerie disembodied angry voice coming out of the crackling night. Toward mid-afternoon I thought I was starting to understand what was making Temujin so angry, and I had some things I wanted to say to him about that.
Maybe you ought to get some sleep, I told myself.
At half past four someone came to me and said the Mongol was on the line again.
The static was very bad. But then came the full force of Temujin soaring over it. I heard him saying, “The Holy Land must be redeemed. I cannot sleep so long as the infidels possess it.”
I took a deep breath.