“So am I. So are most of us. Seems too good to be true, what gossip says.” Timotheus wiped his brow and stared before him into the gloom, as if to conjure her from the steam-clouds. “An avatar of Anaitis.” Hastily, he sketched a symbol with his forefinger. “No disrespect to the goddess. What I know is only what filters forth to the world, by way of friends and servants and such. Her lovers are few, and higher-ups, every one of them. They don’t say much about her. I guess she doesn’t want them to. Else she’d be as widely spoke of as Phryne or Aspasia or Lais. But her men do let words slip now and then, and those words pass on. Maybe growing in the telling. I don’t know.”
“Face and form like Aphrodite’s, voice like song, skin like snow, gait like a panther’s. Midnight hair. Eyes the green of a fire where copper is about to melt. That’s what they say.”
“I’ve never seen her. Few have. She seldom leaves her house, and then it’s in a curtained litter. But, yes, so the song goes. A tavern song. Unfortunately, we can’t do more than sing about her, we commoners. And it could well be exaggerated.” Timotheus sniggered. “Maybe the bard was just wet-dreaming in public.”
If she is Raor, it is not exaggerated. For Everard, the room suddenly lost its heat. He forced his tone to stay casual. “Where’s she from? Any kin here with her?”
Timotheus turned his face to the big man. “Why so inquisitive? She’s not for you, my friend, no, not if you offered a thousand staters. For one thing, the patrons she’s got would be jealous. That could get unhealthy.”
Everard shrugged. “I’m only curious. Somebody out of nowhere, almost overnight fascinating ministers of the king—”
Timotheus looked uneasy. “They do whisper she’s a sorceress.” Fast: “I’m not backbiting her, mind you. Listen, she’s endowed a small temple of Poseidon outside town. A pious work.” He couldn’t resist cynicism. “It gives employment to her kinsman Nicomachus, its priest. But then, he was here before her, I don’t know what he was doing, and maybe he prepared her way.” Quickly again: “No disrespect. For all I know, she is a goddess among us. Let’s change the subject.”
Poseidon? wondered Everard. This far inland? … Oh, yes. As well as the sea, he’s god of horses and earthquakes, and this is a country of both.
Toward evening, he figured Chandrakumar would be back. First he stilled hunger at a vendor’s brazier, with lentils and onions dished into a folded chapatti. Tomatoes, green pepper, and a roast ear of corn on the side were for the future. He would have liked coffee, too, but must settle for diluted sour wine. Another need he took care of in an alley that happened to be unoccupied. That amenity of civilization, the French pissoir, stood equally far uptime, and all too briefly.
The sun was under the ramparts and streets were cooling off in shadow when he reached the vihara. This time the monk led him to a room inside. Rather, it was a cell, tiny, windowless, a thin curtain across the doorway for privacy. A clay lamp on a shelf gave barely enough flickery, odorous light for Everard to pick his way over a floor whose sole furniture was a straw tick and a bit of rug on which a man sat cross-legged.
Eyeballs gleamed through murk as Chandrakumar looked up. He was small, thin, chocolate-skinned, with the delicate features and full lips of a Hindu—born in the late nineteenth century, Everard knew, a university graduate whose thesis on Indo-Bactrian society had led to the Patrol seeking him out with an offer to conduct his further studies in person. Here his garb was a white dhoti, his hair hung long, and he was holding near his mouth an object that Everard deduced was not really an amulet.
“Rejoice,” he said uncertainly.
Everard returned the greeting in the same Greek. “Rejoice.” The monk’s footfalls dwindled away. Everard spoke softly, in Temporaclass="underline" “Can we talk without anybody trying to listen?”
“You are an agent?” The question trembled. Chandrakumar made to rise. Everard waved him back and lowered his own bulk to the clay.
“Correct,” he said. “Things are getting urgent.”
“I should hope so.” Chandrakumar had recovered equilibrium. Though he was a researcher, not a constable, field specialists too must needs be tough and quick-witted. His voice held an edge. “I have spent this past year wondering when somebody would arrive. We are now at the very crisis point.” Pause. “Are we not?” A spectacular episode in history was not necessarily one on which the whole future hinged.
Everard gestured at the disc on its chain. “Best turn that off. We don’t want to risk our conversation falling into the wrong hands.” It doubtless contained a molecular-level recorder, into which Chandrakumar had been whispering notes on this day’s observations. His communicator and other, similarly disguised equipment were stowed somewhere else.
When the medallion dangled loose, Everard proceeded: “I’m passing for Meander, an Illyrian soldier of fortune. What I am is Specialist Jack Holbrook, born 1975, Toronto.” On a mission as damnable as his, you didn’t tell even an ally more than he had to know. Everard shook hands, the polite thing for men of their natal backgrounds to do. “And you are … Benegal Dass?”
“At home. Chandrakumar is the name I currently use here. You caused me a bit of trouble about that, you know. Before, I was ‘Rajneesh.’ Wasn’t reasonable he should pop up so soon after he left for home, so I had to concoct a jolly good kinship story to explain why I look just like him.”
They had slipped into English, almost unconsciously, a breath of the commonplace in this darkness. Perhaps for the same reason, they did not go immediately to the point.
“I was surprised to learn you hadn’t meant to be present,” Everard said. “Famous siege. You could fill in all the lacunae and correct the errors in Polybius, and whatever other fragments of chronicle will survive.”
Chandrakumar spread his palms. “Given my limited resources and finite lifespan, I did not care to squander any of it on a war. Bloodshed, waste, misery, and after two years, what result? Antiochus can’t take the city and doesn’t wish or dare to stay bogged down before it any longer. He makes a peace that is sealed by betrothing a daughter of his to Prince Demetrius, and proceeds on south to India. The evolution of a society is what matters. Wars are nothing but its pathologies.”
Everard refrained from expressing disagreement. Not that he liked wars; he had seen too many. By the same token, though, they must be as much a norm of history as blizzards were of Arctic weather; and all too often, their outcomes did make a difference.
“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, “but we required an expert observer on the spot, and you’re it. Uh, as Chandrakumar, you’re a Buddhist pilgrim, am I right?”
“Not precisely. The vihara does possess a few holy objects, but nothing extraordinary. However, Chandrakumar seeks enlightenment, and the letters that his cousin Rajneesh sent from the silk dealership where he worked in Bactra, those decided Chandrakumar on studying the wisdom of the West as well as the East. For example, Heraclitus was approximately contemporary with the Buddha, and some of his thought shows close parallels. This is a good place for an Indian to learn about the Hellenes.”
Everard nodded. In one identity after another, normally separated by timespans of a length to preclude recognition, Benegal Dass spent years adding up into decades among the Bactrians. Each arrival and departure was by the slow, difficult, dangerous means of the era; a hopper, anything that might seem strange, would have destroyed his usefulness and run afoul of the Patrol’s prime directive. He had watched this city grow great, and he would watch it die. The end product of his labors was the story of it, deep and wide-ranging but never seen except by a handful of interested individuals within the corps or up in the far distant future. When he took furlough in his native country and century, he must lie to family and friends about what he did for a living. Surely no monk had ever accepted an existence harder, lonelier, or more devoted. I don’t have that kind of fortitude, Everard confessed.