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against the Mongols, in case Sable had similar surprises up her spacesuit sleeve. The Macedonians had
no trouble in grasping the principles of firearms; killing at a distance with bows was familiar to them. But
the first time the Macedonians saw a relatively harmless flashbang grenade go off they yelled and ran,
regardless of the harangues of their officers. It would have been comical if not so alarming.
With Grove s support, Abdikadir insisted that Bisesa shouldn t take part in the fighting directly. A
woman would be particularly vulnerable; Grove, quaintly, actually used the phrase a fate worse than
death.
So Bisesa threw herself into another project: establishing a hospital.
She requisitioned a small Babylonian town house. Philip, Alexander s personal physician, and the British
Surgeon-Captain both assigned her assistants. She was grievously short of any kind of supplies, but what
she lacked in resources she tried to compensate for in modern know-how. She experimented with wine
as an antiseptic. She established casualty collection points across the likely battlefield, and trained pairs of
Alexander s powerful, long-legged Agrarian scouts to work as stretcher-bearers. She tried to set up
trauma chests, simple packs of equipment to serve the basis of the most likely injuries they would
encounter even gunshot wounds. This was an innovation of the British army in the Falklands; you made
a quick assessment of the injury, then just grabbed the most appropriate kit.
The hardest thing to impart was the need for hygiene. Neither Macedonians nor nineteenth-century Brits
grasped the need even to wipe off the blood between treating one patient and another. The Macedonians
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were baffled by her vague talk of invisible creatures, like tiny gods or demons, attacking broken flesh or
exposed organs, and the British were scarcely any the wiser about bacteria and viruses. In the end, she
had to appeal to their respective command structures to enforce her will.
She gave her assistants what practice she could. She sacrificed more goats, hacking at the animals with a
Macedonian scimitar, or shooting them in the gut or pelvis. There was no substitute for getting your hands
in real gore. The Macedonians were not squeamish to have survived with Alexander, most of them had
seen enough terrible injuries in their time but the notion of doing something about it was new to them.
The effectiveness of even simple techniques like tourniquets startled them, and inspired them to work
harder, learning all the time.
Once again she was changing the trajectory of history, Bisesa thought. If they survived a big if she
wondered what new medical synthesis, two thousand years early, might develop from the
rough-and-ready education she was struggling to impart: perhaps a whole new body of knowledge,
functionally equivalent to the mechanical Newtonian models of the twenty-first century, but couched in
the language of Macedonian gods.
Ruddy Kipling insisted on joining up, as he called it. Here I stand at the confluence of history, as
mankind s two greatest generals join in combat, with the prize the destiny of a new world. My blood is
up, Bisesa! He had, he claimed, trained with the First Punjab Volunteer Rifles, part of an Anglo-Indian
initiative to fend off the threats emanating from the rebellious North West Frontier. Granted I didn t last
very long, he admitted, after mocking my fellow recruits shooting skills in a little poem about having my
carcass peppered with bullets while walking down a neighboring street . . .
The British took one look at this broad-faced, pudgy, somewhat pompous young man, still pale from his
lingering illness, and laughed at him. The Macedonians were simply baffled by Ruddy, but wouldn t have
him either.
After these rebuffs, and somewhat against Bisesa s better judgment, Ruddy insisted on joining her
makeshift medical corps. I once had some ambition to be a doctor, you know . . . Perhaps, but he
turned out to be astoundingly squeamish, fainting dead away the first time he glimpsed a goat s fresh
blood.
But, determined to play his part in the great struggle, he stuck with it. Gradually he became inured to the
atmosphere of a hospital, the stink of blood, and the bleating of wounded and frightened animals.
Eventually he was able to apply a bandage to a goat s hacked-open leg, all but finishing the job before
fainting.
Then came his greatest triumph, when a Tommy came in with a gashed-open hand from a training
accident. Ruddy was able to clean it out and bind it up without referring to Bisesa, although he threw up
later, as he cheerfully admitted.
After that, Bisesa took his shoulders, ignoring the faint stink of vomit. Ruddy, courage on the battlefield
is one thing but no less is the courage to face one s inner demons, as you have done.
I will persuade myself to believe you, he said, but he blushed through his pallor.
Though Ruddy became able to stand the sight of blood, suffering and death, he was still greatly moved
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