How many people knew that the Mongols fostered the greatest explosion of trade and commerce that had ever taken place prior to that time between China and the western lands of Islam and Christendom? That they built, in China, twenty-seven observatories—and then invited the world’s greatest astronomers to come from Persia to help the Chinese learn to use them? That the Mongols built hospitals and even a medical academy, institutions which would have mystified the Europeans of the time?
Almost no one, thought Indira, beyond a few professional historians. Whatever the glories of their later rule, the methods which the Mongols used to create that rule were all that remained in the common memory of the human race.
An admirable people, in many ways. But they had approached warfare with the clear eyes of a young and unfettered people. They had examined war, and grasped its secret.
Speed above all else. Mobility above all else.
Utter ruthlessness.
Their victims had numbered in the millions.
She watched Joseph walk away, paralyzed between the warm heart of a mother and the cold brain of an historian.
Julius soon noticed the quiet estrangement between Indira and Joseph, and was greatly distressed. In his clumsy way, he attempted to intervene. Indira, at first, denied that there was any such estrangement. Denied it hotly, in fact; and accused Julius of various unsavory psychological traits. She was lying, Julius knew—perhaps as much to herself as to him. He knew she was lying because the accusations had been grotesquely unfair (if not totally groundless). Indira’s criticisms of Julius were normally rather mild—but excruciatingly accurate.
He then approached Joseph. At first, the boy also denied that any estrangement existed. But he did not throw up a cloud of anger. So Julius persevered, until he managed to crack, slightly, the shell of hurt which Joseph had erected.
“She is keeping secrets from me, Julius. Secrets I must learn.”
Julius was dumbfounded. “Secrets? What secrets?”
Joseph groped for words. “Things she knows. She is wise, Julius. She is the wisest being that exists. Especially in those matters which are at the heart of things.”
The boy gestured, in a way which encompassed both the village and the lands beyond.
“How people live, and grow. What roads they must take, and which they must avoid.”
His face grew hard.
“And she also knows the secrets of war. And she will not tell me. My mother has abandoned me, when I need her most.”
He refused to speak further. And Julius did not press him, for he understood the boy was right.
Yet, he also understood the fear possessing Indira. He did not feel that fear so deeply, himself. Perhaps it was because he was wiser; or, perhaps, more foolish. More likely, he thought, it was because he saw the world through the eyes of a biologist rather than an historian. A paleontologist, to boot—for whom all of life is a grand and glorious testament to the inevitability of extinction; and to the new life for which that extinction makes room.
As a human with a good heart, he regretted the suffering of the past. But he thought it had been a necessary evil, an inescapable part of the progress of humanity. Indira, ironically, had a considerably cooler personality than Julius. And she knew, even better than he, that the anguish of human history had been the inevitable accompaniment of human advancement. But she also knew—far, far better than Julius—just how truly horrible and protracted that anguish had been.
Historical suffering, to Julius—as to most people of the early 22nd century—was a pale shadow, an abstraction. He had heard of things, even read about them. He knew who the Mongols were. And Tamerlane.
But Indira had walked the barren vastnesses of Central Asia, where a great civilization had flourished while Europe was a land of fur-clad savages. Before the Mongols came, and Tamerlane. Julius had heard of those things, and read about them upon occasion. Indira had studied the chronicles, and looked at the ruins.
And the bones.
To the warm-hearted Julius, bones were the stuff of his trade. To the cool and distant Indira, each bone had cried out with agony; and horror.