Spring And Shrine

Where there is a spring outside Bactra, there is a shrine:

"...to the god of underground waters."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), p. 102.

The Exaltationist Raor posing as the courtesan Theonis remodels the shrine, rededicates it to Poseidon and appoints her kinsman Nichomachus, really the Exaltationist Draganizu, as its priest. The temple will be the venue of two or three meetings between Draganizu, coming from the city, and Buleni, another Exaltationist posing as an aide to Antiochus while that Seleucid ruler besieges the city.

In fact, the temple instead becomes the site of the defeat of the Exaltationists by the Time Patrol. Thus, powerful forces from beyond the world of 209 BC really do meet and clash in the temple. In fact, Everard of the Patrol reassures a local by explaining to her that the Patrol agents who appeared on timecycles and stunned the Syrian soldiers were enacting the wrath of Poseidon. The war through time fits easily into the world view of the period, as it did when Time Patrollers and Exaltationists fought in the air above a ship from Tyre.

Because of the location of that spring and its significance to the people of the third century BC, great events of world historical importance occur outside Bactra.