Into Bactria

Everard travels with a caravan along a highway on the right bank of the River Bactrus. The camels are one-humped although the two-humped species will later be introduced and will come to be called "Bactrian." Harness bells do not yet exist.

Everard joined the caravan in Alexandria Eschates on the River Jaxartes. (An unmanned spacecraft had tracked the caravan and confirmed that it would reach Bactra on a day suitable for Everard.)

They have traveled south through Sogdiana. Crossing the Oxus brought them into Bactria. Hipponicus, leader of the caravan, is a Hellene, whose ancestors came from the Peloponnessus. The Anatolian strain is not yet prominent in Greece. Everard's persona is Meander the Illyrian from the Balkans north of Macedonia. Antiochus, king of Seleucid Syria, is attacking Bactria. King Euthydemus retreats.

The Achaemenid shahs deported troublesome Ionians to Bactra.

Everard remembers Turkic-Mongolian Uzbegs in Afghanistan in 1970 and reflects:

"A lot of change and chance would blow from the steppes in the millennia to come. Too damn much."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B.C., p. 22.

The people around Everard experience changes and chance events but have no conception of the meanings of those words for a time traveler in a variable reality.

The caravan enters Bactra through the Scythian Gate. The palace is modeled on the one in Seleucid Antioch.

There is more historical detail in this chapter but I hope that I have conveyed the flavor. We are far removed from the abstract arguments about the theoretical basis of causality violation.