Vampire Khan

by Dan Davis

  In less than a day, the trebuchets were brought forward onto these platforms. Hassan and Abdullah said it was to provide a solid base to spread the weight of the machines and stop them from sinking in the friable, fertile earth. Stephen suggested the extra height to which they were raised would increase the range and elevation of the projectiles the machines threw. I pretended to be unimpressed.

  “Have you ever seen a siege progress this rapidly?” Thomas asked me on the third day.

  “I have never seen anything like any of this,” I admitted.

  I had ordered that my people stick together at all times. The common inhabitants of the city were suffering incredible fear, and although we were all dressed as Abbasid soldiers and Baghdad housed people from all over the world, some of us were quite obviously foreigners. That was not a safe thing to be in such a situation and we had to deal with everything from angry glances to arguments that had to be diffused, to being cornered by garrison troops and forcing our way free. Eva and Khutulun kept their faces and bodies hidden but still they were subjected to hungry looks every time we were on the streets. While we could not be all together all the time, I felt safest when I had Abdullah with us, because giving the plebeians an aristocratic tongue-lashing turned out to be one of his greatest talents.

  Beyond the wall, the barbarians swarmed amongst the partially ruined suburbs that lined the crisscrossing canals and channels. The conurbations thinned and became the homes of the agricultural people in the distance, where the thousands upon thousands of barbarians had dug their camps.

  “The benighted bastards are in a rare hurry,” Thomas said, shaking his head in wonder.

  Enemy forces swarmed forward, under attack from the walls. A group of dozens and then hundreds began to form about half a mile along the wall from us. We could not see clearly, because of the towers and the buildings of the suburbs blocking the view. But we pointed out to each other the sight of ladders and ropes being brought forward.

  “They’re making an attempt at the walls,” I said.

  “Don’t think much of the Saracens, do they,” Eva muttered.

  I knew what she meant. Chances of storming a well-manned wall were very low unless the defenders were to break and give up the position.

  “They are used to their enemies running in terror,” I said. “The bloody bastards.”

  “We should rejoice,” Thomas muttered very softly. “We should praise God that this, the greatest city of the Saracens, is destroyed.”

  I glanced along the wall to where Abdullah stood, watching the attack with a face full of anguish. He still had family within the city, and although they had disowned him, he must surely have felt the terror that we all feel when our loved ones are in danger. His mother was old and useless to the Mongols. His brothers were minor functionaries and would surely be slaughtered. His sisters’ husbands would also be killed, and the women would be taken as slaves and forcibly married to some filthy barbarian, treated horribly and would be expected to bear him children until she died. If she was lucky.

  “It is good that the city falls,” I said to Thomas. “And we are thankful to God. But where will these demons be stopped? Do you believe that Damascus will stand where Baghdad falls? Will Acre withstand this army?” I gestured at the uncountable horde that camped in companies as far as eyes could see. “Or even a quarter of it?”

  “God will not allow Christendom to fall,” he said.

  I nodded. “As He did not allow Jerusalem to fall? As He protected Spain?”

  The Templar grew uncomfortable. “We must be worthy of His protection.”

  I sighed. Theology was beyond me. “I hope He can see we’re doing our bloody best.”

  One of the towers far to the north along the wall flung a smoking projectile at the massed companies near the base of the wall. It slammed in amongst them and a great belch of flame bloomed to engulf dozens of men. It roared, like some demon. I imagined the agony, the screams. The survivors streamed away in panic, horses bolting. The Saracens on the wall cheered and Abdullah pounded a fist on the stonework.

  “Can we not find a way to fight?” Abdullah asked, turning to me with tears in his eyes. “We could help fend them off, could we not?”

  I felt a momentary urge to do just that. There was the smell of blood in the wind and then smoke with the mouth-watering scent of burning flesh. It would feel good to kill a few Mongols or their allies. Or Saracens, for that matter. But that was all a distraction.

  “We have discussed this many a time,” I said to Abdullah. “We must stay the course. Our revenge is close at hand. Come. Watching this does nothing for us. There is still much to prepare. Come, Abdullah, come away.”

  After less than a week, three breaches were created in the eastern walls and multiple towers fell.

  The Mongols attacked the eastern walls by climbing up the rubble piles at the base of the breaches and the Abbasid garrison defended as best they could. Using their poorest troops first, the enemy sent hundreds at a time with ladders and ropes to scale the slopes and the standing walls at the sides of them, even while the trebuchets continued to send their stones crashing into the walls and towers. Most assaults were turned back with relative ease, with thousands of arrows pouring down on the Turkomens and Uyghurs. There were Saracens employed, also, many of them formerly of the Khwarazmian lands centred on Samarkand but also former allies from closer to Baghdad were employed. The Atabeg of Mosul and the Atabeg of Shiraz sent armies from their cities against the wall. Khorasani and Turanian troops threw themselves up the ladders, determined to break into the greatest city in the world and loot the caliph three ways from Sunday.

  I never understood the enmity that the Sunnites and Shiites had for each other. At least, not until hundreds of years later when Christendom was engulfed in decades of warfare between the Catholic and Protestant nations. But it seemed Shiite cities in the province like Basra, Kufa, and Najaf had thrown open their gates to the Mongols and then sent detachments to join in the destruction of their overlord, the Caliph. This made it even more dangerous within Baghdad for Shiites like Abdullah and we kept off the streets as much as possible. Fights broke out all over the city, and looting had already begun, especially between the different sects and tribes. It had always been somewhat rare to see women in public but now we began to hear them, wailing in despair from behind the walls of their homes.

  Thomas urged us to take shelter with the Christians, which we did after the fifth day of the bombardment. We made the move into the Christian quarter under the cover of darkness so that we would be less likely to be seen and challenged by a mob. Still, it was a tense night crossing the city with our belongings which we had begged and stolen from our former hosts.

  Jews and Christians lived in the city as dhimmis, that is as second-class citizens who paid an excessive tax to demonstrate their utter subjugation to the Mohammedans. I found the very fact that they lived in such a state to be contemptible but my companions had great pity for the Christians. They were not proper Christians, following the Roman law. They were mostly Syriacs, supposedly subject to the Patriarch of Antioch, but there were also Coptics from Egypt and even some who followed the laws of the Church of Armenia.

  Within the homes and churches of the Christians, the people were feeling quietly optimistic. Of the many thousands of messages shot over the walls of the city had been messages swearing the archons—that is, the priests—should feel comforted as they were not fighting against Hulegu and so would not be harmed when the city fell, nor would their families be harmed or their property damaged.

  “You cannot believe his lies,” I said to them when I heard this. “Hulegu would say and do anything in order to win.”

  “Do not frighten them, Richard,” Thomas hissed at me. “They must have hope.”

  “A false hope is no hope at all, but self-deception,” I said, grandly and loudly so that the priests who had welcomed us would hear me well.

  “Who are you to say whether this hope or that is f
alse?” Thomas pointed out.

  He was right but I did not wish to concede the point in front of those people, who chose to live so utterly at the mercy of the Saracens. Mohammedans who wished to see all of Christ’s children dead, converted, or subjugated. Perhaps I was angry because I had put myself in precisely that very same condition.

  “We shall see,” I said.

  Only a day later, a rumour spread that the Vizier had ordered the garrison to cease resisting, to cease their defence of the eastern wall and to return to their homes. Some said, no, the order was only that they should cease throwing stones down on the attackers because they would only be launched back up again.

  Whether the order was real or not—and it certainly sounded like hysterical nonsense to me—it was believed by those men who wished to believe it. And so many hundreds or thousands abandoned their posts along the eastern wall.

  “It will surely happen quickly now,” I said, as we watched the troops file back across the pontoon bridges over the Tigris and into the Round City and to other parts.

  There was so much more they could have done. So many more tactics they could have employed. But every soul in the city, and for a hundred miles all around, must surely have felt the inevitability of it all. Any civilian east of the Tigris with any sense in their head fled across the river, away from the coming danger.

  And then, one morning, the bombardment ended. The Mongols had captured the entire eastern wall and the eastern quarter, filling it with their shouts of victory. We were miles away across the city by that point but I could imagine them pouring down the stairs of the wall, and over the piles of rubble where they had crumbled the tops of the walls, and into that beautiful quarter.

  They sat there, poised to take the rest of Baghdad.

  Across the river, the garrison manned the barricades between the beautiful buildings and waited for the hammer blow to fall. Waited for the thousands of barbarians to come streaming across the river to murder them all and seize their families.

  And we waited, my people and I. Waited to lay our ambush and to spring our trap.

  But there the Mongols and their allies waited, also, occupying the eastern quarter of the city as if their work was already done. And gradually, the city surrendered itself. The garrison, the nobility, and the scholars. They lost their backbones and their minds.

  “The rest of the city is ready to fall, why do they not attack?” Stephen said, angry at what he saw as the savages’ lack of reason. But it was just that Stephen did not understand. Brutal savages they may have been, but they were still men. No one wants to fight if he does not have to.

  Almost no one.

  “There is no doubt now,” I said. “The city cannot resist. There is no hope left for the Saracens. The Mongols hope to draw them out without losing any more of their own men, which they certainly would if they forced a crossing of the river.”

  “So,” Stephen said, with hope twinkling in his eyes, “so, the city may now fall peacefully?”

  I laughed in his face. “No.”

  Hulegu sent messages to the commanders of the garrison troops in the city. The messages said to lay down their arms and abandon their posts. The captains could not believe their luck, and they pretended to be saddened to be leaving their home, and their families.

  But I could see the relief on their faces.

  “Do not go,” I said to the soldiers near to the quarters that my company had taken over.

  Hassan and the others urged them, too. Abdullah begged them, that they did not understand the Mongols. That they had no honour like civilised men had honour. That their promises meant nothing, that they had massacred entire cities before, many times.

  It did no good. No man would listen to us. Why would they? We were all foreigners, and Abdullah was an exiled Shiite academician.

  Besides, they did not want to believe it.

  It was a false hope, I knew it. But it was all they had.

  “God is punishing the Saracens,” Stephen said. “It is the only reason they would march to their deaths like this.”

  “Praise God,” Thomas said.

  I suppose it was a good thing that the Mohammedans were going to be slaughtered but it did not feel like it. Their idiocy made me feel nauseated.

  And so we watched from the eastern end of the southern wall, at the Tigris, as they marched out, unarmed, in their thousands. Perhaps thirty thousand men, a great army of men, taking hours to pass through the gates. They marched smartly in their companies and were escorted away from the city by the Mongols out to the fields in the west. Each company was divided up from the others and forced into tight groups by the Mongol forces.

  “They handle groups of men with such ease,” I muttered, realising it for the first time as I looked out at the formations in the distance beyond the city.

  “This is how it is when they fight on the field of battle,” Thomas said.

  Hassan nodded. “They are herders by profession, by nature. On the steppe, they manage animals from a very young age. There are many more animals than people out there in the grasslands. They round up sheep or horses. And they hunt, all together, riding out beyond the sight of each other before turning and driving all the game in an area into an ever-tighter circle. Like a noose tightening, do you see? And so they gather up a great multitude of beasts all together and there they slaughter them.”

  I felt sick as he said it, for that described how the Saracens were being herded, into small groups of a few hundred or a thousand. Surrounded on all sides by horsemen, and dismounted infantry with spears.

  And then the killing started. Arrows first, in their many thousands, rising and falling in clouds. Then the survivors were speared and any remaining men were cut down with sword and dagger. Their screams and the jeering of the Mongols was like the crashing of some hellish ocean.

  They made short work of it. Thirty thousand men killed in a single afternoon.

  It was butchery, not war.

  Thomas was quite right, and it was true that the Saracens were my enemy, and that they would have slaughtered a Christian city in just such a manner, given the opportunity. Still, it was difficult not to feel a great pity for their ignominious, pathetic end.

  The groaning and wailing from inside the city was as loud as a hurricane, and people tore at their hair and clothing and they howled in despair. There was yet half a million men, women and children inside Baghdad, and the Mongols were still outside or perched high upon the eastern wall.

  After another two days of negotiation, the Caliph was persuaded to come out himself, along with his three sons and three thousand courtiers. Along with them, thousands beyond counting of citizens attempted to surrender also.

  The Caliph was taken prisoner by Hulegu, as they had agreed. As were his sons, and the members of the court, those great nobles and their families who stood shivering in their finery, subjugated before their new masters.

  As for the ordinary citizens who had hoped and expected to receive the same mercy, they were rounded up just as the soldiers had been, and then they were slaughtered. Some of the women and girls were dragged away from the mass slaughter, but most were savagely murdered. The Mongol method for mass extermination was like some unholy device, an infernal machine that churned through people with all the relentless efficiency of a millstone grinding corn.

  So much death.

  And then, finally, on 13th February, the order was given to sack the city.

  ***

  It was a risk. Staying inside the city as it was sacked. There would be thousands of Mongol and allied savages losing their minds in an orgy of destruction.

  We staked out our territory inside the Round City, using for our fort the former home of a senior scholar of Mohammedan jurisprudence, located between the palace and the madrasa, and we fought to defend it. The scholar had fled weeks before and his home had already been quietly looted before the Mongols even attacked the walls. But we repaired the building, cleaning away the damage and fixing most of the
doors and windows shut. Over a few days, we brought in what provisions we could barter and steal. I did not know how long we would have to wait to attract Hulegu or William but I knew that roaming the streets during the height of the destruction would be akin to murdering oneself.

  The building had a narrow tower in one corner, as many of the prestigious buildings did. Inside, a steep stair around the inside edge of the tower led to a top floor with large arched windows. Abdullah claimed such structures, called minarets, were utilised for allowing hot air inside the home to rise up with the tower and escape, while Hassan said they served to allow cool winds to flow down from the sky. It hardly seemed to work in either capacity, but we used it as a watchtower and as the point to fix my banner.

  No single symbol any of us could conceive of would be unique to me. We discussed variations of crosses, or perhaps the lion of King Richard.

  Instead, we wrote a single, short word. Painted in black letters, on both sides of the white cotton fabric.

  ASHBURY.

  “It is hardly legible,” I complained, looking up from a hundred yards away across the square when it was first erected. “And it can hardly be seen. There are so many towers and domes and bloody great buildings in this God-forsaken, pestilent heathen bastard city.”

  Eva punched me in the shoulder, a glint in her eye. “This was the best idea we could come up with.”

  I shook my head. “That is the worst aspect of this situation. I can feel that this will not work to attract our enemies. How could it? A man could spend a month walking back and forth across this city and never see that pathetic little banner. If William is not with them, even if Hulegu’s men see it, they will not know its meaning.”

  “Then you should pray,” she said.

  If there is one thing I have learned over the centuries, it is that when someone suggests that prayer is your best chance, then you know that you have made a grave error.