by Noah Gordon
The forest ended and they could see Mansura. The village lay in a small valley at the bottom of a stony slope. From the height they could see the garrison and its arrangement: barracks, training grounds, horse corrals, elephant pens. Rob and Mirdin took careful note of the locations and impressed them in their memories.
Both the village and the garrison were enclosed in a single stockade made of logs set into the ground side by side, with sharpened tops to make the barricade difficult to climb.
When they drew near the wall Rob jabbed one of the asses with a stick and then, followed by shouting and laughing children, he pursued the animal around the outside of the wall while Mirdin went the other way, ostensibly to cut off the creature’s escape.
There was no sign of elephant traps.
They didn’t tarry, but turned west again at once. It didn’t take long to return to the encampment.
The watchword of the day was mahdi, which meant “savior”; after they had given it to three lines of sentries they were allowed to follow Khuff into the presence of the Shah.
Alā scowled when hearing of nine hundred soldiers, for he had been led by his spies to expect far fewer defenders at Mansura. Yet he was undaunted. “If we are able to surprise, advantage will yet be on our side.”
Drawing on the ground with sticks, Rob and Mirdin indicated the details of the fortifications and the location of the elephant pens, while the Shah listened attentively and made his plans.
All morning the men had been tending equipment, oiling harness, whetting blades to edges of perfect sharpness.
The elephants were given wine in their buckets. “Not much. Just enough to make them sullen and ready to fight,” Harsha told Rob, who nodded wonderingly. “It is given to them only before battle.”
The beasts appeared to understand. They moved about restlessly and their mahouts had to be alert as the elephants’ mail was unpacked, draped, and fastened. Special long, heavy swords with sockets instead of hilts were fitted onto the tusks, and now added to their aura of brute strength was a wicked new lethality.
There was a burst of nervous activity when Alā ordered out the entire force.
They moved down the Spice Road, slowly, slowly, for timing was all, and Alā wanted them to arrive at Mansura with day’s end. No one spoke. They met only a few unfortunates along the way, who were taken at once, bound, and guarded by foot soldiers so they could not give alarm. When they came to the place in the road where Rob last had seen the Jews of Ahwaz, he thought of the men hiding somewhere nearby and listening to the sounds of the animals’ hooves and the marching feet and the soft jangling of the elephants’ mail.
They emerged from the forest as dusk began to claim the world, and under cover of the gloom Alā deployed his forces along the top of the hill. Behind each elephant, on which four archers sat back to back, were swordwielding men on camels and horses, and after the cavalry would come foot soldiers with lances and scimitars.
Two elephants, naked of battle gear and bearing only their mahouts, moved away on signal. Those atop the hill watched them slowly descending through the peaceful gray light. Beyond them, cooking fires glowed throughout the village as the women prepared the evening meal.
When the two elephants reached the stockade they lowered their heads against the timbers.
The Shah raised his arm.
The elephants moved forward. There was a cracking and a series of thuds as the wall fell. Now the Shah’s arm came down and the Persians began to move.
The elephants ran down the hill eagerly. Behind them, the camels and horses began to lope and then to gallop. From the village there arose the first faint cries.
Rob had drawn his sword and was using it to tap Bitch’s flanks, but she needed no urging. First there was just the swift thudding of hooves and the music of the mail, then six hundred voices began to scream their battle cry and the beasts joined, the camels moaning, the elephants trumpeting wild and shrill.
The hairs rose on the back of Rob’s neck, and he was howling like an animal when Alā’s raiders fell upon Mansura.
59
THE INDIAN SMITH
Rob had swift impressions, like glimpsing a series of drawings. The camel made its way through the splintered ruin of the wall at top speed. As he rode through the village the fear in the faces of the people frantically scurrying gave him a strange feeling of his own invulnerability, a carnal knowledge compounded of both power and shame, like the feeling he had experienced long ago in England when he had baited the old Jew.
When he reached the garrison a fierce battle already was in progress. The Indians fought on the ground, but they knew elephants and how to attack them. Foot soldiers carrying long pikes tried to jab out the elephants’ eyes and Rob saw that they had been successful against one of the armorless elephants that had pushed down the wall. The mahout was gone, doubtless slain, and the beast had lost both eyes and stood blind and trembling, screaming piteously.
Rob found himself staring into a grimacing brown face, seeing the drawn-back sword, watching the blade come forward. He didn’t remember deciding to use his broadsword like a thin French blade; he simply shoved and the point entered the Indian’s throat. The man fell away and Rob turned to a figure struggling at him from the other side of the camel and began hacking.
Some of the Indians had axes and scimitars and tried to take the elephants out by chopping at their trunks or their treelike legs, but it was an unequal contest. The elephants attacked, their ears in their rage spread wide like sails. Bending their trunks inward and folded beneath their deadly sworded tusks, they surged like ramming ships, falling upon the Indians in charges that overturned many. The giant animals raised their feet high, as in a savage dance, and brought them down in stampings that shook the earth. Men caught beneath the driving hooves were pulped like trodden grapes.
He was imprisoned in a hell of killing and fearful sounds, gruntings, trumpetings, screams, curses, shouts, the groans of the dying.
Zi, being the largest elephant and royally caparisoned, attracted more attackers than any other, and Rob saw that Khuff stood and fought near his Shah. Khuff had lost his horse. He wielded his heavy sword, whirling it around his head and shouting great oaths and insults, and atop the elephant Alā sat and used his longbow.
The battle roiled, the men laboring with a fury, all caught up in the serious work of butchery.
Plunging the camel after a lancer who parried and ran, Rob came across Mirdin on foot, the sword at his side looking as if it had not been used. He held a wounded man under the arms and was dragging him out of the fighting, oblivious to all else.
The sight was like a shock of icy water. Rob blinked and jerked the camel’s reins, sliding off before Bitch had truly knelt. He went to Mirdin and helped him bear the fallen man, who was already gray from a wound in the neck.
From that time, Rob forgot about killing and strove as a physician.
The two surgeons laid the wounded in a village house, bringing them in one by one while the slaughter went on. All they could do was collect those who were down, for their carefully prepared supplies were on the backs of half a dozen asses scattered who knew where, and now there was no opium or oil, no great bundles of clean rags. When cloths were needed to stanch the flow of blood, Rob or Mirdin cut them from the clothing of one of the dead.
Very soon the fighting became a massacre. The Indians had been surprised, and while half of them had been able to find arms and use them, the others had resisted with sticks and rocks. They were easily slain, yet most fought desperately in the sure knowledge that if they surrendered they faced shameful execution or lives as slaves or eunuchs in Persia.
The bloodletting carried into the darkness. Rob drew his sword and, carrying a torch, went to a nearby house. Inside was a small, slim man, his wife, and two small children. The four dark faces turned toward him, their eyes fixed on his sword. “You must go unseen,” Rob told the man, “while there is still time.”
But they didn’t know Persian and the man sa
id something in their strange tongue.
Rob went to the door and pointed out into the night at the distant forest, and then returned and made urgent shooing movements with his hands.
The man nodded. He looked terrified; perhaps there were beasts in the forest. But he gathered his family and soon they had slipped through the door.
In that house Rob found lamps, and in others he discovered oil and rags and brought them back to the wounded.
Late in the night, as the last of the fighting ended, Persian swordsmen killed all enemy wounded and the looting and raping began. He and Mirdin and a handful of soldiers walked the field of battle with torches. They didn’t bring in the dead or anyone clearly dying, but sought Persians who might be saved. Soon Mirdin found two of the precious pack asses and, working by lamplight, the surgeons began to treat wounds with hot oil and sew and dress them. They cut off four ruined limbs, but all but one of those patients died. Thus they worked through the terrible night.
They had thirty-one patients and when dawn brought light to the grisly village they found seven more who were wounded but alive.
After First Prayer, Khuff brought orders that the surgeons were to tend to the wounds of five elephants before resuming work on the soldiers. Three of the animals had been cut in the legs, one had an arrow through the ear, and the trunk of another had been severed, so that at Rob’s recommendation she and the elephant that had been blinded were put down by lancers.
After the morning meal of pilah, the mahouts moved into the elephant pens of Mansura and began to sort the animals there, talking to them softly and moving them about by tugging their ears with the hooked goads called ankushas.
“Here, my father.”
“Move, my daughter. Steady, my son! Show me what you can do, my children.”
“Kneel, mother, and let me ride on your beautiful head.”
With tender cries the mahouts separated the trained beasts from those which still were half wild. They could take only docile animals that would obey them on the march back to Ispahan. The wilder ones would be released and allowed to return to the forest.
The voices of the mahouts were joined by a competing sound, a buzzing, for blowflies already had found the corpses. Soon, with the rising heat of day, the smell would be intolerable. Seventy-three Persians had perished. Only one hundred and three Indians had surrendered and lived, and when Alā offered them opportunity to become military bearers they accepted with eager relief; in a few years they might earn trust and be allowed to carry arms for Persia, and they preferred being soldiers to becoming eunuchs. Now they were at work digging a mass grave for the Persian dead.
Mirdin looked at Rob. Worse than I had feared, his eyes said. Rob agreed but was comforted that it was over and now they would go home.
But Karim came to see them. Khuff had killed an Indian officer, Karim said, but not before the Indian’s sword had sliced almost halfway through the softer steel of Khuff’s oversized blade. Karim brought Khuff’s sword to show them how deeply it had been cut. The captured Indian sword was fashioned out of the precious swirl-patterned steel and now Alā wore it. The Shah personally had overseen the interrogation of prisoners until he learned that the sword had been made by a craftsman named Dhan Vangalil in Kausambi, a village three days to the north of Mansura.
“Alā has decided to march on Kausambi,” Karim said.
They would capture the Indian smith and take him to Ispahan, where he would make weapons of rippled steel to help the Shah conquer his neighbors and restore the great and far-flung Persia of ancient days.
It was said easily but proved more difficult.
Kausambi was another small village on the west bank of the Indus, a place of a few dozen rickety wooden houses leaning into four dusty streets, each of which led to the military garrison. Again they succeeded in keeping their attack a surprise, creeping up through the forest that kept the village pinned against the riverbank. When the Indian soldiers recognized the assault they exploded from the place like a pack of startled monkeys, streaming away into the wilderness.
Alā was delighted, thinking that enemy cowardice had given him the easiest of victories. He lost no time in putting his sword to a throat and telling the terrified villager to lead them to Dhan Vangalil. The sword-maker turned out to be a wiry man with unsurprised eyes and gray hair and a white beard that sought to hide a young-old face. Vangalil agreed readily to go to Ispahan to serve Alā Shah; but he said he would choose death unless the Shah allowed him to bring his wife, two sons, and a daughter, as well as various supplies needed to make the rippled steel, including a large stack of square ingots of hard Indian steel.
The Shah agreed at once. Before they could depart that place, however, scouting parties came back with disturbing news. The Indian troops, far from fleeing, had set up positions in the forest and along the road and were waiting to fall upon anyone seeking to leave Kausambi.
Alā knew the Indians couldn’t contain them indefinitely. As had been the case at Mansura, the hidden soldiers were poorly armed; further, they were forced to live off the wild fruits of the land. The Shah’s officers told him that doubtless runners had been sent to bring Indian reinforcements, but the nearest known military force of any size was in Sehwan, six days away.
“You must go into the forest and clean them out,” Alā ordered.
The five hundred Persians were divided into ten units of fifty fighters each, all foot soldiers. They left the village and beat the brush to find their enemy as though they were hunting wild pigs. When they came upon Indians, the fighting was fierce and bloody and prolonged.
Alā ordered all casualties to be removed from the forest lest they be counted by the enemy and give him knowledge of dwindling strength. And so the Persian dead were laid in the gray dust of a street in Kausambi, to be buried in mass graves by the prisoners from Mansura. The first body to be brought in, at the very start of the forest fighting, was that of the Captain of the Gates. Khuff was dead from an Indian arrow in the back. He had been a strict, unsmiling man but a fixture and a legend. The scars on his body could be read like a history of hard campaigns for two Shahs. All that day, Persian soldiers came to look at him.
They were coldly angered by his death and this time they took no prisoners, killing even when an Indian wished to surrender. In turn, they faced the frenzy of hunted men who knew they would be shown no mercy. The warfare was unrelievedly ugly, either jagged arrows or men doing their worst with sharp metal, all slashing and stabbing and screaming.
Twice a day the wounded were assembled in a clearing and one of the surgeons went out under heavy guard and gave first treatment and brought the patients back to the village. The fighting lasted three days. Of the thirty-eight wounded at Mansura, eleven had died before the Persians had departed that village and sixteen more had perished in the three-day march to Kausambi. To the eleven wounded who survived in the care of Mirdin and Rob, thirty-six new maimed were added during the three days of the forest battle. Forty-seven more Persians were killed.
Mirdin performed one more amputation and Rob three, one of them involving only the fixing of a skin flap over a stub made perfectly below the elbow when an Indian sword took a soldier’s forearm. At first they treated wounds the way Ibn Sina had taught: they boiled oil and poured it as hot as possible into the wound to ward off suppuration. But on the morning of the last day Rob ran out of oil; remembering how Barber had tended lacerations with metheglin, he took a goatskin of wine and bathed each new wound with strong drink before dressing it.
That morning the last outburst of fighting had begun immediately after dawn. At midmorning a new group of wounded arrived and bearers carried in someone wrapped from head to ankles in a purloined Indian blanket. ‘Only wounded here,’ Rob said sharply.
But they set him down and stood, waiting uncertainly, and he noticed suddenly that the dead man was wearing Mirdin’s shoes.
“Had he been an ordinary soldier we would have placed him in the street,” one of them said. �
��But he is hakim, so we have brought him to hakim.”
They said they were on the way back when a man sprang from the brush with an ax. The Indian had struck only Mirdin and then was himself cut down.
Rob thanked them and they went away.
When he removed the blanket from the face he saw it was indeed Mirdin. The face was contorted and seemed puzzled and sweetly cranky.
Rob closed the tender eyes and bound the long, homely jaw shut. He didn’t think, moving as if drunk. From time to time he left to comfort the dying or care for the wounded, but always he came back and sat. Once he kissed the cold mouth but didn’t believe Mirdin knew. He felt the same way when he tried to hold Mirdin’s hand. Mirdin was no longer there.
He hoped Mirdin had crossed one of his bridges.
Eventually Rob left him and tried to stay away, working blindly. A man was brought in with a maimed right hand and he did the last amputation of the campaign, taking the hand just above the joint of the wrist. When he came back to Mirdin at midday, flies had gathered.
He removed the blanket and saw that the ax had cleaved Mirdin open at the chest. When Rob bent over the great wound, he was able to pry it wider with his hands.
He was bereft of awareness of either the odors of death within the tent or the scent of the hot crushed grass underfoot. The groans of the wounded, the buzzing of flies, and the far-off shouts and battle sounds faded from his ears. He lost the knowledge that his friend was dead and forgot the crushing burden of his grief.
For the first time he reached inside a man’s body and touched the human heart.
60
FOUR FRIENDS
Rob washed Mirdin and cut his nails, combed his hair and wrapped him in his prayer shawl, from which half of one of the fringes was cut away, according to custom.
He sought out Karim, who blinked as if slapped upon hearing the news.
“I don’t want him in the mass grave,” Rob said. “His family will certainly come here to get him and bring him home to Masqat for burial among his people in sacred ground.”