Chagatai frowned. He did not want to nursemaid women and children while Otrar trembled for the first sight of them.
“Whose order is this?” he replied. “Whose authority?”
Jochi controlled his temper at the insolent tone. “Genghis bids you go,” he said, turning his mount to ride away.
“So you say, but who listens when a rape-born bastard speaks?” Chagatai spoke knowing he was surrounded by his own men, all waiting for such a barb that they could repeat with relish at the campfires.
Jochi stiffened in the saddle. He should have left the grinning fools, but nothing in the world brought him to anger as easily as his younger brother’s blustering arrogance.
“Perhaps he feels you are a fitting companion for the women after the way you knelt to me, brother,” he replied. “I cannot know his mind.”
With a tight smile, Jochi held his mount to a walk. Even with armed men at his back, he would not give them the satisfaction of seeing him urge his pony to a trot.
He heard the sudden rush of hooves and his hand fell automatically to the wolf’s-head hilt before he snatched it away. He could not draw a blade on Chagatai in front of so many witnesses. It would be the end of him.
Jochi glanced back as unconcernedly as he could. Chagatai was closing the gap between them, with his tail of followers trotting behind. His brother was red faced with rage and Jochi had barely opened his mouth to speak again when the young man launched himself from the saddle, taking Jochi down hard.
As they hit and rolled, Jochi lost his temper and struck out, his blows thumping uselessly. They came apart and both of them leapt up with murder in their eyes. Even then, old habits were strong and they did not reach for their swords. Chagatai came at Jochi with his fists high, and Jochi kicked him as hard as he could between the legs.
Chagatai collapsed in agony, but his fury was so all-consuming that to Jochi’s amazement, he struggled to rise and staggered into him again. By then his companions had dismounted and they pulled the two generals apart. Jochi wiped a smear of blood from his nose and spat contemptuously on the ground at Chagatai’s feet. He watched as his brother recovered some semblance of calm, and only then did he glance over to Genghis.
The khan was pale with rage, and as his eyes met Jochi’s, he dug in his heels and trotted closer. Not one of the warriors dared look up as they froze in his presence. His temper was legendary in the families and the youngest men were suddenly aware that their own lives might hang on a word or a gesture.
Only Chagatai seemed unaffected. As his father approached, he stepped forward and tried to backhand Jochi across the face. His brother ducked instinctively and was off balance when Genghis kicked Jochi hard between the shoulder blades, sending him sprawling.
Even Chagatai became still at seeing that, though his sneer remained. Genghis dismounted slowly, his fists tight on the reins until he forced them open.
When he turned to his sons, his anger was clear enough to make Chagatai step back. It was not enough. Genghis placed his hand on Chagatai’s chest and pushed him flat to join Jochi on the ground.
“Are you children still?” Genghis said. He shook visibly at the young fools who dared to brawl while their men looked on. He wanted to take a stick and beat sense into them, but the last thread of his control held him back. If he thrashed them, they would never again command the respect of his warriors. Sly whispers would follow them the rest of their lives.
Neither Jochi nor Chagatai responded. Finally aware of the danger they were in, they chose to say nothing.
“How can you command…?” Genghis stopped before he destroyed them both, his mouth working soundlessly. Kachiun had galloped across the makeshift camp as soon as he heard, and his approach allowed the khan to break off his glare.
“What would you do with young fools like these?” Genghis demanded of Kachiun. “With all the enemies we still face, with our own camp in peril, they fight like boys.”
His eyes pleaded silently with Kachiun to find a punishment that would not be the end for them both. If it had been Jochi alone, he would have ordered his death, but it had been Chagatai he had seen leaping off his horse to roll his brother in the dust.
Kachiun’s face was stern, but he understood the khan’s dilemma.
“It is almost twenty miles to Otrar, Lord Khan. I would have them make the journey on foot, before dark.” He looked at the sun, judging the time. “If they cannot, perhaps they are not fit to lead their men.”
Genghis breathed out slowly in relief he could not show. It would do. The sun was merciless and such a run could kill a man, but they were young and strong and it would serve as a punishment.
“I will be there to watch you come in,” he said to the dumbfounded pair. Chagatai glared at Kachiun for the suggestion, but as he opened his mouth to object, Genghis reached down and picked him up in one smooth motion. His father’s fist rested just under his chin as he spoke again.
“Remove your armor and go,” he said. “If I see you fighting again, I will make Ogedai my heir. Do you understand?”
Both brothers nodded and Genghis stared at Jochi, incensed that he had thought the words were also for him. His temper flared again, but Kachiun deliberately chose that moment to call the men into ranks for the ride to Otrar, and Genghis let Chagatai go.
For the benefit of all those who could hear and repeat the words a thousand times, Kachiun forced a smile as Jochi and Chagatai began to run in the vicious heat.
“You won such a race when we were boys, I remember.”
Genghis shook his head irritably. “What does that matter? It was long ago. Have Khasar bring the families back to Otrar. I have debts to settle there.”
Shah Ala-ud-Din Mohammed reined in as he saw the thin trails of cooking smoke rising from the Mongol camp. He had ridden slowly west before taking a wide route north around Otrar, covering many miles since the first gray light of predawn. As the sun rose to burn off the morning mist, he stared at the filthy gers of the Mongol families. For an instant, the urge to ride among the women and children with his sword was overwhelming. If he had known the khan had left them so vulnerable, he would have sent twenty thousand to kill them all. He clenched his fists in frustration as the light grew. Warriors clustered on the edges, the heads of their ponies peacefully snuffling the dusty ground for grass. For once, there were no warning horns blown from the cursed Mongol scouts.
With a snarl, the Shah began to turn his mount away from the camp. They bred like lice, these Mongols, and he had only his precious four hundred to see him safe in the east. The sun was rising and his guards would soon be seen.
One of his men shouted something and Ala-ud-Din turned his head. The sun’s light revealed what the shadows had hidden, and he grinned suddenly, his mood lifting. The warriors were no more than straw dummies tied to the horses. The Shah strained his eyes as the light grew, but he could not see a single armed man. Around him, the news spread and the noble sons laughed and pointed, already loosening their swords in the scabbards. They had all taken part in punishment raids on villages, when the taxes had been late. The sport was good in such places and the desire for revenge was strong.
Jelaudin did not share the men’s laughter as he rode to his father.
“Would you have the men waste half a day here with our enemies so close?”
In response, his father drew a curved sword. The Shah glanced at the sun.
“This khan must be taught the price of his arrogance, Jelaudin. Kill the children and burn what you can.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SLOWLY, almost ritually, Chakahai wrapped her hand in a length of silk, tying it to the hilt of a long dagger. Borte had told her to beware of the shock of impact, that a woman’s hand could be jarred loose or sweat enough to slip. The process of winding the silk around her fingers and biting one end to hold a knot was somehow calming as she looked out through the gers at the Shah’s riders. The knot of terror in her stomach was not under her control.
She, Bo
rte, and Hoelun had done what they could to prepare the camp. They had been given little warning and the more elaborate traps were still unset. Still, they had weapons and Chakahai murmured a Buddhist death prayer as she readied herself. The morning was cold, though the air seemed heavy and promised another day of heat. She had hidden her children as best she could in the ger. They lay in perfect silence under piles of blankets. With a vast effort, Chakahai put her fear for them aside, leaving it in a separate place so that her mind was clear. Some things were fate, what the Indian Buddhists called karma. Perhaps all the women and children would be killed that day, she could not know. All she desired was the chance to kill a man for the first time, to fulfill her duty to her husband and her children.
Her bound right hand was shaking as she raised the blade, but she enjoyed the feeling of holding the weapon and took strength from it. Genghis would avenge her, she knew. Unless he too had been killed. That was the thought she tried most to crush as it reared in her mind. How else could Arabs have come to the camp if not over a dead nation and the body of her husband? If Genghis still lived, he would surely have moved mountains to protect the camp. For a Mongol, the families were everything. Yet there was no sign of the khan on the horizon, and Chakahai struggled against despair, seeking a calm that came and went in flashes.
At the last, she took a deep breath and felt her heart settle to a slow, heavy thump, her limbs strangely cold as if her blood had chilled in her veins. The riders were trotting toward the city of gers. Life was just a restless fever dream, a short breath between longer sleep. She would reawaken and be reborn without the agony of memory. That, at least, was a blessing.
The herds of Mongol ponies stirred nervously as the Shah rode in with his men. He could see ripples running through the animals, and in the strange silence, he felt a sense of foreboding. He looked to the others to see if they too had a premonition of danger, but they were blindly eager for the hunt and leaned forward in their saddles.
Ahead, threads of cooking smoke lifted lazily into air. It was already growing warm and the Shah felt sweat trickle down his back as he reached the first gers. His guards spread themselves into a wide line as they rode into the maze, and the Shah felt his nerves tighten. The Mongol homes were high enough to conceal anything behind them. Even a mounted man could not see what lay beyond the next, and that made him uneasy.
The camp seemed deserted. If not for the cooking fires, Ala-ud-Din might have thought the place empty of life. He had intended to ride through in one great sweep, killing anyone who ran across his path. Instead, the lanes and paths were silent and the Arab horses drove deeper and deeper without seeing a living soul. Far above his head, an eagle circled, its head twitching back and forth as it searched for prey.
He had not appreciated the sheer size of the Mongol encampment. Perhaps twenty thousand gers were in that place, or even more, a true city sprung from nothing in the wilderness. They had claimed the land on the banks of a nearby river, and Ala-ud-Din could see drying fish tied to racks of wood as he passed. Even the flies were quiet. He shrugged to himself, trying to throw off the dark mood. Already some of his men were dismounting to enter the gers. He had heard the older men talk of threatening the children to make the women more pliable. The Shah sighed in irritation. Perhaps Jelaudin had been right. Once they were in the gers, the morning would be lost. The Mongols could not be far behind and he did not intend to be caught in that desolate place. For the first time, he wished he had simply ridden past the camp.
Ala-ud-Din watched as one of his son’s friends ducked low to push open the door to a ger. The entrance was almost too small for his massive shoulders. The Arab soldier stuck his bearded face through the opening, squinting into the gloom. Ala-ud-Din blinked as the man suddenly shuddered, his legs quivering as if he had begun a fit. To his astonishment, the soldier dropped to his knees, then fell flat into the ger, his body still twitching.
As he took a breath to give orders, Ala-ud-Din caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and brought his sword round in a sweeping blow. A woman had been creeping up on him and the tip caught her across the face, gashing her jaw and breaking teeth. She fell back with blood pouring from her mouth, then to his horror, leapt at him and sank a dagger into his thigh. His second blow took her head off cleanly, then the silence shattered into chaos all around him.
The gers erupted and his warriors were instantly fighting for their lives. Ignoring the pain from his wound, the Shah spun his horse in place and used its bulk to shoulder down a woman and young boy who raced toward him, screaming and brandishing heavy knives. His men were veteran cavalry, used to defending their mounts from men on foot. Yet the Mongol women seemed to have no fear of death. They ran in close and cut either the horse or a man’s leg before vanishing behind the nearest ger. Ala-ud-Din saw more than one hacked down, then stagger in before death took them, using their last breath to plunge a blade into flesh.
In heartbeats, every man of his four hundred was fending off more than one, sometimes four or five different women. Horses bolted wildly as their haunches were cut, and men cried out in fear as they were pulled from their mounts and stabbed.
The Arab guards held their nerve. More than half of them rode without care to surround the Shah, and the rest drew into close formation, each man watching for attacks on the others. The women darted at them from the side of every ger, appearing and disappearing like ghosts. The Shah felt hemmed in, but he could not ride free and let the khan tell the world he had run from women and children. One ger had collapsed as a horse crashed into it, and he saw an iron stove broken open. He snapped an order to his manservant, Abbas, watching eagerly as the man tore a great strip of felt and lit it from the scattered fire.
The attacks became more desperate, but his men had the rhythm by then. The Shah could see some wild fools had dismounted to rape a young woman on the ground, and he rode furiously to them, using his horse to knock them aside.
“Have you lost your minds?” he roared. “Get up! Up! Fire the gers!” In the face of his fury, they drew a knife across the throat of the struggling woman and stood, abashed. Abbas already had one ger aflame. The closest guards took up pieces of the burning material in their hands, riding away with them to spread the terror as far as they could. Ala-ud-Din coughed as he breathed in thick gray smoke, but he exulted at the thought of the khan coming back to a field of ashes and the cold dead.
Jelaudin was the first to spot the running boys. They darted through the gers near the river, weaving between paths, but always coming closer. Jelaudin could see hundreds of the devils, running bare-chested with their hair flying. He swallowed nervously when he saw they carried bows, like their fathers. Jelaudin had time to shout a warning to his men, and they raised their shields and charged down the paths at this new threat.
The Mongol boys held their ground as the Arabs thundered toward them. Jelaudin’s men heard a high voice shout an order, then the bows bent and arrows were flying in the breeze.
Jelaudin yelled a curse as he saw men knocked down, but it was just a few. The boys were as accurate as the adults, but they did not have the power to batter shafts through armor. The only deaths came from an arrow in the throat, and those were good odds. As Jelaudin drew close, the boys scattered before his men, vanishing into the labyrinth. He cursed an arrangement that meant they had to turn only one corner to be lost to view. Perhaps that was how the Mongols had intended it when they laid out their camps.
Jelaudin cantered around a ger and found three of the boys in a huddle. Two loosed a shot as soon as they saw him, the arrows passing wide. The other took a heartbeat longer and released his shaft just as Jelaudin’s horse crashed into him, shattering the boy’s ribs and tossing him away. Jelaudin roared in pain, looking down in disbelief at the arrow that had ripped along his thigh under the skin. It was not a bad wound, but he raged as he drew his sword and killed the dumbfounded pair before they could react. Another arrow whirred past his head from behind, though when he spun his mount
round, he could see no one.
In the distance, smoke rose in thick billows as his father’s men set fires. Already the sparks would be landing on other gers, burying themselves deeply in the dry felt. Jelaudin was completely alone, yet he sensed movement all round him. When he had been a very young boy, he had once been lost in a field of golden wheat, the crop taller than he was. All around him, he had heard the scuttling, whispering movement of rats. The old terror surfaced. He could not bear to be alone in such a place, with creeping danger on all sides. Yet he was not a boy. He roared a challenge to the empty air and hammered along the closest path, heading for his father and where the smoke was thickest.
The Shah’s men had killed hundreds of the Mongol women, yet they still came and died. Fewer and fewer of them managed to draw blood from the guards, now that they were prepared. Ala-ud-Din was astonished at their ferocity, as fierce as the men who had ravaged his armies. His sword was bloody and he burned with the need to punish them. He breathed heavy smoke and choked for a moment, delighting in the destruction as the fire spread from ger to ger. The center of the camp was aflame and his men had developed a new tactic. As they saw a Mongol home burn, they waited outside the door for the inhabitants to come rushing out. Sometimes the Mongol women and children cut their way through the felt walls, but more and more were slaughtered as they rushed armed and mounted men. Some were already on fire and chose to die on swords rather than burn.
Chakahai ran on bare feet toward a warrior with his back to her. The Arab horse seemed huge as she approached, the man on its back so far above her that she could not see how to hurt him. The crackle of flames hid the sound of her steps as she raced across the grass. Still he did not turn, and as he shouted to another man, she saw he wore a leather tunic decorated in plates of some dark metal. The world slowed as she reached the hindquarters of his mount and he sensed her. He began to turn, moving as if in a dream. Chakahai saw a glimpse of flesh at his waist, between his belt and the leather armor. She darted in without hesitation, ramming the blade upwards as Borte had told her to do. The shock of it thrilled along her arm and the man gasped, his head snapping back so that he stared at the sky. Chakahai yanked the blade and found it had wedged in him, trapped in flesh. She pulled at it in a frenzy and did not dare look at the Arab as he brought his sword arm up to kill her.
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