“When have you needed to ask? Your tents are filled with riches I won for you, and you couldn't count your herds. I've given you much, and it's no more to you than a clod of dirt. Perhaps it's time you saw the effort that pays for your comfort more closely.”
“Please—”
He gripped her chin tightly. “I want your household with me, and you as my chief wife in Khwarezm, and you scorn the honour. This courtship has gone on too long, Khulan. I love you more than I've loved any woman, yet there's no fire in you for me. I no longer care how I rouse it, whether it's love or hate that fuels it. You'll come with me, and you will never be far from my side. You'll see your son become a warrior.”
He knew how much she would hate that. She should have known that he would not leave her behind, to do what she could to comfort the captives whose tears and suffering brought him such joy. He would force her into the midst of deeds she had heard about largely at a distance. He would have his victory over her by breaking her indifference to him.
He would enjoy watching her cry, having her plead with him. “If it's your will,” she said, “then I must go.”
105
The horsemen were locusts on the land. They breathed fire and drank blood; so said the peasants who had streamed through Bukhara's gates. The refugees had taken shelter in the rabat, the suburb and pleasure gardens that bordered the main city, with the invaders at their heels. Now the enemy was surrounding Bukhara itself.
Zulaika, hidden by a trellis, peered through the vines and listened as the men with her father talked. “The enemy's army is great,” one man was saying, “but their numbers are swelled by their captives, who are driven to the front to take the first blows.”
Only a short time ago, word had reached them of the fall of Otrar. The border city had been besieged for months. Her father had believed it would stand, but it had been taken, and its governor Inalchik, according to rumour, was executed by having molten silver poured into his eyes and ears. Now the barbarians had come to Bukhara.
“A man told me that Sighnagh was taken,” another man said. “Can this be the same army that rode there?”
“They must have divided their forces,” one of Zulaika's brothers muttered. “That could make it easier to push them back. The Shah, may he be blessed, has divided his as well, to protect the cities.”
“He might have done better,” a wine merchant said, “to have thrown them all against the savages at the start.”
“We can withstand a siege,” her father said. “The garrison in the citadel will protect us, God willing.”
The slaves sitting with Zulaika were silent. The garden was peaceful, untouched by whatever was happening outside. The turbaned men visiting her father Karim lolled on their cushions near the marble fountain, looking much as they always had. Her father seemed more concerned about the trade he might lose during a prolonged siege than with the battle itself. If God willed it, the horsemen would tire of the siege and content themselves with ravaging the countryside.
The men murmured among themselves, and then her two brothers and the other guests made their farewells. Usually they stayed longer, until the shadows lengthened under the trees and the evening call to prayer was heard from the Friday mosque. They seemed anxious to return to their homes, to assure themselves that all was well there.
“Buy what food you can,” her father Karim was saying. “The price is already higher than it was a day ago.” She knew then that he was more fearful than he seemed.
Outside the seven-gated wall surrounding the shahristan, the centre of Bukhara, and the twelve-gated wall enclosing the rabat lay the citadel, with its many towers and a wall nearly a mile around. The enemy attacked the citadel for three days, hurling stones from catapults and storming its walls. The thousands of Turkish mercenaries inside withstood the assault.
Then, after the third day, most of the garrison fled from the citadel under cover of night, perhaps to make a stand elsewhere with other troops, perhaps out of fear.
Zulaika's brother Aziz carried this news to her father, but his slaves had heard it earlier, in the streets. Karim was preparing to leave the house when the two men arrived.
“A few hundred are still in the citadel,” Aziz said.
“We can't fight with so few,” Karim replied. “The enemy will storm the shahristan itself, and we won't be able to hold them back. It's said the enemy spares those who surrender.”
Her brother pulled at his beard. “A surrender to such men may cost us too much.”
“A battle with so few to defend us will cost even more,” her father said. “I go now to meet with the imams and others to see if we can buy ourselves some mercy.”
One of the slave girls behind the trellis moaned. Zulaika twisted her fingers around the vines.
Karim returned to the house only to sleep. By morning, he left with the delegation that would offer the jewel of Bukhara to the enemy.
Karim did not come back in the evening. The servants of the household whispered of the terms of surrender and the horsemen who would enter the city tomorrow. Zulaika slept uneasily, wondering what they would demand.
She awoke to silence. Usually, from her bedroom, she could hear the sounds of the women and boys going about their morning work. She dressed hastily and went from room to room, finding no one. The garden was empty; even her father's new concubine and the boy who sometimes shared his bed had vanished.
In her thirteen years of life, she had never left this house alone. While her mother was alive, Zulaika had accompanied her to the bazaar, and since her death, had gone there with a boy and a female slave, as carefully veiled as herself. Even alone, she might be safer in the street now. She could hear the sounds of crowds beyond the gate. Enemy soldiers might come to the house to loot it, to dig for whatever gold her father had buried.
Zulaika veiled her face, covered herself in a long black chador, then went to the gate. She had barely closed it when she was caught in the press of bodies thronging the street and carried forward. They moved past houses and gardens towards the shops that stood near the Friday mosque. A shout rose from the crowd; over the veiled and turbaned heads, she glimpsed a row of raised lances.
The throng suddenly parted. She heard screams and was forced to one side of the street as people pushed around her. Horsemen trotted down the stony street; their faces had dark, narrow eyes, skin as brown as leather, flat noses, and long thin moustaches that drooped from their upper lips. Their bodies were so thickset that they seemed deformed; there was nothing human in them.
She wanted to run back to her house, but the people around her pushed forward until she was within sight of the mosque's golden domes. Other horsemen were looting the shops, throwing carpets, copper pots, and other goods into the street. More horsemen rode towards the mosque from the gate of Ibrahim. A man at the head of these riders shouted words in his outlandish speech at the mullahs outside the mosque.
“The Great Khan asks,” a man near the enemy said, “if this is the palace of the Shah Muhammad.”
“It is not,” a mullah replied. “It is a holy place, the House of God.”
“There is no grazing for our horses in the countryside. The Khan orders that they be fed.”
Zulaika watched in horror as the horsemen rode through the mosque's entrance. Some of the veiled women near her tried to get away, only to be herded towards the mosque's wall. She struggled to stay on her feet, afraid she might be trampled if she fell. Barbarians spilled into the mosque; horsemen lashed at the crowd. Zulaika was pushed towards the entrance and stumbled through it with the others.
The courtyard was filled with men and horses. Helmeted warriors grabbed at women, tearing away their veils and chadors. Zulaika ducked as a brown hand grabbed at her. Men in the white turbans of imams wailed as jewelled cases were heaped with grain and put before the horses. Scrolls were scattered across the tiles. God would punish them for this, for desecrating the mosque and casting the Holy Korans to the ground. Turbaned scholars were being fo
rced to carry grain to the horses while others bore jars of wine to the barbarians.
A hand clutched at her chador and ripped the garment from her. Zulaika caught at her veil, lost it, and pushed past knots of people until she was near the pulpit. The man who had led the horsemen there climbed the steps to the lectern, followed by two other men, then turned to face the mob in the courtyard. He lifted an arm; the noise faded until she heard only choked sobs and the whinnies of the horses.
The man began to speak in his harsh tongue. With his broad shoulders and bowed legs, he was like the other creatures, but his eyes were the greenish-yellow ones of a cat. Another barbarian stood near him, along with a bearded man who might have been one of her own people, although he wore a breastplate and helmet like the enemy's.
The pale-eyed man was silent; the thick-bearded man spoke then. “The Great Khan speaks these words to you,” he called out, “and to all of Bukhara, which has now opened its gates to him. You are a people that has committed great sins, and the greatest among you have sinned the most. Look at me, and know what I am. I am God's punishment for your sins, and the proof of this is that I have been sent against you. You have no defence against the power of God.”
It had to be true, Zulaika thought wildly; God had abandoned them. She was suddenly pushed towards the steps. A hand grabbed her by the wrist, dragging her up to the pulpit; she shrieked as a yellow-eyed face loomed over her. The courtyard rang with the songs of barbarians and the screams of women. The man threw her down and pushed her robes up to her hips. The weight of him crushed her against the tiled platform as pain tore at her insides. An evil spirit had claimed her; there was no one to protect her. Her soul had entered the dark realm of punishment.
The Scourge of God and his minions celebrated until the sun was high above the courtyard. The learned men of Bukhara brought more wine to the barbarians and set grain before the horses in cases that had once held the scrolls of the Koran. The singing girls of the city were forced to dance before the Great Khan's soldiers hurled themselves upon them. Zulaika sat at the Khan's feet; whenever she moved, his hand caught her by the hair and jerked her back. He had forced her twice, and her clothes were spotted with blood. Now he laughed and drank, apparently content to watch the debauches of his men.
Her shame should have killed her. She wondered dimly if her father and brothers were in the courtyard, witnesses to her wretchedness. A foot caught her in the side; the Khan was on his feet, striding towards the steps where a horse was brought to him; he mounted and rode through the milling crowd.
The horsemen were leaving the mosque. Zulaika was shoved down the steps as the crowd was pushed towards the arch of the entrance. She followed the mob passively. It no longer mattered what became of her; she was only another soul condemned to suffer for the sins of her people.
Near the gate of Ibrahim, the Khan ordered all the wealthy men of Bukhara to yield their possessions to him, and then the people of the city were commanded to leave it with nothing but the clothes they wore. They were herded through the gate and past the canals that fed the gardens of the rabat, until they came to the plain. Dust had darkened the sun, making the plain seem red as blood. Those who left the city spent the night on the plain, surrounded by their captors.
The soldiers left in the citadel held out behind their high wall. By morning, smoke and flames rose from the high ground where the central city stood. The resistance of those still brave enough to fight, to hide behind walls and then attack the looting savages, had only condemned Bukhara. Catapults hurled stones at the walls until only mounds of brick and earth were left. Men and boys—merchants and scholars, imams and slaves—were driven towards the citadel and forced to fill in the moats, where the bodies of those who fell soon clogged the waterways. Flaming pots flew over the wall at the citadel's defenders; after five days, the citadel fell. The heads of the defenders were heaped in front of the levelled wall. Bukhara was a smoking ruin, its canals flowing blood.
Zulaika waited with the crowds of captives and watched her city die. Barbarians moved among them, taking some prisoners off to be slaughtered and others to their tents. Scraps of food were thrown to the captives and they scrambled for jugs of water while the soldiers laughed. Women wailed as their children were torn from them; girls screamed as they were dragged off by groups of soldiers.
She did not know what had happened to her father and brothers. They might have been among the men tortured into confessing where they had hidden their wealth; they might have hidden in the shahristan only to be consumed by fire; they might have met their deaths in the citadel's moats. Better, she told herself, if they were dead, so that they would never know of the devils who used her, then threw her back into the midst of other ravaged women and girls. Better if their suffering was at an end.
Several days after the Wind of God's Wrath had swept through the gates of Bukhara, the horde took down their tents, gathered up their plunder, and moved along the Zerafshan River towards Samarkand, driving their captives before them. The old, the injured, the dying, and the weak were left behind, those whom they did not want or who would be useless in besieging Samarkand. The green land that once marked the flourishing oasis was grazed nearly bare; the canals leading to the city, with no one to tend their locks, were drying up. The horde had cut down trees to build siege towers, and their horses had trampled the flower gardens. The ruins of Bukhara smouldered; only the stone walls of its public buildings, a few minarets, and scarred domes stripped of their gold showed where the city had once stood.
Zulaika was one of those left behind. Vultures picked at the bodies strewn across the plain; others perched on hills of heads. A child, a girl already nearly blind from years of labour as a carpetmaker's slave, her small body ravaged by barbarians, crawled to Zulaika's side and died in her arms.
After covering the girl's body with sand, Zulaika sat by the river, ignoring the survivors who passed her. Some were walking back to the city, although they would find little there. A few stopped near her, told her they were going to seek shelter in an outlying village, and begged her to come with them. She refused to answer and stared past them until they moved on.
For three days, she wandered along the river, her only food bits of rotting melon in the devastated gardens. She slept on the river-bank wrapped in a chador taken from a woman's body. Death would come for her soon: with nothing to eat, the cold night winds chilling her, and drifting sand threatening to bury her by morning, there was almost no life left in her.
When the fire of the sun flamed in the east, she saw a dark mass moving across the land. Zulaika propped herself against a tree stump, but was too weak to stand. She gazed north-east at the apparition, waiting for it to vanish; instead, the mass grew until she could see wagons and camels, horses and other beasts, and riders carrying the standards of the invaders.
One of them might take pity, and end her suffering with his sword. As the horde came closer, she saw large tents on wagons hovering above the dust. The sky darkened; she fell into a black pit, hearing the shrieks of other condemned souls before the silence swallowed her.
She opened her eyes. She had to be dead, but felt dirt under the palms of her hands and water against her lips. Several creatures stood around her with square, elongated heads; devils had come for her. An arm was around her, holding her up; she stared into a woman's face.
The woman whispered a few words. Zulaika shook her head, then saw that the other creatures were also women, with high square head-dresses decorated with feathers; their small dark eyes peered at her from above white veils. Two men with them held bows, their arrows trained on her.
The woman holding her spoke sharply to the others; the men lowered their bows. Leave me, Zulaika tried to say, but the words did not come. The stranger's large brown eyes searched her face.
A young man wearing a turban was suddenly pushed towards her; the woman murmured to him. He nodded, then knelt as Zulaika drew the edge of her chador across her face.
“The Khatun sa
ys you will be safe now,” he said. “Do you understand? You'll be carried to her cart. When the animals have been watered, you will come with us.”
Let me die, she thought as arms reached for her.
106
The traders from Khwarezm had often spoken of the beauty of their land. As Khulan followed in the wake of Temujin's army, she saw little of that beauty. A few walls and monuments of skulls were all that remained in some towns and villages; their only inhabitants now were black birds. Sand drifted over the yellowing grass that bordered drying channels; the desert would reclaim this land.
Khulan's wagons followed a trail of bodies. Occasionally she saw people who had survived. Sometimes they hid among the ruins; more often they stood and watched her pass, seemingly waiting to die.
A few towns still stood, those that had surrendered without any resistance, but even there, the fields were ravaged. Temujin had spared Samarkand, but a mound of heads stood outside the burned walls of its citadel. Those in the citadel's garrison had been the first to surrender, but the Khan did not trust Turkish mercenaries who fought for the Shah's gold; he had executed them all. Samarkand had been looted, and thousands of its craftsmen were captives, following the Mongol army or making the long journey to the Khan's homeland, but the city had survived.
Khulan's wagons held copper vases and cups taken from Bukhara, along with the carpets that city had produced. Her trunks were filled with brightly coloured silks and cottons, silvery fabrics, and jars of wine and oil looted from Samarkand. Grain from the cities fed her animals; round fruits called melons, with succulent flesh inside a hard rind, fed her. Khwarezmian slaves helped tend her herds, prepare her meals, and care for her possessions. She did not want any of this booty, but the slaves might have been killed if she had not accepted them. So she told herself, while feeling that Temujin had won a victory over her by forcing her to take her share of plunder.
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