by Dan Davis
For the first time in months, Hassan smiled. “We can lay an ambush for them. These buildings all around are ideal. We can lay in wait upon the roofs, inside upper windows. Come at them from the front and rear, and from above.”
His grin spread between all of us as we imagined catching our enemies in an enclosed space.
“This city has how many gates?” Eva said. “And how many breaches will they make with their stone throwers? There are hundreds of thousands of people within these walls, and a hundred thousand or even more outside. Richard, you know that I want to kill him as much as you do, but we will never find him amongst the chaos.”
I growled and clenched my fists, and my teeth. Frustrated at every turn, for weeks and months and years now. “There must be a way.”
“What about…” Stephen started, staring out at the Mongols. “No… never mind.”
“Do not be so bloody coy, Stephen. Out with it.”
“I was wondering if you could make a banner,” he said. “Something that William might recognise. Something that would draw him to you. Or to where you wanted him to go. But I recall that you do not have any personal emblem that would be known to him, and any other possible symbol such as a cross would only serve to bring the soldiers of both sides down upon us in a rage.”
His mind worked in ways that mine never could. So many times now, his suggestions had helped me, from Karakorum to Alamut and in a thousand ways ever since. It annoyed me that a man such as he had a wit so superior to my own but I could deny it to myself no longer. He was useful to have around.
And we were about to face an assault more terrible and more massive than anything I had ever known. Perhaps more than the world had ever known, for when before had such a force ever been assembled? We had done what we could to teach him the sword and how to use a shield but it was not his forte and in the face of even the most useless Mongol, Stephen would be instantly slaughtered.
There remained one way to grant him the speed, strength and heartiness that might just give him the chance to survive. It would also bind him to me, or so I believed, in a way that would allow me access to the wisdom and knowledge that I sorely lacked.
“Stephen,” I said, placing my hand heavily on his shoulder. “Do you still wish to become an immortal?”
His mouth smiled but his eyes were filled with hunger. I wonder if it was the first flush of what he would become, or if I had simply seen his mask slip. He had told me his ambitions for England, for the English people, to make us into a great nation that would rival or exceed France. Such an ambition might be suitable for a king but for a lowly jumped up villain like Stephen it was gross pridefulness and certainly sinful in the extreme. Eva had told me Stephen was a wolf, that he would enthusiastically partake in cannibalism for the sake of ambition. All the warnings were there but out of selfishness, I ignored the unease that I felt.
Hassan stepped forward. “It is time for me, also.”
I nodded. He had done well to last so long while maintaining his authority, being as he was so much weaker in body than Jalal, Radi and Raka, the men who he commanded. But then, the Assassins were a highly disciplined people who obeyed their superiors without question. An admirable trait in general but one which had helped enable their destruction.
As much as I did not wish to bring more blood-drinkers into the world, promising it to each of them came easy after I had already granted the Gift to so many. Not only that, as I looked out over the uncountable multitude of savages covering the plains all around, I did not expect all of us to survive the coming assault.
And so it was on that night that I turned Stephen and Hassan.
I made Stephen swear an oath to serve me for the rest of his life but even as he dutifully repeated my words, I recalled how easily he had thrown off his life as a brother of the Order of Saint Francis.
As for Hassan, I asked him only to follow my orders until Hulegu and the immortal Mongols were dead. He also agreed, and I remembered how he would draw on taqiyya, and promise me one thing while intending another. What a sad thing it was, I reflected, that I had ended up surrounded by such men so far from my homeland, a place where oaths were binding and held a sacred power.
For half the night, I sat watching their bodies fight the blood within them. For a time, Stephen appeared so pale and still and cold I thought he would not make it. But their hearts were strong and at sunrise they were welcomed into the strange brotherhood of the blood that I had created. The Assassins knelt before their lord, while Stephen was clapped on the back by all of us. Khutulun kissed him hard on the mouth and he blushed like a maid.
And the next day, the siege continued apace.
The Mongols demolished homes, farms, commercial buildings in the suburbs beyond the walls and used the stones as ammunition. They even uprooted the massive plantations of palm trees and flung entire tree trunks at the walls, and over them. The trebuchets were enormous. The largest machines I had ever seen, indeed, that any of us had ever seen.
The Saracen military response was appalling. The thousands of soldiers and militia inside the city were struck with inactivity or carried out ineffective training that only served to demonstrate their poor morale. We urged anyone who would listen to ride out and make assaults on the enemy positions. Burning the enemy equipment would slow them down, and we knew that the Saracens had naphtha and incendiary weapons. And many captains and soldiers would agree with us to our faces. Yet they would do nothing. Indeed, it seemed that the soldiers grew ever less visible on the walls and I suspected that they were either hiding in their quarters or even deserting within the city. That is, throwing off their armour and slipping away back to their families in the vain hope of avoiding violence.
It was a failure of leadership, of course. The Saracen soldiers were perfectly capable of mounting a sustained defence, if only they could be directed to do so. They claimed that there had been fifty thousand soldiers in the city, and the place was so vast that it was certainly possible that had been the case before up to twenty thousand of them were drowned north of the city. But the thirty thousand remaining could have formed a core, and with citizens armed and organised, they could have put up stout resistance even in the face of such a multitude of savages outside.
But there was not the will to do it.
For instance, for many days while under bombardment, the Mongol mounted archers rode in their hundreds to the walls and shot arrows over the tops of them into the streets. Tied to these arrows were tightly rolled pieces of paper, upon which messages had been written in good Arabic. These messages promised safety to the people of the city if only they would surrender.
In response, the Saracens loosed a few half-hearted volleys back at the horsemen each time but that was all. No one organised a force to seize these messages before they could be read.
“Give me a horse and I will ride out and fight them,” I said, to the captains at the gates, not because I would actually do it but in the hope of shaming them into taking action. Of course, I was ignored, or driven off. I could see in their eyes that they had already lost the battle in their minds.
The city was battered, uninterrupted, day after day, for an entire week. A bombardment of stones, and explosives that shook the walls and the people to their roots. Those outer walls and buildings slowly crumbled, and so did the remnants of the people’s will.
Escape from the city was impossible. The wide Tigris, flowing as it did through the outskirts of the city, appeared to present the best hope of slipping away. But everyone could see how the river was blocked upstream by the pontoons that the Mongols had built so their troops could flow between both sides of the city. Downstream, it was plain that the shores were patrolled by masses of horsemen who certainly watched closely for people to try to float away by one means or another.
Every day, the caliph or someone serving him sent messengers out from the gate. The rumour was that the caliph was now begging to be allowed to surrender the city. But every day, the messengers returned and
the bombardment continued without let up. The caliph had left it too long. Hulegu, I was sure, would never now be turned from the blood-letting that awaited him once the machines of his enslaved Cathay engineers broke through the walls.
The focus of the bombardment was on the eastern wall.
That eastern portion of the city was quite distinct and separated from the rest of Baghdad by the River Tigris that snaked in between in a pronounced curve. Although the walls were said to be over a hundred years old, they were three miles in length, massively built and studded with strong towers. It was not a weak point in the defences. For all their faults as a people, the Saracen builders had designed it well. Joining the eastern section of the city and the rest was three bridges. So even if the Mongols took the east, they would still have to fight across the river. No easy feat.
And the eastern part of the city would surely be fought for. It was newer than the core of the city and contained a beautiful royal palace, and their law college known as a madrassa, as well as the ubiquitous canals and holy buildings.
Masses of Mongol forces converged on that eastern side behind their massive counterweight trebuchets. The troops camped in good order, waiting, and waiting for the walls to crumble, for the towers to fall.
***
“What if all this focus on the eastern wall is merely to divert our attention away from the real direction of the assault?” Stephen suggested as we planned our ambush in the shade of a row of ornate low palms by a narrow canal.
It was a cold day for the lands of Babylon but perfectly comfortable for an Englishman. Indeed, it was warm enough to be comfortable sitting on the paved floor in no more than long Saracen tunics. It would have been a peaceful place, but for the garrison troops sitting and standing in groups all around, just as we were, many in a state of high agitation.
There was also the regular resounding boom of projectiles smacking into the massive, thick walls out of sight to the northeast about a mile away from us.
“Why break a wall,” Hassan said, “only to ignore the breach?”
“To concentrate the Saracen defences here, so the walls elsewhere can be scaled at will before the defenders can cross the city.” Stephen was rightly suspicious of Mongol trickery. “Diversionary assaults are a common tactic, are they not?”
“That is true,” I said, well aware that tens of thousands of men surrounded each side of the city. Any one of the enemy armies would be enough to overwhelm the Saracens within, if they did it correctly. “Let us take a look at it again, shall we?”
Abdullah unrolled the map of the city that he had procured for us and spread it on the floor between us. It was by no means a highly refined document and was seventy years old but it served its purpose well enough. The Tigris snaked and arched through the map, dividing the eastern quarter from the ancient Round City beyond the western bank of the river.
The Round City had three concentric walls, cut through by four roadways leading out from the centre, with gates in the walls. The gates and roads divided the city into quarters, and each gate pointed in the direction of the lands for which it was named. There was the Syrian Gate on the northwest, which led to Damascus. The Basra Gate opposite would lead a man along the route of the Tigris. Southwest was the Kufa Gate, named after the great city on the banks of the Euphrates. And northeast, closest to the river and the eastern quarter beyond, was the Khurasan Gate that led to Persia.
A man travelling into the Round City would proceed along a plumb-straight roadway, walled upon either side, all the way into the open centre. Along the road, he would pass through three gatehouses, in order to pass through the three concentric walls. These gates were like small forts in themselves. Like squat towers. Passing through them was like entering a cool, dark tunnel. There were doors at either ends of the tunnel, with an iron portcullis in the middle. An attacking army would have to fight through that corridor, while defenders above could shoot arrows and throw God-knows what else down on the poor bastards fighting their way along it, step-by-step.
No doubt the Mongols would do it, though. They might force their prisoners through first, then send their Turkomen and Georgians in. Hulegu had enough men to spend a thousand on each gatehouse.
The Round City was a marvel of a design, truly. A work of mathematical precision. Easy for an engineer to draw upon parchment, I suppose, but the Saracens had actually made the thing from stone. And the Round City was vast, filled with homes, mosques, palaces, gardens, pools.
“Where are we now?” I asked.
Abdullah tapped a point across the river in the eastern quarters. “Here. You see, this is the road to the bridge. On the other side is the Palace of Khuld, then the Round City via the Khurasan Gate.”
“Stephen? Did you survey the bridges?”
“As they are pontoon bridges, they can be easily cut if the Mongols attempt to cross by them from the east and so we would find ourselves cut off. We should remain on the western side of the Tigris when the attack proper comes.”
“The eastern city will almost certainly be attacked first,” I said. “William will come. I believe it. Like a feral dog to a carcass, he will be drawn inward and then we shall draw him to us. They will breach the walls in one place or many on the east.” I jabbed my finger into the eastern quarter, where we sat. “Where is the square where we lay our ambush?”
“It is here,” Abdullah said, placing his finger between the outer and middle wall of the Round City.
Hassan let out a long sigh. “It is a wonderful place to lay an ambush, Richard. But getting away from there will surely be almost impossible.”
“I am certain you have it right, Hassan,” I said. “But how likely is it any of us can escape from this city with our lives?”
It was not something we had spoken of overly much, but we all knew it was the truth. Eva caught my eye for a moment with a look that was full of meaning. Fear, sadness. Perhaps even hope, or relief that we would at least die together.
Hassan coughed and stroked his beard. “As long as Hulegu Khan is dead, I shall die with peace in my heart.”
“Fine, fine,” I said. “Is the square close enough to the road that William or Hulegu could be drawn into it? Could they see a banner that we might hold aloft?”
Eva nodded. “A banner could be seen from there if the riders can see over the walls that run beside the road. We could make it more certain if the main road was blocked by something between the outer gatehouse and the middle one, then our square by the madrassa and the palace would be the most obvious route to ride through to go around the blockage.”
“Why not go the other way around a barrier?” I asked, tracing it with my finger on the map.
She had thought of that, of course. “A man can get through on foot but the archways in the wall on that side of the road are too low for riders. And Hulegu and William would be mounted, would they not?”
Of course.
“We draw his company into the square between the palace and the madrasa, yes?” I asked. “Thomas, Abdullah, did you find a way to the roof of the palace?”
The Templar nodded, a smile forming on his lips. “You would not believe it but there are no great lords within, now. Just Saracen soldiers lounging about. A few captains challenged us but Abdullah shouted them down, saying we served Feth-ud-Din and he would have them castrated if they obstructed us.”
“Good man,” I said. “And it overlooks the courtyard?”
“A section of the wall, perhaps twelve or fifteen feet high. As high as that tree over there with the dead palm leaf. But with clear view down into the square, yes, good for archers and perfect for javelins.”
“Could you jump down from that height?” I asked.
“I would rather not,” he said.
“I could,” Khutulun said. “So could Orus.” She muttered a translation to her brother, who nodded in confirmation.
“And it is possible to block the exits from the square?” I asked Eva.
“There are five ways in at gr
ound level. Three pathways from the streets, and one leading into the madrasa.”
“That makes four,” I said.
She nodded. “A corner of the square overlooks a pool. There is a fence that I doubt any horse could jump.”
I looked at Hassan as I spoke because he had described how his fedayin would carry out such a murder. “We let his first soldiers through, then block the exits behind them, trapping Hulegu, William, and the others within. We attack from all sides.”
“Assuming Hulegu comes into the city,” Thomas said. “Which he will likely not.”
“Assuming William comes at all,” Stephen said.
“And the other immortals of Hulegu’s court,” Eva pointed out.
“Indeed, all of it is based on the assumption that William and Hulegu’s immortals will enter the Round City at all,” Stephen said. “And if they do, that they will use the Khurasan Gate.”
I snatched the map from the ground and rolled it up, growling at them. “We have thought it through as well as can be. Do not lose faith, you doubting fools. All will be well. Trust me, I have done such things many times. This plan will work perfectly.”
In fact, it would be a disaster.
***
The trebuchets slammed ton after ton of rock into the high, thick eastern wall. Stones in the wall shook with the impacts, then cracks between them began to form. Chunks of mortar and sandstone were chipped away, piece by piece, and the base at points along the long wall began to accumulate piles of rubble.
Enemy formations continued to ride close to the city and rain their arrows down onto the defenders up on the walls.
The Abbasid soldiers fought back from the wall, shooting arrows and throwing javelins. But the Mongol’s Turkomen infantry were sent forward to collect the massive piles of rubble and bring them back out beyond the suburbs to the irrigated fields where the trebuchets sat. Even though hundreds were killed in the process, the Turkomens were so numerous, and they worked so tirelessly, that they constructed a number of stone platforms out in the wet fields.
