by Dan Davis
The Mongol leader Kitbuqa, already provoked by the constant fleeing of Baibars and his troops, committed a grave mistake. Instead of suspecting a trick, the foolish Kitbuqa decided to march forwards with all his troops on the trail of the fleeing Mamluks. I believe that Kitbuqa’s immortality had gone to his head and it led him to make rash decisions. Whatever the reason for his foolishness, when the Mongols reached the highlands, the hidden Mamluks charged into the fray and the Mongols then found themselves surrounded on all sides.
The Mongol army fought very fiercely to break out but it was too little and too late. Kitbuqa and almost the entire Mongol army perished.
“One of our immortal enemies, Hulegu’s right hand, Kitbuqa, has fallen,” I said to my companions when we heard the news.
“I do not understand,” Khutulun kept saying, for it was the first time that the Mongols had lost a battle. “I do not understand.” Orus likewise scratched his head. All they had ever known their whole lives was Mongol victory, from one end of the Earth to the other.
“They can be beaten, then,” Thomas said to me later. “It is possible.” For all his hatred of them, he seemed almost disappointed. I think that, in his mind, he had made them into something like demons and now he found that they were men after all.
But Hulegu would soon return and we all expected him to crush the Mamluks. In the Mongol civil war, Hulegu supported his brother Kublai and then returned through Persia to take up his war against the Mohammedans.
Knowing this, my companions and I prepared to kill Hulegu as he approached through the lands of Palestine. I spent considerable wealth in exploring a number of potential ambush sites in the hills, and even hired a few desperate mercenaries to help us scout likely areas. It was a dangerous place to be roaming around, with bands of Mamluks, Mongols, and brigands clashing on the borders.
But Berke, brother of the deceased Batu and the leader of the Golden Horde of Mongols on the steppes of Russia, had recently converted and now called himself a Mohammedan. After Baghdad fell, Berke was angry at the insult to his new faith and he moved to attack Hulegu, who had to make his way up to Azerbaijan to defend against this new enemy.
Which took Hulegu far away from us once more.
The presence of a serious threat from fellow-Mongols on his northern flank boxed Hulegu in, and he settled down once more and decided to wait out his cousin Berke, who was already old and who Hulegu, being immortal, would easily outlive. In the cities he had won along the Tigris and Euphrates, Hulegu put his viceroys into power, and rewarded some of the helpful Shiites. Thus establishing his vast dominion, Hulegu declared himself to be the Ilkhan, and his empire as the Ilkhanate. This word il-khan meant subordinate khan. The term had been agreed to by Hulegu, in exchange for in practice having complete autonomy from Kublai. It was said by those we bribed that, behind closed doors, Hulegu laughed that Kublai was concerned with appearances where Hulegu cared only for real power. And Hulegu ruled his vast Ilkhanate not from Iraq but from western Persia and the city of Maragha.
Maragha was up north, near the Caspian Sea. Northeast of Mosul, northwest of the ruined Alamut and south of Armenia and close to the enormous saltwater Lake Urmia. The lake had a number of large islands, the largest of which was about six miles long. An island that I would later visit.
The city of Maragha was situated in a narrow, north-south valley at the eastern extremity of a fertile plain between the valley and Lake Urmia just twenty miles to the west. The land all around in fact was rich with vineyards and orchards, all well-watered by canals led from the river, and producing great quantities of fruit.
It was no wonder that Hulegu was content to wait out the Mongol civil wars and the Mamluk power grab in such surroundings. It was not only the great abundance of the land but the strategic location of the city that allowed him to cover any attacks from the Golden Horde to the north, as well as govern his Persian subjects to the southeast and control his newly-conquered peoples to the southwest in Iraq and Syria.
We knew that the time for us to kill the Ilkhan was approaching. He was ruling from one city and most of his armies were disbursed hundreds or thousands of miles away.
And yet the Hulegu was very careful with his security. Such a conqueror had made thousands of enemies, even millions. And it was not only the Ismailis who were capable of poisoning their enemies or murdering them in their beds. And so we watched from afar as he ruled and, under Hassan’s guidance, we slowly and carefully built a network of spies. Slave traders, merchants, musicians. The jugglers and acrobats. Physicians and masons. Anyone who would travel through the region, first of all. Then we found people who could approach or even enter the city and provide information on the layout of the streets, the important people, and so on. Eventually, we bought off a man named Enrico of Candia who provided a steady stream of slaves to the rulers of Maragha and so could provide a wealth of insider information.
Enrico was a Venetian by birth, though he claimed to have left as a boy, never to return. He had grown rich transporting slaves across the Black Sea in all directions and had grown fat and enormously wealthy ever since coming under the protection of Batu Khan. Since Batu’s death, he had come over to Hulegu’s side following a falling out with Batu’s brother Berke. Hassan and Stephen, both devious men by nature and in practice, believed that Enrico had feigned this conflict with Berke and was, in fact, spying for him. We were therefore concerned about trusting him in any way.
“What if he serves Hulegu and yet only pretends to Berke that he serves him?” Stephen said to Hassan, one evening as we ate together in our home in the Kingdom of Georgia.
It was easy enough in those times and in that part of the world for me to pose as a wealthy French mercenary, especially with such a mixture of foreign peoples in my entourage. Especially, also, as the opposing armies of the Golden Horde to the north and Hulegu’s Ilkhanate to the south were at risk of coming to blows in the lands that lay between them, like Georgia. With a fabricated reputation for martial brilliance and reliability that we had sent ahead of us, the local lord had provided me with a perfectly acceptable residence so that I and other soldiers of fortune like me would be on hand should hostilities break out.
“Perhaps our man Enrico serves both masters?” Hassan said. “Giving information to both Hulegu and Berke, and so serves only himself?”
“Might it be that he trades information to anyone who can pay?” Eva suggested. “The Latin magnates of Constantinople, his fellow Venetian traders, and the Saracen lords. It would seem that Enrico of Candia knows everyone. Surely, we may expect to find him accommodating. We should pay him well, not ask too much of him in return, and grudgingly provide him with a plausible story about why we wish to know about the palace. Something that he would not feel honour bound to sell us out for.”
“What might such a thing possibly be?” Thomas asked.
“Horse thieves,” Eva said. “We will steal the Ilkhan’s most valuable horses right out of his stable, for breeding in Acre, where good horses are a fortune.”
Hassan sighed, and pinched his nose, for he had little regard for the wisdom of women, especially when it was sound. “And if we make contact and he sells us to Hulegu, what then of our entire undertaking? We must be cautious.”
“For God’s sake,” I said to the group, and banged my hand on the table, causing them to turn to me all at once as the plates and cups rattled. “Stephen, go to his people and buy us some blood slaves for ourselves, will you? The usual type. Mutes or morons, if possible. Foreign savages if not. We shall continue to move cautiously but we must act, and not sit around talking about the matter.”
Two years later, I still did not know whether the Venetian Enrico of Candia was loyal to Hulegu or not. Whether he had sold us out, and whether we were walking into a trap. And that thought, along with a thousand other worries about our assassination plan, played on my mind as I scaled the wall of Hulegu’s palace on a cold night in February 1265.
***
Mara
gha was not a large capital but it had a high city wall and four sturdy gates. The outer wall to the north had a small postern gate big enough only for men and not horses, and we had promised a fortune to a certain Kipchak guard if he would but open it to us on that night. Praise God, the young fellow held up his end of the bargain. Orus seized him, and whispered threats should we find he had sold us out to his masters. When the terrified Kipchak swore to Christ—for he was a Nestorian—, that he had done precisely as we had required, Orus expertly cut the young man’s throat.
I have killed uncounted thousands in my life and been witness to many times more deaths, but it is the dishonourable ones such as that squalid murder which have plagued my dreams down the centuries. An inauspicious start to our infiltration, and it unsettled me all the more as it felt as though our venture was tainted with the underhanded act. But it was an act of necessity for, once he had let us in, we could not let him go lest he be captured and give us up, nor could we tie him up lest he be discovered and do the same. And so, a treacherous blade to the gullet it was, and his body we shoved into a dark doorway.
I told myself that the incidental deaths of the innocent were necessary in order to save Christendom from Hulegu’s horde. We would kill hundreds to save millions.
Slipping into the city through the postern was straightforward. Making our way through the streets was likewise a relatively simple matter and we did so swiftly and without challenge. Alas, there was but a single gate into the walled palace compound and so over the wall we went, climbing like lizards up the stones with our gear hanging from sacks behind some of us. We had a lot of men to kill, and we needed the means to do it. For they were not ordinary men, but Hulegu and his immortals, and they would die hard.
The others followed me, dropping as quietly as shadows down the inside of the wall into the dark soil and ornamental bushes near to the base of the wall.
I counted down Eva, Thomas, Stephen, Hassan, Orus, and Khutulun. We were all there, and all ready.
One of the Mongols that William had turned had been killed by the Mamluks and our information suggested Hulegu had twelve immortals left alive to serve him.
Every one of them was in the palace with him that night. Eight of them were Hulegu’s personal bodyguards, collectively known as the keshig, and they were with him or near to him almost all the time and had been for years. By all accounts, they were battle-scarred brutes who terrified the courtiers. But the other four immortal lords had been recalled from their regions of Hulegu’s Ilkhanate. It was the Mongol new year celebration, and they would feast together and discuss the Ilkhan’s strategic priorities for the following year.
It was the first time Hulegu’s immortals had all been together for many months and we knew we may never have a better opportunity.
There were seven of us and thirteen of them, so already we were at a numerical disadvantage as far as immortals of the blood went. Another disadvantage was that one of my men was Stephen, who I had trained to fight with basic competence in the intervening years but who would never be anything like a true warrior, even with his immortal’s strength. And I had two women on my side. Deadly and skilful though they were, neither Eva nor Khutulun had the strength to match an immortal man of similar skill. And Hulegu’s keshig bodyguards and lords were all seasoned soldiers.
Not only that, there would be mortal men in Hulegu’s hall. Retainers, servants, supplicants, family members, soldiers, bodyguards, and slaves. Every Mongol court was a jumbled web of alliances and relationships and anyone we found in that hall would have to be killed, too. At worst they would fight us, and at least they would get in our way. For all I knew, I was leading my six companions against two hundred men or more.
Waving at them to follow, I led my company along the inside of the wall, between it and the lines of heavily-pruned fruit bushes that bordered the Persian style palace gardens. It was an absurd indulgence for a Mongol prince but Hulegu had settled into a luxury that would no doubt have been beyond the imagining of his barbarian fathers out on the savage steppe. An indulgence that displayed the confidence he had in his position, far enough from his enemies than no army could surprise him, and security in his own immortality. He would not be the only Mongol seduced by the degenerate wealth of the people he had conquered with such contempt.
I crept along beside the rows of ornate bushes, bent double and listening carefully for any signs that we had been seen by the patrolling night guards. If the alarm was raised before our attack was begun, then our chance of success would be gone, and the chance that any of us would escape would be close to nought, for we would be cornered and assaulted by hundreds of soldiers.
But we had our advantages. Assuming that none in our network of spies had been compromised or had been an enemy all along, then we would have surprise on our side.
Also, many Mongols would become fall-down drunk on an ordinary night in the ordus and we had timed our assassination to coincide with the celebration of the new year. Orus and Khutulun swore that everyone at court would have feasted all day on milk, cheese, mutton, roast horse, rice and curds and especially endless mountains of buuz, which were steamed dumplings stuffed with meat and were the only halfway edible food in the vile Mongol diet. They would certainly be stuffed to the guts and guzzling down gallons of fermented horse milk and rice wine. Our informants had told us that Hulegu’s men mixed blood into their drinks to make an intoxicating potion they revelled in, to the confusion and repulsion of all who were not immortals. The gluttonous brutes had been hunting and banqueting for several days already and so they would surely be suffering from their excesses.
Whereas we had been practising. At Hassan’s urging, we had rehearsed our roles in the assault on the palace many times. We had discussed it at table, we had even staked the ground in estimated dimensions of Hulegu’s hall and acted out our parts as if we were revels or guisers performing for each other so that we could coordinate the timing of our attacks. We practised fighting in confined spaces. We all practised throwing. Eva and Khutulun became expert at tossing fist-sized stones into distant baskets.
Alert to every sound, I heard the cooks in the kitchens behind the palace shouting at their servants while they roasted meats, the smell of which filled the air and made my guts churn. Figures hurried here and there. A muttering boy dragged a basket of firewood along the ground toward the servants’ entrances at the rear of the palace. Two men carried a freshly-slaughtered goat from one building to another, laughing about something as they went.
When we reached the centre of the north wall, we paused and unwrapped our weapons from the strips of wool or sheepskin that had kept them from clanging or rattling during our incursion. After all of us were ready, I nodded to Stephen.
For just a moment, Stephen’s features in the gloom reminded me of when he had been a bookish English monk too afraid to even approach me on the ship in the Black Sea. He nodded back at me and hurried past us, all alone in the shadows, toward the palace stables with his heavy sack clutched to his chest. Whether he buckled under the pressure of his mission remained to be seen.
Looming above us in the darkness, Hulegu’s palace seemed rather bigger than it had when we had staked out the dimensions on the ground.
After Stephen vanished into the gloom, the rest of us headed straight toward a specific servants’ entrance at the rear of the palace, listening hard for any sign of the guards or anyone else who might discover our intrusion and raise the alarm. The kitchens were close by now, just across a courtyard, and the fires within were casting light from under the door and smoke from above the roof. A door in the kitchens opened, throwing a shard of yellow light slanting across the ground, and a young man came out. I waved my people down and we ducked low on the path. The lad carried a heavy jar in his arms, no doubt filled with wine for the celebrating lords within the palace. Tensing, I prepared to run him down and destroy him before he could raise the alarm. But he continued on across the courtyard, kicked open a door into the palace, and headed
inside.
I let out the breath I was holding and waved my people to follow me. My nervousness only increased as I went. Killing enemy soldiers had rarely bothered me, even when I was young but I knew innocent people would die in our attack and I could not shake the feeling of guilt. I kept telling myself that they would be victims of war and their incidental deaths would help to avoid a great many more deaths in the future and so the sin would be mitigated. Besides, they would only be Saracens, Persians, Mongols, mostly, and Armenians and I would be saving all Christendom west of Jerusalem from the irresistible invasion of the Mongol lords of war.
Assuming, of course, that our attack worked.
We moved swiftly and slipped up to the palace itself. All but Thomas and Hassan, who continued on around the building, heading for a side entrance to the other side of Hulegu’s hall. My steadiest man, the old Templar was a great comfort to me and watching him disappear alone into the darkness stirred my heart greatly. He and Hassan were heading further into the palace than the rest of us and their task was immensely dangerous. I felt certain that I would never see them again, and I wished I had spoken to Thomas of my high regard for him. Then again, what was the point of such things? We all die, and either we will see each other again or we will not. And either way, God knows the truth and surely that is all that matters.
What a foolish old man I had become, feeling so emotional and apprehensive. An indulgence I could not afford.
Inside the servants’ entrance was a large chamber where food and wine was prepared for the hall upstairs. The room was lined with shelves, and dried meats and herbs were hanging from the beams. Lamps hung from chains gave off a good light. Already, I could hear the cacophony of raised voices talking further within the building and above our heads, muffled by the stones and timbers of the building.
The boy who had carried the jug of wine across the courtyard was at a bench along the wall, ladling the contents into smaller serving jugs. I saw and smelled at once that it was not, in fact, wine but fresh blood he was transferring. Two old women in servants clothing turned from preparing a huge platter of roasted meat on a workbench and stared at me with confusion written on their faces. The fact that they appeared to be innocent Armenian servants doing their duty caused me to hesitate to do what was necessary.
