Screams behind her said that members of the harem had been enticed into the entryway by the opening of the door, screams of fright and then screams of pain as they were bitten.
“You fool, Farhad!” Johanna said. “They have flanked the city!”
Farhad gaped at her and she leapt on his moment of surprise and inattention, pulling her knife and slashing it across his face. He flinched, but her blade caught his uplifted arm and left a growing red stain, and she knew a fierce satisfaction. He stumbled backward, tripped over a viper and went down to the floor.
She whirled. Firas had disarmed his captor, who was on the floor choking on his own blood. A man screamed and she whirled again, to see Alma with an adder held just behind its head, pulling its fangs from the second guard’s throat and throwing it to one side. Their eyes met for a brief moment and Alma’s face split in a feral smile.
A second missile crashed through the roof, another urn, this one filled with smaller pottery balls that burst into flame on impact. One burst at the feet of a woman whose flimsy clothes exploded into an instantaneous fiery veil. She screamed and ran, only fanning the flames and setting draperies and two other women alight. It was a horrifying sight, and Alma and Hayat were mesmerized.
“Go!” Johanna shouted. “Go, go, go!”
The four of them ran for the door to the garden, leaping over snakes and flames alike. The guards were gone and it was unlocked, and they charged through into the stable yards.
Ishan, the stable master, met them at the door. “Lady! What are you doing!”
“Get out of my way, Ishan!”
Instant comprehension flashed across his face. “You are leaving.”
She pushed past him. “North Wind!”
The great white stallion already had his head over his stall door and he whinnied in response to the sound of her voice. She slipped the latch and he shouldered out, nosing her and nickering. Firas had succeeded in saddling him before he was taken. She tried to get her foot in the stirrup but North Wind kept moving. She hopped after him, clutching at the edge of the saddle.
“Here, lady.” She looked around to find Ishan cupping his hand. She stepped into it and he threw her up on North Wind’s back. She froze, staring down at him.
He held her gaze for a long moment, before telling Firas, “The gray, yes, and the little mare, but not the black. He will not carry you far, he has no stamina, no endurance.”
He pulled saddle and bridle from the black and replaced them on a rangy chestnut who stepped nervously but delicately in place. Alma was put up on the mare, Hayat on the chestnut, and Firas mounted the grey gelding.
They all hesitated inside the door of the stable, looking at Ishan. “Come with us,” Johanna said.
He bowed to her. “I am honored, lady, by your invitation. But my wives, my children…” A vague wave indicated the city’s interior. “I must go to them.”
Johanna bit her lip. “Get out then, Ishan, get yourselves out of Talikan as soon as you possibly can.”
He bowed to her with his hand on his forehead. “Peace be upon you, lady.”
“And upon you, Ishan,” Johanna said. Impulsively, she held out her hand.
He took it in a firm, brief clasp, and smiled up at her. “Keep my horses safe.”
They had never been the sheik’s horses, not to Ishan. Johanna’s throat was tight and her eyes burned.
The stable master went ahead of them to stand by the doors to the track that Johanna took every day, that at the end of which only this morning, only hours before, Johanna and Firas had found the bodies of the scouts. “Are you sure?” she said to Firas.
“As sure as I can be, young miss,” he said, gathering his reins. “If Ogodei runs true to Mongol tactics, he is at present bringing in two flanks of his troops to engulf the Talikan pursuers.”
“I know,” Johanna said.
He nodded curtly, leaning forward to check bridle, saddle and stirrups, and then moving to Hayat and Alma to check theirs. “Ogodei’s troops are fully occupied at the main gate, which is almost directly opposite this one. This is our best chance.”
Our only chance, Johanna thought. North Wind snorted and sidled beneath her. He didn’t like the sounds he was hearing. The tension on the reins told her that he had the bit between his teeth. But then he was always ready to run, in peace or in war. “Alma, Hayat? Don’t. Fall. Off.”
Their faces turned to hers, Hayat’s grim with determination, Alma’s white with fear. But Alma had been the one to snatch up a venomous snake and use it as a weapon, and effectively, too. “Don’t fall off. Just don’t. We won’t have time to stop to help you if you fall. Do you understand?”
They nodded mutely. Ishan had fastened their feet to the stirrups with quick lashings of what looked like spare reins. Their vests and pantaloons and scarves would be no protection and if they survived Johanna hated to think what the insides of their thighs would feel like. “Keep your balance.” She attempted a smile that she feared was more of a grimace. “It’s just like dancing.”
Again they nodded, far too trustfully for her liking.
“All right,” Johanna said. “Ishan, add to your goodness and open the doors to the track?”
He unlatched the doors and dragged them back. No invading force immediately poured in, which Johanna took to be a good sign. “God be with you and your family, friend Ishan!”
“Allah keep you and yours, lady!” she heard him say.
She bent low over North Wind’s neck and kicked him sharply in the sides, and he went from a standstill to a full gallop in one pace. She heard the faint sound of hoofbeats behind her. Before her, the moon was near full on the horizon, vying with the last light of the setting sun opposite. The white sand of the track was easy to follow in the dusk. Behind them she heard yells and the sound of additional hoofbeats as a counterpoint to the thunder and smash of battle. All seemed to recede almost instantly but she knew better than to trust to that impression. She pulled a little on the reins, slowing him enough so that the other three horses could keep up.
Risking a look around she saw that Alma was being jolted from one side of her mount to the other, but recovering in time to pull herself back up again. Hayat had fallen too far to her left to recover. Johanna checked North Wind, dropped back to reach out, grab Hayat’s arm and dump her back in the saddle.
Something whirred by her face, and she looked around to see that their pursuers were a dozen Mongols armed with bows, presumably the guard set on the stable doors. Their ragged steppe ponies were no match for prize racing steeds out of Sheik Mohammed’s stables. She turned to face forward and bent low again over North Wind’s neck. He passed Hayat’s mount and came up to Firas. “Archers behind us!”
“Really, young miss?” Even at full gallop, the wind whistling past their ears in one direction and the arrows past their heads in the other, Firas managed to sound sarcastic. “Thank you for drawing it to my attention. Look!”
He pointed at the canal beside them, and in it Johanna saw scum in it she had not seen that morning. “They’ve poisoned the canal!”
He didn’t bother to answer, only pointed ahead. “We are making for that cleft, there, between those two hills, do you see?”
“I see!”
“There is water there, a small stream, where we can rest the horses.” If they managed to lose their pursuers. He didn’t say it, but they both thought it.
They didn’t dare keep the horses at a full gallop for an extended length of time. She glanced again over her shoulder. The archers were definitely falling behind, and six of them had left the others and were making for the battle, either to apprise their commander of the escapes or not to miss out on their share of the women and the plunder when the city was sacked. Possibly both, and Johanna swallowed back the bile rising in her throat. The city could not hold without a leader, and when last seen that leader had fallen into a seething mass of poisonous serpents. Johanna hoped in passing that three or four of them had bitten him. She had bee
n a prisoner in Talikan, but she had met with kindness from some of its inhabitants, all of whom would all very probably be dead before nightfall. She thought of Halim the dyer, and Ishan the stable master, and the ornamental, useless women of the harem.
They pushed on as long as they dared, a league and a half, before reining in the horses to a walk. North Wind was sweating but only lightly, the other three horses more, but none of them had thrown shoes or picked up rocks in their hooves. Alma and Hayat both had tear-streaked faces, but no one mentioned that, or much of anything else. The rest of their pursuers had vanished, very probably now at the gates of the city with the rest of the Mongol forces.
They rode for another league, not speaking, before nudging the horses into a canter. They passed burned-out farms and mills, villages with no whole houses left standing, the bodies of men, women and children brutalized and butchered and left where they lay. With this fast-slow-fast pace, it was midnight before they achieved the notch between the two hills Firas had pointed out. They reined in to the incongruous sound of running water, a cheerful chuckle as it tumbled down in a series of rocky pools. Johanna slid from North Wind’s back. He drank from the creek while she loosened his cinch and wiped him down with an armful of dry grass. She led him away before he drank too much and tethered him to a nearby tree.
Firas had loosened the ties that bound Alma and Hayat’s feet to their stirrups and helped them down. Neither woman could stand upright at first, and they limped splay-legged to the creek, there to drop to their knees and drink deeply. Firas came behind with their horses and the chestnut gelding. Like Johanna, he didn’t let them drink too much before leading them to a wizened tamarisk and tethering them to its lower branches.
They knelt next to Alma and Hayat and drank deep of the clean, fresh water, and then drank more, and rested for a few moments.
Johanna rose to her feet.
“Where are you going?” The restrained terror in Alma’s voice caused Hayat to reach for her hand.
“To the top of that knoll. We should be able to see what is happening in Talikan from there.”
Alma rose waveringly to her feet and pulled Hayat, protesting, up with her. Unaccustomed to drinking from creeks, they were both wet to their waists. “I want to see, too.”
Firas joined them, following Johanna up over the small knoll. It was overgrown with some low-growing herb that emitted a cloud of fragrance with every footstep. Lavender, perhaps. She got to the top a pace in front and stood, catching her breath, as she looked across the long plain over which they had fled.
So far as she could tell by the moon’s pale light, they were still not pursued, and it was plain as to why. At this distance, about five leagues, the sounds of human terror and agony could only be imagined, and she was grateful for that, but in a queer way it only more clearly defined what was happening there in her imagination.
Talikan lay in the bend of a wide river of the same name, the canal paralleling the path having been dug to irrigate of the farms that filled the valley. The river lay at the city’s back, the main gate at its front, and it was at the front gate that Ogodei had concentrated his attack. Two wooden towers on wheels stood near the walls, but not so near that the defenders could pour oil on them and light them off with flaming arrows. The catapults mounted on the towers continued to load and swing and hurl deadly projectiles inside the city’s walls.
The great gates were burning, as were the walls on either side, the heat of the flames no doubt driving the defenders from the gate. “What is that?” she said.
“A ram,” Firas said, as it crashed into the gates.
She nodded, numb.
Before the walls, two wide curves of mounted men rode toward each other, enclosing a comparatively pitiful force between them, the third force of Mongol riders closing the last arc of the circle. Talikan’s defeat was nearly complete. She wondered if any city had ever fallen in less than a day before. She thought again of Halim, and Ishan, and the harem. “Do you think Ogodei gave the city a chance to surrender?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Firas said. “Given how soon he began the attack upon his arrival, it would seem unlikely.”
“Why wouldn’t he? My father said that Genghis Khan always gave cities a choice.”
“Ogodei isn’t Genghis Khan.” She felt rather than saw him shrug. “Perhaps his men are hungry. Mongol armies are foragers, they feed themselves on the march. If that is the case, an outright defeat means less time between his men and the city’s storehouses than negotiating a surrender. And a surrender presupposes that enough stores would be left to feed the city’s people, which would be that much less for Ogodei’s men.” He sighed. “I don’t know, young miss.”
“How did they catch you?”
He shrugged. “We were not quite as discreet as we might have hoped, young miss. Tarik saw us talking and followed me to the stables. He saw me saddle the horses and sent for Farhad. They took me when I was on my way to the harem.”
She nodded. “We were fortunate that Farhad thought he was safe with only two guards.”
He almost smiled. “Yes,” he said.
They watched as flame leapt from beyond the gates. It was impossible at this distance, but Johanna felt that she could hear it crackle, could feel its heat, could see the ravenous flames eat up everything in the city. “How do you bury that many people?” she said at last, her voice barely above a whisper.
“You don’t,” Firas said, and stirred. “Young miss. We must go.”
“Yes,” she said. “We must.”
She turned her back on Talikan for the last time and the four of them slipped and slid back down the knoll to the little glen with its life-saving creek, where they surprised a massive striped cat who had come to the spring to drink. North Wind had broken the branch of the tree he had been tethered to and was pawing the ground, preparing to give battle. The tiger snarled at all of them impartially and slunk away into the night.
Hayat seemed frozen in place, until Alma burst into sobs. Hayat relaxed enough to put her arms around the other woman.
“I’ll need a bow and arrows as soon as possible,” Johanna said, and hoped no one else noticed how shaken her voice was. She was probably as frightened as Alma and Hayat, but the accumulated shocks of the day seemed to have left her temporarily numb to any new experience no matter how life-threatening.
Firas let out a long sigh. “We were lucky he wasn’t hungry. He could have taken down any one of our horses. Or all of them.”
Johanna looked at North Wind, still vastly annoyed at this disruption of his well-earned rest. No, not all of them.
“Here,” Firas said, “this will make you feel better.” He handed around bits of dried goat’s meat. He had managed to pack a saddlebag, Johanna saw, and one water skin. “Chew it slowly. It has to last us for a while.”
“We’ll need food,” she said, teeth working at the dried meat, which was very dry indeed. “And more water skins, and better clothing for them.” She nodded at Alma and Hayat, who still stood together with their arms around each other, Alma’s face buried in Hayat’s shoulder, Hayat’s own shoulders shaking. The tiger had been merely the last horror in a day filled with them.
“What do you intend to do with them, young miss?” Firas said in a low voice.
“That’s up to them,” she said in a hard voice that warned him away from further discussion of the topic. “Did you come this way when you came to Talikan? Is that how you knew of this spring?”
He shook his head. “I came roundabout, from the west. I am of Alamut, and so I said, and Alamut is west of here. But I asked questions in the guard house, and looked at maps, and listened to stories. Among these hills, higher up, is a small village that may be out of the way enough to have escaped Ogodei’s attention.”
“How much farther?”
“Ten leagues, twelve.” He shrugged. “We should reach it before sunset tomorrow if we keep up this pace.”
She thought. “You will occasion less comm
ent if you go in alone.”
He almost smiled. “And what will they say when I ask for women’s clothing?”
“Don’t ask for women’s clothing, ask for men’s,” Johanna said. “Tunics and trousers and boots and cheches, if they have them. Tell them you were in the employ of the Sheik Mohammed, that you escaped the sack of the city and that you and your three men are running for your lives. They’ve lived this long this close to Talikan, if they still live, they will honor the relationship they had with the sheik. And they will be grateful for news.”
She hoped.
6
Kabul, spring, 1323
“LAPIS LAZULI,” Jaufre said.
“Emeralds,” Shasha said. She hesitated. “Copper? I’ve never seen so much copper for sale in one place as I have here in Kabul.”
“Heavy,” Jaufre said. “Depends on how much copper and how far we have to carry it. We should take counsel of Grigori the Tatar.”
“One camel can carry five hundredweight,” Félicien said. “The profit on that much copper ought to pay for the camel’s feed with more than enough left over to make such a venture worthwhile.”
The other three looked at him in some surprise. He reddened beneath their scrutiny. “I have been traveling with you for over a year,” he said with asperity. “Even an idiot would have picked up a little knowledge by now.”
Jaufre gave him a buffet on the shoulder that nearly knocked the goliard over. “You have fallen in with traders, Félicien. Who knows where it will end?”
Hari caught Félicien and helped him regain an upright position. “I have been speaking to the teacher in the madrasa,” he said. “He knows of a man with a great store of maps, some old, some new.”
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