The guards had to keep their own weapons to enforce the caliph’s rule, but the sight of them inflamed already dangerous passions. Every father and son feared armed men when they had given up their own weapons. The guards were pelted with roof tiles and rotting vegetables as they checked each street, thrown from above or by darting little boys yelling curses at them.
As the hot days passed, shouting crowds dogged their steps. The guards grew tight-lipped with fury as they continued their work and tried to ignore the sight of people running out of each street with swords and knives as they entered.
On the fourth day, one of the caliph’s men was hit by something foul that slithered wetly down the back of his head. He had been under intense pressure for a long time: called a traitor and a coward, jeered and spat at. He swung round in a rage with his sword drawn and saw a group of teenage boys laughing at him. They scattered, but in his rage he caught one and felled him with a blow. The guard panted as he turned the body over. He had killed the youngest of them, a thin boy who lay with a great red gash across his neck, ugly and wide, so that bone showed. The guard looked up into the faces of the burly men he had paid to carry the blades. One of them dropped his armful with a crash and walked away. Behind him, others pressed forward, calling for still more to come and see what had been done. The anger was growing and the guard knew about rough street justice. His fear showed on his face and he began to back away. He managed to retreat only a few paces before he was tripped and brought down. The crowd fell on him in a rush of fear and rage, tearing with their nails, smashing their fists and shoes into his flesh.
At the end of the street a dozen guards came running. As if at a signal, the crowd suddenly scattered in all directions, running away mindlessly. They left another body with the dead boy, so battered and torn as to be barely human.
The following dawn there were riots across Baghdad. Trapped as he was in the Mongol camp, the caliph lost patience when he was told. It was true that his guards were outnumbered in the teeming city, but he had eight major guard houses built in good stone and three thousand men. He sent new orders, giving his personal permission to kill any malcontents or rioters. He made sure the order was read on every street corner. The guards heard the news with relish and sharpened their swords. One of their own had fallen to the mob and it would not happen again. They moved in groups of two hundred and scoured areas, with hundreds more employed to take the weapons to the walls and drop them over. If anyone protested, the guards used heavy sticks to knock him senseless and threw in a few kicks for good measure. If a blade was drawn in anger against them, they killed quickly and left the bodies where they could be seen. There was no shame or fear in them to spark the revenge heat of a crowd. Instead, the guards stared the citizens down while they went about their work.
The mobs shrank in the face of sanctioned aggression, fading back into the shadows of normal life. They whispered the name of the fallen boy to themselves like a talisman against evil, but the collections went on even so.
After eleven days, Hulegu was at the end of his patience when the message came that the disarming was complete and he could enter and inspect the city. The sheer weight of weapons had been impressive, forcing Hulegu to use a full tuman to cart them away. Most were buried to rust, with just a few choice pieces finding new owners among the Mongol officers. Baghdad waited before him, truly defenceless for the first time in its history. He savoured the thought as he mounted his horse and waited for a minghaan of a thousand to form up around him. At the head, the caliph took his place in his chariot, his clothes filthy and his skin covered in flea bites. Hulegu laughed when he saw the man, then gave the order to go in.
There would still be an element of danger in entering the city, Hulegu was certain. Just a few hidden bows used from roofs as he passed could set off another riot. He wore full armour as well as his helmet, the weight and solidity making him feel invulnerable as he dug in his heels and rode through the gates at last. His tumans were ready to assault the city and he left men to hold the gates open at each point of entry. He hoped he had thought of everything and he was cheerful as he trotted his mount down a main road, empty and echoing.
In just a short time, the outer walls were long behind. The city was predominantly built from a brown baked brick. It reminded Hulegu of the smaller city of Samarra to the north. His tumans had fought a pitched battle there in his absence before looting it. By the time he had come south from the Assassin fortress, Samarra had been sacked, with blood running in the gutters and parts reduced to rubble. That was one reason the caliph’s city would not be relieved. Hulegu’s officers had been thorough.
Baghdad was many times the size of Samarra and the brown buildings were interspersed with highly decorated mosques. Bright blue tiles and extraordinary geometric patterns caught the sunlight, gleaming in the dun roads as splashes of colour. Hulegu knew the Moslems were forbidden from using human forms in their art, so they made patterns of reflected and interwoven shapes. It was said their mathematics had grown out of the art, from men forced to consider angles and symmetry to worship their god. To his surprise, Hulegu found he enjoyed the style far more than the battle scenes Ogedai had commissioned in Karakorum. There was something almost soothing about the repeated shapes and lines that covered vast walls and courtyards. Above the city, minarets and towers loomed, more splashes of colour. When Hulegu looked up, he could see the distant figures of men watching from the heights. No doubt they could see his army outside the city as they stared into the distance.
He passed the famous House of Wisdom and ducked down in his saddle to peer through an archway into the dark blue courtyard there. Nervous scholars peeped out of every window and he recalled that they were said to possess the greatest library in the region. If Kublai had been present, Hulegu knew his brother would have been salivating to get in, but he had other things to see. His minghaan followed a small group of the caliph’s guards through the city, passing over the Tigris at one point on a bridge of white marble. Baghdad was larger than Hulegu had realised, the sheer scale of it only truly visible from inside the walls.
The sun was high by the time he reached the caliph’s gated palace and passed through into sheltered green gardens. Hulegu snorted at the sight of a peacock, running from the armed men with its tail quivering.
Most of the minghaan stayed outside the caliph’s residence, with orders to visit all the banks in the city. Hulegu cared little for what the caliph thought of him. Even as he dismounted, a full tuman of ten thousand was entering the city in slow procession, disciplined men who would seek out its hidden wealth without touching off another riot.
Hulegu was in good spirits as the caliph’s servants led him through cool rooms and down steps to where their master waited. He knew he could be ambushed, but he depended on the threat of his men to keep him safe. The caliph would have to be insane to take him with so many Mongols already in the city - and so few weapons to fight them. Hulegu was certain there were still caches of blades in Baghdad. It was almost impossible to find every knife, sword and bow in a population with basements and hidden rooms. It had been a symbolic act for the most part, though it increased the sense of helplessness in the city as they waited for him to keep his word and leave.
Caliph al-Mustasim was waiting at the bottom of a flight of stone steps that led on from two more above it, so that the treasure rooms were deep into the bedrock and lit only by lamps. No sunlight reached so far down, but it was dusty and cool rather than damp. Even in his soiled clothes, the leader of the city looked far more confident than he had in the Mongol camp. Hulegu watched for some sign of deceit as the caliph’s guards removed a heavy locking bar, a piece of iron so massive that two of them could barely lift it out of its brackets. Al-Mustasim then stepped in and pressed his hands on the doors, heaving at them until they swung open noiselessly. Unable to help himself, Hulegu edged forward to the threshold to get the first sight of what lay within. He was watched in turn by the caliph, who saw greed kindle in his eye
s.
The treasure rooms must once have been a natural cave under the city. The walls were still rough in places, stretching far away. The servants of the caliph had obviously gone in before, as the place was well lit with lamps hanging from the ceiling. Hulegu smiled as he realised the grand opening of the doors had been staged for his benefit alone.
It had been worth the wait. Gold gleamed its unique colour in stacks of bars as thick as a man’s finger, but that was just a small part of the whole. Hulegu swallowed drily as he saw the extent of the cave, every corner of it packed with statuary and shelves. He could not help but wonder how much had been removed before that day. The caliph would want to keep some portion of his wealth back and Hulegu knew he would have a struggle finding the other rooms and chests, wherever they were hidden. Still, it was an impressive sight. Just that one room was equal to or greater than all Mongke’s vaults. Though Hulegu knew he would have to hand over at least half of it to his brother, he realised that at a stroke he had become one of the richest men in the world. He laughed as he stood there, seeing the wealth of ancient nations.
The caliph smiled nervously at the sound.
‘When you check the lists I gave you, you will see I have accounted for it all. I have dealt honourably for my city.’
Hulegu turned to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. One of the caliph’s guards bristled and found a sword laid across his throat in an instant. Hulegu ignored them.
‘You have shown me the visible treasures, yes. They are magnificent. Now show me the rest, the true wealth of Baghdad.’
The caliph looked at the smiling man in horror. He shook his head wordlessly.
‘Please, there is nothing else.’
Hulegu reached out and took a firm grip on one of the caliph’s jowls, shaking him gently.
‘Are you certain?’ he asked.
‘I swear it,’ the caliph responded. He stepped away from the insulting grip as Hulegu spoke again to one of the Mongol warriors.
‘Tell General Kitbuqa to begin burning the city,’ he said. The man ran back up the steps and al-Mustasim watched him go, his face twisting in panic.
‘No! Very well, there is a store of gold hidden in the garden ponds. That is all. I give you my word.’
‘It is too late for that now,’ Hulegu said regretfully. ‘I asked you to make an accurate tally of the tribute and you did not. You have brought this on yourself, O caliph, and upon your city.’
The caliph drew a dagger from the folds of his robe and tried to attack, but Hulegu merely stepped aside and let his guards intervene, knocking the weapon from the man’s fleshy fingers. Hulegu picked it up, nodding to himself.
‘I asked you to disarm and you did not,’ he said. ‘Take him to a small room and keep him prisoner while we work. I am tired of his wind and promises.’
It was no easy task to drag the caliph’s bulk up the stairs, so Hulegu left his guards to it while he walked inside the vault to inspect what he had won. Kitbuqa knew what to do. He and Hulegu had set their plans weeks before. The only difficulty had been in securing Baghdad’s treasures before they destroyed the city.
The winter was mild in that region and Kublai’s tumans settled in around their new lands, secure in their gers. From records of Tsubodai’s Russian campaigns, Kublai knew winter was the best time to launch an attack, but so far to the south the natural Mongol advantage in cold-weather fighting was almost nullified. Armies still moved through the cold seasons and he could not be assured of a respite from warfare. His enemies must have known the same discomfort. The Mongols had entered their lands and no one knew where they would strike next.
Kublai had expected to fight for every step across Sung territory, but after the first battle, it almost seemed as if he were being ignored. Kunming city had opened its gates to him without a struggle, then Qujing and Qianxinan. He wondered if a sense of shock and effrontery had paralysed the Sung emperor. It had been centuries since anyone had last launched a conquest of their lands, but the lessons of the Chin would surely have been hard to ignore. If Kublai had been in power, he would have armed his entire population for all-out war, forcing millions of men against the Mongol war machine until it was ground down to nothing. He still feared exactly that. His only comfort was that the Yunnan region was isolated by a vast range of hills and mountains from the rest of Sung territory. To reach a major Sung city, his maps revealed broken land for two hundred miles, with no detail. Kublai fretted at every passing week as he sent men and money to locate the silver mines of the Sung emperor. It took far longer than he had hoped. Many of his scouts came in empty-handed, or with false leads that wasted time and energy. As two months passed without success, he was forced to head east into the first hills, leaving small groups of warriors in his pacified cities to ensure supplies continued to flow.
Ten tumans and his host of camp followers moved slowly across the land. Kublai had given Uriang-Khadai standing orders to buy food rather than take it, but the result was that his small treasury dwindled visibly. The orlok had insisted on a meeting to point out the idiocy in leaving Chin silver with peasant villages, but Kublai refused to discuss it and sent him back to the tumans without satisfaction. He knew he took too much pleasure in baiting the older man, but he would not explain himself to one who would never understand what he was trying to do. Mountain towns large and small were left intact behind the Mongol ranks and the coins had begun to flow month by month, so that the lowest unranked warrior could be heard to jingle when he trotted his mount. They carried the Chin coins on leather thongs around their necks or hanging from their belts like ornaments. The novelty of it had kept them quiet while they waited to see what such coins would buy them in the Sung cities. Only Uriang-Khadai refused his monthly payment, saying that Kublai would not make a merchant of him, not while he kept his rank. Under the orlok’s angry stare, Kublai had been tempted to strip that rank from him, but he had resisted, knowing it would have been from spite. Uriang-Khadai was a competent commander and Kublai needed all the ones he had.
The going was slow, though there were paths through the hills. There were no great mountains, just a distant horizon of peaks and troughs made green with heavy rain. The drizzle lasted for days at a time, turning the clay into sticky clods that slowed them all further and bogged down the carts. They trudged and rode onwards, the women and children growing thin as the herds were butchered to keep the men strong. The grazing was the only good thing about the trek and Kublai spent his evenings in a leaking ger with Chabi and Zhenjin, listening to Yao Shu reading aloud from the poetry of Omar Khayyam. At every town, Kublai asked for news of soldiers or mines. Such remote places rarely had anyone who had been to the cities and he was relieved when his scouts called him to the farm of a retired Sung soldier named Ong Chiang. Faced with armed warriors, Ong Chiang had discovered he knew a great deal. The ex-soldier told Kublai of the city of Guiyang, which was barely forty miles from an imperial barracks and a silver mine. It was not a coincidence that the two things went together, he said. A thousand soldiers lived and worked in a town which existed only to support the local mines. Ong Chiang had been stationed there for part of his career and he spoke with relish of the harsh discipline, showing them a hand with just two fingers and thumb left on it to make his point. To be born in the towns around Guiyang was to die in the mines, he said. It was a poor place to live, but it produced great wealth. It was just possible that in all his life Ong Chiang had never had such an attentive audience. He settled back in his small home, while Kublai listened to every word.
‘You saw the soil being brought to the surface, then heated?’
‘In huge furnaces,’ Ong Chiang replied, lighting his pipe as he spoke and sucking appreciatively at the long stem. ‘Furnaces that roar all day so that the workers go deaf after just a few years. I never wanted to get close to those things, but I was just there to guard them.’
‘And you said they dig up lead …’
‘Lead ore, mixed with the silver. They’re found toge
ther, though I don’t know why. The silver is a pure metal and the lead can be melted off. I saw them pouring ingots of silver at the site and we had to work to make sure the miners didn’t steal even a few shavings of it.’
He launched into an anecdote about a man trying to swallow sharp pieces of silver that made Kublai feel ill. He suspected the Sung veteran knew little more than he did himself about the actual process, but in his rambling speech, he gave away many useful details. The mine at Guiyang was clearly a massive undertaking, a town that existed only for the purpose of digging ore. Kublai had been imagining something on a smaller scale, but Ong Chiang talked of thousands of workers, hammering and shovelling day and night to feed the emperor’s coffers. He boasted of at least seven other mines in Sung lands, which Kublai had to dismiss as fantasy. His own people worked two rich seams, but Kublai had never visited the sites. To think of eight of them being hollowed out, their ores made into precious coins, was a vision of wealth and power he could hardly take in.
At last the man ran out of wind and settled into silence, made all the more comfortable by a flask of airag Kublai had produced from his deel robe. He rose and Ong Chiang smiled toothlessly at him.
‘You have silver enough to pay a guide?’ he said. Kublai nodded and the man rose with him, reaching out to jerk his arm up and down. ‘I’ll do it then. You won’t find the mine without a guide.’
‘What about your farm, your family?’ Kublai said.
‘The land is shit here and they know it. Nothing but chalk and stones. A man has to earn money and I can smell it on you.’
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