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 together, 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.’
Ong Chiang’s gaze travelled up and down Kublai’s clean deel robe and his mutilated hand twitched as if he wanted to touch the finely woven cloth. Kublai was amused despite himself. He became aware of the farmer’s wife glowering at him from the doorway. Kublai met her eyes for a moment and she looked down immediately, terrified of the armed men around her home.
‘How will I know if I can trust you?’ Kublai said.
‘I am Ong Chiang the farmer now, but I was once Ong Chiang the officer in charge of eight men, before I lost my fingers to some fool with a spade. They told me to hand back my armour and my sword and they gave me my pay, then that was it. Twenty years and I was sent away with nothing. Don’t think I’ll cause you any trouble. I can’t hold a sword, but I will show you the way. I’d like to see their faces when they see your men riding in.’ Ong began to cackle and wheeze and he sucked on his pipe again, like a teat that gave him comfort. His wheezing became gurgles and finally settled, leaving him red-faced.
‘I pay my men four silver pieces a month,’ Kublai said. ‘You will earn an extra payment when you find me a silver mine.’
Ong Chiang’s face lit up. ‘Four! For that much, I’ll walk night and day, anywhere you want.’
Kublai hoped Yao Shu hadn’t overdone his estimates of a soldier’s pay. It was one area where the Buddhist monk lacked experience. Kublai was losing half a million silver coins each month from his campaign funds and though Mongke had been more than generous, he had at best six months before the problem of looting was back. Kublai was still struggling to understand the impact of such a simple decision, but he had a vision of his men descending on a peaceful city with too much wealth in their pouches. Prices would soar. They would drink it dry, argue over the local whores and then fight until they were unconscious.
He winced at the thought. Far to the north, Xanadu was being built by Chin workers who assumed he would return with their back pay. The new capital he imagined would be left as ruins if he didn’t find a new source of silver.
‘Very well. From this day, you are Ong Chiang the guide. Do I need to warn you what will happen if you lead us wrong?’
‘I don’t think you do,’ the man said, showing his withered gums again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The caliph wept as the House of Wisdom burned. The science and philosophy of ages had been tinder dry and the flames spread with a whoosh, quickly becoming an inferno and spreading to the close-packed buildings around it. His Mongol guards had left him alone, keen to take part in the looting of the ancient city. Al-Mustasim had waited for a time, then walked out of his palace, stepping over bodies and past the pools in the courtyards, where bars of gold had been hidden in the mud. The pools were brown and the fish all dead, choked in filth or speared for fun as the bars were dragged out.
He walked on, through streets that were marked with spattered blood trails. More than once, some Mongol warrior came charging out of a side street with a red sword. They recognised his bulk and ignored him, lending an odd feeling of nightmare to his progress. No one would touch the caliph, on Hulegu’s orders. The rest of the city did not enjoy the same protection and he began to weep as he saw the dead and smelled the smoke on the breeze. The House of Wisdom wa
s only one of many fires, though he lingered there for a time, his eyes red in the bitter smoke.
Perhaps a million people lived in Baghdad at the time Hulegu’s tumans had surrounded it. There were whole districts devoted to perfumes, others to alchemy and artisans of a thousand different kinds. One area had been built around dye baths large enough for men to stand in and plunge their feet into the bright coloured liquids. Flames had burnt out there and Al-Mustasim stood for a time looking over hundreds of the stone bowls. Some of them contained drowned men and women, their faces stained by the dyes, their eyes still open. The caliph walked on, his mind numb. He tried to accept the will of Allah; he knew that men with free will could cause great evil, but the reality of it, the sheer scale, rendered him mute and blank, like a staggering beggar in his own streets. The dead were everywhere, the stench of blood and fire mingling across the city. Still there was screaming: it was not over. He could not imagine the mind of a man like Hulegu, who could order the slaughter of a city with no feeling of shame. Al-Mustasim knew by then that Hulegu had intended the destruction from the beginning, that all their negotiations had been just a game to him. It was an evil so colossal that the caliph could not take it in. He stumbled for miles across the city, losing his sandals as he climbed a pile of bodies and going on barefoot. As the day wore on, he saw so many scenes of pain and torture that he thought he was in hell. His feet were bloody and torn from sharp stones, but he could not feel the pain. The words of the Koran came to him then: ‘Garments of fire have been prepared for the unbelievers. Scalding water shall be poured on their heads, melting their skins and that which is in their bellies. They shall be lashed with rods of iron.’ The Mongols were neither Christian, Hindu nor Jew, but they too would suffer in time, as the people of his city had suffered. It was his only comfort.
On a bridge of white marble, al-Mustasim looked down on the river that ran through the city. He rested his arms on the stone and saw hundreds of bodies tumbling past, locked together in the red water, their mouths open like fish as they were washed away. Their suffering was at an end, but his anguish only intensified until he thought his heart would burst in his chest.
He was still there as the sun set, locked in his despair, so that General Kitbuqa had to shake him to bring him back to understanding. Al-Mustasim stared blearily into the eyes of the Mongol officer. He could not understand his words, but the gestures were clear as Kitbuqa tugged him into movement. They headed back to the palace, where lamps had been lit. Al-Mustasim wished only for death to take him. He dared not think of the women of his harem, or his children. The smell of blood grew stronger in the air and, without warning, he bent over and vomited a flood of water. He was prodded on, his feet leaving bloody prints on the marble floor.
Hulegu was in a main chamber, drinking from a gold cup. Some of the caliph’s slaves were attending him, their faces growing pale as they recognised the man who had been their master.
‘I told you to stay in the palace … and you did not,’ Hulegu said, shaking his head. ‘I will enter your harem tonight. I am told the door to that part of the palace is known as the gate of pleasure.’
Al-Mustasim looked up dully. His wives and children still lived and hope kindled in him.
‘Please,’ he said softly. ‘Please let them live.’
‘How many women are there?’ Hulegu said with interest. His men had begun the labour of emptying the vaulted basement, stacking artwork like firewood alongside treasures of the ages. Beyond that, the main palace had been left untouched.
‘Seven hundred women, many of them mothers, or with child,’ al-Mustasim replied.
Hulegu thought for a time.
‘You may keep a hundred of the women. The rest will be given to my officers. They have worked hard and they deserve a reward.’
The men around Hulegu looked pleased and their master stood up, throwing the cup of wine to the ground so that it clattered noisily.
Hulegu led the way through corridors and halls, coming finally to the locked door that hid the gardens of the harem from view. He looked expectantly at al-Mustasim but the caliph no longer had the key, or knew where it was. Hulegu gestured to the door and in moments his men had kicked it in.
‘Just a hundred, caliph. It is too generous, but I am in a fine mood tonight.’
Al-Mustasim hardened his soul, blinking back the tears that threatened. The women screamed when they saw who had come into the private gardens, but the caliph calmed them. They stood with their heads bowed and Hulegu inspected their lines like cattle, enjoying himself. He allowed al-Mustasim to pick a hundred of the weeping women, then sent the others out to his waiting men, who greeted them with cries of excitement. The children remained behind, clinging to women they knew, or wailing as their mothers were taken away.
Hulegu nodded to al-Mustasim.
‘You have made some fine choices. I will take this hundred as my own. I do not need the children.’
He spoke in his guttural language to the guards and they began to pull the women out of the gardens one by one, knocking the children down if they tried to hang on. Al-Mustasim cringed at this final betrayal, though part of him had expected it. He called out words from the Koran to his wives and children. He could not look at them, but he promised them all a place in heaven, with the prophet and the love of Allah for all eternity.
Hulegu waited until he was finished.
‘There is nothing more here. Take the fat man out and hang him.’
‘And the children, lord?’ one of his men asked.
Hulegu looked at the caliph.
‘I asked you to surrender and you did not,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I would have been merciful then. Kill the children first, then hang him. I have squeezed Baghdad dry. There is nothing more worth having.’
Kublai lay on his stomach and cursed softly to himself. He had sent out his scouts looking for silver, paying men for information for hundreds of miles, without considering that the Sung emperor would eventually hear of his interest and respond. It was an error and, though he could curse his own naivety, he could not wish away the army encamped around the Guiyang mines. His own tumans were still twenty miles or more to the west and he had come forward with just Ong Chiang, the newly fledged guide, and two scouts to see the details. Kublai grimaced as he kept low and stared across the hills at the mass of men and machines. This was no guard regiment sent to protect the silver, but a massive force, complete with cannon and pike, lancers and crossbowmen by the tens of thousand. They could not be surprised or ambushed and yet he still needed the silver that lay at the heart of them all. Even then, Kublai doubted the emperor had left much of value beyond the raw ore. He considered abandoning the attack, and only the thought that Mongke would eventually hear he had retreated kept him planning.
The mine was in a shallow valley, which would lend speed to his charging warriors. His cannon teams would be firing down, if they could get their weapons to the edge, whereas the Sung soldiers would have to fire upwards into them. No advantage was too small to consider against so many. Kublai stared with a surveyor’s intensity, taking in every feature of the terrain that he might use. The cannon would be crucial, he realised. He had never yet seen them used in a fixed battle, at least in daylight, but the Sung commanders would surely have more experience of that than he had. He could not assume the officers had won their commissions with connections to the imperial court, or in examinations, no matter what he had heard. He thought back over everything he had read of Sung warfare, how even more than the Chin, battles took place in a ritualistic fashion, with strike and counter-strike. They rarely fought to annihilation, only until one side was satisfied. That too would be an advantage. His tumans fought to destroy, to shatter and break the will of an enemy until he was dust under their feet.
Kublai looked across the thick grass at Ong Chiang, who had been staring down at the Sung lines with just as much intensity. When the farmer felt Kublai’s gaze on him, he looked up and shrugged.
‘There was talk o
f an extra payment when I found the mine, my lord,’ he said. As he spoke, he began to search his pockets for his pipe and Kublai reached across and stopped his hand. It would not do to have a thin trail of smoke rising from their position.
‘I have a battle to plan, Ong the suddenly wealthy,’ Kublai whispered to him. ‘See me after that and I’ll give you a token to take to my quartermaster.’
Ong Chiang looked once again at the massive camp around the mining town and chewed his lips a little, wishing for his pipe.
‘I think I would prefer it before the battle, my lord. In case it does not go so well for you.’ He saw Kublai’s expression and carried on quickly. ‘I’m sure it will go well, but if you could let me take my payment now, I’ll start back to my family.’
Kublai raised his eyes for a moment. With Ong Chiang and the scouts, he crept back on his stomach until he was sure none of the Sung scouts could see them. He had not spotted any watchers during his careful approach and he did not know if that was because they had not been placed, or because they were simply much better than he was at remaining unseen. He wore no signs of rank, knowing that if they recognised him for who he was, they would hunt him down. Just riding the twenty miles to the site had been a risk, but he had needed to see.
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