by Kamran Pasha
But their commander, Khalid ibn al-Waleed, was troubled. He sat upon his mighty black stallion and gazed out across the horizon, past the lava tracts that served as Medina’s natural defensive border to the south. He did not stir, even as Huyayy ibn Akhtab, the leader of the Jewish forces, rode up beside him, beaming.
“Smile, my friend! Victory is upon us.” Huyayy gazed across the dark stones that led to his lost homeland and breathed in the salty oasis air deeply. “Soon my people will reclaim their homes. And your people will regain their honor.”
Khalid turned to face him at last, his eyes burning darkly.
“Where are Muhammad’s advance guards? We are almost to Medina and there has been no sign of even a single horseman.”
The chief of the Bani Nadir shrugged, unwilling to let the dour Arab spoil his jubilant mood.
“He has likely taken refuge inside the city, like my forefathers did at Masada,” Huyayy said, although he disliked comparing the noble warriors of his ancestors with this self-serving impostor and his illiterate fanatics.
But the reference was lost on Khalid, who gave him a blank look.
“They held off the entire Roman army for years,” Huyayy explained proudly. “When the centurions finally breached the walls, they found that all the Jews had killed themselves rather than surrender.”
The chieftain’s eyes gleamed with pride at the memory of the noble sacrifice, the courage of his people in the face of unconquerable odds.
But if the Jew saw honor in this tale, the Arab found it less appealing. Khalid spit on the ground in contempt.
“The Arabs are not suicidal like your ancestors,” he said sharply. “They are nothing if not brave. They will meet us and fight.”
Huyayy bit his tongue before he said something that would wreck their hard-won alliance.
“If these Arabs are so courageous, then where are they?” Huyayy tried to keep the poison out of his voice, but he was not entirely successful.
Khalid shook his head
“That is what concerns me.”
Before Huyayy could respond, shouts echoed from ahead. Khalid roughly spurred his horse and rode past the front lines of the advancing army. Huyayy quickly followed and saw a group of Confederate scouts standing on top of a large lava tract that would give them a view down into the heart of the oasis.
When Huyayy reached the ledge, he felt his heart miss a beat.
A massive trench had been dug across the northern passes into Medina. From where he stood, Huyayy estimated that it was thirty feet wide and perhaps a hundred feet deep. The cavernous ditch wound across the borders of the city to the west until it vanished into the thick jumble of palm trees and rocky hills to the south.
He had never seen anything like it, and he could see no way to traverse this barrier.
As Huyayy’s heart sank, he heard the racing of hooves and saw the Meccan leader Abu Sufyan ride up to join them. The old man breathed in sharply at the sight of this surprising defensive tactic.
“What is this?” Abu Sufyan asked, his voice mixing fury and despair all at once.
And then Huyayy was stunned to hear the sound of deep laughter. He turned to see Khalid’s head thrown back in genuine delight.
“A work of genius,” the general said, without any hint of bitterness.
And then, like a child racing to collect a new toy, Khalid rode down the ash-covered dunes toward the edge of the pit. The Confederate army followed, although the soldiers’ faces were twisted in confusion at the sight of the barrier.
When Huyayy pushed his horse to follow, he saw that the trench was not the only obstacle facing them. The entire Muslim army, numbering perhaps three thousand men, stood on the far side of the ditch, bows pointed at the invading forces, spears held ready to fly across the divide at their adversaries.
And then he saw Muhammad standing there, bare-chested and covered in sweat and dust, and realized that the heretic leader had been among the workers who had torn open the earth in what must have been a backbreaking exercise over many days. Despite his hatred of the man, Huyayy had to admire his willingness to get his hands dirty along with his men. Such leaders always inspired the loyalty of their troops, and Huyayy knew that they would fight to the death for this man should the Meccans somehow break through their defenses.
Muhammad greeted the invaders with a broad smile and threw open his arms in a defiant welcome. Khalid stared across the divide and smiled, saluting his enemy an acknowledgment of a well-conceived plan. Whatever differences of faith divided them, the code of honor between warriors still held its sway.
And then Khalid turned and signaled to his best horsemen. Without a word spoken between them, the cavalry rode forward, knowing exactly what the Meccan general expected of them.
A dozen of the mightiest chargers raced through the desert plain and leaped across the trench. A swarm of arrows met them and the horses were hit in midflight. The terrified screams of the animals ended abruptly as they plunged to their deaths in the pit below. Most of the riders broke their necks in the fall, but those who somehow managed to survive and crawl away from their shattered mounts were immediately struck by a second volley of projectiles.
Khalid held up his hand to prevent more honor seekers from trying to leap across the ditch. As an experienced general, he knew that once a stratagem had failed, it was a waste of lives and resources to repeat it in the hope of securing a better outcome. The horses simply could not leap the distance and land safely on the other side, and if miraculously one or two made it across the chasm, their riders would be alone and surrounded by well-armed enemies.
He looked across the ditch at his adversaries and calculated. Khalid could send his men down into the pit with ropes, but the Muslims held the advantage of the high ground. They would easily cut down his soldiers before they ever managed to climb to the other side. It would be a waste of life with little likelihood of success.
“What do we do?” It was the despairing voice of Abu Sufyan, who looked increasingly too old and weary to lead the Meccans to triumph. Khalid had nothing but contempt for this man who had proclaimed himself king of Mecca and whose only claim to power came from his cowardly avoidance of battle at Badr, where the competing chieftains were killed. There had already been whispers that Khalid should dispatch the elderly fool and take his place in the Hall of Assembly.
But Khalid ibn al-Waleed was a warrior, not a king. He found purpose and joy in the heat of the battlefield among the brave men he loved, not in the coddled life of a ruler surrounded by bureaucrats and sycophants. Khalid had no interest in becoming a king, but he knew that one was needed at the moment. It was kings and chieftains who declared the wars that men like Khalid lived to fight. But in the past several years, he had become increasingly disgusted with the leaders of Mecca, who showed cowardice and avarice, who ruled by bribery and fear, without any sense of honor.
He gazed across the enemy lines at Muhammad again and realized that his enemy had all the qualities that his allies did not. He was noble and courageous and could inspire men to lay down their lives. As he looked at the man who had been denounced as a rebel by the lords of Mecca, Khalid began to wonder what life would be like leading armies under Muhammad’s command.
But before he could take the thought further, he heard the insistent braying of Abu Sufyan in his ear, demanding a solution to this unforeseen problem.
Khalid sighed heavily and turned his attention to the fields of grain that stood just outside the borders of the trench, the groves of olive trees that were budding with the coming of the spring. The Muslims had wisely built the trench in a circle as close to the city as possible, limiting the area that needed to be defended. But in the process, they had been forced to cut themselves off from their own farmlands.
Khalid knew what needed to be done. And a part of him regretted that it had to be this way.
He turned to face Abu Sufyan and his Jewish ally Huyayy.
“We wait. Hunger will accomplish what swords and
spears cannot.”
10
The siege had persisted for ten days and our food supplies were running desperately low. I had spent almost every daylight hour at the front lines, taking water to the soldiers who bravely guarded the trench. The Meccans had been tireless in their efforts to find a way around the obstacle, and we could not afford to let our guard down for a minute. The first few nights, Khalid’s warriors attempted to use the cover of darkness to climb down into the ditch. But Zubayr’s alert eyes caught sight of the moving shadows and a barrage of arrows and spears quickly put an end to infiltrators. Had it not been for your father’s sleepless vigils, Abdallah, a few of the assassins would have broken the perimeter and wreaked havoc on Medina.
By the fourth day, Meccan scouts had spied a small weakness in our defenses. The trench ended at a leafy marsh to the southwest, where the natural barriers of trees and rocky hills made penetration by cavalry impossible. But a few intrepid men, led by Ikrimah, the son of Abu Jahl, and Amr Abdal Wudd, swam through the muddy bog and slipped past our sentries. The band was poised to enter the confines of the city, where they planned to spread fires and breed general chaos, when Ali confronted them at the edge of Medina. Ali and Abdal Wudd engaged in a short but brutal duel, which ended when the glowing Dhul Fiqar split the Meccan spy’s head in two. The cowardly Ikrimah and his men fled back through the swamp, dodging the barrage of missiles raining down upon them when the alarm was raised.
On the sixth day, the horizon was covered in smoke. Abu Sufyan had ordered the burning of the crop fields that circled the oasis, and I watched with tears as the verdant lands around us were consumed. We had harvested most of the date palms and the grains of wheat and barley in the weeks prior to the attack, but with the destruction of the trees that were the lifeblood of Medina, our chances of long-term survival were greatly diminished.
But by then, few of us were thinking in the long term. Survival had become a matter of getting through each day alive. With trade effectively cut off by the siege, we had no way to replace the rapidly diminishing stores of food. Even though the Messenger had instituted rationing, with women and children given twice the daily portions of the men, there was simply not enough to go around.
And so it was that on the tenth night of the battle, I walked with the other Mothers, going from house to house to check on the needs of the families that had been sequestered away from the front. It had been a difficult evening, for in every household we came upon we found the sick and the dying. The matrons pleaded with me for their children, asking me to relay the distress of their loved ones to the Messenger and begging me to perform some kind of miracle to save their lives. I wanted to run away, to hide somewhere from the desperate looks, the bony hands that reached out to touch me as if my body carried some kind of baraka, some miraculous blessing that would take away their sorrow.
I smiled gently at them and spoke words of comfort and hope, as required of a Mother of the Believers. But for all my lofty spiritual trappings, I was only fourteen years old and the weight of the world was crushing me.
As I emerged from a small stone hut that was overcrowded with a dozen women and their children, I let the cool oasis breeze strike my face, felt the tingle of the air against the wetness of my cheeks. This last house had been the worst. Several families were hunched together inside a space that had been meant for three people at most, with barely any room to breathe, much less walk. The house belonged to a carpenter whose wife had recently given birth to a daughter. The man had been injured by an arrow to the shoulder while guarding the trench, and he had been brought back here to heal. But the unsanitary conditions in the tight quarters had made his wound fester, and I could smell the lurid stench of death hovering over him. I thought bitterly that the carpenter’s martyrdom would at least somewhat alleviate the space concerns inside the cottage. Perhaps when he was buried, some of the children could move just far enough away to avoid catching the dreaded camp fever that had infected two toddlers, who had been crying nonstop for hours.
It was a heartless thought, but I was tired and hungry. I was angry at life. And perhaps, although I would not have admitted it aloud, I was angry at God for letting this happen.
As I led my fellow Mothers away from the house, my scarved head bowed in fury and despair, I heard Umm Salama, the gentle widow, speak.
“We should tell the Messenger,” she said, her voice cracking in sorrow from the tragedies we had witnessed tonight.
I turned to face her and shook my head grimly.
“He has enough to worry about.”
The Messenger had not left his post at the trench since the first Meccan horseman had appeared. He had survived on perhaps two hours of sleep every night, and the toll of the siege was clear on his face. His glossy black beard had begun to streak with gray, and new lines had appeared around his dark eyes. It was as if this perpetually young man had aged overnight.
Sawda, my plump and elderly cowife, wiped tears from her eyes.
“But the children are starving. It will not be long before Jannat al-Baqi takes them,” she said, referring to the graveyard on the outskirts of the oasis.
“There is nothing more he can do,” I snapped, suddenly feeling intensely protective of my husband. The last thing he needed right now was to be nagged by his wives about matters that he could not control.
The Messenger knew full well the suffering of his community. Providing grisly details of famine and disease would only shatter his soft heart, making it that more difficult to stand up against this relentless foe.
I saw my young rival Hafsa shrug as if she were not convinced by my words.
“Perhaps he can negotiate a truce,” she said bluntly. “Or perhaps a surrender with honor—”
I slapped her.
Hafsa recoiled as if I had cut her with a knife. But the slice of a blade would have been more bearable than the cold fire in my eyes.
“The wolf is at the door and you would deliver us into its jaws!”
Hafsa’s face turned bright red, the rage that was the legacy of her father’s blood kindled. I steeled myself for a retaliatory blow and prayed that the cover of night would prevent anyone from seeing the Mothers of the Believers fighting like cats in the streets.
But then Hafsa surprised me. The daughter of Umar ibn al-Khattab took a deep breath and calmed herself. With what must have been a monumental effort, she bit down on her lip and then spoke in a calm, steady voice.
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that.”
In that moment, Hafsa went from being a dreaded rival in the harem to a woman I could respect. Indeed, as our friendship deepened over the years, we would often laugh that it began because I was the only person ever to stand up to her.
But that night there was nothing to laugh about. The vultures were waiting at the edge of Medina for us to fall prey to starvation and disease. And within ten days, they would have their wish. Unless the Messenger could find a way to dislodge the dogs of war from our doorstep, we were all doomed. And to have any hope of doing that, he needed support from his loved ones in his darkest hours.
I turned to face my cowives. When I spoke, it was with the voice of a strong woman, not that of a little girl. My body was that of a child, but my soul was already aged beyond a dozen a lifetimes.
“We are not like other women, who have the luxury of nagging their husbands with doubts and fears,” I said solemnly. “We are the Messenger’s last defense against this cruel and mad world. Do you think Khadija ever asked him to surrender when all of Mecca sought his head?”
That last was the hardest for me to say. Even though I had shared the Messenger’s bed for five years, even though I had been proclaimed the most beloved and honored of his wives, I had never been able to take the place of Khadija, the first person to believe in him and stand by his side. There were times when I felt him toss restlessly in bed beside me. And I would hear him whisper her name and see tears fall from his sleeping eyes as the pain of loss consumed his hidd
en mind. No matter how long I stayed with him, no matter how many sons I might bear him, he would never truly be mine.
Hafsa bowed her head and I saw the last fire of pride go out.
“I was a fool. I’m sorry,” she sobbed.
And then the radiant Zaynab bint Jahsh put her hand on Hafsa’s shoulder in comfort.
“Do not be. The thought had entered my mind as well.”
Zaynab looked at me with a raised eyebrow, her eyes challenging me to strike her perfect face as I had struck Hafsa’s. There was such power in her gaze, such innate nobility, that I suddenly felt like a child again, my pretense of authority vanishing into the night air.
The kindly Sawda moved to my side, perhaps sensing that my bravado was little more than a cover for the grief and uncertainty that veiled my heart.
“But what do we do?” she asked softly. It was strange, this woman who was well into her sixties turning to a teenage girl for advice. But the world was upside down and only those who could navigate the strange pathways of this nightmare would survive.
“We stand with the Messenger,” I said, feeling my confidence return with renewed vigor. “And if our destiny is to die at his side, whether by an arrow or by hunger, we do it with dignity and a smile on our faces.”
I took Sawda’s right hand as if to swear an oath. Hafsa placed hers atop mine. After a moment of hesitation, Zaynab did so as well.
“We are the Mothers of the Believers,” I said, pronouncing each word of our shared title with great dignity. “Nothing less can be expected of us in the eyes of God or man.”
The women smiled, their hopes renewed, and even Zaynab gave me a grateful look. I smiled back at her and hoped that her piercing eyes could not see the terrible chains of fear that bound my heart.
11
The black gates of the fortress shimmered in the moonlight. They had stood for a dozen generations, protecting their inhabitants from the wolves that roamed the volcanic hills, whether those beasts were canine or mortal men.
