Mengu stared. What was this peasant woman doing?
He had been looking for the siege engine anxiously. Another few moments and it would be in position. He glanced at his troops. The ring around the fort was almost complete. This would be his day. Studiously he avoided looking towards the general. ‘I’ll have the whole place under control in an hour,’ he murmured.
Though his face showed nothing, he felt a surge of excitement. It was like the great ring in the royal hunt. And today, the ring was his. For a brief hour he was to be general, like a prince. I’ll show them, he thought elatedly.
But who was this peasant woman coming towards him?
It was just then that he suddenly remembered a story he had heard some months ago. A peasant woman, no doubt very like this, had made a sudden rush at a young captain when they were burning the city of Riazan. She had pulled out a knife and killed him, too. ‘So watch out for their women,’ the fellow who told him had warned. He frowned, irritated. Who was she, to disturb the imperial hunt? He was not going to have a Russian peasant woman threaten his career.
Now she was breaking into a run, making straight for him.
At the lightest pressure from his knees, his horse clattered forward. He took out his sabre and with a single, curving slash cut straight down to her breast. She crumpled and slid across the ice. He turned back to look for the siege engine.
‘Mama!’
A scream. He wheeled again, sword in hand, to face this new threat. Even before he knew it his curved sabre was raised high, his face tense, his mouth a snarl.
A little girl, white-faced, was kneeling in terror on the ice beside the woman. Blood was pumping from the huge gash. The woman’s eyes were open; she was gazing at the child, trying to say something.
For a second he, too, forgot everything. He saw only the faces of the mother and her child.
‘Yanka!’
A shout, this time from a small boy and a peasant on a sled, two hundred yards away. He had not noticed it before because his horsemen, now across the river, had been in the way.
‘Yanka!’
The peasants stood there by their sled with no idea of what to do, in front of several hundred bowmen who could have killed them in a second.
The woman’s eyes were glassy. It was over.
There was a clatter upon the frozen river as the Mongol reached down and scooped the little girl up in one arm. The flakes of ice flew as his horse raced towards the sled where he threw her carelessly to the ground. Looking down contemptuously at the boy and his father, he waved them away.
A second later, their sled was racing through the trees.
It was not the policy of the Mongols to kill the peasants in the lands they conquered. Peasants tilled the soil, paid taxes and supplied recruits. The Mongols only killed those who were foolish enough to resist them.
Mengu turned back. The entire incident had taken rather less than a minute, during which time he supposed everyone had been too busy to take much notice.
The troops were all in place. The catapult was coming up, and an engineer was awaiting his order. He put the foolish incident out of his mind. Secretly he felt ashamed of killing the woman. As for the little girl… His face showed nothing.
With a curt nod, he signalled the catapult to proceed.
The inhabitants of Russka had never seen a catapult like this. Its technology was simple enough – a massive counterweight at one end of a lever caused the arm to hurl a stone from the other. But its power was truly extraordinary. For the engineers of China had constructed a machine that could be loaded with a stone it took four strong men to lift, and then hurl it with devastating accuracy almost a quarter of a mile.
The first stone completely broke down the parapet over the gate. The second smashed the gate itself.
At Mengu’s order, the Mongols streamed through into the fort. They moved rapidly but methodically. Every door was kicked open: every room, every crevice searched. They used spears and swords. Any living creature, man, woman or child, was quickly and efficiently butchered. They were so quick and thorough that, apart from a few moments of sheer terror, few of the people there even suffered very much.
Inside the fort they found some modest quantities of fresh food and ten tons of stored grain, which they removed in carts taken from the village. Then, leaving the bodies where they were, they set fire to every building, and to the wooden walls.
The huge bonfire on the little hill grew rapidly. Soon the whole fort was alive with fire, and over its walls, new walls of roaring flames appeared, hurling smoke and sparking cinders high into the air above the forest. As the broad-faced Mongols watched below, the whole place seemed to shudder with the roar, crack and whine of the little fort’s destruction.
Mengu turned to a decurion. ‘Twenty bowmen, with fire arrows,’ he ordered. ‘Surround the church.’
A few moments later there were broad-chested Mongols in leather jerkins and with huge, curved bows at the ready before each of the church’s walls. At a nod from Mengu, they took out long, heavy arrows with huge cloth heads that had been dipped in pitch, and lit them.
‘Fire.’ The arrows began to fly, and to crash through the church’s narrow windows. Soon smoke emerged; then flame.
Mengu wondered whether the people inside would come out of the door, and stationed more bowmen opposite. But though the force of the fire within seemed to be causing the door to tremble, it remained closed.
After a time, the little dome collapsed and fell with a crash into the building. No one could possibly be alive in there by now, he thought. The place must be a roaring furnace. Even the bricks were starting to glow. A wall fell, then another. It was good. In case the general thought him soft about the child, he meant to show he knew how to be harsh.
That evening, as a few villagers crept out of the woods, they saw in place of the fort and the brave little church, only blackened ruins beside which the birds were swooping curiously.
The report the general made to the mighty Batu Khan that evening was sensible and clear-headed.
‘He lost concentration because a woman ran towards him. He should have seen her before and ordered his men to cut her down or remove her. He didn’t. He waited until she reached him, then he killed her. He took his eyes off the job.’
‘Then?’
‘There was a little girl. He picked her up and threw her out.’
‘Waste of time. What then?’
‘He took the fort. Burned it down.’
‘Very well. Anything else?’
‘He burned down a church.’
‘Inside the fort?’
‘No. Outside.’
‘Was it defended?’
‘No.’
‘That is bad. The Great Khan respects all religions.’
‘I do not think he has a cool head,’ the general concluded.
That night, the mighty Batu Khan changed his mind and did not sleep with Mengu’s sister.
That same night, as she rocked herself to sleep in a shelter her father and brother had improvised in the bee-forest, Yanka remembered only one thing about the Mongol who had killed her mother: he had a scar across one side of his face, and was missing one ear.
She would never forget it: never.
1246
Softly the raft drifted through the early morning mists. Until the previous month, to escape detection, they had travelled only at night, inching their way upstream, reconnoitring every village in case of patrols. Once, on a moonlit night, they had almost run into a party of soldiers camped on the river bank.
It was August. Making their way northwards by the curving rivers, they had already covered a distance of some five hundred miles. It had taken them three months.
Last month they had left one river system and made their way overland to another. The boat by which they had come so far – a huge single tree trunk, hollowed out – was too heavy to carry. They had left it therefore and, having reached the other stream, had built themselves a raft, which suited their purposes well enough since, from now on, instead of working their way upstream, they would be drifting with the current. Their mood had also begun to lighten. It was possible, now, to travel by day. But they were still cautious.