‘Now we begin trials with Sword of Allah,’ Hendra said.
Duat smiled. Yes, Khalid bin Al-Waleed, the famous general known as the Sword of Allah, who conquered so many lands and peoples in the time of the Prophet, and in His name. ‘That is a good name, Hendra. Kadar Al-Jahani would have approved. We’ll paint “Sword of Allah” on the side of the drone and bless it with prayers and song.’
‘Thank you, Emir,’ said Hendra as he turned to sprint up the beach to collect the aircraft just landed.
Duat allowed himself some degree of satisfaction. Plans had actually progressed far better than he ever would have expected since the death of Kadar. Much of that, Duat readily admitted to himself, was largely because of Kadar’s planning and foresight. The strike against the embassy had achieved many good things — secured their support and swelled their ranks.
A sudden sharp explosion from the encampment made Duat flinch. The screams began as he sprinted up the embankment and into the camp. It had come from the weapons range. Duat rounded the hut where lectures on explosives were given, and pushed through a growing knot of men and women shouting and crying over the remains of three men who’d been harvesting Composition B from claymore mines. Obviously, some of the men had been careless and all three had paid the price with their lives, the mine’s seven hundred small ball bearings macerating them into human mince. The sight annoyed Duat. They could ill afford to lose three lives so pointlessly. One of the dead had also been amongst the most experienced of the explosives handlers, personally trained by Kadar Al-Jahani himself. He would be missed.
Kipchak Khan Janiberg, the Mongol Khan of the Golden Hordes, screamed at the top of his lungs so that his own men cowered in fear behind him. His anger rang in his own ears and his horse shifted about nervously, its hooves scrabbling for purchase in the greasy mud. He again cursed the delays forced on his army by the weather and by the sickness. These delays had allowed news of the Khan’s approaching force to race ahead of the forward companies, bringing stories of the horror set to be unleashed on the people of this Italian outpost. So the peasants, merchants and noblemen alike had time to run for their lives and cringe like frightened dogs behind the city’s forbidding concentric grey walls.
The Khan looked up at those implacable walls and in frustration called aloud to the gods to deliver the city of Caffa on the shores of the Black Sea to his army. For three long years they had surrounded it and yet the city was still denied him. The Khan snatched at the bridle and his white horse wheeled about. One of the men beside him, a general no less, slipped off his mount and landed heavily on the ground, unconscious. Kipchak did not have to wonder long at the reason for the fall, for the characteristic swelling the size and colour of a rotten onion stood out black and shiny from the man’s neck. Frightened by the proximity of the disease, where a man vomited blood and his fingers, toes and penis turned black before death came, the Khan dug his spurs into the horse’s thighs and galloped off towards the camp.
Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim found the general later on his rounds. He was one of many charged with the gathering of the hundreds who died daily, for disposal. The wagon behind him swayed precariously in the mud, overloaded with corpses for the cleansing fires. There were some on the pile who were still alive, but only just, but the Khan’s household had made the decision that, for the good of all, those close to death should be taken to its bosom. Rahim looked down at the general, a great man by all accounts, a leader, a conqueror of foreign lands and people, laid low by the swelling disease, and soon for the fires. The irony of it made him laugh, for he, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim, was a nobody from a poor family with no land and no prospects save for the opportunity provided by war, and yet here he was, strong and alive, a conqueror of death itself. A survivor. He directed his assistants to pick up the general and throw him on the wagon. But the general was a big man with plenty of meat still on his carcase, despite the long campaign, and it took three to lift him. Rahim took him by the shoulders and lifted up his head.
‘Send me to mine enemies,’ the general said breathlessly.
It was a strange thing to say and Rahim asked him what he meant. Of course, the general was delirious and couldn’t understand anything Rahim said to him, but he nevertheless kept repeating, ‘Send me to mine enemies,’ while he rocked and swayed on top of the small mountain of legs and arms and heads loaded on the wagon, as it wound its way through the encampment.
This was a dream Rahim had experienced many times before, and he knew it like an old and familiar movie. Sometimes he played a soldier, once the Khan himself, but mostly he was just an extra in the drama that filled his sleep. And because it was a familiar dream, he was not at all scared by its horror. Indeed, since his system had been introduced to heroin, he found himself capable of manipulating the story in his sleep, just like a movie director. So it was that Rahim allowed the drama to cut to the tent of the Khan.
Rahim approached the guards outside the entrance. He could see the fear in their eyes, for Rahim had become associated with Death, indeed was His emissary. ‘Tell the Khan that I, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim, can deliver Caffa to him.’
The guards looked nervously at each other. They were clearly frightened of him, but equally fearful of disturbing the Khan’s pleasure, the cries of ecstasy and pain rising in volume from the captured women within. But on this long campaign in foreign lands, the guards, themselves soldiers, knew the importance of spies, traitors and stratagems. Yes, the Khan would be angry at the disturbance, but war came before a women’s legs were parted and the guards would lose their lives if they were involved in prolonging the siege one day longer than necessary. Fortunately, while they considered Rahim’s request, a scream mixed with the grunt of male orgasm told the guards that their king’s lust was spent, and they allowed the filthy pedlar of death to pass after searching him thoroughly.
Rahim entered the tent and saw the Khan lying amongst five naked women, all of them smeared with the blood of a sixth woman disembowelled on the floor. Rahim surmised rightly that the dead woman was a virgin, and free of the disease, and so her blood possessed magical protective powers.
‘What!’ demanded the Khan when he saw Rahim enter, blood dripping from his beard.
‘Great Khan. I can deliver Caffa to you.’
Such was Rahim’s ability to manipulate the dream that he moved it forward again to the moment marking the beginning of the end of the siege of Caffa. Rows of trebuchets were assembled in crescents around the city walls, their wheels chocked and raised to provide maximum elevation and, hence, range. Rahim himself had been given the task of loading their pouches with the lethal cargo, fresh human corpses displaying the largest black swellings under their arms and in their groins. And there were many corpses available as the swelling disease had cut a swath through the Mongol army, great piles of them stacked ready and waiting, oozing filth with a stench that made even Rahim gag.
Rahim watched for the Khan’s signal, a nod to the herald with the cow’s horn. A groan from one of the bodies loaded on the sling beside him distracted him and he missed the movement of the Khan’s head, but the clear notes that rang hard against the city walls were unmistakable.
Rahim wondered if this was what the general meant when he said, ‘Give me to mine enemies,’ but it was a good idea. Rahim himself gave the order and the hammers came down on the locating pins, releasing the massive counterweights and leather springs that wound rapidly back to their stops. The heavy trebuchet arms swung through their arcs in unison and, with a mighty crash, the first wave of infected corpses flew high in the air and cleared the walls of the city. The Mongols cheered while the townspeople on the parapet watched perplexed at the tangled human mass that sailed overhead and landed with a distressing splat on the muddy walkways and stonework within the walls.