Their silence was laudable, but useless—Turkish sentries in the hills saw, stared in disbelief, then sent horsemen galloping to the khan with the news. Still, it took time for the couriers to arrive and longer for the warriors to leave their tents, strap on swords, sling their bows, and mount their horses. By the time they came shrilling and galloping over the plain, the last of the Arabs had cleared the wall.
The barbarians rode all out, trying to catch up—but the khan, with a cooler head than Suleiman had hoped, held back half his force. A hundred riders charged through the open western gate into the empty city. Not long after, the eastern gate swung open and barbarians poured into Baghdad.
“There!” The Caliph pointed to rising ground between two rivers. “Give the command for all to ride to that plateau!”
“So slight as that?” the general cried, aghast. “They shall thunder upon us without the slightest slackening of speed, lord! There shall be no chance for our archers to bring them down!”
“There shall, for between us and that table land lie the marshes! Around and up, Emir, quickly!”
The general gave the order, and trumpets blared. The vanguard turned, fording the rivers on each side and turning again to ride up onto the high ground.
As the rear guard rode up, the general looked about him with pleased surprise. “That neck of land is so narrow, only half a dozen barbarians can ride up abreast! How did you know of this, lord?”
“I have heard of this confluence often,” the Caliph replied. “One of my ancestors was balked by a small army here; they held off his horsemen for days, until he tired of assaulting them and rode past to capture Damascus.” He turned to look eastward toward the advancing horde, hooves beginning to be heard as thunder. “We have a river to each side of us and marshland before—but since the ground slopes down gently to those marshes, the barbarians may try to ride directly toward us.”
“They shall succeed!”
“I think not,” the Caliph said, and waited.
The thunder grew louder; it filled the world, and the ground began to tremble under their feet. The Arabs’ horses began to grow restive, tossing their heads and fighting the bridles, but their riders held them steady. Then the horde burst into the marshes, waving their swords and shrilling their war-cries.
Their ponies stumbled in the mud, fell to their knees, and could not rise again.
Riders leaped off, cursing, and tried to help their mounts up. Many struggled back to their feet, but some had ridden into quagmires and, thrash though they might, only sank deeper. Other barbarians threw ropes to the riders and pulled them free. Here and there they even saved a horse or two—but more barbarians, not seeing the fate of the first, galloped into the marshes and bogged down. In minutes the whole breadth of the wetland was filled with barbarians struggling to free their horses from the agglutinative mud.
“Bid the archers loose,” the Caliph said.
The general signaled and the trumpets sang. Archers lifted bows, strings thrummed, and hundreds of barbarians fell with arrows in thigh or chest. Horses, too, died with barbs in them, which was a quicker death than the mud gave.
“Loose again!” the general cried. “Again, and again!”
The air filled with arrows. The barbarians returned the fire, but their bows were made for power, not range; and their arrows fell far short. Immune, the Arabs stood high above and rained arrows upon them. At last the barbarians turned and scrambled for the odd bits of dry land, trying to make their way out of the marshes.
Their khan must have seen their plight, for he sent a diversion to draw the Arabs’ arrows—thousands of horsemen scouting the rivers to find fords, then splashing across to charge the rising ground. Their horses were smaller, though, and had a more difficult time wading, so the rout was well under way before the first horsemen came charging up the slope.
The general bawled orders. Half the archers turned, ran to the rear, and loosed their shafts at the galloping ponies. The front rank went down. The second hurdled them and fell upon the Arab infantrymen with screams of rage—but they could only ride six abreast, and the footmen set their spears for horses to run upon, then struck down the riders with their swords. Here and there a barbarian proved skilled enough to exchange three or four strokes with an Arab, but Damascus steel bit through the softer blades of the barbarians, and they died by scores. Arabs fell, too, but only one for every fifty barbarians. Fearless, the barbarians rode and kept riding, trying to drown the Arabs under sheer weight of bodies, but they succeeded only in building a wall of their dead that quickly rose high enough that even with their skill, they could not hurdle it. The Arabs drew back, wary and watchful, but the wall of flesh held. As the sun reached noon, the barbarians retreated.
They pitched camp, though, round about the low plateau, and settled down with an air that said they meant to stay. “We are besieged, my lord,” the general said, “and the dead will quickly bring a pestilence.”
“Not to us, though,” the Caliph said. “Bid our men roll their dead back down to them. As to the fallen horses, butcher them for stew and boil their bones for soup.”
The general nodded slowly. “If we keep the stewpots boiling, we can last for weeks—and one of the men has found a spring at the top of this rising land.”
“I had hoped for that, with so much water about it.” The Caliph tried not to show the relief he felt. “We can wait, then, for armies to relieve us.”
There was a shout of delight, and Arabs began to sing a victory song. “They celebrate too quickly,” the general said, frowning. “Wars are not won by retreats.”
“This one may be,” Suleiman said. “They have proved for themselves that the barbarians can be beaten, for all their numbers. More importantly, the barbarians have learned that they can lose, that their ancient god cannot always give them victory. They will charge with less assurance now.”
The general lifted his head in understanding. “You do not think their khan will wait for Tafas bin Daoud and the other emirs.”
“I think that, as soon as his spies tell him of an army advancing, he will raise the siege and ride for Jerusalem,” the Caliph said, “but Tafas has his own spies, and will invest the Holy City before the khan comes.”
“Then we shall attack from the rear, and catch him between two forces!” The general grinned. “Well planned, my lord! We may yet win this war!”
“We may,” the Caliph said, frowning, “but we will need many more stratagems than these to counter so many men. Bid my wizards come to me, Emir—and bid the muezzin call the faithful to prayer. We have much for which to thank Allah.”
“Do not let him talk,” cautioned a voice with an accent that sounded vaguely Pakistani. “He is a wizard, after all.”
“Doesn’t look like one,” grunted another in common old Merovencian—very common indeed. “More like a mercenary soldier looking for a job.”
“He is not what he seems!”
“How would a wizard not see us jumping out of that hedgerow nor hear us running toward him?”
“Because I know a little magic myself, and used a spell to hide our approach!” said the Asian voice. “Bind that gag tightly, or I shall try another verse I know and see if it really will turn a man to a toad!”
Quickly then, a smelly rag tightened around Matt’s mouth, so smelly that it brought him out of grogginess into full consciousness—and made him aware of the worst headache he’d had since the last time someone had sneaked up behind him and sapped him on the head.