Shike by Robert J. Shea (the reading list txt) 📕

just below the walls scrambled back across the moat, chased by samurai and Chinese arrows. The hua pao stopped spitting fire. The Mongol catapults kept hurling stones and fire bombs over, but less frequently. The many fires throughout the city were under control.

There was no sunrise. Thick grey clouds rolled in from the south and, to Yukio’s satisfaction, it began to rain heavily. Rain would protect the city from fire and greatly hamper the besiegers.

Jebu and Yukio sat by the parapet and wiped blood from their swords to keep them from becoming pitted. “We lose so many each time we fight the Mongols that soon there will be none of us left,” Yukio said wearily. “What a poor leader I am, having brought these men this far, for them all to die in a strange land.”

Governor Liu came down from his ivory chair of state and gripped Yukio and Jebu by the arms. “You should be sleeping, not wasting your time talking to this old man.”

Jebu smiled into the governor’s red-rimmed eyes. “I doubt that His Excellency has slept this night.”

Yukio reported that two hundred Chinese troops and over a hundred samurai were dead or badly wounded. But the two white dragons were still flying over Kweilin.

The governor said, “My scouts say the Mongol tarkhan, Arghun Baghadur, is on his way with reinforcements of two more tumans, twenty thousand men, which his master, the Great Khan Mangu, has assigned to him. With a general like Arghun leading them and outnumbering us so greatly, the Mongols will surely take Kweilin. We are entering the season of heavy rains, and that may slow them down, but the end is still inevitable.”

“We have been promised that if we need reinforcements they could be sent here by way of the Kwei Kiang from Canton,” Yukio said.

“It is time to send for them,” said Liu. He beckoned to his son, an officer of high rank among the Chinese troops. The younger Liu’s armour was nicked and battered. He stepped away from the wall of the governor’s audience room and knelt at his feet.

“You will go to Canton, my son. You will sail tonight from the river gate.”

Eive of the nomads, men too badly wounded to fight to the death, had been taken prisoner, and Jebu managed to convince the samurai that these men would be more useful to them alive than dead. Each day he spent some time visiting the prisoners in the stone building near the governor’s palace, doctoring their wounds and conversing with them.

At first they talked in Chinese, which most Mongols knew because northern China had been part of their territory for almost a generation. It was hard for Jebu to understand their dialect, almost a different language from the southern Chinese he was used to. Among them selves the nomad warriors spoke Mongolian, and Jebu learned some of the words and used them when he talked to them. In time their conversation was more and more in Mongolian.

The Mongols distrusted Jebu. Aside from the suspicion of prisoners of war towards any captor, they recognized, as Torluk had, his Mongol features. They assumed he was a traitor, captured in an earlier battle, who had agreed to serve the Chinese in order to save his life. They guessed he had been sent to persuade them to do the same, and they offered to kill him if he would only come close enough.

To the distress of the Chinese guards, Jebu selected the biggest Mongol and fought him barehanded in the courtyard of the prison building. His opponent was the only one of the prisoners who had not been seriously wounded; he had been found unconscious on Kweilin’s wall, where a rock, apparently catapulted from his own side, had struck him. It was traditional, bone-cracking, Mongol-style wrestling against Zinja unarmed combat techniques. Jebu threw the big Mongol five times.

Once he had earned their respect and convinced them he wanted no military information, the Mongols grew friendlier. They came to realize that Jebu really did not know Mongolian and therefore could not be a turncoat from their own side.

Eor his part, Jebu soon felt a certain affection for his near countrymen. These five, four of them wounded and sitting in a prison cell, bored and apprehensive, seemed far from being the brutal warriors of legend. Jebu found them simple, illiterate, young, quick to laugh, courageous and kind to one another.

He also discovered that they were fond of drink. He ordered a few jars of rice wine sent into their cell. Within an hour it was gone and they were calling for more. Their appetite for wine was bottomless, and Jebu had to limit their ration to prevent them from being drunk all the time. In their cups they tended to be merry, not belligerent. The language lessons went better with the help of a little wine.

He was starting to understand the Mongol way of life. These young Mongols had grown up enjoying the ease and wealth of the empire Genghis Khan had created, but their parents and grandparents had told them of the older times when not a season went by without at least one death in every family. The world of ice and desert and steppe never relaxes, never gives a second chance. The laws and customs of the Mongols were modelled after the laws of nature, or as the Mongols themselves called it, Eternal Heaven.

Days of inactivity passed behind the wooden wall of the besiegers and the stone walls of Kweilin. Jebu acquired a smattering of Mongolian. Yukio and Governor Liu directed repairs to the city and its fortifications. Everyone watched the river for signs of transport junks bringing a relief expedition.

Twelve days after the unsuccessful assault on Kweilin, word came from Governor Liu’s scouts that Arghun Baghadur had returned from his visit to Mangu Khan in Szechwan province.

“Do we launch another attack on them to demonstrate how much we are to be feared?” Yukio asked Jebu as they stood on the wall watching the two additional tumans Arghun had brought with him set up camp.

“Suppose I toss you off the wall into their midst. That should frighten them.”

Moko, who was on the walls with them, watching the arrival of the Mongol reinforcements, said, “I have been trying to design a catapult that would toss me out of this city and safely across the Kwei Kiang to the opposite bank.”

After setting up their yurts, as they called their round felt tents, the new arrivals remounted their horses. They formed up in squares of a hundred mounted men, a whole tuman containing a hundred such squares, ten across and ten deep. The five tumans that made up the army besieging Kweilin formed in a semi-circle wider than the city itself on the southern shore of the two lakes. Eifty thousand cavalrymen faced the city. Beyond them, drawn up in parade formation, were new siege machines and masses of auxiliary troops from the nations the Mongols had conquered.

Jebu felt a chill go through his body. Even for a Zinja-a Zinja hardened by fifteen years of almost continuous combat-the Mongol army was a terrifying sight. He had never seen an army this large. He doubted whether all the samurai in the Sunrise Land, gathered together, would present a spectacle like this. No wonder men were so terrified of the Mongols that some of them surrendered at the first news of their approach.

Yukio, beside him, let out a deep breath. “How foolish I was to think my little band could stand against something like this.” He shook his head sadly.

A bannerman rode out before the massed Mongol troops, carrying the three-horsetail battle standard of the army. Now Jebu noticed that each tuman had a standard of its own planted in the ground before the massed squares of cavalry. The banner carrier drove the pointed base of his standard pole into the ground in the centre of the field, just by the joining of the two lakes. How many battles, Jebu wondered, had these six standards seen? Over how many nations had they triumphed?

Eive more horsemen rode into the open centre of the field, one from each tuman. They formed a semi-circle behind the battle standard.

“The tumanbashis,” Yukio said.

The army before the city and the spectators on the walls seemed to hold their breath. A horn blared. Down from the hills beyond Kweilin rode a single horseman on a steppe pony.

He could have his pick of any horse in the conquered territories, Jebu thought. He could ride a huge black stallion or a white charger.

He could have a horse worth a kingdom. But he chooses, when he shows himself to his army and to his enemy, the same sort of pony he has ridden all his life, the sort his ancestors have ridden for thousands of years before him.

The only sound was the clatter of one horse’s hooves. The rider’s red cloak streamed out behind him, showing his red lacquered armour.

It’s strange, thought Jebu. I’m seeing the man who murdered my father, and yet he makes me think of my father. My father must have been a man very like him, and so he restores my father to me.

Arghun Baghadur rode out before the battle standard of his army. The five generals facing him got down from their horses, ceremoniously unbuckled their belts and draped them over their shoulders, took off their helmets and put them on the ground.

Arghun spoke to them and acknowledged their submission with an inclination of his head. The tumanbashis stood up and remounted. Arghun turned to face his troops. Again there was a moment as if the world held its breath. Then a roar went up from fifty thousand throats.

Arghun stood in his stirrups and addressed his tumans. His voice boomed across the parade ground, but he was too far away for those on the walls of the city to hear him.

“We’ll find out later what he is saying,” a voice said beside Jebu. “My scouts will tell us.”

Yukio bowed to the governor. “Your Excellency need not expose yourself to danger in order to see what is happening among the barbarians.”

Liu smiled. A party of Chinese guardsmen and silk-robed city officials stood behind him. Jebu saw that he had been carried to the top of the wall in a sedan chair.

“When those who govern refuse to go out and see for themselves, the country is lost,” said Liu.

Across the two lakes Arghun raised his arm in a signal. A hill in the distant camp seemed to move. It lumbered down towards Arghun, followed by another gigantic grey shape, then another. Eor a moment Jebu could not understand what he was seeing. Einally he recognized that four enormous animals, the largest creatures he had ever seen, were moving towards Arghun. They were covered with brightly coloured cloths under which armour gleamed. High on the back of each animal was a rider who occupied a little castle. The beasts were fantastic under their armour-a, high, domed head; a nose as long as a tree limb, with a serpentine life of its own; two white spears, each the length of a man and the thickness of a leg, jutting out from either side of the mouth.

Jebu had seen such a beast before. After a moment he remembered where. It had been one of the strange animals he had seen in his vision of the Tree of Life, when Taitaro first gave him the shintai. He reached into his robe and rubbed the Jewel with his fingertips.

“Is it some kind of dragon?” Yukio whispered.

“It is a creature that is as terrible for the fear it inspires as for the damage it can do,” said Liu. “They are much used in warfare by the nations