Читать книгу Tamerlane: The Earth Shaker - Harold Lamb - Страница 12

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The passing of Princess Aljai removed the tie that had held Timur and Hussayn together for the last five years. Hussayn had treated his sister spitefully on more than one occasion, and Timur remembered it. He always brooded over personal grievances, and now he mourned his wife. Taking his son Jahangir, he moved south with the men of his clan, over the river again, near to the spot where he had rested that last summer with Aljai.

“To God we belong,” the pious Zain ad-Din wrote to him, “and to God we must return. To each of us there is a place and an hour appointed for death.”

But Timur was not a fatalist. The zeal of the mullahs and the imams roused no answering fire in him. Outwardly, his calm seemed to be the peace of the true believer, who admits that a man’s destiny unrolls before him and that salvation lies in the Law propounded by Muhammad; inwardly, Timur was tormented by questions he could not answer, and by the savage desires that were his heritage from his ancestors.

He prayed at the appointed hours, and he took his place in the ranks at the mosque readings, gravely attentive. For hours during the nights he sat at the chessboard, moving the miniature horsemen and ivory castles and elephants over the squares—as often as not without a companion. When he played with an opponent he almost always won, and this was not policy on the part of his officers. Timur was a master player.

To satisfy his study of the game he had a new board made with double the number of squares and pieces. On this he worked out new combinations, while the five-year-old World Gripper sat by him on the carpet, watching with dark eyes the manœuvres of the strange and glittering toys that engrossed his father’s attention.

To Timur thus occupied came in haste mullahs—the eyes and the secretaries of Islam—from Samarkand with a message.

“God hath lifted the collar of oppression from the neck of the believer,” they said. “Reverend and courageous expounders of the Law came from Bokhara to Samarkand, and roused the people of the city to bear arms against the oppressors of the faithful—until our Lords the princes should gain sufficient strength to resist them. Although the accursed enemy entered into the suburbs, the inhabitants of Samarkand, even without their two princes, defended the wall and the streets, so that the accursed enemy was driven out.

“Then by the will of God a plague spread among the horses of the Jats. Three-fourths of the horses died, so that they lacked even mounts for the couriers. They retired from the country, most of them with their quivers and packs on their backs and their swords on their shoulders. Surely never before in this world was an army of Jats seen walking afoot.”

After the mullahs came officers of Timur who had been watching events, and they confirmed the fact that the townspeople of Samarkand had kept the city until the Jats withdrew, adding that the disease among the horses was so bad that Tatar cavalry following them up had avoided the infected districts.

This sudden stroke of fortune brought Hussayn back into the country. He made a triumphal entry into Samarkand, the people—full of their own success in beating off so formidable an enemy—exulting in the occasion. Carpets were hung from windows and roof parapets, the mosques were crowded and music greeted the amir in every garden.

Hussayn and Timur were now the virtual rulers from India to the Sea of Aral. Timur had, morally, an equal claim with Hussayn. He had been the real leader of the army, and his following was as great. But Hussayn was the grandson of the Kingmaker and son of a reigning prince. He chose the puppet Khan, the figurehead whose one virtue was that he was a tura, a descendant of Genghis Khan. With all the proper ceremonies the Khan was seated in his palace, and Hussayn undertook to rule as his grandfather had done.

Timur, by force of circumstances, was now inferior to Hussayn, who collected the taxes, gave judgments and apportioned out land. One thing Timur insisted upon—he must have his valley, and the district from the Green City to his river.

“As far as the river is mine,” he said decisively.

He bore himself with dignity, and his generosity would endure no quarrelling over exactions. When Hussayn imposed a heavy head tax upon the Barlas men, Timur protested that they had lost most of their property at the last battle, but he himself paid Hussayn the full amount, including by need or by moodiness even the jewels of Aljai—the earrings and the pearl necklaces she had worn on her bridal night. Hussayn recognized the jewels but accepted them without comment.

The final quarrel between the leaders was brought about by the turbulent amirs, their vassals. Hussayn, in setting up his puppet khan, had given the Jats new cause for invasion and in trying to reduce the amirs he made new enemies. When his companionship with Timur ceased—by whose immediate fault, no one knows—the result was civil war, and intrigue, castigated by periodic incursions of the Jats. For six years the lands of the Tatars were an armed camp.

Through the dark days of struggle, Timur moved like a disembodied spirit of war. His cold recklessness, his utter disregard for his own safety and his open-handed generosity are unmistakable. Around the fires at night the caravan people told tales of Lord Timur. “Verily,” said they, “he is well named, for there is iron in him—yea, unbending iron.”

Perhaps the favourite story in bazaar and camp was of the taking of Karshi.

This was the city of the Veiled Prophet—now long in his grave—of Khorassan. A certain man of religion who had aroused the wonder and fanaticism of a multitude by showing them nightly at the bottom of his well the rising moon—when there was no moon in the sky. So they named him the Moon Maker, whom history knows as a trouble maker.

In Karshi Timur had built a stone fortress, and had taken some pride in it. At this particular time Hussayn’s forces were in possession of Karshi, citadel and all. And Timur’s men knew well the strength of the place. Amir Musa commanded the three or four thousand men holding Karshi, and they knew Musa too. He had held the stone bridge against Bikijuk. He was an experienced soldier, too fond of wine and the good things of the table, often careless, but always to be relied upon in a crisis.

Timur had with him at the time about two hundred and forty men, and his officers, Amir Jaku, and Mouava—who had fought beside Musa at the bridge—and Amir Daoud, a lover of hazard. But when he explained to them that he meant to take and hold Karshi they were incredulous. They said it was too hot a season to think of such action, and they had their families to safeguard.

“O ye men of small wit,” Timur railed at them, “have I not sworn that your families shall be protected?”

“Nay, that is true,” responded one of the amirs, “but they are not behind walls.”

“There are walls around Karshi,” Timur laughed. “Think ye—if we be masters of Karshi!”

They did think, but the prospect rendered even Daoud silent, and Jaku shook his head. “Let us first gather more strength, O my Lord. There is a time for rashness and a time for caution and thought. Musa hath followed the standards too long to be taken like a woman on a camel.”

“Then go thou to the women and ask to be taught!” Timur said in his deep voice. “And I will keep with me those who held the bridge against the Horde. Thou, Mouava, and thou, Elchi! Are there others?”

Many voices proclaimed that they also had crossed the river with Timur, and had made the Jats flee without their saddles.

“Then go ye to where your families wait. Nay, go to the markets and boast thus of what is past. I will draw my reins to Karshi with others.”

They knew that he would, indeed, do this if they hung back and they went off to discuss it together. Once he had decided to do something, Timur was not to be dissuaded. When he gave an order he never changed it. This singleness of purpose caused loss of life and misfortune at times that might well have been avoided; but it gave to Timur’s decisions something of the immutability of fate.

When his nobles came back to join him, Jaku held in one hand a Koran, in the other a sword. “We have sworn to follow thee, O my Lord, and here is the Koran upon which we took oath. Here is a sword, and if we obey thee not, strike life from us.”

So they sat down again with zeal, to discuss ways of drawing out Musa.

“O ye of little wit,” Timur laughed, after he had listened a while. “If ye induce the Amir to come out with his three thousand, and ye but a hundred and another hundred and forty what will be the gain?”

“It would be better,” spoke up Daoud, seeing his companions silent, “to go secretly at night, and enter Karshi and surprise Musa in his bed. Thus we could take him.”

“Yea, indeed it would be better,” assented Timur grimly. “And after that, will you go also to the beds of his three thousand?”

“All things are in the hands of God,” Daoud defended himself. “Musa knows well that we are here, and he will not be drawn out while we are here. His Lord ordered him to maintain Karshi and Musa will do nothing otherwise.”

“If I,” Timur mused aloud, “should send a summons to Musa to go down to the meadows by the river and satisfy his thirst with wine, and his discomfort with coolness, would he do so?”

Daoud smiled, because it was the middle of the dry season, and they—free to choose the open camping places of the plain—were sitting coatless and damp with sweat, while Karshi must have been intolerable behind the walls. The citadel was a winter, not a summer resort, and Musa’s fondness for the jug and feasting was well known. “God forbid,” he said. “He would like to go, but he would not.”

“Then I will not invite him,” Timur made response.

And he said nothing more to his companions. In fact, he seemed to change his mind about making an attempt at Karshi, because he sent couriers with greeting and gifts to the Malik of Herat in the south. He moved with his men down to the Khorassan road leading to Herat. There on the plain of ridged yellow clay along the edge of the sand dunes, he pitched his tents in spite of the heat, by the Well of Isaac.

For a month, until his galloper came back, he halted at the well all north-bound caravans. His messenger as he had expected brought back return gifts and a letter of salutation from the Malik, bidding Timur visit him. There was by that time quite a concourse about the well, and the news proclaimed by the messenger became common property.

The next day, Timur released the caravans and made evident preparations himself for departure. The merchants begged him for an escort to protect them from other bodies of his men, and he explained that he had no followers on the road to Karshi. Then he rode off swiftly to the south with his two hundred and forty—the caravans going on to the north, to cross the Amu and arrive at Karshi.

There Musa questioned them and learned that Timur had undoubtedly gone on toward Herat, evidently planning to take refuge with the Malik. Immediately Musa moved out to a pleasanter site, in the meadows Timur had mentioned, where, according to the chronicle, he “unrolled the carpet of feasting and unsealed the wine jar of intoxication.” But he left his son with several hundred men to hold the fortress of Karshi.

Timur waited at his next camp a week or so, to give the caravans time to reach Karshi, then he returned to the Amu by a single forced march. He did not stop at the river, but urged his horse at once into the current and swam across, forty of his riders daring to follow him.

Then boats were sent back for the others, the forty jeering at them when they came up. They spent that night out of sight of the road—a score of men being sent at dawn to hold up all travellers on the way to Karshi. After the next sunset they mounted again and rode through the night across the open plain to a well near the outskirts of Karshi. Here they halted as long as daylight lasted, hidden in the wormwood and tamarisk growth. All of Musa’s people who happened to visit the well were kept there as prisoners, and Timur set his own men and the captives to work making ladders of sorts and ropes. When darkness set in, they mounted, taking the ladders but leaving the prisoners under guard.

“We have come very fast,” Jaku said, “and not all our people are up with us. This venture is important, and so it would be well to move forward slowly and take no risks.”

“Do thou bring the men on slowly,” Timur assented, “and I will ride ahead to look at the wall and select a place for the ladders.”

Accompanied by only two men he galloped on, until they saw the loom of the towers through the trees, and dismounted. One of the warriors remained with the horses, but Timur’s servant Abdullah would not leave him. The two walked forward until they saw the water of the moat gleaming before their feet. For a while they listened, hearing nothing from within the place.

Following the edge of the moat, they came to the spot where the open aqueduct of the fort crossed it—a stone trough, knee deep in water. Into this Timur climbed, Abdullah following. From the aqueduct he dropped to the edge of earth that projected under the wall on the castle side.

Along this he felt his way until he reached the wooden framework of a gate. After listening for some time, he knocked on the gate. What devilry inspired him to do so is not apparent. At all events he found the gate to be walled up within and no one answered his knock.

Resuming his prowl, he searched until he made certain of a place where the wall had breached at the top, an easy point of access. He then showed it to Abdullah, and assured himself that his servant would find it again. Not until then did he return to his horse, and ride back to his men who were waiting beyond the walls. Forty-three of them were told off to guard the horses—leaving about a hundred for the storming party.

Timur again left them, to seek his breach, while Abdullah ushered up separate groups to the aqueduct and guided them across. They found Timur sitting on the wall, and he gave them orders what to do next.

Some were sent to round up whatever sentries might be inside the wall. They found all Musa’s watchers asleep, at that hour near dawn. There was some fighting at the citadel itself, but Timur assembled all his men there and—it being now sunrise—sounded his horns from the tower.

All the inhabitants of Karshi rolled out of their quilts to hurry to the flat housetops and learn the meaning of this strange reveille. Not knowing what Timur’s strength might be, and utterly taken by surprise, most of Musa’s officers came in to the citadel to offer submission, and when Timur had talked with them, they agreed to join him. Only Musa’s son resisted, defending his house. But when fire was thrown in through the embrasures he came out with his sword around his neck and yielded himself.

Timur praised his bravery, but kept him in Karshi—sending out the rest of Musa’s family to the amir down in the meadows.

“Our Lord’s good fortune gave us the city,” Jaku said afterward. “And we who follow him have increased our glory.”

It seemed to them little less than miraculous that Timur was able, thereafter, to hold the fortress of Karshi against Hussayn’s thousands. Victory, in their minds, was the gift of God, and defeat not otherwise. The venerable Zain ad-Din and his mullahs warned them of this, ceaselessly.

But these lords of Tatary were incorrigibly wayward; for hours they would sit entranced in front of a dirty dervish who, intoxicated with fervour, screamed at them of sanctity and the wonders of Muhammad’s paradise; at other moments they spat and gibed at all mullahs: “It takes two preachers to make a man; one makes only a woman.”

They were troubled by visions. They would take to horse and flee from the portent of an evil dream, or an omen. And yet, faced by inevitable death during battle, they would cast off their helmets and shout aloud, that others might envy them their moment of glory. They were jealous of their personal honour, and shame, to their spirits, was more trying than suffering. “What is profit without honour?” they echoed the saying of the Arabs.