Читать книгу Tamerlane: The Earth Shaker - Harold Lamb - Страница 13

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In these uncertain years of strife they turned their eyes more and more to Timur. His personal daring stirred their admiration; his escapades and triumphs became their gossip. Even they who were in the field against him liked to listen to the tales of Lord Timur. His courage was the one solid thing in their restless fancies.

Several of them grew tired of Hussayn and came over to his standard. Mangali Boga, one of the older nomad chieftains of Mongol stock, rode up without so much as announcing himself and sat down among Timur’s lords. Mangali had been one of his most impetuous opponents—had offered once to bring Timur in a captive, if six thousand men were given him.

“Now that I have eaten Lord Timur’s salt,” he said, “I will not turn my face to any other man.”

Upon no greater thing than Timur’s reckless leadership and the loyalty of these men was founded the dominion that history knows as Tamerlane’s empire.

It was Mangali who won a battle for Timur in later years by his quick wit. The Tatars, an isolated division of them, were engaged with Kara Yussuf, chieftain of the Black Sheep Turkomans. Timur’s men were hard pressed on all sides and felt the issue going against them, when Mangali withdrew from his officers and searched the ground until he found what he wanted, a Turkoman’s severed head with its long beard and shaven pate.

This head Mangali thrust upon his lance tip and spurred into the leading Tatar ranks, shouting that Kara Yussuf was slain. The Tatars were encouraged and all the foemen within hearing correspondingly depressed. Before long the Turkomans gave way, carrying back with them in their flight the very much alive and angry Kara Yussuf.

More than once these sagacious and headstrong Tatar lords saved their master at the edge of the grave. A story is told of Elchi Bahatur, the Valiant Envoy. Like Prince Murat of Napoleon’s suite, he was fond of plumed headgear and gilded boots. Perhaps on account of the magnificence of his appearance, perhaps because of his bravado he was often chosen to go to other courts as ambassador. But he appears regularly throughout the fighting—plumes, boots and all.

On this particular occasion Timur had returned from beating off a raid of the Jats, and was searching for the hostile forces of the kings of Badakshan, in the higher ranges where the Amur takes its rise.

The mountain kings drew back steadily, up into the treeless solitude where the snow lay deep, and the projecting rocks were worn by ages of storms. Here in the gorges glaciers crawled like inanimate snakes, and the schist of the gorge walls gleamed red and purple. And here the two small armies played at hide-and-seek around the peaks, sliding down thousand foot slopes, and sitting out snow flurries huddled together like sheep.

A courier reached Timur with word that his advance guard had been cut off and captured by the Badakshanis, who were retiring with their prisoners by still another ravine.

It was part of the rigid code of the Tatars that no leader should abandon his men while it was humanly possible to reach them. But the warriors with Timur could see no chance of aiding their comrades. Timur was stirred into a passion by their weariness and lack of hope. He summoned them to mount and set out with the courier for a guide, to seek for a way along the heights that would bring him out in the ravine the Badakshanis were moving down.

His men lagged along the ice-coated paths, where every now and then a horse and rider would slip and slide head over tail into eternity. Timur pressed ahead so rapidly that only thirteen were with him when he came out in the gorge and hastened to seize the summit of a pass before the Badakshan forces could reach it. With his thirteen, among them Elchi Bahatur, he took up his position in the rocks along the ridge and engaged the advance of the mountaineers with bows.

Only fifty warriors were in the first party of the enemy, but two hundred more appeared down the ravine. Elchi Bahatur at this point executed a flank movement of his own, riding alone down the side of the ravine, and loping toward the oncoming two hundred. Sight of him in his sable cloak, bound with a flaming girdle, and his bearskin headgear made them pause. He came, apparently, from nowhere and he was undoubtedly riding a blood stallion. His bow was in its case, his sword in its sheath of ivory inlaid with gold.

“Hai, ye sons of many fathers,” Elchi hailed them. “Draw rein and look. That man up there is Lord Timur.”

Riding in among them, as if a battle were the least thing in his mind, the Tatar pointed out to them carefully the figure of Timur in the familiar crested helmet, among the flying arrows.

“Think,” Elchi advised them gravely, “if ye are slain, even your families will call you fools. What good to be slain here—now—when Lord Timur is between you and safety? It would be better to make a truce. Much better to gather together the captives and thus gain his good-will by sending them to him.”

So Elchi blandished them. And they, all uncertain, dismounted to bow before him—convinced that the Tatars were in strength, if a lord like this came among them unescorted. Elchi dismounted also, and stroked—so the chronicle has it—the backs of their necks. Soon the arrows ceased, and the captives were brought forward to Elchi, who eyed them critically.

“Will ye send his own men to Lord Timur like cattle, without their swords?” he reproved the Badakshanis. “They had swords when ye took them.”

The mountaineers were sadly bewildered. They could see the dreaded Timur over there on the ridge, apparently awaiting them. Their road to safety was blocked. In the end they did all that Elchi had advised—the plundered weapons were restored—and Elchi led his six hundred rescued Tatars over the ridge, and announced to Timur that the Badakshanis were waiting to kiss his stirrup.

At once Timur went down, and the men of Badakshan, who had been more frightened than hostile in the beginning, swore a peace on their bow cases. Timur and Elchi kept them occupied in talk until the lagging contingent of Tatars came up.

“This is not a fit place for sitting down,” the fastidious ambassador then said. “Here there is nothing to eat or sleep in but the snow.”

The Badakshani chieftains suggested that they should all go to the villages, and so they trooped down from the roof of the world to feast.

This affair of Elchi the Valiant is pure gasconade. One is reminded of Marshal Murat waving his handkerchief at the Austrians upon the bridge of Vienna, and coming over to sit on the Austrian cannon while his Frenchmen removed the mines that had been placed under the bridge.

A year or so later Elchi Bahatur died attempting to swim his horse across a river.

They knew, these lords of Tatary, that their lives would not long endure under Timur’s leadership. But he shared their risks and his body bore as many wounds as theirs. Days passed with him were filled with exulting, and his nobles went singing into conflict, as the Viking berserks had done before them.

“It is a time,” he said to them once, “of dancing for warriors. The dancing ground is the field of battle, the music is the battle shout and the whining of steel, and the wine poured out is the blood of your enemies.”

At the end of the six years the majority of the Tatar lords had sworn allegiance to Timur. In the beginning he had been called a kazak, a wandering fighter who did not stay more than twenty-four hours in one spot—a word that survives to-day in the Cossacks of these same steppes. Now he was war-lord, leader of a host. When Musa’s people, the Jalairs, joined his standard the end was in sight. The Jalairs were half-Mongol, and they could gather together an army as numerous and formidable as the army of England that had won the battles of Crécy and Poitiers less than a generation before. And Timur’s eldest son had been born of a Jalair mother.

In the face of such a host led by such a warrior as Timur, the power of Hussayn melted away as snow melts before the spring rains. He was driven south of the Amu, hunted through the hills, cornered in Balkh. The city fell almost at once, and Hussayn, hidden in the ruins, sent a last overture to Timur—a pledge that he would abandon his country and go off to Mecca, a pilgrim.

Accounts vary as to what followed. Some say that Timur promised Hussayn his life if he would come in and give himself up; but Hussayn, changing his mind at the last moment, disguised himself and hid anew in the minaret balcony of a mosque—where he was found either by the caller-to-prayer who ascended the tower the next dawn, or by a soldier who had lost his horse and had gone to the tower to look for it.

How Hussayn met his death is equally uncertain. It seems that the Tatar leaders gathered in council to discuss his fate and that Timur left the council, saying, “Amir Hussayn and I vowed friendship, and he is safe from harm at my hand.” A second version is that Mouava and another officer slipped away from the gathering without letting Timur know their purpose and slew Hussayn after pretending to let him escape.

The truth of the matter is that Timur allowed his rival to be put to death. The chronicle says, “It was the hour and the place appointed for Hussayn, and no man may escape his fate.”