Authors: Unknown
“We cannot vanquish the Mongols on their own ground, I agree,” said Dawud, frustrated. “But we
can
tackle the Franks. They will no longer give us any problems at all if we drive them from Palestine for good!”
“You are not listening to me, Amir,” said Kalawun in a tight voice. “We move on the Franks and the rules of the game change. The Mongols could take that opportunity to attack us from the rear. A siege on Acre will be long and costly, in terms of both money and men, and there is no guarantee we would take it.” His brow furrowed as he saw the doubt in their eyes. “You are young, many of you, and so I will forgive your ignorance, this once. My predecessor, Sultan Baybars, tried five times to take the city of Acre. Do you know how many times he succeeded? Well?” he demanded into their silence.
“None,” murmured Dawud.
Kalawun cupped a hand around his ear, emphasizing his point. “I didn’t hear you.”
“He never succeeded, my lord,” said Dawud grudgingly.
“And do you not think if I break the peace treaty that I myself signed with the Temple, the merchants and the nobles at Acre, a peace to last a decade, that they will rethink any decision to join forces with the Mongols? If we attack Acre and they repel us, they will know we are a serious threat and will look to safeguard themselves. As you have said, a united Frankish and Mongol force could damage us.” Kalawun’s voice was harsh. “Do you suppose we want to push them into each other’s arms out of necessity?” No one spoke. Kalawun shook his head angrily. “This meeting is ended. You are dismissed.” He turned his back as they began to file out of the throne room. Ascending the dais to his throne, he sat with a wince as the attendants came forward to clear the plates and goblets. One man remained in the chamber.
“Thank you for your support,” said Kalawun, rubbing at his brow again as the tall youth climbed the steps.
“You will always have my support, Father,” said Khalil coolly.
Kalawun glanced at him. “But you do not agree with me?”
“You know I don’t.”
“Even after all you just heard me say?”
“I know we can beat the Franks, Father,” said Khalil earnestly. “With enough men and engines. I have studied plans of the city. It has weaknesses. The Franks are nowhere near as strong as they were when Sultan Baybars tried to attack them. They are disorganized and fragmented.”
“The city walls are still as strong,” said Kalawun placidly. “That hasn’t changed.”
“Why is it so personal to you, Father?” demanded Khalil, surprising Kalawun with the force of his tone. “You have always defended them!” The prince stalked back down the dais steps and crossed to the window. As he stood there, a breath of wind lifted his hair.
Kalawun saw his fiercely knotted brow and felt a heavy weariness drag him down. Khalil always appeared to him like a scholar or a mullah, with his searching gaze and his quiet, aloof manner. But, in truth, he was a warrior, through and through, and, at twenty-four, a military strategist the like of which Baybars would have been proud.
Baybars.
Often these days Kalawun’s thoughts were drawn back to his old comrade. Perhaps because he now understood, all too well, the difficulties his predecessor had faced in this court on this very same subject. The difference was, Baybars had had no desire for friendship with the Franks; he had wanted them gone as much as his men had; he just believed the Mongols to pose the greater threat. As it had happened, the threat, for Baybars, had been much closer to home.
Kalawun felt a slight shiver run through him as he watched Khalil. It was ironic. He had spent all those years trying to make Baraka Khan into a better man, a lover of peace, only to have his own son grow up to be a military genius.
It wasn’t even that Khalil was possessed of any mindless, fanatical hatred toward the Franks. He just had a disturbingly matter-of-fact belief that they had no right to be here and should be removed. Sometimes, alone at night, unable to sleep, Kalawun wondered if he were being punished for his deception of Baybars and his heirs. But he tried to ignore such thoughts. He had deceived Baybars for the good of his own people as well as the Franks. As for Baraka, well, he had dealt with him as fairly as he could.
Baraka Khan was granted only two years on the throne of Egypt, making no accomplishments in that time, before Kalawun, having built enough support amongst the men of the army, threatened him with a coup d’état and marched on Cairo at the head of his Syrian troops. Baraka, finding little support from his own men and fearing for his life, fled with his mother, Nizam, leaving his infant brother, Salamish, as heir to the throne. Several months later, Kalawun gently deposed the child and was proclaimed sultan, inheriting all the lands Baybars had spent his years in power taking. He could have pursued Baraka, brought him into custody, interrogated him, but he let him go. He no longer had the stomach for a confrontation. Baybars was dead and so was Aisha. Nothing he did to Baraka would ever bring them back, and he had found the whole affair simply too painful to relive. Other factors in his unwillingness to confront the past were the deaths of Ali and Ishandiyar. His eldest son, strong, capable Ali, had succumbed to a fever and Ishandiyar had been stabbed in an alley in Cairo shortly after the Mamluk Army returned from Damascus, following Baybars’s death. The murderer hadn’t been caught. The fresh tide of grief had overwhelmed thoughts of revenge, and in the end, Kalawun had allowed himself to let it go. He had safeguarded the throne and his people. He would live with what he had lost for that.
But even with his best efforts, liasing in secret with the Anima Templi under William Campbell, peace had not been an easy thing to achieve. Kalawun had come to see it as a living, breathing thing. Peace was mutable, unreliable, meaning different things to different people and having unexpected effects. Between the Muslims and Christians it was still weak and untried; a child that needed to be protected. Despite this, much of Kalawun’s reign had been calm and prosperous; trade had boomed, and although it remained impossible to secure any kind of peace with the Mongols, who were actively aggressive, the conflicts with them, although brutal, had been short-lived. Another treaty had been created to replace the truce signed by Edward and Baybars, mostly thanks to the Anima Templi, specifically Campbell, who had persuaded the grand master of the Temple to assert the proposition over the rest of Acre’s leaders.
But his men weren’t happy. And neither was his son.
Kalawun moved his gaze from Khalil as he heard a knock. Nasir was in the entrance, rapping his knuckles on the open door. He had a scroll in his other hand. Kalawun beckoned to him. “Come in.”
Nasir entered, nodding in greeting to Khalil, who smiled. Kalawun felt an unwelcome twinge of jealousy; Nasir and Khalil had grown close in the past few years, since Nasir had returned to the citadel. But, despite his envy of their closeness, he was glad of the good relationship his son and his oldest comrade had. It was further cement to the bonds of friendship reestablished between himself and Nasir, which, several years ago, had seemed irrevocably broken.
Following Baybars’s death, the Syrian officer had withdrawn into himself, becoming distracted and angry. Kalawun put it down to his ordeal as a prisoner of the Assassins and made concessions for his friend. But as the months went on and Nasir’s dark moods grew worse, erupting into open insubordination, Kalawun found it harder and harder to excuse his behavior. Eventually, saddened, but having run out of ideas and patience, he sent Nasir to a garrison in a Syrian border town, hoping that time away from the hustle of court would temper him. It worked. Six years ago, Mongols captured the town and Nasir returned, a quieter, calmer man. It took some time, but Kalawun drew him back into his trust and into his life. Slowly, their friendship was rebuilt and Nasir once again became his closest confidant. Kalawun had even chosen to name his newborn son after the officer.
“The monthly reports from Damascus and Aleppo have arrived, my lord,” said Nasir, heading up to the throne and offering Kalawun the scroll. “Your advisors have read through them. Apparently there is little to speak of.”
“That is what I like to hear,” murmured Kalawun, rising and taking the scroll.
“How did the council go?”
“I believe I managed to draw some of the men around to my point of view in the end.”
There was a deliberate sigh from over by the window. Nasir and Kalawun looked at Khalil.
“If you have something to say, Khalil, then say it,” said Kalawun. “You can always speak your mind to me, you know that.”
“You put yourself at risk, Father, with your continued insistence on ignoring the problem of the Franks. And they are a problem, no matter what you say, if only because so many of your own people want them gone. I fear for your safety,” Khalil added, quietly. “For your position.”
“Let me and my guards worry about that,” replied Kalawun gruffly.
“But I—”
“Listen to your father, my prince,” said Nasir. “He knows what he is doing.”
Kalawun gave Nasir a grateful look.
Khalil lowered his gaze. “I am sorry, Father.”
Kalawun went to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Come, let us take supper together; we can talk more then. Did you need to see me for anything else?” he asked Nasir.
“No, my lord.”
Kalawun nodded to him and headed for the doors. Khalil shrugged away from his father’s hand, but consented to walk at his side.
After they had gone, Nasir returned to his own chambers to organize some papers he had collected with the purchase of a new batch of slaves, mostly Mongols, for Kalawun’s Mansuriyya regiment, now the Mamluk Royal Guard.
He was going through the list of slaves, checking the details the trader had written and deciding what Arabic names these boys would take, when there was a knock at his door. He crossed to it, muttering distractedly, and opened it to find a servant outside. “Yes?”
The servant passed him a scroll. “This arrived, sir.”
“From whom?”
“I do not know, sir. It was left at the gates with instructions to pass it to you.”
Nasir took the scroll and closed the door. Frowning, he returned to the window, where the last of the day’s light was still strong enough to read by, and unfurled it. It took him several minutes to read, and by the end his hand, clutching it tightly, was white and trembling. When he had finished, he screwed it up fiercely and tossed it away, sending it skittering across the tiles. Putting his palms on the window ledge, Nasir hung his head. When he raised it, he caught sight of himself in the beaten mirror hanging on his wall. Pale, sweating, he looked as if he had just seen a ghost. Which, in some senses, he had.
Thirty years ago, Nasir’s life, already blighted by conflict, had been thrown into turmoil with the fall of Baghdad to the Mongol forces. In the chaos, slave traders had captured him and torn him from his brother, his only surviving family. Nasir had been enslaved in the Mamluk Army, aged nineteen. He spent his first year in Cairo planning his escape. But not knowing where his brother was, or even if Kaysan were still alive, he didn’t know where he could run to, and crucifixion remained an effective deterrent, always prevalent in his deserter’s mind. Instead, he had thrown himself into his training, realizing that the more he did to distinguish himself the greater the power and, thus, freedom he would gain. Under Kalawun, he had advanced quickly and was eventually, the irony bitter within him, assigned to purchase slaves and train them for the army. It always amazed Nasir how quickly these children were assimilated into life within the rigid Mamluk regime, how rapidly they were indoctrinated, all senses of their past erased, forgotten; families, beliefs, gone in months. He guessed their young age must help this process, for he himself had been fully aware of who he was and what he believed in when he had been enslaved, and no amount of instruction had ever taught him otherwise.
He was an Ismaili Shia, born in northern Syria, where he had lived with his family until he was ten, when his village was brutally attacked by a mob of Nubuwwiyya: Sunni vigilantes who had been organized to cleanse the region of Shias, whom they proclaimed heretics. Kaysan, four years his senior, had taken him into the Jabal Bahra Mountains, fleeing the raid. They returned the next morning to find their family and everyone else butchered, the mutilated corpses strewn across the churned up earth. Stumbling out of the smoking ruins, the two boys had lived in the wild for almost a month until a Syrian Christian merchant, passing through the area with a trade caravan, had found them. The man took them into his care, where, in exchange for food and clothing, they looked after his camels. Nasir had taken well to life on the road, but Kaysan resented the menial work and was sullen and insolent, until the merchant thrust a sword into his hand and promoted him to guard duty. The eight years they spent on the road traveling between Aleppo, Baghdad and Damascus, whilst not enough to erase from the brothers’ minds the tragedy that had set them on this course, had nonetheless been mostly good. But then the Mongols had attacked Baghdad and everything changed.
It had taken years, but in the end Nasir had come to accept his fate under the dominion of the Sunni Mamluks. He felt like a tiger that has had its teeth pulled and its claws blunted. In his heart, he was still wild, but seeing the futility, he had ceased flinging himself against the bars of his cage and had lain down, broken.
Turning from the window, he looked at the screwed up letter on the tiles. Slowly, he went to it and bent down. Picking it up, he opened it out, the creases crackling apart. Nasir’s eyes drifted over the words and returned fearfully, yet with an almost indiscernible sense of hope, long forgotten, to the name scrawled untidily in red ink at the bottom.
Angelo Vitturi.
38
The Sands, Acre 20 OCTOBER A.D. 1288
Will lay back on the warm sand, propping himself up on his elbows. The glare was in his eyes and he could only see the outlines of the two figures down at the water’s edge. Behind him, beyond the swelling dunes where the sand was fine and light as sugar, cypress trees flanked the beach. All morning, the sky had been a stunning, endless blue, but a bank of slate-gray clouds was starting to build in the south, creeping up behind the humped shadow of Mount Carmel. The sea glittered, rows of white waves chasing one another in their race for the shore. Will watched the two figures jumping them, heard laughter, felt contentment suffuse him, making him drowsy.