Authors: Conn Iggulden
“Do you want to be executed, Lujan?” he said to the man at his side.
“I have a family, General,” the man replied. He was pale, understanding what they faced.
“Then listen to me and follow my orders,” Zhi Zhong replied.
The general was recognized at a distance and the outer gate was lowered over the expanse of water. Zhi Zhong turned in the saddle to shout orders to the men with him.
“The emperor must be told,” he snapped. “We can counterattack with the city guard.” He saw the words have an effect on the defeated men, straightening them in their saddles. They still trusted their general to salvage something from the disaster. Zhi Zhong made his face a mask as he passed into the city, the sound of hooves on paved streets loud in his ears. He had lost. Worse, he had run.
The Imperial palace was a huge construction inside the city, surrounded by gardens of great beauty. Zhi Zhong headed for the closest gate that would take him to an audience room. He wondered if the young emperor was even awake at that hour. He would be alert soon enough, when he received the news.
The guards were forced to dismount at the outer gate, striding inward along a wide road of lime trees. They were met by servants, then passed through a chain of halls. Before they could come into the emperor’s presence, soldiers from the emperor’s own guards blocked their way.
Zhi Zhong showed nothing as he handed over his sword and waited for them to step aside. His soldiers would remain in the outer halls while he went in. He imagined Emperor Wei being woken at that very moment, his slaves fussing around him with the news that the general had returned. The palace would be awash with rumor, but they knew nothing yet. The full scope of the tragedy would come later, but the emperor had to know first.
It was a long time before Zhi Zhong saw the doors of the audience chamber open before him and strode across the wooden floor to the figure seated at the far end. As he had thought, the emperor’s face was puffy from sleep, his hair braided hurriedly so that wisps of it were out of place.
“What news is so important?” Emperor Wei said, his voice strained. The general felt calm at last and took a deep breath as he knelt.
“His Imperial Majesty does me honor,” he said. He raised his head then and the eyes that looked out from the heavy brows made the young emperor clutch at the front of his robe in fear. There was madness there.
Zhi Zhong stood slowly, glancing around the hall. The emperor had dismissed his ministers to hear the private communication from his general. Six slaves stood around the room, but Zhi Zhong cared nothing for them. They would carry the news to the city as they always did. He let out a long breath. His mind had been confused for a time, but at last it was clear.
“The Mongols have come through the pass,” he said, at last. “I could not hold them.” He saw the emperor pale, his skin turning waxy in the light coming through the high windows.
“The army? Have we been forced to retreat?” Emperor Wei demanded, rising to stand before him.
“It has been broken, Imperial Majesty.”
The general’s eyes bored into the young man who faced him and this time they did not look away.
“I served your father well, Imperial Majesty. With him, I would have won. With you, a lesser man, I have failed.”
Emperor Wei opened his mouth in amazement. “You come to me with this and dare to insult me in my own palace?”
The general sighed. He had no sword, but he drew a long knife from where it had been hidden under his armor. The young emperor gaped at the sight of it, suddenly frightened.
“Your father would not have let me come to him, Imperial Majesty. He would have known not to trust a general who returns from a defeat.” Zhi Zhong shrugged. “In failing you, I earned my death. What choice is there for me, but this?”
The emperor took a deep breath to scream for his guards. Zhi Zhong lunged at him and clamped a hand around his throat, stifling the cry. He felt hands batter at his armor and his face, but the boy was weak and his grip only tightened. He could have strangled him then, but it would have been a dishonor to the son of a great man. Instead, he found a place in the emperor’s chest as it writhed and twitched, pressing the blade into the heart.
The hands fell away and only then did he feel the sting of the scratches on his cheeks. Blood stained the robe around the blade and the general lifted him up to place him back in his seat.
The slaves were screaming and Zhi Zhong ignored them, standing before the body of the young emperor. There had been no choice, he told himself.
The outer door swung open as the emperor’s guards burst in. They raised their weapons and Zhi Zhong stood to face them, seeing the figures of his men fill the corridor behind. Lujan had followed the orders he had been given, and he was already bloody. It did not take long to finish the last of them.
Lujan stood with his chest heaving, staring in wonder at the white face of a dead emperor.
“You have killed him,” he said, awed. “What do we do now?”
The general looked at the exhausted, bloody men who brought the stink of the battlefield into such a place. Perhaps later he would weep for everything he had lost, everything he had done, but now was not the time.
“We tell the people the emperor is dead and that the city must be closed and fortified. The Mongols are coming here and we can do nothing else.”
“But who will be emperor now? One of his children?” Lujan said. He had gone very pale and he did not look again at the sprawled figure on the throne.
“The eldest boy is only six,” Zhi Zhong replied. “When the funeral has been held, have him brought to me. I will rule as his regent.”
Lujan stared at his general. “Hail the new emperor,” he whispered, the words repeated by those around him. Almost in a trance, Lujan lowered himself until his forehead touched the wooden floor. The other soldiers followed suit and General Zhi Zhong smiled.
“Ten thousand years,” he said softly. “Ten thousand years.”
CHAPTER 25
T
HE SKY BURNED BLACK OVER THE MOUNTAINS,
the oily smoke reaching for miles. Many of the Chin had surrendered at the end, but the tribes had lost too many of their own to consider mercy. The killing had gone on for days around the pass, those who still wanted to seeking out every last one of the fleeing soldiers and slaughtering them like the marmots of home.
Great bonfires had been built of the pike poles and flags, leaving only food and the dead. The families had come slowly through the pass behind the warriors, bringing carts and forges to melt down the pike heads for their steel. The Chin supplies were dragged into snowbanks where they would remain fresh. There was no tally of the Chin corpses, nor need for one. No one who saw the mountains of broken flesh would ever forget it. The children and women helped to strip the bodies of their armor and anything else of value. The stench was awful after only a day, and the air was rich with flies that crackled and burned in the swirling smoke of the bonfires.
On the edge of it, Genghis waited for his generals. He wanted to see the city that had sent such an army against him. Kachiun and Khasar rode out to join him, staring back in awe across the field of blood and fire that stretched into the distance. The bonfires threw flickering shadows on the mountains of the valley, and even the tribes were subdued as they sang in low voices for the dead.
The three brothers waited in silence as the men Genghis had summoned trotted up, their backs stiff. Tsubodai came first, pale and proud with ugly black stitches running the length of his left arm. Jelme and Arslan rode together, dark against the fires. Ho Sa and Lian the mason came last of all. Only Temuge remained behind to move the camp to a river ten miles north. The flames would burn for days yet, even without the tribes to feed them. The flies were getting worse and Temuge was sickened by the constant buzzing and the rotting dead.
Genghis could hardly drag his gaze away from the plain. It was the death of an empire he was seeing, he was certain of it. He had never come so close to defeat and destruction as in the battle through the pass. It had left its mark on him and he knew he would always be able to close his eyes and summon the memories. Eight thousand of his own men had been wrapped in white cloth and taken up to the mountains. He glanced up to where they lay like fingers of bone in the snow, far away. Already, hawks and wolves tore at their flesh. He had stayed only to see them sky buried, to honor them and give their families honor.
“Temuge has the camp,” he told his generals. “Let us see this Yenking and this emperor.” He dug in his heels and his horse jerked into a run. The others followed him, as they always had.
Built on a great plain, Yenking was by far the largest construction any of them had ever seen. As it grew before him, Genghis recalled the words of Wen Chao, the Chin diplomat he had met years before. He had said that men could build cities like mountains. Yenking was such a place.
It rose in dark gray stone that was at least fifty feet from bedrock to the crest. Genghis sent Lian and Ho Sa around the city to count the wooden towers that rose even further. When they returned, they had traveled more than five miles around and reported almost a thousand towers, like thorns along the walls. Even worse were the descriptions of huge bow weapons on the battlements, manned by silent, watching soldiers.
Genghis studied Lian for some sign that the mason was not intimidated, but the man visibly drooped in the saddle. Like the Mongols, he had never visited the capital and could not think of a way to break walls of that size.
On the corners of the immense rectangle, four forts stood apart from the main walls. A wide moat ran between the forts and the walls and yet another girdled them on the outside. A huge canal was the only breach in the walls themselves, running through an immense water gate of iron that was in turn protected by platforms for archers and catapults. The waterway stretched into the south, as far as any of them could see. Everything about Yenking was on a scale too great for the imagination. Genghis could not begin to think of a way to force the gates.
At first Genghis and his generals kept as close as they had to Yinchuan, or some of the other Chin cities to the west. Then a hammer blow sounded on the evening air and a dark blur shot past them, staggering Kachiun’s horse with the power of its wake. Genghis almost lost his seat as his own mount reared and could only gaze in amazement at a shaft half-sunk in the soft ground, more like a smooth tree trunk than an arrow.
Without a word, his generals retreated past the range of the fearsome weapon, their spirits sinking even lower as they understood another part of the defenses. To come closer than five hundred paces was to invite more of the great poles with their iron tips. Just the thought of one of them striking a mass of his riders was appalling.
Genghis turned in the saddle to the man who had broken lesser walls.
“Can we take this place, Lian?” he demanded. The mason would not meet his stare and looked over the city. At last he shook his head.
“No other city has a wall so wide at the top,” he said. “From that height, they will always have more range than anything I can make. If we built stone ramparts, I might be able to protect the counterweighted catapults, but if I can reach them, they can certainly reach me to smash them to firewood.”
Genghis glared in frustration at Yenking. To have come so far and yet be baulked at the final obstacle was infuriating. Only the day before, he had been congratulating Khasar on taking the fort in the pass and Kachiun for his inspired charge. He had believed then that his people were unstoppable, that conquest would always come easily. His army certainly believed it. They whispered that the world was his to take. Facing Yenking, he could almost feel the emperor’s scorn at such ambition.
Genghis kept the cold face as he turned to his brothers.
“The families will find good land here for grazing. There will be time to plan an attack on this place.”
Khasar and Kachiun nodded uncertainly. They too could see that the great sweeping conquest had halted at the foot of Yenking. Like Genghis himself, they had become used to the fast and exciting pace of taking cities. The carts of their people were now so laden with gold and wealth that they broke axles on any long trip.
“How long will it take to starve such a city?” Genghis demanded suddenly.
Lian had no better idea than any of them, but did not want to admit his ignorance. “I have heard more than a million of the emperor’s subjects live in Yenking. To feed so many is difficult to imagine, but they will have vast granaries and stores. They have known we were coming for months, after all.” He saw Genghis frown and hurried on. “It could be as long as three years, even four, lord.”
Khasar groaned aloud at the estimate, but the youngest of them, Tsubodai, brightened.
“They have no army left to break a siege, lord. You will not need to keep us all here. If we cannot bring the walls down, perhaps you will allow us to raid in this new land. As things stand, we don’t even have maps beyond Yenking.”
Genghis glanced at his general, seeing the hunger in his eyes. He felt his own mood lift.
“That is true. If I have to wait until this emperor is skin and bone before he submits, at least my generals will not be idle.” He swept an arm across the landscape that blurred into distance too great for any of them to imagine.
“When the families are settled, come to me with a direction and it will be yours. We will not waste the time here and grow fat and sleepy.”
Tsubodai grinned, his enthusiasm kindling that of the others to replace the dark mood of moments earlier.
“Your will, my lord,” he replied.
In shining, black-lacquered armor, General Zhi Zhong paced angrily as he waited for the emperor’s ministers to join him in the coronation hall. The morning was peaceful and he could hear the creaking squawks of magpies outside. No doubt the omen takers would read something into the quarrelsome birds, if they saw them.
The funeral of Emperor Wei had taken almost ten days, with half the city tearing their clothes and rubbing ash into their skin before the body was cremated. Zhi Zhong had suffered through endless orations by the noble families. Not one of them had mentioned the manner of the emperor’s death, not with Zhi Zhong glowering at them and his guards standing with their hands on their sword hilts. He had taken the head from the Imperial rose, nipping it off with a single blow so that everything else remained.
The first few days had been chaotic, but after three ministers had been executed for speaking out, any further resistance collapsed and the great funeral went ahead just as if the young emperor had died in his sleep.
It had been useful to find that the governing nobles had made a plan for the event long before it was needed. The Chin empire had survived upheaval and even regicide before. After the initial spasm of outrage, they had fallen into the routines almost with relief. The peasants in the city knew nothing except that the Son of Heaven had left his mortal flesh. They wailed ignorantly in the streets of the city, mindless in hysteria and grief.
The emperor’s young son had not wept when he heard of his father’s demise. In that, at least, Emperor Wei had prepared his family well. The boy’s mother had enough sense to know that any protest would mean her own death, so she had remained silent through the funeral, pale and beautiful as she watched her husband’s body burned to ash. As the funeral pyre collapsed with a cough of flame, Zhi Zhong thought he had felt her gaze on him, but when he looked up, she had her head bowed in supplication to the will of the gods. His will, he thought, though the result was much the same.
The general ground his teeth in irritation as he paced. First the funeral had taken longer than he would have believed possible, and then he had been told the coronation would take another five days. It was infuriating. The city mourned and none of the peasants actually worked while great events played themselves out. He had borne the endless fittings for new robes to mark his position as regent. He had even remained still while the ministers lectured him nervously on his new responsibilities. All the while, the Mongol khan prowled like a wolf at the door, watching the city.
In his free hours, Zhi Zhong had climbed the steps to a dozen places on the wall to watch the filthy tribes settle themselves on Imperial land. He thought sometimes that he could smell their rancid mutton and goats’ milk on the breeze. It was galling to have been beaten by sheepherders, but they would not take Yenking. The emperors who had built the city had intended it to demonstrate their power. It would not fall easily, Zhi Zhong told himself.
He still woke at night from nightmares of being chased, the humming of arrow shafts like mosquitoes whining in his ears. What else could he have done? No one thought the Mongols could climb the highest peaks to flank him. Zhi Zhong felt no more shame at the defeat. The gods had been against him and yet they had given the city into his hands as regent. He would watch the Mongols shatter their army against the walls, and when they were bloody, he would take the head of their khan in his hands and bury it in the deepest shit hole in the city.
The thought lightened his mood as he waited for the boy emperor to make his appearance. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear gongs booming, announcing the presence of a new Son of Heaven to the people.
The doors to the coronation chamber opened to reveal the sweating face of Ruin Chu, the first minister.
“My lord regent!” he said on seeing Zhi Zhong. “You are not wearing your robes! His Imperial Majesty will be here at any moment.” He seemed about to collapse, after days of organizing the funeral and the coronation. Zhi Zhong found the fat little man irritating and took pleasure from the impact his words would have.
“I have left them in my rooms, Minister. I will not need them today.”
“Every moment of the ceremony has been planned, lord regent. You must—”
“Do not tell me ‘must,’ ” Zhi Zhong snapped. “Get the boy in here and place a crown on him. Chant, sing, light tapers of incense, whatever you want, but say one more word to me about what I
must
do and I will have your head.”
The minister gaped at him, then lowered his eyes, shuddering visibly. He knew that the man he faced had murdered the emperor. The general was a brutal traitor and Ruin Chu did not doubt he would even shed blood on the day of a coronation. He bowed as he walked backwards, opening the doors. Zhi Zhong heard the slow pace of the procession and waited in silence as the minister reached it. He chuckled as he heard the pace increase.
When the doors opened again, there was a definite look of fear in the entourage around the six-year-old boy who would become emperor. Zhi Zhong saw he was bearing up well, despite having little sleep over the previous days.
The procession slowed again as it passed Zhi Zhong, heading toward the golden throne. Buddhist monks waved censers, filling the air with white smoke. They too were nervous to find the general in his armor, the only man with a sword in the room. He stalked behind them as Emperor Wei’s son took his place on the throne. It was only the beginning of the final stage. Reciting the titles alone would take until noon.
Zhi Zhong watched sourly as the ministers settled themselves comfortably, sitting like peacocks around the center of the ceremony. The incense made him drowsy and he could not help but think of the Mongols on the plain outside the city. At first, he had seen the need for the rituals, a way of keeping order after he had killed the emperor. The city could have erupted without a strong hand to rule it, and it had been necessary to allow the nobles the comfort of their traditions. Now he was tired of it. The city was calm in its grief and the Mongols had begun building great trebuchets, raising walls of stone to protect the weapons.
With an exclamation of impatience, Zhi Zhong strode forward, interrupting the droning voice of a priest. The little boy froze as he looked up at the dark-armored figure. Zhi Zhong took the Imperial crown from where it lay on a gold silk cushion. It was surprisingly heavy, and for an instant, he was touched with awe at the thought of handling it. He had killed the man who wore it last.