The Thief of Bagdad/Chapter 10

evening before, after Wong K’ai had replied to the message of the Mongol Prince’s fluttering handkerchief by dipping the crimson, triangular flag three times, he had waited until dark.

Bagdad was asleep. Night lay over the slumbering town with a trailing cloak of purple shadows. In the black depths of the sky hung tiny points of light that glistened with the cold gleam of diamonds. The bazars were shuttered until the morning. So were the houses and palaces, with no sign of life except, here and there, a light springing warm and friendly through chink or curtained window. The mosques were empty. Nobody was abroad except, occasionally, a watchman making the rounds with swinging lantern and steel-shod pike; a prowling leprous beggar nosing for scraps in a heap of refuse; a lover returning from a scented, romantic meeting. Another half hour—and the watchmen fell asleep in dark posterns and doorways, squatting comfortably, their pikes across their drawn-up knees; the beggars sought the asylum of their hovels to whine their complaints to other beggars; the lovers returned home to dream.

Not a sound now except a dim stir of leaves blown about by some vagabond wisp of wind.

Black, silent, the night looked down.

Then, at the shock of midnight, according to the prearranged signal, Wong K’ai mounted the tower of the Caravanserai of the Tartar Traders. There, secretly, an enormous beacon had been prepared these many weeks. He lit it. A few seconds later, the flame of it stabbed through the velvety gloom with an intense, strident, threatening, golden wedge. Another second—and from the minaret of the Mosque of Suleyman the Magnificent a gleaming circle of torches replied to the beacon, sending showers of sparks. At once, in the four quarters of the city, other torches took up the message, puncturing the night. The sky grew scarlet and crimson, like a netted weave of molten, half-liquid metal, with a trail of emerald-green and peacock-green cutting through it. Reds softened to violets. The torches moved through the streets, with the tramp-tramp-tramp of marching feet. The fires were like the blood-gleam in an immense, black opal.

Came a bull-like roar of long-stemmed Mongol war trumpets; a beating of drums; a shrilling and wailing of fifes.

Here and there a watchman awoke, startled, frightened, picking up his steel-shod pike. What was it? A conflagration? Perhaps a tribal row of desert Bedawins drunk with hasheesh in some caravanserai? Revolt? Mutiny?

“Who goes there?”—the watchmen’s challenging questions as shadows came round the street corners with a crackle of naked steel.

They had no time to find the answer. Out of the dark in back of them—where these many hours Mongol spies had been watching them—leaped other shadows. The flash of curved Mongol daggers. Pikes clattered harmlessly to the ground. A sob and gurgle of death. Blood staining bright tunics, staining darkly the earth.

The next moment it seemed as if all Bagdad’s alleys and bazars and caravanserais were disgorging the flat-featured, yellow-skinned warriors of the North and the East, iron-capped, chain-armored, armed with lances and swords and battle-axes. A forest of oval-bladed, tall spears moved rapidly across the Square of the One-Eyed Jew. Other Mongols rushed out of houses and palaces where they had hired themselves out as servants.

A Babel of war cries rose, in Tartar and Mongol and harsh, guttural Manchu.

In companies of a hundred each, four abreast, they marched through Bagdad, with a steady, forward motion. Scarred, wind-beaten—stained with the blood of many battles, the mud of many bivouacs, but in their tramp the ringing rhythm of success, pennants and standards fluttering vivid brightness of device and colors above the dazzling glitter of tall spears.

Then, as always, with the scent and hope of loot, the Mongol ranks broke here and there as fists crashed against doors, as weapons pried open locks, as men rushed across thresholds to rob and kill.

Wong K’ai exchanged a quick word with the war captains.

“An hour’s looting! Then the attack against the palace!” He smiled with cruel amusement. “Wild dogs must be fed before they can be trained!”

They were excited shouts and queries as windows were thrown open. Householders leaned out. Heads were quickly withdrawn as battle-axes came whistling and whirling through the air.

“Allah! What was it? A band of robbers from the desert, setting at defiance the Caliph’s law? Bedawin raiders?

“Help! Help! Soldiers! Police! This is the Caliph’s town! Must we have our honest sleep disturbed by pulling, quarreling desert rats?”

Then, as the torches flared higher, bathing the streets in a sea of light, as steel-clad warriors invaded the houses:

“Oh—by the Prophet!—the Mongols! The Mongols!—God protect us!”

A shudder ran over Bagdad. The Mongols! The flat-nosed, yellow-skinned riders of the North! The terror of all Asia and half Europe! The Scourge of God! The dread warriors with the awe of whose name German and Russian mothers frightened their naughty children!

“Dear Lord God”—came a Moslem priest’s stammered prayer—“against the darkness of the night when it overtaketh me and against the Mongol scourge, I betake me for refuge to Allah, the Lord of Daybreak …

He had no time to finish the prayer. A squat, bow-legged Mongol captain rushed into the Mosque. His crooked sabre flashed away from the tassled cord that held it. The point of it gleamed like a cresset of evil passions. It descended. It cut across the priest’s neck with a dull, sickening whish-whish-whish. The priest fell backward with a soft, gurgling cry—his blood trickling slowly, staining God’s altar with splotches of rich crimson.

Arab soldiers tumbled out of their barracks, strapping on their weapons as they ran. They went down before the Mongol lances as ripe wheat before a reaper’s blade. The scourge passed on. Gates shook. Walls crumbled. The streets ran red with blood. Flames licked over roofs with yellow tongues.

They tore through the peaceful town with the swish of the sword, the scream and bray of war trumpets, the rasp of bamboo lance butts, the thud of broad blades; here and there like a scarlet typhoon of destruction; blazing up and down the streets and alleys with the leap of their lean knives; already, from desert and forest and mountain, the carrion-hawks wheeling and dipping to the feast and paralleling the Mongols’ progress on eager wings; looting, burning, killing.

“An easy thing to write about,” comments the ancient Arabic chronicle—“a horrible thing to picture. For the sabre was the only god whom these accursed, dog-faced Mongols worshipped. May their souls burn in the lowest depths of perdition for a thousand eternities to come!”

Looting. Burning. Killing.

Treasure smashed and torn and trampled on, because found useless or too heavy to carry away. Priceless rugs slashed. Priceless porcelain shivered to pieces. Priceless lives—of children and poets and philosophers—sacrificed to the god of the sabre. Broken doors. Gutted shops. Shivered walls. Huddled in frightened heaps, crawled into the darkness of cellars and cisterns, where the wounded, a remnant of the living, crazed with anguish and terror. Out in the open streets and alleys, was stench of festering flesh, loathsomeness, a crimson, sickening mush of what once had been useful, contented human life.

Ruins. Temples of God desecrated. Shaggy Tartar ponies stabled in the holiest of holies. An Empire lost in a night.

Death. Torture. Decay. Sacrilege. The Mongol’s historic mission before Islam tamed and civilized him. And, up in his room in the Caliph’s palace, the Mongol Prince looking out upon the doomed city of Bagdad and uttering the ancient boast of his dynasty:

“I am the enemy of god—of pity—and of mercy!”'

In the meantime, out in the streets, the captains were giving orders to stop the sack:

“To the palace! To the attack! Tomorrow you can continue your looting!”

They fell once more into military formation. Four abreast, they rolled through the streets of Bagdad, relentless, resistless, with the thunder of the drums, the bull-like roar of the long-stemmed trumpets, the sardonic shrilling of the fifes, the crackle of weapons, the yelling of savage, throaty war cries—with a sweeping, indomitable energy that raised the crunching, cruel soul of the Mongol scourge into something nearly magnificent.

On—the forest of lances! On—the dazzling glitter of tall spears! On—the fluttering of the battle flags! On—with the flames that licked over the Bagdad bazars peaking higher and higher, changing night into ruddy day, glinting on steel and iron with running white high lights, shimmering with gold and silver on keen-edged swords and armor.

They swarmed like locusts. They killed whatever was in their path. Thus Germany had known them, paying for defeat with the flower of its knighted chivalry on East Prussia’s and Silesia’s battlefields. Thus Russia and Poland had feared them, trampled into bloody mire beneath the feet of their small, shaggy ponies. Thus China and India and Hungary had wilted beneath their blight. Thus, time and again, they had drawn a crimson furrow across half the world. Thus, this day, Bagdad—and with Bagdad all Araby, all Islam—seemed doomed to fall under their pitiless yoke.

They marched down the broad avenue that led to the palace of the Caliph; marched clumsily—being men born and bred on horseback—but steadily. The high call of an ivory horn stabbed out; it was repeated from troop to troop; and at once they split into three columns. One column swung West to cut off the defenders should they try for retreat or sally. The second column flanked the great garden which surrounded the palace, made a living platform and staircase with the help of their steel-bossed, buffalo-hide arm shields, clambered up on the wall, jumped down the farther side. The third column, composed of picked Manchu shock troops, giants in size and strength, made direct for the steel front gate. It gave under their massed impetus as if it were brittle glass—and fear swept over the palace servants and slaves and eunuchs who, at the news of the Mongol attack, had been formed there to give battle.

They ran away, throwing down their weapons, with frenzied cries, pressing, pressing—fighting, killing each other in their mad haste to escape. A sea of black and brown and white—hands striking out crazily, futilely—voices bellowing puny defiance—other voices imploring for mercy—tearing screams as the Mongol spears went home—bodies falling, trampled, crushed.

The caliph’s bodyguard of noble Arabs rallied. They fought bravely. But the Mongol horde waved them aside as with a single, contemptuous gesture—killed them with that same gesture. On the battlements a few watchmen jumped into the fray. They were tumbled off the walls to be caught and impaled by the forest of lances below.

The Mongols poured into the palace.

Too late the Caliph had understood the Mongol Prince’s treachery. At first, like the city watchmen, like the Bagdad citizens roused from sleep, he had imagined that it was only a passing riot of Bedawin desertmen. Too late, now that he knew, accompanied by a handful of soldiers and by the Princes of India and Persia—poor little man, his spirit was willing though his flesh was decidedly over-weight—he rushed toward the Mongol Prince’s room to make him pay with his life.

Too late!

On the stairway they met the vanguard of the invaders; were pulled down; heard the Mongol Prince’s ironic command to his warriors as he stepped from his room:

“Do not harm them. For as to the Caliph, I shudder at the sacrilegious thought of killing my future father-in-law. And as to the descendant of Hindustan’s impotent gods and the descendant of Persia’s grease pots—why”—he laughed—“before I kill them I shall have them harnessed like horses to my chariot of victory, tomorrow, when I shall drive in triumph through the streets of Bagdad!”

To the Persian’s greater glory be it said that, in spite of his fear, he broke into a flood of abuse, calling the other every bad name he could think of:

“Traitor! Pig! Dog-faced Mongol barbarian! Seller of hog’s tripe! Descendant of monkeys!”

More of the sort. Nor did the Mongol interrupt him. He waited until lack of breath caused the Persian to stop. Then he smiled.

“You are braver than I imagined, O great sausage!” he replied. “Very well. Your tortures tomorrow shall be lengthy, novel, and exquisite—to let me see how brave you really are!”

Then, at his order, they dragged the captives away, while he returned to his room, closing the door.

From the outside, strident cries and yells drifted in as the Mongol swords leaped to their grim work.

He smiled. Then he frowned. He wished to be alone, quite alone with his pride and his coiling thoughts. So he closed the windows and the heavy iron shutters. The noises from the outside ceased. Only a dim memory of sounds was left in gliding, vibrant tone waves—very soft, very far away, not at all like the echo of battle and death.

There was now in the room a cloak of enormous, breath-clogging stillness. Crushing, unhuman stillness.

For a few seconds he stood quite motionless, thoughts flashing and zigzagging through his brain, deeply furrowing his yellow, stark devil’s-mask of a face.

Then he walked to a taboret on which was a narrow, square package wrapped in silk of imperial yellow, embroidered with the five-clawed dragon. He took off the wrapping; took out a dozen tiny, very thin tablets of emerald-green, transparent jade inlaid in gold with a succession of Mandarin hieroglyphics. These tablets were the ancestral tablets of his clan, reaching back into the dim mists of antiquity when his forefathers were still wild shepherd chiefs near the shores of Lake Baikal, in Central Asia. Generation for generation, century for century, victory for victory, also occasional defeats when the Mongols were driven back into the steppes, thence to issue again, a generation later, with renewed vigor and savagery—generation for generation, the history of his clan was gold-engraved there on the smooth jade tablets.

He bowed before the tablets with slow, proper ceremony. He filled a bronze bowl with black incense powder, lit it, and watched the scented smoke curl up in opalescent spirals. From the ceiling lamp a yellow ray of light stabbed down, cutting across his face as clean as with a knife, emphasizing the prominent cheek bones, the oblique, heavy-lidded eyes, the thin lips, heightening the expression of stony relentlessness on his features, yet, too, strangely, incongruously, lending to them something akin to spiritual ecstasy. He stared at the coiling incense clouds. Through the whirling, perfumed smoke he saw the green glitter of his ancestral tablets; saw there his own aim and the aim of his race—like a blood-red, challenging scrawl across the history of all the world.

Again he bowed, with hands clasped across his chest. Then he spoke. It was a prayer to his race, his tribe, his clan, his dynasty, himself.

A prayer. Too, a grim prohecy [sic]:

“As long as water runs and the wind blows as long as fire burns and the seas toss, so long shall the Mongol race endure. It runs its way like a shuttle through all the broad lands of the earth, waving an eternal, unbreakable fabric. Time and again, in the past, the Mongol power has gone down before the gathered strength of other races, snatching at and taking the luring jewel of dominion. Time and again we returned to the attack; we shivered the fetters; we enslaved the enslavers. Time and again, in the future, the Mongol power shall go down before the gathered strength of other races, snatching at and taking the luring jewel of power. Time and again we shall return to the attack; we shall shiver the fetters; we shall enslave the enslavers.” His voice rose shrilly, triumphantly. “Yellow, toothy wolves we, of our mothers’ bearing! Never shall we eat dirt to stay our craving! Ours is the greatest ambition, the greatest call, the greatest mission on earth. We cleanse with the swish of the sword when it is red. And the end is not yet; will not be for many centuries; never will be. For ours is the only pure race on earth. Our race is undying, eternal. The Emperors of Germany and of Russia, the Kings of Poland and Hungary, the Dukes of Lithuania and the Volga Tribes, the Chiefs and Khans and Princes of half the world have gone down before the shining Mongol sword. Thus, in the future, Kings and Nations and Republics shall kowtow before our curved scimitars and kiss the shadows of our horses’ feet. Time and again! Time and again! For ours is the vigor and the energy and the subtle brain and the harsh, ruthless will. Ours is forever the mighty, ever resurgent resurrection of race. All that is welded together by the rest of mankind we shall again and again tear asunder. All that has been built by the rest of mankind we shall again and again overthrow. All the weak deities invented and worshipped by the rest of mankind we shall again and again send down to oblivion and ridicule. For we are the Scourge of God!”

He bowed once more before the jade tablets; then turned as the door opened to admit Weng K’ai.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “I shall elevate the Princess Zobeid to the dragon throne. She is of foreign race. I know. But the Mongol race is stronger. My great-grandfather married a German Princess captured in war, but the son of this union, my grandfather, was pure Mongol. My grandfather married an Indian Princess stolen by Tartar raiders, but my father was pure Mongol. My father married a Persian Princess, sent to him as a tribute by the Shah-in-Shah, but I am pure Mongol. I shall marry an Arab Princess. But my sons shall be pure Mongol.”

He paused; went on:

“Tell Zobeid to prepare for the wedding. Let it be a wedding after the Mongol manner. Bestow on every one of my soldiers a horse, a slave, and three gold pieces. Bestow on every one of my war captains nine times nine white stallions, nine times nine precious pearls, nine times nine crimson robes of honor, nine times nine pieces of gold, nine times nine rolls of silk, and nine times nine female slaves. Have all the astrologers, sorcerers, soothsayers, and witch doctors fed at my expense. Let there be a tinkling of bells and burning of incense and chanting of songs throughout Bagdad. See that all the Moslem priests be crucified at the altars of their impotent Allah. Have all the Christian and Jewish merchants’ teeth pulled one by one, so that their cries may make sweet music. Give to the Princess Zobeid as my wed ding present the Kingdom of Tartary, the Chieftainship of Outer Mongolia, the Viceroyalty of Manchuria, the Island of Wak, and the revenues from nineteen thousand villages and cities in Russia and Siberia. Tell her that I shall confer upon her the charming and elegant title of the Model of Ten Thousand Female Generations to Come!”

“Listen is obey, O Great Dragon!” murmured Wong K’ai and withdrew, while the Prince of the Mongols walked over to the window and opened it.

He looked out.

Gradually the loom of the night lifted; the fires set here and there by the looting Mongol warriors had died out; and the smoke veil which had covered the town twisted up in baroque spirals and tore into gauzelike arabesques.

He gave a sensuous, throaty exclamation of triumph.

For down there at his feet Bagdad became more and more distinct every minute. There stretched hundreds of flat, dazzling white roof tops, richly adorned towers, fairy-like turrets, and hell-shaped Arab domes. Under the rays of the young sun the sloping roof of a Mosque in the middle of the city burned like the plumage of a gigantic peacock with every mysterious blend of blue and green and purple and heliotrope. The whole was buried in flaunting gardens gay with many-colored trees and shrubs and bushes, with crotons and mangoes, with roses and mellingtonias, with poinsettias and begonia creepers.

Bagdad! Bagdad was his! His the dominion over Araby and—soon, soon—over all Islam! His the subjection of these stiff necked Arabs, these stiff-necked Semites! His the worship of their grief-stricken sobbing and wailing that beat up from city and palace in immense tone waves. …

Yet in the palace there was one that night who neither wailed nor sobbed nor complained. It was Zobeid, although there were Mongol warriors in her very bedroom, watching her for fear that she might commit suicide.

But there was no such thought in her brain. Huddled close against Zemzem, she whispered to her the reason for her serene fortitude of soul.

“Ahmed is coming!” she said. “Aye! He is coming! I saw it in the magic crystal!”

“But he is alone, Heaven-Born! What can one man do against the Mongol horde?”

“Have you ever been in love, Zemzem?” smiled Zobeid.

“Oh, yes. Three or four times.”

“I do not believe you.”

“Why not, Heaven-Born?”

“Because, if you had really been in love, you would know that the loved one can do anything—anything and everything. Good night, Zemzem!”

And she slept quietly, fearlessly, with neither dream nor nightmare, while down the road from Terek el-Bey the Thief of Bagdad spurred his great black stallion through the night, through the green and yellow of young morning, at last arriving at Bagdad and demanding entrance with a loud voice.

A yellow-skinned, flat-nosed, iron-capped warrior appeared on the wall and looked down.

“Go away!” he said in his loutish Mongol speech. “The gates of Bagdad are closed until after the wedding.”

“Whose wedding?”

“The wedding of Cham Sheng, the Great Dragon, and Zobeid, daughter of the Caliph.”

The man withdrew; returned as Ahmed leaned from his horse, rattling at the gate, beating against it with the hilt of his sword, shouting noisily and insolently:

“Let me in, let me in, dog-snouted Mongol pig! Hey, there, let me in, O most unbeautiful yellow pimple bereft of all the virtues!”

The other raised his battle-axe threateningly.

“I gave you fair words,” he said. “Now I give you fair warning. If you do not go away, immediately, quietly, like a decent lad, by the tribal gods of my clan, I shall …”

“Pah!” sneered Ahmed. “Powerless gods—the gods of your clan! Swinish gods for a swinish race! Pot-bellied, yellow-skinned, slit eyed, ridiculous, indecent Mongol gods! Wait! Hold your hand a second”—as the battle-axe was about to come down whistling through the air—“and I will show you what mine own God can do! Allah, the One, the All-Powerful! Look, Mongol pig! Behold the blessed miracle!”

And, the thought popping into his brain, his fingers obeying the thought, he dipped them deeply into the magic silver box that was filled to the brim with the tiny seeds—the wishing seeds—the seeds from the Tree of Righteous hut Unfulfilled Desires.

He sprinkled the seeds thickly on the ground.

He spoke hurriedly, fervently:

“O Allah! I want soldiers! Mounted, armed soldiers! Brave Moslem soldiers! Fearless soldiers, Arabs and Turks and Moors and Egyptians—soldiers from all the lands of Islam—to protect Bagdad from Mongol desecration—to save the ancient city—to save Zobeid! Soldiers I want—numerous as the waves of the sea, the sand grains of the desert!”

And suddenly the Mongol captain’s sneer changed into a stare of incredulity, a grimace of surprise, fear, horror, as, springing from the ground like great flowers, there rose an immense army of mounted Moslem fighting-men, men of a dozen races, brandishing their weapons.