SWORD OF KHAN- PART III
"O people, know that you have committed great sins, and the great ones among you have committed these sins.
If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the Scourge of God.
If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you."
Genghis Khan to the people of Bukhara, 1220
Vaggie awakened to the third dream, and beheld the most beautiful city she had ever seen...
Azure shining domes and palaces and libraries and gardens near the Zeravshan river... A city of a thousand wonders...
And, once again, she remembered how did it come to this, like in the account of the life of Genghis Khan the once Baron Ungern had given...
...
It had been fourteen years since the great quriltai; it was the Year of the Dragon...
...and the Mongol armies, without having completed the war against the Jin Dynasty, had marched into the fabled lands of the distant west, beyond many mountains and deserts...
...to fight a war started by the greed of the governor of Otrar, the wicked Inal-khan. He had welcomed into his city a Mongol caravan, over a hundred and fifty people, who brought riches from faraway China. For that treasure Inal-khan traded the fate of his people! But he knew his king, the Shah Mohammed II of Khwarezm, had grown weary of the power of the Mongols to the north-east of his kingdom, and was preparing for war. Therefore, he sent a missive to the Sultan in which he accused the Mongol merchants of being spies. Mohammed II thus gave the governor freedom to deal with them as he saw fit...
The whole caravan was massacred. As news of this reached Mongolia, Genghis Khan thought the governor had acted on his own, and sent three envoys to Mohammed's court with a letter in which the Great Khan, to avoid war, demanded compensation in the form of the governor's head.
Genghis Khan and Mohammed II both ruled an empire they had recently acquired with many years of conquests. Inal-khan was a cousin to the Shah's powerful mother, Tarkan-hatun, and the king needed the support of his mother's Turkic clan to bring stability to his newly formed empire. Hence the Mongol envoys were promptly hanged.
Shah Mohammed had expected to face a Mongol raid, one that would leave the countryside devastated before the invaders foolishly decided to lay siege to Samarkand, a city that could endure a siege for years. Having distributed his troops inside his major cities as garrisons, he would have sent the garrisons of Bukhara and Urgench to the aid of Samarkand, thus crushing the Mongols there.
Little did he know that Genghis Khan would lead against him the greatest and best organized army the lands of Khwarezm had ever seen...
In the preparedness of the Mongol army one could see how the many lessons learned over the years of war in China had been taken full advantage of. Each and every Mongol warrior was meticulously equipped with an array of tools, even needle and thread, and each wore a solid raw silk shirt; instead of being torn when hit by an arrow, the silk fabric goes deep into the wound, thus allowing the removal even of a broken arrowhead- something made possible, of course, by learned Chinese physicians.
In addition to the physicians, the army had engineers tasked with the meticolous disassembly, transportation and reassembly of vast siege engines. And then came the most breathtaking wonders of Chinese science; the Hu dun pao, a cannon, and the Meng huo yòu guì, a flamethrower.
The Mongol forces were divided in three, later four distinct armies; Giagatai and Ogodei's army arrived on the Syr Darya and besieged Otrar, Joci's army attacked the valley of Ferghana in the east and Giebe's army took Nishapur in the south. Having provided enough distractions to the Khwarezmian forces, Genghis Khan and his youngest son Tolui with the main army left Otrar and marched westward through 300 miles of the Kyzyl-kum desert...
Nothing should have been able to survive the journey, let alone the army headed for Bukhara! With the fall of the city on the fourth day of siege, the garrison in Urgench was now cut off from Samarkand; with one tactical masterstroke, Mohammed's plan to rescue the city had fallen apart before the Mongols were even in sight of Samarkand...
As the Mongols entered Bukhara, Genghis Khan rode toward what seemed to be the grandest palace in the city...
"Is this the house of the Shah?" asked the conqueror of the world.
Someone responded that it was the Great Mosque, the house of the Authority.
There the Mongol warriors fed their horses, and gloriously trampled under infidel boots the holy books of the Authority...
...
Following the course of the Zerafshan river, the Mongols came at long last before the walls of Samarkand...
And now Vaggie was there. For two days she rode in wide circles around the city, observing from afar the mighty walls, the moats, the many towers and the iron gates. She thought of the memories she now had of the siege of Beijing, that lasted for years...
And among the orchards of peach trees and apricot trees, the siege works begun...
For two days the city was relentlessly bombarded with incendiary projectiles, while the Mongols prepared to fight the city garrison, expecting them to launch a sortie and to give much more of a fight that the garrison of Bukhara had done...
And on the third day, the sortie came...
About 50.000 Turk and Tajik warriors, nearly half of the city's defenders, marched into the open field...
Like at the Battle of the Thirteen Sides, Vaggie led one of the wings of the Mongol army, while Tolui led the center.
An advanced guard departed from Tolui's formation, engaging the Turkic and Tajik cavalry before retreating. It was but the beginning of the tactical false retreat, a stratagem that had already worked spectacularly against the Tangut army of Weiming linggong on the way from Wolohai to Yinchuan. But this time the enemy commander, suspecting it was a feigned retreat, hesitated...
'If only we can make them advance into our trap...' Vaggie thought, '...we can quickly end this siege!'
This had to be the third test, Vaggie was sure of it; like in the battle exercises, back when she was a cadet in the Exorcists...
As she observed the enemy army from a distance, she spotted something in the rear...
War elephants! Behemots from India the Mongols had never seen before!
And Vaggie had a plan...
...
Taking a smaller, faster detachment of horsemen with her, she rode all around the enemy's right wing, until she was behind them.
As they drew close to the elephants, the horses became alarmed and swerved, and started turning back against their masters' commands!
"Dammit!" Vaggie had not considered that the horses had not seen elephants before either!
They were spotted by a mahout (an elephant's driver) and the enemies with their Indian beasts turned around to face them.
The monsters were now marching toward them!
"FALL BACK!" Vaggie ordered, "I'LL SLOW THEM DOWN!"
Vaggie saw one elephant bigger than the others, carrying a tower and a standard bearer...
She rode toward it, trough a hail of arrows, holding her spear...
'Here goes nothing...'
She threw her spear.
A sickening crack!
The behemot fell stumbling forward, destroying the tower, killing the mahout and all the archers instantly...
...the point of a spear stuck in its montrous forehead...
...sending the entire elephant formation into disarray...
"NOW!"
The Mongol horsemen started their own barrage of arrows! As thick skinned as the monsters were, they still had eyes...
As they felt the arrowheads pelting them like rain, they turned tail and fled, and nothing on earth would induce them to turn and face the Mongols! So off they sped with such a noise and uproar one would have believed the world was coming to an end!
They were now plunging through rows of friendly soldiers, and nothing could stop them!
The panicked Turks and Tajiks started running confusedly from the elephants...
...right into the charging Mongol cavalry!
...
By the end of the third day of siege, nearly half of the defenders of Samarkand had been massacred.
The following day, a delegation of imams came out of the city, offering the surrender of Samarkand; in exchange for the city of a thousand wonders, 50.000 men and their families would be safely escorted outside.
On the fifth day of siege, March 19, Samarkand fell.
And with the greatest cities of the fabled west in Mongol hands, the way was now open to the Mongol hordes; the way to the conquest of further Wests beyond...
...
Vaggie awoke to the dream one last time...
She was now astride a horse on a sandy plain north of Yinchuan, near the Yellow River...
There was another with her.
An elderly horseman, perhaps in his early sixties; he was tall, his forehead wide, his beard long and thin. His eyes looked weary... and tired above all else.
"Come and see, my friend..." he said.
Vaggie's eyes widened as she heard that voice...
"Is that... you?"
He smiled.
"I would have asked you the same thing... But now I know that you are the one I've been waiting for..."
"You... waiting for me?"
"Indeed... There's but one more chapter of my story that you must know. After the fall of Samarkand, when the time came to pursue Shah Mohammed's son, Jalal ad-Din, in the savage lands of Afghanistan all the way to the Indus River, I felt the weight of my many years, for I had seen over fifty springs...
I had heard of a wise man, truly a man of Tien, who lived a life of contemplation in a remote monastery in China. His name was Chang Chun.
I sent two of my trusted advisors, Ja'far and Liu Zhonglu, to the monastery with a letter in which I pleaded the holy man to come speak to me. He travelled to Samarkand and from there he reached my ordu, south of the Hindu-Kush near Pershawar, after a journey of ten thousand li...
When he arrived before me, I foolishly asked him if he knew the secret of the elixir of eternal life. He didn't have it, but he told me that I, the conqueror of the world, truly had not sought immortality for myself but for the Empire I had built. That was the fear that prompted me to seek the advise of Chang Chun. Fear that I had not built an Empire everlasting...
But he told me of a prophecy; he told me of another that would come long after me. He told of the Chosen One who will one day complete the work I started; the one who is destined to unite the peoples of the Earth against the Enemy..."
Vaggie was speechless.
"I... he spoke of me? And this prophecy was..." she paused, "...comforting to you?"
"It wasn't just the prophecy, of course..." he smiled, "...I saw with greater clarity, past the troubled thoughts that had weighted on my heart, that I was leaving the Empire I had built in the capable hands of my sons... and of my grandsons, destined to great things, whom I was fortunate enough to meet in my old age..."
...
Vaggie would not have believed it, not in a thousand years...
Could it be that such a legacy of emperors and conquerors, a legacy beyond compare, was now passed down... to her?
She remembered why she had embarked on this Quest; why she had agreed to face every trial...
"I'll do it for Charlie! She is the Savior, all of this is for the sake of her destiny, not mine... I'll be her armor..."
"No," the Great Khan replied, "you'll be much more than that; you'll be a Rider in your own right. The bond you share with your Princess is more powerful than you know...
...and as long as you are each other's armor, you shall prevail!"
...
In that moment, Vaggie felt like her many fears and doubts no longer weighted on her heart... Like her quest was truly complete...
...
"It's time for me to leave, I'm afraid..." said Genghis Khan, "...would you go on one last ride with an old man?"
And they rode together onto the endless plain, facing northeast...
...and she glimpsed in the gleaming horizon- where the shadow of the dome of pleasure floated midway on the waves; where was heard the mingled measure from the fountain and the caves- the shining domes of long-lost and faraway Xanadu...
...but Genghis Khan was no longer by her side to see them.
His breath growing heavier, his heart failing him, he had fallen from his horse, dead.
Open now were the golden gates of Shangri-La, for the Horseman had returned to pastures everlasting...
The son of Hoelun and Yesugei baatur: Temujin, Khan of Khans, Second Horseman.
...
Vaggie awoke on the cavern's floor.
The toxic fumes had been dispersed, like by a magic wind...
As she got back on her feet, she glimpsed a crystalline light ahead, deeper into the cave...
She knew the light beckoned her to go, to find the prize at the end of her Quest, at the center of the labyrinth...
...
A suffused, mysterious glow came from a magic crystal on the ceiling of the vast cavern...
The mystical lights danced on the numberless shining treasures, on the gold and the amber and the silk and the rubies and sapphires...
The treasures of a hundred kingdoms; the treasures of the richest cities of the earth, of Beijing and of Bukhara and of Samarkand!
And in the center of it all, an exquisitly engraved granite sarchophagus...
And lying on it was...
...The Sword of Empires!
The Sword of Power!
The hallowed Blade of heroes older than history, already ancient when the mammoth hunters walked this land!
...
Vaggie walked out of the cave into the evening light...
As they witnessed her appeareance and beheld the Sword of Empires in her hand, every Mongol bowed before her...
...like one bows before a hero who has become the Enlightened One, Victorious in Strife!
The Great Khan smiled, knowing that mysterious are the ways of the Great Blue Sky...
Vaggie held the Sword high above her head...
...and it blazed blood-red in the Mongolian sunset!
She beheld the primeval glyphs on the ancestral Sword, and she read aloud those timeless words...
She who wields this Sword and carries the Flame of Leadership in her Heart
Will unite the fractured people before her
And forge them into a mighty Empire
For so long as she lives.
Helluva President will return.
Thanks to all who have followed me on this journey, it means the world to me.
I'll see you again for the next chapter of this epic tale of Presidential proportions!