Strategos: Born in the Borderlands

8. Glory

War horns keened across the Seljuk horde. The Daylamid city of Isfahan was to be theirs today, bringing to an end the year-long siege. The ranks roared their holy battle cry as the elite, iron-clad ghulam cavalry rumbled into place on the flanks, making the ground quiver. In the sweltering heat haze, the bowmen lining the baked city walls appeared to shrink at the noise and at the thousands of Seljuk banners that hovered outside the city, the horizontal bow emblem still and stern in the dead air.

At the centre of the Seljuk horde, Sultan Tugrul was saddled on a white stallion. He sat poised with rigid majesty, grey-flecked hair curling from under his ornate helmet, the crafted nose guard adding to his austerity. Now in his fifty seventh year, he had united the tribes and led the Seljuk people from the steppe and on to glory, toppling the Ghaznavid Empire. Now he was in the cusp of controlling all Persia. Beside him, saddled on a fawn-dappled gelding was his young nephew, Muhammud.

‘They fight for you, Falcon!’ Muhammud enthused.

Tugrul looked round, letting a wistful smile touch his stern expression for just a moment. ‘I command them, but they fight for Allah!’ He noticed his nephew’s gaze was fixed on one point on the city walls and followed it; a Daylamid bowman waited there in silence, impotent to change the storm that was coming for him. Beneath the iron helmet of the bowman, he could see only the glimmer of a nose-guard and shadow for his face, a bronze tipped crossbow resting on the wall. He sensed the question forming on Muhammud’s lips.

‘If you take the city, Uncle, what will you do with the people?’

Tugrul laughed at this and his officers around him joined in. ‘When we take the city, Muhammud, when,’ Tugrul replied. At that moment the ground began to shake and the groaning and snapping of breaking rocks filled the air behind them.

Muhammud twisted in his saddle: the trebuchets at the back of the ranks were dwarfed as twelve war towers on gargantuan wheels rumbled towards them, swaying, the ranks parting to let them through. The timber walls were featureless but at the top, a squat enclosure was perched, covered to the front and sides. Hundreds of heavily armoured akhi spearmen would be packed in there, waiting to burst onto the battlements when the towers reached the walls. Armoured engineers hung from the back, toppling buckets of water down the sides of the towers, soaking the wood to protect it from fire arrows.

Tugrul smiled at the eagerness of his protégé. ‘The city takers will give us the walls, after the trebuchets have cleared the battlements.’ He looked back to the bowman atop the wall, just as the first trebuchet bucked and loosed a mass of rock, which flew over the heads of the Seljuk army. The rock exploded through the battlements. The army roared at this as the dust cleared and the gouged battlement was revealed, spattered with red stains where the defenders had stood. He saw his nephew shudder.

‘If there had been a field battle, Muhammud,’ Tugrul leant forward to speak in his nephew’s ear, ‘many men would have died, probably in a single day. They would have earned glory and the death would have ceased after that, but these people choose to shun the glory of meeting my army in the field and instead hide behind their walls. A year of famine and pestilence and then inglorious defeat is their reward. Every man inside those walls will die today. It has to be that way; otherwise all our enemies will barricade themselves away like this. A field battle is glorious and swift. Remember this.’

‘Then why do you choose to end this with a siege on this day?’

‘Because, Muhammud, victory today will end the Daylamid threat. What is left of their armies will march under our banner. Then we march against our next foe and our next again. . until the Seljuk people and her lands form an empire that none can threaten, dominating this ancient land.’

‘What happens when we achieve this, Uncle?’

Tugrul grew a sly grin at this. His nephew was thinking ahead already. ‘Then we cast our net ever wider; there are two fruits ripe for the picking. The Fatimids to the south and ancient Byzantium to the west. They are still strong right now, but one of these proud civilisations will flinch at our presence. Flinch, and then fall.’

Another volley of trebuchet fire exploded against the walls, huge sections crumbling to dust leaving yawning chasms in the bulwark. The defenders were impotent to retaliate with only short-range bows and bolt throwers that barely reached the Seljuk front ranks, instead concentrating their fire on the city-takers that now rumbled close to the walls. One of the towers stumbled into a spike pit that had been dug to trap infantry, its structure shattering and scattering hundreds of men from the ladders and enclosure on the top, dashing them on the ground, cutting their screams short. Another tower was riven by a bolt that caught the structure in the corner, splitting the timber walls, which fell away to reveal the akhi packed inside — easy prey for the Daylamid bowmen who fired volley after volley into their mass. With a chorus of screaming, the tower slowed to a halt and then toppled forward with the weight of the dead inside. The remaining ten towers carried on relentlessly until a great wail rose up from inside the city as they clunked into place by the battlements, peppered with arrow shafts but undamaged.

Muhammud watched the carnage with a puzzled look. ‘Byzantium; that is the empire of the western god?’

Tugrul shook his head. ‘Of the one and only God. Byzantium holds on to a tradition of invincibility and I would relish the chance to teach them of their own mortality. But it will be a long journey, one of many years, like our longest shatranj duel. . we are positioning our pieces now to fortify our homeland before we can strike out at these distant empires. By that time you will be a grown man, Muhammud, and you will not shudder at scenes like those you will see today before you today. Men will revere you and you will bring glory to Allah. Our destiny is foretold: glory waits on us!’

With that Tugrul raised his banner and bellowed, spotting the Seljuk banners flooding the city battlements. ‘The walls are ours. Forward!’

The war horns sounded and as one, the Seljuk army surged forward like a tide.

‘Watch, Muhammud.’ Tugrul twisted his nephew’s head to face the execution.

Muhammud shivered at the screams of the Daylamid prince, whose face had turned pale at the sight of the wide, squat and roughly hewn stake set up in the square at the centre of Isfahan. The dipping sun cast a long shadow from the execution device as two akhi spearmen grappled the prince’s shoulders and marched him forward. The crowd of Daylamid citizens — the women and children who had survived three days of butchery since the city had fallen — and Seljuk conquerors watched in a near silence.

‘He has to die. If he lives, he presents a threat of rebellion. Thus he must die, and in a public forum so that his people will know what awaits them should they take up his mantle.’

Muhammud kept his expression stern. He knew his uncle was right, despite the horror of the spectacle. He shook free of Tugrul’s grip. ‘I understand. Do not treat me like a boy, Uncle.’

Tugrul nodded with a faint hint of a smile. ‘You are growing into the young man I knew you would. One day they will give you a name to match your greatness. To become what I know you can, you must shun all doubt. Know you are invincible and do not squirm at the brutality of war.’ He looked wistfully towards the west. ‘I once had a protégé who could have been great, yet he let feebleness guide him, preferring to shun the reality of war.’

‘What happened to him, Uncle?’

‘He went west, to settle in Byzantine lands,’ Tugrul snorted, ‘as some kind of statement of his pacifism. He could have been great, but he was meek, Muhammud, meek like your father.’

Muhammud’s skin crawled in shame. His father, Chagri, was content to rule as a weak sibling, defending and consolidating in the wake of Tugrul’s conquests. He loved his father but felt shame at the contrast between him and Tugrul. He knew from the first time he rode with the armies that it was his uncle’s path in life he wanted to follow.

Yet his own actions in proving himself to Tugrul caused him far more shame. He remembered the old slave, a quiet and unassuming man, happy to receive reward from Muhammud and repentant after punishment. One day, Tugrul had called Muhammud to the palace rooftop, and there he found the slave kneeling, weeping in the centre of a circle of his uncle’s trusted men. Tugrul had announced to his men that Muhammud would one day lead them to ultimate glory, then he had handed his nephew a knife. Tugrul had roared that Muhammud would now show his ruthlessness by executing the slave. A year had passed since that day and he could still feel the warmth of the blood spilling over his hands, the confusion in the slave’s eyes, staring up at his young master.

He looked up at Tugrul, realising he hated and loved his uncle with every breath. ‘I will never shirk glory,’ he spoke sternly.

Tugrul’s expression remained stony.

Then a groan of terror sounded from the centre of the square.

The two akhi spearmen strained to push the prince forward towards the waist-high wooden stake; the man, who that morning had been a royal member of the Daylamid Dynasty, began to claw at his fine-skinned face, throwing laments to the sky and begging his previous subjects for help.

Finally, the two spearmen got each of the prince’s legs either side of the stake. They looked up to Tugrul, who nodded. The prince’s eyes bulged and he mouthed silent pleas now as he was pushed down by the shoulders. A ripping of clothing and then a cracking of bone and sinew was all there was to be heard as they pushed him down further and further, the stake impaling his rectum and crunching through his gut, then parting his organs. Finally, his legs were splayed out on the ground, the tip of the stake resting somewhere in his chest cavity.

Muhammud refused to look away as the prince’s breathing grew shallow, blood running from his mouth, eyes, nose and ears. But the man was very much alive, and he would be for the rest of the day and most of the night until his heart grew too weak to pump blood around his horribly compacted and distorted body.

‘Now gouge out his eyes!’ Tugrul barked.

Muhammud did not flinch.

This was the other side of glory.