Hulegu reached out and took a firm grip on one of the caliph’s jowls, shaking him gently.
‘Are you certain?’ he asked.
‘I swear it,’ the caliph responded. He stepped away from the insulting grip as Hulegu spoke again to one of the Mongol warriors.
‘Tell General Kitbuqa to begin burning the city,’ he said. The man ran back up the steps and al-Mustasim watched him go, his face twisting in panic.
‘No! Very well, there is a store of gold hidden in the garden ponds. That is all. I give you my word.’
‘It is too late for that now,’ Hulegu said regretfully. ‘I asked you to make an accurate tally of the tribute and you did not. You have brought this on yourself, O caliph, and upon your city.’
The caliph drew a dagger from the folds of his robe and tried to attack, but Hulegu merely stepped aside and let his guards intervene, knocking the weapon from the man’s fleshy fingers. Hulegu picked it up, nodding to himself.
‘I asked you to disarm and you did not,’ he said. ‘Take him to a small room and keep him prisoner while we work. I am tired of his wind and promises.’
It was no easy task to drag the caliph’s bulk up the stairs, so Hulegu left his guards to it while he walked inside the vault to inspect what he had won. Kitbuqa knew what to do. He and Hulegu had set their plans weeks before. The only difficulty had been in securing Baghdad’s treasures before they destroyed the city.
The winter was mild in that region and Kublai’s tumans settled in around their new lands, secure in their gers. From records of Tsubodai’s Russian campaigns, Kublai knew winter was the best time to launch an attack, but so far to the south the natural Mongol advantage in cold-weather fighting was almost nullified. Armies still moved through the cold seasons and he could not be assured of a respite from warfare. His enemies must have known the same discomfort. The Mongols had entered their lands and no one knew where they would strike next.
Kublai had expected to fight for every step across Sung territory, but after the first battle, it almost seemed as if he were being ignored. Kunming city had opened its gates to him without a struggle, then Qujing and Qianxinan. He wondered if a sense of shock and effrontery had paralysed the Sung emperor. It had been centuries since anyone had last launched a conquest of their lands, but the lessons of the Chin would surely have been hard to ignore. If Kublai had been in power, he would have armed his entire population for all-out war, forcing millions of men against the Mongol war machine until it was ground down to nothing. He still feared exactly that. His only comfort was that the Yunnan region was isolated by a vast range of hills and mountains from the rest of Sung territory. To reach a major Sung city, his maps revealed broken land for two hundred miles, with no detail. Kublai fretted at every passing week as he sent men and money to locate the silver mines of the Sung emperor. It took far longer than he had hoped. Many of his scouts came in empty-handed, or with false leads that wasted time and energy. As two months passed without success, he was forced to head east into the first hills, leaving small groups of warriors in his pacified cities to ensure supplies continued to flow.
Ten tumans and his host of camp followers moved slowly across the land. Kublai had given Uriang-Khadai standing orders to buy food rather than take it, but the result was that his small treasury dwindled visibly. The orlok had insisted on a meeting to point out the idiocy in leaving Chin silver with peasant villages, but Kublai refused to discuss it and sent him back to the tumans without satisfaction. He knew he took too much pleasure in baiting the older man, but he would not explain himself to one who would never understand what he was trying to do. Mountain towns large and small were left intact behind the Mongol ranks and the coins had begun to flow month by month, so that the lowest unranked warrior could be heard to jingle when he trotted his mount. They carried the Chin coins on leather thongs around their necks or hanging from their belts like ornaments. The novelty of it had kept them quiet while they waited to see what such coins would buy them in the Sung cities. Only Uriang-Khadai refused his monthly payment, saying that Kublai would not make a merchant of him, not while he kept his rank. Under the orlok’s angry stare, Kublai had been tempted to strip that rank from him, but he had resisted, knowing it would have been from spite. Uriang-Khadai was a competent commander and Kublai needed all the ones he had.
The going was slow, though there were paths through the hills. There were no great mountains, just a distant horizon of peaks and troughs made green with heavy rain. The drizzle lasted for days at a time, turning the clay into sticky clods that slowed them all further and bogged down the carts. They trudged and rode onwards, the women and children growing thin as the herds were butchered to keep the men strong. The grazing was the only good thing about the trek and Kublai spent his evenings in a leaking ger with Chabi and Zhenjin, listening to Yao Shu reading aloud from the poetry of Omar Khayyam. At every town, Kublai asked for news of soldiers or mines. Such remote places rarely had anyone who had been to the cities and he was relieved when his scouts called him to the farm of a retired Sung soldier named Ong Chiang. Faced with armed warriors, Ong Chiang had discovered he knew a great deal. The ex-soldier told Kublai of the city of Guiyang, which was barely forty miles from an imperial barracks and a silver mine. It was not a coincidence that the two things went together, he said. A thousand soldiers lived and worked in a town which existed only to support the local mines. Ong Chiang had been stationed there for part of his career and he spoke with relish of the harsh discipline, showing them a hand with just two fingers and thumb left on it to make his point. To be born in the towns around Guiyang was to die in the mines, he said. It was a poor place to live, but it produced great wealth. It was just possible that in all his life Ong Chiang had never had such an attentive audience. He settled back in his small home, while Kublai listened to every word.
‘You saw the soil being brought to the surface, then heated?’
‘In huge furnaces,’ Ong Chiang replied, lighting his pipe as he spoke and sucking appreciatively at the long stem. ‘Furnaces that roar all day so that the workers go deaf after just a few years. I never wanted to get close to those things, but I was just there to guard them.’
‘And you said they dig up lead …’
‘Lead ore, mixed with the silver. They’re found together, though I don’t know why. The silver is a pure metal and the lead can be melted off. I saw them pouring ingots of silver at the site and we had to work to make sure the miners didn’t steal even a few shavings of it.’
He launched into an anecdote about a man trying to swallow sharp pieces of silver that made Kublai feel ill. He suspected the Sung veteran knew little more than he did himself about the actual process, but in his rambling speech, he gave away many useful details. The mine at Guiyang was clearly a massive undertaking, a town that existed only for the purpose of digging ore. Kublai had been imagining something on a smaller scale, but Ong Chiang talked of thousands of workers, hammering and shovelling day and night to feed the emperor’s coffers. He boasted of at least seven other mines in Sung lands, which Kublai had to dismiss as fantasy. His own people worked two rich seams, but Kublai had never visited the sites. To think of eight of them being hollowed out, their ores made into precious coins, was a vision of wealth and power he could hardly take in.
At last the man ran out of wind and settled into silence, made all the more comfortable by a flask of airag Kublai had produced from his deel robe. He rose and Ong Chiang smiled toothlessly at him.
‘You have silver enough to pay a guide?’ he said. Kublai nodded and the man rose with him, reaching out to jerk his arm up and down. ‘I’ll do it then. You won’t find the mine without a guide.’
‘What about your farm, your family?’ Kublai said.
‘The land is shit here and they know it. Nothing but chalk and stones. A man has to earn money and I can smell it on you.’
Ong Chiang’s gaze travelled up and down Kublai’s clean deel robe and his mutilated hand twitched as if he wanted to touch the finely woven cloth. Kublai was amused despite himself. He became aware of the farmer’s wife glowering at him from the doorway. Kublai met her eyes for a moment and she looked down immediately, terrified of the armed men around her home.
‘How will I know if I can trust you?’ Kublai said.
‘I am Ong Chiang the farmer now, but I was once Ong Chiang the officer in charge of eight men, before I lost my fingers to some fool with a spade. They told me to hand back my armour and my sword and they gave me my pay, then that was it. Twenty years and I was sent away with nothing. Don’t think I’ll cause you any trouble. I can’t hold a sword, but I will show you the way. I’d like to see their faces when they see your men riding in.’ Ong began to cackle and wheeze and he sucked on his pipe again, like a teat that gave him comfort. His wheezing became gurgles and finally settled, leaving him red-faced.
‘I pay my men four silver pieces a month,’ Kublai said. ‘You will earn an extra payment when you find me a silver mine.’
Ong Chiang’s face lit up. ‘Four! For that much, I’ll walk night and day, anywhere you want.’
