The servant smiled. ‘It is too late for that, master. Instead, I have brought you a greeting from Alamut and a peace you surely do not deserve.’
Hulegu gaped at him, then tried to rise. His legs felt weak and he staggered, but he had the strength to shout.
‘Guards! To me!’
He slumped against the table. The door slammed open and two of his men entered with their swords drawn.
‘Hold him,’ Hulegu snarled.
A wave of weakness washed over him and he slid to his knees, pushing two of his fingers deep into his throat. As his men watched in horrified confusion, Hulegu vomited up the contents of his stomach in a great flood. He had eaten well and he heaved again and again, the bitter smell filling the room. Still the pain increased, but his head cleared a little. The servant had not resisted and merely stood between the warriors, watching closely with a worried frown.
Hulegu was a bull of a man, but his heart was pounding and his face poured with sweat as if he had run all day. It dripped off his nose onto the wooden floor as he sagged.
‘Charcoal,’ he growled. ‘Grind up as much as you can find … in water. Take it from the fireplaces. Fetch my shaman …’ He struggled through a wave of dizziness before he could speak again. ‘If I pass out, force charcoal slurry into me, as much as you can.’ He saw the guards hesitate, neither man willing to let go of the servant. Hulegu snapped, anger rising in him with the pain.
‘Kill him and go,’ he shouted, falling back.
He heard a choking sound as they cut the man’s throat and then raced out of the room. Hulegu tried to vomit again, but his stomach was empty and every dry heave made lights flash before his eyes. His head felt enormous, fat with pounding blood. His heart was racing too fast, making him dizzy and weak. He was dimly aware of men clattering into the room and a wooden bowl being pressed to his lips, full of swirling blackness that he took in and immediately vomited in a gritty flood over his clothes. He forced himself to drink again, bowl after bowl until he felt his stomach would burst. His teeth grated against each other as he tried to clear his mouth and throat, gasping between gulps. There were a dozen men in the room by then, all working to reduce chips of charred wood to dust with any tool they could find. After a time, he fell into blackness, covered in his own bitter acids.
When he woke again, it was dark. His eyes were covered in something, so that his eyelids stuck together. He reached up and rubbed one of them, feeling his eyelashes tear away. The gesture was noticed and voices called that he was awake. Hulegu groaned, but the biting pain was gone from his stomach. His mouth felt raw and he could still feel the grit between his teeth from the charcoal that had saved him. The same filth had once saved Genghis and Hulegu gave silent thanks to the old man’s spirit for lending him the knowledge he needed. The Assassin had been confident at first, he recalled. It would have been a close thing, a certain death without the charcoal to soak it up. If the man had kept silent, Hulegu would have died without knowing why.
He could not believe how weak he felt. General Kitbuqa was looming over him, but Hulegu could not rise. He felt himself lifted up and saw he was in another room of the roadhouse, propped up on thick blankets under his head and shoulders.
‘You were lucky,’ Kitbuqa said.
Hulegu grunted, unwilling even to think back to the appalling moments before unconsciousness. It had come so suddenly: from eating a good meal to fighting for his life with his killer watching him complacently. He thought his hands were still trembling and he bunched his massive fists in the blankets so that Kitbuqa would not see.
‘The charcoal worked, then,’ he muttered.
‘You are too stubborn to die, I think,’ Kitbuqa said. ‘Your shaman tells me you will be shitting black for a few days, but, yes, you gave the right orders.’
‘Have you been praying for me?’
Kitbuqa heard the mockery and ignored it.
‘I have, of course. You are alive, are you not?’
Hulegu tried again to sit up straight, his thoughts suddenly sharpening.
‘You must warn my brothers, especially Mongke. Send a dozen fast scouts along the yam lines.’
‘They have already gone,’ Kitbuqa said. ‘It happened yesterday, my lord. You have slept since then.’
Hulegu slumped back. The effort of rising and thinking had exhausted him, but he was alive and he had expected death. He shuddered as he lay there, flashing memories disturbing his peace. Had the leader in Alamut sent men to kill him even before he saw the fortress? It was possible. Yet it was more likely that he had men out already doing their work, men who would have returned to Alamut and found it in ruins. Hulegu could imagine them swearing vengeance against those who had broken their sect and killed its leaders. He closed his eyes, feeling sleep come swiftly. How many more could there be? Perhaps there was only one, now just another corpse in the road.
Kitbuqa looked down, pleased to see some colour return to his friend’s face. He could only hope that the attack had been the last spasm of a dying clan. Even so, he knew it would be years before Hulegu went anywhere without a troop of guards around him. If even one Assassin still survived, there would always be danger. Kitbuqa only wished the poisoner had lived, so that he could have taken him out into the woods and questioned him with fire and iron.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Kublai had given strict orders that the workers in the mine town were not to be touched. For once, Uriang- Khadai had nothing to say on the subject. Someone had to continue to drag the ore out of the ground and none of Kublai’s men understood the processes involved, even when they had seen the smelters and the sacks of strange powders in the buildings around it. A huge heap of black lead and slag metal was part of the sprawling site and the smell of bitter chemicals was always in the air, somehow drying the throat so that warriors coughed and spat as they searched it.
Bayar brought the news himself when they found the silver ready to be taken out. Kublai had seen from his face that it had been worthwhile and the reality astonished him. Refined metal filled a long stone building, behind an iron door that had to be broken in when no one could find the key. Inside, slender bars were set out on trestle tables, black with tarnish and ready to be loaded into carts and taken to the emperor’s capital city.
Bayar had not even counted them and Kublai had the pleasure of making the first estimate. He counted two hundred and forty on a table, then multiplied it by eighty tables to reach a total that was dizzying. Each bar could be melted and pressed into at least five hundred small coins if he found the right equipment. For a time, Kublai just stood in the silent room, then a smile appeared and Bayar laughed. The contents of the room came to almost ten million coins, enough to pay his army at their current rate for two years in the field. He frowned at the thought of sending a tithe back to Mongke in Karakorum, but it was long overdue. Bearing in mind Ong Chiang’s response to his offer, Kublai wondered if there was a way of reducing the monthly pay without losing the trust of his men. He could hardly claim hardship after such a find. The news would already be winging its way around the camp.
‘Find the most senior man in the town, whoever runs the mine,’ he said to Bayar. ‘I need to know if this is the product of a month or a year. I’ll need to leave men to defend this place and keep it working.’
‘The emperor will fight to get the mine back, if it’s worth this much,’ Bayar replied, still looking around him in a kind of awe.
‘I hope so. I want him to send his best, general. At the rate I’ve been going, I’ll be an old man by the time I reach his capital. Let them come and we will add rich new lands to the khanate.’
For a moment, he felt a pang that everything he won, everything he accomplished, would be for the glory of Mongke in Karakorum, but he stifled the thought. Mongke had been generous: with men, with his generals, with cannon and even with lands. Kublai realised he no longer missed the life of a scholar in Karakorum. Mongke had set out to change him and in one important way he had been successful. Kublai could not go back to the man he had been. He had even grown used to the scale armour. He found he looked forward to the battles to come, the tests and trials that he would face with the elite tumans of his nation. Kublai clapped Bayar on the shoulder.
‘A mining town will have something to drink, I am certain. We had better move quickly before the men run it dry.’
