XV
In a cramped, smoky visitors' room in the priory, Thomas served them mead. Saladin sipped from his cup. The flavour was disgusting, the drink a kind of fermented honey, but it delivered a strong kick.
'Listen to the story I have to tell you,' Thomas said. 'Listen, believe, try to understand.'
He had come upon this truth by accident, when Thomas, in the service of Joan, was studying the progress of the Mongols.
Armed with al-Hafredi's glimpse of the future, Joan and her ancestors had been able to profit from a foreknowledge of the Mongols' advance. But in the year 1242 the Mongols had suddenly withdrawn from Europe. Thomas, digging into the reasons for this reversal, eventually found a man who had actually been at the court of the Mongols in that crucial season, two years ago. He was a knight called Philip of Marseilles. Devout, strong, fearless, Philip had taken the Cross more than once.
And he had agreed to serve as a legate for the Pope, in the pontiff's hopeful negotiations with the Mongol Great Khan.
The Mongols had been a nomadic people, one of many who hunted and warred across the vast grassy ocean of the Asian steppes. The Mongols' expansion across the world was the dream of Temujin, who called himself Genghis Khan, which meant 'the emperor of mankind', and he taught the Mongols to believe that they and only they were born to rule the whole world.
Genghis first unleashed his war dogs against China to the east. With one ancient civilisation reduced, the Mongols next assaulted the prosperous Islamic states to their west and south, especially Khwarazm, where they shattered an irrigation system that had endured since antiquity. Then Genghis's son Ogodai assaulted the Viking- founded cities of Russia to the north. Mongols cared nothing for cities or civilisation; resolute nomads, they wanted only plunder, and space to graze their horses.
Then the Mongols turned west, to Europe, and Christendom.
The great general Sabotai led the attack. He split his forces into three, making diversionary thrusts to north and south while Sabotai himself led the main body of his forces across the Hungarian plain. Thus Sabotai controlled forces separated by hundreds of miles and by mountain ranges; there had been nothing like this coordination and control since the legions. And the forces of the Hungarian King Bela broke before these savage horsemen, their leathery dress strange, their horses small, fast and muscular.
Sabotai set up his yurts on the plain of northern Europe, and, in the autumn of 1241, prepared to overwinter before his next push west.
He was only a few days' ride from Vienna, along the Danube. No Christian army had even slowed the Mongol advance, let alone halted it. Now it was a dagger held over the heart of Europe, a world empire preparing to overwhelm the petty, squabbling states of Christendom.
And yet Pope Innocent IV tried to deal with the Mongols. Even as the horses of Sabotai grazed east of Vienna, Philip of Marseilles was attached to a party of clerics and knights despatched to the court of Ogodai, son of Genghis Khan.
Many Christians had applauded as the Mongol attacks thrust into the soft belly of Islam. There were even hopeful rumours that some of the Mongols were Christians, adherents of a heretical sect called Nestorians who clung to an obscure argument about the separation of the divine and human nature of Christ. And there was a popular legend of a figure called Prester John, said to be descended from one of the magi who attended the birth of Christ, a Christian ruler of a vast kingdom in the east. So in the Pope's counsels there was hope that the Mongols could be turned into allies against Islam, the ultimate foe.
Thus Philip and his party came to the strange capital of the khans, deep in their Asian homeland. This was a 'city' of nomads, a town of tents, each laden with pointless heaps of booty. And yet in this place they found embassies from across the known world and beyond. The Mongols' destruction was terrible, but the unity they had imposed connected empires which had had little knowledge of each other since antiquity.
But Philip found that Ogodai, a clever, impulsive, hard-drinking man, was no Christian, no Prester John. In fact only a few Mongols were Nestorians; the rest adhered to a kind of primitive animism. And besides the Mongols waged war not for religion but for the conquest itself. To Ogodai even the Pope was no more than the weak leader of a rabble of petty states that would, in due course, be conquered, reduced and assimilated, and that was that. The Pope's embassy failed.
But it was while they remained as guests of the Khan that one of the papal party, a nervous but intelligent young monk called Bohemond, discovered in his pack an 'amulet', as he called it. He had no idea how it had got there.
'Philip eventually examined the amulet for himself,' Thomas whispered. 'He described it to me. It was a sealed box, the size of a man's hand, slim and flat and smooth to the touch. It was pale, cream-coloured, but with coloured markings on its upper surface. It was made of neither wood nor ceramic nor metal – something none could identify. The Christians, huddled in their Mongol tent, exploring this thing, found they could not cut it with a knife, nor would fire bum it.'
But Bohemond himself discovered that if he pressed a certain marking on the upper lid, a green arrow, the box would speak to him – in good if stilted Latin, in a tiny insect's voice. The legates were startled, terrified, intrigued. After much praying, and the application of much of their precious stock of holy water, they gathered around the box to hear what the imp in it had to say.
The imp spoke clearly of the future: of the next day, and of the years to come.
Of the next day, it described in detail Ogodai's movements: the hour he would rise, the breakfast he would take, the councillors, ambassadors and generals he would meet, the letters he would dictate and have read to him, the wife he would lie with – and the cup of mare's milk laced with Chinese rice wine that he liked to drink in the middle of the day.
On that cup of mare's milk and wine, said the imp in its tiny voice, the future of the world depended. For it spoke then of what would happen if Ogodai lived – what would become of the world at the feet of the Mongols, in the future.
Mongol armies always advanced in the depths of winter, with their horses fat on the grasses of summer. So it would be, in just a few weeks, that they would fall at last on Vienna. The city would be plundered, torched and razed, and the Viennese scattered to starve on the plains. As the Mongols advanced further west, the Christian princes, hastily uniting, would raise another army, which would meet the Mongols in a pitched battle before Munich. The numbers were well matched. But the Christians would be lured by a false retreat into an ambush, a classic Mongol tactic. Munich would be smashed. The Mongols' advance would be barely interrupted.
Next the Mongol force would split once more into three detachments. The first would strike at the Low Countries, plundering the rich young trading cities there before shattering them and slaughtering the population in the usual way. Holland's dykes would be broken up; the sea would complete the Mongols' victory.
A second detachment would spend the summer grazing their horses in the plains around the smoking ruins of Paris, while students from what had been the finest university north of the Pyrenees scratched in the rubble for food.
The final Mongol detachment would meanwhile cross the Alps and descend on Italy. The vibrant modern cities of Milan, Genoa, Venice – all put to the sword, all destined never to rise again. And then there was the Eternal City. When the Mongols were done, it would be said that Rome had been reduced to the villages on the seven hills from which the great old city had once coalesced. The Mongols considered the Pope a prince, and therefore no hand would be raised against him. Instead the successor to Saint Peter would be thrust into a sack and trampled to death by horses.
The next season, the squabbling Christian kings of Spain would provide no serious resistance to the Mongol force that marched south through the Pyrenees. And then there was England. The Mongols had learned how to build boats in their campaigns in the far east. By the autumn of that year, London would burn.
So the conquest would be completed. With its great cities shattered, its monasteries and churches broken, Europe would be reduced to a shrunken population living in utter poverty in villages too small to be worth the plunder, ruled brutally by the khans' governors and tax-collectors.
Eventually, the imp said, the Mongols would withdraw, their empire withering away. But the damage would