“Swords out!”
Though not caught entirely off guard, they might as well have been. They were cut down, and their horses galloped wildly home with empty saddles: and Timur resumed his bold race.
By now the gates of Kesh were closed. When Timur reined in, his archers shadowed him with a curtain of arrows. He demanded, “Surrender at once, and we’ll let you march out alive.”
A man in heavy Khorassan mail risked his head. Timur’s archers ceased firing. The garrison commander came up to the parapet. The man was puzzled: a hundred horse seemed hardly the right force to take a walled town.
“You’re crazy!” he raged. “Or drunk. Who are you?”
“Timur Bek, and what are you doing in my town?”
The bold challenge took the commander aback. “I am Daulat Ali, and I hold this in the name of Elias Koja, Khan of Samarkand, Son of Togluk Khan.”
“You can become wealthy and famous by taking my head,” Timur reminded him “Bikijek wants it badly.”
Daulat Ali was no drill ground soldier; Bikijek didn’t send that kind out to hold a town. Yet he was worried. There must be a sizable army on the way, and there had been no warning.
Timur went on. “March your garrison out. One hour’s delay, and I’ll have the head of every fifth man, taken by count, with no regard to rank.”
“You can’t take a town with that handful!” Daulat Ali retorted.
“Only Allah knows what is in my hand! Trifle a bit longer, and not one of you leaves alive. Quick, man! You’re up on the wall. Look around. Do you want a siege, or do you think you’d like to try a sortie?”
On the four horizons, great columns of dust rose. Each was drawing toward Kesh. Citizens were now on the walls, some of Timur’s own people. They began to yell, “Allah! Armies from Khorassan! Armies from Kabul!”
Rioting broke out within the town. Timur grinned when he heard the shouting. “I won’t have to take your heads, they’ll tend to that before I can save you fellows!”
Heaving water jugs and roofing tiles from housetops may annoy soldiers, but such civilian resistance rarely gets far. That was what worried Daulat Ali. Timur must have promised his people four armies, or they’d never be crazy enough to stone Kipchak hard cases.
Timur could now see the dust columns from the ground level. “If you move fast enough you’ll have a chance to warn the apprentice king.”
Turning the garrison loose, instead of taking them prisoner or cutting them down would give Elias Koja and Bikijek a nasty shock. Only a strong army could afford such a gesture of contempt. And Daulat Ali, already shaken, signaled to his trumpeters; they sounded recall.
The disarmed garrison filed out, and rapidly enough not to see that they had surrendered to dust clouds raised by horsemen dragging green branches.
And when Timur found Olajai, he said, “Home again, shireen, but only Allah knows how long we’ll stay.”
CHAPTER VI
KING-MAKER
By the time his spies had caught up with him, Timur realized that though he would quickly have to abandon Kesh he had at least succeeded in more than a personal enterprise: his daring capture of the city was bringing hundreds of one-time doubters to his standard.
And then Timur learned that Elias Koja’s army, strongly reinforced by his father’s troops, had moved out of Samarkand. They were going toward the Jihun, to make a clean sweep of the Jagatai lands and possibly to invade Khorassan.
So Timur and his newly won recruits got out of Kesh before Elias Koja’s general, Bikijek, could learn that green branches had swept his garrison out of town.
Timur won the bridge with a few hours to spare. Then from the Khorassan side, he saw touman after touman of Kipchak troops, each 10,000 strong. The apprentice king’s father was out for conquest. “Brother.” Mir Hussein said, “our army will scatter like dust, once we start running. They’ll forget that trick at Kesh.”
“Then we won’t run.”
“We can’t face 60,000 Kipchaks, not when Bikijek leads them.”
Olajai came from behind the red carpet which, hanging from its long fringes, separated her quarters from the reception room of the pavilion. “Remember the horse tails, Timur!” she cut in.
Hussein turned on his sister. “You little fool, how long will Allah’s patience last! Bluffing Bikijek is not quite the same as scaring a blockhead out of Kesh!”
Timur scowled. “I’ve got an army. One retreat, and they’ll go back to their sheep.”
“Yes, and just one bout with the Golden Horde, and they’ll be minced mutton. You can’t keep on recruiting on the strength of glorious defeats like the one at Kivak!”
“The horse tails,” Olojai repeated. “The Presence!”
Timur rose. “We can hold the bridge for a day.”
So he went to dispose his six thousand against ten times as many.
From sunrise to sunset, troop after troop of Kipchaks charged the bridgehead, taking their toll, but going down before the stubborn defense. Timur and Eltchi Bahadur plied mace and sword; and the sight and sound of them steadied the little army. Yet when the sun sank, they were tired and battered: wearied from the very cutting down of successive waves.
That night, spies swam the Jihun. In speech and dress and face, they matched the enemy; and they could mix freely, grumbling about the stiff resistance, and muttering about Timur’s reserves, spread out, well behind the Jihun. And they muttered about the fall of Kesh.…
Meanwhile, Timur was moving, He left only five hundred to hold the bridge: which picked men could do, for another day. The others divided, half going upstream, half downstream, well beyond hearing of the enemy, to risk the dangerous fords.
Bikijek could have made a similar attempt, but with his overwhelming force, it seemed far more sensible to hammer for another day, and drive through the troops who held the bridge.
Finally, there was the rumor of Timur’s reserves; Bikijek was too good a general to risk being cut up in such fashion. Once he learned—
But Bikijek had no chance to learn.
Timur’s losses by drowning were smaller than they could have been, had he and his captains not known every foot of the treacherous fords. Time and again, he went back, each time with a fresh horse, to lead the next detachment over. And on the final trip, he listened to a spy just returned: “Togluk Khan is dead! His son was about to go home when there was news of us.”
Timur turned to Hussein, who commanded the final party.
“Allah is with us! There is a fear in Elias Koja. When he should go to Kipchak to receive the allegiance of his father’s lords, and take the old man’s throne, he stays here. The raid on Kesh has shaken him!”
Timur led his hazaras into the hills well behind the Kipchak camp. He spread them far apart. “Make fires,” he commanded. “Many fires. As of many bivouacked toumans.”
That night, he looked down on the fires of Bikijek’s six toumans. And that night, Bikijek looked backward and upward at fires which suggested a force at least equal to his own: and a force which had slipped up between him, and Samarkand, and the long trail to Kipchak.
At dawn, with all his men carefully under cover in the woods at the foot of the slope, Timur watched Bikijek’s scouts patrolling the river. The Kipchaks