The space between the gates was deliberately small and no more than a dozen warriors could stand inside at a time. Except for those who wielded hammers with desperate force, the others stood with pieces of wood above their heads, wedged together as best they could. The ground was still sandy and bristled with spent shafts, thicker than the hairs on a dog. Still more were shot down and Tsubodai heard orders shouted in an alien language above his head. If they had stones to drop, the entire assault would be crushed before the inner gate gave way, he thought, fighting terror. He felt enclosed, trapped. The man closest to him had lost his helmet in the attack. He gave a shriek of pain and fell with an arrow’s feathers standing upright in his neck, loosed from almost directly above. Tsubodai caught the planking he had held and raised it, wincing with every shuddering impact. The hammer blows went on with maddening slowness and, suddenly, Tsubodai heard a grunt of satisfaction from one of the warriors and the sound changed as those closest began kicking at the cracking timbers.
The gate gave way, sending men sprawling on the dusty ground beyond it. The first ones through died instantly as they were met with a volley of crossbow shafts from a line of soldiers. Behind them, Khasar’s men roared in savage anticipation, sensing there was a way in. They pushed forward, compressing the group at the gate as they stumbled over dead men.
Tsubodai could not believe he was still alive. He drew the sword Genghis himself had given him and ran forward in a mass of raging men, freed at last from the confines of the killing ground. The crossbowmen never had a chance to reload and Tsubodai killed his first enemy with a straight thrust to the throat as the soldier froze in horror. Half of those who came into the fort were wounded and bloody, but they had survived and they exulted as they met the first lines of defenders. Some of the first ones inside climbed wooden steps to a higher level and grinned as they saw the archers still firing down into the killing hole. Mongol bows snapped shafts across the fighting below, striking the Xi Xia bowmen from their feet as if they had been hit by hammers.
The army of Genghis began to funnel through the gate, exploding into the fort. There was little order to the assault in the first charge. Until senior men like Khasar or Arslan took charge, Tsubodai knew he was free to kill as many as he could and he shouted wildly, filled with excitement.
Without Liu Ken to organise the defence, the Xi Xia warriors broke and ran before the invaders, scattering in panic. Leaving his horse in the pass, Genghis walked through the gate and ducked through the broken inner gate. His face was alight with triumph and pride as his warriors tore through the fort soldiers. In all their history, the tribes had never had a chance to strike back at those who held them down. Genghis did not care that the Xi Xia soldiers thought themselves different from the Chin. To his people, they were all part of that ancient, hated race. He saw that some of the defenders had laid down their weapons and he shook his head, calling Arslan to him as the swordsman strode past.
‘No prisoners, Arslan,’ Genghis said. His general bowed his head.
The slaughter became methodical after that. Men were discovered hiding in the fort’s cellars and dragged out for execution. As the day wore on, the dead soldiers were piled on the red stones of a central courtyard. A well there became the eye of the storm as every dry-throated man found time to quench his thirst in water, bucket by bucket, until they were gasping and soaked. They had beaten the desert.
As the sun began to set, Genghis himself walked to the well, stepping over the piles of twisted dead. The warriors fell silent at his step and one of them filled the leather bucket and handed it to the khan. As Genghis drank at last and grinned, they roared and bayed in voices loud enough to echo back from the walls all around. They had found their way through the maze of rooms and halls, cloisters and walkways, all strange to their eyes. Like a pack of wild dogs, they had reached right to the far side of the fort, leaving the black stones bloody behind them.
The commander of the fort was discovered in a suite of rooms hung with silk and priceless tapestries. It took three men to batter down the door of iron and oak to reveal Shen Ti, hiding with a dozen terrified women. As Khasar strode into the room, Shen Ti tried to take his own life with a dagger. In his terror, the blade slipped in his sweating hands and merely scored a line in his throat. Khasar sheathed his sword and took hold of the man’s fleshy hand over the hilt, guiding it back to the neck a second time. Shen Ti lost his nerve and tried to struggle, but Khasar’s grip was strong and he drew the dagger sharply across, stepping back as blood spurted out and the man flailed in death.
‘That is the last of them,’ Khasar said. He looked the women over and nodded to himself. They were strange creatures, their skin powdered as white as mare’s milk, but he found them attractive. The scent of jasmine mingled with the stench of blood in the room and Khasar smiled wolfishly at them. His brother Kachiun had won an Olkhun’ut girl for his wife and had two children already in his ger. Khasar’s first wife had died and he had no one. He wondered if Genghis would let him marry two or three of these foreign women. The idea pleased him enormously and he stepped to the far window, looking out on the lands of the Xi Xia.
The fort was high in the mountains and Khasar had a view of a vast valley, with cliffs stretching away into the haze on either side. Far below, he saw a green land, studded with farms and villages. Khasar breathed deeply in appreciation.
‘It will be like picking ripe fruit,’ he said, turning to Arslan as the older man entered. ‘Send someone to fetch my brothers. They should see this.’
The king sat in the highest room of his palace, looking over the flat valley of the Xi Xia. With the dawn mist rising off the fields, it was a landscape of great beauty. If he did not know there was an army out there beyond sight, the land might have seemed as peaceful as any other morning. The canals shone in the sun like lines of gold, carrying precious water to the crops. There were even distant figures of farmers out there, working without thought for the army that had entered their country from the northern desert.
Rai Chiang adjusted his robe of green silk, patterned in gold. Alone, his expression was calm, but as he stared out into the dawn, his fingers picked nervously at a thread, worrying at it until it caught in his nails and snapped. He frowned, looking down at the damage. The robe was a Chin weave, worn to bring him luck in the matter of reinforcements. He had sent a letter with two of his fastest scouts as soon as he heard of the invasion, but the reply was long in coming.
He sighed to himself, his fingers resuming their picking without him being aware of it. If the old Chin emperor had lived, there would be fifty thousand soldiers marching to defend his little kingdom, he was sure of it. The gods were fickle to have taken his ally at the very moment when he needed aid. Prince Wei was a stranger and Rai Chiang did not know whether the arrogant son would have the generosity of his father.
Rai Chiang considered the differences between their lands, wondering if he could have done more to ensure Chin support. His most distant ancestor had been a Chin prince and ruled the province as a personal fiefdom. He would have seen no shame in asking for aid. The Xi Xia kingdom had been forgotten in the great conflict centuries before, unnoticed as greater princes struggled against each other until the Chin empire had been cut in two. Rai Chiang was the sixty-fourth ruler since that bloody period. Since the death of his father, he had spent almost three decades keeping his people free of the Chin shadow, cultivating other allies and never giving offence that could lead to his kingdom being forcibly returned to the fold. One of his sons would one day inherit that uneasy peace. Rai Chiang paid his tribute, sent his merchants to trade and his warriors to swell the ranks of the Imperial army. In return, he was treated as an honoured ally.
It was true Rai Chiang had ordered a new script for his people, one that bore little resemblance to Chin writing. The old Chin emperor had sent him rare texts by Lao Tzu and the Buddha Sakyamuni to be translated. Surely that was a sign of acceptance, if not approval. The Xi Xia valley was separate from the Chin lands, bordered by mountains and the Yellow River. With a new language, the Xi Xia would move further from the influence of the Chin. It was