And then he saw Muhammad standing there, bare-chested and covered in sweat and dust, and realized that the heretic leader had been among the workers who had torn open the earth in what must have been a backbreaking exercise over many days. Despite his hatred of the man, Huyayy had to admire his willingness to get his hands dirty along with his men. Such leaders always inspired the loyalty of their troops, and Huyayy knew that they would fight to the death for this man should the Meccans somehow break through their defenses.
Muhammad greeted the invaders with a broad smile and threw open his arms in a defiant welcome. Khalid stared across the divide and smiled, saluting his enemy an acknowledgment of a well-conceived plan. Whatever differences of faith divided them, the code of honor between warriors still held its sway.
And then Khalid turned and signaled to his best horsemen. Without a word spoken between them, the cavalry rode forward, knowing exactly what the Meccan general expected of them.
A dozen of the mightiest chargers raced through the desert plain and leaped across the trench. A swarm of arrows met them and the horses were hit in midflight. The terrified screams of the animals ended abruptly as they plunged to their deaths in the pit below. Most of the riders broke their necks in the fall, but those who somehow managed to survive and crawl away from their shattered mounts were immediately struck by a second volley of projectiles.
Khalid held up his hand to prevent more honor seekers from trying to leap across the ditch. As an experienced general, he knew that once a stratagem had failed, it was a waste of lives and resources to repeat it in the hope of securing a better outcome. The horses simply could not leap the distance and land safely on the other side, and if miraculously one or two made it across the chasm, their riders would be alone and surrounded by well-armed enemies.
He looked across the ditch at his adversaries and calculated. Khalid could send his men down into the pit with ropes, but the Muslims held the advantage of the high ground. They would easily cut down his soldiers before they ever managed to climb to the other side. It would be a waste of life with little likelihood of success.
“What do we do?” It was the despairing voice of Abu Sufyan, who looked increasingly too old and weary to lead the Meccans to triumph. Khalid had nothing but contempt for this man who had proclaimed himself king of Mecca and whose only claim to power came from his cowardly avoidance of battle at Badr, where the competing chieftains were killed. There had already been whispers that Khalid should dispatch the elderly fool and take his place in the Hall of Assembly.
But Khalid ibn al-Waleed was a warrior, not a king. He found purpose and joy in the heat of the battlefield among the brave men he loved, not in the coddled life of a ruler surrounded by bureaucrats and sycophants. Khalid had no interest in becoming a king, but he knew that one was needed at the moment. It was kings and chieftains who declared the wars that men like Khalid lived to fight. But in the past several years, he had become increasingly disgusted with the leaders of Mecca, who showed cowardice and avarice, who ruled by bribery and fear, without any sense of honor.
He gazed across the enemy lines at Muhammad again and realized that his enemy had all the qualities that his allies did not. He was noble and courageous and could inspire men to lay down their lives. As he looked at the man who had been denounced as a rebel by the lords of Mecca, Khalid began to wonder what life would be like leading armies under Muhammad’s command.
But before he could take the thought further, he heard the insistent braying of Abu Sufyan in his ear, demanding a solution to this unforeseen problem.
Khalid sighed heavily and turned his attention to the fields of grain that stood just outside the borders of the trench, the groves of olive trees that were budding with the coming of the spring. The Muslims had wisely built the trench in a circle as close to the city as possible, limiting the area that needed to be defended. But in the process, they had been forced to cut themselves off from their own farmlands.
Khalid knew what needed to be done. And a part of him regretted that it had to be this way.
He turned to face Abu Sufyan and his Jewish ally Huyayy.
“We wait. Hunger will accomplish what swords and spears cannot.”
10
The siege had persisted for ten days and our food supplies were running desperately low. I had spent almost every daylight hour at the front lines, taking water to the soldiers who bravely guarded the trench. The Meccans had been tireless in their efforts to find a way around the obstacle, and we could not afford to let our guard down for a minute. The first few nights, Khalid’s warriors attempted to use the cover of darkness to climb down into the ditch. But Zubayr’s alert eyes caught sight of the moving shadows and a barrage of arrows and spears quickly put an end to infiltrators. Had it not been for your father’s sleepless vigils, Abdallah, a few of the assassins would have broken the perimeter and wreaked havoc on Medina.
By the fourth day, Meccan scouts had spied a small weakness in our defenses. The trench ended at a leafy marsh to the southwest, where the natural barriers of trees and rocky hills made penetration by cavalry impossible. But a few intrepid men, led by Ikrimah, the son of Abu Jahl, and Amr Abdal Wudd, swam through the muddy bog and slipped past our sentries. The band was poised to enter the confines of the city, where they planned to spread fires and breed general chaos, when Ali confronted them at the edge of Medina. Ali and Abdal Wudd engaged in a short but brutal duel, which ended when the glowing Dhul Fiqar split the Meccan spy’s head in two. The cowardly Ikrimah and his men fled back through the swamp, dodging the barrage of missiles raining down upon them when the alarm was raised.
On the sixth day, the horizon was covered in smoke. Abu Sufyan had ordered the burning of the crop fields that circled the oasis, and I watched with tears as the verdant lands around us were consumed. We had harvested most of the date palms and the grains of wheat and barley in the weeks prior to the attack, but with the destruction of the trees that were the lifeblood of Medina, our chances of long-term survival were greatly diminished.
But by then, few of us were thinking in the long term. Survival had become a matter of getting through each day alive. With trade effectively cut off by the siege, we had no way to replace the rapidly diminishing stores of food. Even though the Messenger had instituted rationing, with women and children given twice the daily portions of the men, there was simply not enough to go around.
And so it was that on the tenth night of the battle, I walked with the other Mothers, going from house to house to check on the needs of the families that had been sequestered away from the front. It had been a difficult evening, for in every household we came upon we found the sick and the dying. The matrons pleaded with me for their children, asking me to relay the distress of their loved ones to the Messenger and begging me to perform some kind of miracle to save their lives. I wanted to run away, to hide somewhere from the desperate looks, the bony hands that reached out to touch me as if my body carried some kind of baraka, some miraculous blessing that would take away their sorrow.
I smiled gently at them and spoke words of comfort and hope, as required of a Mother of the Believers. But for all my lofty spiritual trappings, I was only fourteen years old and the weight of the world was crushing me.
As I emerged from a small stone hut that was overcrowded with a dozen women and their children, I let the cool oasis breeze strike my face, felt the tingle of the air against the wetness of my cheeks. This last house had been the worst. Several families were hunched together inside a space that had been meant for three people at most, with barely any room to breathe, much less walk. The house belonged to a carpenter whose wife had recently given birth to a daughter. The man had been injured by an arrow to the shoulder while guarding the trench, and he had been brought back here to heal. But the unsanitary conditions in the tight quarters had made his wound fester, and I could smell the lurid stench of death hovering over him. I thought bitterly that the carpenter’s martyrdom would at least somewhat alleviate the space concerns inside the cottage. Perhaps when he was buried, some of the children could move just far enough away to avoid catching the dreaded camp fever that had infected two toddlers, who had been crying nonstop for hours.