35. Confluence
The dust: that was what Josh saw first, a great cloud of it kicked up by racing hooves.
It was about midday. For once it was a clear, bright day, and the rolling bank of dust, perhaps half a kilometer wide, was filled with smoky light, elusive shapes. Then, in Josh’s clear view, they emerged from the dusty glow, shadows at first, coalescing into figures of stocky menace. They were Mongol warriors, identifiable at a glance.
Despite all that had happened to him Josh had found it hard to believe that a Mongol horde, under the control of Genghis Khan himself, was really and truly approaching, intent on killing him. And yet it was so; he could see it with his own eyes. He felt his heart beat faster.
He was sitting in a cramped guard position on the Ishtar gate, looking out over the plain to the east, toward the Mongol advance. With him were Macedonians and a couple of British. The British had decent pairs of binoculars, Swiss-made. Grove had impressed on them the importance of keeping the lenses shielded: they had no idea how much information Genghis Khan had about their situation here in Babylon, but Sable Jones would surely understand the significance of a glinting reflection. The best-equipped of all was Josh, though, for Abdikadir—who had gone off to fight—had bequeathed him his precious NODs, the farsighted night-vision glasses that one wore like goggles.
At the first glimpse of the Mongols, among Macedonians and British observers alike there was an air of tension, and yet of excitement, a palpable thrill. On the next gate, Josh thought he saw the brightly colored chestplate of Alexander himself, come to view this first clash.
The Mongols came in a long line, and seemed to be grouped into units of ten or so. Josh counted the units quickly; the Mongol line was perhaps twenty men deep but two hundred wide—a force of four or five thousand men, just in this first approach.
But Alexander had drawn up ten thousand of his own men on the plain before Babylon. Their long scarlet cloaks billowed in the breeze, and their bronze helmets were painted sky blue, the spines of their crests marked with the insignia of rank.
It started.
The first assault was with arrows. The front ranks of the advancing Mongols lifted complicated-looking compound bows, and fired into the air. The bows were of laminated horn, and could strike accurately over hundreds of yards, as fast as a warrior could pull arrows from his quiver.
The Macedonians had been drawn up into two long files, with the Foot Companions at the center, and the elite Shield Bearers guarding either flank. Now, as the arrows flew, to brisk drumbeats and trumpet peals, they quickly regrouped into a close order, boxlike formation eight men deep. They raised their leather shields over their heads and locked them together, like the formation the Romans had called the turtle.
The arrows fell on the shields with audible thumps. The shell formation held, but it wasn’t perfect. Here and there men dropped, to sharp cries, and there would be a brief hole in the cover, a fast flurry as the wounded man was dragged from the formation, and the shell would close up again.
So men had already started to die, Josh thought.
Perhaps a quarter-mile from the city walls, the Mongols suddenly broke into a charge. The warriors roared, their war drums banged like a pulse, and even the clatter of the horses’ hooves was like a storm. The wave of noise was startling.
Josh didn’t believe he was a coward, but he couldn’t help but quail. And he was astonished at how calmly Alexander’s seasoned warriors held their places. To more trumpet peals and yelled commands— “Synaspismos!”—they broke up their turtle formation and formed their open lines once more, though some kept their shields raised to ward off arrows. They were in a line four deep now, with some troops held in reserve at the back. They were infantrymen facing the Mongols’ cavalry charge, a thin line of flesh and blood was all that stood between Babylon and the oncoming Mongols. But they locked their button shields together and rammed the butts of their long spears in the ground, and foot-long iron blades bristled at the oncoming Mongols.
In the last moments Josh saw the Mongols very clearly, even the eyes of their armored horses. The animals seemed crazed; he wondered what goads, or drugs, the Mongols used to induce their horses to attack packed infantry.
The Mongols fell on the Macedonian lines. It was a brutal collision.
The armored horses battered a way through the Macedonian front line, and the whole formation buckled at the center. But the Macedonians’ rear lines cut at the animals, killing or hamstringing them. Mongols and their horses began to fall, and their rear lines slammed into the stalled advance.
All along the Macedonian line now there was a stationary front of fighting. A stink of dust and metal, and the coppery smell of blood, rose up to Josh. There were cries of rage and pain, and the clash of iron on iron. There were no gunshots, no cannon roars, none of the dark explosive noises of the warfare of later centuries. But human lives were erased with industrial efficiency, all the same.
Josh was suddenly aware of a silvered sphere hovering before him, high over the ground, but almost at his own eye level. It was an Eye. Perhaps, he thought grimly, there were other than human observers here today.
The first assault lasted only minutes. And then, to a trumpet-call, the Mongols suddenly broke away. Those still mounted galloped back from the fray. They left behind a line of broken and writhing bodies, severed limbs, maimed horses.
The Mongols paused in loose order, a few hundred yards from the Macedonian position. They called insults in their incomprehensible language, shot off a few arrows, even spat at the Macedonians. One of them had dragged a wretched Macedonian foot soldier with him, and now, with mocking elaboration, began to carve a hole in the living man’s chest. The Macedonians responded with insults of their own, but when a unit ran forward, weapons raised, their officers roared commands for them to hold their positions.
The Mongols continued to withdraw, still taunting the Macedonians, but Alexander’s soldiers would not follow. As the lull continued, stretcher-bearers ran out from the Ishtar Gate.
The first Macedonian warrior to be brought into Bisesa’s surgery had suffered a leg wound. Ruddy helped her haul the unconscious figure onto a table.
The arrow had been broken and pulled out, but it had passed right through the calf muscle and out the other side of the leg. It didn’t look to have broken any bones, but flaps of muscle tissue spilled out of the raw wound. She stuffed the muscle tissue back into the hole, packed some wine-soaked cloth into it, and then, with Ruddy’s brisk help, bound it up tight. The soldier was stirring. She had no anesthetic, of course, but perhaps, if he woke, fear and adrenaline would keep the pain at bay a while.
Ruddy, working with both hands, wiped sweat from his broad, pale brow onto the shoulder of his jacket.
“Ruddy, you’re doing fine.”
“Yes. And this man will live, will he not? And walk out, scimitar and shield in hand, to die on some other battlefield.”
“All we can do is patch them up.”
“Yes …”
But there was no time, no time. The leg wound was just the first of a flood of stretcher-bound invalids that suddenly flowed in through the Ishtar Gate. Philip, Alexander’s physician, ran to meet the flow and, as Bisesa had taught him, began to operate a brisk triage, separating those who could be helped from those who could not, and sending the invalids to where they could best be treated.
She had Macedonian porters take the leg wound away to a casualty tent, and grabbed the next stretcher in line. It turned out to be a fallen Mongol warrior. He had taken a sword blow to his upper thigh, and blood pumped from an artery. She tried to press the edges of the wound together, but it was surely too late, and already the flow was stilling of its own accord.