Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [88]
Suddenly the little girl felt a flood of relief. She was safe. Without pausing even to think, she ran down the bank on to the frozen river, straight towards her mother, oblivious even of the Mongol on his horse who stood in the path between them.
Mengu stared. What was this peasant woman doing?
He had been looking for the siege engine anxiously. Another few moments and it would be in position. He glanced at his troops. The ring around the fort was almost complete. This would be his day. Studiously he avoided looking towards the general. ‘I’ll have the whole place under control in an hour,’ he murmured.
Though his face showed nothing, he felt a surge of excitement. It was like the great ring in the royal hunt. And today, the ring was his. For a brief hour he was to be general, like a prince. I’ll show them, he thought elatedly.
But who was this peasant woman coming towards him?
It was just then that he suddenly remembered a story he had heard some months ago. A peasant woman, no doubt very like this, had made a sudden rush at a young captain when they were burning the city of Riazan. She had pulled out a knife and killed him, too. ‘So watch out for their women,’ the fellow who told him had warned. He frowned, irritated. Who was she, to disturb the imperial hunt? He was not going to have a Russian peasant woman threaten his career.
Now she was breaking into a run, making straight for him.
At the lightest pressure from his knees, his horse clattered forward. He took out his sabre and with a single, curving slash cut straight down to her breast. She crumpled and slid across the ice. He turned back to look for the siege engine.
‘Mama!’
A scream. He wheeled again, sword in hand, to face this new threat. Even before he knew it his curved sabre was raised high, his face tense, his mouth a snarl.
A little girl, white-faced, was kneeling in terror on the ice beside the woman. Blood was pumping from the huge gash. The woman’s eyes were open; she was gazing at the child, trying to say something.
For a second he, too, forgot everything. He saw only the faces of the mother and her child.
‘Yanka!’
A shout, this time from a small boy and a peasant on a sled, two hundred yards away. He had not noticed it before because his horsemen, now across the river, had been in the way.
‘Yanka!’
The peasants stood there by their sled with no idea of what to do, in front of several hundred bowmen who could have killed them in a second.
The woman’s eyes were glassy. It was over.
There was a clatter upon the frozen river as the Mongol reached down and scooped the little girl up in one arm. The flakes of ice flew as his horse raced towards the sled where he threw her carelessly to the ground. Looking down contemptuously at the boy and his father, he waved them away.
A second later, their sled was racing through the trees.
It was not the policy of the Mongols to kill the peasants in the lands they conquered. Peasants tilled the soil, paid taxes and supplied recruits. The Mongols only killed those who were foolish enough to resist them.
Mengu turned back. The entire incident had taken rather less than a minute, during which time he supposed everyone had been too busy to take much notice.
The troops were all in place. The catapult was coming up, and an engineer was awaiting his order. He put the foolish incident out of his mind. Secretly he felt ashamed of killing the woman. As for the little girl … His face showed nothing.
With a curt nod, he signalled the catapult to proceed.
The inhabitants of Russka had never seen a catapult like this. Its technology was simple enough – a massive counterweight at one end of a lever caused the arm to hurl a stone from the other. But its power was truly extraordinary. For the engineers of China had constructed a machine that could be loaded with a stone it took four strong men to lift, and then hurl it with devastating accuracy