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the pleasure of their destruction. Women were raped within sight of the city walls, and then their throats
were cut when the rapist was done. Whole families were lined up just beyond bowshot, and slaughtered.
Urgench held out for five months against the Mongol horde, until all the arrows had been exhausted, all the
food was gone. and even the rats had all been captured and eaten. Then the Mongols had proposed a truce.
They said that if the prince would surrender himself, they would let all others in the city live, for only the
prince had rebelled against his masters, the others were but dupes who had followed him. The Mongols
swore this to Allah. and to their own pagan gods.
The prince took counsel with his nobles, and then voluntarily surrendered himself. As arranged, the prince
went out the city gate, and Mongol soldiers took charge of that gate. They beheaded the prince within sight
of his subjects, and marched their army within the walls.
Then they said that all must leave the city, for they had sworn to leave the people with their lives, but the
city itself was to be destroyed. The people could take what they could carry, but that was all.
As the citizens went through the gate, they were searched, and all weapons were taken from them. They
were then sorted into groups, according to their occupations. Each group was separately guarded.
Military officers were the first to be murdered. They were bound hand and foot in sight of their families
and then some were strangled and others slashed to death. Their families were soon butchered as well,
except for a few hundred attractive young women, who were stripped, chained, and set aside.
Other groups followed, and the systematic killing went on for days. When the people complained to the
Mongols that they were not keeping their oath to their gods, the Khan answered that he had promised not to
kill those within the city, but that they were now outside its walls.
When none were left but a hundred of the city's best craftsmen with their families in one group, two
thousand young women in another, and eighty thousand healthy men in a third, the killing stopped for a
time.
While the butchering had been going on, and all the heads of the murdered stacked in neat pyramids, others
of the horde had been systematically looting the city, although in fact most of the portable wealth had been
in the baggage of the refugees.
The city was then burned, and the captive men were put to tearing down every wall, every palace, every
mosque, and every hovel. When that was done, it still was not enough to satisfy the Khan. The captives
were forced to dig a canal and then to dam the mighty Amu so that the river cut a new channel right
through where the city had been. This destroyed the irrigation system, and without irrigation, the fields
dried up and the very soil was blown away. Nothing was left of once beautiful Urgench that once held half
a million people. The eighty thousand workers were then slaughtered and their heads added to the pyramids
of skulls.
The Mongols made Hitler look like a piker, and Stalin look like small change.
Zoltan had been master alchemist of the city, and his family had been spared so that the Mongols might
have something to threaten him with. This was also the case of the others in his small group.
The young women were taken off separately and never seen again. Zoltan's group was led off in the
direction of Karakorum, the Mongol capital, with a guard of twenty men.
The prisoners were forced to cook for the guards, and Zoltan Was as knowledgeable of vegetation as he
was of minerals. He concocted a poison from the roots of certain desert plants, and slipping it into their
food, used it to kill all the guards.
He then led his people west, and for seven years they had wandered in search of a home, constantly thrown
out of Christian lands because they were Moslems, thrown out of Moslem lands because they were
considered heretics and deathly afraid of going near the lands of the Khan.
Once there had been over five hundred of them, but four out of five had been lost along the way. A hundred
were all that were left from a city of half a million.
It was a pitiful story, and I felt sorry for these people. But dam it, I had problems of my own! I had to make
sure that what happened to Urgench didn't happen to Cracow! To do that, I needed the continued support of
the Church, of the state, and of my own people. Having this crowd of refugees around wasn't going to help.
They were Moslems, of a sort, but as best as I could tell, they were all members of some heretical sect. Or
at least Zoltan said that all the other Moslems were heretics, so I guess it amounted to the same thing. That
was the last thing that I needed. Members of small religious sects tend to be fanatics eagerly searching for
converts. The Church was already conducting an inquisition concerning me, and if they found out that I
was harboring and encouraging Moslems, and heretical Moslems at that, it could go bad for me. And if the
refugees started making converts out of good Christians -well, I didn't want to think about it.
I got very firm on the point that his people were not to try to talk my people into joining his Church, or
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