CHAPTER 29

 

The Work of God

 

The Crimean port of Kaffa on the Black Sea

Autumn 1346 in the Year of the Dog

 

… “It’s a nomad custom,” Karia said. “They’re sealing the gers. The Mongols do that when the person inside has died or is seriously ill. I mean, can’t you smell it? It’s putrid.”

 

“I thought that was their latrines,” Paul said.

 

“No, I’d recognise that stench anywhere. It’s the pestilence,” Karia said, holding her nose. “Every day since I noticed it, I’ve walked the perimeter of the walls and imagined the entire city inside a subtle protective dome, a spirit cloak.”

 

“Will it work?”

 

“I hope so,” Karia said. “It should stop the pestilence from seeping into the city.”

 

“With the pestilence in their camp, they’ll be forced to raise the siege. I’m going to tell the bishop,” Paul said. “We’ll hold an open Thanksgiving Mass to celebrate.”

 

Thousands of relieved Kaffa citizens and courtesans, merchants and ministers, soldiers and sailors, crammed into the main cathedral square. The people’s joy was unbound. They cheered as the bishop mounted the podium, and she felt the gentle wings of peace descend on the congregation.

 

As if by accident, her hand brushed against a small pouch in her pocket. From it, she felt an immediate sensation of power and authority. It was from the Unbending Lord himself, Genghis Khan. For in the pouch was the white sulde of peace, the horsehair from the tail of his white stallion. The peace touched her spirit, and her spirit touched the peace. They were one, and she remembered the importance of that single white horsehair. It was a path to bring peace to the east and the west. 

 

In the distance, Karia heard creaking and groaning. She recognised the sounds. The Mongols were preparing a trebuchet.

 

“Brethren,” the bishop said. “You have all heard the great tidings. The Golden Horde is not so golden anymore. Their minds are swollen with their ambition, now their bodies are swollen with the pestilence.”

 

To great applause, he added, “This is the work of God. This is how He strikes down our enemies. This is His reward for our soldiers’ bravery, and our citizens’ courage, and above all, for our continuing belief in the Lord, that He will save us, and forgive us our sins.”

 

In the background, Karia heard the strings of a trebuchet being tightened.

 

“People of Kaffa,” the bishop went on. “We are the righteous ones. On this day, we move with the spirit of the times, for this is our salvation. May the Lord be with you.”

 

“And with you.” As the crowd responded in kind to the bishop’s homily, they heard the familiar tight snapping sound of the release of the trebuchet. Soon after, something flew over the battlements and landed in the crowd. Karia couldn’t see what it was. The Mongols often catapulted missiles like firebombs over the walls.

           

The people near where the projectile landed ran from it, leaving an open space in the crowd. But it was odd, because it didn’t set fire to anything. A similar object traced an arc over the battlements, and the same thing happened; the people dispersed and this time raised a hue and cry. Some folk edged back towards the packages to examine them, prodding them with sticks. Others stood by and pointed at them. Again, there were no flames. It wasn’t an incendiary.

 

Something was awry. Karia had an inkling what it was.

 

It happened a third time. A bundle glided serenely over the city walls and dropped into the crowd, this time on the ground below where she stood on the battlements. She expected it to explode.

 

But it didn’t. Neither did the other two.

 

The crowd scattered as if a pride of lions rampaged among them. There, in the middle of the main square, in the shadows cast by the great twin towers of the city’s Christian cathedral, lay three bodies.

 

Three human corpses.

 

And not just any old corpses.

 

The skin of the one nearest to her was blackened. The body was swollen with buboes as big as lemons. It was plague-ridden. Her inkling was right. But she could never have foreseen that the Mongols would do something as vile as this. While they packed to leave, Jani Beg Khan sent them a parting gift or two, or three or four. This devastating Parthian shot was made by an army that was expert in performing a similar strategy on the battlefield.

 

What flew over the walls of Kaffa that day marked the first time such an event had ever happened anywhere on Earth. In her experience, the air itself was benevolent. It didn’t mind what went through it nor what it carried, whether the smell of roses, a swirl of leaves, or a cluster of thunder clouds. On another day, the air could host the arc of a rainbow, a susurration of swallows, or the light of a star from the Heavenly River, the Milky Way. It was oblivious to the flight of a bird of prey or the ferocity of a lightning strike.

 

On that day, it all changed, because it hosted something it never had before. On that day, on the Crimean Peninsula, it rained disease. Death came out of the air and landed on the poor souls of Kaffa. Karia didn’t know if they deserved it. Nor did she think it was an act of God, because she didn’t believe God was anywhere near Kaffa that day. Evil occurred in the absence of God, and that conscious act of wrongdoing by the Mongols was evil.

 

During the rest of the day, the screeching sounds of the tightening and release of the strings of the trebuchet grew ever more eerie, ever more horrific, as scores of plagued cadavers arced over the city walls and landed on the roofs of the houses, in the bazaar, in the square, on the mosque, in the alleys, in the small gardens by the side of the church. One even conveniently landed in the cathedral cemetery.

 

The citizens of Kaffa watched as rotten bodies fell from the skies, crashing onto their soil, spreading their putrid smell in all directions. The Christians could neither hide nor flee from the havoc that rained down upon them. Despite her begging him not to, Roberto Spinola ordered the populace to handle the rotten bodies and dump them over the walls and into the sea. He’d repulsed them once, and sniffed a second victory over the Mongols, but all he could smell was the stench of the pestilence, and the awful fear that emanated from his citizens.

 

The next morning, Karia went to the cathedral square. It was shorn of bodies, though someone had sprinkled rose petals all over the ground. Karia knew who that was.