Goliath's Spring

GOLIATH'S SPRINGA Historical Novel1260. Three commanders walk toward one morning in a Galilee valley.The Mongol empire has never lost a war. It has burned Baghdad, drowned an army in the dark at the Dujayl canal, and rolled the last Abbasid caliph in a carpet so that no blood would touch the ground. Now only Egypt is left.In Damascus, Kitbuqa governs a city that had expected far worse of him. A Naiman by birth, a Christian of the Church of the East, an administrator who counts everything and enters it honestly whether or not the number flatters anyone, he has been left behind with a fifth of an army and a whole country to hold, while the khan who gave him the order rides four thousand miles east to a succession council that may never send an answer. He writes six letters. Nothing comes back. He does not know whether he has been refused or simply forgotten, and cannot decide which would be worse.In Cairo, Qutuz rules by a throne he took from a child. Sold out of Khwarazm at eleven, he watched his own kingdom end from a rooftop with his aunt's hand closing on his shoulder, and he has spent forty years rehearsing arguments so that he will never again be the boy who had none. He executes the envoys who come demanding submission, puts what remains of them on the gate at Bab Zuweila, and in a single afternoon makes unanimous a court that has spent a year despising him — and makes certain a war he cannot afford.Riding beside him is Baybars, commander of the vanguard, who reads ground the way other men read faces and says almost nothing about himself. Six years ago Qutuz murdered his patron. He has never mentioned it. He has never forgotten it.What brings these men to Ain Jalut is not destiny. It is grass. Two years without rain have thinned the pasture from Aleppo to the Jordan, and an army that lives on horses cannot stay where the horses cannot eat. It is also a Genoese slave trade that emptied the Kipchak steppe and sold its boys into the Cairo barracks — so that the empire which broke that country supplied, without noticing, the only army in the world that fought the way it did.They win. Against everything the century believed possible, on a September morning in a valley the Arabs called Goliath's Spring, an army that had never been beaten is broken in a single day.Seven weeks later, on the road home, one victor kills the other.Told in three unmistakable voices — a general who thinks in ledgers, a sultan who thinks in cadenced arguments he has already lost, a soldier who thinks in terrain and almost never in himself — Goliath's Spring is a novel about the arithmetic underneath famous events. It follows a wife who rides four hundred leagues because a four-line letter arrived with no figures in it, and who spends the only thing she has to spend in a field hospital that morning. It follows a caliph who was tolerably good at sums before the throne, and who asks, one evening too late, how many men a third of a disbanded army actually comes to. It follows a Chinese engineer whose hand no longer closes, an astrologer who reads the sky in whichever direction the khan already leans, and a queen whose intercession saves a quarter of Baghdad and is credited to no one.And it follows, thirty-one years afterward, an old chronicler in Cairo with two irreconcilable accounts on his table: the drought, the silence, the dead khan — and the miracle. He believes the first. He writes the second. He knows exactly what he is doing, and he does it anyway, because a city that has just survived the end of the world needs a story it can carry, and the true version has never once been the useful one.History calls Ain Jalut a miracle.The ledger says otherwise.