**Scene: The Jewel of the The South**
The walls of Kandahar rose like a taunt from the sun-baked plains of Zamindawar. Built by Persian kings centuries ago, its cyclopean stones glowed ochre in the late afternoon sun. From Mahmud's vantage point on a low ridge, the city seemed impregnable: triple walls studded with towers, a deep moat fed by the Arghandab River, and the scarlet banners of its Saffarid governor, Rustam, snapping defiantly in the dry wind.
**Ayaz** (Shading his eyes): "Alexander couldn't crack these walls, Sultan. Rustam has stocked grain for two years. His archers outnumber our entire vanguard."
**Mahmud** (Not taking his eyes off the citadel): "Alexander didn't have *time*. We do. And Rustam doesn't have water."
**Ayaz:** "The river—"
**Mahmud:** "—is his weakness. Cut the river, Ayaz. Starve the wells."
He turned to his engineers, Turkic men with forearms like knotted rope and eyes narrowed from squinting at siege lines.
**Mahmud:** "How long to dam the Arghandab above the city?"
**Chief Engineer, Boran:** (Scratching calculations in the dirt): "Ten days. With every man swinging a pick. The current is strong, Sultan."
**Mahmud:** "You have seven. And if the river still flows into Kandahar on the eighth day, *you* will drink from its mud."
---
**Scene: The Desert Wind's Curse**
Seven days became an eternity. Under the blistering sun, thousands of Ghaznavid soldiers toiled. Earthworks rose like scar tissue along the riverbank. Men collapsed from heatstroke, their lips cracked and bleeding. The stench of sweat, mud, and animal carcasses used to reinforce the growing dam choked the air.
Inside Kandahar, Rustam struck back. Night raids harassed the work crews. Ghaznavid sentries were found at dawn with throats slit, Pashto curses carved into their flesh.
**Rustam** (Shouting from the ramparts, voice amplified by a brass cone): "MAHMUD! SON OF A STEPPE WHORE! DO YOU THINK YOU ARE THE FIRST BANDIT TO COVET THESE WALLS? YOUR BONES WILL WHITEN IN THE SAND BESIDE THEM!"
Mahmud, inspecting the dam progress, didn't flinch. He picked up a fallen soldier's waterskin, nearly empty, and hurled it toward the distant walls. It fell pitifully short.
**Mahmud:** (To Boran): "He wastes breath. Soon, he'll waste blood for water. Double the night guard. Crucify the next raider caught alive facing the city."
---
**Scene: The River Dies, The Thirst Begins**
On the seventh day, the Arghandab choked. The massive earth dam, shored up with timber and the bodies of dead horses, finally held. The river pooled angrily behind it, rising like a brown mirror. A cheer went up from the Ghaznavid lines.
Inside Kandahar, silence fell. The steady rush of water through the city's aqueducts slowed to a trickle, then ceased. The moat began to recede, revealing slimy green stones and discarded rubbish.
**Ayaz** (Watching through a captured Persian far-seeing tube): "The wells. They're digging frantic in the courtyards. Drawing mud."
**Mahmud:** "Good. Let them taste the earth. Now, the mines."
While the dam rose, Boran's engineers had been busy elsewhere. Like moles in the night, they dug. Three tunnels snaked toward Kandahar's foundations – one beneath the mighty Shahi Gate, another targeting a corner tower weakened by time, the third aiming for the citadel itself. Men worked in shifts, blind in the suffocating dark, their world the scrape of shovel on stone and the fear of collapse.
**Boran** (Emerging from a tunnel mouth, face black with dirt): "The gate tunnel is ready, Sultan. Forty paces deep, packed with dried apricot wood and naphtha. It will burn hot enough to crack the gates of Hell."
**Mahmud:** "And the citadel tunnel?"
**Boran:** "Slower. Hard rock. Another week."
**Mahmud:** "We don't have a week. Light the gate mine at dawn."
---
**Scene: The Gates of Fire**
Dawn painted the eastern sky blood-red. Kandahar's walls stood silent, ominously still. Mahmud's entire army formed up just beyond arrow range, a bristling forest of spears and banners. At the head, Mahmud sat astride his black Turkoman stallion, scimitar bare in his hand.
**Mahmud:** "Sound the horns."
A deep, mournful bellow echoed across the plain. It was the signal. Deep beneath the Shahi Gate, a fuse of soaked flax hissed to life.
Seconds stretched. A bird chirped in the sudden silence. Then—
The earth *bucked*. A low, grinding roar erupted as if the mountain itself were protesting. The Shahi Gate didn't just shatter; it *levitated*. Huge stone blocks, timber beams, and the twisted iron portcullis were hurled skyward in a geyser of dirt, smoke, and hellish orange flame. A shockwave flattened men hundreds of yards away. When the dust settled, a jagged, smoking maw gaped where the gate had stood.
**Mahmud:** (Voice cutting through the ringing silence): "*Allahu Akbar!* FORWARD!"
The Ghaznavid tide surged. Heavy infantry with tall shields rushed the breach, met instantly by a desperate wall of Saffarid defenders. The fighting was brutal, confined to the narrow, rubble-choked gap. Men died trampled, crushed, or screaming as they fell onto shattered stone.
**Ghulam Officer** (Stumbling back, clutching a spear wound): "Sultan! They're holding! They've barricaded the inner streets!"
**Mahmud:** (Eyes scanning the chaos): "They're focused on the gate. Ignore the breach. Boran! Signal the tower!"
High on the ridge, a red flag waved. From the tunnel beneath the corner tower, engineers lit a second, smaller charge.
*CRACK!*
The ancient tower groaned. Cracks spiderwebbed up its face. Then, with agonizing slowness, the entire structure leaned outward, shedding stones like rotten teeth, before collapsing inwards onto the screaming defenders massed in the inner courtyard. A new, wider breach yawned open.
**Mahmud:** "AYAZ! THE CITADEL! TAKE THE NORTH BREACH! LEAVE RUSTAM FOR ME!"
---
**Scene: The Falcon and the Lion**
Mahmud led his personal *ghulams* through the collapsed tower debris, carving a path toward the citadel square. The streets became killing grounds. Arrows hissed from rooftops. Boiling oil cascaded down alleyways. The air thickened with the coppery stink of blood and the choking smoke of burning homes.
In the central square, before the doors of the fortified governor's palace, Governor Rustam made his stand. Surrounded by his last hundred *dihqans* – Persian knights in battered lamellar armor – he stood like a cornered lion, his once-fine robes stained with soot and gore, a notched longsword in his hand.
**Rustam:** (Spying Mahmud): "GHOZI! COME! LET'S SEE IF ALLAH TRULY FAVORS BUTCHERS!"
Mahmud dismounted, pushing through his guards. He met Rustam in the open space between the lines, the crackle of distant fires their only audience.
**Mahmud:** "Yield the citadel, Rustam. Your people are dying of thirst. Your walls are dust. Spare them."
**Rustam:** (Barking a laugh): "Spare them? For your slave markets? For your *taxes*? We are Persians, Turk! We remember Cyrus. We do not kneel to wolves from the steppe!"
**Mahmud:** "Cyrus is dust. So is your pride."
Rustam attacked. He was older, heavier, but his skill was born of generations of aristocratic warfare. His longsword wove a deadly pattern – thrust, parry, a sweeping cut that forced Mahmud back. Mahmud fought with the economical ferocity of the steppe – darting steps, lightning-fast cuts of his lighter scimitar aimed at joints and eyes. Steel shrieked.
**Rustam:** (Panting): "You fight well... for a thief!"
**Mahmud:** (Ducking a wild swing): "I conquer. Thieves steal in the dark."
Mahmud saw an opening. Rustam, tiring, overextended on a thrust. Mahmud sidestepped, his scimitar lashing out not at Rustam, but at the older man's supporting leg. The blade bit deep into the thigh above the knee. Rustam cried out, stumbling. Mahmud's boot slammed into his wounded leg, sending him crashing to the bloody cobbles. Mahmud's blade rested on Rustam's heaving chest.
**Mahmud:** "The citadel. Your surrender. Now."
**Rustam:** (Eyes burning with hate, blood foaming on his lips): "Never. Kandahar... dies... free."
He spat blood towards Mahmud's face. Mahmud didn't blink. His scimitar flashed down.
---
**Scene: The Taste of Victory and Ashes**
By dusk, the fighting died. Kandahar was his. Ghaznavid banners hung limply from broken towers. The city stank of smoke, blood, and the deeper, more pervasive stench of human waste and desperation. The river dam was breached, brown water slowly refilling the moat and cisterns, but too late for thousands.
Mahmud walked through the ravaged governor's palace. Tapestries depicting Persian hunts were slashed. Fine porcelain lay shattered. In the great hall, Boran awaited him, face grim.
**Boran:** "The citadel well, Sultan. When the thirst grew desperate... Rustam's men... they used it for the dead. Animals. Men. It's poisoned. The whole lower city drank from it these last days."
**Mahmud:** (Stopping before a shattered portrait of a Saffarid prince): "Plague?"
**Boran:** "Dysentery. Blood flux. It's already spreading in the lower quarters. Our men too, who drank before we knew."
A cold fury settled over Mahmud. Not at the defenders, but at the waste. A city broken, its wealth tainted, its people dying not by his sword, but by their own ruler's final, vicious act.
**Mahmud:** "Burn the bodies. All of them. Inside the walls and out. Quarantine the lower city. Any Ghaznavid showing symptoms is to be moved outside the walls. Let no disease touch the army."
**Ayaz:** (Entering, wiping grime from his face): "The survivors, Sultan? The women? The craftsmen?"
**Mahmud:** (Looking out a broken window at the smoldering city): "Sort them. The strong, the skilled – blacksmiths, masons, weavers – send them to Ghazni in chains. They will rebuild *our* city. The rest... tax them triple for five years. If they live. If they flee..." He shrugged. "Let the desert have them."
He turned from the window. The tactical brilliance of the siege felt hollow now, overshadowed by the reek of death and the specter of disease. Kandahar was a prize, yes, but a poisoned one.
**Mahmud:** "Send word to Ghazni. Victory at Kandahar. But tell the poets... tell them to write of the river, the fire, the broken gate. Not the well. Not the flux."
**Ayaz:** "History favors the conqueror, Sultan."
**Mahmud:** (A bitter twist to his lips): "History is written by the survivors, Ayaz. See that we are among them. This city is a lesson. The next one will be sweeter. *India* will be sweeter."
He strode from the hall, the echoes of his boots on the marble floor the only sound in the dead governor's palace. The Iron Falcon had proven his genius, bending rivers and shattering walls. But the cost of Kandahar clung to him, a grim reminder that even victory could taste of ashes and despair. The hunt for untainted glory pushed his gaze further east, beyond the mountains, where the fabled riches of Hindustan awaited.