John responded to Daoud's remark. "Not at all tiring. We had five tumans at Moscow. There were about fifty thousand people living in the city, and many had died in the siege. Subotai gave the honor of the killing to the most valorous tuman, which happened to be mine. We just divided them up. Each of us took about five of them. You can kill five people in no time. It is not like fighting. Some we shot with arrows. Others we cut their heads off. The women are especially easy. You just pull their hair to stretch their necks so the sword will go through easier, and chop!" Ana, imperturbable even now, repeated the slicing gesture John made with his hand. "The children run away sometimes, and you have to chase them," John chuckled. "It is best to use arrows on them. But the adults are so terrified, they just stand there." Daoud looked again at the circle around them. Several people looked a bit sick. The mouth of the elderly contessa hung open, revealing the absence of two or three lower front teeth. Pope Urban leaned forward in his chair, his face expressionless. Driven by his growing hatred for the Tartars, he pressed them to reveal more of themselves. He should be pleased, he thought, at this much success, but he wanted to destroy them utterly. "You do not mind killing children?" he asked. John seemed puzzled by the question. "What else could we do with them? With their parents dead they would only starve to death. Or if they lived, they would grow up hating us, and we would have to fight them." _You could make slaves of them_, said a voice inside Daoud, and the red mist swelled into a cloud of fury billowing up inside him. He had to sit motionless, his fist clenched on the stem of his silver goblet, waiting for the feeling to pass. Thank God for Saadi's teaching. It was painful to look directly with the inner eye at the disorientation of his senses and at the anger surging through his body, but it saved him from any fatal mistake. Philip said, "At Baghdad I found a whole house full of babies, maybe thirty or forty. I slit all of their throats. Their mothers were dead already. I suppose they left the babies behind when they went out of the city to be executed, hoping they would survive. But with no one to suckle them, the babies would have starved to death. Killing them was an act of mercy." Remembering what he had seen of Baghdad, Daoud felt his rage grow cold and towering as the mountains of the Roof of the World. Those were his Muslim people. He wanted to draw the dagger at his belt and slash the throats of the two gloating, drunken savages before him. He bit down hard on his lower lip to keep himself under control. "When we shot people with arrows," said John, "we went around and pulled the arrows out of the bodies afterward so we could use them again. We do not waste anything." _He is trying to show how admirable they are._