On the great dry plain, outside of Iron Man bowshot range and with no scouts visible, the genie conjured once more. This time the results came quickly: An army of one hundred magnificently uniformed light cavalry and a towering white stallion for Aladdin to ride as their leader. The genie costumed himself as a somewhat less magnificent officer’s aide.
“Time for you to do your part. You must get a detachment of Iron Men to follow you to the location we talked about.”
Aladdin breathed deeply, “Right! I’m ready!”
“Remember: Lead from behind, looking princely.”Aladdin started with a commanding speech—the princely way to start a battle—and launched a lightning raid on the Iron Man camp.
For a few minutes it was a devastating success. The Iron Men were not expecting a night attack and certainly not from the desert side. Many panicked and many Iron Men fell while no genie men fell.
But the battle-hardened Iron Men did not stay spooked for long. First they formed squares of resistance, then they started shooting back. When five genie men had fallen to their pikes and arrows and only a few additional Iron Men went down, Aladdin called for a retreat back into the desert. As quickly as it had come, the genie army regrouped a short ride away.
“Very nice,” Aladdin’s aide told him. “Now collect your patience for a long wait.”
<<<*>>>
The Iron Men’s response took about an hour to organize. Their commander was prepared to do nothing but post more guards—until he inspected the bodies of the dead genie soldiers. Their uniforms were magnificent and each wore a belt of heavy gold chain buckled with a large ruby. He smelled treasure … fine treasure!
He ordered his best lieutenant, “Find them, and find out where they came from.”
When the lieutenant’s scouts reported that the enemy had regrouped outside the camp, he organized three hundred men for desert travel and headed out to do some “intensive interrogation”.
As the troop came within long arrow range the genie’s army launched a volley, retreated to a low ridge, then stood their ground again. The lieutenant was no fool. He spread his army into a wide crescent and let the two wings advance ahead of the center. This time when Aladdin’s army retreated after a few volleys, ten more fell under the hail of Iron Man arrows.
“Ouch!” said the genie. “You’re down to eighty-five men. Be careful. Your army must last the night!”
Aladdin nodded grimly.
The running battle did continue all night, with Aladdin’s army leading the Iron Man army into badlands north of the Tyre-Induslan road. There the armies played cat-and-mouse in a warren of gullies and valleys that lay between the buttes, mesas, and higher flatland to the east and the great plain to the west. The game was deadly, and more so for the Iron Men, but each dead enemy’s belt added a small fortune to their booty.
As dawn lightened the eastern sky, the genie army had dwindled to thirty men and the three hundred Iron Men to sixty. But the lieutenant took some comfort that his sixty men each had a small fortune in uniforms, and he had a large one. Nevertheless, he was about to order a return to camp when the amazing happened.
As they turned up one last gully they saw the thirty-man genie army standing its ground reinforced by another hundred men or so—and behind them a magnificent city, its walls trimmed in fine, lustrous gold glittering in the light of dawn!
“No wonder these soldiers are so rich!” muttered the lieutenant as the genie army advanced. “Retreat!” he commanded. “We will finish this fight another day.”
For half that day the cat-and-mouse game continued reversed, with the genie army hunting down Iron Men trying to find their way out of the badlands warren and back to camp. In the end, only thirty men made it back to camp, hot, tired, and half crazed.
But they were laden with treasure and full of stories about the Golden City to the north.