‘And all the saints of my poverty-stricken little country?’
‘All the saints of every country, if that’s what Blue has in mind.’
‘Will a plodding old friar do instead?’ Brother Jerome was philosophical about the changed plans, standing pink-and-grey in the bright morning. ‘Leave it in the hands of the good Lord,’ he said simply. He didn’t see Twm’s sudden grin.
It was a slow journey following the causeway that led along the marshy lakeside. After the storm, the land was flooded; impossible to tell, in places, what was solid ground and what was deep and treacherous marsh. Feet and hooves made sucking noises in the mud and the stink of the marsh rose around them. ‘Just like back hoöme,’ said Blue with satisfaction. ‘Squidgy, this is. We’ll be spruttled all over wi’ muck afore the day’s done.’ He was as sure-footed as Sakoura, and picked his way with the same instinct for safe ground. He was leading his horse, trusting to his own two feet, but he’d insisted Hatice ride. She’d done enough walking, he said, and Edgar agreed. His own horse could easily carry his weight and that of slender Agathi, if she would trust herself to him.
She would. She darted little glances from under lowered lids, let herself be helped into the saddle, sat demurely behind Edgar with her arms about his waist.
Kazan stared expressionless at the pair then leaned down and hoisted Niko into the saddle behind her, careful of his injured arm. She was still riding Yıldız. Dai had insisted. The mare was used to her now. Let gentle Asperto ride the sure-footed chestnut. She was keen to be in the open air again, true, but she would be safe with him, as he would be safe with her if there was any faintness or falling. Brother Jerome was content to sit astride a mule, his lean legs dangling low each side and his sandalled feet swinging. And so they journeyed through the cold day, through a watery world with the wide arc of pale sky above them. The road left the great lake behind for the firmer ground amongst the foothills of the mountains until it swung back towards another vast lake with the encircling, snow-topped mountains reflected in water that shimmered deepest blue to green and icy air nipped cheeks and noses. Sakoura pointed out the mountains: Barla Dag˘ı and Karakuş Dag˘ı to the west; Davras Dag˘ı to the south and behind them now, in the east, Dedegöl Dag˘ı and Kirişli Dag˘ı. There, down on the lowest slopes, were the remains of the yürük summer camps. There were signs of hasty leaving. This was an early winter.
By sunset they had reached the solid, plain han on the banks of the lake, the last before Eg˘ridir, thankful to tumble from mounts to bath to supper to sleep. The next day was their last in the high plain: after Eg˘ridir they would start the long descent down the mountains through the Aksu gorge, down to Attaleia and, God willing, the Venetian fleet.
The road twisted and looped through the mountains alongside the lake; the wildness gave way to cultivated stretches of orchards high above the glittering water, the trees all but bare of leaves now, most ripped away in the storm. In spring, Sakoura said, it was beautiful to see the blossom-laden trees. In autumn, as well, when the fruit was ripe and the branches hung heavy. Dai nodded his agreement; he had been this way before in spring, summer and autumn. He knew when the road would twist around the last outcrop of rock and there would be the walls of Eg˘ridir below them on the lakeside, and the high minaret of the new cami that was barely ten years old and the causeway that reached across the lake to two small islands.
He was riding behind Kazan and Niko when they breasted the road and urged the brown horse alongside them though the way was narrow enough. ‘There.’ He pointed. ‘Not long now. Tired, are you?’
‘Tired of riding.’
Dai laughed. He shifted in his saddle and eased his shoulders. ‘It’s been a long two days. We’ve done well. We’ll be comfortable tonight. Eg˘ridir has one of the biggest hans I know, as big as the Sultan hans.’ He meant the hans commissioned by the Sultans themselves, not just wealthy individuals. Blue shouted to them. He had been whittling all day at a piece of wood he had begged from the carpenters at the last han. Now he held out his handiwork to the small boy clinging one-armed to Kazan’s waist: a stick with triangles of cotton fixed like sails horizontally across the top.
‘A windmill,’ said Dai. ‘I made those for my brothers.’ Long ago, he thought, in another life, as if it had never been, yet the sight of the simple toy brought all rushing back.
Niko tugged at Kazan’s sleeve to be let down. They watched as he stumbled, stiff with the day’s journey, hugging his injured arm, then recovered his balance and ran across to Blue to take the toy, uncertain at first of its purpose. Blue’s big hand engulfed the boy’s and together they held the sails into the gentle wind that was ever-blowing from the mountains. The sails fluttered and moved very slightly. Blue tilted the windmill further into the breeze and the sails whirred round. Niko’s mouth opened in surprise and pleasure and at once he seemed like any young boy, a child again delighting in a child’s simple toy. Somewhere, there was another child, too young to have been taken from his parents, dead now and newly buried; others also, young brothers long since dead from painful starvation.
‘Look Hatice!’ they heard him cry and then the miracle: Hatice’s gaunt face, watchful and suspicious, half-hidden under the indigo-blue bonnet, breaking into a smile. A cautious smile, it was true, more a grimace, but a smile for all that. Blue grinned back at her. ‘Eh, but yer an eyeäble woman,’ they heard him say in his broadest dialect, and saw the woman’s perplexed expression.
‘Let’s hope she thinks he’s saying something about Niko,’ Dai murmured.
‘What did he say?’
Dai repeated it in Venetian and watched Kazan’s face crease into laughter. She answered in the same language, with more ease than at first. ‘It would be very difficult if Blue and Asperto were rivals in love, would it not? Perhaps they will fight for her.’
Dai grinned again. He felt suddenly light-hearted. ‘It would save you from that night out Blue’s promised you once we get to Attaleia, isn’t it now?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Seems he’s promised you all a night’s wenching – said that it would do you and Edgar and Rémi good. Be an education for you.’ He watched with interest as the clear red came up into her face. ‘He said you blushed. Now, how did he put it? “Thowt as he’d go pop he were that red in the face.” That was it.’ He laughed out loud at her outraged expression.
‘It seems to me,’ she said loftily, ‘that men have only one thing in mind and that is the thing they carry between their legs, and that is nothing much. I have seen it.’
Her words registered slowly. ‘What?’ She nodded with mischievous satisfaction at his shock.
‘Yes. I have seen. Once only, when I was hiding behind the waterfall. In the morning the men brought the beasts down for water and one man, he stood naked under the waterfall. He had nothing but a shrivelled purse and a drooping white finger like this.’ She crooked her little finger. ‘And you men boast of this?’
‘The cold water does that.’
‘So when it is warm then their thing grows as big as the men say?’
‘Kazan, this is not…you should not say this.’
She laughed at him. ‘Your face is red. I think perhaps you will go pop.’
‘I begin to suspect, Kazan, that your grandmother did not beat you enough.’
‘She never did.’
‘A pity. Perhaps I should repair the omission.’
She poked out her tongue. ‘You would not. Besides, you spoke of this night of wenching, not I. And who should I ask about these things if not you?’
‘Better not ask at all.’
‘But they tease me and joke amongst themselves and laugh because I do not understand. They talk about what they would do to a woman.’
He closed his eyes. Of course they would, and it was no fit talk before a maid. If – when – they knew her sex, there would be many faces red enough to pop.
‘It is not for you to repeat. It is men’s talk and vulgar talk
at that. A beating, Kazan, that is what is needed for you.’ She only laughed in answer.
The han was further from the town, just beyond the walls and close to the lake shore. It was the last han on the busy route from Konya before the mountain road began. There had been a smaller han in the town itself but it had become a medrese since the town had grown with trade; this new han was enormous, as Dai said, with six corner towers and fourteen along the sides. The portal was grandly decorated with braids and stars and blossoms and arching arabesques and led into a huge courtyard bursting with activity.
The news of the landslide had spread quickly and new plans made to change routes. There were the nomad tribes as well, travelling down from the summer pastures. An early winter and the prospect of blocked routes; time to move down to the plains, now, before worse weather. The han was full, buzzing with caravans, nomads, travellers, merchants like themselves anxious to reach the coast and the Venetian and Genoan fleets. Late evening, they sat by the fires, and Hatice and Asperto told how they had been captured and taken as slaves. ‘We think Vecdet planned to take us to Candia,’ said Hatice. ‘We are worth more there.’
‘My sister is valuable.’ Niko’s voice was very quiet. ‘She is a virgin. She is worth many akçe.’
‘I think she is safe now,’ said Dai, ‘if you are happy that she becomes the wife of this Edgar of ours?’ He spoke quietly so that the young couple could not hear though they were so deep in a world of their own making it was unlikely they heard anything except their own hearts beating.
Niko’s face was ecstatic. ‘He is just the man for her,’ he said. ‘He will know how to look after her.’ He grimaced. ‘I think I shall not tell him she is very hard work and that she cries too much. He might change his mind about her.’
Dai laughed at that and encouraged the boy to talk. He told the story of how he had rescued Kazan and hidden him behind the waterfall. His dark eyes, long-lashed, mischievous, flickered to Kazan, and met the inscrutable, golden gaze. ‘Kazan the invincible,’ he said. ‘Kazan who escaped from the evil donkey Vecdet.’ His eyes opened wide when they all laughed.
‘I am the hero Kazan whose boasting words fly faster than arrows.’ sang Mehmi.
‘Oh Kazan, bright star, hero, warrior!’
And then the tale of her riding and shooting had to be told again, and Mehmi’s song sung though Kazan protested and hung her head. ‘Kazan the Great,’ she thought. ‘Who amongst these men would ever believe that Kazan is a feeble girl who deceives them all?’ Shame it is for a warrior to hide his name from another. Her gaze met Dai’s. Soon she must tell them who she really was and risk their anger. She owed it to the quiet brown man that some called dangerous and Thomas would call worse.
The next day they started early along the route that would take them down through the gorge to the coastal plain and Attaleia. This was country where travellers had to beware of wolves and bears and wild boars that lived in the forests of cedar and pine. Early as they were, the yürük were before them, travelling before dawn. Perhaps they would catch up later in the day. Kazan knew of them, knew their password. All yürük had special passwords and secret signs so that they could communicate with one another. At first the going was level and easy, the bubbling river swollen by the heavy rain but giving no sign as yet that it would become huge and fierce, its dark water rolling with the rapids that gave it its name of Aksu: white water.
The day travelled on. Feeble sunlight gave way to threatening clouds that massed over the mountains. The track dropped more steeply, with limestone outcrops rearing up on one side and on the other crashing down into the gorge, a dizzying depth below them where the river rushed in the valley bottom. They passed waterfalls cascading out over the chasm; they passed a bridge leaping in an arc across the empty space between the sides of the gorge and Dai wondered at the miraculous cleverness of those who had built it. An ancient bridge, Sakoura had said, used from time out of mind. A bridge built by the Old People. The same who had made the roads they travelled.
A grey sky and the air silent. They travelled down the track, the gorge on their left, a stone’s throw away; to their right, the high crags of the valley walls. Down and down, the camels and mules and their herders; men on horseback and the rushing river, the noise they made unnaturally loud in the silent air. When they stopped to rest Sakoura searched out Dai.
‘This silence,’ he said, ‘it is wrong. No sound. No birds, no animals, nothing.’
‘We’re making enough noise – and there’s the river.’
Sakoura made an impatient gesture with his hand. ‘It is not that,’ he said, ‘but something more. I do not like it. We should go carefully.’
Uneasiness was affecting them all, animals and men alike. Again and again the horses shook their heads and had to be urged on; again and again the mules resisted, shying away from the muleteers; again and again they halted, listened: silence except for the distant roar of the water. Far below them they caught glimpses of the yürük flocks, a flash of white, a black goat, a plodding figure, a bright saddle cloth. Sometimes the jink, jink of harness. Above them another caravan was jingling and chinking its way down. Sometimes the voices of the men floated down to them, a quiet call, a whistle, the whine of dog, the bray of a donkey. The wall of rock gave way to overhanging crags, and forested ravines that travelled far back into the mountains. Sakoura paused by an outcrop of rock; there was a symbol crudely drawn on to its surface. ‘Look, Master Dai. This is made by the yürük. It is one of the signs the boy told us of.’
‘Kazan!’ They waited until she had ridden down to them. ‘What is this?’
She studied it, biting her lip in concentration. ‘It tells the traveller to go carefully. There is danger.’
‘What danger?’
‘It does not say. At least…’ She paused, frowning. ‘I cannot read this. The earth,’ she said. ‘I think that is what it says. Perhaps it means the path?’
‘Maybe.’ Dai debated with himself: too late in the day to turn all around and go back to the han at Eg˘ridir; there was no place here to camp safely, and silent the forest may be but in its silence were wild animals. But to travel on into unknown danger? ‘What do you think, Twm?’
‘The nomads have not turned back.’
Dai nodded. ‘Go to the back of the caravan,’ he told the girl. ‘Tell Asperto and Hatice to go with you. Edgar and the girl as well, and the good Brother. You should be safer there if there is danger.’ She nodded, obeyed without word, turned Yıldız, keeping Niko balanced behind her.
It was as she came up to Asperto that it happened. A strange sensation, as if she were falling, as if she were dizzy and faint though she knew she was not. Another tremor, hardly felt at first. ‘Earthquake,’ someone shouted.
‘There’s land sliding!’
‘Look out!’
Danger it was, and from the earth, as the sign had said, but the danger was not at the front of their caravan. It was above her, where she and Asperto struggled to keep the mares from plunging and rearing in panic, and the earth tremor had shaken loose the rain-swollen earth. Rocks and earth cascaded past them, tumbling and crashing. High above a pine tree creaked and groaned, sliding upright, eerily, slowly slowly towards them before it fell roaring down the mountainside dragging a torrent of mud and scree in its wake. The pebbles hit them, hard and sharp. Rüzgar screamed and flung sideways. Asperto was thrown from her back and rolled away from under her clashing hooves to lie perilously close to the crumbling edge. Kazan felt Niko slip, his one-armed hold precarious. She twisted in the saddle and pulled him up and in front of her. ‘Hold tight,’ she said, and felt his good arm grasp her round the waist and the other arm – what it must have cost him – he shook free of the sling and twisted that hand around the material of her tunic. It left both her hands free: one to pull on the reins of the frantic animal; the other to reach out to Asperto. She had him by the wrist, desperately trying to pull him high enough to get a firm grip on the saddle and all the while pebbles and eart
h were skittering away from under him and there was the roar of waterfall booming in her ears. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Rüzgar scramble clear to safety, felt the splattering mud and earth, saw the fall of rock that must surely sweep them over the edge, down into the gorge where the swirling, white-foamed water waited for them unless Yıldız could carry them to safety.
‘No good!’ gasped Asperto. ‘No good. Too much weight. Take care of the boy.’
From the head of the caravan Dai watched helplessly. ‘We must keep moving, Dafydd,’ Twm yelled. ‘There’s no room on this path to do anything else. Too narrow. Keep moving.’ Keep the animals calm, he thought, keep them moving down the path and away from the falling mountain. He didn’t dare look back but Dafydd now, Dafydd was staring back. Sakoura was of Twm’s mind, urging the animals and their herders on to safer footing and surer ground. One of the mules slithered and slipped, scrabbling uselessly for a hold. It fell screaming over the edge, its heavy pack breaking loose. The animal bounced once and once again on outcrops of rock before falling into the water with a spurt of white foam. The packs burst open and the bright saddle cloths billowed into sails then collapsed into the water and were tumbled along and out of sight.
He had sent her into danger, Dai thought, she and the boy. All of them. Edgar and Agathi. Where were they? Brother Jerome? Asperto? There was the chestnut mare scrabbling over the rocks, safe on the path but riderless.
‘There they are,’ Giles pointed. Dai’s first rush of relief lasted the seconds it took to see how Niko clung to Kazan while she was pulling on Yıldız’s rein and leaning far over towards something unseen on the edge of the road. The edge! They were on the very edge of the road, and earth and rocks were rushing towards them. The world stopped, forever frozen in the moment of earth falling and the girl and the boy on the mare in the path of the murderous fall.
‘Why don’t they move?’ breathed Twm.
‘She’s trying to hold Asperto as well.’ They watched the desperate struggle. ‘She can’t hold him,’ said Dai. The words were jerked out of him. ‘He’s too heavy for her. She’s not strong enough and neither is the mare.’
The Storyteller's Granddaughter Page 27