Silk Road

by Falconer, Colin

  ‘You will go?’

  He shook his head. His gaze focused on the grey horizon, contemplating the uncertainty of a future without their Khan of Khans. ‘I think it is better I stay here.’

  She knew what he was thinking: if there was going to be bloodshed it was better to stay here and protect his own fief. ‘A rider came from Bukhara this morning with news,’ Qaidu said. ‘There are ambassadors passing here on their way to Qaraqorum. We are asked to escort them as far as Besh Balik. I want you to lead that escort.’

  Khutelun felt a surge of pride at being chosen before either of her brothers for the task. ‘You will bring them here first, until the weather is better. But you will not take them to Besh Balik. Instead I want you to take them all the way to Qaraqorum.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So you can give Ariq Böke my support in the khuriltai. I cannot be deaf and blind to everything that happens.’

  ‘I am honoured you trust me with this task, Father.’

  ‘I have always trusted you, daughter. You are the ablest of all my children.’

  It was the greatest compliment he had ever given her. If only I had been a son, she thought, I could have been khan. ‘These ambassadors,’ she asked him. ‘Where are they from?’

  ‘They are from lands far to the west. Barbarians. It seems they wish to prostrate themselves at the feet of our Khan of Khans.’

  ‘But we have no Khan of Khans.’ The process of the khuriltai, she knew, could take perhaps two or three years.

  Qaidu shrugged. ‘If we have no Khan of Khans,’ he answered, ‘then they will have to wait in Qaraqorum until there is one.’

  Aleppo to Kashgar

  northern spring,

  in the year of Our Lord 1260

  XVII

  HOW LONG HAD they been travelling? He had lost count of the weeks. Or was it months?

  They had taken the great desert route from Aleppo, mile upon mile of hard gravel, the lonely province of goats and Bedouin shepherds. The Tatars had insisted they leave behind their carts with the heavy iron chests of provisions and the suit of chain mail Josseran had brought as a gift for the Tatar khan. The other gifts Josseran packed into a waterproof leather bag and carried on his horse. He himself wore the damascened sword.

  William still clutched a leather satchel that he had brought with him from Acre. Josseran wondered what treasures he had decided were indispensable to his mission. A thumbscrew and a hair shirt perhaps.

  Although it was yet winter the days were warm and William, unaccustomed to the heat and fatigued by the rigours of the journey, swayed from side to side on his mount. He will not last eight more days, never mind eight months, Josseran thought. They were all tortured by the flies that clustered at the corners of their eyes and mouths whenever they stopped to rest. Eight months! Josseran thought. Impossible. Juchi must have been trying to torment them.

  ‘I want you to teach me to speak Tatar,’ Josseran said.

  ‘You would find it too hard,’ Juchi said, in Arabic.

  ‘It sounds very much like Turkic and I already speak that well enough. I think you will find I have an aptitude. And we have nothing else to do on this interminable journey.’

  ‘Where do you want me to start?’

  ‘I already know Hello is Salam. Thank you is Rèqmèt. In the morning you say Qaiyerle irtè to each other. At night it is Qaiyerle ki.’

  Juchi laughed, delighted. ‘Excellent. My men think you are as stupid as your horse, but they have underestimated you. Very well, Barbarian. As you say, we have nothing better to do while we ride. I will tell you a few words as we ride, and we shall see who learns to speak Tatar first, you or your horse!’

  One evening, not long after they had set out from Aleppo, one of the Tatars was bitten by a scorpion. He spent that entire night sobbing with pain, and died early the next morning. The incident chilled William to the marrow.

  But visions of his Christ helped him endure. If this was to be his cross, his purgatory, then so be it. He would welcome his tribulations as scourge for his impure thoughts.

  Horse dung clung to their damp clothes; the atmosphere inside the tent was ripe with it. William wiped his eyes, which were streaming, smarting from the fire smoke.

  ‘You think they will eat us next?’ he said to Josseran.

  He had heard the legends about these people; that they drank blood and ate dogs and frogs and snakes, even each other. Watching them now, it was not difficult to imagine. He stared in disgust at the mess of sheep’s intestines on the soaking grass in front of him. The Tatars laughed and encouraged him to eat as they wrenched tubes of offal from the steaming pile of guts with grease-blackened fingers. The rest of the animal, the fleece, the head and bloodied bones lay in a heap to one side.

  The owner of the yurt had slaughtered the animal in their honour. Josseran had never seen an animal killed in such a fashion; the man had simply thrown it on its back, pinned it down with his knees and slit its belly with his knife. He had then thrust his arm into the animal’s twitching guts up to his elbow and squeezed off the aorta, stopping the heart. In a few moments the sheep’s head had flopped to the side and it died, with barely a drop of blood spilled.

  Their method of cooking the beast was just as brutal. Only the stomach contents were discarded; everything else, the tripe, the head, the offal, the meat and the bones were tossed in boiling water.

  William felt faint with hunger but his stomach rebelled at eating any of the pink and parboiled mess in front of him.

  Juchi carved off a piece of almost raw meat from the carcass with his knife and thrust it in his mouth. William could hear small bones crunching between his teeth. Grease glistened on his chin.

  There was a goatskin bag at the doorway. Juchi lurched to his feet and poured some of the liquid from the bag into a wooden bowl and thrust it into William’s hands. He motioned for him to drink.

  It was what they called koumiss, the fermented mare’s milk that they drank with every meal. This at least was not unpleasant, now he had become accustomed to it. It was clear and pungent, like wine, and slightly effervescent; it left an aftertaste of almonds.

  William lifted the bowl to his lips and downed the contents in one gulp. Immediately he clutched at his throat, gasping for breath. His insides were on fire. The Tatars burst into laughter.

  ‘You have poisoned him!’ Josseran shouted.

  ‘Black koumiss,’ Juchi said. He patted his stomach. ‘It’s good!’

  And so nothing would do but they forced William to drink more, standing in front of him and clapping their hands at each swallow. He knew what they were doing. This black koumiss was as strong as sack and William knew that soon he would be as drunk as they were. After he had downed several cups of this foul liquor they tired of their game and sat back down on the wet grass and resumed their meal.

  ‘Are you all right, Brother William?’ Josseran asked him.

  ‘Will you join me . . . in prayer?’ he answered. His tongue felt suddenly twice the size and he realized he had slurred his words.

  ‘My knees are already blistered and raw from your constant supplications.’

  ‘We should ask for divine guidance . . . so that we may win these people for the Lord.’

  The Tatars watched him as he fell on his knees beside the fire and lifted his clasped hands to the sky. Their eyes followed the direction of his gaze to the smoke hole and the single evening star that hovered above the yurt.

  ‘God’s bones, just stop it,’ Josseran told him. ‘They are not at all impressed with your devotions. They think you are afflicted.’

  ‘The opinion of a Tatar does not trouble me.’

  It was true. For the first time in weeks he was no longer afraid. He felt strong, invincible and charismatic. William called loudly on the Lord to come among them, guard their souls and lead their barbarian escorts to the one true way.

  When he had finished Josseran was still grimly chewing on a piece of raw offal. ‘How can you eat this disgusting mess
?’ William said.

  ‘I am a soldier. A soldier cannot survive without food, no matter how displeasing it may be to the palate.’

  William took a coil of cooked gut in his hand, feeling the slimy texture of it. He felt his gorge rise. He stood up and left the tent, shaping to toss the offal at a pack of dogs.

  But then the world began spinning around him and he fell, dead drunk, on his back.

  William woke before dawn. He heard the baying of a wolf somewhere in the night. There was a dull ache behind his eyes. He reached for the crucifix at his throat and murmured a silent prayer. He knew that if he failed in this, the redemptive mission of his poor life, there could be no deliverance.

  XVIII

  IT WAS A cold, grey morning. Below them was a lake, the colour of steel. The slopes around them were wreathed in dark cloud. Occasionally, between breaks in the overcast, they glimpsed the jagged teeth of the mountains that stretched across the horizon, their peaks capped in snow and ice.

  Juchi crouched beside the fire outside the yurt. He seemed unaffected by the cold. He wore thick-soled felt boots, like all the Tatars, and a thick wrap-around gown that they called a del, tied with a broad sash of orange silk. He had not yet put on his furlined cap. His head was almost completely shaven, like all the rest, with just a tuft of hair at the forehead and two long braids behind each ear.

  He was roasting the head of a sheep on the end of a long stick. He turned it over the coals. When all the hair had been singed off he put it on the ground and began to extract meagre pieces of charred flesh and marrow with the point of his knife.

  Breakfast.

  ‘How long before we arrive in Qaraqorum?’ Josseran asked him, in the language of the Tatars.

  Juchi grinned. ‘Very good. You said you had an ear for language. I thought it was just boasting.’ He probed with his knife in the eye socket to find another tender morsel. ‘Qaraqorum? If we ride hard and if the weather is favourable . . . perhaps summer.’

  Josseran felt his spirits dip. So they had not been toying with him after all. ‘Still so far?’

  ‘Qaraqorum is at the centre of the world. Here we are still at its very rim.’

  William emerged from the yurt, staggering slightly, his skin ashen. ‘How did I find my bed?’ he said to Josseran.

  ‘I carried you there. You had fallen in the grass.’

  The friar absorbed this information in stolid silence. Josseran expected a murmur of thanks, at least. ‘I see you are learning their jabber now.’

  ‘Is that not a good thing?’

  ‘You are a traitor and heretic, Templar.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You banter with them constantly yet you have not informed these heathen of the missive I bear from the Holy Father. Is it not true you offered to make truce with these devils?’

  ‘I am your escort and interpreter. That is all.’

  ‘Do you take me for a fool?’

  Josseran turned away. He saw Juchi toss the remains of his breakfast into the fire, where the head popped and sizzled.

  ‘How I long for a good piece of roast hogget,’ William said and stumbled away to find his horse.

  Josseran was worried about Kismet. The pace of their journey had wasted her. Since reaching the mountains there had been less feed and now she was no more than a skeleton. She struggled on, her spirit undaunted, but he did not think she could survive much longer.

  At first he had thought the Tatar mounts ridiculous. They had thick necks and a dense coat and were barely taller than the pony on whose back he had first received instruction as a child. When he saw these supposedly fierce Tatar warriors on these yellow-brown mules, he could scarcely believe this was the cavalry that had laid waste half the known world.

  He had been forced to revise that opinion. These squat, ugly beasts could ride forever at a gallop and even with the snow thick on the ground they were able to find their own feed, pawing at the ice with their front hooves to chew at the frozen and blackened vegetation beneath and somehow draw sustenance from it.

  The packhorses Josseran had brought from Acre had long since died.

  It had been a harrowing journey, day after day, week after week, in the saddle, their escorts setting a murderous pace. There was only one way a Tatar knew how to ride and that was at a gallop, taking just a few minutes’ rest every two hours. Sometimes they would travel up to fifty miles a day.

  Each of them had brought with him from Aleppo at least five horses, the bridle of each one loosely knotted around the neck of the horse on its left, the last animal in the line led right-handed by the rider. They used each horse for two days before resting it.

  Josseran had been given his own string of Tatar ponies. But their flat hammering run left him saddle-sore and exhausted after the easy gallop of the Persians he was accustomed to riding, and Kismet herself could not keep up, even unsaddled.

  The Tatars employed short stirrups, made of leather, and stood in the saddle, hour after hour, their sinuous legs never seeming to tire. Josseran had tried to imitate them but after a few minutes his thigh muscles cramped and so he let himself sag in the hard, wooden saddle and was jolted and shaken until his bones rattled. By noon every day the pain had settled into his joints; first his knees, and then his spine, until by late afternoon it seemed that his whole body was on fire.

  But these Tatars seemed more at ease on horseback than they did on their short bow legs; he had even seen them sleep in the saddle. They controlled their mounts by pressure of their calves on the horse’s flanks, and because they could ride without using the reins they could even fire arrows at full gallop. This was why they wore such light armour, he realized; they had no interest in conventional hand-to-hand combat. They could let their arrows do their killing for them, at a distance. Even the Templars would not stand a chance in battle against cavalry like this.

  He had never known warriors like them. They were able to survive on so little. Sometimes they would pass the whole day without stopping for food. And such food. It invariably consisted of a few chunks of boiled mutton, eaten almost raw.

  He had always prided himself on his strength and endurance, but he had come to dread the mornings and the prospect of another unrelenting battering in the saddle. There were times he even wondered if he would survive to see this legendary Qaraqorum. As for William, his skin had turned grey, and Josseran had to lift him off of his horse at the end of every day. But, sure in his faith, he gave himself up to it again each morning like a true martyr.

  And as long as the damned friar could endure it, so could he.

  XIX

  WHAT JOSSERAN HAD seen of these Tatars so far had persuaded him that an alliance was not only advisable, it was essential. No Christian army could defeat them on horseback, or even halt their advance, certainly not with the forces they had in Outremer.

  If the Crusaders could not defeat the Tatar cavalry on the battlefield, their only alternative would be to take refuge behind the walls of their castles. But if the number and size of the Tatar siege machines he had seen at Aleppo was any indication, then even Acre and Castle Pilgrim might not long withstand them.

  Yet Qaraqorum was so far away. By the time they sat down to finally talk with this Khan of Khans, there might not be a Christian or Saracen left alive in the Holy Land to strike the treaty.

  After they crossed the Elburz Mountains into Persia he saw for himself the consequences of resistance.

  At the caravan city of Merv not a building was left standing. Chinggis Khan had laid the city waste many years ago. After the population surrendered, he had ordered that each Tatar soldier must slay three hundred Persians by his own hand. The command was applied to the letter. Later he burned the great library, feeding the fire with 150,000 ancient books. It was said that the glow of the resulting inferno could be seen across the desert in Bukhara.

  They crossed yet another desert, this one even thirstier than those they had seen in Syria, just frozen waves of sand dotted with clumps of dry saxaul bushe
s. At night they saw a glow on the horizon to the north-east, which Juchi said came from a fire lit in the tower of the Kalyan minaret in Bukhara. It was the tallest building in the whole world, he told him, and it had a brick lantern with sixteen arches at the very top that served as a beacon for merchant caravans in the desert at night.

  Josseran dismissed the claim as the typically florid exaggeration of the Mohammedans, but when they finally arrived at the great city he found it was true.

  The Kalyan minaret was a finger of baked and banded terracotta brickwork that soared giddyingly into the heavens. Just below the scalloped corbels of the muezzin’s gallery there was a necklace of glazed blue tiles in flowing Kufic script. ‘It is known also as the Tower of Death,’ Juchi said. ‘The Uzbek rulers who once reigned here used to toss their prisoners from the top of the minaret down there into the Registan.’

  It was an astonishing building. Even Chinggis Khan was impressed by it, Juchi said, for it was the only building in Bukhara that he spared, that and the Friday mosque, and even that had scorch marks on the walls.

  The rest of the city had been built since the time of Chinggis. It still possessed a desolate air, as if Chinggis and his murdering hordes had passed through just days before. It had a stench like Paris or Rome and the water in the canals was stagnant and green. The houses were drab, chalk-pale, built from whitewashed clay, with crooked door frames. There were few Persian faces; the population here had dark skins and almond eyes: Tatars and Kirghiz and Uzbeks.

  The land outside the ruined walls was still desolate. Just an hour’s ride from the Registan they came upon a pyramid built from human skulls, now bleached by the sun and picked clean by scavengers.

  ‘Dear God,’ Josseran murmured.

  They had hired an Arab guide for this part of the journey and he looked over his shoulder, to ensure Juchi and his soldiers were not within hearing. ‘Before the Tatars, everywhere you looked, there was green. Now everything is dying. Everything!’