Silk Road

by Falconer, Colin

  My father, Josseran wondered, or God the Father? He did not know which meeting he feared the most.

  ‘You will come before the judgement and you will be cast down into the pit of hell.’ William raised his right hand, holding it in front of Josseran’s eyes. ‘Unless I absolve you with this hand! With this hand!’

  Do it, Josseran thought. Why this stubborn resistance to the confessional?

  He had waited until his father had been called away to a parlay in Paris. King Louis had called for another armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land to free Jerusalem from the Saracens. As a knight and liegeman of the Count of Burgundy his father was obliged to answer the call to arms.

  That very night Josseran went to her in her chamber. And may God forgive me, he thought. Four times he had her that night, rutting like a dog, she panting underneath him, their sweat and seed spilling on to his father’s bed. Each time he coupled with her he heard the Devil laughing as he dragged him down into hell.

  What could he have been thinking?

  The next night he went again. The deeper he fell into his offence the less it seemed to matter to him. Sometimes, it seemed, the only way to ease the pain of the guilt is by sinning again.

  He drowned his conscience in her hot, moist flesh. Was there also a trace of pride in taking that which belonged to his father, youthful arrogance persuading him that now he was the greater man?

  ‘Tonight you shall see Christ or you shall see Satan. What do you say?’

  ‘I have not . . . sinned with her,’ Josseran croaked.

  ‘You have sinned with her in your heart! It is the same thing!’

  Josseran winced. ‘I am sure God lies awake in his heaven worrying about my desperate and lonely pleasure in the darkness. Your God is worse than any mother-in-law!’

  He heard the hiss of breath as William took in this latest blasphemy.

  ‘You must confess!’

  Yes, confess, Josseran thought. Let him have his way. What difference did it make now?

  The friar had removed the barbarian’s robes. His face was flushed but the skin of his shoulders and arms was like polished ivory. His chest and belly were covered with a fine matt of hair that shone like bronze in the firelight. His muscles were hard like corded rope.

  The strangeness of him made her suck in her breath. Naked, he appeared terrifying, yet in some strange way, exciting too.

  She could not think why the death of one barbarian offended her so. Her concern was surely just for her father’s anger should she fail to deliver her charges safely to Qaraqorum, as she had been ordered to do.

  Whatever the reason, she could not let him die.

  William heard a sound behind him and turned his head. ‘You!’

  She walked in backwards, as she had done in Qaidu’s ordu. She sang a low, rhythmic chant in the infernal language of the Tatars. Three of her soldiers followed her in, their faces grim. Khutelun shuffled to the centre of the tent and knelt beside the fire, clutching her rag flail and tambourine, the Devil’s devices.

  Her eyes rolled in her head.

  He tried to cover Josseran’s naked body. ‘Get out of here!’ he shouted and grabbed her by the shoulders to eject her. Immediately her Tatar escort took him by the arms and dragged him outside. They tied his wrists with thongs and threw him on the cold ground to scream his protests to the lonely night.

  William sobbed with frustration. The Devil was about to drag another soul down to hell.

  XL

  JOSSERAN OPENED HIS eyes. Wood smoke drifted lazily through the roof; weak yellow sunshine angled across the carpets. The entrance flap had been pulled aside to reveal a high, green meadow. He heard the neighing of horses.

  William sat by the fire, watching him.

  ‘It is well for you that you did not die, Templar. Your soul is steeped in sin.’ William lifted his head and brought a wooden bowl of fermented mare’s milk to his lips.

  ‘How long have I . . . slept?’

  ‘Just a night.’

  ‘Khutelun . . .’

  ‘The witch is outside.’

  Josseran put his fingers gingerly to his scalp. The dried blood had matted his hair and there was a gaping wound beneath. ‘I thought I should die.’

  ‘It was not God’s will.’

  ‘She was here. I remember now. She was here.’

  ‘She tried to enslave you with her devilment.’

  A shadow fell across the entrance. Khutelun stood there, her hands on her hips. Josseran thought he saw a measure of relief in her eyes when she saw him awake but the look was gone as quickly as it had come.

  ‘You seem to have recovered your strength,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Josseran mumbled.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For . . . your prayers.’

  ‘I would have done the same for any of our party who was sick.’ She held a bowl of steaming boiled meat. ‘Here. You should eat.’

  I wish I knew what you were thinking, Josseran thought.

  ‘I am glad you are recovered. My father would have been angry if you had perished. He was charged with your safe delivery to the Centre of the World.’ She left the food and gave him an enigmatic smile that made his heart leap. Then she left.

  William clutched his crucifix to his breast. ‘What did she say? Doubtless the witch claims credit for your recovery.’

  ‘You were ready to . . . bury me. Why should I not give her my thanks?’

  ‘You suffered no more than a knock to the head. It was not serious.’

  ‘You were about to administer . . . the rites.’

  ‘Just a stratagem to have you confess and unburden your stinking soul.’

  Josseran stared at the breakfast she had brought him. ‘More boiled mutton?’

  ‘Not mutton,’ William said. ‘This morning we enjoy a variety to our diet.’ There was a look on his face Josseran could not decipher. ‘One of the horses died during the night.’

  ‘Which horse?’ But he already knew.

  William did not answer. At least the friar had the decency to appear abashed.

  ‘Kismet,’ Josseran said.

  ‘The witch said that we should not leave her for the vultures while we ourselves starve.’ William got to his feet. ‘In His wisdom He chose to take your horse’s soul instead of yours. He perhaps found more value in it.’

  ‘Then He is not just. He should have been more merciful to my horse. I chose this journey. She did not.’

  ‘It was just a beast of burden! Praise God that you yet live!’

  William stormed out.

  Kismet! Josseran thought. William was right; why grieve over a horse? But although she was, as the friar had said, merely a beast of burden, it did not ease his shame or his sorrow. He had watched her starve by inches over these last months. She had carried him to her last breath. Her suffering was on his head.

  Another weight added his load. Well, so be it. He remembered how the priest had carped at him last night to give up his burden and confess. Lay down these sins, he had said. Why had he not taken the opportunity? Why was he so stubborn?

  Perhaps it was because he was the harsher judge. Even if God could forgive Josseran Sarrazini, Josseran Sarrazini could not forgive himself.

  XLI

  THE NEXT DAY Josseran was well enough to travel. William bandaged his head with some strips of cloth and they prepared to resume their journey. They saddled their horses under a perfect sky. The reflection of the sunlight on the snowfields above them hurt their eyes.

  He overheard several of the Tatars muttering to each other about William. The crow has brought us bad luck, they said. It is because he would not ride around the obo. Now we have lost two horses and a day’s ride. Worse will follow.

  ‘Something is amiss with these Tatars,’ William said to him, tightening the girth on his saddle. Khutelun had replaced William’s mount with one of her own horses, a straw-yellow mare with a milk eye and bad-tempered disposition. Josseran also had a new mount, a stallion of dirt
y colour with shoulders like a woodcutter.

  ‘I have noticed nothing unusual.’

  ‘They are all scowling at us.’

  ‘They do not scowl at us, Brother William.’

  The churchman looked bewildered.

  ‘Their ill disposition is directed entirely at you,’ Josseran said, as if explaining something to a small child.

  ‘At me?’

  ‘They blame you for what has happened.’

  ‘I am not to blame if my horse loses its footing on the rocks!’

  ‘But it was you who refused to pay homage to their cairn of stones.’

  ‘That was just their foolish superstition!’

  ‘They said it was bad luck not to do so and now we have had bad luck. You see what you have done in your pride? You have reinforced for them their belief in the sanctity of the obo and now they believe our religion cannot be as strong as theirs, for it did not protect you. So in trying to prove how great we are, you have succeeded only in lessening our esteem in their eyes.’

  ‘I will not demean my faith by allowing their witchcraft.’

  ‘You may be a pious man, Brother William, but you are not a wise one.’ Josseran climbed on to his new mount. After Kismet it felt as if he was astride a child’s pony.

  William jerked the reins, transmitting his ill temper to his horse, which turned her head and tried to bite him.

  ‘See? You even antagonize the horses.’

  ‘It is just a beast!’

  ‘If you say so. By the way, our witch still wishes to see the Bible and Psalter.’

  ‘Never! She will defile it!’

  ‘God’s bones!’ Josseran swore and spurred away from this damned priest and set off down the trail.

  XLII

  THE WHITE PEAKS at the Roof of the World were behind them now. They had disappeared into an overcast of lead-grey cloud. The air turned suddenly warmer.

  On the fourth day they followed a track down a dune of loose sand to a salt marsh. Their approach startled a flock of wild geese. A boulder-strewn valley led to yet another gorge and then a broad plain of hard-baked sand and black gravel.

  A dusty road led to an avenue of murmuring poplars and an oasis town of mud-brick houses, with straw and manure drying in the sun on the flat roofs. They saw donkey carts, piled high with melons and cabbages and carrots, entire families perched on the running boards. Startled faces stared at them from the fields and houses.

  Khutelun rode up beside him. Her scarf was coiled around her face and all he could see were her dark, liquid eyes. ‘This place is called Kashgar,’ she said.

  ‘Then we survived the Roof of the World?’

  She pulled the scarf away. ‘You had a guardian, Christian.’

  Christian? So he was no longer a barbarian.

  He looked around, saw the friar slumped over the milk-eyed pony behind them. ‘Guardian? I would rather trust my life to a dog.’

  ‘I do not mean your shaman. You have a man riding with you.’

  He felt the small hairs on the back of his neck start to rise. ‘What man?’

  ‘He has long yellow hair going to grey, and a beard much like yours. He wears a white coat with a red cross painted here, on the left shoulder. I have seen him often, riding behind you.’

  The man she was describing was his father.

  He had said not a word to him before he left for the king’s court but he knew. Josseran could see it in his eyes. When he returned from Paris he told him that he had excused himself from service on King Louis’s armed pilgrimage because of his age, but within days of his return he announced a change of heart. He discovered a sudden and uncharacteristic zeal to assist in the liberation of the Holy Land from the Saracen.

  But Josseran knew the real reason he took up arms for the King.

  They said that when the king’s ships landed at Damietta there were scores of Mohammedan horsemen waiting for them. The Frankish knights collected on the beach, braced their lances and pointed shields into the sand and waited for the charge.

  His father pulled his horse through the surf to join them on the strand and jumped into the saddle. He did not even stop to put on his coat of mail. He charged past the startled defenders and hurled himself among the Saracen, killing three of them before he himself was brought down by a sword thrust to his belly. They carried him back to the ship, still living. They said it took him four days to die.

  Why would he do such a thing?

  Josseran could find only one reason for his father’s impetuosity.

  ‘Christian?’ Khutelun said, jolting him back from his reverie.

  ‘The man you describe is my father. But he is dead these many years and he would never ride with me.’

  ‘I know what I see.’

  More sorcery! As if there was not enough to trouble a man’s soul. This journey began as a straightforward escort mission. It should have taken no more than a few weeks. Instead I am dragged on an odyssey beyond the limits of the world, and every belief I hold dear to me, my chastity and my duty and my faith, are challenged at every turn.

  What is happening to me?

  Kashgar to Kumul

  the Year of the Monkey

  XLIII

  THEY HAD CROSSED the Roof of the World looking for Prester John and the Magi of the Gospels but all they found beyond the watch-tower walls of Kashgar were the Mohammedans. It was not as Josseran had imagined the fabled land of Cathay but seemed only like another town of Outremer, with its hans and bazaars, arched porticoes and mosaic domes.

  The people called themselves Uighurs. They did not have the almond-eyed and flat-nosed appearance of their Tatar escort. In fact they looked like Greeks and their language was very similar to the Turkic he had learned in Outremer. The Tatars, too, spoke it fluently, bastardized with a mixture of their own expressions.

  They made their way to the bazaar, Khutelun and her soldiers clearing a path through the jostle of the streets behind the mosque where old men in embroidered prayer caps sat on the steps of the iwan and bare-legged children played in the trickle of a canal. The air was full of dust and tiny flies. Sweat ran down his spine and lathered his face.

  Warren-like alleys spread out in every direction, the shadowy lanes shot through with bolts of yellow sun. Crippled beggars moaned and stretched out gnarled claws for alms. Barbers shaved the skulls of customers with long knives, smithies and bakers sweated in black-walled caves, the chink of metal and the cries of the hawkers mingled with the warm smells of baking bread and the taint of offal and excrement.

  Josseran had seen many Arab markets in Outremer, but nothing like this. They were hemmed in by crowds on every side. He saw every colour of skin, from fair to nugget brown and every kind of costume: leather-skinned hawkers in turbans like Saracens; sand-blasted horsemen in fur-lined hats, sheepskins flapping against their high boots; Tajiks in tall black hats. The Uighurs were distinctive for their knee-length black coats, while their women either wore colourful silk scarves or were hidden under thick brown shawls so long and shapeless that it was impossible to tell which way they were facing when they were standing still.

  The wooden two-storey houses of the city crowded in on every side. Occasionally he looked up and saw a veiled face staring at him from behind an ornate window shutter, only to quickly disappear. Josseran gawped like a peasant at a fair. There were bolts of silk taller than a man, bulging sacks of hashish and huge calico sacks of spices, orange and green and pepper-red; hand-made ornamental knives glittered with jade and rubies; boiled goats’ heads stared smoke-eyed from crumbling walls and fatty sheep lungs boiled in vats. On the fretted wooden balconies of the teahouses whitebeards in long gowns sipped green tea and smoked bubbling tobacco pipes.

  The market was a bedlam of animals: camels, the fearsome-looking horned cattle they called yaks, donkeys, horses and goats. The smell was overpowering; their droppings were everywhere. A camel roared close by, deafening him; a donkey shrieked through its brown teeth as it swayed and buckled under a mon
strous load. They were forced against the wall by a cart, piled high with melons and cabbages and beans, the driver screaming, ‘Borsh! Borsh!’ as he tried to clear a path through the crowds.

  Bearded Kirghiz horsemen galloped and wheeled across the maidan, churning up thick clouds of dust, while others haggled with the horse traders. A crowd had gathered for a cockfight, fierce hawk-eyed men shouting and shoving each other in the cockpit.

  Khutelun strode ahead of them, leading her horse, unperturbed. She cut an exotic figure even among this Saracen throng in her purple del, her long silk scarf wrapped tightly around her head. Only the long braid of hair that straggled at her shoulder identified her as a woman. When she finally reached the animal pens, she got involved in a furious debate with a one-eyed camel trader.

  ‘What is she doing?’ William asked.

  ‘She says we must trade our horses for camels. After here we cross a great desert to arrive at Qaraqorum.’

  ‘A desert now? How much further will they lead us?’

  ‘Since it is far too late to turn back perhaps it is better that we do not know.’

  Josseran felt eyes watching them from every corner of the bazaar. He imagined they were an unlikely spectacle in their makeshift Tatar robes. A beggar pawed at William’s sleeve; the friar shouted an oath at him and he recoiled. One of the Tatars rounded on the cripple and slashed at him with his whip.

  Meanwhile Khutelun had grabbed the camel man’s robe in her fist. ‘You are trying to rob us!’ she growled at him. ‘May your private member grow cankers and rot like meat in the sun!’

  ‘It is a good price,’ the one-eyed man protested, still grinning like a lunatic, ‘you can ask anyone! I am an honest man!’

  ‘If you are an honest man, there is rice growing in the desert and my horse can recite suras from the Q’ran!’

  And so it went on, Khutelun shouting insults and the camel man throwing up his hands in horror every time Khutelun offered him a lower price. If Josseran had not seen such commerce a thousand times in the medinas at Acre and Tyre he might have thought that Khutelun and the camel merchant were about to come to blows. Khutelun spat in the dust and shook her fist in the camel man’s face, while he raised his hands towards heaven and beseeched his god to intercede on his behalf before he was made destitute.