Silk Road

by Falconer, Colin

  It was almost like being alive again.

  But when Khutelun leaped on to her camel the next morning she shouted a warning to Josseran. ‘I hope you have enjoyed your rest! From here we enter the worst desert in the world. Soon you will long to be back at the Roof of the World!’

  XLVIII

  THE SPEED WITH which night fell in the desert surprised Josseran. It was like being thrown into a windowless dungeon and having the iron door slam shut.

  Late some afternoons they might see a lonely caravanserai in the distance, and Khutelun would make them quicken their pace to arrive before sunset, find shelter behind its dun-yellow walls. They would sprawl exhausted among the packs and fibre ropes, the kettles spitting over their fires, grateful for the shelter from the unremitting desert wind.

  But other nights they were forced to make their camp in the open desert, huddled by a meagre fire built from camel droppings dried by the sun. The Tatars called this argol and in that barren wilderness it was their only source of fuel. At least there was always plenty of it as the route they took was the one all caravans followed; it was marked by a cairn of stones every quarter of a league. One-Eye collected baskets of dung during their daily march and when they stopped to camp the Tatars would collect handfuls more while the fires were lit.

  Then they would eat the thin gruel of mare’s curd that had become their staple before falling into black, exhausted sleep on the hard ground, curling into their sheepskins.

  Then it was the turn of the lice to start feasting.

  One night Josseran stayed huddled by the cold fire, long after the other Tatars had curled up to sleep inside their dels. Khutelun delayed also; he wondered if she had begun to look for his company as much as he now craved hers.

  William stayed awake as long as he could, beggar at the feast, but fatigue finally overtook him. Alone now, Josseran and Khutelun watched the fire die, listening to the rumbling snores of the Tatars. In the darkness One-Eye babbled at the demons who infested his sleep. The camels snuffled and barked.

  ‘Tell me about yourself, Christian,’ Khutelun said softly.

  ‘What is it you wish to know?’

  ‘Tell me about this place you talk of. This Outremer. Is this where you were born?’

  ‘No, I was born near a place called Troyes, in Burgundy, a province of a country called France. I have not seen it these five years or more. My home ever since has been a place called Acre, which is a great city and fortress next to the sea.’

  ‘What is it like to live inside a fortress? Do you not sometimes feel that you are in a prison?’

  ‘I have lived all my life inside stone walls. I am accustomed to it. It is these wide spaces that make me afraid.’

  ‘I could never live behind a wall. A civilized person must have the grass beneath their feet and a horse saddled to ride.’

  He looked up at the sky. It was like a piece of black velvet, strewn with diamonds. It was beautiful, but it left him feeling naked. ‘Once, when I was a child, I decided to find out how many stars there were. I crept out of the castle one night and lay down in the field and started to count.’

  ‘How many are there?’

  ‘I don’t know. I fell asleep. My father found me under a big oak tree, almost frozen, and had to carry me back home. I woke up on a fur beside a big log fire. I have never wished to know the night so well again. Neither have I been so cold. Until the Roof of the World.’

  He remembered his father’s arms around him, warming him, how his beard tickled his cheek. It should have been a pleasant memory, but it was tainted with sorrow like so many of his remembrances.

  Perhaps he should have left me there under that oak tree, Josseran thought.

  ‘My father carried me home many times,’ Khutelun said. ‘I was always running away at night. I wanted to fly, to touch the stars with the tips of my fingers.’ She reached out her hand towards the night sky. ‘In Christian, do you have names for the stars?’

  ‘That one is the Pole Star,’ he said, pointing to the north, ‘but we also have names for the gatherings of the stars.’ He pointed above his head ‘For instance, we call that one the Great Bear. If you look long enough, you can imagine the outline of a bear.’

  ‘Then you have a wonderful imagination,’ she said, and he laughed. ‘For us it is the Seven Giants. You see that star, there. That is the Golden Nail. It is where the gods tie their horses.’

  ‘You believe in more than one god?’

  ‘I believe there might be. Who can tell?’

  ‘But there is only one God, who made us, and who made all things.’

  ‘How do you know there is only one god? Have you been to the Blue Sky to see for yourself?’

  ‘It is my faith.’

  ‘Faith,’ she repeated. ‘I have faith that my horse will take me to the end of my journey. The rest I must know for myself.’

  They fell silent for a while. ‘Have you children, Christian?’ she asked him suddenly.

  ‘Once. I had a daughter.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She died.’

  ‘What of your wife?’

  He hesitated. How much should he tell this woman of his past? And even if he did tell her, how much could she understand of it, when her own ways were so different? ‘She is far away, in France.’

  ‘Do you love her?’

  ‘I loved her body.’

  ‘How long since you have seen her?’

  ‘It is many years now. I dare say she has forgotten what I look like.’

  ‘Why do you not return to her?’

  ‘Because she is not, in truth, my wife. She belongs to another. It is a sin on my head.’

  Khutelun nodded. Taking another man’s wife was a crime among the Tatars as well. She wrapped her scarf tighter around her cheeks against the cold. He could only see her eyes and the glow of the fire reflected in them.

  ‘I will tell you this frankly,’ he said. ‘I have never thought of any woman as anything more than a pillow, something soft to lie with at night. Do I speak too freely for you?’

  ‘No, of course not. My own father has many wives that he keeps for the pleasures of the body. But he has only one favourite wife, and now he is older and his blood has cooled he spends most of his days with her. They talk much.’

  ‘It is wrong to have more than one wife.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A man should control his base desires. They are an affront to God.’

  ‘Is that what your holy man would have you believe?’

  ‘I may not love him overmuch but I believe he understands the mind of God better than I.’

  ‘How can a man understand the mind of the gods? So much in life is uncertain.’

  ‘God’s law is immutable. It is for men to keep it.’

  ‘I was taught as a child to obey no law but that of Chinggis, our Great Khan, because that is what makes our empire strong. But as for the gods, we try and listen to the spirits of the Blue Sky as best we can. But nothing is certain.’

  ‘Did your Chinggis teach you that it was right for a man to have as many wives as he wished?’

  ‘A woman is not just a warm place for your desires, Christian. She is also a hungry mouth and she possesses a womb with which to grow children. It is not a man’s appetite that constrains his desire for women, it is his wealth. Chinggis says that, by law, a man may not take another man’s wife for his pleasure; for that is indeed a crime. But that is only because it endangers the peace of the clan, not because it offends the Spirit of the Blue Sky.’

  Josseran had never imagined he might talk so frankly with a woman about such matters. Yet out here, beneath the cold vault of stars and amidst the loneliness of the desert, he felt free from the constraints of his society and the tyranny of his God. But God was the god of all men, surely, and not just the god of the Franks?

  ‘Tell me,’ she asked him, ‘this confession you talk about, this thing you do with your shamans. What is it you tell them?’

&nb
sp; ‘We tell them our sins.’

  ‘Your sins?’

  ‘Lusting after women. Fornication.’

  ‘Is it only the things you do with women, then, that you must tell them?’

  ‘Not just that. Our falsehoods, our violence to others. Also our impure thoughts.’

  ‘Your thoughts?’

  ‘If we are envious. Or if we are too proud.’

  ‘You are ashamed, then, of those things that make you a man and not a god.’ She sounded puzzled. ‘Does this stop you sinning? Do you feel better when you do this?’

  ‘Sometimes. I still live in fear of being punished for eternity.’

  ‘You have a god who makes you weak, then punishes you for your weakness. Do you not find that strange?’

  He did not know how to answer her. Once again he had failed his faith. He could not even defend his religion in debate with a Tatar woman! Instead he said: ‘You said you saw an old man riding with me in the mountains.’

  ‘You do not believe me.’

  ‘It is hard for me to believe it. Yet I am curious.’

  ‘The old man is there whether you believe it or not. He is there if you are curious or not.’

  ‘If it were true, I think I know who that man is.’

  ‘I tell you what I see. I do not wish for your explanation of it. It is not necessary.’

  ‘You describe my father.’

  ‘Your father is dead?’ When he nodded, she said: ‘Why is that strange to you, Christian? Our ancestors are with us always. We must honour them or they will bring us bad luck.’

  ‘Do you believe the ghost of my father would follow me here to protect me?’

  ‘Of course. Why else would he be there, riding behind you?’

  ‘Why else? As a curse.’

  ‘If he curses you, why did he not throw you off the mountain when you went to save your shaman?’

  Josseran could not answer her. He wanted desperately to believe her. He also wanted to hold her. He felt his heart hammering against his ribs and there was an oily warmth in his groin and belly. ‘I have never known a woman like you,’ he murmured.

  For one wild moment he imagined reaching for her and placing a kiss on her lips. He even hoped that she might reach for him first, that they might bundle together under this great blanket of stars even with their companions asleep just a few feet away.

  But instead she said: ‘I am tired now. I am going to sleep.’

  After she had slipped away into the dark he huddled on the ground, confused, exhausted, and unable to rest. His mind and his heart were in turmoil. He put his head in his hands. ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered into his cupped fingers.

  The moon rose over the desert. He listened for his father’s voice.

  XLIX

  THEY SET OFF once again, heading east. Ranged to their left were the mountains that the Tatars called the Tien Shan, the Celestial Mountains. Ice caps glittered against an indigo sky, while below them the spurs of the foothills were gouged with steep gullies, giving them the appearance of the paws of some crouching beast. Day after day they rode, watching the mountains change with the passage of the sun, from the soft pinks of dawn to the coppers and metal greys of midday, the violets and maroons of twilight.

  Everywhere on the plain they saw bones, the bleaching skeletons of horses and camels and donkeys, occasionally even the grinning skull of a man.

  They were skirting the great desert of the Taklimakan, One-Eye said. Translated from the language of the Uighurs, it meant ‘go in and you will never come out’. But they would not venture near the maw of the Taklimakan, One-Eye assured him. Oases ringed the dead heart like strings of pearls on the neck of a princess. ‘Unless there is a bad storm and we become lost, we will stay well away.’

  ‘How many times a year are there such storms?’ Josseran asked him.

  ‘All the time,’ One-Eye answered and broke into his peculiar cackling laugh.

  The desert was a drab plain of gravel and flat stones that the Tatars called gebi. But when Josseran stopped to examine one of these stones he found they actually contained brilliant colours, both red and aubergine. But soon the gebi plains gave way to a salt pan of heat-cracked mud with a friable white crust, which in turn surrendered to a wasteland of grey hard sand. It seemed to merge into the heat haze so that there was no longer a horizon between the land and the sky. As they left the mountains behind it seemed that they were not travelling anywhere at all, but trudging the same mile over and over again, day after endless day.

  Once, another caravan passed them, heading west to Kashgar. The camels’ backs were draped with large oval blankets under their wooden saddle frames, each animal bearing two great bolts of silk on either side. The shouts of the camel driver and the jangle of the camel bells carried to them on the hot wind.

  ‘Do you know where that silk is going?’ he shouted to William. ‘Venice.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ William shouted back, bouncing on the back of his camel.

  ‘This is the Silk Road! Have you not heard of it? The Mohammedans travel along it every year to barter for those silks in the bazaars at Bukhara and Tabriz and Baghdad. But none of them have ever been further along it than Persia. But now Josseran Sarrazini has seen where the great road starts!’

  ‘I don’t see any road,’ William said.

  ‘Because there is no road. Yet traders have been coming this way with cargos of silks since the days of our Holy Book.’

  ‘You mean that camel man will drive his camels all the way to Baghdad?’

  ‘No, he’ll sell his load in Kashgar. The Silk Road is like a chain. He’ll trade for coriander or jade in the bazaar. Someone else will take his silk over the mountains and exchange it for dates and glass. And so it goes, until some bishop in Rome buys it for his mistress!’

  ‘Did you tell this story just to bait me, Templar?’

  ‘Indeed no. I thought it might interest you. Are you telling me that none of the bishops you know keep mistresses?’

  ‘They will answer for their sins when the day comes. As you will answer for yours.’

  ‘At least I shall be in good company.’

  As he watched the caravan disappear into the rippling mirage of the Taklimakan, Josseran felt himself caught in the sweep of history. For centuries these camels had been trudging across this desert with their precious cloth, and only these last few years had anyone finally discovered how it was made. Incredibly they cultivated the cocoon of a certain kind of moth! William might call these people savage. To him they were an endless source of fascination.

  L

  EACH DAY BEGAN at dawn with One-Eye rising silently and spreading his prayer mat in the direction of Mecca. He then performed his prayer ritual, kneeling, bowing and prostrating himself on the ground, his palms held upwards in supplication to Allah.

  Afterwards he drove the camels to their loads. With a jerk of their nose strings he brought them on to their knees one by one so the Tatars could heave their baggage over the wooden pack saddles that straddled their humps. The hemp cords that secured them were then tied under the beasts’ chests, despite their roars of protest, to which he paid not the slightest attention. Then, with the eastern sky a dusky orange and the last freezing stars yet in the sky, they rode once more into the desert sunrise.

  For the desert crossing One-Eye had tied the nose cord of one camel to the pack saddle of the one behind so that all the camels were in a string. The last camel in the line had a bell at its neck. One-Eye knew that if he could not hear the bell then one or more of the camels had broken free. Josseran soon became accustomed to the soft tinkling sound it made, together with the rhythmic thudding of the camel pads on the hard sand, the somnolent creaking of the ropes, and the whispered ‘sook-sook’ of their camel man as he walked ahead, leading the way.

  The hot wind sucked them dry. Josseran could no longer feel his lips, which were swollen with a hard crust of cracked and parched skin. There was no water to wash but it was of no consequence because
the desiccated air stopped any perspiration from collecting on the skin. Even William had lost his stink.

  The thorny tamarisk bushes were the only vegetation that survived here. The wind had weathered the ground around them, leaving them exposed in purplish clumps. But even in the most desolate places herds of wild goats grazed on them, somehow drawing sustenance from this Devil’s land.

  Their meagre diet had left him weak. He feared he was going mad; the endless sky and the grey, featureless desert melted into one another and even time itself became featureless. The heat rising from the desert floor created ghosts on the horizon, the phantoms of trees and castles, and in the afternoons, when his eyes were fatigued and his throat parched, he would see mountains in the distance only to realize a few moments later that they were merely a handful of stones. Or he would see vast lakes and when he looked again they had gone.

  To keep himself sane, he tried to recall the songs of the jongleurs in the marketplaces at Troyes and Paris, or recite his psalms and paternosters. But the heat and exhaustion had somehow robbed him of his ability to engage in even such simple tasks. His thoughts wheeled erratically and sometimes he forgot where he was.

  He was tormented constantly by thirst. Occasionally they came across a shallow basin of baked mud and reeds, and with it a few pools of brackish water. Insects skated across the suds on the surface. The Tatars would cheerfully replenish their water bottles from this richly flavoured soup.

  Out in the desert dust storms danced and whirled like wraiths.

  Khutelun saw him staring at them one evening as they made camp on the gebi plain. ‘Ghost spirits,’ she said.

  ‘There is always a pair,’ he murmured, ‘spinning in opposite directions.’

  ‘The Uighurs say they are the spirits of two lovers from different clans who were not allowed to marry, because of a feud between their tribes. Unable to bear the thought of living apart they ran off into the desert to be together and perished in the sands. Now they spend their days dancing and running through the hills.’