Silk Road

by Falconer, Colin

  Josseran wondered how he should answer him. Would a Tatar consider boiling a good death? ‘They were beheaded. It was quick.’

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’

  Sartaq seemed relieved. ‘That is at least a blessing. Dai Sechen,’ he said, using Drunken Man’s real name, ‘was my brother-in-law.’

  ‘He died like a man,’ Josseran said and looked away. It was kinder than telling him they had made soup out of him. It was a falsehood, but then there were some truths it was better not to know.

  Kashgar to Bukhara

  in the year of the Hejira 638, and the year

  of the Incarnation of our Lord 1261

  CXX

  THE CRISIS IN the Chaghadai khanate had trapped them in Kashgar for the winter. Now Sartaq told them it might be years before they were able to safely cross the Roof of the World. But arrow riders of the yam continued to appear at the fort almost every day on their way to and from the east. It was not difficult to imagine the plotting now taking place in Qaraqorum and Shang-tu.

  One day Sartaq confided to Josseran that the Son of Heaven had found a way around the impasse. ‘There is a caravan on its way to Bukhara from Ta-tu,’ he said. ‘Alghu has promised to send soldiers as escort. We will join the caravan when it reaches here. But we will have to wait until spring to cross the Roof of the World.’

  ‘So Khubilai has reached an accommodation with the Chaghadai khan?’

  ‘In secret.’

  ‘What is in the caravan? Gold?’

  Sartaq smiled. ‘Gold can be spent. It is a woman. One of the Emperor’s daughters is to marry Alghu. A judicious alliance, for it will ensure harmony between the house of the Emperor and that of the Chaghadai khanate.’

  ‘What is the princess’s name?’ Josseran asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer.

  ‘It is Miao-yen,’ Sartaq told him. ‘Princess Miao-yen.’

  To the north the mountains, barrier to new and undiscovered lands; to the west the medinas and murmuring poplars of Samarkand and Bukhara; to the east the pavilions and rustling bamboo of Cathay; to the south the howling winds of the Taklimakan. And here, at Kashgar, crossroads of the Silk Road, the paths of his life converged.

  He watched from the walls of the fort as the caravan snaked its way across the oasis. The camels coughed and complained; the horses held their heads low, beaten by the long crossing of the desert. There were two squadrons of cavalry, their gold helmets reflecting the sun. The green and white standards of the Son of Heaven whipped in the wind.

  The wooden gates of the fort were flung open and the vanguard entered, in single file. Behind them came a gilt sedan, bearing the princess, rocking on the back of a wooden cart, followed by two more wagons for her maidservants. When they were safely inside the fort the women climbed down from the wagons and clustered around the princess. He sensed immediately that something was wrong.

  A few moments later he saw soldiers carry the princess Miao-yen out of the courtyard on a litter.

  He thought of the fragile creature he had walked with in the Garden of the Refreshing Spring. Of course her porcelain loveliness would not withstand the rigours of such a journey. He said a silent prayer for her to a merciful God, if there was such a being.

  CXXI

  IT HAD BEEN his regime to rise for prime with William, eat a breakfast of pilau and then train at wrestling with Angry Man. The Tatars were very fond of wrestling, and very skilled, and Josseran became an avid student. The exercise helped him regain the strength in his wounded shoulder. He had yet to score a victory over Angry Man but at least the falls had become fewer.

  Every morning they practised on the maidan but after a dozen falls Josseran always held up his hands to signify his surrender. But he was determined that one day he would win.

  Angry Man – his real name, Josseran had learned, was Yesün – was short, stocky and bow-legged, like many of these Tatars. Most of them had learned to ride even before they could walk and the bones in their legs had grown to accommodate the shape of a horse. Angry Man’s body was fleshy rather than muscled, but when he charged it was like being hit by a small bullock. He wrestled bare-chested, and with his body wreathed in sweat it was like trying to hold on to a greased pig.

  Angry Man had showed him many holds, and how to break them; but it was not just a matter of learning holds, the art of the sport was combining many different moves in a blurring of arms and legs, overpowering an opponent with a combination of speed and brute strength and bullying confidence.

  One afternoon he finally managed a throw; he took Angry Man off balance for a moment and put him on his back in the dust with spine-jarring force. Josseran was as surprised as his opponent by this development and he hesitated before following through on his success. Before he could pin him to the ground Angry Man held up a hand, his face creased in a grimace of pain.

  ‘Wait,’ he gasped. ‘My back!’

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘You’ve broken my back!’

  Josseran hesitated. With one movement Angry Man kicked his legs away and Josseran found himself staring up at the sky, all the breath jarred from his chest. Angry Man jumped on top of him, threw him over and put his knee in the small of his back. He put his hands on either side of his head, and twisted. Josseran heard sinews crack.

  Angry Man roared in triumph and jumped to his feet. ‘Never show mercy!’ he shouted. ‘It is another lesson you must learn.’

  Josseran would have cursed him but he could not catch his breath.

  ‘Remember, surprise and feint. Your greatest weapons.’

  He walked away, laughing. Josseran spat the dust out of his mouth, his body hammering with pain. It was a lesson well learned. One day he would use it.

  The morning after Miao-yen’s arrival they were again in the maidan, at practice. They circled each other in a makeshift ring that Angry Man had marked out in the dirt with a mulberry branch. He made a sudden charge and feint; Josseran reacted too slowly. A blur of movement and he found himself on his back on the hard ground under a stinking press of heaving, sweating Tatar. He had lost again.

  Angry Man laughed uproariously and jumped up. ‘If all barbarians are like you we will rule the whole world!’

  Josseran grimaced and slowly forced himself upright. Because of his physical size he was unaccustomed to being defeated like this in trials of strength. It had never happened to him in his whole life and regular beatings at the hands of this nuggety Tatar made him seethe.

  ‘Again,’ he said.

  Angry Man circled him and then they came together, their hands on each other’s shoulders, using their legs to try make the fall.

  Josseran heard someone calling his name. ‘Barbarian!’

  Josseran looked around and Angry Man took advantage of his lapse in concentration to throw him on his back. ‘Will you never learn?’ he hooted.

  Sartaq ran over. Josseran sensed something was terribly wrong.

  ‘Where is your companion?’

  ‘Most surely on his knees somewhere. What is amiss?’

  ‘It is Princess Miao-yen. On the way across the desert she sickened with some malady and now she will not wake.’

  Josseran had heard much whispering among the maidservants and officers who attended her quarters outside the western tower. He had asked to see her but had been refused without explanation. He had not known until now the severity of her illness.

  ‘I am distressed to hear this news,’ he said. ‘But what does it have to do with our good friar?’

  ‘The shamans who accompanied her on this journey have done all they can. I thought perhaps your holy man . . .’

  ‘William?’

  ‘After all, he made you well.’

  ‘William has no power to heal. God alone performs such miracles.’

  ‘I do not care who cures her, whether it is your god or theirs. But she must not die. She is under my jurisdiction now and I would be blamed.’

  Jos
seran shrugged his shoulders. It could no harm, he supposed, though he also doubted that it would do any good. He could persuade William to say a few prayers, at least. ‘I shall ask him to assist you, if that is your wish.’

  ‘Fetch him to me as soon as you can,’ Sartaq said. ‘Without her, there is no alliance with Alghu and then perhaps we will not leave Kashgar before our hair turns white!’

  CXXII

  Fergana Valley

  Smoke rose from the yurts scattered across the valley. The Roof of the World was hushed with snow.

  The three riders rode slowly past the shocked faces of their clansmen. Their scalps and parts of their faces were scorched and blackened; glistening white bone was visible through the charred flesh. One had lost his eye, another a good part of his nose. It was all they could do to remain upright in their saddles but they did not fall until they reached the door of the khan’s yurt where one of them finally slipped from his horse and lay unmoving in the snow.

  ‘It was Ariq Böke himself who helped put Alghu on the throne in Bukhara. And as our Great Khan wished, I sent a delegation to him to ask for a share of his taxes to buy our Khaghan’s army supplies for the fight against the traitor, Khubilai. And what does he do? He says he will pay his share in precious metals and has molten gold poured on the heads of our envoys.’

  Qaidu was in his yurt, his sons on his right, his favourite wife and his daughter, Khutelun, on his left. Blue smoke drifted lazily from the fire through the hole in the roof.

  ‘We should withdraw further into the mountains,’ Tekudai said. ‘Alghu has one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers at his back.’

  ‘Withdraw?’ Qaidu muttered. He turned to Gerel. ‘Do you agree with your brother?’

  Gerel did not have time to answer for Khutelun could not keep her peace any longer. ‘If we run now, we run forever, and we will never see our fields and pastures again!’

  ‘So what would you have us do?’

  ‘We cannot defeat Alghu on the battlefield. But we can strike when he least expects and hide in the mountains before he has the chance to retaliate. When he turns his back we can strike again. We should never give him a moment’s peace. We will wear him down like a wolf with a bear, nip at his heels moon after moon, year after year, until he is hamstrung and exhausted. One day, when we have gathered other wolves like ourselves, then we can take him down.’

  Qaidu smiled. His daughter, the warrior, the shaman; Chinggis Khan returned in the body of a mare. The spirits had toyed with him in his life and their joke had been to make his greatest son a woman.

  He considered a moment. Finally, he said: ‘I agree with Khutelun. It suits my temperament rather better to be a wolf than a sheep. But we must first seek the wisdom of the gods to know their wishes. Khutelun, you must meet the spirits and know their counsel. Then, and only then, shall we decide.’

  CXXIII

  Kashgar

  Through an iron-bossed doorway, studded with brass, along a narrow walled courtyard where roses climbed the brickwork; under an arch with a broken Kufic frieze, grape blue on white. Finally, up narrow, century-worn steps to a tower.

  It was a strange delegation that made its way down the dark corridor of the western barbican. The Tatar lieutenant in his gold-winged helmet led the way, behind him a sallow-faced man in a black-cowled robe and behind him a bearded giant in the del and stubby boots of a Tatar. At the summit of the tower they stopped outside one of the chambers. A bevy of Chinese maidservants hovered outside a carved walnut door, their heads lowered.

  William took Josseran to one side. ‘What am I to do?’ he moaned. ‘I cannot pray for a heathen!’

  ‘Pray then, for a human soul in distress.’

  ‘What you ask is impossible!’

  ‘Will you mortally insult our escort by refusing them? Do whatever you will and hope for the best, then, for I believe the result will be the same.’

  ‘What does he say?’ Sartaq snapped.

  ‘He fears he may fail you.’

  ‘His magic worked well enough on Mar Salah. Besides, nothing else has helped her. Remind him that if the princess dies, we may be forced to linger here for fifty winters.’

  ‘I cannot do this!’ William repeated.

  ‘Is he ready?’ Sartaq said.

  ‘He is ready,’ Josseran answered.

  Sartaq opened the door to the chamber and Josseran steered William through the door. The room must have once served as the private quarters of a Mohammedan prince or princess, Josseran thought, for it was wondrously appointed, unlike his own bare cell. There was a ribbon of Arabic script around the arched windows, and the mud-brick walls were decorated with a ceramic frieze of geometric design, ox-blood on wax yellow.

  Miao-yen lay on a bed in the centre of the room, apparently asleep. She seemed lost in this vast chamber. There were braziers lit in the corners, but the crackling poplar branches could not take the chill from the room.

  Sartaq refused to step over the threshold, afraid of the spirits that hovered around Miao-yen’s body. Josseran stood back and William went alone to her bedside. He looked around, alarmed. ‘Where are her physicians?’

  ‘Sartaq says they have failed to heal her so he has banished them.’

  William licked his thin white lips. ‘I tell you I cannot do this! She has not received the sacrament of baptism.’

  ‘We cannot offend our hosts! Is it so great a burden to ask you to pray for her? You spend enough of your time on your knees!’

  What had so unnerved him? Josseran wondered. Did he fear contagion himself? But if her sickness was of a kind that was spread by her vapours then surely all of her maidservants would be swooning by now?

  Josseran looked at the tiny figure in the bed. She deserved better than to die here in this lonely oasis, while yet a child. In some unfathomable part of his being, he still believed that the supplications of a priest, even those of such a vicious cleric as William, were worth to God a hundred of any commoner’s prayers.

  ‘Do what you can for her,’ Josseran said and turned for the door.

  William caught his sleeve. ‘You are leaving me here?’

  ‘I am no shaman. It is up to you now to work the miracle.’

  ‘I told you, I cannot pray for her! God will not bestir Himself for a heathen!’

  ‘She is not a heathen, as you yourself know. She is just a young girl and she is sick! You can make the appearance of compassion, can you not?’ He went out, closing the heavy door with a crash that seemed to echo through the entire fort.

  CXXIV

  WILLIAM KNELT BESIDE the bed and began to recite the paternoster. But he stumbled on the words and could not finish. The Devil was here in this room, in all his stinking subterfuge. He saw him smirking from the shadows, knowing too well his thoughts before he knew them himself.

  He moved closer to the bed.

  In sleep there is the resemblance of death, and in death the victim is forever silent. The thought came to him unbidden: he could do anything he wished with this woman; should he reach out and touch her no one would know.

  Impossible now to contemplate the Infinite, to concentrate his thoughts on anything but his own compulsion. He looked around to reassure himself that the door was closed, the room empty. He tentatively reached out his hand. It was as if it was no longer a part of him. He watched it, horrified as if it was some huge, pale spider making its way across the coverlets.

  His finger touched the marble flesh of the girl’s arm, and then jerked away suddenly as if it had been scalded.

  Miao-yen did not wake; the shallow rhythm of her breathing did not change. Again William glanced guiltily around.

  Motes of dust drifted through the yellow chevrons of light from the latticed windows.

  His fingers pinched Miao-yen’s earlobe before jerking back again; then they grew bolder; they stroked her hand, even pulled at some of the tiny, golden hairs on her forearm until they came away from the skin. But still she did not stir.

  William stood up, ag
itated, and paced the room, continually glancing at the door. No Tatar but a shaman would enter the room of a sick person, Josseran had said. And even they had been banned from her presence.

  ‘I did not ask for this,’ he said aloud and wrung his hands in prayer. But there was no answer from God and the demons that had haunted him now came to take total possession.

  Fergana Valley

  The trance was brought on with hashish smoke and koumiss. Khutelun danced alone in her yurt until the spirits came and carried her with them to the eternal Blue Sky. Freed of the bonds of the earth, soaring through the air on the back of a black mare, she rode with the barbarian warrior, Joss-ran; she felt his arms around her as they plunged into the yawning embrace of the clouds.

  She dreamed that they rode above the mountains to a high pasture where she joined with him in the long rich grass of summer. It was an image so real that even as she lay on the thick rugs of her yurt, lost in her reverie, her nostrils quivered with the foreign smell of him, and she opened her arms to receive his embrace.

  Something moved inside her and she groaned and thrashed in pain; a bloodied child slipped from her body, bronzed like a Person but with the gold-red hair of the Christian.

  ‘Joss-ran.’

  It was morning when she woke from the dream. It was dark and the embers of the fire were cold. She sat up, shivering, and stared around the yurt, disoriented.

  She had entered the world of the spirits at the behest of her father, in order to discover the will of the gods concerning Alghu and Ariq Böke. But the image of Josseran and the child had drowned out the whisper of every other intuition. She could not comprehend what she had just experienced.

  Her skin was slick and there was warmth and dampness in her loins. She rose unsteadily to her feet and stumbled outside.

  A broken moon hovered above the snow-white hills. He was still out there somewhere. She knew now without question that there was a silver cord that joined them, and one day the wind would blow the seed towards the flower and they would meet again, after all.