The Immortal Knight Chronicles Box Set

by Dan Davis

  I could see why they had settled there. In all that harsh land, that plain where the city lay was sheltered by the mountains around them. And there came a big river down from the mountains which irrigated the whole country wherever they wanted to lead the water, and it flowed not into any sea but was absorbed in the ground, forming many marshes. There at Kenjek, I saw vines, and twice we drank real wine, though it was sharp as vinegar.

  We heard that there was a village of Teutons out there in the vastness, six days or so through the mountains out of our way so we never came across them in person but I was assured they were indeed there. It was a startling thought and only later did I learn that Mongke had transported these Teutons, with Batu's permission, so very far from their homeland. I should have known that they were not there of their own free will. The Mongols had no arts of their own, save those concerning the horse and other animals, so they pressed civilised men into service for them. And so it was with those poor Teutons, who were set to work digging for gold and manufacturing arms for their masters. Friar William did everything he could to persuade our guides to divert to them for a time so that he could pray with them, administer rites and do whatever else he could for their souls and so ease their hearts while they delved and travailed in a hollow existence. The monk was greatly anguished when they denied him, and he drew into himself further for many days as his mind dwelled on the suffering Teutons so close by.

  From there on, we went eastward again staying close to the mountains. We had entered the lands of the direct subjects of Mongke Khan, who everywhere sang and clapped their hands before our guides because they were envoys of the great lord Batu, who was considered second only to Mongke in all the world. A few days later we entered more alp-like mountains and there we found a great river which we had to pass in a boat.

  “They say that if any of us should fall in,” Abdullah said, “the water is so cold that we will die immediately, even if we were pulled to the bank downstream.”

  I gripped the side of the boat so hard I swear my fingers marked the wood.

  After that, we entered a valley where we saw a ruined fort whose walls were nothing but mud but the soil was cultivated there. No doubt the people had fallen foul of the Mongols and all their efforts to tame that land was slowly being undone by the elements. Days later we found a goodly town, called Equius, in which were Saracens speaking Persian, though they were a very long way off from Persia. Unlike the village of Teutons, these people were there by choice because they were all merchants who profited from the goods moving up to the royal road from their own lands in Persia. The Mongols were greedy for Saracen goods, and the merchants of Equius lived in relative luxury despite the harshness of the jagged landscape all about them.

  Descending from the mountains we entered a beautiful plain with high mountains to the right, and a sea or lake which was twenty-five days in circumference. All of the plain was well watered by the streams which came down from the mountains, and all of which flowed into that sea.

  Such a fruitful land was like an island of fertility in the desert. In that plain, there used to be many towns but they were destroyed so that the Mongols could graze there, for there were most excellent pasturages in that country. They had allowed a single town called Qayaligh to survive under the yoke because the Mongols valued the market there and many traders frequented it to take advantage of the Mongol’s wealth.

  Here we rested twelve days, waiting for a certain secretary of Batu, who was to be associated with our guide in the matters to be settled at Mongke's ordus. It was there that I first saw idolaters, who were properly called Buddhists, of whom I was told there were many sects in the east.

  Even amongst such a diversity of people, our company was very much outside of the norm in those parts and we were regarded with suspicion and hostility.

  “We must stay all together,” I said to my people. “All of the time.”

  Bertrand scoffed. “I am not afraid of these weaklings. They are no more than dogs. I could slay a dozen at once.”

  “And how many dogs does it take to bring down a bear?” I asked. “No matter how strong you are, sir, we are outnumbered more than a hundred to one. If they decided to rob us of our belongings, who would we go to for justice? Our guides?” He had no answer. “We stay together, in pairs at the least, and in as large a group as possible. And keep your hands on your valuables. Weapons and armour especially. Nikolas, you will not leave my sight, do you hear me? Any one of these Saracens would snatch you up and take you home as soon as look at you.”

  There was never a restful moment, for me at least, as I stood watch over the company and turned away many a hostile ne'er-do-well and would-be pilferer with no more than my gaze and an occasional kick to the guts.

  In November we left the city, passing after three days a vast sea, which was called Lake Ala Kol, east of Lake Balkhash, which seemed as tempestuous as the Ocean beyond Bordeaux in winter, though they swore it was indeed a lake. I stomped down to the shore across the frozen mud and moistened a cloth in it to taste the water, which was brackish though drinkable. And it was as cold as ice.

  The cold in those regions was savagely penetrating, and from the time it began freezing in the fall, it never thawed until after the month of May. And even then, there was frost every morning, though during the day the sun's rays melted it. But in winter it never thawed, and with every wind it continued to freeze further, covering everything with an ever-increasing thickness of ice as hard as rock. And with the ceaseless wind, nothing could live there and we barely survived wrapped in furs and carrying all our food and fuel with us as we rode. Every once in a while, a terrible gale arises and blows hard enough to stagger a man, if he be unbraced or weakened. Bartholomew was blown from his horse and fell on the ice so that his arm needed splinting and he grew a lump over his eye as large as a goose egg. Little Nikolas was once blown a hundred yards down a slight hill and so I tied him to his horse for a while and later I took to holding him before me as I rode. His bones were so sharp that I had to feed him from my own rations to fatten him up, for the sake of my own comfort.

  “You cannot fatten a boy’s elbows,” Eva said when she caught me as if she had not been secretly feeding him also, which she had and far more than I.

  We crossed a valley heading north towards great mountains covered with deep snow, which soon covered the ground on which we travelled. In December we began greatly accelerating our speed for we already found no one other than those Mongol men who are stationed a day apart to look after ambassadors. In many places in the mountains the road was narrow and the grazing very bad, so that from dawn to night we would cover the distance of two stages, thus making two days’ distance in one and we travelled more by the light of the moon than by day. I thought I had known bitter cold before but I was wrong. We would all certainly have perished had the Mongols not cared for us as if we were children or fools and they allowed us the use of their sheepskins and furs, which we all took most gratefully.

  One evening we passed through a certain place amidst most terrible rocks. The pass we climbed had grown narrower and sharper, even as it grew colder, and the jagged rocks, dark but streaked with red, stretched up like walls sculpted by the hands of a vengeful God. Our guides stopped, though there was a wind that howled through us like a storm of ghosts tugging at our clothes, and they sent word through Abdullah, begging the monks to say some prayers by which the devils of that cursed place could be put to flight.

  “What heathen nonsense is this?” Friar William said, his teeth gritted against the cold.

  Abdullah had always been as thin as a spear shaft but he had shrunk on the journey so that he appeared to be a skeleton with skin stretched across it and when he spoke, his voice was flat. The dead voice, I always called it, the voice of a man who has no hope in his heart. “They say that in this gorge there are devils. The devils will suddenly bear men off. You will turn to speak to the man behind you and he will be gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?
” William said, warily. He had lost much of his fat by that time and looked like a different man.

  The Mongols babbled, their eyes darting about, and Abdullah related it to us while the wind tugged at his words. “Sometimes they seize the horse and leave the rider. Sometimes they tear out the man's bowels and leave the body on the horse. These things happen on every journey through. They say we should expect to lose at least one man.”

  “They cannot give us commands,” Bertrand said, bundled up in the best furs, which he had claimed for himself. His bulk had reduced but he had coped with the hardships with surprising determination. Then again, the man had been to war before. And it felt very much as though we were at war with the land all around, and with the sky above.

  Friar Bartholomew roused himself enough to provide us with his learned opinion. “Heathen fools. God will protect us. Onward with you.”

  He was ignored.

  “It may be a ruse,” Stephen Gosset called out. The young monk had never faced such difficulties, nor anything approaching it. He had withdrawn into himself and his rosy cheeks had faded first into grey and then into a wind and cold-blasted rawness. He did not look so young as he had. “A ruse, so that they may kill one of us and then blame it on the demons.”

  None knew what to think about that. When one is cold, thinking clearly is a great challenge and brave men become cowards. Energetic men grow idle.

  “For the love of God,” I said, raising my voice above the wind and their prattling so that the sound echoed off the rocks and made the Mongols wince. “Will you monks just chant some prayers so we may get moving again.”

  We proceeded through the pass while the monks all chanted, in loud voice, Credo in Unum Deum. The three monks, frozen as they were, gave full-throated conviction to their singing. It lacked the finesse of monks raising their voices to God in their own chapels but our three had to contend with the howling wind and the echoes of the iron-hard rocks all around. That far-off, God-forsaken heathen pass resounded to the beautiful, clear voices of those men of Christ. For the Mongols, it was no more than a spell of protection, and they would have been as contented with Buddhists, Mohammedans, or their own shamans. Yet it seemed to me that Christendom had conquered that pass. That we had left a mark upon it, though the voices echoed into nothingness. My companions were confused by my joy, for it was a terrible place, but the voices of those monks warmed my heart, and my body, too.

  By the mercy of God, the whole of our company passed through.

  Again, we ascended mountains, going always in a northerly direction. Finally, at the end of December we entered a plain vast as a sea, in which there was seen no hillock, and the following day, we arrived at the ordus of the great emperor, Mongke Khan, lord of all Asia from the ocean of the east, to the Black Sea in the west, king of all Tartar devils that rode upon the Earth. It may be true to say that there was no man richer than he in all the world at that time, for his armies and those of his grandfather, had stolen the wealth of uncounted millions and brought it back home so that even the lowliest in Karakorum wore silk from head to toe beneath his furs.

  I was far from impressed.

  “What town is this?” I asked our guides, through chattering teeth, when I saw it with my own eyes, looking down on it from the hills.

  Abdullah was horrified. “This is Karakorum, lord.”

  “Dear God,” I said. “What a pigsty.”

  ***

  Perhaps I was overly quick to judgement. But after such a journey, I was deeply disappointed by the place. Of the city of Karakorum, other than the palace quarter of the Khan, it was not even as big as the village of Saint-Denis outside Paris. And the monastery of Saint-Denis was ten times larger than the Khan’s palace.

  There was a rectangular wall enclosing it, with two roads running right through to make a cross in the centre where most buildings were, and one corner was taken up by the palace and associated buildings. Dotted here and there about the city were a number of smaller enclosures, each surrounding a temple of some kind.

  The important buildings, such as palaces and holy places, were of stone and timber and the houses in the centre, clustered along the crossroads, were two-storey homes for the most eminent inhabitants. But the majority of the people, and the visitors of a lower standing, lived in gers packed very close together within one quarter where all the ground was churned mud, frozen into rock-hardness.

  There were two non-Mongol quarters in the city, one of which was inhabited by the Saracens, where all the markets were. I was full of contempt for the steppe nomads’ inability to learn to operate something so simple as a marketplace. A great many Tartars of all sorts gathered in the Saracen quarter to do business, as the Great Khan was never far from the city and so it was always full with ambassadors from every place on Earth. These visitors frequented the Saracen markets in huge numbers, buying and selling goods from everywhere that there were people.

  The other quarter was that of the Cathays, which is what we called the Chinese, all of whom were artisans making a great many useful things in iron, silver, and gold, and in timber and stone, also. For the Mongols were utterly ignorant of all civilised things and could make nothing for themselves. I assumed that they were all too stupid to learn such things.

  “Yet they are not stupid in war,” Stephen pointed out when I made my judgement of their failures in mercantile activities and skilled crafts.

  “A man may be stupid in one way but not another,” Bertrand pointed out, and he was living proof of his own statement.

  “Please pardon my presumption, my lords, but would you yourself seek to become a silversmith or a merchant?” Stephen said.

  “Of course I bloody well would not stoop so low as that, you impudent little monk.”

  Stephen bobbed his head as his cheeks flushed. “Quite so, my lord, yes indeed. And each Mongol man, whether he be lowly or wealthy, considers himself to be something like a knight, in that his trade is war, and so none of them would become anything lesser, just as you would not.”

  “How dare you!” Bertrand had roared. “These little fat shits are not knights, you ignorant villein.”

  Stephen had hitched up his robes and fled from Bertrand’s presence while the man shouted after him. I had laughed at the sight of it but I did believe Stephen was quite right about the Mongols. Still, it made their one city a very strange place, cobbled together as it was from the skills and cultures of alien peoples so that it felt like no other town I had ever seen. The closest thing I could liken it to was, perhaps, a busy port in the Holy Land.

  Besides these foreign quarters and the Mongol ger quarter, there were the great palaces set about Mongke’s own, though what were called palaces would have been grand townhouses in any leading city of Christendom. The palace quarter was home and workplace for the leading administrators of the court and the entire empire of the Mongols.

  There were twelve idol temples of different nations all over the city, two mosques in which was cried the law of Mohammed, and one church of Nestorian Christians in the extreme end of the city. Karakorum was surrounded by a mud wall about ten feet high that did little more than keep out wandering animals and, I suppose, provided the Mongols with a means of controlling the entry of people. The four gates in the wall were guarded at all hours of the day and night by hard-looking men.

  At the eastern gate was sold millet and other kinds of grain, although there was rarely any to be brought there. At the western one, sheep and goats were sold. At the southern, oxen and carts were sold. And at the northern gate were the horse markets.

  Even though it was so small, and even though every surface was covered in ice and the ground was so hard that a pick could never be hammered into it, the city of Karakorum stank. It was surrounded by herd after herd of horses and oxen, clustered together in tight groups against the winds and shivering in the bitter cold. Every morning, more would be dead. Frozen to the ground. But the Mongols seemed not to care overly much, for there were always more animals to be had
and the ones that died were eaten.

  The animal smell surrounded the city but within the streets, such as they were, it reeked from the dung-fuelled fires that burned in every hearth. And, God forbid, when you were inside a ger that was warm enough to thaw out the people within and heat their clothing. For then the stench of months of sweat and filth would fill the air like a cloud of pestilence so foul that I saw children vomiting from it. And the food and the drink that they consumed was always sour and bitter. The iron-hard ground was too solid to bury night-soil or absorb urine, so it was collected in buckets and thrown into great mounds here and there all across the city, within and outside the walls. Those frozen mounds grew all through the winter and I wondered what would happen when summer thawed those mountains of shit.

  This, then, was the capital city of the great Mongol Empire.

  Yes indeed, I was far from impressed.

  But I was not there to be awed.

  From the moment we were led in through the gate, I looked everywhere for William, or for any sign of him. The city was so small and there were so few men who could conceivably be from Christendom that I was certain I would clap eyes upon him from across a marketplace or along a street.

  But William was nowhere to be seen.

  Our guides, who had brought us from Batu, housed us all together in a single ger on the edge of the city near to the church, which pleased the monks mightily. They told us to wait in the city and that the Khan would send for us. Every day, someone would bring food and fresh water. It was never enough but it kept us alive.

  And we were free to explore the city at will. No one guarded us.

  After so many months of hard travelling, our company was suffering from terrible ailments. Feet were rotten, skin was raw. All of them had sores and weeping blisters. I was astonished that Friar Bartholomew had survived the journey and I was certain that he would die at any moment. Abdullah, for the first few days, seemed as though he had already died but he was young and recovered quite rapidly. All they wanted was to stay inside the ger, away from the wind and by the fire.