He knew roughly where he was, of course. South of here, he would eventually come into the Ottoman Turks’ holdings in the Balkans. He would be able to speak with them, he would be back in the world, but out of Temur’s empire. Something then would start up for him, some way to live.
So he rode south. But still only skeletons occupied the villages. He grew hungrier and hungrier. He drove the mare harder, while drinking more of her blood.
Then one night in the dark of the moon, all of a sudden there were howls and wolves were on them in a snarling rush. Bold just had time to cut the mare’s tether and scramble into a tree. Most of the wolves chased the mare, but some sat panting under the tree. Bold got as comfortable as he could and prepared to wait them out. When rain came they slunk away. At dawn he woke for the tenth time, climbed down. He took off downstream and came on the body of the mare, all skin and gristle and scattered bones. The sidebags were nowhere to be found.
He continued on foot.
One day, too weak to walk, he lay in wait by a stream, and shot a deer with one of the sorry little arrows, and made a fire and ate well, bolting down chunks of cooked haunch. He slept away from the carcass, hoping to return to it. Wolves couldn’t climb trees, but bears could. He saw a fox, and as the vixen had been his wife’s nafs, long ago, he felt better. In the morning the sun warmed him. The deer had been removed by a bear, it appeared, but he felt stronger with all that fresh meat in him, and pressed on.
• • •
He walked south for several days, keeping on ridges when he could, over hills both depopulated and deforested, the ground underfoot sluiced to stone and baked white by the glare of the sun. He watched for the vixen in the valleys at dawn, and drank from springs, and raided dead villages for scraps of food. These grew harder and harder to find, and for a while he was reduced to chewing the leather strap from a harness, an old Mongol trick from the hard campaigns on the steppes. But it seemed to him it had worked better back there, on the endless grass, which was so much easier to cross than these baked tortured white hills.
At the end of one day, after he had long got used to living alone in the world, scavenging it like Monkey himself, he came into a little copse of trees to make a fire, and was shocked to see one already there, tended by a living man.
The man was short, like Bold. His hair was as red as maple leaves, his bushy beard the same colour, his skin pale and brindled like a dog. At first Bold was sure the man was sick, and he kept his distance. But the man’s eyes, blue in colour, were clear; and he too was afraid, absolutely on point and ready for anything. Silently they stared at each other, across a small clearing in the middle of the copse.
The man gestured at his fire. Bold nodded and came warily into the glade.
The man was cooking two fish. Bold took a rabbit that he had killed that morning out of his coat, and skinned and cleaned it with his knife. The man watched him hungrily, nodding at each familiar move. He turned his fish on the fire, and made room in the coals for the rabbit. Bold spitted it on a stick and put it in.
After the meat had cooked they ate in silence, sitting on logs on opposite sides of the fire. They both stared into the flames, glancing only occasionally at each other, shy after all their time alone. After all that it was not obvious what one could say to another human.
Finally the man spoke, first brokenly, then at length. Sometimes he used a word that sounded familiar to Bold, but not so familiar as his movements around the fire, and no matter how hard he tried, Bold could make nothing of what the man said.
Bold tried out some simple phrases himself, feeling the strangeness of words in his mouth, like pebbles. The other man listened closely, his blue eyes gleaming in firelight, out of the dirty pale skin of his lean face, but he showed no sign of comprehension, not of Mongolian, Tibetan, Chinese, Turkic, Arabic, Chagatay, or any other of the polyglot greetings Bold had learned through his years of crossing the steppe.
At the end of Bold’s recitation the man’s face spasmed, and he wept. Then, wiping his eyes clear, leaving big streaks on his dirty face, he stood before Bold and said something, gesturing widely. He pointed his finger at Bold, as if angry, then stepped back and sat on his log, and began to imitate rowing a boat, or so Bold surmised. He rowed facing backwards, like the fishermen on the Caspian Sea. He made the motions for fishing, then for catching fish, cleaning them, cooking them, and feeding them to little children. By his gestures he evoked all the people he had fed, his children, his wife, the people he lived with.
Then he turned his face up at the firelit branches over the two men, and cried again. He pulled up the rough shift covering his body, and pointed at his arms — at his underarms, where he made a fist. Bold nodded, felt his stomach shrink as the man mimed the sickness and bleat of all the children, by lying down on the ground and mewling like a dog. Then the wife, then all the rest. All had died but this man, who walked around the fire pointing at the leaf litter on the ground intoning words, names perhaps. It was all so clear to Bold.
Then the man burned his dead village, all in gestures so clear, and mimed rowing away. He rowed on his log for a long time, so long Bold thought he had forgotten the story; but then he ground to a halt and fell back in his boat. He got out, looking around in feigned surprise. Then he began to walk. He walked around the fire a dozen times, pretend-eating grass and sticks, howling like a wolf, cowering under his log, walking some more, even rowing again. Over and over he said the same things, “Dea, dea, dea, dea,” shouting it at the branch-crossed stars quaking over them.
Bold nodded. He knew the story. The man was moaning, with a low growl like an animal, cutting at the ground with a stick. His eyes were as red as any wolf’s in the light. Bold ate more of the rabbit, then offered the stick to the man, who snatched it and ate hungrily. They sat there and looked at the fire. Bold felt both companionable and alone. He eyed the other man, who had eaten both his fish, and was now nodding off. The man jerked up, muttered something, lay down, curled around the fire, fell asleep. Uneasily Bold stoked the fire, took the other side of it, and tried to do the same. When he woke the fire had died and the man was gone. It was a cold dawn, dew-drenched, and the trail of the man led down the meadow to a big bend in a stream, where it disappeared. There was no sign of where the man had gone from there.
• • •
Days passed, and Bold continued south. Many watches went by in which he didn’t think a thing, only scanning the land for food and the sky for weather, humming a word or two over and over. Awake to emptiness. One day he came on a village surrounding a spring,
Old temples scattered throughout,
Broken round columns pointing at the sky.
All in the midst of a vast silence.
What made these gods so angry with their people?
What might they make of a solitary soul
Wandering by after the world has ended?
White marble drums fallen this way and that:
One bird cheeps in the empty air.
He did not care to test anything by trespassing, and so circled the temples, chanting ‘Om mane padme hum, om mane padme hummmm’, aware suddenly that he often spoke aloud to himself now, or hummed, without ever noticing it, as if ignoring an old companion who always said the same things.
• • •
He continued south and east, though he had forgotten why. He scrounged roadside buildings for dried food. He walked on the empty roads. It was an old land. Gnarled olive trees, black and heavy with their inedible fruit, mocked him. No person ate entirely by his own efforts, no one. He got hungrier, and food became his only focus, every day. He passed more marble ruins, foraged in the farmhouses he passed. Once he came on a big clay jar of olive oil, and stayed there four days to drink it all down. Then game became more abundant. He saw the vixen more than once. Good shots with his ridiculous bow kept him away from hunger. He made his fires larger every night, and once or twice wondered what had become of the man he had met. Had meeting Bold made him realize he wou
ld be alone no matter what happened or whom he found, so that he had killed himself to rejoin his jati? Or perhaps just slipped while drinking? Or walked in the stream to keep Bold from tracking him? There was no way of telling, but the encounter kept coming back to Bold, especially the clarity with which he had been able to understand the man.
The valleys ran south and east. He felt the shape of his travels in his mind, and found he could not remember enough of the last few weeks to be sure of his location, relative to the Moravian Gate, or the khanate of the Golden Horde. From the Black Sea they had ridden west about ten days’ ride, hadn’t they? It was like trying to remember things from a previous life.
It seemed possible, however, that he was nearing the Byzantine empire, coming towards Constantinople from the north and west. Sitting slumped before his nightly bonfire, he wondered if Constantinople would be dead too. He wondered if Mongolia was dead, if perhaps everyone in the world was dead. The wind soughed through the shrubs like ghosts’ voices, and he fell into an uneasy sleep, waking through the watches of the night to check the stars and throw more branches on his fire. He was cold.
He woke again, and there was Temur’s ghost standing across the fire, the light of the flames dancing over his awesome face. His eyes were black as obsidian, and Bold could see stars gleaming in them.
“So,” Temur said heavily, “You ran away.”
“Yes,” Bold whispered.
“What’s wrong? Don’t want to go out on the hunt again?”
This was a thing he had said to Bold before. At the end he had been so weak he had had to be carried on a litter, but he never thought of stopping. In his last winter he had considered whether to move east in the spring, against China, or west, against the Franks. During a huge feast he weighed the advantages of each, and at one point he looked at Bold, and something on Bold’s face caused the Khan to jump him with his powerful voice, still strong despite his illness: “What’s wrong, Bold? Don’t want to go out on the hunt again?”
That earlier time Bold had said, “Always, Great Khan. I was there when we conquered Ferghana, Khorasan, Sistan, Kbrezm and Mughalistan. One more is fine by me.”
Temur had laughed his angry laugh. “But which way this time, Bold? Which way?”
Bold knew enough to shrug. “All the same to me, Great Khan. Why don’t you flip a coin?”
Which got him another laugh, and a warm place in the stable that winter, and a good horse in the campaign. They had moved west in the spring of the year 784.
Now Temur’s ghost, as solid as any man, glared reproachfully at Bold from across the fire. “I flipped the coin just like you said, Bold. But it must have come up wrong.”
“Maybe China would have been worse,” Bold said.
Temur laughed angrily. “How could it have been? Killed by lightning? How could it have been? You did that, Bold, you and Psin. You brought the curse of the west back with you. You never should have come back. And I should have gone to China.”
“Maybe so.” Bold didn’t know how to deal with him. Angry ghosts needed to be defied as often as they needed to be placated. But those jet-black eyes, sparkling with starlight —
Suddenly Temur coughed. He put a hand to his mouth, and gagged out something red. He looked at it, then held it out for Bold to see: a red egg. “This is yours,” he said, and tossed it over the flames at Bold.
Bold twisted to catch it, and woke up. He moaned. The ghost of Temur clearly was not happy. Wandering between worlds, visiting his old soldiers like any other preta . . . in a way it was pathetic, but Bold could not shake the fear in him. Temur’s spirit was a big power, no matter what realm it was in. His hand could reach into this world and grab Bold’s foot at any time.
All that day Bold wandered south in a haze of memories, scarcely seeing the land before him. The last time Temur visited him in the stables had been difficult, as the Khan could no longer ride. He had looked at one thick black mare as if at a woman, and smoothed its flank and said to Bold, “The first horse I ever stole looked just like this one. I started poor and life was hard. God put a sign on me. But you would think He would have let me ride to the end.” And he had stared at Bold with that vivid gaze of his, one eye slightly higher and larger than the other, just like in the dream. Although in life his eyes had been brown.
Hunger kept Bold hunting. Temur, though a hungry ghost, no longer had to worry about food; but Bold did. All the game ran south, down the valleys. One day, high on a ridge, he saw water, bronze in the distance. A large lake, or sea. Old roads led him over another pass, down into another city.
Again, no one there was alive. All was motionless and silent. Bold wandered down empty streets, between empty buildings, feeling the cold hands of pretas running down his back.
On the central hill of the city stood a copse of white temples, like bones bleaching in the sun. Seeing them, Bold decided that he had found the capital of this dead land. He had walked from peripheral towns of rude stone to capital temples of smooth white marble, and still no one had survived. A white haze filled his vision, and through it he stumbled up the dusty streets, up onto the temple hill, to lay his case before the local gods.
On the sacred plateau three smaller temples flanked a large one, a rectangular beauty with double rows of smooth columns on all four sides, supporting a gleaming roof of marble tiles. Under the eaves carved, figures fought, marched, flew and gestured in a great stone tableau depicting the absent people, or their gods. Bold sat on a marble drum from a long-toppled column and stared up at the carving in stone, seeing the world that had been lost.
Finally he approached the temple, entered it praying aloud. Unlike the big stone temples in the north, it had been no place of congregation in the end; there were no skeletons inside. Indeed it looked as if it had been abandoned for many years. Bats hung in the rafters, and the darkness was lanced by sunbeams breaking through broken rooftiles. At the far end of the temple it looked as if an altar had been hastily erected. On it a single candlewick burned in a pot of oil. Their last prayer, flickering even after they had died.
Bold had nothing to offer by way of sacrifice, and the great white temple stood silent above him. “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond! O what an awakening! All hail!” His words echoed hollowly.
He stumbled back outside into the afternoon glare, and saw to the south the blink of the sea. He would go there. There was nothing here to keep him; the people and their gods too had died.
• • •
A long bay cut in between hills. A harbour at the head of the bay was empty, except for a few small rowing boats slapping against the waves, or upturned on the shingle beach stretching away from the docks. He did not risk the boats, he knew nothing about them. He had seen Issyk Kul and Lake Qinghai, and the Aral, Caspian and Black Seas, but he had never been in a boat in his life, except for ferries crossing rivers. He did not want to start now.
No traveller seen on this long road,
No boats from afar return for the night.
Nothing moves in this dead harbour.
On the beach he scooped a handful of water to drink — spat it out; it was salty, like the Black Sea, or the springs in the Tarim Basin. It was strange to see so much waste water. He had heard there was an ocean surrounding the world. Perhaps he was at the edge of the world, the western edge, or the southern. Possibly the Arabs lived south of this sea. He didn’t know, and for the first time in all his wandering, he had the feeling that he had no idea where he was.
He was asleep on the warm sand of a beach, dreaming of the steppes, trying to keep Temur out of the dream by force of will alone, when he was rousted by strong hands, rolling him over and tying his legs together and his arms behind his back. He was hauled to his feet.
A man said “What have we here?” or something to that effect. He spoke something like Turkic, Bold didn’t know many of the words, but it was some kind of Turkic, and he could usually catch the drift of what they were saying. They looked like soldiers or perhaps b
rigands, big hard-handed ruffians, wearing gold earrings and dirty cotton clothes. He wept while grinning foolishly at the sight of them; he felt his face stretch and his eyes burn. They regarded him warily.
“A madman,” one ventured.
Bold shook his head at this. “I — I haven’t seen anyone,” he said in Ulu Turkic. His tongue was big in his mouth, for despite all his babbling to himself and the gods, he had forgotten how to talk to people. “I thought everyone was dead.”
He gestured to the north and west.
They did not seem to understand him.
“Kill him,” one said, as dismissive as Temur.
“The Christians all died,” another said.
“Kill him, let’s go. Boats are full.”
“Bring him,” the other said. “The slavers will pay for him. He won’t bring down the boat, thin as he is.”
Something like that. They hauled behind him down the beach. He had to hurry so the rope wouldn’t pull him around backwards, and the effort made him dizzy. He didn’t have much strength. The men smelled of garlic and that made him ravenous, though it was a foul smell. But if they meant to sell him to slavers, they would have to feed him. His mouth was watering so heavily that he slobbered like a dog, and he was weeping as well, nose running, and with his hands tied behind his back he couldn’t wipe his face.
“He’s foaming at the mouth like a horse.”
“He’s sick.”
“He’s not sick. Bring him. Come on,” this to Bold, “don’t be scared. Where we take you even the slaves live a better life than you barbarian dogs.”
Then he was shoved over the side of a beached boat, and with great jerks it was pulled off into the water, where it rocked violently. Immediately he fell sideways into the wooden wall of the thing.
“Up here, slave. On that pile of rope. Sit!”
He sat and watched them work. Whatever happened, it was better than the empty land. Just to see men move, to hear them talk, filled him. It was like watching horses run on the steppe. Hungrily he watched them haul a sail into the air on a mast, and the boat heeled to the side such that he threw himself the other way. They roared with laughter at this. He grinned sheepishly, gesturing at the big lateen.
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 2