The Road to Samarcand

by Patrick O'Brian

  “There’s another flight coming in,” said Derrick, eagerly.

  “Well, get one more brace if you like,” said Sullivan, “but we’ll finish then.”

  “Will that be the end of the flighting?”

  “No. They’ll go on for quite a long time still, but we have got all we can eat. You don’t want to kill for the sake of killing, do you?”

  “No, I suppose not,” said Derrick, rather regretfully, as he watched the duck skim in and rise as they saw the movement in the butt.

  “I’m glad you don’t,” said Sullivan. “I hate these big shoots where you kill a hundred brace or more just for the fun of it. Shooting for the pot is another matter.”

  IN THE THIN, cold light they made their way back through the reeds with their game-bags heavy on their backs, and when they had mounted again and had ridden a mile or so, Derrick said, “So you never were a pirate in the China Seas.”

  “What’s biting you?” asked Sullivan, looking round at him curiously. “You’re very full of questions this morning, young fellow.”

  “Oh, it was only something that Hsien Lu said,” said Derrick, going red, “and I thought that if it was true, then what you said about war—well, I mean, piracy is a kind of war, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, that’s the trouble. I see. Yes, real piracy is almost exactly the same as aggressive war, and it has got some of the same phoney glamour when you hear about it at a distance. Well, you can set your mind at rest about that. I have done some pretty queer things in my time: I did a good many things when I was young that I would not do now, but I never hung out the black flag in earnest. I think I know what Hsien Lu was talking about. You know that there are plenty of genuine pirates in the South China Sea? Some of them are ordinary merchant junks that will turn pirate if they find a weaker junk in the offing—sort of halftime pirates—and some are the real article. But both kinds like to get hold of a white captain if they can—I don’t mean the coastwise pirates, the ones you hear most about, but the gentlemen who work on the high seas. That was what we had in mind when we cast around in Wang Tso for the leaders of the Benign Chrysanthemum. We had had a brush with the pirate junk belonging to the Fraternal Lotuses in which they had killed our bo’sun, a Kanaka who had been with us for years—we were very fond of him, and we thought our best way of dealing with the situation was to blow the Fraternal Lotuses out of the water. Perhaps what we ought to have done was to have lodged a complaint in the proper quarters, but I never knew any good coming of that in China, particularly in those days. So what we did was this: we told a good friend of ours, Suleiman ibn Yakoub, that he had bought the Wanderer—we had the Wanderer by then—and we hung about Wang Tso looking down-at-heel and miserable and poor, as like two master-mariners on the beach and out of a job as we could, until we got in touch with the old lady who ran the pirate organisation called the Benign Chrysanthemum. We knew that if we could get into her confidence we would learn about the hide-out of the Fraternal Lotuses: and I may say that we had a long score to settle with the Fraternal swabs, quite apart from the bo’sun. She took us on, and after she had tried us out with a few legitimate voyages, all above-board, she began to come round to thinking that perhaps we would do as full-blown Benign Chrysanthemums: but she did not want to hurry about it, and as we did not want to linger in those waters for very long, we thought the best thing to do was to impress her with some pretty hearty doings. All that we had been able to learn was about the society called the Everlasting Wrong: they were long-shore pirates, and they did not interest us very much, but they were a thorough-going pest to peaceful coast-wise ships, and we thought they would be as well out of the way as not, especially as they would serve our turn. So when there was a very big feast going on in their harbour Ross and I went and blew the bottoms out of their junks—it would be a long story to tell you all about it, but in fact it was quite simple, and it impressed the old lady immensely. It was rather irregular, of course, because the two societies were supposed to be at peace, but they were rivals in their trade, you see, and old Yang Kwei-fei—that was our old lady’s name—was really as pleased as Punch. She suddenly conceived the idea that trade would be much better all round if she had no rivals at all, and she told us all she knew about the Fraternal Lotuses, and in a week the Lotuses had withered to the extent of having to work for their living, which was something that no Fraternal Lotus had done for generations. That was what Hsien Lu had heard about, no doubt; and if he said that we were pirates, he certainly thought that he was telling the truth, because in the days before we had dealt with the Lotuses we stalked about boasting about how we had sunk this ship and that ship, murdering every man-jack aboard, and drowning the women and children and so on, like the biggest villains unhung. I am sure he thought it was a compliment when he said it, but I am afraid I must admit that we were never quite such great men as Hsien Lu believed. We never even made anyone walk the plank, and to tell the truth, I don’t think that I should enjoy the entertainment very much—I haven’t really got the makings of a really good bloodthirsty pirate. If some swab starts knocking my ship around, I’ll sink him if I can, but I am such a mild-natured creature that I have to be hit first before I begin to get sore—not cast in the heroic mould, as you might say.” He had been gazing at the horizon for some time, and now he reined in and shaded his eyes with his hand. “What do you make of that?” he asked.

  Derrick made out a single horseman on the skyline. “It is not one of our people,” he said.

  “No,” said Sullivan. “It looks to me more like a Kazak, from his lance. It is strange to see one here. We are a long way from their country.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THROUGH THE BLEAK LANDS beyond the great marshes the column pursued its steady road. Day after day they went straight over the high steppe or the half-desert where the cold sand blew perpetually over the dun earth: they no longer dug in the minor sites that the Professor had marked, and although he said that there were still three or four places where they must certainly stop, he said it without conviction. He was in a ferment about the jade, and his chief wish was to get it safely back to the museum: he carried the pick of the collection about his person, and the rest he confided to Li Han, who sewed the pieces into his quilted cotton clothes and walked about as though he were treading on eggs. The Professor had already begun a rough catalogue of the jades, and every night the lamp burnt until after midnight in his yurt. He said, “Our aim must now be to reach Samarcand as early as possible: fortunately, the worst of our journey is over, and we have only the Takla Makan to traverse or to circumvent, and then, I understand, the rest of the road is comparatively simple.”

  “Only the Takla Makan!” exclaimed Sullivan, thinking of that howling desert. “Only the Takla Makan.” But seeing the Professor’s anxious face he added, “Yes, you are quite right. Once we have got that behind us, the rest should not be too difficult.”

  When he was alone with Ross he said, “Are they still there?”

  “I saw them at break of day,” said Ross, “but I have not seen them since. It may be that we are wrong—growing over-anxious and seeing boggles behind every door, like bairns.”

  “I hope so,” replied Sullivan, scanning the horizon. Ever since they had left the swamps he had had the impression that they were being followed. Sometimes it was a group of horsemen who kept so far away that they might have been antelopes or the tall wild asses of the steppe, and sometimes it was a single rider; but Sullivan and Ross had powerful glasses, and the form that might have been a distant antelope to a naked eye showed up as a Tartar in the binoculars, a Tartar with the head-dress and the lance of a Kazak.

  Yet when some days later they met with the immense herds of the Churungdzai and camped for the night with the tribesmen, they heard nothing of the Kazaks; they felt that their suspicions had been mistaken, and they were glad that they had not mentioned them to the others. The Churungdzai were a tribe related to the Kokonor horde: they were as friendly as could be, and they gave news
of Hulagu Khan. He was a week’s journey to the north, on the edge of the Takla Makan, and they thought that he might come south to cut their route near the place called the Kirgiz Tomb.

  It took them nearly the whole of the next day to pass through the innumerable herds of the Churungdzai, although they were but a tenth part of the tribe’s wealth, but by the evening they were alone on the steppe again, and in the days that followed, the old, calm routine settled down as though there had been no change.

  Derrick had traded some ammunition for a hawking eagle with one of the Churungdzai, and with the great bird on his arm he rode out with Chingiz to see what they could find for the pot. The eagle was big enough to strike down an antelope, and Derrick, at intervals of working out the problem in trigonometry that Ross had set him for his morning’s task, had thought that he had seen some on the far edge of the sky.

  “You must ride with your right arm across your saddlebow,” said Chingiz, and Derrick quickly realised that he was right. He had been trying to imitate the Mongol’s way of carrying his falcon with his arm free at his side, and each time that his arm had moved under the much greater weight of the eagle, the huge talons had gripped his muscles through the thick glove that he wore as the hooded eagle stirred to keep its balance.

  They had gone almost out of sight of their caravan, and Derrick was riding more easily, when they heard the drumming of horse’s hooves: it was Sullivan, coming up fast to join them.

  “I thought I would come and see how your new purchase behaves,” he said, drawing alongside. “Is it any good, Chingiz?”

  “I hope so,” said Chingiz, looking at the eagle with his beady eyes narrowed still further. “But it is very small.”

  “Small!” cried Derrick, thinking of the steely grip of those talons, and how they had gripped him to the bone when the bird was merely sitting there, with no intention of doing harm. “Small! What do you think we are going to hunt? Elephants?”

  “My father has an eagle twice that size,” said Chingiz, stroking his little peregrine.

  “Yes,” said Sullivan, “but your father is a Khan, and drinks the milk of white mares. Naturally he has a larger eagle than anybody else.”

  “And my ancestor,” said Chingiz, who was not altogether pleased about Derrick’s eagle, “had one four times the size of my father’s.”

  “That must have been difficult to carry,” observed Derrick.

  “Not for my ancestor,” replied Chingiz, firmly. “He had two on each arm.”

  Derrick was about to say something, but he checked himself. He had learnt by now that if he pulled Chingiz’s leg the results were likely to be rapid and bloody.

  “Did your ancestor ever have any trouble with the Kazaks?” asked Sullivan.

  “No,” said Chingiz. “He built a tower of ten thousand Kazak skulls—Maiman Kazaks, they were—and then he never had any trouble with them at all.”

  “Ten thousand?” asked Derrick.

  “Yes,” said Chingiz, “ten thousand. You will see them when we come to the rocky country soon: they are still there, at the place called the Kazak Tomb.”

  Sullivan nodded. He had seen it.

  Suddenly Chingiz shouted, “Loose, loose, loose!” While they had been talking an antelope had sprung up out of a single patch of shade, and now it was flying towards the horizon. Derrick tore at the jesses, the leather thongs that held the eagle to his arm, but he was unhandy with his left hand, and his pony was too excited to stand.

  “Cast off,” cried Sullivan. “Look alive, boy.”

  Chang barked, the pony shied, and it was minutes before Derrick had the eagle in the air. By this time the antelope was no more than a swiftly-moving mist of flying sand.

  The eagle towered, its huge wings making a bar of shadow over them, and circled high, with its wing-tips flaring in the wind. It seemed to take some time to make up its mind, and they could see its head turned from side to side as it scanned the plain; but then, with no perceptible movement of its wings, it began to travel down the sky, faster and faster, as if it were sliding down an oiled groove. They galloped at full stretch below it, with their reins loose and their horses racing at the height of their speed, but it left them as if they were standing still. On and on it went, growing smaller in the distance; then Derrick saw it mount again and stoop.

  Chingiz was up first, but the eagle had already lifted, and it was floating easily in the sky. “Call him,” Chingiz shouted to Derrick, and when Derrick had called the eagle without effect, the Mongol cried, “Lure him, lure him as fast as you can.”

  Derrick unslung the lure from his saddle, a stuffed piece of felt on a short length of rope, and he whirled it in the air, calling still. The eagle looked, dropped twenty feet, hesitated and rose again.

  “He sees something,” said Chingiz. “We must follow.” He stopped for a moment to hoist the little antelope across his saddle-bow—the eagle had broken its back with one gripe of its claws—and they rode slowly after the towering eagle, calling and luring, but in vain.

  They were so busy watching the bird that they did not see the men until they were quite near them. They were two, one mounted and watching the eagle, and the other looking at his horse’s hoof. They were fully armed, with slung rifles, curved swords hanging at the left side of their saddles, and in his right hand the mounted man held a lance.

  Sullivan motioned Chingiz and Derrick to a halt and rode slowly forward.

  “Peace be with you,” he said.

  “And on you be peace,” replied the mounted man.

  At this moment the eagle came down to Derrick’s arm, and he was too busy hooding it to catch what was being said. But when the bird was quietly on his arm again he heard the mounted man say, “Are you in the company of the idolaters?”

  “We are people of the Book also,” answered Sullivan.

  Derrick noticed that the dismounted man had his rifle unslung, and for a second he thought there was going to be trouble, but Sullivan swung his horse about, and saying over his shoulder, “A good journey and peace, in the Name of God,” he rode back to them.

  The Tartar’s deep reply, “In the Name of God, peace and a good journey,” came over the sand, and each group rode away from the other.

  Sullivan went on silently for some time, and although Derrick looked questioningly at him he said nothing until they were nearly up to the column.

  “They were Kazaks,” he said in an off-hand tone. “They are Mohammedans, you know. They are probably on a journey. Can you tell what horde they belong to, Chingiz?”

  “They were not Kirei Kazaks,” said Chingiz, “nor Uwak. They might have been from the Altai, though that is far away. But they were Kazaks, and they must have had my father’s permission to be here.

  “And yet,” said Chingiz, as they rode up to the halted column, “if they were going on a journey, it is strange that they had no led horses. The Kazaks always lead two or three if they are far from home.”

  Derrick thought it strange, too, but the camp was just forming, and as they hurried to the kitchen tent to deliver the antelope to Li Han, he forgot all about it.

  Li Han was doling out a measure of rice to Timur, a lame, one-eyed, dog-faced Mongol to whom he had delegated nearly all the work of cooking for the past few weeks.

  “Come on, Li Han, you’ve got to do this yourself,” cried Derrick, bringing in the antelope. Timur was an expert in loading camels, but his one idea of cooking was thin, rubbery strips of flesh, as nearly raw as possible.

  “That’s right,” said Olaf, suddenly appearing from behind a mound of provisions. “You turn sea-cook again for a day, Li Han.”

  Li Han sniffed, and turned to light the fire. The Professor had more and more entrusted him with duties as far from those of a sea-cook as could be imagined. For a long time now he had copied Chinese inscriptions and had arranged the Professor’s notes, taking endless pains and writing with beautiful neatness: he had thrown himself into it heart and soul, and all day long, as they rode, he was to
be seen gazing into a book, in order, as he said, “to fit himself for service and society of august philosophical sage.” But all this, though it pleased the Professor, pleased nobody else. Both Derrick and Olaf regretted the days when Li Han would turn out a succulent dish at a moment’s notice. They reminded one another of the meals aboard the Wanderer, wonderful meals that came in rapid succession from the galley stove; and that evening, when the keen air and the long day’s march had given them a needle-sharp appetite, they looked forward eagerly to something very good indeed from the antelope.

  But as they sat round the fire, Li Han appeared from the Professor’s tent, carrying a fresh sheaf of papers: he pointed to the iron pot and sat on a box, frowning over the written sheets. Olaf helped himself and stirred moodily in his dish: it contained an evil mess prepared by Timur by way of an experiment. The antelope was still untouched. Li Han sipped at his tea-bowl, staring thoughtfully into the distance.

  “You going to eat any of this duff, eh?” growled Olaf.

  “By no means,” replied Li Han. “Have already partaken of egg with learned Professor.”

  “Humph. Ay reckon you ought to try some of this stuff. What you say, Derrick, eh?”

  “It is horrible duff,” said Derrick, offering a little to Chang, who refused it apologetically. “Why don’t you cook us some decent chop, Li Han?”

  “When engaged in learned pursuits, cannot bend mind to menial tasks.”

  “Don’t you like to eat good food yourself?”

  “For disciple of philosopher, preserved egg suffices. I no longer worship belly, as in former days of besotted ignorance.”

  “You ban getting too high-hat,” said Olaf, angrily. “Who are you calling besotted ignorance, anyway? You mouldy son of a half-baked weevil, if you was in the Wanderer’s galley right now, Ay reckon we would wipe the dishes with you, eh, Derrick?”

  “Abusive language invariable mark of cultural backward person,” said Li Han.