Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  Gokudo’s head bounced once with a meaty thud and rolled a few feet away, his face still looking a little puzzled. His eyes blinked rapidly six or seven times. His body crumpled into a disorderly heap. Blood at first fountained from his severed neck, then flowed, then streamed, then trickled, and then stopped.

  The swing of the naginata pulled Johanna around almost as far to her right as she had begun it to her left, Firas noticed with profession detachment, so far as to pull her left heel from the ground. She let it, probably so it would look as if it was her idea, until the naginata’s swing slowed and she was able to regain her authority over it.

  She neatly reversed its waning momentum to bring it back level in front of her, and let it lay flat against her palms as she presented it to Jibran with a slight bow, the blade still wet with Gokudo’s blood. Firas believed that only he saw the fine tremble in her arms.

  Jibran looked at Johanna in silence for a long moment, and then bowed once more, deeply, respectfully, profoundly. As one, the men of Aab bowed with him. He accepted the naginata with due reverence and respect, and then he and his men began to melt rapidly down the canyon in the wake of the boys who had taken the horses, leaving Farhad and the other soldiers standing where they were, stupid with fatigue and shock, staring at Gokudo’s severed head.

  Hayat and Alma came up, having changed back into their traveling clothes and leading their horses. They looked at Gokudo’s body. Alma shuddered. Hayat gave Johanna an approving nod. “All done here?”

  “All done,” Johanna said, and mounted North Wind.

  As they passed down the canyon, Farhad lunged for Johanna, again calling down curses on her head and her line and her descendants until the end of time. Displeased, possibly by Farhad’s intemperate language, possibly by his uninvited nearness, North Wind exercised the excellent muscles in his right hind leg to plant his hoof squarely in Farhad’s belly. Farhad flew backwards and landed in the stream with a magnificent splash, where he lay gasping for breath.

  Johanna gave North Wind’s neck an extra pat. He gave his ears a nonchalant flick. They walked around the next curve of the canyon without a backward glance.

  9

  On the Road, summer, 1323

  “TELL ME ABOUT THE TEMPLARS,” Jaufre said.

  Alaric sighed. To Jaufre’s ears it sounded a little theatrical. “First, I beg you, please rid yourself of the habit of calling me Alaric the Templar,” the older man said. “Ram will have his little joke, but the farther west we travel, the more dangerous it gets.”

  “Why?”

  “Because our order has been proscribed, by church and state.”

  “What church? Which state?”

  “All of them,” Alaric said gloomily.

  “Since when?”

  “That depends,” Alaric said, and launched into a disjointed history frequently interrupted by strong personal opinions and bitter asides that lasted, on and off, for four days. They had come out of the foothills and were well launched upon the eastern edge of the aptly-named Emptiness Desert, and Rambahadur Raj had switched travel time from days to nights. Traveling across the great salt waste with the stars painting the sky overhead lent an otherworldly element to the tale, which might have been partially responsible for leaving Jaufre inclined to believe less than half of what he heard. It was all so very improbable.

  The short version seemed to be that the Knights of the Temple was an order of warrior monks first established a little over two hundred years before by a Frankish knight named Hugues.

  “De Payens,” Félicien said, who kept close by during the entirety of the long nights of the tale of the Templars and evidently felt empowered to correct anything he felt Alaric got wrong.

  Alaric, who had taken an inexplicable dislike to his fellow Frank at first sight, harrumphed and continued. “He went on crusade to the Holy Land—”

  “Crusade?” Jaufre said. “Oh, I know, I remember my father talking about it. There’s a shrine or, no, a city. Something near the western shore of the Middle Sea that—Christians, isn’t it?—regard as belonging to their religion.” Father John had spoken of it, he remembered. “Where your Christ was born,” he said out loud.

  “Everyone’s Christ,” Alaric said in a shocked voice, and this time Jaufre thought of Uncle Cheng. “His birthplace has fallen into the hands of the infidels. It is a holy cause to regain it.”

  “It was that,” Félicien said, as if admitting an unpalatable truth. “But it was also driven by the need to re-open trade routes to the East.” Jaufre couldn’t see the goliard’s lip curling but he could hear it in his voice. “Our noble rulers can’t do without their nutmeg.”

  “It was a quest to reclaim the holy places where our Lord and Savior once walked and preached the Gospel,” Alaric said frostily.

  “It also gave the knights of Europe a new target to fight, instead of each other.”

  Alaric reared back so violently that his camel stumbled and protested. “My dear young student, as you say you are, you would do well to listen if you wish to learn.”

  “And Hugues de Payens…?” Jaufre said.

  Alaric, very erect, said, “The evil Saracens—”

  “Also known as the Seljuk empire,” Félicien said to Jaufre. “Mostly Turkics.”

  “—were robbing and murdering pilgrims—pious, unarmed travelers to the holy places of Jerusalem, where—”

  “—once our Lord and Savior walked and preached,” Félicien said in a sing-song voice, and grinned at Alaric’s fulminating look, unrepentant. “And you say I don’t listen.”

  Alaric harrumphed again. “The Holy Father on his throne in Rome—”

  “Pope Urban II in 1096.”

  “—responded to these outrages—”

  “As well as to a request from the emperor of Byzantium,” Félicien said, “who was worried about the Seljuks knocking at his front door, and his back door, too, for that matter.”

  “—by preaching the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont.”

  “And Hugues de Payens…?” Jaufre said.

  “Yes, yes,” Alaric said testily, “that came later.”

  “How much later?”

  “About a hundred years later,” Félicien said, and he and Alaric fell into another wrangle about just when the Knights of the Temple had been officially established. As near as Jaufre could make out, the Templars were a volunteer force from when Hugues de Payens and his companions offered their services to King Baldwin of Jerusalem in 1113, but they weren’t officially an arm of the Christian church until fifteen years later.

  “So,” Jaufre said, making a mental effort to sort all this into a timeline, “they protected pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem.”

  Alaric straightened. “It was our calling.”

  Félicien snorted.

  “I beg your pardon?” Alaric said, the frost back in his voice.

  “They were bankers,” the goliard said. “And some of the richest landowners in Europe. And that is exactly why they no longer exist.” Except as superannuated old fidgets like this one, his silence added.

  “But—”

  “They became too powerful, too rich,” the goliard said. “It created a great deal of jealousy. Philip of France had borrowed heavily from them, and he didn’t want to pay it back. And—”

  Someone called for a guard and Alaric spurred away, gladly, Jaufre thought.

  He saw Félicien’s head turn as he watched the older man move down the line of the caravan. “And?” he said.

  “And they lost,” Félicien said. “They lost Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. In 1291, they lost Acre, the last Christian outpost in the Holy Land. Eleven years later, they lost Ruad Island, most of the Templars who were there dying in its defense. In the end, they lost everything the Crusades had gained.” He paused. “Well,” he said, “at least everything they gained in the first Crusade. None of the rest of the crusades amounted to much.”

  “And when they lost the Holy Land, everyone turned against them?�
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  “How do you think the Crusades were paid for, Jaufre?”

  “Oh,” he said, after a moment.

  “Yes,” the goliard said, “taxes. The Christian world paid and paid and paid again to regain the Holy Land for those of their faith. Lords great and small from Italy to Spain to France to England bankrupted their estates financing this holy effort. A wasted effort, in blood and in treasure. I’m surprised the Templars lasted as long after the fall of Acre as they did.”

  Jaufre subtracted. “Twenty-one years.”

  “Fifteen,” Félicien said grimly. “Philip the Fair arrested as many as he could lay hands on in 1307. Pope Clement held out as long as he could but Philip finally forced his hand at the head of an army. In 1314, with full papal approval, Philip burned the last Templar Grand Master at the stake in Paris, and it was all over.”

  Jaufre wondered where his father had been in all this. Alaric had given him to understand that Templars were monks and that they did not marry, but Jaufre himself had been born in 1306, four years after the fall of Ruad, a year before the first arrests and eight full years before the head of his order had been executed. “You don’t seem all that fond of Philip the Fair,” he said cautiously. “He was your king.”

  “He was my father’s king,” Félicien said, his voice devoid of his usual mockery. “De Molay, the Grand Master, cursed them both from his pyre. Pope Clement and King Philip, both. They both died within the year, and there hasn’t been a king able to keep the throne of France beneath his ass for more than a few years at a time since then.”

  “And you think the curse had something to do with that?”

  “You don’t find the juxtaposition of events persuasive?” The customary mocking tone was back in the light voice.

  “I’m not a superstitious man,” Jaufre said.

  He heard the shrug in Félicien’s voice. “As you wish. They’re still dead.”

  So are the Templars, Jaufre thought, but refrained from saying so. There was that in the goliard’s voice that spoke of much unsaid, something personal, if he had to guess. Was there a Templar in Félicien’s family, perhaps? Or a family bankrupted by taxes raised for a Crusade?

  At dawn, when they set up camp to sleep through the heat of the day, Jaufre took his sword to the guards’ practice ground and whaled away stoically at the wooden post set up there. The men had at first teased him over his weakness and ineptitude, but his determination had eventually silenced them, and now when he was done they came forward to offer one-on-one practice. Slowly, too slowly, he was building his stamina and his skill back to where he might be able to beat a ten-year old child, if said child were armed only with a dinner knife.

  He staggered back to collapse next to their campfire, and drank the entire bowl of soup Shasha handed him in one gulp, chunks of goat meat and all. She refilled it and handed it back without comment.

  And so the days on the Road progressed, unchanging, monotonous, seemingly without end. The desert continued flat and salt, and Rambahadur Raj delayed their start a little longer each evening to allow the ground to cool before they set out across it. They had no trouble with raiders in this first leg of their journey. There weren’t many people of any kind, the oasis towns few and far between, and the people of the caravan looked forward to Kerman in eager anticipation. Kerman was a storied city famous for carpets and turquoise and must certainly support a caravansary worthy of the name, with running water and public baths.

  In this they were proven right, thankfully. Two mountainous ridges capped with late-melting snow hid the city from view until they were right on it, and at last they beheld the sprawl of red brick buildings, a vast expanse of peaked and arched and domed roofs rising up to a central fortress whose size awed them all into momentary silence.

  “It’s bigger even than the palace at Cambaluc,” Shasha said.

  “By half again,” Jaufre said.

  “It’s not as tall as Chartres,” Félicien said, and kicked his donkey into motion again.

  The caravansary was large and spacious, with a fully functioning fountain and indoor plumbing. The stables were vast and the lush personal accommodations were better than Kashgar’s. Jaufre and Shasha agreed to splurge on a suite of two rooms that opened onto a balcony over the central court, and they drew back the shutters so that the sound of water trickling out of the fountain would sweeten their sleep all night long.

  Félicien leaned out the window and inhaled deeply of the scent of roses growing riotously beneath. “How long do we stay here?”

  “Rambahadur Raj said his merchants want to spend a few days in trade,” Jaufre said. “I wouldn’t mind a look around the market myself.” He looked at Shasha. “Should we buy some carpets?”

  She answered his question with another. “I wonder what the going rate is here for lapis?”

  “Did Wu Li have an agent in Kerman?”

  She shook her head. “I think he bought most of his carpet stock through Tashkent.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt to ask around,” Jaufre said, and did so that afternoon, making the rounds of the market, which featured piles of carpets taller than he was arranged in long, straight corridors interrupted by spaces for the merchants to entertain opening offers.

  “Wu Li of Cambaluc?” they said, doubtful. “I may have heard the name, young sir, but just sit here for a moment while I try to remember. My assistant will show you some of my finer carpets while you wait.” A wink. “Very rare and fine, two hundreds of knots per finger, I assure you, you may count for yourself.”

  It would be an hour or more before he got away, and by the time he did there would be three or four other merchants clamoring for his attention. It was no wonder that he didn’t notice the small, dark nondescript man who detached himself from a shadow near his fourth stop, and followed.

  In the end they sold half of their lapis and could have sold it all but that Shasha wanted to see what the price was in Damascus. “Greedy,” Jaufre said, and Shasha made a face at him while Félicien and Hari laughed. The copper pots went, all of them, at a twenty percent markup that was so easily swallowed that they were sorry he hadn’t marked them up by half again.

  Still, they had freed up loads on two of their pack camels and made serious inroads on a third. “I shall go down to the carpet bazaar,” Shasha said the next morning, in the manner of Alexander announcing his descent on India, and she stalked off with Félicien in tow. The goliard would probably write a song about it.

  “There is a Zoroastrian community here I wish to explore,” Hari said in the manner of one anticipating the sight of a herd of exotic beasts, and he too was off.

  Jaufre, on his own, went up to get as close a look at the fortress as he could without offending its guards, who were each large men, well armed, and looked very capable. He noticed towers rising up from the edifice, tall ones with perforations. Surveying the city, he saw many more, tall and short, rising up from buildings large and small everywhere. He bought a glass of fresh fruit juice from the cart of a friendly-looking vendor, who gave him a quizzical look in answer to his question. “Towers? Ah, you mean the bâdgir, the wind catchers.”

  Without further ado the vendor closed up his cart and ushered Jaufre around his city, displaying wind catcher after wind catcher and lecturing his new young friend extensively on Persian architecture, desert weather and prevailing wind dynamics throughout the year. He concluded the tour by bringing Jaufre to his favorite café and introducing him to all of his friends, who included an architect, two builders, and a philosopher of astrology who insisted on having Jaufre’s birthday and birth place and who grew very sorrowful when Jaufre could provide him only with the former. Jaufre suspected there was something in the astrologer’s glass besides tea, but no one said anything, alcohol being forbidden by Islam and all of his companions being good, observant Muslims.

  He still hadn’t noticed the small, dark man, who might have been made to order to blend into the woodwork, who sat at the back of the café and nursed the same
carafe of pomegranate juice for three hours, impervious to the black looks of the waiter.

  Jaufre and his new friends drank oceans of mint tea late into the night, swore eternal friendship, and everyone went home, Jaufre boring everyone back at the caravansary with an enthusiastic recitation of all he had learned that day. Balked of sharing by his companions’ determination to sleep soundly off the ground for the last time for what would undoubtedly be many weeks, if not months, he attempted to enlighten the ignorance of his sparring partners the following morning at practice, and was soundly spanked for his pains.

  Over breakfast, Shasha informed them that they had acquired a load of carpets and that she would need help loading them that afternoon.

  “I have found a man of books,” Félicien said. “He has so many he wishes to sell some of them to make room for more.” He smiled. “Reluctantly.”

  “I don’t know,” Jaufre said, looking at Shasha. “Are they bound or scrolls? Bound books are bulky and heavy.”

  “They are also more valuable, pound for pound,” Shasha said. “It can’t hurt to look.”

  “In the souk they speak of a blacksmith who turns out fine knives,” Hari said.

  “Do you have his name and direction?” Jaufre said, and Shasha threw up her hands. “I’ll go with you,” she said to Hari, but raised an admonitory finger. “You must all be back in time to help pack!”

  At the home of the man of books, Jaufre was surprised to find Alaric sitting cross-legged on the floor, mooning over an illustrated manuscript with brilliantly colored drawings of fantastical beasts, unicorns and dragons, and “Look, here, a parandrus. It is an animal that can take any shape, and so trick its enemies by becoming them, until they learn it too late to save themselves.”

  It was written in Latin and weighed as much as Jaufre’s sword, scabbard and all. “What did you say it was called?”

  “A bestiary,” Alaric said, in the tone of someone better describing a catalogue of heaven itself.

  “So I see,” Jaufre said untruthfully.

  “Look,” Alaric said, displaying a particularly magnificent illustration glittering with gilt, “a dragon! Have you ever seen such a dragon before, young sir?”