The plain was hung with a mournful stillness. It was as if the massacres had happened only yesterday, and the corpses were still rotting in the fields.
‘The Tatars did all this?’
He nodded. ‘The qanats,’ he said, using the Persian word for the underground wells that fed the desert, ‘were maintained by poor farmers. The Tatars butchered them all, as if they were sheep. Now there is no one to dig out the silt from the wells and so the land has been murdered, too.’
‘They killed everyone?’
‘No. The poets, the artisans, the physicians, these they took back with them to Qaraqorum. But everyone else.’ He shrugged and nodded toward the pyramid of bones. ‘They even killed the animals.’
Who are these people? Josseran thought. They have no mercy for anyone. The further we travel, the more futile our embassy seems. If I could return to Thomas Bérard now, what should I tell him? No one in Acre or Rome could imagine a kingdom like this. It stretched to the end of the world and far beyond. In France he might ride from Troyes to Marseille in two weeks. Here two weeks did not even get you out of the desert.
‘We shall save these people for Christ,’ William said.
‘We shall be lucky to save ourselves’ Josseran muttered and turned his horse from the grisly monolith.
XX
THEY CROSSED A great plain and villages of whitewashed clay. Occasionally they saw the ruins of a mosque or the solitary arch of a caravanserai, testament to the bloody passing of Chinggis Khan fifty years before. But finally the deserts were behind them. They followed a green river basin towards Samarkand.
The caravan city was circled by snow-lit mountains. The ribbed domes of Mohammedan churches slept under silver poplars, the Registan a riot of bazaars within the dun walls of merchant warehouses and travellers’ inns. This city, too, had been rebuilt after the ravages of the Tatars, the sun-baked bricks of the madrassahs and mosques newly decorated with a faience of peacock blue and vivid turquoise that sparkled in the winter sun.
Josseran stood on the roof of their han, watching the dawn slip its dirty yellow fingers over the multi-domed roofs of the bazaar and into the warren of arcades. The tiled dome of a mosque glittered like ice, the black needle of a minaret was silhouetted against a single cold star. The muezzin climbed to the roof of the tower and began the azan, the call to prayer. It echoed across the roofs of the city.
‘Auzbillahi mina shaitani rajim, bismillah rahmani rahim . . .’
‘Listen to them. They warble like a man having his teeth pulled,’ William said.
Josseran turned around. The friar emerged from the shadows, like a ghost. He finished tying the cord of his cowled robe.
‘It is a hymn very much like our own plainsong,’ Josseran said. ‘It rises and falls and is just as melodious.’
‘Like one of ours?’ William growled.
‘You think it barbarous because you do not understand it. I have lived in the Holy Land these five years. It is a hymn they repeat every day at dawn, the same words, the same harmony. They seek their god as we seek ours.’
‘They do not have a god, Templar. There is only one God and He is the God of the one and true faith.’
Josseran made out the ungainly shape of a stork, nesting in the roof of a nearby minaret, a sight as familiar to him here as it was in Acre. He would miss the storks if he ever went back to France, he realized. Perhaps it is true, perhaps I have lived too long among the Saracen and I am infected with their heresies.
‘I only mean to say that they are not godless, as some believe.’
‘If they do not love Christ, then how can they be anything but godless?’
Josseran did not answer.
‘We are a long way from Acre here,’ William went on, ‘but we shall return soon enough and I shall be forced to report on what you say. You would be wise to guard your tongue.’
A pox on all priests, Josseran thought. And the thought occurred to him: perhaps I shall not go back, if God is kind. But then, when in all my years have I ever seen a merciful God?
XXI
THE COLOUR OF the lake changed from violet to black. The dark silhouette of the mountains in front of them faded against a leaden sky shot through with shafts of gold.
He shivered inside his furs. Since they had started their climb out of the plains of Samarkand he had taken to dressing in the manner of the Tatars, in a thick fur jacket and felt trousers tucked into his boots. But he was still cold.
His companions were unsaddling their horses. He turned away from his contemplation of the lake and joined them. He stroked Kismet’s muzzle, murmuring words of encouragement. Poor girl, he could see the outline of her ribs through her flanks.
He turned to Juchi. ‘We have to cross those mountains?’
‘You must cross many more mountains and many more deserts before you reach the Centre of the World.’ He seemed to take a perverse delight in their discomfort. He himself seemed inured to all suffering. He must have buttocks as hard as cured leather, Josseran thought.
‘Your shaman,’ Juchi said, using the Tatar word for holy man, ‘will not survive the journey.’
‘Deus le volt,’ Josseran whispered, in French. God wills it.
‘You would like to see his blood run.’
‘He is too niggardly to bleed.’
Juchi looked over his shoulder. ‘It is getting dark. Where is he?’
‘Is he not with his horse?’
But William was not with his horse, nor was he inside the tent. They searched the camp but there was no sign of him.
Josseran found him by the river, the top half of his cloak stripped down, holding a switch he had torn from a poplar tree. His back was livid and striped with red weals. Josseran watched from Kismet’s saddle as the friar flailed the branch over his shoulder.
As he worked the scourge he was chanting, in time with the strokes, although Josseran could not make out the words.
‘I would have thought the rigours of our journey are chastisement enough, even for a man of God,’ Josseran said.
William turned, startled. He was shivering with cold. ‘It is the flesh that causes us to sin. It is right that the flesh should suffer for it.’
‘And what sins have you committed this day? You have spent the whole time in the saddle of a horse.’
William threw down the stripling and struggled back into his robe. ‘The body is our enemy.’
‘Our enemy? If that is so, it would seem to me yours has suffered enough from carrying you around these last few months.’
William finished dressing himself. He had so far spurned the felt boots of the Tatars and his sandalled feet were almost black with cold.
‘Is this day’s journey not torment enough for you?’
The friar struggled up the bank. ‘Do they say how much further we must travel?’
‘It may be that by the time we return to the Holy Land our beards will be white and even the Saracens will be too old to mount their horses and chase us.’
William trembled in the bitter upland wind, his blood staining the back of his robe. Josseran felt both awe and revulsion in equal parts. There was something almost carnal in this passion for pain.
‘Are you not afraid of what is beyond the mountains, Templar?’ William said.
‘I am afraid of God and I am afraid of his judgement. Besides that, I do not fear anything on this earth, or any man.’
‘But I am not talking of men. Some say that in the land of Cathay there are creatures with heads like dogs who bark and speak at the same time. Others say there are ants as big as cattle. They burrow in the earth for gold and tear anyone who comes across them to pieces with their pincers.’
‘I have heard these same stories but I have never met any man who has been to this Cathay and seen such things with his own eyes.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘In Samarkand you said to me that we would soon be returned to Acre. Lately, I must confess, I think we shall never return at all.’
‘Then we fly straight to
the arms of the Lord.’
‘Well, I hope he has a fire warming,’ Josseran muttered under his breath, ‘for I have never been as cold in my life.’
XXII
THEIR NEW ESCORT appeared from a world of cloud and ice.
There was a squadron of perhaps twenty riders. They wore fur caps with earflaps, some of them with dome-shaped helmets over the top. Their long felt coats hung down their horses’ flanks almost to their boots. Arrows bristled in the wooden quivers on their backs; a triangular pennant hung limp from the point of a lance.
Steam rose from the horses; snow drifted slowly from a sky the colour of steel.
Their officer spurred forward. He had a purple silk scarf wrapped around his hair and face to protect him from the cold. With one movement he pulled the scarf aside.
Josseran was startled. It was not a man.
Her lips parted in a smile that lacked kindness and she turned to Juchi. ‘So these are the barbarians,’ she said, in her own language, thinking he could not understand. Her almond-shaped eyes had been darkened with kohl but there was nothing alluring about them. They were the hard eyes of a horse trader looking over stock for sale in the bazaar.
It was her bearing and the way she rode her horse that made him think her a man, he realized, for she did not dress like a Tatar warrior. Under her fur jacket she wore a wine-coloured robe, long-skirted and high-collared, slit to the waist so as not to interfere with her riding. A wide silk sash was wound tightly around her narrow waist and a single jet braid fell down her back almost to her hips.
‘These two barbarians were sent here by our khan, Hülegü,’ Juchi said to her. ‘They wish an audience with the Great Khan in Qaraqorum. He asks that they be delivered safe to Besh Balik so they may be escorted on the final part of their journey to the Centre of the World.’
The girl turned to one of her companions. ‘The thin one will die of cold before we are halfway across the mountains. The other one looks fit enough. But he is as ugly as his horse and his nose is twice as big.’
The Tatars laughed.
‘I have no quarrel with you for my own account,’ Josseran said in her own language, ‘but I object to you calling my horse ugly.’
Her grin fell away and her companions fell silent in astonishment. ‘Well,’ she said finally. ‘The barbarian speaks.’
‘But you are right about him,’ Josseran added, nodding towards William. ‘We might as well bury him here.’
It was Juchi’s turn to smile. ‘He has learned the language of a Person since we have been journeying. He has a ready mind. He is entertaining for a barbarian.’
‘I cannot see how a civilized person might find a barbarian entertaining,’ she said. She turned back to Josseran. ‘I am Khutelun. My father’s name is Qaidu. He is the greatest Tatar chieftain here at the Roof of the World. I am to take you to him. I advise you to watch your manners.’
And she turned her horse away and led the way through the pass to the Fergana Valley.
XXIII
A NOMAD CITY was sprawled across the valley floor, the black beehive domes of the Tatar yurts framed against the snow-dusted steppe and lowering sky. Wagons had been drawn up in a circle around the perimeter, and warriors stood sentry on their horses. Camels, horses and sheep foraged on the open plain.
As they rode into the camp, people came out to stare. They had dark almond-shaped eyes and wind-blackened faces, the men in fur caps and heavy brown coats, the women with their hair coiled on either side of their heads, like ram’s horns. The children had shaved heads and long forelocks.
They stopped before the khan’s audience tent. By the entrance a banner made from yak tails whipped in a cool, upland wind.
The audience tent was long enough and wide enough to fit perhaps ten thousand people; it was made entirely of silk, was stitched on the outside with leopard skins, and dyed red and white and black. It was supported by stout, lacquered poles.
‘Take care, Barbarian,’ Khutelun said as they dismounted their horses. ‘You or your companion must not tread on the threshold of the khan’s yurt. It would bring bad luck on the clan. Then they would have to kill you, and slowly.’
‘I should hesitate to put them to such inconvenience,’ Josseran answered and passed the warning to William. Such superstition! Josseran thought. They have terrorized half the known world and yet they live in fear of their own shadows.
They followed Khutelun inside.
The great tent was lined with furs of ermine and sable and smelled of wood smoke. It was blessedly warm. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom Josseran made out two rows of Tatars, men on one side and women on the other, and, at the far end of the great pavilion, a stern and grizzled figure reclining on a bed of bear and fox furs.
Two fires of briar and wormwood roots were alight in the centre of the yurt. ‘You must walk between the fires, Barbarian,’ Khutelun said. ‘The flames will purge your spirit of evil intentions.’
As an added precaution against evil intentions, Qaidu’s guards searched them thoroughly for knives and Josseran was made to hand over the damascened sword. Only then were they allowed to approach the khan’s throne.
Josseran noticed a small shrine to one side, with incense burning in small silver pots before the image of a man made from felt.
‘You must bow,’ she whispered. ‘It is the shrine of Chinggis Khan, Qaidu’s grandfather.’
Josseran turned to William. ‘We must make obeisance before their god,’ he whispered.
‘I shall not bow down to graven images.’
‘Give unto Caesar.’
‘It is an abomination!’
‘Do it,’ Josseran hissed, ‘or we die right here. Where will our Pope be without his holy emissary?’
He felt a thousand eyes watching them.
To Josseran’s relief William submitted, appreciating the wisdom of compliance. He genuflected, scowling, in front of the shrine; Josseran did the same. Then they approached Qaidu’s throne and bent their knee again, three times, as Khutelun had done.
Qaidu, khan of the high steppes, studied them in silence. His robe of silver fur was indistinguishable from his grizzled beard. He wore a gold domed helmet over his fur cap. His eyes were golden, like a hawk’s.
He was attended on his right by what Josseran assumed to be his chief courtiers and perhaps also his sons. There was a falconer and some wild-eyed holy men; on his left were the women of his household, their hair in the same crescent-shaped frames he had noticed as they rode into the camp, but these women had silver ornaments dangling from the braided ends.
‘So,’ Qaidu growled. ‘This is what a barbarian looks like.’
Josseran said nothing.
‘Which of you can speak the language of men?’
Josseran looked up. ‘I can, my lord.’
‘I am told that you wish to speak with the Khan of Khans in Qaraqorum.’
‘It was the wish of the lord Hülegü, whom it was my honour to meet in Aleppo. I brought him a message of friendship from my master in Acre, which is in Outremer, far to the west of here.’
‘The Khan of Khans is dead,’ Qaidu said. ‘A new Khaghan is to be elected. No doubt he will accept your obeisance when the time is right.’
Josseran was stunned. Their chieftain was dead? He wondered why no one had thought to tell him this before. Would the succession be disputed, as it so often was in Europe? Their own Jerusalem had been in a state of war for years over the crown. If there was a delay in the succession, did it mean they must return to Acre? Or would they be made to spend months, years even, in these lonely mountains while any dispute was settled? He thought about Gérard and Yusuf mouldering in Aleppo.
It seemed to him they would all be old men before this was over.
‘You have brought gifts for me?’ Qaidu asked him.
‘We have gifts for the Great Khan in Qaraqorum. It was a long journey and we could carry only very little.’
Qaidu seemed displeased with this response.
‘What did he say?’ William said.
‘He wants to know if we have gifts for him,’ Josseran answered.
‘We do have a gift for him. The gift of religion.’
‘I do not think it is quite the treasure he was hoping for. I think he would rather have something that is negotiable in the bazaar.’
Qaidu pointed at William. ‘Who is your companion?’
‘He is a holy man.’
‘A Christian?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Can he do magic?’
‘I fear he cannot.’ Unless you call turning any sweetly reasonable man into a foul-tempered madman within the space of hours, he thought.
‘Then what good is he?’
Indeed!
‘He has a message for your Khan of Khans from our Pope, the leader of our Christian world.’
‘Pope,’ Qaidu said, repeating this strange and cumbersome word several times. ‘Does he also wish to gaze on our Khan of Khans?’
‘He does, my lord. Is the Great Khan’s palace many days’ ride from here?’
Laughter from around the court. Qaidu silenced the gathering with a raised hand. ‘To reach Qaraqorum, first you must cross the Roof of the World. But it is yet winter and the passes are closed. You will wait here until the snows melt. Perhaps another moon.’
‘What is this Roof of the World?’
‘It is as it says. They are the highest mountains on the earth, and they are only passable in the summer.’
‘What is he saying now?’ William said.
‘He says the mountains are yet unpassable. We may have to stay here until the spring.’
‘Next spring? By the time I arrive we may have a new Pope!’
No, Josseran thought. By the time we arrive Christ Himself may have returned a second time.
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