Silk Road

by Falconer, Colin

  ‘What is an arrow rider?’

  ‘They carry urgent despatches to and from the imperial court. They are expected to ride at full gallop for the entire day. That way they can travel perhaps eighty leagues a day, changing horses at every post house. If it is an emergency they may even travel at night, and footmen will run in front with torches.

  ‘Every hamlet, every town must provide horses for the yams, so it costs the Emperor nothing. He provides horses only for those stations on the steppes or in the desert where no one lives.’

  ‘Why was he wearing all those belts?’

  ‘They help keep him upright in the saddle. The scarves around his head protect him against the wind and the flying stones.’

  ‘And the gold medallion?’

  ‘It is a paizah, the seal of the Emperor himself. If his horse goes lame he can empower any man to give up his own horse for him, on pain of death. You look surprised, Barbarian. Do you not have anything like this where you come from?’

  Josseran did not know how to answer him. I have never seen anything like this, he thought. But how much should I tell these Tatars about us? They already call us barbarians.

  He estimated that there was a yam around every eight leagues or so. They were like a Mohammedan caravanserai, but far more luxurious than any he had seen in the desert. Most were surrounded by green meadows, with hundreds of horses at pasture, others waiting in the stables ready to be saddled at a moment’s notice.

  An imperial official was always waiting for them on their arrival and Josseran and William were each furnished with an apartment with wooden beds to sleep on and sometimes even silk coverlets. There were even servants to bring them refreshments.

  The privations of the Taklimakan seemed a distant memory already.

  LXVI

  THEY FOLLOWED A great river between high green gorges. The villages here were so close to each other that on leaving one hamlet they could already see the walls of the next. Everywhere there was rich pastureland dotted with walled farms; mud houses with straw-thatched roofs crouched below sparse groves of poplars; men with stringy muscles tilled fields with ox-drawn ploughs or fished in the shallows of the river.

  Josseran saw ruins of watchtowers and fortresses everywhere, gateways and barbicans crumbling into disrepair. What was it the old monk had said? Empires are built and will crumble; even Chinggis Khan did not live forever.

  The river flowed like a yellow vein into the heart of Cathay. The gorges above it were scalloped with rice fields, and the yellow loess cliffs beehived with row upon row of caves. The people winnowed grain in the sun, retreating inside the mountain at nights, as they had done for thousands of years.

  Everything seemed strange and frightening and compelling at once: the demonic clash of cymbals and doleful beating of a gong from the temples; the rhythmic chanting of priests; the massive statues of Borcan reclining beside the road, painted with stupendous colours. Once he saw a statue the height of ten men, hewn from bare rock in the cliff face.

  The Silk Road was no longer a lonely place, it was crowded with creaking carts, or peasants treading their way to market with baskets of fruit and vegetables balanced across their shoulders on bamboo yokes. Small caravans of a few mules or camels brought silks and teas from the south. Occasionally Josseran heard an imperial postman run past with his great belt of bells. They saw countless orchards of mulberry trees, where they harvested the moths for their precious silk cocoons.

  The villages they passed were mostly poor, the huts made of mud and straw and thatch. Pigs and geese waddled through muddy alleys; bare-bottomed children squatted to defecate in the ditches.

  Once they passed a funeral cortège. The boarded coffin was covered in dazzling silk coverlets, and the mourners were laughing and singing as if it were a feast day. A troupe of musicians followed behind, trumpets wailing. Josseran had never known any funeral that was not an occasion for mournful silence and seeing people celebrate a death left him astonished.

  ‘They are happy for the dead,’ Sartaq said. ‘They do not have to worry about the cares of the world any more. The loud noises keep away the evil spirits.’ He leaned closer. ‘I must be an evil spirit because I hate the sound of those trumpets too!’ And he laughed.

  The people of the Middle Kingdom found them just as curious, and perhaps even more terrifying. Plump, moon-faced children, squatting under roofed gateways, would run inside as they passed, pointing at them and screaming in fright. Old whitebeards set aside their long pipes and stared open-mouthed; old women in quilted vests and trousers, with toothless mouths and impossibly small and slippered feet, hurried inside their hovels, wailing like the small children.

  Late one afternoon they came in sight of one of the greatest cities Josseran had ever seen, larger even than Constantinople or Venice or Rome. The walls, he estimated, were seven or eight leagues around, disappearing into the mist on either side. Drum towers and pagodas rose in astonishing profusion.

  Its name, Sartaq said, was Kenzan Fu, and it was where the Silk Road began. More than a million people lived there, he said.

  ‘This is where we shall meet Khubilai?’ Josseran asked him.

  ‘No, Barbarian,’ he laughed. ‘We go to a finer city than this!’

  At the time Josseran thought this an idle boast.

  But they did not stop at Kenzan Fu. Instead they followed the Yellow River north. It was swollen with rain and thick with mud, not yellow now but reddish-brown. They passed another great city which the Tatars called Tai Yuan and very late one afternoon came upon a sight that left Josseran open-mouthed in disbelief.

  Ahead of them was a wall of beaten earth and mud brick. It stretched away for mile after mile across the hills, sinuous as a snake, before finally disappearing into the mist. It was the height of two or three men. Watchtowers had been built along its length in both directions.

  ‘By the balls of St Joseph,’ Josseran said.

  Sartaq dismounted below the wall. They followed him, leading their horses up a causeway to the battlements where they again remounted, and started riding along the carriageway at the summit. They continued along these battlements not for hours, but for several days. They passed endless guardhouses. The soldiers who manned the walls were armoured like their escort, and carried the same green and white pennants.

  They never reached the end of this astonishing structure. Long before then, they came to Shang-tu.

  LXVII

  PERHAPS IT IS well the gods intervened, Khutelun thought. Who knows what madness I might have undertaken if they had not?

  I am a princess, a Tatar, the daughter of a great chieftain; he was a barbarian, and an ugly one at that. Yet he made my heart jump whenever I looked at him. I have never felt that way before when I was with a man of my own tribe, and now I ache to feel that way again.

  Already I miss him. At night when I fly with the spirits of the everlasting Blue Sky, I shall seek him out again. I shall never forget him.

  The anvil of a grey thunderhead drifted across the mountains. The summer rains had begun, and the whole countryside shimmered with water. The grass ocean of the steppe was carpeted in wild flowers, yellow, purple, carmine and violet, and the sheep grazing in the valley were already so fat they waddled like geese. In every yurt in every valley the leather bladders that hung inside the doorways were bloated, bulging with koumiss.

  Faces appeared at doorways of the yurts dotted across the plain, hands shielding eyes from the glare of the sun, watching these strangers gallop past. The shepherds’ dogs would rush out at them, howling, running with them for a time before peeling away again and heading home.

  A flock of wild geese flew across the sun. The desert was just a dream.

  But such a dream! A dream that had cost the lives of sixteen of her brothers, as well as One-Eye, their camel man, his throat torn out by a cavalryman’s lance. A dozen had been butchered there on the plain, by Khubilai’s horsemen, four more had died from their wounds on the long journey back across the Taklim
akan.

  After the ambush by Khubilai’s soldiers she had considered returning immediately to her father at Fergana. She had postponed that unpleasant prospect, deciding instead that Khubilai’s betrayal should first be brought to the attention of the Khan of Khans, Ariq Böke, in person.

  She exchanged their surviving camels for horses in Kashgar and led the survivors of her party racing across the northern steppe. After the death of so many of her comrades she found it a comfort just to ride, to forget what had happened in the desert. It made it easier to forget, too, what Joss-ran had said to her by the crescent lake and how he had held her so tightly in the storm.

  Such memories should now belong to another Khutelun.

  One day they reined in their horses on a high ridge and looked down on Qaraqorum, the City of the Black Sands, capital of the Blue Mongol. On the lush pasture below, thousands upon thousands of felt yurts were spread over the plain. At the centre of this vast encampment the curlicued roofs of a handful of wooden pagodas glittered jade and yellow in the late afternoon sun. The stupas of a dozen temples pushed into the blue sky, the dome of a single Mohammedan church nestled among them. Beyond the city, the white necklace of the mountains was reflected in the flooded pasture.

  And the desert was just a dream, she reminded herself again as she led the ragged remains of her escort down the hills towards Qaraqorum. Just a dream.

  The defences of the city were a token, for the Great Khan of the Mongol Horde was unchallenged as the lord of all Asia. The earthen walls around the city rose to barely the height of a man, the moat scarcely as deep as that.

  The entrance to the city was guarded by two stone tortoises. The imperial edicts of the Great Khan, the yassaq of Chinggis, were placed here, inscribed on stone tablets the height of two men, with dragons carved into the crown of the stele. They were written in the flowing Uighur script that the Tatars had borrowed from one of their vassal peoples.

  By the strength of Eternal Heaven, and by order of the Universal Ruler of the Empire of the Mongol . . .

  Khutelun had journeyed here just once, with her father, for the khuriltai that had elected Möngke Khan of Khans. She had been just a child then, and her memories of the city were vague, its wonders magnified by her child’s innocence. It had seemed impossibly huge then.

  In fact there were just a handful of buildings at its heart, the wooden pagodas of the palace and some granaries and stables of rough-hewn stone. There was also a cramped quarter of mud brick and thatch, home to the Cathay saddle smiths who plied their trade in the muddy streets.

  As they entered the city they were swallowed up in the milling chaos of the sheep market. They walked their horses through thick, stinking mud, heard the babble of a dozen different languages, the deafening bleating of animals slaughtered or sold.

  They passed a great house with swooping red roofs, the lintels adorned with golden dragons. Ahead of them were the walls of the palace. She heard the chanting of monks, the rattle of a shaman’s drums.

  They came to two massive wooden gates, studded with nails. The imperial guards stepped forward and asked for their weapons and they were questioned as to their business. Her identity established, Khutelun and her companions were escorted by the officer of the guard to the customs house, a long and narrow building supported on thick wooden pillars. There was a brick stove in the centre of the room where the guards warmed their hands. They eyed Khutelun and her companions with cold suspicion.

  Finally they were given permission to pass through another gateway and into the silent heart of Qaraqorum.

  The palace of the Khan of Khans rose above the marsh on a mound of beaten earth. Its design had been borrowed from the Cathays. Dragons writhed up the colonnades, its tiered roof ended in curlicues of lacquered tiles in vermilion, jade and gold.

  Storehouses and treasuries and the private apartments of the Golden Clan clustered around it; the lesser palaces where the court secretaries attended to the business of the Khaghan’s empire were connected to it on raised pathways, like the spokes of a wheel.

  She glimpsed another mound at the far end of the royal enclosure, on which large yurts of white felt had been constructed. By day the Khan of Khans and his princes might now receive their visitors in this grand palace, but at least they still slept with a smoke hole above their heads at night like true Tatars.

  To the Cathays it was known as the Palace of a Myriad Tranquillities; the Tatars themselves called it simply Qarshi, the Palace.

  The entrance hall was supported on thick, lacquered poles, and there was a vaulted roof, raging with gilt dragons. Khutelun and her escort stopped before three massive doors, glittering with gold leaf, guarded on either side by the figures of a bear and a lion.

  The keepers of the palace, members of the Great Khan’s own bodyguard, again searched them for weapons, then a chamberlain came to escort them inside. They entered at the southern end of the hall, taking great care not to step upon the threshold, and were ushered into the presence of the Power of God upon the Earth, Master of Thrones, Ruler of Rulers, the Great Khan of the Blue Mongol.

  LXVIII

  IT WAS THE most breath-taking sight she had ever seen.

  The glazed aquamarine tiles beneath her feet seemed to shimmer, as if she were walking on the surface of a lake. The colonnades on their granite bases were painted crimson and lacquered to a sheen. Golden-scaled dragons slithered upwards to the great vaulted ceiling, their talons extended, green wings spread.

  The palace had been built in the shape of a cross. There was a nave running north to south, and along the transepts golden shafts of light pierced the mullioned windows. Six rows of colonnades, three on each side of the nave, led to the dais at the northern end of the hall, focusing the attention of all who entered on the figure reclining there at the head of two flights of marble steps.

  The Khan of Khans reposed on a couch of solid ebony. His throne was inlaid with gold and pearl and jade, and enfolded by a tent of purple silk. Despite the magnificence of these surroundings, Khutelun noted that the court was arranged in the traditional manner of a Tatar yurt; below the Khaghan and to his right was another dais where his sons and his brothers attended him. To the left there was a similar platform for his wives and daughters.

  There were elevated seats along the walls for other members of the Golden Clan. Khutelun was aware of the rich furs and brocades, the visceral glimmer of rubies.

  A fire of briars and wormwood roots burned in the centre of the room.

  There was a feast in progress for Qaraqorum was still celebrating Ariq Böke’s elevation to the title of Great Khan. Steam rose from cauldrons of boiling mutton. The men were drinking koumiss from silver bowls and at each toast white-robed shamans sprinkled a little of the mare’s milk in the four corners of the hall to appease the spirits of the Blue Sky.

  ‘You should wait until the feasting is done,’ the chamberlain whispered to her. ‘The Khaghan will hear you then.’

  But by the time the gathering had finished their carousing, most of the courtiers on the men’s side of the hall were lolling on the carpets in a stupor. The jugglers and acrobats and fire-eaters were brought on to entertain those who were still upright.

  Finally a snow leopard was led into the pavilion at the end of a long silver chain. Its attendant released it from its collar and it padded, docile, up the steps of the throne and dropped, as if in obeisance, at the Great Khan’s feet.

  A mean trick, Khutelun thought. She would rather have her Khaghan prove his worth by confronting a wild leopard with a single arrow in his bowstring.

  The chamberlain turned to her and ushered her forward to bring her news to the Khan of Khans.

  Ariq Böke lolled on the divan, bleary from drink and food. Khutelun glimpsed a corona of fur around a thin beard and a cruel mouth. He watched her with a savage indifference. Rubies glistened on his fingers like old blood.

  She greeted him on her knees, as was the custom, and relayed her story. There were angry oaths aro
und the hall when she told him of what had become of the Christian ambassadors. The raiders who took them, she announced, had made no effort to disguise their identity. They were warriors of Khubilai’s own imperial guard.

  When she finished her tale there was a long silence. The Khan of Khans gazed around the room, his eyebrows beetling with displeasure. He was assuredly blurry from drink, but when he spoke, his voice was clear enough.

  ‘My brother covets the throne of Chinggis Khan, which is mine, by proper election in khuriltai! He has disobeyed the yassaq that our grandfather, Chinggis Khan, gave to us, and he should fear the retribution of the Mongol horde!’

  There were growls of assent from his generals. Those who were still sober, anyway.

  ‘We all know that he has become that which every Mongol despises,’ Ariq Böke shouted. ‘A Chin, our age-old enemy! He knows that you, his own people, do not love him so now he turns those we conquered against us! He calls himself Chung t’ung, like a Chinese emperor. He governs like a Chinese, with secretariats and courtiers and clerks! He even calls himself the Son of Heaven! He fawns to the Chin as if they were the victors and we the vanquished!’

  More angry murmurs.

  Khutelun, still on her knees, realized that Ariq Böke might have already heard her news. His speech sounded as if it had been carefully rehearsed.

  ‘He has a Shang-tu Construction and Protection Office! He has a Court of the Imperial Stud, a Court of the Imperial Tack, a Directorate of Animal Feeds. A Directorate of Animal Feeds! Why should a grandson of Chinggis Khan need such a thing? A good Tatar pony needs only to be let loose in a field and it will find its own food in ten feet of driven snow! He has forced the Chinese generals and bureaucrats to crown him Emperor of China because he knows we Mongols will never crown him Khan of Khans!’