Silk Road

by Falconer, Colin

  They set out on the second moon of the autumn, accompanied by a hundred imperial troops. Sartaq led the vanguard with Drunken Man and Angry Man. They took the road south, towards the teeming villages and towns that stretched along the green plains of Cathay and then to the dusty and meagre trails of the Silk Road to the west.

  The Taklimakan Desert

  from the Feast Day of the Assumption of

  Our Lady to the Feast of St Michael

  XCIV

  IT HAD BEEN a rainless summer and the spiked haze from winnowed husks mixed with the fine loess dust that had blown in from the northern steppes. It was a world so golden it was difficult to discern tracks from rivers. The fields had been laid with round stones from the riverbeds, to prevent the topsoil from turning to dust and being borne away by the wind. A whole landscape lay honeyed and choking.

  Behind this yellow veil lay the evidence of the frenetic summer industry of the farmers: the carefully tended mulberry orchards where the precious silkworms fed; hay stacked into twist-topped beehives; winter grain and vegetables drying on roofs. Here and there a few farmers were yet busy with sickles in their fields, their sinuous brown bodies clad only in loincloths. Mules laden with wicker panniers, stacked high with the last of the harvest, plodded along crumbling tracks on the banks of the Yellow River.

  As they travelled west they came across more and more evidence of military activity: imperial cavalry in their lamellar armour; lightly armoured levies marching west with their short lances over their shoulders; squadrons of Uighurs and Tanguts led by Tatar officers in winged helmets.

  Josseran thought again of Miao-yen’s warning: You know your return will be more dangerous than your first passage here. If war began, they might be stranded here in Cathay for years. If that happened, their treaty would mean nothing when . . . indeed, if . . . they reached Acre.

  William no longer concerned himself with present or future hazards. His thoughts had turned inward, contemplating his own failure. He had thought he had won a king for Christ; instead he had been played for a fool.

  A hundred priests! How might such an expedition be gathered, and if it was, could they really trust this Khubilai? He had dreamed of an apostolic mission of Pauline proportion, bringing all the souls of the East to God. Instead he would return with mumbles and promises.

  The realization had come to him that he had failed because God had examined his heart and found him unworthy.

  He journeyed in silence, rarely speaking a word to Josseran, the cowl pulled over his face, alone with his misery. He was no longer afraid, or hopeful; he was a different man to the one that had travelled these same roads two months before.

  Prayer flags fluttered in the wind; there was the sonorous booming of a gong, an ochre wall flushed pink by a lowering sun, a gate of timber studded with heavy nails. Josseran followed William into the courtyard of the lamasery and looked around. Galleries had been carved from the ancient black timbers on all four sides. Two camels were tethered by their nose cords to the twisted limbs of a pomegranate tree.

  They wandered through a cloister alive with brilliant frescoes of scarlets and greens, where snarling devils dismembered unfortunates in a heathen hell. William gave a shout of fear as a bear rose snarling from a doorway.

  ‘It is just a statue,’ Josseran grunted.

  But it was not an ordinary statue. It was, he saw, the fur and skin of a bear, preserved in its likeness, though there were dark cavities where its eyes had been. Its flanks were sticky with ritually applied butter.

  They found another corridor, musky with incense. A row of monks, their shaved domes shining in the glow of the oil lamps, sat in their cross-legged posture on the ground. Their dolorous chanting echoed from the scarlet pillars and dark walls.

  ‘I am cast into shame, Templar,’ William said. ‘These people love their religion better than I.’

  ‘No one loves religion better than you, William.’

  ‘Look at them. They do not sell their services for money. They do not feast like bishops or fornicate like priests or politic like the clerics in Rome. They have not faith yet they live holy lives.’

  ‘If they have not the redemption of Christ, what good is all their holiness?’ Josseran asked, repeating the litany that had been the thorn in his conscience ever since he was a child.

  ‘Everything you have said to me on this journey about my fellow priests is true. I know that many are venal and grasping. Our Order was founded to confound such behaviour and bring holiness back to the Church. It is why I sought my vocation among them. But I am unworthy, Templar. I am an unholy man.’ He brought up his hands. ‘Pray with me, Templar.’

  Josseran prayed with him, not out of piety, but because he felt such pity for the friar at that moment. He put his hands together and raised them to a God that did not inhabit these cloudless blue skies and together they said a score of paternosters for the living and another half-score for the dead. Finally he said another paternoster for himself, that he would find some way back to the living from the forgotten and the lost.

  XCV

  Fergana Valley

  AT THE ROOF of the World the brief summer was almost over. The red poppies were already dying, and the shepherds were preparing to return to the sheltered valleys of the lowlands, leaving the mountains once again to the wolves and the snow leopards and the eagles.

  The wedding feast was still in progress when Khutelun rode into the camp.

  The bride was younger than she, a broad-faced, bronze-cheeked girl, her features set like stone while around her the men and women of the clan were laughing and shouting and drinking. Her headdress of bronze coins reflected the light of a thousand torches. She was seated beside her husband in the silken pavilion, while vats of mutton bubbled and steamed and men spilled koumiss on the rich carpets and fell over the bodies of their fellows who were already passed out on the floor.

  While she had been in Qaraqorum, Qaidu had taken another wife. She was the daughter of a chieftain from west of Lake Balkash, and the union had further entrenched his power on the western borders of the Khaghan’s empire. Like Hülegü in the west and Batu in the north, her father was looking to protect himself now that Möngke was gone.

  He was slumped on his ebony throne beside his new bride, hard-faced and brooding in the midst of the revelry going on around him. When he saw her, he got to his feet and swept out of the tent, his bodyguard with him. She followed him outside. There was a stone in her throat. Now she must tell him how she had failed.

  ‘Khutelun,’ he said. ‘Daughter.’

  She knelt to receive his blessing in the light of the soldiers’ torches. ‘Father.’ A cool upland wind whipped the silk of the tent.

  ‘I am happy to see you safe returned.’

  ‘A thousand good wishes on this happy day.’

  ‘It is just politics, daughter, you understand that. How was your journey?’

  She hesitated. ‘I failed you, my khan,’ she said, choking on the words.

  ‘Failed me, how?’

  ‘I allowed my arbans to be ambushed by Khubilai’s soldiers. We lost sixteen of our party. The barbarian ambassadors were kidnapped.’ There. It was done, it was told, not couched in a pretty speech.

  He grunted. ‘Yes, I know of this.’

  Of course. News would have reached him from Qaraqorum. He had his own spies at court, like every khan of any influence and worth.

  ‘The fault was not yours,’ he said, finally. ‘If you thrust your hand in a hornet’s nest, it is no surprise that you are stung. I should have sent you by the northern way, around Lake Balkash.’

  ‘I have made sixteen widows.’

  ‘You did not make them. Khubilai made the widows. And soon he will make many more.’ He took her by the shoulder and pulled her to her feet. ‘You saw Ariq Böke?’

  ‘I gave him your oath of allegiance. He wished to know if you would send armies to support him against Khubilai.’

  ‘And what did you say to that?’

/>   ‘I said that I could not know the mind of my father. How else was I to answer him?’

  He smiled. ‘A good answer. For I cannot help him, even if I wished to. I dare not leave myself unprotected here, not now.’

  From inside the pavilion she heard the shouts of the dancers and the raucous carousing of the drinkers.

  The soldiers’ torches crackled in a flurry of wind. ‘I have news also. There is a new khan in Bokhara. Organa has been murdered and Alghu has taken the khanate.’

  ‘He has pledged his support to Ariq Böke,’ Tekudai said.

  ‘For now, he has,’ Qaidu said. ‘But men will do whatever suits their purposes best at the time. Alghu is ambitious. He cannot be trusted.’

  ‘What of the other khans?’

  ‘All look to their own lands now, and their own dynasties, and we must look to ours. Möngke was the last of the great Khaghans. Once more our Tatary is not an empire, but a gathering of rivals.’ He reached out his right hand and placed it upon her head. ‘You did not fail me. Indeed, it pleases my heart to see you safe returned. Now, come inside and enjoy the wedding feast.’

  Khutelun followed him into the great pavilion. Gerel was passed out on the rugs, as usual. Her return had not gone as badly as she had feared; indeed he had brushed aside her shame as if it were nothing. Yet she could not enjoy the revelry. She understood her father’s stony-faced contemplation of his new bride. This was not a marriage; it was an alliance in preparation for war.

  XCVI

  the Taklimakan desert, west of Tangut

  THEY HAD EXCHANGED their horses for camels at the Jade Gate and set off once more into the Taklimakan. The heat-racked emptiness was almost familiar to him now. At times the desert consisted of hard-packed gravel and the camels made good progress; at others it was just thin grit with a friable crust that collapsed under the camel’s hooves and made every jarring step a torture for both man and beast.

  The summer had claimed even more victims. They saw the still drying bones of horses and camels and once the contorted skeleton of a donkey, mummified by the heat, still with a partial covering of skin and fur. The ghosts of lakes and rivers rippled among the vastness of grey shale.

  The sun flogs us, Josseran thought. Is it possible to hate the sun? Once was enough. I do not think I can endure this crossing again.

  XCVII

  THEY LOADED THE camels just before dusk, under a windless sky. They had come once more to the great sand dunes of the Taklimakan and had begun travelling by night to avoid the terrible heat of the day. When the moon rose it made the desert beautiful, for the sands seemed to ripple like fine silk laid upon a flat table.

  Their caravan set off, the shadows of the camels monstrous on the undulating sands. Even scrawny patches of tamarisk took on terrible shapes, like the devils that William had spoken of when they set out on their journey.

  The hushed silence of the night-time desert threw a pall over their spirits, and the only sound was the creaking of cordage and the soft padding of the camels’ hooves in the sand. There were no landmarks here, and when the moon set over the desert they followed a single bright-lit star to the west. By the time the purple staining of dawn appeared on an empty horizon, the camels were coughing with exhaustion and had to be forced along by their ropes.

  They stumbled on even as the sun rose up the sky and halted only when it became too hot to continue. Then they collapsed in the lee of their camels and tried to sleep through the furnace of the day, restless in the baking wind. They would wake just before evening, their throats parched and their bodies coated in wind-blown sand. There was time only for some bitter tea and rancid meat and then they would load the camels again and resume their endless journey.

  The first hours beyond dawn were the worst time. Crushed with exhaustion, minds and spirits sapped by the rigours of their journey, they were often forced to dismount and haul their protesting camels over the last miles.

  One morning, just before light, with the desert yet black and bitter cold, Josseran was walking beside his camel, head down into the nagging wind. He was thinking, as he always did, of Khutelun. There were times when he convinced himself that she might appear over the horizon, on her white Tatar mare, the purple silk of her scarf trailing in the wind behind her.

  And he looked up, startled, for at that very moment he heard the sound of riders galloping towards them from just beyond the next line of dunes.

  ‘What is that?’ William shouted, from behind him.

  They all stopped. Josseran remembered the last time he had heard this same drumming, by the lake of the crescent moon. ‘It is the sand spirits,’ he said to William. ‘They wish to lure us into the desert.’

  ‘What sand spirits?’

  ‘The dead of the desert.’

  William made the sign of the cross.

  Josseran listened again. The drumming was gone, the sands had returned to silence.

  The caravan continued. But from time to time William stopped to listen to the cries of the lonely spirits, and he thought he heard them call his name.

  There were endless tracts of salt pan, heat haze rippling off the scorched wastelands, the way ahead marked by crumbling, ancient beacons. Beyond them lay another vast expanse of dunes.

  From the saddle of his camel William found it impossible to see even to the head of the string through the yellow haze. Lulled by fatigue and the hammering of the wind, he hid his face in the cowl of his robe and consigned himself instead to the voices of self-recrimination carping inside his head and the jarring lurch of the camel.

  Some time during the morning the wind died and he ventured to throw the hood back from his face, hoping to see some change in the monotony of their horizon.

  It was then he discovered that he was alone.

  There was no way of knowing when the string had broken, whether it was minutes or hours. He stared at the frayed end of rope trailing from the camel’s halter in horror and disbelief. He searched the sand around him for tracks but even those left by his own camel were quickly covered by the drifting wind. The dunes stretched away in all directions, like the march of waves across the ocean.

  He heard babbling, someone talking too fast and too loud, unintelligible words. He looked desperately around, thinking there must be someone behind him, and then realized that the sounds were coming from his own throat.

  XCVIII

  Fergana Valley

  A sharp wind from the north chased clouds like mare’s tails across the sky before the march of a grey thunderhead reached them and a flurry of icy rain stung her face. It was time to drive the herds back down to the valleys.

  The sheep were spread across the high pasture. There were thousands of them, waddling like geese, their rumps and tails plump from the rich summer grazing.

  Tekudai rode up behind her. They had spoken little since her return from Qaraqorum. He had felt the task of escorting the barbarian ambassadors should have been his, and now he rejoiced in her failure.

  ‘I trust you do not find these poor valleys too dull after the fine courts of Qaraqorum.’ When she did not answer him, he went on. ‘It is a pity you were not able to deliver the barbarians to the Khaghan. As our father ordered you to do.’

  She clenched her jaw and said nothing.

  ‘Though some say the barbarian was kidnapped not a moment too soon.’

  ‘Who says it?’ she hissed.

  He smiled. ‘My sister the stallion is a mare after all.’

  She turned away. I will not give him the satisfaction.

  ‘They say he mounted you three times.’

  She twisted in her saddle, and suddenly her knife was in her fist. He grinned back at her, lifted his chin to expose the soft flesh of his throat. A futile gesture matched by his empty defiance.

  She felt the blood pulse in the veins at her temple. ‘Who said this of me?’ she hissed.

  His eyes glittered but he said nothing.

  She sheathed the knife, knowing how foolish she had made herself look
. ‘It is a lie,’ she said. She dug her heels into her horse’s flanks and galloped away. But she could hear her brother’s triumphant laughter ringing in her ears.

  XCIX

  the Taklimakan

  WILLIAM SCRAMBLED OFF his camel and threw himself to his knees. The sand was scorching hot. ‘Please, oh Lord . . . dear Lord Jesus, protect me! . . . Save me!’

  Precious saliva leaked down his chin. He screamed, throwing handfuls of sand into the air, hardly aware of what he was doing. It was then he heard the hollow drumming of hooves and knew that God had answered him. He shouted thanks to the scorching sky and, staggering back to his feet, stumbled up a gully of crumbling sand in the direction of the returning caravan. When he reached the soft crest he shouted Josseran’s name, and fell tumbling down the drift.

  Only emptiness.

  Yet he could still hear the drumming, just beyond the next dune. He ran down the loose-packed sand, rolling and falling, then, on hands and knees, scrambled up the face of the next crest. His heart hammered against his ribs, feeling as if it would burst.

  ‘No! . . . Please . . . Gracious Lord, hear . . . your servant in his hour . . . Wait for me! Josseran! . . . All praise to you . . . my Redeemer . . . It is William! Wait!’

  He reached the top of the ridge, expecting to see the caravan below him, but there was only emptiness. He stared about him in confusion. The desert was silent again save for the whisper of the wind. He remembered what Josseran had told him about the sand spirits, and he knew the devils that lived in this accursed desert had tricked him too.

  Snakes of sand licked and whispered around his legs.