Silk Road

by Falconer, Colin

He ran blindly back down the ridge, the soft sand sucking the strength from his legs, and finally he collapsed, exhausted. He should find his camel. His camel with the water bag. He stood up, whimpering at the cramping pains in the muscles in his thighs and calves.

  He stumbled in circles, eyes screwed tight against the white glare of the desert. He searched for his tracks, but already the wind had covered them and he realized he was utterly lost. He looked up to the heavens and screamed.

  C

  THERE WAS AN instant of bronze twilight before the night fell. Josseran huddled in his cloak. They all sat around a poor fire of argol. The camels coughed in the darkness.

  ‘There is nothing we can do,’ Sartaq said.

  This is my good fortune, Josseran thought. The friar is lost. Now there will be no one to call me heretic and blasphemer when we return to Acre. I have a treaty with the Tatars and the glory will be mine alone.

  But he could not bring himself to abandon that cursed priest. It was his duty both as a Templar knight and as a Christian to go back and search for him. There was a chance he might still be alive somewhere in this vast wilderness.

  ‘We have to go back for him.’

  Sartaq gave a snort of derision. ‘When a man is swallowed by the desert, the Taklimakan never gives him up. It is like looking for a man inside the stomach of a bear. You only ever find the bones.’

  ‘We must go back,’ he repeated.

  Angry Man spat in the sand. ‘The barbarian is crazy.’

  ‘A man cannot survive as much as a day without water in this desert,’ Sartaq said. ‘Even a seasoned traveller cannot live out here alone. And your companion knows nothing of the Taklimakan. I guarantee that by now he has already wandered away from his camel.’

  Josseran knew he was right, and besides, he owed William nothing. You could even call it God’s will. William would, if the situation was reversed.

  ‘I shall go and search for him tonight, alone if I must. You must make your own decision, then. But will the Son of Heaven show you favour when he learns that you have lost both your ambassadors?’

  Angry Man spat again and shouted and cursed at him until Sartaq ordered him to silence. Drunken Man, without the solace of strong mare’s milk, started to croon softly into the quickening ashes of the fire while the moon rose over the desert.

  It was a Tatar dirge for the dead.

  William woke to the moon. He thought about other Christian men like himself looking up at this same sky, safe in their monasteries and presbyteries in Toulouse or Rome or Augsburg. As consciousness filtered back, the terror of his predicament hit him like a physical blow and he began once more to weep. He felt such a longing for his own life that he moaned aloud. The consolations of heaven meant nothing to him now, nothing at all.

  The wind had died and the vast sea of the desert was calm. It was then he saw the remains of a tower, thrown into sharp relief by the phosphor glow of the moon. He stared at it for a long time without comprehension. Then he got up and stumbled towards it.

  It was only a few stones, perhaps part of a fortress that had once stood in this spot many centuries ago, before the sands reclaimed it. He scrabbled at the sand with his fingers, made a little hollow in the lee of the ruined wall for a bed, and curled into it. Somehow he felt safer here, the boundaries of the stones providing some protection from the terrible void around him.

  He lay there for a long time, shivering with cold, listening to the trembling of his own breath. It sounded to him like the panting of a wounded animal. He tried to sleep.

  Perhaps he succeeded, for when he opened his eyes again the moon hung almost directly above him, pale and trembling. It was full, a hunter’s moon, and drew him to the treasures lying in the sand near his feet, set them glittering like glass.

  He crawled towards them on his hands and knees. His breath caught in his throat.

  A ruby, a huge one. He turned it in his fingers, letting the moonlight play on every facet of its cut. He tore at the sand with his fingers and found another and another. After a few minutes of digging his fists were bulging with jewels and there were more still only half-covered by the sand. The ransom of a king, buried here in the Taklimakan, as the camel man had told them.

  He started to laugh.

  One of the great treasures of the world, and vouchsafed to a dead man! He rolled on to his back and howled at the great vault of the skies. It was God’s great and last joke on him. When his laughter had spent itself he lay there, his chest heaving.

  In this parlous state he imagined a hundred Dominican friars accompanying him back across this desert to the court of the Emperor Khubilai to preach the holy religion and bring countless millions into its fold. With this treasure they would build a hundred churches. This must be what God had always intended

  If only he could find his way out alive.

  CI

  Fergana Valley

  THE RIDER APPEARED out of the east, exhausted, fingers black with cold. The man was brought before Qaidu in his ordu and given a bowl of boiled mutton and some hot rice wine. After he had relayed his message the khan emerged, stern-faced, and called for his eldest son and most favoured daughter to attend him immediately.

  Qaidu sat on a mat of silken carpets behind the cooking fire, his eyes fixed on the mountains framed in the entrance of the yurt. Tekudai and Khutelun were greeted by the wife of Qaidu’s second ordo, and took their proper places either side of the iron cooking pot. Warm bowls of koumiss were brought.

  ‘I have just learned,’ Qaidu said, ‘that Khubilai has taken control of the Silk Road all the way from Tangut to Besh Balik. My cousin, Khadan, has pledged him his support and with his help he has cut Ariq Böke’s supply route to the south and the east.’

  ‘The whole of the Blue Mongol has risen against Khubilai,’ Tekudai said. ‘This can only be a temporary setback.’

  Qaidu gave him a look of impatience. ‘Khubilai has too many friends among the Uighurs and the Tanguts now. The whole of the Blue Mongol may no longer be enough.’

  Tekudai fell silent after this rebuke. ‘The empire of Chinggis Khan is gone,’ Qaidu went on, ‘as I prophesied. Hülegü and all the other khans have their own kingdoms now. What the two brothers fight over now is Cathay.’

  ‘The messenger was from Khubilai, then?’ Khutelun asked.

  Qaidu nodded. ‘It is his heart’s desire that I brighten his eyes with my presence in Shang-tu next summer.’

  ‘You will go?’

  He shook his head. ‘I will not bow the knee to Khubilai.’

  ‘We shall fight then?’ Tekudai asked. ‘We will join Ariq Böke?’

  ‘We must consider what will happen to us if Khubilai proves to be the stronger,’ Khutelun said.

  ‘Your sister is right,’ Qaidu said and Tekudai glared at her. ‘Before Chinggis Khan, men lived on these steppes without a palace at Qaraqorum and without a Khan of Khans to sit in it. The Tatars have lived this way since time began. If we must now return to those days, then this is what we shall do.

  ‘I have made my decision. We shall not rebel, nor shall we cooperate with these mighty lords. We will keep the caravan trails open, but all who wish to cross the Roof of the World must pay tribute now to Qaidu. It will be well for Khubilai to remember that in the Fergana Valley at least, Qaidu is khan of khans!’

  CII

  the Taklimakan

  THE LINE OF camels and horses snaked across the dunes. Sartaq led the way, on foot, leading his camel by its string. Josseran followed. Just before dawn they stopped to rest. No one spoke, but Josseran felt the Tatars’ fury. It was Angry Man, predictably, who broke first. He threw an empty leather water bag in the sand. ‘We will not find him!’ he shouted at Sartaq. ‘This barbarian is mad!’

  Sartaq looked at Josseran.

  ‘I cannot abandon him,’ he said.

  Sartaq looked back at Angry Man and shrugged his shoulders.

  Josseran went back to his camel and dragged on the nose cord, jerking her back to her feet.
He trudged on. The Tatars had no choice but to follow him.

  And so they filed across the dunes, back the way they had come, looking for one solitary swimmer in that great ocean of sand.

  He had always expected to find peace, perhaps even elation, at the moment of his death. But he had never imagined that he would die unshriven and alone in the wilderness. As the sun rose over the Taklimakan he curled inside his robe and sobbed like an infant, saying the name of Christ over and over again.

  The dark angels had gathered already. They swarmed around him, their terrible wings spread, tiny eyes bright and greedy. William raised his head from the sand. ‘No!’ he shouted.

  The spectres ventured closer, ready to bear him down to hell. He could imagine the brands glowing in the braziers, all the instruments of his torment prepared for him. God had no mercy on sinners. As Christ had said, it was not only the actions that a man performed in his lifetime but the longings of his heart that betrayed him in the sight of God.

  Even beyond the Taklimakan, an eternity of suffering still awaited him. ‘Get away from me!’ William shouted. ‘God have mercy!’

  The griffons fluttered backwards, just a few paces, wary but not deterred. They were the largest vultures he had ever seen, each of them as tall as a man’s chest and with a wingspan of perhaps two rods. They knew the carrion was theirs but they would not set to work with their beaks until their prey was still.

  ‘I am saved in Christ!’ William shouted again and threw a handful of sand at the nearest bird. Then he collapsed, weeping, on his face.

  Josseran watched his hopeless thrashings with the same feelings of pity and disgust he experienced at a bear-baiting or a public execution. The rest of the Tatars were gathered behind him in awed and dreadful silence. They had not expected to find the other barbarian, but it seemed that they were too late anyway. The sun had driven him over the brink of madness.

  He had been on the point of abandoning the search, but just after dawn he saw the griffons circling in the sky. William had been saved, in the end, by a flock of vultures.

  ‘You have no claim on me!’ William shouted again. He raised his arms to the sky. ‘Holy Father, forgive me for my sins and bear me on the arms of angels to heaven!’

  Josseran ran down the sand. The vultures craned their ugly heads around at his approach and one by one they fluttered away, reluctantly giving up their prize. But they did not yet take to the sky. They waited at a safe distance, yet hoping for easy pickings.

  ‘William!’

  The priest was half-blinded by the sun, his face blistered raw. There was sand stuck to his lips and eyelids.

  ‘William!’

  The friar did not recognize him, nor even understand what nature of creature he was. He collapsed on the sand, still raving. Josseran tried to haul him to his feet but could not.

  He felt the weight of the priest’s robe. ‘What in God’s name have you got there?’ he grunted.

  The friar hooked his fingers into Josseran’s cloak. His lips were bleeding, and burned skin hung in paper-thin strips from his forehead. ‘Protect me,’ William croaked, ‘and half shall be yours.’

  And with that he fainted away.

  William was too weak to continue the journey. The Tatars made a makeshift shelter with some poles and strips of canvas, and laid him there in the shade. Josseran dribbled water into his mouth while he shouted and raved. The wind came up again and they huddled together inside the protective ring of the camels and endured as best they could the miserable whipping of the sand.

  By evening William was no longer screaming at the phantoms of his delirium and had instead fallen into a deep slumber. Josseran brought him some more water and as he bent over him William’s eyes blinked open.

  ‘I had a dream,’ he murmured. His tongue was so swollen it was difficult to make out his words. ‘I was lost.’

  ‘It was no dream,’ Josseran said.

  ‘Not a dream? Then . . . you have rescued . . . the treasure?’ Watery blood oozed from his blistered lips.

  ‘What treasure?’

  ‘With it . . . we shall build a church . . . in Shang-tu. A church as fine . . . as the Holy . . . Sepulchre . . . in Jerusalem.’

  ‘William, there was no treasure.’

  ‘The rubies! Did you . . . not find them?’

  ‘Rubies?’

  ‘There were . . .’ He held his hand in front of his eyes, as if he still expected to find the gems in his palm. ‘I held them . . . in my hand.’

  ‘You dreamed it. Your cloak was weighed down with stones.’ Josseran picked up William’s cloak, showed him the rent in the cloth. He put his hand inside, scooped out a handful of dust and crumbled brick from the ruined tower. ‘Just stones,’ he repeated.

  William stared at him. ‘You . . . you stole them?’

  ‘William, there were so many rocks concealed in your robe, I could barely lift you on to my camel.’

  William’s head fell back on the sand and he closed his eyes. If there had been moisture in him he would have wept. Instead he grimaced in an agony of despair and the blood from his lips ran into his mouth in place of tears.

  CIII

  IF QAIDU’S MOUNTAINS were the Roof of the World, then Kharakhoja was its dungeon, a great depression far below the level of the sea. The oasis was just a grey jumble of hovels and dusty fields. Somehow the Uighurs who lived there had coaxed vineyards and fig and peach orchards out of that grey oven of a desert, using the glacial waters of the karezes.

  Like the other oases of the Taklimakan, it was a village of dusty narrow alleys and mud-walled courtyards. But here many of the dwellings had been built underground as sanctuary from the boiling heat of summer and the incessant, gritty winds. They were roofed over with wooden poles and straw matting and were invisible except for their chimneys, sticking up through the hard grey sand.

  The vines were bare now, just broken brown fingers protruding from the earth, and the red mud roads were cracked like paving stones. A solitary donkey stood miserably beneath a dead tree, flicking its tail at the hordes of flies.

  Dispirited, they made their way towards the han.

  ‘The worst place on earth,’ Sartaq growled. ‘They say you can boil an egg here by burying it in the sand. If you kill a chicken you do not even have to cook it. The flesh is already white and tender.’

  His odd, barking laugh was without humour. They had survived the desert but they were close to the borderlands now and Qaidu and his renegades were out there somewhere, waiting. Sartaq knew the many ways an ambush might be laid. Now the tables had turned on him.

  Josseran stood on the roof of the han staring into the darkness. He could make out the silhouette of the Celestial Mountains against the night sky. Beyond them, somewhere, was the Roof of the World.

  ‘I did not think to find you here,’ William said. ‘I thought you would be disporting yourself with the wives of the heathen. It seems our Tatar escort have availed themselves almost to a man of the whoring that passes in these lands as hospitality.’

  Josseran had been offered similar comforts but tonight he had no interest in such consolation. But he would not allow William even this small victory, and so he said: ‘I fear there were only the ugly women left. Sartaq has offered me use of the camels, should I find one that is not too displeasing to my eye.’

  ‘Knowing you, you will find one.’

  ‘I see you are recovered from your ordeal.’

  ‘Why did you come back for me?’

  ‘I gave my word that I would protect you on this journey.’

  ‘Many men give their word, few keep it. You are a man of many contradictions, Templar. There have been times when I thought your sole purpose was to confound my every effort to bring Christ to these godless lands. Yet now I owe you my life.’

  ‘It was God’s will that we found you.’

  ‘Do not think you have me now in your debt.’

  ‘Oh, I would never think that. I am sure that in the weeks to come I will rebuke mys
elf many times for not letting you die in the desert.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have done.’

  Josseran was startled by this admission. He wondered what had prompted it. But William was not about to say more. He turned away and left Josseran there on the rampart, under the cold shelter of the dispassionate stars.

  CIV

  THE NIGHT WAS a torment. Fleas and mosquitoes and sandflies feasted on Josseran with voracious appetite and there was no escape. Finally, exhausted, he drifted into fitful sleep, only to be rudely woken in the middle of the night when something fell on him from the beams above his head. He sat up, his heart hammering in his chest, and reached for the candle. He saw a spider with a body as large as an egg scuttle away across the earth floor. There was a red-eyed cockroach in its jaws.

  After that, sleep was impossible.

  He was roused from his bed at dawn by terrible screams. William! His first thought was that the friar had been bitten by a scorpion. Josseran stumbled to his feet.

  The friar was sitting with his back against the wall, eyes wide with shock. His face and arms were covered in hard, reddening lumps from the bites of the lice and fleas. Otherwise he appeared unharmed.

  Sartaq was standing over him, holding a torch he had snatched from the wall. The other Tatars appeared one by one, stumbling through the shadows, also woken by his screams.

  ‘I heard him shout out,’ Sartaq said. ‘When I got here there was a giant cockroach sitting on his face.’

  ‘How could you tell?’ someone said. It was Drunken Man.

  Sartaq and the others roared with laughter.

  William curled into a ball, scrabbling at the earthen floor with his fingers, making a soft mewing sound like a wounded animal. The laughter died stillborn in their throats.

  ‘He is possessed by the sand spirits,’ Sartaq hissed. ‘They crawled into his body while he was lost in the desert.’