And then her horse staggered and went down, hard.
CXXXV
ANGRY MAN HEARD a shout behind him and twisted around in the saddle. The barbarian! What was he doing here? He should be safe away from the battle on the other side of the valley.
‘Help me!’ Josseran shouted and sagged in the saddle, clutching his chest.
‘Get away from here!’ Angry Man shouted. ‘Are you mad?’
But he stopped and wheeled around. No more than twenty paces away from him the fallen rebel lay motionless on the grass. Her horse tried to get back to its feet, but finally surrendered to the pain and lay her head down on the grass, exhausted. Satisfied he would not lose his quarry, Angry Man trotted back down the slope. The barbarian cried out again and clutched at his horse’s mane to keep from falling from the saddle.
‘What are you doing here?’ Angry Man shouted at him.
‘Help me . . .’
‘Where are you hurt?’ He grabbed Josseran’s coat in his fist, jerking him upright in the saddle.
Josseran struck him full in the face with his right fist.
Angry Man fell heavily on his back, and lay there, stunned and only half-conscious, blood pouring from his nose.
‘Remember, surprise and feint,’ Josseran said. ‘Your greatest weapons.’
He slapped Angry Man’s mount hard on the rump and sent it cantering away down the mountain. He spurred his own yellow stallion up the slope after Khutelun.
Her mare lay on its side, in its death throes. There was an arrow in the animal’s shoulder, another in her belly, yet another in her rump. Blood was streaked along her heaving flank. Finally she lay still, eyes wide in death.
Khutelun lay just a few paces away from her. She clutched at her ankle, slowly easing herself to a sitting position. So, she thought. This is my day to die.
She heard the thunder of hooves and saw another of Sartaq’s cavalrymen spurring up the slope towards her. One of Alghu’s irregulars by the look of him, in his brown furs and felt boots. She found her sword in the grass and struggled to her feet, ignoring the searing pain in her leg. She would not let them take her alive for their torments and their pleasure.
He stopped his horse a few paces away from her. She recognized the round eyes, and the fiery beard. Joss-ran!
He leaned from the saddle and held out his hand. ‘Quickly!’ He pulled her up beside him.
They galloped through a dark forest of spruce and pine, following the ridge along the shoulder of the mountain. Now they were safe Josseran was overcome with the exhilaration that always came in the aftermath of a battle and he shouted aloud, relief and triumph all mixed up together. His voice echoed from the sheer walls of the gorge. From somewhere below them he heard the rushing of a river in torrent.
She turned around in the saddle and he grinned at her. But she did not answer his smile; her face was pale; there was blood seeping under the scarf. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘You should not have come back for me, Joss-ran.’
‘It was a gamble. I won. We won. Didn’t we?’
She did not answer him.
They left the trees, emerging into cold sunshine on a stark red ridge, bare of trees and grass. They slowed their pace. The narrow trail became a ledge skirting the edge of a ravine. Suddenly Josseran felt a cold dread settle again in his insides. Spring and the thawing of the ice had brought down an overhang and the way ahead was blocked by a mountain of boulders.
Josseran’s stallion turned up the face of the scree looking for a way through. Too steep. Its unshod hooves slipped on frost-cracked rock and lichen, and loose shale clattered away down the slope. They were trapped. There were cliffs on one side of them and a ravine on the other.
‘Leave me here,’ she said. ‘If you stay you only put yourself in danger.’
‘If they take you alive, you know what they will do.’
‘I will not let them take me alive.’
Below them he heard the rush of black water, a river swollen by the spring floods. Josseran turned his horse, thinking to find some other way around the mountain, but then he heard shouts from the tree line. Sartaq’s soldiers had found them.
Josseran saw the dull gleam of lance points, as one by one they emerged from the forest; steam rose from their horses’ flanks, ice and mud and blood stained their boots and coats. There were a score of them, most of them from Khubilai’s kesig, many of them his riding companions from Kashgar. He recognized Sartaq among them.
‘Go back, Joss-ran,’ Khutelun whispered.
‘I shall not leave you.’
‘Go back. It is not you they want. Leave me here.’
They were less than a hundred paces away. One of them had put his bow to his shoulder but Sartaq raised his hand and at his shouted command the man reluctantly removed the arrow from the bowstring.
‘There is a way out,’ Josseran said. He walked the yellow stallion to the edge of the cliff and stared into the foaming river.
‘You are mad,’ Khutelun said, reading his thoughts.
‘I made such a jump once before.’
‘This cliff is ten times as high. This time you will die.’
‘I may die or I may live. But if I live I will have you. Or I can die and it will make no difference for I do not wish to live without you.’ He put his arms around her waist to support her. ‘Tell me that you will marry me and live with me the rest of your days.’
‘There will be no more days.’
‘Just say it then. As a parting gift.’
‘They do not want you,’ she repeated. ‘Go back to them. You do not have to die!’
‘Every man has to die. There is no escape from it. But a lucky few have the opportunity to name the time and the place. Today is my chance. So say it! Say you will have me in marriage.’
He turned the horse to face Sartaq and his Tatars. He saw Sartaq shake his head, bewildered. Then he turned his stallion again, back towards the cliff. Sartaq realized what Josseran intended and he gave a shout of surprise and despair. Suddenly Josseran spurred his horse towards the gorge, and then they were falling, falling down towards the brutal judgement of the river.
She had always dreamed she could fly.
She felt the rush of the wind against her cheek and as it had been in her dreams the sky was both above and below her. And she shouted out the words, I would gladly live with you and have your babies and be your woman if that is what you want, but almost at once her voice was drowned by the rushing of the river as it came to meet them.
She had always dreamed she could fly.
CXXXVI
SUMMER CAME AGAIN to Bukhara, and the almond trees were once more in bloom. The honey-coloured bricks of the great Kalyan minaret were framed against a sky of impossible blue. Under the raggle-taggle awnings in the bazaar, the fresh-dyed rugs blazed in crimson and buttercup yellow and royal blues as they hung to dry in the sun. Grapes, figs and peaches set the stalls groaning with their weight and there were scarlet-fleshed watermelons in abundance, the gutters running with their sweet juice leaving the cobblestones of the bazaar ankle deep in rind.
But in the palace of Khan Alghu other seeds had also begun to ripen.
Dust motes drifted through the shafts of sunlight that filtered down from the vault. There was silence in the great hall, a shuffling dread before the face of the khan’s anger. The prisoner, his wrists tied behind him with leather thongs, was thrown face-first on to the stone flags, and there was no one in that great company who would not have rather laid open their own veins than swap places with the miserable wreck writhing like some night crawler at the khan’s feet. It was apparent he had been beaten over a period of days rather than hours. There were few teeth left in his head and his eyes were almost shut.
William felt his bowels turn to water. He had not recognized the man at first. ‘What is happening?’ he whispered to the man at his side.
His companion was a Mohammedan, a Persian scribe who spoke Latin as well as Tatar. He had been assigned to
him by Alghu’s court on his arrival in Bukhara from Kashgar a few weeks before.
‘The princess Miao-yen is with child,’ the man answered. ‘Her maidenhood had been taken before she arrived here. This officer stands accused. As chief of her escort he was responsible for her protection. If he will not give up the culprit then he must pay the price himself.’
William watched, gripped by a terrible fascination. Sartaq was hauled to his feet by his guards and stood there, swaying, blood caked in his sparse beard, his skin the colour of chalk. William imagined he could smell his fear.
Alghu barked out something in his heathen tongue and Sartaq answered him, his voice no more than a croak.
‘He denies it was him,’ the Persian whispered in William’s ear. ‘It will do him no good. Whether it was or it wasn’t, he was in charge.’
‘What will they do to him?’ William asked.
‘Whatever it is, it will not be easy.’
At a command from Alghu, Sartaq was dragged from the court. He was screaming and babbling, his valour had deserted him in the face of whatever death Alghu had pronounced for him.
No, William thought. No, I cannot allow this to happen.
‘Tell Alghu it was me,’ William said. ‘He is innocent. I am the guilty one. Me.’
But he only imagined he heard himself say the words. Terror had paralysed him and he could not speak, or think. He could not even pray.
That night he dreamed he was falling. Below him was the blue-ribbed dome of the Shah Zinda mosque and beyond, the burning plains of the Kara Kum. His arms and legs kicked frantically at the spinning blue sky. Then the dust of the Registan rushed to meet him and there was a terrible sound, like a melon being split with a sword, and his skull cracked open like an egg and stained the dust.
And then he dreamed he was standing in the square staring at the corpse, but it was not his own body lying there below the Tower of Death, it Sartaq’s; and it was not a dream.
Sartaq was already raw as a carcass when they tossed him from the minaret, for they had flayed him first, there in the Tower of Death, slicing off his skin in strips with sharp knives and levering it from the flesh with iron pincers. His screams had rung over the city, a call to prayer for all those ever unjustly accused, Mohammedans and unbelievers together. William stood over the tortured and broken flesh with the others who had witnessed his execution that afternoon, and murmured over and over: ‘Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.’
But no one understood. William knew he had escaped his terrible punishment and now stood condemned a second time for his silence.
CXXXVII
ALGHU SENT A swift message by yam to Khubilai to request his further wishes in the matter. The answer was unequivocal.
Miao-yen was sequestered in a tower of the palace with her handmaidens for the remaining months of her confinement. Alghu’s executioner was then given a further and secret charge. Miao-yen was a royal princess and it was not permissible for the blood of Chinggis Khan to be spilled. Another method of execution must be devised for her.
Swallows darted among the cupolas and semi-domes, dipping under the branches of the mulberry trees in the gardens, fluttering into the nests they had built under the jutting beams of the thick-walled mud-brick houses. They are preparing for their hatchlings, she thought, placing a hand on the swell of her own stomach. There is a frantic joy to their busy swooping and wheeling. Yet I wait here in this dolorous tower like a prisoner.
She knew she had displeased her new lord, that she had displeased everyone, and she knew that it had to do with the child growing in her belly. She did not understand how such new life was made, but that it had to do with the lying of a man with a woman. But she also knew, from her conversations with Nestorian priests and with Our-Father-Who-Art-in-Heaven, that a child could be born from a young and chaste woman, and that this was regarded as a great blessing.
The maidservants she had brought with her from Cathay had been sent away and in their place were sullen, silent Persian girls who spoke only their own Farsi and could tell her nothing of what was happening. They did not understand the custom of the lily foot and did not try to hide their disgust when they changed the dressings. She endured her lonely vigil, wondering at the manner of her offence and fearful of the coming birth, of which she was as helpless and as ignorant as a child.
Late that evening, the soldiers appeared, their armour clattering as they hurried through the corridor to her quarters. They were Alghu’s soldiers, the first men she had seen since the day of her arrival in Bukhara. Their expressions were cheerless. She turned from the window, expecting some messenger from Alghu or her father, but instead the soldiers took her by the arms and without a word marched her out of the apartments and through the heavy barred door at the end of the cloister.
She was rushed across the hexagonal flagstones of a treed courtyard, the mulberries crunching under the soldier’s boots in the grey twilight. Beyond another gateway a kibitka with a curtained litter was waiting, and she and two of her Persian handmaidens were motioned to step inside.
They were driven through the streets towards the western gate. Through the curtains Miao-yen saw oil lamps flickering in countless windows. And then they were out of the city, and she felt the hot, fetid breath of the desert.
She wondered what the khan had planned for her. Perhaps, she thought, there is to be no marriage after all. Perhaps they have decided to spirit me away in the darkness, and I am to return to Shang-tu.
But the soldiers had not come to escort her to Shang-tu. She was not even to leave the khanate of her proposed husband. She was instead brought to a lonely yurt on the featureless plains of the Kara Kum, with only her two mute servant girls and a dozen of Alghu’s soldiers as company.
She passed the next few days alone inside the yurt, frightened and confused. Outside the wind howled across a barren plain.
Don’t let them hurt my baby.
It was dawn when the waters broke. The stab of pain in her belly took her by surprise, leaving her gasping in shock on the floor of the yurt. She cried out for her servant girls but they just stared at her wide-eyed and made no move to help her. One ran off to fetch the soldiers. Moments later the flap of the yurt was pushed aside and when she saw their faces she screamed, for she knew in that moment what her fate was to be.
Not my baby.
They dragged her out of the yurt to where the horses were already waiting, saddled to ride. It was a beautiful morning, the sun not quite risen, the moon still a pale ghost on the desert.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she screamed. ‘Why are you doing this?’
They bound her arms behind her back with leather thongs and threw her on a litter that they had tied between two of their horses. They took her perhaps no more than three or four li from the yurt. Then they hauled her from the litter and dragged her across the sand.
She screamed, racked by another contraction, but they paid her suffering no heed.
There was a shallow depression, still sunk in black shadow. It was here they threw her down and one of the men held her while the other bound her legs with rope around her knees and her ankles. Then they applied leather thongs around her thighs and heavier leather ties around her pelvis, binding them so tightly she cried out in pain.
‘What are you doing?’ she cried at them. ‘Tell me what is happening! What have I done?’
They walked back to their horses. Their officer stared at her for a long time, perhaps to ensure that his men had performed their task to the exact specifications, and then they galloped away across the plain.
Miao-yen gasped at the shock of another birth-pain, and when it was over and she opened her eyes again the soldiers were no more than specks on a featureless horizon.
As the sun rose she screamed her protest to the everlasting Blue Sky, shouting over and over the words of the paternoster, taught to her by Our-Father-Who-Art-in-Heaven, for she knew she had never sinned against her father or her husband, and Josseran’s priest had told her th
at the innocent were never punished. If you will but call out the name of God, he had said, you will be saved.
EPILOGUE
Lyon, France
in the year of the Incarnation of Our Lord 1293
THE MONK’S EYES turned towards the abbot.
‘Now you know the most terrible thing I have done. I took her, while she was near death, thinking only the Devil and I would know what I had done. I was wrong.’ His eyes followed the shadows of the candle to the corner of the room. ‘The thongs they tied around her thighs and her belly would not allow the child to be born. It is a unique punishment among the nomads of those lands. Finally the babe is forced away from the natural path of its birthing, upwards, into the vitals and the heart. It kills the mother and, with her death, the infant dies also. How long it took for Miao-yen to die, no one can know. As no one can ever know how indescribably she must have suffered.’
He paused, and his breath rattled in his lungs.
‘The Templar was right, of course. When I returned to Acre history had already overtaken our mission. Soon after we left on our great journey to the East, the Tatar hordes from the north attacked Poland. Lublin and Cracow were sacked, and when he heard the news the Pope proclaimed a crusade against the Tatars. The Holy Father also declared those Christians who had sided with the Tatars in Palestine excommunicate. So the Haute Cour stayed their hand when the Mamluks met the Tatars at Ain Jalut and defeated them, driving Hülegü from Syria. Now of course the Saracens have all the Holy Land and our one chance to defeat them was lost.’
‘And the Templar and this Tatar witch?’
‘No one could have survived such a fall. Although the water was deep there were great boulders beneath the surface. Even if the rocks did not crush them, the torrent ran so fast they must have drowned. And yet . . .’
Silk Road Page 39
