As the cheers died down, somebody called out cheekily from the Carthaginian ranks, ‘What’s it like to lose a war, then, sir?’
‘Ha!’ Fabius stopped dead, hands on hips, and scanned the ranks. ‘We’ve got a historian, have we? Who’s your sergeant?’
Gisco stepped forward. ‘Sir. The man is called Suniatus. Tough sort from the back streets. More mouth than brains if you know what I mean. I’ll sort him out later-’
‘You won’t, you know. Because he asked a fair question. Who’s Suniatus? You? I’ll tell you what it’s like to lose a war. You know why I’ll tell you? Because I’ll promise you something. Unless I tell you, you’ll never know, not you or you or you, because no Carthaginian is ever going to learn what it’s like to lose a war, not while there’s breath in my body to lead you, that’s what I promise you, that’s what I promise!’
The end of this invective was drowned out by cheers, and Nelo, borne along, joined in.
‘A boy from the streets, eh?’ Fabius eyed Suniatus again. ‘We’ve all had our journeys. I’m from the back streets of Rome myself. When I was a boy I sold pretty pebbles in the forum by day, and fought to stay alive by night. Yet here I am, standing before you now. Some of you have come even further. Where’s the Northlander?’
Nelo was frozen with shock. Those around him had to shove him out of the line. He stood shivering, exposed.
But Fabius’ smile was like the sun. ‘Here we stand, a Northlander, a Roman, and my good friend Suniatus the historian from Carthage. But wherever we’re from, whatever gods we follow, we’re here, together.
‘And I’ll tell you this. It’s a special war we’re here to fight, when the Hatti come, thick as a swarm of locusts. A war like none other in history. Because this is a war that will end history. It’s not about glory or the ambitions of kings or booty or even about our gods. It’s about who lives and who dies — as simple as that.
‘The world is ending, you know that, you’ve seen the winter close its fist on the land. And whoever loses this war will end with it. But whoever wins will build a new world, when the sun returns once more. That’s what I want you to remember when the Hatti come, as you whet your blades and polish your armour. You are the last warriors, fighting the last war in the world. And you will fight to win!’
Again the men cheered at these terrifying, inspiring words.
Still Nelo stood before this formidable man, trying not to tremble.
The general said more softly, ‘A Northlander, eh? You folk dismay the likes of us — oh, dismiss your men, Sergeant. Not you, Northlander. Do you know why you dismay us?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Because of your cursed history. Such a weight of it, as massive as your Wall, or so I’m told as I’ve never seen it, which hangs around the neck of the world like a slave’s shackle. And makes the likes of us, Latin and Carthaginian, look like children at your feet. Well, that’s all to be scrubbed away by the ice, isn’t it? Leaving the world bare, and ready for a new race to build a new world, fit for the gaze of the gods.’ An impulse seemed to strike him. ‘This is the same Northlander who’s the artist, is he, Gisco?’
‘He is, sir.’
‘Oh, don’t look shocked, boy; a good sergeant knows all his men’s secrets, and their hiding places. I think Gisco is proud of you, in his way. I was taken by the scribbles he showed me, I must say.
‘Listen to me, Northlander. I think I have an interesting assignment for you. I want you to join my staff. You can be my official artist. You’ll find me an unusual sort of soldier. Like my good friend Suniatus over there I fancy myself as something of a historian. I want future generations to witness what’s to be done, here on the plain before Carthage. And it’s through your eyes, perhaps, that they will do that witnessing. Hmm. I don’t suppose you have any epic poets hiding in your ranks, do you, Sergeant? Never mind, never mind.’ He walked on, turning to his aides. ‘What’s next?’
When they had gone Nelo just stood there, staring after the Roman.
It was Gisco who broke the spell. ‘Well, get a move on, lad, what are you waiting for? You heard the general. Pack up your kit and go after him. And don’t forget your crayons.’
53
In Daidu, it was not yet dawn when Uzzia came to Avatak’s room to wake him, with a not-so-gentle kick in the buttocks. ‘Get up.’
Avatak, lying on his blankets and furs on the floor of his room, rolled on his back. The room was cold — cold enough for Uzzia’s breath to mist in the grey early light, cold enough to leave a rime of frost on the window ledge. It was spring here in Daidu, he was assured, but you wouldn’t know it. Well, Avatak liked it this way.
But he smelled smoke. His nose wrinkled. ‘What’s that?’
‘None of your business.’
He rolled easily to his feet. ‘Why am I awake? I thought you Hatti liked to sleep until noon.’
Uzzia grinned. ‘You’re learning cheek. I should have kicked you harder. The Khan is going to his hunting grounds in the south.’
He frowned. ‘So late in the season?’ In the months they had stayed here in Daidu, he had learned that the Khan preferred to take out his mighty hunting parties in the depths of winter, when the land was open, bare, the game easy to spot. ‘What does that have to do with me?’
‘We’re invited — you and I. Pack a bag, have a piss, and meet me at the south gate.’
Daidu, that cold, clear spring morning, seemed more tense than usual to Avatak. There were fewer people in the wide streets, but more soldiers, watching nervously from doorways and gates. The gates of the palace compound were sealed shut. To the north a pall of brown, greasy smoke rose from beyond the city wall. In moments of stillness, Avatak thought he heard distant shouting.
He found Uzzia at the city’s south gate, in a milling crowd of Mongols and Cathay. Some were dressed in expensive breeches and tunics, cloaks and felt hats, the hunting gear of rich folk, slapping gloved hands, their breath steaming. The rest were servants and slaves, dressed drably but as warmly as they could manage. Uzzia wore her travelling clothes, including her precious quilted cloak. She carried a couple of throwing spears. She handed one to Avatak; it was a light, well-balanced javelin.
They made their way through the gate. Outside, on the wide, well-made road leading south from the city, more attendants had assembled horses — a whole herd of them, saddled, or harnessed to carriages. An attendant from Bolghai’s household brought Avatak and Uzzia a horse each. The man had more weapons strapped to his back, including stout stabbing spears.
Avatak started to see the scale of this expedition, stretching off down the road. There had to be thousands of riders here, thousands of horses and attendants, and carts bristling with weapons, with javelins and stabbing spears and blades. Back in Coldland hunting parties were no more than a few men and boys, gathered together on a whim. This was more like an army assembling for war. And Avatak saw an expensive-looking pavilion, bright colours under the clear blue sky, mounted on top of what looked like a rock, a fat grey boulder. No, not a rock — it moved, slow yet oddly graceful. It was some tremendous beast.
Again he smelled smoke as the wind shifted. Heads turned to the north, and faces wore worried frowns. He suspected there were plenty of folk who would rather not be riding off with the Khan to play at hunting on this particular day. But the Khan’s whim overrode all other considerations, and the hunters began to mount their horses and carriages.
Horns sounded, and there was a cheer, noisy if unenthusiastic. The Khan’s great grey beast was the first to move. It really was like a boulder, walking on legs like cut-off tree trunks, with flapping ears and a long nose that trailed to the ground. A boy, dark, slight and skinny, rode behind its huge head, slapping the beast’s ears with a switch to make it go this way and that. The Khan himself was invisible inside the tent of silk and wool strapped to its back, but the tent tipped this way and that as the animal plodded, and Avatak could not imagine that it would be a comfortable ride. The beast was an astoni
shing sight, and would have been even if it had not had the most powerful man in the world in a box on its back. But Avatak had seen nothing but astonishing sights since he had been brought away from Coldland.
‘Where is Pyxeas?’
Uzzia, riding beside him, shrugged. ‘With his colleague Bolghai, I imagine. Immersed in his numbers and his theories. As happy as he ever is.’
Avatak knew that the old man was agitating to be away, to return to the west. It would be a journey back over the roof of the world, Avatak supposed, and the sooner they started the better. But meanwhile, here he was hunting with the Khan. ‘Why are we here? You and I.’
‘Because we have both been observed to fare well in the games in the palace, I with the javelin, you with the stabbing spears.’
He grunted. ‘None of those sleepy, overfed beasts we faced in the games would be a match for the great bears of Coldland.’
‘Be that as it may, you have caught the eye of the Khan’s attendants. And today we are here as the guests of Bolghai.’
‘Why?’
‘So that Bolghai himself does not have to travel. I suspect Bolghai has more pressing business in Daidu. Most people do.’
‘Not the Khan, it seems.’
‘No. Not the Khan.’
The procession was a great crowd, trailing the Khan on his boulder-beast. The ride continued through the morning, across a landscape of woodland and open plains, a land dotted with farms — though the plain looked parched, many farms abandoned, the woodland hacked for firewood. Twice the progress was interrupted for hunting. Horns sounded, scouts rode off — and then the animals would appear, to great excitement. The first was a band of wild boar, ugly, bristling creatures that ran squealing across the road. The Khan had his curtains thrown back so he could see, and allowed his barons to run down the boar. Then a magnificent stag was sighted. A cage was revealed on a cart, and opened to release a hunting animal, a lithe cat that Uzzia believed had been brought from Africa. The cat was ferociously fast, and Avatak saw the Khan stand up in his pavilion so he could see it chase down the stag.
Uzzia was not impressed. ‘I spoke to the attendants. They go ahead into the country, hunters, beaters, trappers. They flush out the game, round it up. They even cage the beasts to be released when the Khan rides by. This is not true hunting. This is a rich man’s indulgence. This particular Khan is a man of civilisation, of letters, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But he plays at being what his ancestors once were, a wild man of the steppe. I hope he remembers his limitations.’
As noon approached there was a commotion ahead. The progress of the caravan was not slowed, but Avatak heard shouting, brisk, impatient commands, and the unmistakable ring of swords being pulled from scabbards.
He saw a band of people beside the road, adults, old folk, children, families. Some of them had carts or mules laden with carpets, furniture; others carried goods on their backs. Avatak saw one thin old woman in a neat floor-length silk gown, expensively made but very dusty, with a bird in a bronze cage perched on her head. To let the Khan pass they had been cleared from the road.
‘Nestspills,’ Uzzia murmured.
‘From where?’
‘Daidu, of course. Or its suburbs. Where else? There have been rumours about this all winter, in the taverns and the suburbs, that as soon as the winter relented half the population would be off, heading south.’
There were cries of ‘Crane! Crane!’
All eyes turned to the sky, where a pair of the big ungainly birds were flapping over. The Khan threw back his curtains once more and released a bird from his arm, a huge, muscular-looking falcon. In Daidu, only the Khan was allowed to keep birds of prey, and this was a breed of falcon unique to Cathay. The falcon shot into the air and dived down on one of the cranes. There was an explosion of feathers, and the birds, locked together, tumbled from the sky. The watching nobles whooped and applauded, the nestspills utterly forgotten.
At the end of the day Avatak at last glimpsed the Khan’s lodge, in the middle of the great hunting ground. It was a band of brilliant colour along the southern horizon, tents and pavilions and yurts; it was as he had imagined Genghis’ yurt-capital of Karakorum to have been, before it was broken up. There was much activity, smoke rising from a hundred hearths, men on foot and horseback moving everywhere. Uzzia said there were traders in these districts who raised huge nations of dogs, to be ready to provide thousands of hounds at a time to the Khan on demand. The great hunts could span an area as wide as Northland itself, she said, though Avatak wasn’t sure he believed that.
But in the event he saw no more of the Khan’s hunt. No sooner had they reached the lodge than messengers came riding down from the north, from Daidu, demanding an audience with the Khan. The rumours spread quickly of trouble in the city. The bulk of the party turned around immediately, led by the Khan on his boulder-beast. Nobles hurried to change their horses, and attendants sparked torches.
As dusk gathered, Uzzia and Avatak joined the ride. Uzzia murmured, ‘So much for this foolish jaunt. Stay close to me.’
Behind them, Avatak heard thousands of dogs howl at the rising, ice-ringed moon.
54
Having ridden all day, now they rode through the night back to the capital. Avatak wondered how many plans were being curtailed and abandoned like this, around the world, because of the weather.
It was almost morning again when the van of the hunting party approached the gate in the southern wall. That great plume of smoke from the north loomed taller than ever, and flames leapt high in the dawn light. As they neared Daidu the Khan’s caravan had to battle through a thickening crowd of nestspills pouring south from the city, a flood compared to the trickle they’d overtaken yesterday. Some of the nestspills actually jeered at the Khan, and shook their fists. All of these were Cathay, Avatak saw. But the protestors melted into the crowd when the Khan’s guards drew their weapons.
At the city gate, the soldiers gathered around the Khan as he was lifted down from his litter, and formed a tight party around him as he was hurried through the outer wall. Behind him, the great column broke up into smaller parties, each noble with his own little band of warriors.
‘Stay close to the Khan,’ Uzzia said to Avatak.
‘Why?’
‘Because each of these nobles has his or her little pack of retainers. We have none. Best we are protected by the Khan’s own men, if we can manage it. I have this.’ She pulled Pyxeas’ golden paiza, his safe-conduct pass, from the neck of her tunic; she wore it tied to a thread. ‘It ought to get us inside the palace.’
‘And then?’
‘We find Pyxeas.’
‘Yes, and then?’
‘I’m making this up as I go along, boy. Wait and see.’
They hurried after the Khan, through the city. Even inside the palace compound there was pandemonium, courtiers and warriors running everywhere. In the palace itself, one of the Khan’s senior advisers was waiting for him at the door, a slender Cathay who trembled with fatigue and terror as he prostrated himself before the ruler. The Khan kicked the man to his feet and stalked on into the heart of his palace, with the guard from the hunting party following. Maybe the Khan trusted them more than his palace guard at this moment, Avatak thought. The Khan was unmistakable in his brilliantly coloured silk hunting gown, and the soldiers, grimy from the march, were dark, lumpen figures in the palace’s brightly lit opulence. Avatak noticed racks of the soft white slippers you were supposed to wear to protect the carpets; now they were ignored, and trails of muddy, dusty footprints were everywhere.
All the way the adviser jabbered to the Khan in rapid Mongolian.
Uzzia murmured, ‘I can’t hear it all. He’s talking very softly, very fast, and these warriors around us aren’t exactly keeping quiet. It sounds as if it’s all falling apart. The smoke we saw to the north, the flames-’
‘Yes?’
‘Warriors from the steppe. More nomadic horsemen. I can’t make out if they are Mongol or
not. I don’t suppose it matters. They got through the border walls, and here they are at the gates of Daidu. Some of the men are muttering that the city walls have already been breached.’
‘No wonder the people are running away.’
‘Yes. Those that aren’t rising up. That’s the other thing. The Cathay are taking the opportunity to rebel. The Mongols are marauding conquerors, after all. Some of the soldiers around us are muttering about conspiracies, maybe the Cathay rebel leaders have been in touch with the nomads. But there are more unpleasant surprises for the Khan to come, I think. I keep hearing a name: Kokachin, who they call the Wind-Rider.’
‘Kokachin’s a woman’s name. A Mongol woman’s.’
Uzzia grinned. ‘So it is.’
They turned corners, following the increasingly agitated Khan, until Avatak was quite lost in the belly of the great building. They came to a tremendous hall, yet another of this palace’s gigantic chambers, packed with milling people. And, under a roof of lacquered blue, he heard the hooves of a horse, oddly muffled. A horse?
The Khan ascended a podium on which stood a huge, elaborately carved throne. He glared down the length of the room — and faced a rider sitting boldly on a horse, Avatak saw now, a short, squat beast, one of the Mongols’ own tough ponies from the steppe. The rider was a woman, wearing light Mongol armour, a chest plate of boiled leather stitched with metal pieces, a small bow slung on her back. She wore no helmet, so all could see her face. She was handsome, severe, her straight black hair pulled back from her brow. And she was laughing as she turned the horse around, making it prance and nod.
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