Sotomayor said something under his breath and Luke glanced at him. The Castilian was shaking his head, his eyes wide with horror. Luke found himself standing. He leant forward, supporting his swaying body on the table. ‘Lord!’ he shouted. He wondered whether he, or another, had spoken.
Tamerlane turned. Luke breathed deeply. He’d begun to sweat. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Luke said: ‘This woman you gave to me. Is the tarkhan’s prize to be auctioned like a cow?’
Tamerlane stared at him, blinking. The tent had fallen silent.
Luke’s fists were clenched on the table, keeping him upright. He heard Sotomayor behind him whisper: ‘This is good. Keep going.’
Luke sucked in breath. He felt the sweat on his eyelids. Speaking was such an effort. He blinked. ‘Was this woman not given to me as tarkhan, lord?’
He heard whispers from the tables and then the thump of a cup on wood, then another and another. Soon the tent was ringing with the banging of cups upon tables. The tarkhan was claiming his prize. Tamerlane looked at the tables and then raised his hand for silence. When he turned back to Luke he was grinning. He bowed giddily, straightened and nodded. ‘Tarkhan,’ he said quietly, lifting his cup in salute.
Instantly, Sotomayor was on his feet and had run the length of the table to climb from the dais and reach Maria. Amidst the cheering and banging, and with Tamerlane distracted by more wine, he led her down the walkway and out of the tent. There was just Zoe left.
She was dressed in a simple white garment of silk that looked more like a bed-gown than a dress and she was barefoot. The gown was open at the top and the curve of her breasts rose from its top button in two perfect arcs. In the light of the lanterns, her skin was a wash of amber and her hair blacker than panther-pelt; she stood with her head held high and an expression of calm amusement on her face. She was looking straight at Tamerlane and if she was afraid, not one muscle in her body betrayed it.
Tamerlane was leaning against a table, his arms spread out to either side of him like buttresses, and he was watching her through half-closed eyes. He was moving the top half of his body from side to side and every now and then his chin would fall suddenly to his chest. He was breathing heavily through open lips and his brow was beaded with sweat. Despina was kneeling at his feet, her body very still and a wine jug in her hand. She had a gash at her temple and streaks of blood on her cheek and she too was watching Zoe.
‘Who are you?’ Tamerlane growled.
Zoe tipped her head to one side as if considering the question. Then she smiled. ‘Does it matter?’
The two slowly appraised each other and gradually the tent fell silent around them. Men sensed that some new entertainment was imminent and strained their necks to see.
Tamerlane frowned. ‘Do you know who I am?’
Zoe’s head went over to the other shoulder as if these questions were a game to be played. ‘Ah, now that does matter,’ she said quietly. ‘You are Temur, Sword of Islam, Lord of the Celestial Conjunction and master of everyone in this tent, including Bayezid.’ She paused and smiled again. ‘Including me.’
Then, very slowly, she walked towards Tamerlane, placing each careful foot in front of the other as if stepping on glass. When she reached him, she undid the buttons at her front one by one until the garment fell open. Then she placed two hands on her shoulders, her elbows pointing at Tamerlane, and, with the slightest of movements, pushed the silk away so that the whole dress slithered to the ground. ‘Including me.’
She was naked.
Naked except for a cord at her neck from which hung a pendant nestling within the valley of her breasts. The pendant was of three gold circles joined and it glowed against her satin skin as if painted there.
The Celestial Conjunction. Temur’s sign.
Tamerlane stared at it, transfixed, his eyes behind their glasses vast with lust. His hand went to his crotch and stayed there, the palm flat against silk that was moving as it hadn’t for months. ‘Where did you get that?’ he whispered.
‘It’s my birth-sign,’ she said softly. ‘And yours.’
Then she walked towards him and knelt at his feet. She took the wine jug from Despina and the cup that had been with it. She poured wine into the cup and rose, offering it to Tamerlane. ‘You will need a new cup-bearer, lord,’ she said. ‘Your last one is hurt.’
Luke watched it all with appalled fascination, hardly daring to breathe. Zoe had decided to survive in the way she did better than any woman in the world. She had decided to seduce the man who ruled the earth.
And it seemed to have worked. Zoe turned slowly, allowing the lantern light to play itself across the curves of her exquisite body, and began to walk towards the dais. Tamerlane followed her in a trance, his lame leg dragging on the floor and one hand still clamped to his crotch. When they got there, she led him round to his place and then sat herself demurely at his feet, the wine jug still in her hand.
She glanced up at Luke and within those dark, dark eyes was a sort of triumph. It was the look that Tamerlane had had above Bayezid’s cage, only quieter. It was the look of conquest. Luke stared at her for some time, her face sometimes becoming two. Then he felt a surge of nausea rise from his stomach and knew that, very soon, he would vomit.
He rose to his feet. With one hand on the table, he began to lurch away from Tamerlane and his new pet. He needed air and the fixed certainty of the heavens above to give bearing to the capricious world around him.
I must get outside.
He reached the end of the dais and somehow made it to the ground without falling. He walked in front of Barbi and heard him call his name from somewhere far away and he saw, from the corner of his eye, the figure of Tamerlane reach over the table to him. But he kept walking. He passed vats of stew with eyeless skulls that leered at him and burnt himself on the sides of braziers and crashed into slaves bearing wine. But he kept on walking.
Then he was at the tent’s entrance and it was if an island had risen magically from the waves in front of a spent swimmer. He staggered the last few yards and went out into the night and saw that the stars had occupied the teetering earth as well as the heavens. Stretching all around him to the horizon were the fires of an immeasurable army that had won a great battle and was drinking to remember and to forget it.
Luke fell to the ground and rolled over on to his back and took great lungfuls of the dry desert air. He turned his head slowly from side to side, taking in the boundless expanse of the firmament.
Anna, I am coming.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
ANATOLIA, AUTUMN 1402
It was then that Tamerlane disappeared.
Fifty thousand lay dead on the field of Ankara and long after the crows had picked out their eyes, Tamerlane kept to his tent, refusing access to all but those who provided the necessities for living: food, wine, cool sherbet and water to wash from his body the messy business of love.
Zoe’s talented lips and fingers had managed to do what no other woman had in years: to bring Tamerlane to shuddering climax. And she hadn’t been permitted to step outside the tent while she could bestow such a blessing. Tamerlane was infatuated.
Bibi Khanum was not summoned from Samarcand, as was the custom, and it was the elephants that carried back the news of her husband’s greatest victory, staying on to haul stone for her gigantic mosque. All of them but two.
A message was sent to the army to move to Kutahya and somehow Yakub learnt that he must prepare his palace for Tamerlane’s personal use. So the tents were packed up and put on to the wagons, the siege engines hitched to the oxen and the long, long line of Mongol horsemen, their wives, children and slaves behind them, began to snake its way west into the land of the Germiyans.
But if Yakub had thought that his change of sides would spare the fields and villages of his beylik, he was wrong. The Mongols continued their pilgrimage of rape and murder and the horizon that stretched behind this savage army was black with the smoke of its destruction.
&n
bsp; Yakub was beside himself with rage. But Tamerlane was still in his tent at Ankara and Shulen had taken Mohammed Sultan into the fortress there, prepared to use every skill she possessed to heal the man she now called brother. Luke, too, had gone there to recover fully from his head wound. Khan-zada went to nurse them both.
Maria had chosen to go with the army. More accurately, she’d chosen to go with the Castilian Sotomayor to whom she’d become attached. Both thought that their chances of reaching Castile together would be higher the closer they got. Meanwhile, she was appointed handmaiden to Zoe.
*
After a month, Tamerlane emerged from his tent looking happier than he had in years. The pains of age had disappeared and he’d forgotten Shulen and the magic of her lotions. He summoned his courtiers and declared that he would make the journey west to Kutahya by elephant, taking Zoe, her ointments and some poetry along for his entertainment. He set forth in an enormous canopied howdah, reclining with Zoe amidst cushions, porringers of honey and a servant who poured iced sherbet and murmured the sonnets of the Persian Hafiz into his ear. In the second elephant’s howdah rode Shahrukh, Pir Mohammed and Tamerlane’s grandson Ulugh Beg. The boy was Shahrukh’s eight-year-old son and had an interest in astrology; at night, when they camped, he would describe the stars to his grandfather as the old man lay beneath their majesty. Behind the elephants came a jornufa, an ostrich and a cage that contained the Sultan of an empire that no longer existed. Behind them marched a guard of gautchin with three Varangians at their head.
The main army was outside Kutahya and was growing restless. It had secured a great victory, perhaps the greatest ever won, and it wanted to go home. The generals had sent messages to Pir Mohammed urging him to ask his grandfather about his plans. Now the time had come for Pir Mohammed to act.
Zoe was reclining next to Tamerlane on cushions big and soft enough to absorb the elephant’s sway. It was a warm day and she wore a thoub of almost transparent cotton. She had a little lectern poised below her breasts from which she was reading aloud from the Kama Sutra, her left hand turning the pages. Her right hand was invisible beneath Tamerlane’s housecoat. Curtains hung around the howdah and one inside. The servant was, for now, on the other side of this, singing to a stringed instrument.
Tamerlane grunted and lay back against the cushions and Zoe stopped reading and withdrew her hand. It was, she had learnt, a good time to arrange things. ‘We have only three Varangians in our party,’ she said, discreetly wiping her hand on the curtain. ‘I noticed them this morning as we set off. Was there not another?’
Tamerlane’s closed eyes formed small arcs of pleasure and he was breathing quickly, his great chest rising to part and close his housecoat. Small beads of sweat teetered on the banks of his forehead before coursing to his beard. He didn’t seem to have heard her.
‘The Varangians’ leader,’ she tried again.
‘He’s at Ankara,’ he said. ‘With my grandson.’ Then he remembered something. ‘And his wife.’
‘Except that she’s not his wife,’ Zoe said. ‘He lied to you, lord. They both did.’
Tamerlane opened his eyes to watch Zoe pour them both wine from a pitcher held steady in a clever gimbal by her side. He frowned. ‘How do you know this?’
The truth was she didn’t, for sure. But she’d known Luke from birth and had seen what had happened with Anna. She knew that he and Shulen were a lie.
‘I just know, lord.’
Tamerlane took the wine. ‘Should I torture the Varangians to tell me the truth?’ he asked.
Zoe pretended to consider this. She shook her head. ‘No, they’ve done you no wrong. You should release them from their oaths.’
‘And the other?’
‘He has lied to you. He should explain himself.’
Tamerlane nodded. ‘When he gets here.’ He drank. ‘He wants me to go to Chios.’
Zoe had suspected this. Indeed, she’d hoped to guide the conversation to this very place, pausing only to secure the Varangians’ release. ‘It’s a good idea, lord. It is an island I have long desired to see.’
Tamerlane’s eyes twinkled. His hand pushed aside the lectern and arrived on her breast, squeezing. She gasped convincingly. ‘Desired? Would you like it?’
Zoe stretched like a cat. She placed her hand on his, pressing it down. ‘I deserve no such thing, lord,’ she murmured. ‘Anyway, it’s not yours to give. Yet.’ She moved her hand south.
‘No, too soon. I am old.’
‘Not so old,’ she whispered, turning to his ear. Her hand continued south and its fingers curled around soft flesh. ‘You should summon the Varangian to explain himself,’ she said again. ‘Soon.’
Zoe stroked and pressed and teased and all the while wondered what she was doing. She knew the game her hand played but not her mind. Why did she want Luke back? To share in her triumph? Why had she gone to Allaedin ali-Bey of the Karamanids to get him back for Suleyman? Why had she tried again with the younger di Vetriano, and again with the Mongol envoy? Why had she worked so hard to keep Anna away from him, only arranging for her to go into Constantinople when she’d guessed she might be sent somewhere further?
Her hand rose and dipped in rhythm and her thoughts reached an awful realisation.
I cannot help myself.
The world shifted and her hand lost its grip. Something large had bumped against the side of their elephant. She rolled away and lifted the curtain to see Pir Mohammed leaning out from his howdah.
‘Grandfather,’ he called over her, ‘may I speak with you?’
‘Your grandfather is busy,’ she said, closing the curtain.
Pir Mohammed tried again. ‘Lord, the generals wish to know your plans.’
Zoe glanced at Tamerlane, who was scowling at the wine jug that had left its gimbal and was now resting against his puddled thigh. The servant had dared to draw his curtain and was frantically mopping with his sleeve.
‘Your grandson wants to know where we’re going, lord,’ she said, shooing away the servant and applying her own sleeve to the work. ‘Shall I say Chios? Will you meet the Christian powers there?’
Tamerlane grunted and she rose to her knees and lifted the curtain again.
‘The Lord of the Seven Climes intends to take Smyrna, as he said he would, then go to Chios. He has reflected on the Varangian’s advice and wishes to meet the Emperor Manuel and other Christian kings there. He asks you to arrange it.’
She lowered the curtain too quickly to see the delight on Pir Mohammed’s face. They would make peace with the western Kings and then go home. She didn’t see the Prince turn to his cousin and say: ‘Let’s play chess.’
*
The city of Smyrna was said to be impregnable.
Certainly the defenders thought so. Two hundred Knights Hospitaller under the command of the Aragonese General Iñigo of Alfaro had declined the offer of surrender begged from Tamerlane by his Nestorian advisers. For sixty years their walls had stood firm against every assault by the Turk and they would not open their gates to an illiterate barbarian now. Anyway, they had Greek fire supplied to them by an engineer from Chios who, they’d have been surprised to learn, was somewhere within Tamerlane’s army.
It was December and the first snows had fallen on the mountains to the north and the gulf on which the city sat was moiling with wind-clipped waves. It had rained without cease since the army had arrived and the Mongols, miserable, wet and cold, were yearning ever more for home. Their only enjoyment had been the daily spectacle of Bayezid dragged out in his cage to watch them attempt what he’d failed to do: wipe this last Christian outpost from the lands of the Prophet.
The city stood high on a rocky outcrop which extended into the gulf and could only be taken by a two-pronged attack by land and sea. Tamerlane soon saw that the walls were weakest on the seaward side and ordered platforms to be built across the water, supported by sunken columns, so cutting off the city from the shore. Benedo Barbi’s covered alleyways, never used at Ankara
, were rolled up to the city walls and the fires lit. Meanwhile, the cannon captured from Bayezid were hauled into position on the land side.
After fifteen days, breaches appeared in the walls and they began to fall. The Mongols rushed over them with no thought of mercy in their minds. The men and children of the city were cut down where they stood, the women raped, then slaughtered.
The Hospitallers had sent reinforcements from Rhodes but they’d arrived too late. As the fleet rowed up the gulf, with the city of Smyrna smoking before them, the sky was suddenly filled with comets trailing blood in their wake. A moment later, the two hundred heads of Smyrna’s defenders thudded on to the decks around them. The Hospitallers turned about and rowed for home.
Smyrna had fallen.
*
On Chios, the signori were angry with the Knights.
Dominic de Alamania of their Order had brought his fleet to the island from Rhodes and demanded that the Hospitaller fleet be allowed to revictual there before sailing on to Smyrna. The signori, who now included Dimitri among their number, had had no choice but to agree. So it was in some trepidation that the twelve Genoese and one Greek awaited Tamerlane in the palace of Marchese Longo in the citadel at Chora. The days had been long and nerve-racking and their only relief had been the charm and beauty of their leader’s wife and son.
Giovanni Giustiniani Longo was five years old and had his mother’s hair. He was tall for his age and would be taller than his father. He was an intelligent child who already spoke three languages, could recite Homer and found amusement in mathematics. And in the hours of pacing the long marble corridors of the palace, the signori would distract themselves by trying to satisfy the boy’s endless curiosity.
The signori were further distracted by the arrival on Chios of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, the philosopher Plethon and King Sigismund of Hungary, who’d brought Anna Laskaris with him. After delivering her letters, Anna had stayed at Sigismund’s court and watched with satisfaction as the letters had done their work: a new crusade had been called with both Popes persuaded to back it.
The Towers of Samarcand (The Mistra Chronicles) Page 39
