Vallon 02 - Imperial Fire

by Robert Lyndon

  Negotiating a bazaar, Wayland passed through the rancid butchers’ quarter, fanning away flies when something glimpsed to his left swung him round. There on the pestilential counter, legs trussed and fledgling wings brailed, lay a young eagle.

  ‘What on earth…?’

  ‘You want to buy?’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  The butcher pointed towards the Kun Lun range. ‘Shepherds took it from its nest in the mountains.’ He scooped it up. ‘Good price.’

  When he set it back down, it fell over before squatting right way up, propped on its elbows with its legs stuck out, head sunk on its balled-up feet. Wayland’s lips curled. ‘Why would anyone buy an eagle in that condition?’

  ‘For soup.’

  ‘You eat eagles?’

  Like many citizens of Khotan, the vendor was afflicted by goitre. ‘Oh yes, sir. Berkut meat makes men strong.’

  Wayland exhaled a fluffing breath and studied the creature. It was close to death, its mouth agape, indifferent to the flies walking over its slitted eyes.

  ‘What have you been feeding it on?’

  ‘Bread.’

  ‘Dear God.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Wayland stifled his anger. ‘When did the shepherds take it?’

  The butcher raised his shoulders. ‘One week perhaps.’

  ‘How long have you had it?’

  ‘Fresh this morning.’

  Wayland swung away. ‘It will be dead before the day is out.’

  ‘For you, one solidus.’

  Wayland halted despite himself. The butcher cocked his head like a bird about to spear a worm.

  ‘Nobody in their right mind would pay that much for carrion.’

  ‘You belong to the Greek caravan. I hear you spend gold coins as if they were horn buttons.’ The butcher held up a finger as if bestowing a benediction. ‘One solidus.’

  ‘To hell with you.’

  ‘Not so fast, my friend. Let us talk. Let us bargain. We’re gentlemen.’

  Wayland stabbed a finger at the eagle. ‘I’ll give you a dirham just to save it from the cooking pot.’

  The butcher clapped his hands at an attentive urchin. ‘Chai for our honoured client. Or perhaps the gentleman would prefer wine. Please, sir. Step this way.’

  Wayland entered the caravanserai cradling the sickly foundling, two live cockerels dangling around his neck. Lucas spotted him and hurried over.

  ‘A young eagle, by heaven.’

  ‘Find Hero and ask him for some eye balm.’

  Wayland barged into his quarters and dumped the eagle on the ground. Even for a tenth of the asking price – cockerels included – the bird was worthless. What galled him was the knowledge that if the bird had been healthy, Sultan Suleyman’s falconers would have paid as much as they would have laid out for a prize stallion. The berkut was the largest race of golden eagle, capable of killing gazelles, foxes and even wolves. Under Wayland’s quizzing, the butcher had told him that no one in the Khotan oasis practised falconry.

  Wayland’s dog glanced at him, requesting permission to investigate the eaglet. It sniffed the soiled plumage, wrinkled its nose and backed off.

  ‘I know,’ Wayland said.

  Lucas crashed in with Hero’s potions and watched while Wayland swabbed the eagle’s eyes.

  ‘That doesn’t look like a well bird,’ he said.

  ‘Cut one of the cockerel’s throats and collect the blood. Fetch fresh water.’

  Zuleyka entered. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Step out of my light. No, stay. I might need your help.’

  ‘Here,’ Lucas said, offering Wayland a bowl of warm blood.

  ‘Grip her by the shoulders. Not too tight.’

  Lucas clasped the eagle’s wing butts. ‘How do you know it’s a “she”?’

  ‘Because she is,’ Wayland said.

  He took from his bag of hawking furniture a thin gut tube and a horn funnel.

  ‘Hold her beak open,’ he told Zuleyka.

  ‘She might bite me.’

  ‘She’s only a baby.’

  Zuleyka prised the mouth apart. The eagle gave a pathetic mew and seemed to collapse from within.

  ‘I think it’s dead,’ Lucas whispered.

  Wayland inserted the tube above the eagle’s pallid tongue, eased it down into its crop and fitted the funnel to the free end. He half-filled it with diluted blood, jiggled the tube and registered the level of the liquid sink.

  ‘If you ask me, you’re wasting your time,’ Lucas said.

  ‘You waste yours. I’ll waste mine.’

  Drop by drop Wayland emptied the funnel. He swayed back and scrubbed his brow with his forearm. ‘Find a basket.’

  Zuleyka left and the dog followed her.

  Wayland slumped on a stool and looked at his purchase. The kindest thing would be to wring its neck.

  ‘Anything else I can do?’ Lucas said.

  ‘No. Thank you for your assistance.’

  ‘Call if you need me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Wayland said. ‘There is something you can do. You can end this nonsense with Vallon.’

  Lucas cramped up. ‘I tried. I requested an audience a few nights ago and he wouldn’t admit me.’

  ‘You’re not an ambassador seeking admission to a foreign court. You’re his son. Just say the words or let me say them for you.’

  ‘Aah,’ Lucas groaned. ‘It’s not as easy as you think. Imagine yourself in Vallon’s place. What sort of reception would you give to a son you gave up for dead ten years ago?’

  They were strung on each other’s stares when Zuleyka returned with a fleece-lined wicker basket. Wayland placed the eaglet in the cradle and levelled his gaze at Lucas.

  ‘The eagle will be dead by dawn. Life is fleeting. We have only one chance to cast our shadows against the sun. The previous expedition was wiped out between here and the next oasis. When I’m gone, nobody else will know who you are.’

  ‘You gone?’

  Zuleyka stamped a foot. ‘He tells you to go.’

  She crouched before Wayland and took his hand.

  Wayland snatched it away. ‘I’ve told you. I’m not interested. I have a wife and children.’

  Zuleyka rubbed her face against his hands. He jumped up.

  ‘Get away from me.’

  She flounced out, stopping at the door to crook two fingers at him in some kind of spell or malediction.

  ‘Not you,’ Wayland said to the dog.

  It slunk after Zuleyka with a hang-dog look, leaving Wayland alone with the dying eagle.

  During the night the fledgling produced a horrible squelching sound as it vented the noxious matter that had been clogging its gut. Wayland pushed up on one elbow and stared through the dark before sinking back. He’d already wasted too much time on the bird.

  He woke by dawn, lit a lamp and stole over to the eagle. It lay in a heap, an inanimate bundle of flesh and feather. He steeled himself to handle the corpse.

  At his touch the eaglet opened its eyes and blinked. Kewp, it said. It wobbled upright. Kewp, it repeated in a more insistent tone. Kewp.

  Wayland ran to the door. The poplars surrounding the caravanserai were just beginning to brush the sky. ‘Lucas!’

  He was holding the eagle on his lap when Lucas burst in. Wayland smiled like a proud father. ‘Baby wants her breakfast.’

  Another feed of the nourishing liquor only sharpened its appetite and lent strength to its voice. ‘Cut up a chicken breast. Chop it fine.’

  By the time the sun had cleared the walls, the eagle had gorged and lay asleep on Wayland’s lap with its crop distended to the size of an apple. His dog slunk in, looking guilty.

  ‘Are you going to train her?’ Lucas asked.

  Wayland placed the eaglet in its cradle. ‘I don’t know. She’s been taken too young. Now her cries tug at your heartstrings, but in a month her squalling will drive you mad. By then she won’t be a helpless infant. She’ll be full-grown and da
ngerous, with no respect for her handler or anyone else. I knew a Seljuk falconer who reared a goshawk from a ball of fluff. Six months later that hawk – a quarter of the size of a full-grown berkut – plucked out one of his eyes and laid his face open from brow to jaw.’

  Lucas rubbed his hands. ‘What are you going to call her?’

  ‘I’m no good at names. Wait. What about Freya, the Norse goddess?’

  ‘Freya sounds good.’

  When Lucas left, Wayland studied the fledgling properly for the first time. He guessed she was about six weeks old, an infant with a gawky out-at-elbows look, her flight feathers still in blood and her head downy. But already she weighed more than any other bird of prey he’d trained. Her smoky hazel eyes, billhook beak and saffron feet armed with black talons hinted at her latent powers. Her hind claws were already as long and thick as his little finger. When fully grown, each extended foot would be wider than a hand’s span and powerful enough to drive through a deer’s skull.

  He left Khotan with the eaglet travelling loose in a basket placed in front of his saddle. She wolfed down her rations and grew daily, metamorphosing from avian toad into Jove’s winged avenger in the space of a fortnight. By then she was hard-penned, only a few traces of down on her head, her plumage an autumnal blend of greys, tans, cinnamon, plum brown and burnt ochre. Wayland had worried that her traumatic experiences would have left hunger traces on her flight feathers – thin lines marking arrested development and points of weakness. Instead, her feathers grew straight and sound. She began to exercise her wings and peer about with the curiosity of a youngster exploring the world and its wonders.

  She’d outgrown her basket by then and he jessed her legs and carried her unleashed on his gloved fist. A morning of supporting her with his arm crooked left it so numb that he could hardly move it. At Keriya, the next oasis, he weighed the eagle on a corn merchant’s balance. She tilted the scales at eleven catties, equivalent to fourteen English pounds – and she hadn’t stopped growing. Wayland commissioned a carpenter to make a T-perch four feet high, its base footed in a leather socket stitched to his saddle.

  He rode forth on the next stage with the eagle clutching her perch, wings spread in an eight-foot span, her eyes fastening on everything that flowed into her vision. The troopers liked to see her at the head of the column, imagining that she was the flesh-and-blood equivalent of the standards carried by their military forebears, the Roman legions of old.

  One of the Sogdians added an intriguing twist. ‘This isn’t the first time the Roman eagle has travelled the Silk Road,’ he told Wayland. ‘Long ago a Roman army fought a battle with a race called the Parthians at Carrhae in Afghanistan. The Parthians defeated the legions and sold the survivors. Many of them were transported east, even as far as China, where they founded a colony that retained their language and customs for centuries. One of my ancestors encountered them on his first journey to China. They’re only a memory now, but you can still find Roman armour on sale in bazaars.’

  ‘How do you Sogdians preserve such long memories, Shennu?’

  ‘From the day we can understand speech, our elders teach us our history. What happened here? Who can you trust in this oasis? Who to avoid? Which wells supply water fit only for camels and which wells provide water sweet enough for men? What time of day does the river freeze in the mountains, lowering the level and making it safe to cross? It’s a father’s duty to pass on such knowledge. I remember my grandfather telling me about the first Chinese traveller to reach Afghanistan. His name was Zhang Qian and he made the journey a thousand years ago, but to hear my grandfather tell the tale, you’d have thought the two of them travelled together. By the way, I’m Yexi. My cousin is riding with the general.’

  Later that day the eagle launched into her first clumsy flight. Buoyed up by a gust of wind, she let go of her perch and flapped away south into sand country, feet dangling and scuffing the ground in an attempt to land. She hadn’t learned how to stop. A hundred-foot-high dune blocked her path. She tried to clear it, ran out of strength and tumbled tail over beak not far below the top. Wayland jumped off his horse and climbed after her.

  The eagle had scrabbled up to the crest and stood looking about as if she owned the wilderness. Wayland picked her up and laid his cheek against her head, breathing in her scent, wondering not for the first time why a creature with such a carnal appetite exhaled the odour of spring gorse.

  ‘That’s enough liberty for now,’ he said. ‘From now on you wear a leash and hood and only fly at my bidding.’ He rested a while, the sweat on his forehead drying in a hot headwind that blew a yellow mist from the tops of the sandhills. To the south the haze that had hidden the Kun Lun range for weeks drew aside, exposing a panorama of icy peaks.

  Lucas flogged up. ‘I thought you’d lost her.’

  ‘She has a long way to go before she finds independence. My task is to teach her to hunt before casting her loose.’

  ‘You intend letting her go?’

  Wayland didn’t answer.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  Wayland had stood, peering at a flock of vultures spiralling about half a mile to the south. One of them dropped out of the formation and fell on cupped wings. Another followed. Three more joined the carousel from different directions and more dots were converging.

  Lucas followed his gaze. ‘Probably a camel or wild ass.’

  ‘A dead camel doesn’t attract fifty vultures. That’s a scene of slaughter.’

  They laboured over four dunes before running down to a gravel terrace cut by an arid stream bed. Wayland followed the course, guided by the vortex of carrion birds and the occasional whiff of putrid flesh. Around the next bend twenty vultures trundled into clumsy flight.

  ‘Christ,’ Lucas said.

  Twelve bloated and blackened bodies lay strewn over the stony bench on one side of the watercourse. Their murderers had decapitated some of them and the heads lay at hideous angles, glaucous eyes staring sightless at the sun and a droning fog of flies hovering over the carnage. Two wolves were feasting on the decomposing corpses. One of them fled when Wayland shouted. The other, riddled with mange, chopped its teeth at him and continued tugging at a baby clasped in the arms of its dead mother until Lucas ran at it with drawn sword. It abandoned its prey and crabbed humpbacked into the dunes.

  Lucas smothered his nose against the stench. ‘Who were they?’

  Wayland squinted around. ‘Tibetan traders or pilgrims to judge from their costume.’

  ‘Who killed them?’

  ‘Bandits. Perhaps the same gang who wiped out the last Greek expedition.’

  ‘We’d better warn Vallon.’

  ‘You go. I’ll try to make sense of these tracks.’

  Wayland quartered the ground, reading the clues. Lucas had dropped from sight when the dog came pattering up. ‘Faithless hound,’ Wayland said. He bent its head towards a faint impression. ‘One member of the party escaped. Seek.’

  With a yelp the dog ran down the stream bed, pausing to pick up scent and looking back at Wayland for encouragement.

  ‘You’re on the right track. Keep going,’

  Quarter of a mile down the gulley the dog flung itself round and froze, its muzzle pointing towards a hole in the bank. A wolf’s den. Wayland slid into the stream bed and squatted before the entrance.

  ‘You can come out. The bandits have gone. I won’t hurt you.’

  Nothing stirred.

  ‘I know you’re in there. It’s a lot cooler inside than out. I’m burning up. Put me out of my torment.’

  The dog pranced around the hole, barking. Wayland called it off and slung a goatskin waterbottle through the entrance. ‘You have to come out some time.’

  He was holding the eagle on his left fist, his dog panting by his side when two hands gripped each side of the entrance and a dust-smothered head emerged. Wayland dragged the survivor clear and stood him upright. His eyes were deranged by shock and tears had carved channels through his dust
mask.

  ‘Let’s get you back.’

  A voice called and Wayland turned to see a squad of troopers crest the nearest dune. Lucas plunged down, lost his balance and tumbled the last thirty feet.

  Wayland rolled his eyes. ‘Do you always have to be so impetuous?’

  Lucas shook his head and blinked. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Take his other arm and we’ll find out when we return to the caravan.’

  A night under Hero’s care restored the survivor. Washed, watered, fed and rested, he turned out to be a young Tibetan with features Greek sculptors would have loved to carve in marble. Raven-black hair hung down to his shoulders. His name was Yonden and he told his story in a ruined caravanserai while rats scuttled and chittered in the shadows.

  At the age of sixteen, he’d entered a Buddhist monastery in the south of Tibet, within sight of a mountain range called the Himalayas. Two years before, an elderly monk had professed a wish to make a last pilgrimage to a shrine in a Buddhist cave complex called Dunyuang, on the northern branch of the Silk Road. The abbot had chosen Yonden to accompany the monk as his servant and secretary. They’d been two years on the journey, seeking alms and hospitality in return for prayers, horoscopes and medicines. When they reached Dunyuang, the monk told Yonden that he’d reached his last destination on earth and wouldn’t be returning to Tibet. He gave himself up to prayer and fasting and within a week his spirit left him so peacefully that the closest observer couldn’t have decided the moment when his soul slipped from his human shell into divine nothingness.

  Shennu translated, conveying Yonden’s conflicted emotions – his grief at his master’s death, his awe at the manner in which the monk had sloughed off his mortal mantle, his resentment that the holy man had left him penniless to make the journey back to the Tibetan monastery.

  ‘It was a test and I failed it,’ Yonden said. ‘Without my spiritual guardian, I fell into bad habits. I gambled and succumbed to temptations of the flesh.’

  ‘Tell us more about them,’ Wulfstan said, savaging a mutton shank. ‘I’m partial to tales of sin and redemption.’ He looked around the company. ‘What?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Vallon said. ‘I have to discuss tomorrow’s stage with the centurions.’