Silk Road (10 page)

‘I want you to teach me to speak Tatar,’ Josseran said.

‘You would find it too hard,’ Juchi said, in Arabic.

‘It sounds very much like Turkic and I already speak that well enough. I think you will find I have an aptitude. And we have nothing else to do on this interminable journey.’

‘Where do you want me to start?’

‘I already know Hello is
Salam
. Thank you is
Rèqmèt
. In the morning you say
Qaiyerle irtè
to each other. At night it is
Qaiyerle ki
.’

Juchi laughed, delighted. ‘Excellent. My men think you are as stupid as your horse, but they have underestimated you. Very well, Barbarian. As you say, we have nothing better to do while we ride. I will tell you a few words as we ride, and we shall see who learns to speak Tatar first, you or your horse!’

One evening, not long after they had set out from Aleppo, one of the Tatars was bitten by a scorpion. He spent that entire night sobbing with pain, and died early the next morning. The incident chilled William to the marrow.

But visions of his Christ helped him endure. If this was to be his cross, his purgatory, then so be it. He would welcome his tribulations as scourge for his impure thoughts.

Horse dung clung to their damp clothes; the atmosphere inside the tent was ripe with it. William wiped his eyes, which were streaming, smarting from the fire smoke.

‘You think they will eat us next?’ he said to Josseran.

He had heard the legends about these people; that they drank blood and ate dogs and frogs and snakes, even each other. Watching them now, it was not difficult to imagine. He stared in disgust at the mess of sheep’s intestines on the soaking grass in front of him. The Tatars laughed and encouraged him to eat as they wrenched tubes of offal from the steaming pile of guts with grease-blackened fingers. The rest of the animal, the fleece, the head and bloodied bones lay in a heap to one side.

The owner of the yurt had slaughtered the animal in their honour. Josseran had never seen an animal killed in such a fashion; the man had simply thrown it on its back, pinned it down with his knees and slit its belly with his knife. He had then thrust his arm into the animal’s twitching guts up to his elbow and squeezed off the aorta, stopping the heart. In a few moments the sheep’s head had flopped to the side and it died, with barely a drop of blood spilled.

Their method of cooking the beast was just as brutal. Only the stomach contents were discarded; everything else, the tripe, the head, the offal, the meat and the bones were tossed in boiling water.

William felt faint with hunger but his stomach rebelled at eating any of the pink and parboiled mess in front of him.

Juchi carved off a piece of almost raw meat from the carcass with his knife and thrust it in his mouth. William could hear small bones crunching between his teeth. Grease glistened on his chin.

There was a goatskin bag at the doorway. Juchi lurched to his feet and poured some of the liquid from the bag into a wooden bowl and thrust it into William’s hands. He motioned for him to drink.

It was what they called koumiss, the fermented mare’s milk that they drank with every meal. This at least was not unpleasant, now he had become accustomed to it. It was clear and pungent, like wine, and slightly effervescent; it left an aftertaste of almonds.

William lifted the bowl to his lips and downed the contents in one gulp. Immediately he clutched at his throat, gasping for breath. His insides were on fire. The Tatars burst into laughter.

‘You have poisoned him!’ Josseran shouted.

‘Black koumiss,’ Juchi said. He patted his stomach. ‘It’s good!’

And so nothing would do but they forced William to drink more, standing in front of him and clapping their hands at each swallow. He knew what they were doing. This black koumiss was as strong as sack and William knew that soon he would be as drunk as they were. After he had downed several cups of this foul liquor they tired of their game and sat back down on the wet grass and resumed their meal.

‘Are you all right, Brother William?’ Josseran asked him.

‘Will you join me . . . in prayer?’ he answered. His tongue felt suddenly twice the size and he realized he had slurred his words.

‘My knees are already blistered and raw from your constant supplications.’

‘We should ask for divine guidance . . . so that we may win these people for the Lord.’

The Tatars watched him as he fell on his knees beside the fire and lifted his clasped hands to the sky. Their eyes followed the direction of his gaze to the smoke hole and the single evening star that hovered above the yurt.

‘God’s bones, just stop it,’ Josseran told him. ‘They are not at all impressed with your devotions. They think you are afflicted.’

‘The opinion of a Tatar does not trouble me.’

It was true. For the first time in weeks he was no longer afraid. He felt strong, invincible and charismatic. William called loudly on the Lord to come among them, guard their souls and lead their barbarian escorts to the one true way.

When he had finished Josseran was still grimly chewing on a piece of raw offal. ‘How can you eat this disgusting mess?’ William said.

‘I am a soldier. A soldier cannot survive without food, no matter how displeasing it may be to the palate.’

William took a coil of cooked gut in his hand, feeling the slimy texture of it. He felt his gorge rise. He stood up and left the tent, shaping to toss the offal at a pack of dogs.

But then the world began spinning around him and he fell, dead drunk, on his back.

William woke before dawn. He heard the baying of a wolf somewhere in the night. There was a dull ache behind his eyes. He reached for the crucifix at his throat and murmured a silent prayer. He knew that if he failed in this, the redemptive mission of his poor life, there could be no deliverance.

I
T WAS A
cold, grey morning. Below them was a lake, the colour of steel. The slopes around them were wreathed in dark cloud. Occasionally, between breaks in the overcast, they glimpsed the jagged teeth of the mountains that stretched across the horizon, their peaks capped in snow and ice.

Juchi crouched beside the fire outside the yurt. He seemed unaffected by the cold. He wore thick-soled felt boots, like all the Tatars, and a thick wrap-around gown that they called a
del
, tied with a broad sash of orange silk. He had not yet put on his furlined cap. His head was almost completely shaven, like all the rest, with just a tuft of hair at the forehead and two long braids behind each ear.

He was roasting the head of a sheep on the end of a long stick. He turned it over the coals. When all the hair had been singed off he put it on the ground and began to extract meagre pieces of charred flesh and marrow with the point of his knife.

Breakfast.

‘How long before we arrive in Qaraqorum?’ Josseran asked him, in the language of the Tatars.

Juchi grinned. ‘Very good. You said you had an ear for language. I thought it was just boasting.’ He probed with his knife in the eye socket to find another tender morsel. ‘Qaraqorum? If we ride hard and if the weather is favourable . . . perhaps summer.’

Josseran felt his spirits dip. So they had not been toying with him after all. ‘Still so far?’

‘Qaraqorum is at the centre of the world. Here we are still at its very rim.’

William emerged from the yurt, staggering slightly, his skin ashen. ‘How did I find my bed?’ he said to Josseran.

‘I carried you there. You had fallen in the grass.’

The friar absorbed this information in stolid silence. Josseran expected a murmur of thanks, at least. ‘I see you are learning their jabber now.’

‘Is that not a good thing?’

‘You are a traitor and heretic, Templar.’

‘How so?’

‘You banter with them constantly yet you have not informed these heathen of the missive I bear from the Holy Father. Is it not true you offered to make truce with these devils?’

‘I am your escort and interpreter. That is all.’

‘Do you take me for a fool?’

Josseran turned away. He saw Juchi toss the remains of his breakfast into the fire, where the head popped and sizzled.

‘How I long for a good piece of roast hogget,’ William said and stumbled away to find his horse.

Josseran was worried about Kismet. The pace of their journey had wasted her. Since reaching the mountains there had been less feed and now she was no more than a skeleton. She struggled on, her spirit undaunted, but he did not think she could survive much longer.

At first he had thought the Tatar mounts ridiculous. They had thick necks and a dense coat and were barely taller than the pony on whose back he had first received instruction as a child. When he saw these supposedly fierce Tatar warriors on these yellow-brown mules, he could scarcely believe this was the cavalry that had laid waste half the known world.

He had been forced to revise that opinion. These squat, ugly beasts could ride forever at a gallop and even with the snow thick on the ground they were able to find their own feed, pawing at the ice with their front hooves to chew at the frozen and blackened vegetation beneath and somehow draw sustenance from it.