Silk Road (14 page)

When Josseran turned back to Khutelun, the mocking expression on her face had disappeared. She was looking at the priest with a wild and strange look in her eyes. The Tatars around her had fallen silent.

‘Tell him he must go back,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘He must go back. If he crosses the Roof of the World he will never find rest in his soul again.’

‘He cannot go back. He has his duty, as I have.’

There was a dangerous silence. The Tatars, both the men and the women, were watching Khutelun; even the lute player had set aside his instrument and the drunkards had stopped singing. She was staring at William; not at him, through him, somehow.

‘What is happening?’ William said.

‘I do not know.’

‘Why do they stare? Have we done something to incite them?’

Khutelun spoke again. ‘Tell your shaman that if he will not go back, he must learn to suffer.’

‘Suffering is something he enjoys.’

‘He does not even begin to understand what suffering is,’ Khutelun said, and then the look was gone from her eyes and she returned her attention to the mutton.

The moment passed. The talk and laughter resumed. The drinkers attacked the black koumiss with renewed vigour. But Josseran was shaken. He felt a chill along his spine as if the devil himself had stepped on his grave.

J
OSSERAN AND
W
ILLIAM
were given their own yurt near the centre of the great encampment, close to Qaidu’s
ordu
. Their Tatar hosts had lit a silver bowl of incense by the shrine of Natigay, and though William had quickly snuffed it out, its aroma lingered in the air. Josseran crawled under his blankets of animal skins and lay on his back staring at the sky through the smoke hole in the roof.

Josseran saw William on his knees silhouetted by the glowing coals in the fire. He murmured a prayer for their deliverance.

Josseran huddled further under the furs. He wished William would just shut up and sleep. His nerves were frayed and he needed rest. France, even Outremer, seemed such a very long way away tonight. It was as if they had arrived at some underworld. He had laughed at William’s superstition of giant ants and other beasts but now he, too, was afraid. At night it was harder to scoff at tales of men with tails and feet growing from their heads.

They were so far from Christ’s mercy. Few survived journeys such as this. Most were swallowed up in the fastnesses of these mountains, lost to Christendom forever, and were never seen again.

William was the only vestige of the familiar that remained to Josseran, his only anchor to the Christian world. What sad irony.

In Acre Thomas would be wondering why he had not returned with Hülegü’s response to their entreaties. Gérard and Yusuf would be growing beards down to their knees while they sat in some barred cell in Aleppo. Everyone else would have forgotten about them. Even the Pope, he suspected.

‘Do you wish to make your confession?’ William asked in the darkness.

‘My confession?’

‘We have been travelling these many weeks and you have not made confession.’

‘I have spent all my time in the saddle of a horse. It has not given me great opportunity to sin.’

‘How long since your last confession, Templar?’

More than ten years, he thought. It would be pointless to enumerate my small sins when there is an unwashable stain on my very soul that I cannot, or will not, speak aloud, especially to a priest. ‘In the Order we have our own chaplains who serve us.’

‘If that is so, then you know you should make penance regularly.’

‘When I feel the need for penance, Brother William, I shall advise you.’

Josseran rolled on his side and tried to sleep.

‘Why do I feel you carry a great burden with you?’ William said.

‘I do carry a great burden. He is a Dominican friar and his name is William.’

‘I know your opinion of me, Templar. But do not make the mistake of thinking me dull in the wits. I know when a man is greatly troubled. War may be your province. The vagaries of the spirit are mine.’

‘I thank you for your concern. Now go to sleep.’

Josseran closed his eyes but sleep would not come. He thought about this Khutelun, and of the black void that had come to her eyes when she looked at William and the way the Tatars had fallen silent around her. It was as if she could see inside his soul. Can she see inside mine as well? He hoped she could not, for it was not the monsters lurking beyond the Roof of the World that he feared most, but those hiding within himself.

K
HUTELUN HAD HAD
the gift for as long as she could remember. It had begun as an energy in her body she could not contain. She had never been able to stay still, even as a child; she had always found it difficult to sleep and several times she had wandered off in the night.

Her brothers would be sent out into the teeth of the wind to search for her in the darkness. Sometimes they could not find her. When she reappeared at the camp the next morning, frozen and wild-eyed, her mother would already be weeping for her, mourning her death.

Khutelun was always filled with remorse afterwards. But there was nothing she could do to stop. The gift would not allow it.

The strange urgings of her soul quieted after her first bleeding, but did not stop. Once she walked her horse to the lip of a cliff and imagined spurring over the ledge into space and the silence of the everlasting Blue Sky. She had thought how she might spread her arms and they would become the great, tawny wings of a falcon.

She could fly.

Fly
.

It was her brother, Tekudai, who found her, grabbed the reins and pulled her pony back from the edge.

Soon afterwards Tekudai became ill. Her father called for the shamans and they said their prayers over him, and on their advice three Kerait prisoners were cut open and their blood sprinkled on Tekudai’s body as he lay convulsing on his bed of furs. But still he became weaker.

Only the shamans ever entered a yurt when there was sickness for evil spirits could leap from one body to another and it was perilous for an ordinary person to come too close. But one morning Qaidu peered through the flap of the yurt and found Khutelun curled up beside her brother, fast asleep. He rushed in and carried her out,
wailing in despair, thinking that now he would lose a daughter as well as a son. But Khutelun did not fall sick.

Instead, Tekudai began to get well.

It was after this that she began to have visions. One day she went to her father and told him not to hunt that day because she had dreamed of a monster eating him. He had laughed away her protests. But that same afternoon, while he was retrieving his arrows from a fallen ibex, he was attacked by a bear. It ripped four great slashes in his chest and when they brought him home there was scarcely breath in him.

Khutelun stayed with him all through that night, sucking the clotted blood from his wounds. When her father survived, the other shamans came to her and told her she had the gift.

An old woman, Changelay, and a man, Magui, taught her the sacred rites and from that moment on Qaidu always consulted her whenever there were important decisions to be made.

But for Khutelun the gift was sometimes a burden. There were occasions when her knowing tormented her, as when she dreamed that one of the men of the tribe was bulling another man’s wife. She kept her silence, but was haunted by it until the man was killed in a battle with the Kermids.

She did not want this gift. She wanted to be free, like her brothers, to ride the steppes and gallop with her father.

But in the smoky dark of the night the spirits would talk to her and transport her across the steppe. At first these visions lasted no longer than a splinter of lightning in the mountains at night. But as she grew older she stayed longer and longer in the Otherworld, could sometimes glimpse to the very horizon of time. When the spirit was strong in her she could fly through the whole valley and see into everyone. But it was a dizzying experience and it left her exhausted.

Tonight she streaked across the Roof of the World with the barbarian with the fire-blond beard, twisting the shifting axis of the hours to see what lay ahead for her and for him. It was a terrible prescience, for the future that lay below her in the panorama of the seasons was too frightening to contemplate.

J
OSSERAN WOKE TO
the sound of a commotion outside. He got up and pushed aside the heavy flap at the entrance. A crowd had gathered on the plain, just beyond the first line of wagons. It was clear something of import was about to happen.

‘Some viciousness, no doubt,’ William said behind him.

Josseran threw on his furs and boots and set off. William hurried after him. The ground was hard, and dusted with snow.

Hundreds of Tatars, men, women and children, had gathered in a circle. The mood was festive. He had seen such flushed expressions before, at public executions in Orléans and Paris.

A woman stood in the centre of the circle, holding a plaited leather horsewhip in her right hand. She was young and sturdy, and there was a knife thrust into her belt.

A young man rode out from the camp and the crowd parted for him. His trousers were tucked into his leather boots, in the fashion of the people of these mountains, but his chest and back were bare.

‘What are they doing?’ William whispered.

‘I don’t know.’ Josseran turned, saw Khutelun standing a few yards away, her eyes bright with excitement.

The man rode slowly, circling the woman, who hefted the whip in her right fist, testing its weight. What was happening? Was this some sort of tribal punishment? If it was, the victim seemed cheerful enough.

‘He is going to let her whip him,’ William said, with sudden realization.

Josseran nodded. And then he added mischievously: ‘It is not too late for me to find you a horse. Perhaps you could join in.’

He left him and went to join Khutelun. As he turned his back he heard the whip crack.

There was such a look of savagery on her face. Not a woman at all, as I have known them, he thought. She is a primitive. A true lady does not take her pleasure in such spectacles.

‘What are they doing?’ he asked.

‘She is testing him.’

‘Testing him?’

‘He has asked her to marry him. It is now her right to discover if he would be suitable as a husband. He has to prove himself. What use is a weak husband? A woman cannot feed her children with kisses and endearments.’

The whip cracked again. Josseran turned around. The young man was still upright in the saddle, riding steadily. But already there were two bloody stripes across his back.

‘How long does this go on?’

‘Until she is satisfied.’

‘And if she does not want him for a husband?’

‘Then he must decide how long he can endure the whip. If he falls from the saddle he loses any claim to her. She is not expected to marry a man with no courage or strength.’

The whip cracked again and again. The young boy allowed no outward sign of pain to show. But the blood ran freely down his back now, staining his trousers. The girl wielded the whip once more.