Silk Road (16 page)

Soon afterwards, Tekudai came to fetch them. ‘You must come,’ he said. ‘The hunt has begun.’

It was bitterly cold; Josseran threw on his
del
and boots. William followed him out of the yurt. Even he had now succumbed to Tatar ways; he had surrendered his sandals for stubby, felt boots and wore a thick Tatar robe over his black cloak.

They saddled their horses and followed Tekudai to the hill overlooking the camp. Qaidu was waiting for them, surrounded by his bodyguard, and hunched inside a great ermine coat. He wore all the trappings of a khan; his leather cuirass was richly studded with silver and there were carmine trappings on his horse and his wooden saddle was studded with jade.

‘We honour you,’ Qaidu said to Josseran as they rode up. ‘No barbarian has ever seen this.’ I have been on hunts before, Josseran thought. He imagined returning that evening with a few boar, perhaps some antelope. He had not the faintest idea of the slaughter that he was about to witness.

They rode hard for several hours, in the Tatar way, without a break. Kismet kept up the pace; she was in better condition for the rest at Qaidu’s camp and fattened by the feed she had found on the plain. Josseran was relieved; he had feared that he might lose her.

They reached the crest of a low hill. The blue-white peaks of the mountains surrounded them, like the rim of some giant bowl.

In the dawn light he made out a dark line of Tatar horsemen spread across the valley. These must be the cavalry he had heard
leaving the camp. Suddenly the line broke, the flanks galloping forward in two separate horns across the steppe.

A herd of antelope darted ahead, more than a hundred score of them, caught between the advancing wings of the cavalry. He heard their queer, quacking bleats as they stampeded across the frozen tundra. Some of them leaped high into the air above the backs of the herd, like fish jumping out of the sea. William gasped and pointed to the right where a pack of wolves were also running; they were joined by two snow leopards, panicked and howling, padding over the ice on the flank of the charge.

Now a herd of goats darted ahead, corralled by the horsemen.

‘In the name of God,’ Josseran breathed.

He had hunted stag and boar in the forests of Burgundy but he had never seen a hunt on a scale such as this. It was performed with startling precision. In France they used beaters and hounds to chase down their prey; when a quarry was sighted it was up to the lord or the knight to hunt it down and kill it. Compared to this, such sport was child’s play.

Here the Tatars used their entire army, acting in unison.

The horns of the Tatar advance were about to close, encircling the animals on the plain below.

‘This is how we drill our soldiers,’ Tekudai said. He had to shout to make himself heard above the drumming of hooves on the frost-hard ground. The riders themselves made no sound, wheeling and turning in total silence, their movements coordinated by the messengers who streaked between the commanders on their ponies, by signal flags, and by the occasional singing flight of an arrow.

‘Nothing may be killed until the khan himself gives the signal. If a single hare is lost from inattention that man is put in the cangue and given a hundred strokes of the cane.’

Josseran had been raised to believe that battle was a series of individual combats. Personal courage and skill was everything. It was only when he joined the Templars that he was trained to charge and wheel and turn about in unison with the rest of the cavalry. It was this iron discipline that had set the Templars and Hospitallers apart from all others as a fighting force in the Holy Land.

But it was nothing compared to what he witnessed now. When you fought the Tatar, he realized, you fought the entire horde
at
once
. The lightness of their armour and their weapons was in stark contrast to the heavy chain mail and broadsword of himself and his fellow Templars. Individually, these wild horsemen would be no match for a Frankish knight; but fighting and moving as a unit, as these men were doing now, they would carry all before them.

If he did not somehow return to Outremer with a truce, he could envisage the whole of the Holy Land being swallowed up by these devils.

Qaidu nodded to the lieutenant who attended him. The man took an arrow from his quiver. It was one of the signal arrows that Tekudai had showed him. The man fired it into the air and it whistled as it fell towards the warriors on the plain below.

It was the signal for the killing to begin.

One of the figures in that great circle of riders leaped from the saddle. Even at this distance he knew it was her by the flash of her purple scarf. Qaidu smiled wolfishly at him.

‘My daughter,’ he said. ‘I have given orders. No one is to kill until she has fired the first arrow.’

She left her weapons on her horse, even her quivers, and strode across the plain armed only with her bow.

‘She is allowed one arrow,’ Tekudai said. ‘She must kill with a single shot.’

There were thousands of beasts milling on the plain, wide-eyed with panic. Khutelun strode among them, apparently unafraid, holding just the slender bow.

A pack of wolves had detached themselves from the howling press of animals and now veered towards her, baying and scampering. She held the bow loosely in her right hand and waited.

‘She’ll be killed,’ Josseran murmured.

He looked around. Beside him, Khutelun’s father and brother watched, their faces like flint. Josseran returned his attention to the drama playing out below him. The wolves were closing on her. He felt an unexpected rush of fear. Why should I care what happens to some Tatar savage? he asked himself. What is it to me?

But his heart thundered.

Still she waited, letting the wolves come closer, the bow still at her side.

She has no nerves at all . . .

She raised the bow in one fluid movement and took aim. She is too late, he thought. The pack must overtake her now, before she has to time to loose her arrow.

Suddenly one of the wolves fell, pitching head over tail on the frosted ground, the arrow embedded in its throat. Immediately there was a singing of arrows from the riders behind Khutelun and a dozen more fell in a tangle of legs and bloody fur. But it was not enough to save her. She went down under the rush of the remaining beasts. Her companions rode in, firing one arrow after another into the pack.

Josseran looked at Qaidu.

Nothing. No expression at all.

He held his breath and waited. Khutelun lay face down in the ice.

Finally, a movement, and she stirred and rose slowly to her feet. One of her fellows held her horse’s rein and she limped towards him. Impossible to tell how badly she was hurt.

Qaidu grinned. ‘Ah, what a son she would have been! But a fine mother of khans!’

The killing continued for another hour. Then another singing arrow was fired into the sky, the signal for the slaughter to end. The iron ring of cavalry broke and the remaining animals were allowed to escape to the northern wastes.

The soldiers set to work, gathering the feast.

‘So,’ William murmured at his shoulder. ‘We shall not be eating mutton tonight at least.’

‘Have you ever seen anything as like?’

‘Savages at the hunt.’

Khutelun rode up the slope to greet her father. There was blood on the sleeve of her coat and on her trousers, but nothing in the way she held herself indicated that she was wounded. As she came closer he could feel her black eyes watching him out of her sun-coppered face.

He wondered what damage the wolves had done, what wounds were hidden by her thick robes. How could he be so affected by a
savage? She smiled hawkishly at him as she rode past, perhaps reading his thoughts. ‘Father,’ she shouted to Qaidu.

‘How are your wounds, daughter?’

‘Scratches,’ she said. She swayed a little in the saddle but recovered.

‘A satisfactory hunt.’

‘Thank you, Father.’

‘Congratulate your
mingan
. Tell them I am pleased.’

Khutelun grinned again, then she turned her horse to rejoin the soldiers on the killing ground below.

Josseran turned to Tekudai. ‘Will she be all right?’ he asked him.

‘She is a Tatar,’ he grunted, as if that were explanation enough, and said nothing more on the long ride back to the camp.

But on their return Josseran saw another side to his new friends.

William and Josseran had been invited to Tekudai’s yurt to drink koumiss and celebrate the hunt. A sudden crack of thunder overhead shook the ground under them. Gerel stampeded for the corner, burrowing under a pile of skins, while Tekudai’s wives and children screamed and cowered, the youngest taking refuge beneath their mother’s skirts.

Tekudai jumped to his feet, a loop of saliva dangling from his chin. He grabbed William by the shoulders and threw him across the yurt, kicking him out through the flap at the entrance.

He turned on Josseran. ‘Out! Outside!’

Josseran stared at him, astonished.

‘You have brought the anger of the gods down on all of us!’ Tekudai shouted.

‘It is just a storm,’ Josseran shouted over the hiss of the rain.

‘Outside!’ Tekudai dragged him to the entrance and pushed him into the rain-slashed mud.

William stared at the rolling black clouds, his hair stringy with rain. ‘What is wrong with them?’

Josseran shook his head. He picked William up by the arm and dragged him away, back to their yurt. They huddled together by the small fire, still soaking wet, steam rising from their sodden coats.
How to make sense of such people? Scourge of half the world, conquerors of Baghdad and Moscow and Kiev and Bukhara, and here they were, burrowing under their blankets, scared of thunder, like children.

A strange people indeed.

T
HERE WAS ONE
thing that continued to trouble him, gnawing at him every day, something he had to know. Why should this be of any consequence? he thought. But he had to have an answer.

It was a morning about a week after the storm; the skies were ice blue, the sun bouncing off the snows at the Roof of the World. He was riding with Tekudai on the hill above the camp. Tekudai carried a noose of rope on the end of a long pole, which he used to catch the horses they would take with them on their upcoming journey through the mountains. It required a great deal of skill and strength to snare the animals this way, for they were allowed to run half-wild across the steppe until they were needed and fought madly against capture. Across the valley other horsemen were performing the same task, their whooping cries and the hammer of horses’ hooves echoing from the valley walls.