Silk Road (19 page)

T
HE CLOUDS PLUNGED
from the high summits, rolling and broiling like smoke, and the earth under their feet turned to shale. All colour was leeched from the world.

Occasionally, through breaks in the cloud, they saw barbicans of white appear for just a moment before disappearing again. Eagles watched them from the crags, or rode on the freezing winds that were channelled through the cols.

Their ponies’ hooves slipped on the loose scree, the rocks tumbling hundreds of feet and they never heard their fall. The horses gasped and fought for breath, and as soon as they reached the crest of a ridge they would have to dismount and lead the beasts clattering and slipping down to the valley on the other side.

They climbed higher and higher.

One evening they reached a high col and for a moment the clouds parted. Josseran looked back and saw the lonely tablelands of the Kazak shepherds far behind them. Then the grey clouds and soft snow closed around them once more, like a curtain, leaving them alone with the clink of horses’ hooves on shale, the sound of William’s voice as he shouted his prayers to the echoing mountain passes, the distant baying of a wolf. Beside the track the bones of a long-dead horse crumbled into the snow.

The Roof of the World was still far above them, cold and terrible.

When they climbed above the tree line there was nowhere to tie off the reins of the horses. Instead Khutelun showed Josseran and William how to fix their lead reins around the front legs of their horse as a hobble, then showed them the special quick-release knot
the Tatars used. The horses seemed accustomed to this treatment. Josseran never once saw a Tatar pony protest at having its legs handled.

Josseran was surprised at the relationship between the Tatars and their horses. Although they were without exception the best horsemen he had ever seen, they did not forge any bond with their mounts, as Christian or Saracen knights did. They would not treat a stubborn horse with cruelty nor would they treat a good horse with any particular affection. They did not talk to them or stroke them or give them any encouragement at all. At the end of a day’s ride they would simply give their mount a brisk curry with a wooden blade to scrape away the dried sweat and then the horses were immediately hobbled and turned loose to forage for themselves, for the Tatars did not find feed for their ponies, even in the snows.

Josseran himself worried endlessly over Kismet. He did not think she would survive long up here.

They were in the high valleys now, where not even the hardy Tajiks or Kirghiz would venture. For the last few nights they had huddled under makeshift canvas tents. They stacked saddlebags as low ramparts against the encroaching wind and snow. Tonight, as the sun sank below the Roof of the World, Kismet stood miserable and shivering. She was starving, a parody of a horse, her bones visible beneath her skin. She twitched in the last of the sunlight as the shadows of the cliffs crept towards her and whimpered when Josseran stroked her scrawny neck.

He whispered a few words of comfort into her ear, knowing that unless they came down off these mountains soon, he would lose her.

‘Not far, my brave Kismet. You must keep your courage. Soon there will be rich grasses to eat and the sun will warm your flanks again. Be brave.’

‘What are you doing?’

He looked around. It was Khutelun.

‘She is suffering.’

‘She is a horse.’

‘Kismet has been with me for five years. I have had her ever since I first arrived in Outremer.’

‘Kismet?’

‘It is the name I gave her,’ he said, stroking the horse’s muzzle. ‘It is a Mohammedan name. It means “fate”.’

‘Her name?’

‘Yes, her name.’

Khutelun gave him a look one might give an idiot found playing with his own excrement.

‘You do not give your horses names?’ he asked her.

‘Do you give names to the clouds?’

‘A horse is different.’

‘A horse is a horse. Do you talk to your sheep and your cattle as well?’

She was mocking him, perhaps, but she was also trying to understand. She was the only one of the Tatars who was genuinely curious about him. Although he had taught himself their language, and he could communicate with them easily now, they did not ask him questions about himself or his country, as Khutelun did. They accepted his presence with brute passivity.

‘You despise your own holy men, yet you love your horses. You are a difficult people to understand.’ She turned and looked back towards their camp: strips of canvas whipping in the mountain wind, their scrap of shelter for the night. She watched William struggle with his saddlebag, leaning into the wind as he staggered towards the tent.

‘What is in the bag that is so precious to him?’

‘It is a gift for your Great Khan.’

‘Gold?’

‘No, not gold.’ He had learned that the friar had brought with him an illuminated Bible and Psalter, together with the essential regalia of his profession: a missal and surplice and silver censer. He guarded them as if they were the greatest treasure on earth; the Bible especially, for no one outside the church was allowed to have in their possession either an Old or a New Testament. Josseran himself possessed only a breviary and a Book of Hours.

‘Why does he guard them like that? If we were going to murder you for your trinkets we would have done it in more comfort a moon ago.’

‘I don’t know,’ Josseran said. ‘The only valuable thing he has is a censer made of silver.’

She nodded, thoughtfully. ‘I doubt if our new khan will be much impressed. After the
khuriltai
, he will have mountains of silver and gold.’

‘William hopes to impress your khan with our religion.’

‘Without magic?’ She seemed incredulous. She turned around in time to see him stagger and fall on the ice. ‘He is not even going to impress the street sweepers. That is, if he gets to Qaraqorum, which I cannot imagine.’

‘You underestimate him. He enjoys his sufferings as much as you enjoy your mare’s milk. It spurs him on. He will get there.’

‘May I see this Bible?’ she asked suddenly.

‘You must ask Brother William.’

‘And he will refuse. But not if you were to ask him for me.’

‘Me? He thinks I am a devil. He won’t give it to me. He is very jealous of it.’

‘Tell him it is his opportunity to impress a Tatar princess with his religion.’

Josseran wondered how much weight this argument might carry when William considered her not a Tatar princess but a Tatar witch. ‘I will do what I can.’

He stared at her, unashamedly. So much of her beauty, or her beauty as he imagined it, was hidden under her furs. Or was it? He was curious about her body but it was her eyes that kept him trans-fixed. When he looked at her, it was as if he could look into her soul.

‘Can you really see the future?’ he asked her.

‘I see many things, sometimes in the present, sometimes things still to come. It is not something I wish for. I have no control over this gift.’

Gift! Josseran thought. In France, the priests would not call it a gift. They would put you to the rack and then have you burned!

The sudden dark descended, leaving them alone with the mournful howl of the wind.

‘It is late. I must check the guards. I shall leave you to finish your conversation with your horse. Perhaps later you will share its thoughts with us.’

And she laughed and walked away.

S
UMMER CAME TO
the Roof of the World for just a few weeks and this early in the spring nothing grew. There was just a restless, snow-bitter wind that moaned and murmured hour after hour, rasping the nerves.

At times they pulled their horses through snowdrifts into the teeth of a gale, following a series of finger ridges that snaked ever upwards into a sheer spine of rock. The air was thin here and William seemed on the point of collapse. His face was tinged with blue and his breath wheezed in his chest.

The wind was a constant, tireless enemy. Josseran found he could not speak or even think because of it. It buffeted them with invisible fists, trying to drive them back, raging at them day after day.

One afternoon, the clouds vanished for an instant, and they saw on the other side of the valley the scars of shale and liver-coloured earth that had been carved into the blue-white massifs of the glaciers. An ochre river, coiled like a vein between the mudslides of shale and ice, twisted down to a patchwork of shadowed green valleys, perhaps a full league below them.

It was like looking over the earth from heaven.

Khutelun turned in the saddle, her scarf whipping in the wind. ‘You see,’ she shouted. ‘The Roof of the World!’

Josseran had never felt so small. Here were the dimensions of God, he thought, the length and breadth of Him. This was raw religion.

Up here I am a long way from the man I thought I was. Every day I feel another piece of me is stripped away and I become a stranger to myself. No longer subject to the Rule, or in the thrall of the Church, I have such wild and blasphemous thoughts. It is a savage freedom this journey has afforded me.

He looked at William, slumped over his horse, the hood of his cowl pulled over his face. ‘We are far from Christ here!’ he shouted at him.

‘No man is ever far from Christ, Templar!’ William shouted over the roar of the gale. ‘The hand of God guides and protects us, even here!’

You are wrong, Josseran thought. The god that lives here has no dominion over me.

The corpse had turned black in the frost. The eyes were gone, torn out by birds, the entrails opened by animals. It appeared above them for a moment through the mist. It had been placed on a crag above the track, an arm hanging stiff over the lip of the rock. It was impossible to tell if it was male or female.

‘By the balls of St Joseph, what is that?’ Josseran muttered.

‘It is the custom,’ Khutelun said. ‘In the valleys we consign our dead to the worms. In the high passes they leave theirs for their gods.’

William made the sign of the cross. ‘Heathen,’ he spat.

They saw two other corpses, in various stages of disrepair. And the next day, as they were passing through a narrow defile under a fist of black frost-cracked rock, Josseran heard something fall and he cried out an alarm, thinking it was a rock. Behind him, something landed on William’s shoulder in a shower of small stones. It looked for all the world like a giant black spider. William shrieked and his pony shied, loosening the scree under its feet, and almost threw him.

It was Josseran, closest to him, who turned Kismet on the narrow trail and grabbed the reins of William’s mount and calmed her.

William stared at the rotted thing that had tumbled on to him from the unseen corpse twenty feet above.

‘There you are, Brother William,’ Josseran said. ‘The hand of God.’

The roar of his laughter echoed through the lonely mountain trails.