Silk Road (23 page)

T
HEY HAD CROSSED
the Roof of the World looking for Prester John and the Magi of the Gospels but all they found beyond the watch-tower walls of Kashgar were the Mohammedans. It was not as Josseran had imagined the fabled land of Cathay but seemed only like another town of Outremer, with its
hans
and bazaars, arched porticoes and mosaic domes.

The people called themselves Uighurs. They did not have the almond-eyed and flat-nosed appearance of their Tatar escort. In fact they looked like Greeks and their language was very similar to the Turkic he had learned in Outremer. The Tatars, too, spoke it fluently, bastardized with a mixture of their own expressions.

They made their way to the bazaar, Khutelun and her soldiers clearing a path through the jostle of the streets behind the mosque where old men in embroidered prayer caps sat on the steps of the
iwan
and bare-legged children played in the trickle of a canal. The air was full of dust and tiny flies. Sweat ran down his spine and lathered his face.

Warren-like alleys spread out in every direction, the shadowy lanes shot through with bolts of yellow sun. Crippled beggars moaned and stretched out gnarled claws for alms. Barbers shaved the skulls of customers with long knives, smithies and bakers sweated in black-walled caves, the chink of metal and the cries of the hawkers mingled with the warm smells of baking bread and the taint of offal and excrement.

Josseran had seen many Arab markets in Outremer, but nothing like this. They were hemmed in by crowds on every side. He saw every colour of skin, from fair to nugget brown and every kind of costume: leather-skinned hawkers in turbans like Saracens; sand-blasted horsemen in fur-lined hats, sheepskins flapping against their
high boots; Tajiks in tall black hats. The Uighurs were distinctive for their knee-length black coats, while their women either wore colourful silk scarves or were hidden under thick brown shawls so long and shapeless that it was impossible to tell which way they were facing when they were standing still.

The wooden two-storey houses of the city crowded in on every side. Occasionally he looked up and saw a veiled face staring at him from behind an ornate window shutter, only to quickly disappear. Josseran gawped like a peasant at a fair. There were bolts of silk taller than a man, bulging sacks of hashish and huge calico sacks of spices, orange and green and pepper-red; hand-made ornamental knives glittered with jade and rubies; boiled goats’ heads stared smoke-eyed from crumbling walls and fatty sheep lungs boiled in vats. On the fretted wooden balconies of the teahouses whitebeards in long gowns sipped green tea and smoked bubbling tobacco pipes.

The market was a bedlam of animals: camels, the fearsome-looking horned cattle they called yaks, donkeys, horses and goats. The smell was overpowering; their droppings were everywhere. A camel roared close by, deafening him; a donkey shrieked through its brown teeth as it swayed and buckled under a monstrous load. They were forced against the wall by a cart, piled high with melons and cabbages and beans, the driver screaming, ‘
Borsh! Borsh!
’ as he tried to clear a path through the crowds.

Bearded Kirghiz horsemen galloped and wheeled across the maidan, churning up thick clouds of dust, while others haggled with the horse traders. A crowd had gathered for a cockfight, fierce hawk-eyed men shouting and shoving each other in the cockpit.

Khutelun strode ahead of them, leading her horse, unperturbed. She cut an exotic figure even among this Saracen throng in her purple
del
, her long silk scarf wrapped tightly around her head. Only the long braid of hair that straggled at her shoulder identified her as a woman. When she finally reached the animal pens, she got involved in a furious debate with a one-eyed camel trader.

‘What is she doing?’ William asked.

‘She says we must trade our horses for camels. After here we cross a great desert to arrive at Qaraqorum.’

‘A desert now? How much further will they lead us?’

‘Since it is far too late to turn back perhaps it is better that we do not know.’

Josseran felt eyes watching them from every corner of the bazaar. He imagined they were an unlikely spectacle in their makeshift Tatar robes. A beggar pawed at William’s sleeve; the friar shouted an oath at him and he recoiled. One of the Tatars rounded on the cripple and slashed at him with his whip.

Meanwhile Khutelun had grabbed the camel man’s robe in her fist. ‘You are trying to rob us!’ she growled at him. ‘May your private member grow cankers and rot like meat in the sun!’

‘It is a good price,’ the one-eyed man protested, still grinning like a lunatic, ‘you can ask anyone! I am an honest man!’

‘If you are an honest man, there is rice growing in the desert and my horse can recite suras from the Q’ran!’

And so it went on, Khutelun shouting insults and the camel man throwing up his hands in horror every time Khutelun offered him a lower price. If Josseran had not seen such commerce a thousand times in the medinas at Acre and Tyre he might have thought that Khutelun and the camel merchant were about to come to blows. Khutelun spat in the dust and shook her fist in the camel man’s face, while he raised his hands towards heaven and beseeched his god to intercede on his behalf before he was made destitute.

But there was no violence and no lives ruined that day in the bazaar. Instead, an hour later, Khutelun and her Tatars left Kashgar with a string of camels in place of their horses and the grinning one-eyed trader as their guide.

T
HE
K
ASHGAR OASIS
was spread a day’s ride across the plain, through avenues of poplar trees and fields of sunflowers and green wheat. Behind them, the ragged peaks at the Roof of the World were barely visible through the heat haze. Just a dream now.

They spent that night in a drab caravanserai, a fortified inn that provided safe haven from bandits in the lonely deserts. This one had stark mud walls devoid of windows, just slit holes for firing arrows. The only entrance was a barred gate of wood and iron. Animals were sheltered in a central courtyard; there was also a well for water and a mosque. Beside it was a cavernous hall with a high, vaulted roof and beaten-earth floor where travellers ate and slept together. The rules of the caravanserai were immutable, Khutelun told Josseran; it was a sanctuary from all violence. Even sworn blood enemies would not feud while they were inside the walls.

They ate a meal of mutton and rice and spices. Tiny grains of sand had inevitably found their way into the rice and crunched between their teeth. That would be the way of it from now on, Khutelun warned him. The desert would insinuate its way into everything.

Like the Devil, William answered, when Josseran translated what she had said.

‘If everything that is said becomes an opportunity for a sermon,’ Josseran answered, ‘then I shall leave you as a deaf mute for the rest of the journey.’

Just on sunset a rider appeared at the gates of the caravanserai. Josseran recognized him as one of Qaidu’s bodyguard. He had ridden hard from the west, and his horse was exhausted, its flanks streaked with froth. He whispered a message to Khutelun and she stalked away, white-lipped.

But whatever had happened, it seemed no one was of a mind to tell the barbarian.

They were the only travellers that night and spread themselves around the vast hall. Even down from the mountains the night was yet cold. Josseran shivered under a huddle of furs on the hard ground.

Shadows lit by the dying fire danced around the walls. The Tatars were subdued; they feared the desert more than they feared the Roof of the World.

He stared at the blackened beams of the roof and wondered how many other travellers had passed through this great vault over the centuries, merchants going east to Cathay or west to Persia, with their silks and spices and ivory and Roman coins. There must have been very few Christian men like himself. He had heard of Venetian traders who were supposed to have come this way, but if they had, they never returned to tell of it.

‘When will you make your confession to me?’ the friar whispered in the darkness.

‘I fear you are growing tiresome.’

‘Your soul is in danger.’

‘Let me worry for my soul.’

‘I have seen the way you look at the witch. Did you not take a vow of chastity when you joined your Order?’

‘My vow was not of lifelong obedience. I pledged five years to the Temple as penance. Those five years are almost done.’

William fell silent. Josseran thought he had fallen asleep.

‘So you are not a true knight of the Temple?’

‘I have faithfully fulfilled my pledge of service to the Order. When it is done I shall return to France. I have a manor house and a few poor fields that have doubtless been stolen by my neighbours in my absence.’

‘You abandoned your estate to come to Outremer? What sin required such a penance?’ When Josseran did not answer, William said: ‘Something must weigh heavily on your conscience.’

‘My service to the Order grants me remission from my earthly sins.’

‘You say the words but you do not believe them. I can see into your heart, Templar.’

‘I shall enumerate my sins to my confessor at the Temple on my return.’

‘Be sure I shall enumerate them also.’

‘I do not doubt it.’

‘Mend your ways if you wish to see France once more,’ William said, and then he rolled over and went to sleep.

Mend your ways if you wish to see France once more
.

He expected the good friar would accuse him of all manner of blasphemy and disservice before the Council on their return to Outremer. He knew what these Dominicans were like. He could drag this ingrate from the fires of Hell with his bare hands but if he winked at a harlot on the way out, he would report him to the bishop.

He tried to imagine being back in France again. He would have to find himself a wife, he supposed, talk to some of his neighbours about their daughters. He had left a bailie in charge of his affairs and he did not doubt that the man had robbed him blind in his absence and let the fields and the manor house fall into disrepair. He imagined arriving home in the middle of winter with no fresh meat in the larder, filthy rushes on the floor and half the servants asleep or run off.

He had forgotten most of their names. He wondered if even one of them would remember him either. So many memories slipping away from him. If it were not for William he wondered if he would remember France at all.