Silk Road (26 page)

‘A woman is not just a warm place for your desires, Christian. She is also a hungry mouth and she possesses a womb with which to grow children. It is not a man’s appetite that constrains his desire for women, it is his wealth. Chinggis says that, by law, a man may not take another man’s wife for his pleasure; for that is indeed a crime. But that is only because it endangers the peace of the clan, not because it offends the Spirit of the Blue Sky.’

Josseran had never imagined he might talk so frankly with a woman about such matters. Yet out here, beneath the cold vault of stars and amidst the loneliness of the desert, he felt free from the constraints of his society and the tyranny of his God. But God was the god of all men, surely, and not just the god of the Franks?

‘Tell me,’ she asked him, ‘this confession you talk about, this thing you do with your shamans. What is it you tell them?’

‘We tell them our sins.’

‘Your sins?’

‘Lusting after women. Fornication.’

‘Is it only the things you do with women, then, that you must tell them?’

‘Not just that. Our falsehoods, our violence to others. Also our impure thoughts.’

‘Your thoughts?’

‘If we are envious. Or if we are too proud.’

‘You are ashamed, then, of those things that make you a man and not a god.’ She sounded puzzled. ‘Does this stop you sinning? Do you feel better when you do this?’

‘Sometimes. I still live in fear of being punished for eternity.’

‘You have a god who makes you weak, then punishes you for your weakness. Do you not find that strange?’

He did not know how to answer her. Once again he had failed his faith. He could not even defend his religion in debate with a Tatar woman! Instead he said: ‘You said you saw an old man riding with me in the mountains.’

‘You do not believe me.’

‘It is hard for me to believe it. Yet I am curious.’

‘The old man is there whether you believe it or not. He is there if you are curious or not.’

‘If it were true, I think I know who that man is.’

‘I tell you what I see. I do not wish for your explanation of it. It is not necessary.’

‘You describe my father.’

‘Your father is dead?’ When he nodded, she said: ‘Why is that strange to you, Christian? Our ancestors are with us always. We must honour them or they will bring us bad luck.’

‘Do you believe the ghost of my father would follow me here to protect me?’

‘Of course. Why else would he be there, riding behind you?’

‘Why else? As a curse.’

‘If he curses you, why did he not throw you off the mountain when you went to save your shaman?’

Josseran could not answer her. He wanted desperately to believe her. He also wanted to hold her. He felt his heart hammering against his ribs and there was an oily warmth in his groin and belly. ‘I have never known a woman like you,’ he murmured.

For one wild moment he imagined reaching for her and placing a kiss on her lips. He even hoped that she might reach for him first, that they might bundle together under this great blanket of stars even with their companions asleep just a few feet away.

But instead she said: ‘I am tired now. I am going to sleep.’

After she had slipped away into the dark he huddled on the ground, confused, exhausted, and unable to rest. His mind and his heart were in turmoil. He put his head in his hands. ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered into his cupped fingers.

The moon rose over the desert. He listened for his father’s voice.

T
HEY SET OFF
once again, heading east. Ranged to their left were the mountains that the Tatars called the Tien Shan, the Celestial Mountains. Ice caps glittered against an indigo sky, while below them the spurs of the foothills were gouged with steep gullies, giving them the appearance of the paws of some crouching beast. Day after day they rode, watching the mountains change with the passage of the sun, from the soft pinks of dawn to the coppers and metal greys of midday, the violets and maroons of twilight.

Everywhere on the plain they saw bones, the bleaching skeletons of horses and camels and donkeys, occasionally even the grinning skull of a man.

They were skirting the great desert of the Taklimakan, One-Eye said. Translated from the language of the Uighurs, it meant ‘go in and you will never come out’. But they would not venture near the maw of the Taklimakan, One-Eye assured him. Oases ringed the dead heart like strings of pearls on the neck of a princess. ‘Unless there is a bad storm and we become lost, we will stay well away.’

‘How many times a year are there such storms?’ Josseran asked him.

‘All the time,’ One-Eye answered and broke into his peculiar cackling laugh.

The desert was a drab plain of gravel and flat stones that the Tatars called
gebi
. But when Josseran stopped to examine one of these stones he found they actually contained brilliant colours, both red and aubergine. But soon the
gebi
plains gave way to a salt pan of heat-cracked mud with a friable white crust, which in turn surrendered to a wasteland of grey hard sand. It seemed to merge into the heat haze so that there was no longer a horizon between the land and the sky. As they left the mountains behind it seemed that they
were not travelling anywhere at all, but trudging the same mile over and over again, day after endless day.

Once, another caravan passed them, heading west to Kashgar. The camels’ backs were draped with large oval blankets under their wooden saddle frames, each animal bearing two great bolts of silk on either side. The shouts of the camel driver and the jangle of the camel bells carried to them on the hot wind.

‘Do you know where that silk is going?’ he shouted to William. ‘Venice.’

‘How do you know that?’ William shouted back, bouncing on the back of his camel.

‘This is the Silk Road! Have you not heard of it? The Mohammedans travel along it every year to barter for those silks in the bazaars at Bukhara and Tabriz and Baghdad. But none of them have ever been further along it than Persia. But now Josseran Sarrazini has seen where the great road starts!’

‘I don’t see any road,’ William said.

‘Because there is no road. Yet traders have been coming this way with cargos of silks since the days of our Holy Book.’

‘You mean that camel man will drive his camels all the way to Baghdad?’

‘No, he’ll sell his load in Kashgar. The Silk Road is like a chain. He’ll trade for coriander or jade in the bazaar. Someone else will take his silk over the mountains and exchange it for dates and glass. And so it goes, until some bishop in Rome buys it for his mistress!’

‘Did you tell this story just to bait me, Templar?’

‘Indeed no. I thought it might interest you. Are you telling me that none of the bishops you know keep mistresses?’

‘They will answer for their sins when the day comes. As you will answer for yours.’

‘At least I shall be in good company.’

As he watched the caravan disappear into the rippling mirage of the Taklimakan, Josseran felt himself caught in the sweep of history. For centuries these camels had been trudging across this desert with their precious cloth, and only these last few years had anyone finally discovered how it was made. Incredibly they cultivated the cocoon of a certain kind of
moth
! William might call these people savage. To him they were an endless source of fascination.

E
ACH DAY BEGAN
at dawn with One-Eye rising silently and spreading his prayer mat in the direction of Mecca. He then performed his prayer ritual, kneeling, bowing and prostrating himself on the ground, his palms held upwards in supplication to Allah.

Afterwards he drove the camels to their loads. With a jerk of their nose strings he brought them on to their knees one by one so the Tatars could heave their baggage over the wooden pack saddles that straddled their humps. The hemp cords that secured them were then tied under the beasts’ chests, despite their roars of protest, to which he paid not the slightest attention. Then, with the eastern sky a dusky orange and the last freezing stars yet in the sky, they rode once more into the desert sunrise.

For the desert crossing One-Eye had tied the nose cord of one camel to the pack saddle of the one behind so that all the camels were in a string. The last camel in the line had a bell at its neck. One-Eye knew that if he could not hear the bell then one or more of the camels had broken free. Josseran soon became accustomed to the soft tinkling sound it made, together with the rhythmic thudding of the camel pads on the hard sand, the somnolent creaking of the ropes, and the whispered ‘sook-sook’ of their camel man as he walked ahead, leading the way.

The hot wind sucked them dry. Josseran could no longer feel his lips, which were swollen with a hard crust of cracked and parched skin. There was no water to wash but it was of no consequence because the desiccated air stopped any perspiration from collecting on the skin. Even William had lost his stink.

The thorny tamarisk bushes were the only vegetation that survived here. The wind had weathered the ground around them, leaving them exposed in purplish clumps. But even in the most
desolate places herds of wild goats grazed on them, somehow drawing sustenance from this Devil’s land.

Their meagre diet had left him weak. He feared he was going mad; the endless sky and the grey, featureless desert melted into one another and even time itself became featureless. The heat rising from the desert floor created ghosts on the horizon, the phantoms of trees and castles, and in the afternoons, when his eyes were fatigued and his throat parched, he would see mountains in the distance only to realize a few moments later that they were merely a handful of stones. Or he would see vast lakes and when he looked again they had gone.

To keep himself sane, he tried to recall the songs of the
jongleurs
in the marketplaces at Troyes and Paris, or recite his psalms and paternosters. But the heat and exhaustion had somehow robbed him of his ability to engage in even such simple tasks. His thoughts wheeled erratically and sometimes he forgot where he was.

He was tormented constantly by thirst. Occasionally they came across a shallow basin of baked mud and reeds, and with it a few pools of brackish water. Insects skated across the suds on the surface. The Tatars would cheerfully replenish their water bottles from this richly flavoured soup.

Out in the desert dust storms danced and whirled like wraiths.

Khutelun saw him staring at them one evening as they made camp on the
gebi
plain. ‘Ghost spirits,’ she said.

‘There is always a pair,’ he murmured, ‘spinning in opposite directions.’

‘The Uighurs say they are the spirits of two lovers from different clans who were not allowed to marry, because of a feud between their tribes. Unable to bear the thought of living apart they ran off into the desert to be together and perished in the sands. Now they spend their days dancing and running through the hills.’

‘So now they are free?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if you believe the legend. Now they are free.’

The oasis towns would appear dramatically from a grey skyline. Suddenly there would be a thin, green border to the horizon, they would see trees gathered beside a rippling lake, but then within minutes they would disappear again into the haze.