Silk Road (28 page)

‘You would like to be my guest, sir?’

Josseran hesitated. ‘Your wife,’ he asked. ‘She is beautiful?’

The man bobbed his head. ‘As God wills.’

An honest answer, at least.

William drew back his shoulders. ‘You must stay here at the palace. I forbid this!’

‘You may not forbid me anything! I shall stay where it pleases me to stay!’

‘Then may God have mercy on your soul!’ William said in a tone that implied he hoped He would not. He stalked away.

One-Eye looked quizzically at Josseran. ‘He does not like women?’

Josseran shook his head. ‘He abstains from all flesh.’

‘Not even, you know, the occasional sheep?’

Josseran wondered in what dangerous pursuit their camel man had lost his eye. ‘You will not spurn this man’s hospitality?’ One-Eye persisted. ‘He is eager to earn favour with his gods.’

Josseran hesitated, glancing at Khutelun, who pointedly looked the other way. Damn her. Should he pauper himself waiting for riches he would never see?

Well, he is after all just a man, Khutelun thought as she made her way back to her quarters. What of it? Her own father had his private harem, the Great Khan in Qaraqorum had a hundred women at his disposal, or so she had heard. Besides, this Joss-ran was just a messenger from a barbarian country, why should she care where he spent his nights or what mares he mounted?

And yet this man troubled her. Before he came to the steppes her destiny was clear; she might stay the hour as long as she could, but one day she knew she must marry a strong and suitable prince from another clan and have children by him. That would be her life.

Before now she was resigned to it.

So why did her heart now rebel at the prospect? Surely she could not love a barbarian? The very thought was repugnant. Her life was on the steppe, with a Tatar chief like herself, where she would raise her children with the wind in their hair and the grass of the steppe under their feet.

And yet she cursed the Uighur and all his family. She hoped his wife had the face of a camel and his daughters all smelled like goats.

That night the
darughachi
had arranged a feast in honour of his guests but Khutelun failed to appear. When one of her officers went to fetch her from her quarters she sent him scurrying from the room with a well-aimed kick. As he slammed the door shut behind him he heard her knife slap into the wood a few inches from his face. He fled.

Alone, in a foul temper, she watched the shadows creep across the floor. She drank three bowls of black koumiss and passed out in a dead sleep on the floor.

L
IKE ALL THE
houses in Gaochang, the man’s home was built of mud brick. There was a
khang
in the centre of the room, for baking bread and roasting meat. Rugs hung from the walls, butter yellow and ruby red. An arched doorway led to a courtyard at the rear, which was shaded by a trellis with trailing vines.

His wife stood in the middle of the room, in a robe of home-spun silk. She wore heavy brown stockings and her hair was covered with a brown veil. Even after five years of abstinence I could as well mount my horse as mount her, Josseran thought grimly. Her daughters stared at him wide-eyed. They both wore velvet caps, what the local people called
dopas
, traced with gold thread. They wore pretty blue glass necklaces and their hair was braided in plaits as far as their hips. Only their kohl-darkened eyes were visible behind their veils.

His hostess poured water from a ewer and washed her hands three times, as etiquette required. She indicated that he should do the same. Then she bade him enter.

‘Allah send down from heaven a legion of angels for our protection,’ she murmured to her daughters. ‘Look at the size of him! If his feet are any guide we must pray to merciful God to strike his member with a withering disease or we are all dead! And look at that nose! He is as ugly as a dead dog and I wager he has the manners of a pig!’

Josseran blinked and wondered what to do. He did not want to humiliate his hostess. ‘What did you say?’ Josseran asked her with sudden inspiration. ‘A thousand apologies. I was wounded once about the head and since then my hearing is not what it was.’

‘You speak Uighur?’ the woman said, appalled.

‘I have a few words.’

‘My mother complimented you on your fine beard and fire-coloured hair,’ one of the girls giggled.

Josseran grinned back at her. ‘Thank you. I am honoured to be invited into a home where three such beautiful women abide.’

The wife smiled and bobbed her head, her face betraying fear as well as relief. ‘The lord is very kind,’ she said. ‘Tonight our home is yours and we are honoured to have such a master!’

They took
dastarkan,
a formal supper. A cloth was placed on the floor and the women brought fruit and the flat bread they called
nan
. Josseran sat with his palms uppermost, then passed them over his face in a downwards motion, as if he was washing his face, bringing thanks to Allah for the food and a blessing on the family. The three women watched him, amazed that this barbarian knew the ways of a civilized person.

Afterwards they served him sweet white wine and something they called – and he translated as two words –
ice cream
. They served this delicacy to him in a terracotta jug and watched, giggling, while he scooped the delicious sweet into his mouth and asked for more.

He asked them how this wonder was prepared and the wife told him it was made from a mixture of butter and milk to which they added vanilla as flavour. This concoction was then stored underground in the cellar, and kept cold by packing it in ice which was hacked from the distant glaciers and transported across the plain in the winter months.

After his third bowl he sat back, replete. The silence grew.

By now the daughters had removed their veils. He noted that they were not displeasing to the eye. They were round-faced and cheerful, with pretty smiles and playful eyes. They were as curious about him as he was about them, it seemed. They kept staring at his boots. He knew what they were thinking: women in the East thought they could judge the size of a man’s member by the size of his feet.

The wife finally stood up and indicated that he was to follow her. She led him across the courtyard into a separate house; the girls followed, still giggling into their hands. He found himself in a large
room, with a cistern of dark, tepid water at its centre. The mother stood there and waited.

‘What is it you want?’ he asked her.

‘Take off your clothes, please, lord,’ she said.

Another outbreak of giggling.

Josseran shook his head. Stripping in front of three women?

But the wife was insistent. She tugged at his tunic. After almost a month in the desert it was stiff with dirt and dust. ‘I will wash it for you, lord. First we shall give you your bath.’

Josseran was not afraid to bathe, as some of his countrymen were. In Outremer he bathed often, as the Mohammedans did. But he performed his toilet privately. ‘I would rather bathe alone,’ he said.

‘You are the lord tonight,’ the wife said. ‘It is our duty to give you your bath.’

Josseran relented. ‘If that is your wish.’

He removed his tunic and hose and the three women gasped. He gave them an abashed smile. ‘Among my own it is not considered a lance of any great length or girth. But I am flattered that you think it so.’

They made him stand on the tiles while they drew water from the cistern with wooden bowls. They washed the dust from his hair and his body, clucking and giggling like hens, pulling at the forest of hairs on his chest and belly, prodding the various parts of him as if he were a camel at the bazaar. They seemed both repulsed and fascinated in equal measure.

Afterwards they dried him and then the wife gave him the long robe that belonged to her husband.

By the time they returned to the house it was sunset. The wife lit an oil lamp. ‘This way,’ she said and led him to their sleeping quarters. The two daughters sat next to him on the bed and for the longest time no one spoke or moved.

‘Do you all intend to stay?’ he wondered aloud.

‘You are the lord,’ the wife said. ‘It is for you to say.’

Josseran hesitated. Perhaps the wife read the expression in his eyes, for she nimbly got to her feet, placing the lamp in a niche in the wall. ‘I shall bid you good night,’ she said. ‘May you rest well.’

And she went out, drawing a curtain across the doorway.

Josseran looked at the two daughters. They were not giggling any more.

One of them, the youngest, stood up and took off her gown. He stared at her in wonderment. In the soft yellow light of the lamp she appeared as fragile as porcelain. She had no hair anywhere on her body except on her head. He had heard that Mohammedan women shaved their bodies with sharpened scallop shells.

Her sister was the same, except a little plumper. He felt himself stirring. He heard Catherine’s voice whisper to him from the shadows:
Forget everything, Josseran, forget everything tonight except me.

The two girls lay down on the bed either side of him. They both looked a little frightened.

The older girl took it upon herself to open his robe. ‘The lord is mighty,’ she whispered.

He reached out a hand. ‘You have nothing to fear. I shall be gentle.’

Suddenly the curtain was thrown aside and the lady of the house romped into the room, chortling. She was naked. She threw herself on him with an abandon that would have shocked him had he not spent so much time in the brothels of Genoa on the way from France.

She wrapped her thighs around him and rolled him on top of her. They joined violently. He supposed she must have done this sort of thing before.

The two younger women watched. To his eternal shame he found that their presence spoiled his performance not at all.

The dim-lit saints and their attendant angels mounted the pillars of the great church, drawn in thick brushstrokes of black and gold. Icons of the Virgin flickered in the glow of candles while an old woman with a brown and toothless face poured oil into the lamps that were set in niches around the mud-brick walls.