Silk Road (32 page)

D
AYS, WEEKS; FORMLESS
, endless, the monotony of the journey broken only by almost imperceptible changes in the desert surface and the vagaries of the weather. One morning broke warm and blue, but by noon the sky was leaden with clouds and the winds turned the horizon to an impenetrable yellow haze. The storm lasted an hour. By the afternoon the sky had cleared and the desert was once more a furnace.

The next morning they woke with ice in their beards.

Flat
gebi
stones gave way to sand, which flowed like breakers on a big sea and changed shape in the wind even as they watched. The dunes stretched as far as they could see, some as high as the walls of Antioch.

There were no birds, or lizards, or shrubs. The way ahead now was marked only by occasional clumps of crumbling
argol
and the bones of long-dead animals, bleaching under a relentless sun.

They spent two weeks in that howling wilderness, which One-Eye called the Storehouse of the Wind. It blasted them, day after day, the landscape constantly shifting and changing. When they camped at night One-Eye would tie an arrow to a long stick and plant it in the sand to indicate the direction they should take the next morning. Then they would huddle together under the cold stars, listening to the susurration of the sand, and in the mornings when they woke their surroundings had changed utterly and if it were not for their camel man’s stratagems they would have become hopelessly lost.

Once they came across the ruins of a large city. Josseran was walking beside his camel, One-Eye in front of him at the head of the string, Khutelun behind.

As they reached the crest of another great dune the camel man stopped in his tracks. Below them lay all that remained of a forest,
the gnarled fingers of the petrified trunks reaching from the ground like the fingers of a half-buried corpse. Beyond them the roofs of an ancient city protruded from the sand. In some places Josseran could make out the outlines of streets and laneways, in others there were just shapeless piles of rubble.

‘What is this place?’ Josseran asked.

‘I do not know the name of it,’ One-Eye answered, his voice dropping to a whisper, ‘perhaps it is the Golden City of the legend.’

‘What golden city?’

‘There is a story of a great king who built his capital here in the Storehouse of the Wind. The city had fabulous wealth, for this place was not desert then, there was an oasis here, larger even than Gaochang or Aksu. Stories of the riches that this lord possessed spread far and wide and a tribe came down from the steppes to attack him. After he had invested the town, the chief of the tribe sent a messenger to the king saying that if he gave him ten chests of gold he would leave in peace. But the old king refused. Every day the chief sent a messenger to the walls with his offer, but always the king sent him away with words of defiance. After a long siege the city fell and the king was taken prisoner and brought before the chieftain. Again he made the same offer, ten chests of gold and he would let the king have his life and he would leave the city and all the people in peace. But still the king refused. You see, the king loved the treasure more than his own life.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘The chieftain told him that if he loved his gold so much, then he should have it with him always, even in death. So he had him executed by pouring molten gold into his ears and eyes.’

Josseran shuddered. ‘And his city?’

‘The chieftain’s soldiers ransacked it but they did not find the gold they believed was hidden there. So before they returned to the north, they poisoned all the wells. Without fresh water the people died, the crops withered, the city crumbled away and was forgotten. But legend says the gold is still here somewhere, hidden underneath the sand.’

‘It sounds like a story a minstrel would tell around a camp fire.’

‘Perhaps you are right,’ One-Eye answered, and shrugged his shoulders.

Josseran watched the wind lift feathery grains of sand from the dunes and send them whispering through the crumbling walls. He remembered what Khutelun had said that night by the crescent lake: the days move on, the wind blows, men die, empires fall. What this city had once been, or how it had come to ruin, they would never know.

The wind howled again, sent grit whipping into their faces. Josseran heard again the strange rumbling of the sands, like the tramping hooves of some invisible army.

What if some marauders were to sweep down on us? Josseran thought. We would never suspect until it was too late.

That night Khutelun was visited in her dreams by the Spirit of the everlasting Blue Sky.

She dreamed she was shut inside the walls of a great palace and from her window she could see the grass of the steppe blowing in the wind. It looked like the ripples on a lake. She ran to find her horse but there were no doors and the window had a grille of iron bars.

She ran up some winding stone steps to the tower and reached out for the grasslands, so close and yet so far away. If only she could fly.
The only way out was to fly.
She woke calling out her father’s name in fear.

After the dream, she lay awake the rest of the night, unable to sleep. Her thoughts wandered inevitably to the Christian and his foul-smelling crow and their stories of palaces and churches and forts.

William could not sleep either. The closer they came to Qaraqorum, the easier his journey became. He realized now that God had been testing him, and he knew he had proved himself worthy. The Tatars were his destiny. The Papal despatch was merely God’s way of getting him beyond the known world.

He was to be an apostle of the new age.

At some future time, he would be spoken of in the same breath as the Church’s greatest disciples, his journey to Tatary compared to Peter taking the Gospel to Rome.
Saint William, the preacher who
brought God to the ungodly.
The agonies of this journey would all have been worth it. He could not wait for the morning, to ride atop of Satan to a new dawn. The heathen souls of half the world were in his hands.

I
T CAME OUT
of a blue sky, sweeping down from the north.

The camels sensed it first. They began to fidget and growl long before the first clouds appeared on the northern horizon. Then Josseran saw a dirty yellow haze creep quickly up the sky. Dust devils leaped and danced all over the plain, vanguards of the terrible onslaught to come.

It was still afternoon when darkness fell on the desert. The sun disappeared behind the thunderheads, and lightning flickered in sheets along the borders of the desert.

A cold wind whipped sand into their faces, as if flung at them from a giant fist.

The camels shrieked and pulled on the ropes. One-Eye shouted for everyone to dismount.

‘The
karaburan
,’ Khutelun shouted. The black hurricane.

A dun-coloured veil of dust rolled towards them across the desert, herded by the storm. It came on them quickly, like a wave rising from a calm sea. There was nowhere to shelter, nowhere to run.

There was a clap of thunder and the younger camels screamed and stamped their hooves. The older beasts knew what was happening and had already dropped to their knees and begun to bury their mouths and noses in the soft sand. One-Eye ran up and down the string, jerking on the nose cords of the younger animals to drag them to their knees, forcing their muzzles close to the ground.

‘Help me!’ he shouted to Josseran. ‘Otherwise they will suffocate!’

When the work was done, Josseran took the only shelter there was, crouched in the lee of his camel’s flank. The first sheets of rain swept towards them. A few minutes before they had been blistering in the sun. Now they shivered under a barrage of driving sleet.

He looked up, saw Khutelun, her face transformed by the storm-light, eyes wide. There was no mistaking the look on her face: the ice princess of the Tatars was afraid. Her companions, too, were jibbering like fools, shrieking and ducking with each peal of thunder.

‘It is a signal from Tengri,’ Khutelun shouted. ‘The Spirit of the Blue Sky is angry with us!’

It is only a storm, Josseran thought. Some rain and some thunder. How bad can it be?

Only a storm.

A storm, yes, but unlike any storm he had ever known. The wind howled like a banshee. Away to their left a massive dune had started to avalanche, the sands drumming down from the crest like the breaking of a golden wave.

And then the driving sleet turned to hail.

Khutelun huddled against the flanks of her camel. She was no more than a dozen paces away from him but was now almost invisible through the sheets of icy rain and wind-blown sand. Josseran stumbled over and threw himself down beside her.

‘Pull your hood over your mouth and nose!’ she shouted at him. ‘Or you will die!’

He did as she told him to do. She was right. There was sand in his eyes, his mouth, even his nose. Already it was almost impossible to breathe.

There was a terrible groaning, as if the ground itself was creaking open. Josseran pulled the hood of his robe further over his face, choking on grit.

Even in his terror he was aware of the closeness of her. He put an arm around her shoulders, a gesture of possession and protection, and he felt her inch closer to him. Now their bodies were touching. He even felt himself stirring, despite the upwelling of fear, or perhaps because of it.

He felt her arm close around his waist.

If it should end now, he thought, in this storm, if our bodies are buried entwined in the sand and never found, it would be a fitting
ending. Then I will never have to suffer the agony of leaving her, as I surely must. We will become dust devils, and dance forever on the Taklimakan.

They lay there for what seemed like an eternity, clinging to each other with the same urgency as they clung to life, surrounded by roaring, choking darkness. No words were spoken; none were possible. Yet Josseran knew that a pact had been joined.

The ice-wind whipped and tore at their clothes, sand and stones thrown into the air around them clashed in a maelstrom of noise, as if the Devil himself were cursing and shrieking at finding them in their embrace.