Silk Road (36 page)

Late one afternoon they came in sight of one of the greatest cities Josseran had ever seen, larger even than Constantinople or Venice or Rome. The walls, he estimated, were seven or eight leagues around, disappearing into the mist on either side. Drum towers and pagodas rose in astonishing profusion.

Its name, Sartaq said, was Kenzan Fu, and it was where the Silk Road began. More than a million people lived there, he said.

‘This is where we shall meet Khubilai?’ Josseran asked him.

‘No, Barbarian,’ he laughed. ‘We go to a finer city than this!’

At the time Josseran thought this an idle boast.

But they did not stop at Kenzan Fu. Instead they followed the Yellow River north. It was swollen with rain and thick with mud, not yellow now but reddish-brown. They passed another great city which the Tatars called Tai Yuan and very late one afternoon came upon a sight that left Josseran open-mouthed in disbelief.

Ahead of them was a wall of beaten earth and mud brick. It stretched away for mile after mile across the hills, sinuous as a snake, before finally disappearing into the mist. It was the height of two or three men. Watchtowers had been built along its length in both directions.

‘By the balls of St Joseph,’ Josseran said.

Sartaq dismounted below the wall. They followed him, leading their horses up a causeway to the battlements where they again remounted, and started riding along the carriageway at the summit. They continued along these battlements not for hours, but for several days. They passed endless guardhouses. The soldiers who manned the walls were armoured like their escort, and carried the same green and white pennants.

They never reached the end of this astonishing structure. Long before then, they came to Shang-tu.

P
ERHAPS IT IS
well the gods intervened, Khutelun thought. Who knows what madness I might have undertaken if they had not?

I am a princess, a Tatar, the daughter of a great chieftain; he was a barbarian, and an ugly one at that. Yet he made my heart jump whenever I looked at him. I have never felt that way before when I was with a man of my own tribe, and now I ache to feel that way again.

Already I miss him. At night when I fly with the spirits of the everlasting Blue Sky, I shall seek him out again. I shall never forget him.

The anvil of a grey thunderhead drifted across the mountains. The summer rains had begun, and the whole countryside shimmered with water. The grass ocean of the steppe was carpeted in wild flowers, yellow, purple, carmine and violet, and the sheep grazing in the valley were already so fat they waddled like geese. In every yurt in every valley the leather bladders that hung inside the doorways were bloated, bulging with koumiss.

Faces appeared at doorways of the yurts dotted across the plain, hands shielding eyes from the glare of the sun, watching these strangers gallop past. The shepherds’ dogs would rush out at them, howling, running with them for a time before peeling away again and heading home.

A flock of wild geese flew across the sun. The desert was just a dream.

But such a dream! A dream that had cost the lives of sixteen of her brothers, as well as One-Eye, their camel man, his throat torn
out by a cavalryman’s lance. A dozen had been butchered there on the plain, by Khubilai’s horsemen, four more had died from their wounds on the long journey back across the Taklimakan.

After the ambush by Khubilai’s soldiers she had considered returning immediately to her father at Fergana. She had postponed that unpleasant prospect, deciding instead that Khubilai’s betrayal should first be brought to the attention of the Khan of Khans, Ariq Böke, in person.

She exchanged their surviving camels for horses in Kashgar and led the survivors of her party racing across the northern steppe. After the death of so many of her comrades she found it a comfort just to ride, to forget what had happened in the desert. It made it easier to forget, too, what Joss-ran had said to her by the crescent lake and how he had held her so tightly in the storm.

Such memories should now belong to another Khutelun.

One day they reined in their horses on a high ridge and looked down on Qaraqorum, the City of the Black Sands, capital of the Blue Mongol. On the lush pasture below, thousands upon thousands of felt yurts were spread over the plain. At the centre of this vast encampment the curlicued roofs of a handful of wooden pagodas glittered jade and yellow in the late afternoon sun. The
stupas
of a dozen temples pushed into the blue sky, the dome of a single Mohammedan church nestled among them. Beyond the city, the white necklace of the mountains was reflected in the flooded pasture.

And the desert was just a dream, she reminded herself again as she led the ragged remains of her escort down the hills towards Qaraqorum. Just a dream.

The defences of the city were a token, for the Great Khan of the Mongol Horde was unchallenged as the lord of all Asia. The earthen walls around the city rose to barely the height of a man, the moat scarcely as deep as that.

The entrance to the city was guarded by two stone tortoises. The imperial edicts of the Great Khan, the
yassaq
of Chinggis, were placed here, inscribed on stone tablets the height of two men, with dragons carved into the crown of the stele. They were written in the flowing Uighur script that the Tatars had borrowed from one of their vassal peoples.

By the strength of Eternal Heaven, and by order of the Universal Ruler of the Empire of the Mongol . . .

Khutelun had journeyed here just once, with her father, for the
khuriltai
that had elected Möngke Khan of Khans. She had been just a child then, and her memories of the city were vague, its wonders magnified by her child’s innocence. It had seemed impossibly huge then.

In fact there were just a handful of buildings at its heart, the wooden pagodas of the palace and some granaries and stables of rough-hewn stone. There was also a cramped quarter of mud brick and thatch, home to the Cathay saddle smiths who plied their trade in the muddy streets.

As they entered the city they were swallowed up in the milling chaos of the sheep market. They walked their horses through thick, stinking mud, heard the babble of a dozen different languages, the deafening bleating of animals slaughtered or sold.

They passed a great house with swooping red roofs, the lintels adorned with golden dragons. Ahead of them were the walls of the palace. She heard the chanting of monks, the rattle of a shaman’s drums.

They came to two massive wooden gates, studded with nails. The imperial guards stepped forward and asked for their weapons and they were questioned as to their business. Her identity established, Khutelun and her companions were escorted by the officer of the guard to the customs house, a long and narrow building supported on thick wooden pillars. There was a brick stove in the centre of the room where the guards warmed their hands. They eyed Khutelun and her companions with cold suspicion.

Finally they were given permission to pass through another gateway and into the silent heart of Qaraqorum.

The palace of the Khan of Khans rose above the marsh on a mound of beaten earth. Its design had been borrowed from the Cathays. Dragons writhed up the colonnades, its tiered roof ended in curlicues of lacquered tiles in vermilion, jade and gold.

Storehouses and treasuries and the private apartments of the Golden Clan clustered around it; the lesser palaces where the court secretaries attended to the business of the Khaghan’s empire were connected to it on raised pathways, like the spokes of a wheel.

She glimpsed another mound at the far end of the royal enclosure, on which large yurts of white felt had been constructed. By day the Khan of Khans and his princes might now receive their visitors in this grand palace, but at least they still slept with a smoke hole above their heads at night like true Tatars.

To the Cathays it was known as the Palace of a Myriad Tranquillities; the Tatars themselves called it simply Qarshi, the Palace.

The entrance hall was supported on thick, lacquered poles, and there was a vaulted roof, raging with gilt dragons. Khutelun and her escort stopped before three massive doors, glittering with gold leaf, guarded on either side by the figures of a bear and a lion.