Silk Road (37 page)

The keepers of the palace, members of the Great Khan’s own bodyguard, again searched them for weapons, then a chamberlain came to escort them inside. They entered at the southern end of the hall, taking great care not to step upon the threshold, and were ushered into the presence of the Power of God upon the Earth, Master of Thrones, Ruler of Rulers, the Great Khan of the Blue Mongol.

I
T WAS THE
most breath-taking sight she had ever seen.

The glazed aquamarine tiles beneath her feet seemed to shimmer, as if she were walking on the surface of a lake. The colonnades on their granite bases were painted crimson and lacquered to a sheen. Golden-scaled dragons slithered upwards to the great vaulted ceiling, their talons extended, green wings spread.

The palace had been built in the shape of a cross. There was a nave running north to south, and along the transepts golden shafts of light pierced the mullioned windows. Six rows of colonnades, three on each side of the nave, led to the dais at the northern end of the hall, focusing the attention of all who entered on the figure reclining there at the head of two flights of marble steps.

The Khan of Khans reposed on a couch of solid ebony. His throne was inlaid with gold and pearl and jade, and enfolded by a tent of purple silk. Despite the magnificence of these surroundings, Khutelun noted that the court was arranged in the traditional manner of a Tatar yurt; below the Khaghan and to his right was another dais where his sons and his brothers attended him. To the left there was a similar platform for his wives and daughters.

There were elevated seats along the walls for other members of the Golden Clan. Khutelun was aware of the rich furs and brocades, the visceral glimmer of rubies.

A fire of briars and wormwood roots burned in the centre of the room.

There was a feast in progress for Qaraqorum was still celebrating Ariq Böke’s elevation to the title of Great Khan. Steam rose from cauldrons of boiling mutton. The men were drinking koumiss from silver bowls and at each toast white-robed shamans sprinkled a little
of the mare’s milk in the four corners of the hall to appease the spirits of the Blue Sky.

‘You should wait until the feasting is done,’ the chamberlain whispered to her. ‘The Khaghan will hear you then.’

But by the time the gathering had finished their carousing, most of the courtiers on the men’s side of the hall were lolling on the carpets in a stupor. The jugglers and acrobats and fire-eaters were brought on to entertain those who were still upright.

Finally a snow leopard was led into the pavilion at the end of a long silver chain. Its attendant released it from its collar and it padded, docile, up the steps of the throne and dropped, as if in obeisance, at the Great Khan’s feet.

A mean trick, Khutelun thought. She would rather have her Khaghan prove his worth by confronting a wild leopard with a single arrow in his bowstring.

The chamberlain turned to her and ushered her forward to bring her news to the Khan of Khans.

Ariq Böke lolled on the divan, bleary from drink and food. Khutelun glimpsed a corona of fur around a thin beard and a cruel mouth. He watched her with a savage indifference. Rubies glistened on his fingers like old blood.

She greeted him on her knees, as was the custom, and relayed her story. There were angry oaths around the hall when she told him of what had become of the Christian ambassadors. The raiders who took them, she announced, had made no effort to disguise their identity. They were warriors of Khubilai’s own imperial guard.

When she finished her tale there was a long silence. The Khan of Khans gazed around the room, his eyebrows beetling with displeasure. He was assuredly blurry from drink, but when he spoke, his voice was clear enough.

‘My brother covets the throne of Chinggis Khan, which is mine, by proper election in
khuriltai
! He has disobeyed the
yassaq
that our grandfather, Chinggis Khan, gave to us, and he should fear the retribution of the Mongol horde!’

There were growls of assent from his generals. Those who were still sober, anyway.

‘We all know that he has become that which every Mongol despises,’ Ariq Böke shouted. ‘A Chin, our age-old enemy! He
knows that you, his own people, do not love him so now he turns those we conquered against us! He calls himself Chung t’ung, like a Chinese emperor. He governs like a Chinese, with secretariats and courtiers and clerks! He even calls himself the Son of Heaven! He fawns to the Chin as if they were the victors and we the vanquished!’

More angry murmurs.

Khutelun, still on her knees, realized that Ariq Böke might have already heard her news. His speech sounded as if it had been carefully rehearsed.

‘He has a Shang-tu Construction and Protection Office! He has a Court of the Imperial Stud, a Court of the Imperial Tack, a Directorate of Animal Feeds. A Directorate of Animal Feeds! Why should a grandson of Chinggis Khan need such a thing? A good Tatar pony needs only to be let loose in a field and it will find its own food in ten feet of driven snow! He has forced the Chinese generals and bureaucrats to crown him Emperor of China because he knows we Mongols will never crown him Khan of Khans!’

The gathering shouted and cheered him. The leopard sat up, pricking its ears.

‘Khubilai went to Cathay as a lion and they have made him a lamb. My brother has forgotten how to ride!’ he shouted, the worst insult a Tatar could say of another. ‘We shall march on Shang-tu with an army of our best horsemen and we will reduce his city to rubble!’

Uproar.

The firestorm had to come, Khutelun thought, as the courtiers around her bayed for Khubilai’s blood.

And it seems Joss-ran is the lightning that will set the spark.

F
OR
K
HUTELUN
, Q
ARAQORUM
was both a wonder and a disappointment. She wondered if Chinggis Khan would have approved of his ancestors building themselves palaces such as the ones he had spent a lifetime tearing down.

A canal had been dug across the plain from the Orkhon River, to power a waterwheel for the city’s blacksmiths. But these foundries were not only forging arrowheads and swords and wheels for siege engines, but picks and ploughs, mattocks and sickles also.

They were cultivating the plain, she realized with a sickening lurch. The Tatars were becoming farmers, that which they had always despised.

Ariq Böke might revile his brother Khubilai, but it was clear he himself was no Chinggis Khan either. The comforts at his palace both astonished and dismayed her. In the cellar was a brick furnace that carried heated air throughout the building in stone flues. In this way every room of the palace was kept warm at night. It was an impressive accomplishment, but was this the way for a Tatar horseman to live?

And then there was the silver tree.

Chinggis and the Khaghans that had succeeded him had taken captive craftsmen and artisans from the cities they had conquered in Persia, Cathay and even Europe. Among them was a master goldsmith, who had been brought back from a raid on a distant land called Hungary two decades before. He had been commissioned to design and build a tree of silver for use at the Great Khan’s feasts. It had been artfully designed, with four silver serpents entwined around the branches. From each of the serpents’ mouths came a different beverage; from one, rice wine; from another, black koumiss; from another, honey mead; the last spouted red wine made from grapes.

Underneath this tree was a crypt in which a man was hidden; a pipe led from the crypt to a silver angel, holding a trumpet, perched at the very top of the tree. When one of the beverages ran low the man blew on the pipe, and the angel’s trumpet gave a blast that alerted the servants in the kitchen. They then hurried to pour more beverages into the vats hidden below the tree.

In this way there was never an excuse for any man to be sober at one of the Khan of Khan’s feasts.

In itself it was assuredly a wonder and Khutelun had no objection to a man getting good and drunk. Men had always intoxicated themselves; they probably always would. But drinking from silver trees? Was this the way they had been taught to live? A Tatar’s strength came from the steppe, from the cold wind and the wide valleys and living day by day on milk curd and snow. On the Roof of the World there were no palaces heated with furnaces and no silver trees to feed their gluttony.

This Ariq Böke might have the blood of Chinggis in his veins, but he did not have his heart. She was, at least, relieved to find that the Great Khan’s soldiers shunned the palace and disdainfully pitched their yurts on the plain. But this practice also meant that there was now a divide between the Great Khan and his people. She wondered what Chinggis Khan would have thought of that.

Ariq Böke sat on his ebony throne. At his feet, fish-eyed and bloody, was the corpse of a prisoner. He had recently been disembowelled and steam still rose from his body cavity. The Great Khan had his left foot inside the gaping wound.

The day after their arrival Khutelun was escorted back into the palace by a chamberlain for private audience with Ariq Böke. She knelt down at the foot of the dais.

‘So, Khutelun.’

She waited, her eyes fixed on the corpse.

‘We have heard much about you.’ He grunted and shifted his weight. ‘And how is my cousin, Qaidu?’

‘Great Khan, my father rides like a youth and wrestles men half his age.’

‘We hear many reports of his strength and wisdom.’ She wondered what it was he wanted with her. Surely their business was concluded. ‘He did you great honour to entrust the barbarian ambassadors to your care.’

But I failed in my duty, Khutelun thought. Is that why I am here? Am I to be punished?

‘Tell me about them.’

‘The barbarians, Great Khan? One was a holy man, sickly looking and with no magic. The other was a warrior, a giant with hair like fire. He was clever as well as strong. He had even learned to talk like a Person.’ She nodded to the khan’s chamberlain, who stepped forward with the gifts she had salvaged from Joss-ran’s horse after the ambush.

Ariq Böke studied them carefully in turn; first the mailed helmet, the leather gauntlets, the ebony inkstand and then the rubies, which he discarded on the marble floor as casually as a man might toss aside a few grains of rice.

Finally he examined the damascened sword she had found lying on the grass after the fight. She still felt a sickening lurch in her stomach as she looked at it now. She prayed they had not harmed him when they took it from him.

‘They were Christians?’

She understood the nature of the question. She had heard that Ariq Böke favoured the Nestorians. ‘They prayed to Jesus and the Christian saints. They held Mary in great esteem. But they spoke also of someone they called the Pope, whom they said was their God’s chosen upon the Earth and to whom they gave their obeisance.’

‘This Pope is their Khaghan?’

‘I do not think so. From what I understood, this Pope is not a warrior. It seemed he was more like a priest.’

Ariq Böke grunted, no doubt remembering how even Chinggis himself had to execute a holy man in order to gain supremacy over his own tribe. Perhaps the barbarian princes had not been as wise and had lost control of their clans to the shamans.