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Authors: Colin Falconer

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BOOK: Silk Road
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The smells of the city were themselves an assault on the senses. Gasping from the stink of ordure, Josseran took two more paces along the alley and smelled jasmine; taking a deep breath he caught a whiff of offal left to dry in the sun on the bare brick window of a butcher, but then was immediately seduced by the heady scent of cardamom and cumin at a spice merchant just another step further on.

Veiled women, arms jingling with gold hooped bracelets, hurried past him, hugging the walls. The huge brown eyes behind their veils betrayed hate and fear in equal measure. Long-bearded Armenians in blue turbans and barelegged water carriers jostled him and he was as careless of them as he would have been of any French burgher or peasant in Troyes.

The street was so steep it was like a stone ladder, but he could have found his way along it blindfold. He ducked his head into a dark vaulted passageway, emerging suddenly into a small square courtyard, fringed with yellow sand. Three servant girls were squatting on straw mats spinning wool. They looked up as he entered, but he was a familiar presence here, and they quickly returned to their work.

A broad square of red cloth had been stretched over the court to shade it from the worst of the midday sun, but the heat radiated from the whitewashed walls like a brick oven. A rampart looked out over the harbour where the tips of yellowed sails drifted past, but the sea offered up only a scrap of breeze.

The light was intense. It was the one thing that he would miss when he returned to Burgundy. Even on its fiercest summer days the light was never like this.

The striped curtain that had been drawn across the door was flung aside and Simon stepped out. He looked like a bear in a djellaba and skullcap, and was almost as tall as Josseran himself. His salt and pepper ringlets and beard framed a broad smile.

‘Friend,’ he said and embraced him. ‘Come inside. Drink tea with me.’

It was blessedly cool inside, the thick stone walls keeping out the worst of the heat. It was dark, and redolent with the frankincense that burned in copper censers hanging from the ceiling. There were rich carpets on the walls and the floor. Simon clapped his hands and a woman brought tea and a tray of almonds.

‘So, you are leaving us?’ Simon said.

‘You know already?’

‘All everyone does in this city is gossip. I probably knew about the envoy from Rome before you did.’

‘Then I did not need to come and bring you the news.’

Simon clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You came because we are friends and you wanted to say goodbye.’

Doves fussed and fluttered around the window. ‘I am going to miss this,’ Josseran said.

‘I will still be here when you return.’

Josseran shrugged his shoulders. If I return.

Simon must have known what he was thinking, for he said: ‘Is it dangerous, what you are about to do?’

‘Being a Templar is always dangerous.’

‘Not as dangerous as being a Jew.’

Josseran smiled. ‘You are probably right.’

‘Before I forget!’ Simon said and jumped to his feet. He opened an iron-banded chest in a corner of the room and took out a small crimson velvet pouch. He handed it to Josseran. ‘For your protection on your journey.’

‘What is it?’

‘Something of no use whatever to a Jew like myself.’

Josseran loosened the drawstring. A heavy crucifix fell into the palm of his left hand. He held it towards the light. It was made of burnished copper and inset with garnets. ‘How did you come by this?’

‘It was given to me as part of a transaction I made a long time ago. It is very old, I believe, five or six centuries, perhaps more. The man who sold it to me said his father found it many years ago near a convent high in the Languedoc. He believed it has a certain magic to it.’

‘Why did he sell it?’

‘He was dying and he had no further need of magic. He wanted the money instead, to give to his concubine. Would you like it?’

‘I should never shun good fortune, or a gift from a friend.’

‘Now you have both.’

Josseran put the cross around his neck. It felt curiously warm against his skin. Then they drank tea and sampled sweetened almonds from an enamelled dish and Simon tried to explain to Josseran the rudiments of
al’jibra
. At home, Josseran thought, I should drink myself senseless on ale, tear at a joint of beef with my teeth and talk endlessly about jousting. Perhaps I am getting soft living here.

He said goodbye to his friend and made his way back up the alley towards the castle. How strange that I should feel so at home here among these hawk-eyed traders and veiled women. I speak Latin more often than I speak French and Arabic more than I speak Latin. His best friend was not a soldier but a heathen and a usurer
and, thanks to him, he knew the Talmud, the Q’ran and the Kabbalah as well as he knew the Gospel. He had found more kinship with a man whose ancestors had murdered Jesus than with his own kind.

He feared he was becoming a stranger to his fellows and a foreigner to his friends. But should he not return from Aleppo he yet hoped to find heaven. At least there he might find a corner where he belonged.

VII

Fergana Valley

T
HE STEPPES WERE
dusted with snow. The air was brittle, under a sky of endless blue. Two figures, wrapped in furs, were silhouetted against the morning sun, their broad-shouldered ponies at the walk.

‘You had to win,’ Tekudai said. ‘He would have made as fine a husband as any other. Father wanted it. His father wanted it. I think perhaps
you
even wanted it. But no. You had to win. You always have to win.’

She ignored him. Her breath formed white clouds on the air.

‘You have to get married some time,’ he said, pressing her.

He is jealous, she thought. It burned in him, this envy, for he was not like Gerel. Gerel was drunk on black koumiss all the time. He cared for nothing else. Tekudai was a warrior with a warrior’s soul. But simple. He had neither the brains of a general nor the athleticism of a good horseman. She knew she had been favoured by the gods with both and it rankled with her brother that she was the better hunter and the better horsewoman.

And that she was their father’s favourite, as her mother had been. Her father had three other wives now, as well as concubines, in the Tatar custom, but it was still Bayaghuchin he grieved for.

She had died when Khutelun was ten years old. Bayaghuchin had been Qaidu’s first wife. Khutelun remembered her as strong and straight and with a temper to match. She was a woman in the mould of a true Tatar; it was said that even Chinggis Khan had been afraid of his wife. But Khutelun had not only inherited her mother’s fire; she had her gifts as a seer as well.

Suddenly there was movement on the steppe. Two marmots, ground squirrels, perhaps two hundred paces distant, whistled in perplexity at the appearance of these intruders in the vast emptiness.
One scampered underground, the other hesitated, head jerking quizzically, tail erect.

Khutelun had her bow to her shoulder first, the arrow already in her right hand, her movements so swift and practised it was as natural to her as blinking. Her first arrow – there would not have been time for a second – took the small creature cleanly through the skull, death swift and merciful. More food for the pot that night, some meat for the winter stew.

Tekudai had yet to draw back his own bowstring. He replaced the arrow in the wooden quiver at his waist. Their eyes met.

He hated her.

VIII

the Templar fortress at Acre

A S
ARACEN MOON
rose over the lighthouse, a perfect crescent. Josseran stood on the parapet, staring at the sleeping city. He could hear the rush of the ocean against the rocks below.

The great monastery of San Sabas loomed in the darkness, on a hill between the Venetian and Genoese quarters. It had been abandoned by the monks who lived there several years before and had immediately become a point of contention between the two rival merchant communities. Each had tried to gain possession of it, first by legal wrangling in the Haute Cour, then by force. Pitched battles in the street had led to a full-scale civil war, with the barons and military orders being forced to take sides. The survival of the Crusader states themselves, after all, depended on the sea power of the Italian merchants.

The war had culminated in a naval battle off Acre just eighteen months before in which the Venetians had sunk twenty-four Genoese ships. An uneasy truce had been patched together by the Pope. But the dispute still simmered, with the Genoese having now abandoned Acre for Tyre, to the north.

We were supposed to be fighting the Saracens.

Josseran picked out other landmarks in the darkness: the tall, graceful silhouette of St Andrew’s Church; the palace of the governor in the Venetian quarter; the cathedral of the Holy Cross; the Dominican monastery in Burgos Novos; and in the distance, on the northern walls, the Accursed Tower and the Tower of St Nicholas.

He knew this city now better than he knew Paris or Troyes. Five years he had been in Outremer and he barely recognized himself as the zealot who had first stepped on these shores, fervent, conscience-weary, afraid. On leaving France he had secured a loan
of two thousand shillings from the Templar preceptory to make his way to Acre. In return he had pledged his properties to the Templar lodge should he not return from his pilgrimage.

Five years!

He had changed so much. At home he and his fellow Franks had dressed in furs and gorged themselves on beef and pork. He rarely washed his body, believing that he would make himself sick with chills. What a savage I was! Here he ate little meat and supped from copper salvers of oranges, figs and melons, drank sherbets instead of mulled wines. He bathed at least three times a week.

He had been taught from a child that the Mohammedans were the embodiment of the Devil himself. But after five years in Acre he sometimes wore robes and turbans in the Saracen manner, and had learned from these same devils a little of mathematics and astronomy and poetry. The Temple even kept Mohammedan prisoners as artisans or armourers and saddlers. Over time he had formed tentative friendships with several of them, had come to see them as men like himself.

BOOK: Silk Road
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