Silk Road (52 page)

Fergana Valley

A sharp wind from the north chased clouds like mare’s tails across the sky before the march of a grey thunderhead reached them and a flurry of icy rain stung her face. It was time to drive the herds back down to the valleys.

The sheep were spread across the high pasture. There were thousands of them, waddling like geese, their rumps and tails plump from the rich summer grazing.

Tekudai rode up behind her. They had spoken little since her return from Qaraqorum. He had felt the task of escorting the barbarian ambassadors should have been his, and now he rejoiced in her failure.

‘I trust you do not find these poor valleys too dull after the fine courts of Qaraqorum.’ When she did not answer him, he went on. ‘It is a pity you were not able to deliver the barbarians to the Khaghan. As our father ordered you to do.’

She clenched her jaw and said nothing.

‘Though some say the barbarian was kidnapped not a moment too soon.’

‘Who says it?’ she hissed.

He smiled. ‘My sister the stallion is a mare after all.’

She turned away.
I will not give him the satisfaction.

‘They say he mounted you three times.’

She twisted in her saddle, and suddenly her knife was in her fist. He grinned back at her, lifted his chin to expose the soft flesh of his throat. A futile gesture matched by his empty defiance.

She felt the blood pulse in the veins at her temple. ‘Who said this of me?’ she hissed.

His eyes glittered but he said nothing.

She sheathed the knife, knowing how foolish she had made herself look. ‘It is a lie,’ she said. She dug her heels into her horse’s flanks and galloped away. But she could hear her brother’s triumphant laughter ringing in her ears.

the Taklimakan

W
ILLIAM SCRAMBLED OFF
his camel and threw himself to his knees. The sand was scorching hot. ‘Please, oh Lord . . . dear Lord Jesus, protect me! . . . Save me!’

Precious saliva leaked down his chin. He screamed, throwing handfuls of sand into the air, hardly aware of what he was doing. It was then he heard the hollow drumming of hooves and knew that God had answered him. He shouted thanks to the scorching sky and, staggering back to his feet, stumbled up a gully of crumbling sand in the direction of the returning caravan. When he reached the soft crest he shouted Josseran’s name, and fell tumbling down the drift.

Only emptiness.

Yet he could still hear the drumming, just beyond the next dune. He ran down the loose-packed sand, rolling and falling, then, on hands and knees, scrambled up the face of the next crest. His heart hammered against his ribs, feeling as if it would burst.

‘No! . . . Please . . . Gracious Lord, hear . . . your servant in his hour . . . Wait for me! Josseran! . . . All praise to you . . . my Redeemer . . . It is William! Wait!’

He reached the top of the ridge, expecting to see the caravan below him, but there was only emptiness. He stared about him in confusion. The desert was silent again save for the whisper of the wind. He remembered what Josseran had told him about the sand spirits, and he knew the devils that lived in this accursed desert had tricked him too.

Snakes of sand licked and whispered around his legs.

He ran blindly back down the ridge, the soft sand sucking the strength from his legs, and finally he collapsed, exhausted. He
should find his camel.
His camel with the water bag.
He stood up, whimpering at the cramping pains in the muscles in his thighs and calves.

He stumbled in circles, eyes screwed tight against the white glare of the desert. He searched for his tracks, but already the wind had covered them and he realized he was utterly lost. He looked up to the heavens and screamed.

T
HERE WAS AN
instant of bronze twilight before the night fell. Josseran huddled in his cloak. They all sat around a poor fire of
argol.
The camels coughed in the darkness.

‘There is nothing we can do,’ Sartaq said.

This is my good fortune, Josseran thought. The friar is lost. Now there will be no one to call me heretic and blasphemer when we return to Acre. I have a treaty with the Tatars and the glory will be mine alone.

But he could not bring himself to abandon that cursed priest. It was his duty both as a Templar knight and as a Christian to go back and search for him. There was a chance he might still be alive somewhere in this vast wilderness.

‘We have to go back for him.’

Sartaq gave a snort of derision. ‘When a man is swallowed by the desert, the Taklimakan never gives him up. It is like looking for a man inside the stomach of a bear. You only ever find the bones.’

‘We must go back,’ he repeated.

Angry Man spat in the sand. ‘The barbarian is crazy.’

‘A man cannot survive as much as a day without water in this desert,’ Sartaq said. ‘Even a seasoned traveller cannot live out here alone. And your companion knows nothing of the Taklimakan. I guarantee that by now he has already wandered away from his camel.’

Josseran knew he was right, and besides, he owed William nothing. You could even call it God’s will. William would, if the situation was reversed.

‘I shall go and search for him tonight, alone if I must. You must make your own decision, then. But will the Son of Heaven show you favour when he learns that you have lost
both
your ambassadors?’

Angry Man spat again and shouted and cursed at him until Sartaq ordered him to silence. Drunken Man, without the solace of strong mare’s milk, started to croon softly into the quickening ashes of the fire while the moon rose over the desert.

It was a Tatar dirge for the dead.

William woke to the moon. He thought about other Christian men like himself looking up at this same sky, safe in their monasteries and presbyteries in Toulouse or Rome or Augsburg. As consciousness filtered back, the terror of his predicament hit him like a physical blow and he began once more to weep. He felt such a longing for his own life that he moaned aloud. The consolations of heaven meant nothing to him now, nothing at all.

The wind had died and the vast sea of the desert was calm. It was then he saw the remains of a tower, thrown into sharp relief by the phosphor glow of the moon. He stared at it for a long time without comprehension. Then he got up and stumbled towards it.

It was only a few stones, perhaps part of a fortress that had once stood in this spot many centuries ago, before the sands reclaimed it. He scrabbled at the sand with his fingers, made a little hollow in the lee of the ruined wall for a bed, and curled into it. Somehow he felt safer here, the boundaries of the stones providing some protection from the terrible void around him.

He lay there for a long time, shivering with cold, listening to the trembling of his own breath. It sounded to him like the panting of a wounded animal. He tried to sleep.

Perhaps he succeeded, for when he opened his eyes again the moon hung almost directly above him, pale and trembling. It was full, a hunter’s moon, and drew him to the treasures lying in the sand near his feet, set them glittering like glass.

He crawled towards them on his hands and knees. His breath caught in his throat.

A ruby, a huge one. He turned it in his fingers, letting the moonlight play on every facet of its cut. He tore at the sand with his fingers and found another and another. After a few minutes of digging his fists were bulging with jewels and there were more still
only half-covered by the sand. The ransom of a king, buried here in the Taklimakan, as the camel man had told them.

He started to laugh.

One of the great treasures of the world, and vouchsafed to a dead man! He rolled on to his back and howled at the great vault of the skies. It was God’s great and last joke on him. When his laughter had spent itself he lay there, his chest heaving.

In this parlous state he imagined a hundred Dominican friars accompanying him back across this desert to the court of the Emperor Khubilai to preach the holy religion and bring countless millions into its fold. With this treasure they would build a hundred churches. This must be what God had always intended

If only he could find his way out alive.

Fergana Valley

T
HE RIDER APPEARED
out of the east, exhausted, fingers black with cold. The man was brought before Qaidu in his
ordu
and given a bowl of boiled mutton and some hot rice wine. After he had relayed his message the khan emerged, stern-faced, and called for his eldest son and most favoured daughter to attend him immediately.