Silk Road (8 page)

‘The heathen believe the world is round, in defiance of the laws of God and of heaven,’ William said. ‘Do you believe this, too?’

‘All I know is that though they may not have faith, they are not animals.’ He looked at Gérard. ‘Tell him what happened to you.’

‘When I was in Tripoli, I was kicked in the leg by a horse,’ Gérard said. ‘The leg became infected and an abscess formed. A Templar surgeon was about to cut off my leg with an axe. One of my servants sent for a Mohammedan doctor. He applied a poultice to the leg, and the abscess opened and I soon became well. You understand, Mohammedan or no, it is very hard for me to hate that man.’

‘You have a blasphemous tongue, Templar. It was God that healed you. You should give thanks to the Lord, not the heathen.’

‘I am tired of talking to priests,’ Josseran said. He walked away and lay down on a blanket under the trees. Gérard followed.

William sat alone in the guttering firelight. He prayed to God for the soul of the Templar, as was his duty, and prayed also for strength for what was to come. He prayed long into the night, long after the fire had settled to embers, for he was deathly afraid of facing this Hülegü and he did not want the others to know.

T
HEIR PROCESSION SNAKED
across the hills, past villages with curious beehive-shaped mud-brick houses. Yusuf rode in front, Josseran and Gérard behind, the packhorses and carts spread along the trail behind them, Bohemond’s soldiers at the centre. William followed at the rear, head stooped, already exhausted by the journey.

Josseran found a grim satisfaction in the priest’s suffering.

They followed an old paved Roman road that cut through the rocky wastes, as it had since the days of the Book. Josseran was glad of Bohemond’s soldiers, for the country was perfect for ambush, and he was sure they were being watched from the hills by Bedouin bandits. Not that he supposed they looked much like a rich Christian caravan, certainly not from their dress.

He and Gérard wore simple tunics made of
mosulin
, a fine cotton the Crusaders traded from the Turks in Mosul, and they had Mohammedan scarfs wrapped around their faces to keep the sun from burning their skin. Josseran had offered similar comforts to Brother William, who insisted instead on keeping the heavy woollen cowl he had brought with him from Rome. His face was already beet red.

They enjoyed their suffering, his lot.

By late afternoon, their journey had settled to drowsy fatigue; Gérard and William dozed in the saddle, lulled by the heat of the sun on their backs, the creak of the wagons and the dull clip of the horse’s hooves. The stony Syrian hills stretched away all around them.

They smelled them before they heard them. Their ponies reacted first, twitching and stamping their hooves. Yusuf reined in his horse and twisted in the saddle.

‘What is wrong?’ William shouted.

They appeared suddenly and from nowhere. Their helmets
flashed in the sun, their red and grey standards whipped from pennant lances. Yusuf shouted an oath. His eyes were wide, like a horse running from a fire.

But the horsemen had already outflanked them, in an expert pincer movement, executed at the gallop. Gérard instinctively reached for his sword but at a sharp command from Josseran he sheathed it again. Bohemond’s soldiers, too, had been taken by surprise and sat docile in their saddles, watching.

Josseran looked around at the friar. William sat calmly in the saddle, his face a mask. ‘Well, Templar,’ he shouted over the thunder of hooves, ‘let us hope your Grand Master’s faith in you was not misplaced.’

Kismet stamped her feet, excited by the charge and the foreign scent in her nostrils.

The horsemen whooped like devils as they completed the encirclement and then rushed towards them. There were perhaps as many as a hundred in the squadron. For a moment it seemed they would gallop over them but at the last moment they reined in their broad-shouldered ponies and stopped.

Then there was deathly silence, save for the occasional snort of a horse and jangle of traces. Josseran spat out their dust.

So. These were the dread Tatars.

Their stench was more horrible than their appearance. Their cheeks were the colour of boiled leather and without exception they had dark eyes that seemed to slant, and coarse, straight black hair. They wore little body armour, either a coat of mail or a cuirass of leather covered with iron scales. Each soldier had a lobster-tail helmet of leather or iron and a round, leather-covered wicker shield. In hand-to-hand combat they would be no match for a heavily armoured Frankish knight, Josseran thought. Yet he supposed, looking at the bows they carried with them, and the box-like quivers of arrows on their belts, they would never allow a superior enemy to get up close.

Their horses were scarcely bigger than mules; ridiculous, ugly animals with blunt noses and large shoulders. Was this really the most feared cavalry in the world?

One of the Tatars, wearing a gold-winged helmet, walked his pony forward and looked them over. Their officer, Josseran
supposed. His eyes were golden and almond-shaped, like a cat. He had a wisp of a black beard and carried a battleaxe in his right fist.

‘Who are you?’ he said, in passable Arabic. ‘Why do you approach Aleppo?’

Josseran removed the scarf he had coiled around his mouth and he saw a moment’s surprise in the eyes of the Tatar officer at seeing his fire-gold beard. ‘My name is Josseran Sarrazini. I am a knight of the Order of the Temple, assigned to the fortress of Acre. My lord is Thomas Bérard, Grand Master of the Order. I have been sent as ambassador to your prince, the lord Hülegü.’

‘And what of the crow perched on the brown skeleton behind you?’

The crow. Josseran smiled. In his black habit, it was exactly what William looked like. ‘He is a fellow ambassador.’

‘He does not dress like one.’

‘What does he say?’ William said.

‘He wishes to know our business.’

‘Tell him I have a missive for his lord from the Pope himself.’

‘Be patient and let me do the talking for us.’

‘My name is Juchi,’ the Tatar officer said. ‘I will escort you to Aleppo. Hülegü, Khan of all Persia, will meet with you there.’

Josseran turned to William. ‘They are going to take us to Aleppo to meet with Hülegü.’

‘Good,’ William said. ‘I have had enough of this horse and your company already. I do not think I could stand another day of it.’

T
HEY HEARD
A
LEPPO
long before it came into view.

The city was in its death throes. Only the citadel, with its great barbicans and paved glacis, perched on a rock high above the town, still resisted the Tatar onslaught. Below the fortress, the town itself was already in the hands of the invaders, who had exacted swift retribution for the people’s intransigence. Smoke rose from the gutted remains of the mosques and madrassahs, the pale blue sky merging with the yellow haze, streaked with smoke from burning fires.

It was the greatest siege army Josseran had ever seen. Herds of sheep and goats and packhorses and camels seemed to fill the entire plain. Even from a distance the booming of the Tatar kettledrums seemed to make the ground itself vibrate. He heard the braying of horses and camels and the screams of men fighting and dying below the walls as another charge was flung at the gates of the citadel.

‘This could be Acre,’ Josseran murmured. If their great enemy could be routed so easily, what chance would they stand against the barbarians?

They rode through the streets of the old bazaar, passed the smoking, blackened timbers of a merchant warehouse. The cobbles below their horses’ hooves were slick with blood. The Tatar massacre had been chillingly efficient. Men and women and children lay where they had fallen; many of them had been beheaded and mutilated. The corpses had bloated in the sun and were covered with swarms of black flies that rose in murmurous clouds at their passage.

The stench of death was everywhere. Josseran thought he was accustomed to it, but even he had to swallow back the bile in his throat. William put a sleeve across his mouth, began to gag.

The Tatar soldiers stared at them with pure hate. They would
rather cut our throats than parlay with us, Josseran thought, A regiment of Armenian foot soldiers trotted past, urged on by a Tatar drummer mounted on the back of a camel, beating a
naqara
, a war drum. This is why Hülegü found the alliance with Bohemond so useful, Josseran thought. He needs cannon fodder for the walls.

The dark, brooding presence of the citadel loomed above them. The sun had fallen behind the barbican, throwing the streets in shadow.

Squadrons of Tatar archers, armed with crossbows, were firing volleys of flaming arrows over the battlements. Nearby, huge siege engines had been drawn up. Josseran counted more than a score of them, great ballistae that hurled massive blocks of stone the size of houses. The walls of the fortress were pocked and battered from the daily assaults.

‘Look!’ Gérard hissed, pointing.

Instead of stones the engineers were loading one of the lighter siege engines, a mangonel, with what appeared to be small, blackened melons. It took him some moments to realize what they were: not melons, or stones, or weapons of any kind. They were loading the sling with scores of human heads. They would not bring down the Saracen walls but he could imagine the effect these grisly missiles would have on the defenders’ morale.

The sling was released, with a hiss, and its gruesome cargo arced towards the burning walls.

A detachment of horsemen approached them through the smoke, the now familiar red and grey standards whipping from pennant lances.

Bohemond’s soldiers had already dismounted and were kneeling beside their horses. Josseran and the others were slow to respond so Juchi’s men dragged them from their saddles.

‘What is happening?’ William shrieked.

Josseran made no effort to resist. It was pointless. The Tatars forced them to their knees. From somewhere behind him he heard their guide, Yusuf, sobbing and begging for his life. William began to recite a prayer, the
Te Deum
.

Beside him Gérard had his face pressed into the dirt, a Tatar boot on his neck. ‘Do they wish our heads for their catapults?’ he whispered.

‘If they do,’ Josseran answered, ‘the friar’s will make a particularly fine, heavy one. It may even make the breach in the wall that they have been hoping for.’

He could feel the drumming under his knees from the hammer of the horses’ hooves. Were they to die then, their faces in the dirt?

T
HE HORSEMEN STOPPED
no more than twenty paces away; to a man they were armed with battleaxes and iron maces. Two of the Tatars walked their horses forward. One of them had a gold winged helmet and a leopard-skin cloak.

Hülegü.

Juchi fell to his knees. He said something to the khan and the general who attended him in a language Josseran had never heard before. Josseran used the moment to study this Tatar prince who had so easily accomplished what the Christian forces had failed to achieve – even with God’s help – for almost two centuries; the rout of the Mohammedan world. He was an unlikely scourge, a small man with a smooth rounded face, a pug nose, and those same curiously almond-shaped eyes so distinctive of the Tatars.