The Towers of Samarcand (50 page)

Tamerlane turned. Luke breathed deeply. He’d begun to
sweat. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Luke said: ‘This woman you gave to me. Is the tarkhan’s prize to be auctioned like a cow?’

Tamerlane stared at him, blinking. The tent had fallen silent.

Luke’s fists were clenched on the table, keeping him upright. He heard Sotomayor behind him whisper: ‘This is good. Keep going.’

Luke sucked in breath. He felt the sweat on his eyelids. Speaking was such an effort. He blinked. ‘Was this woman not given to me as tarkhan, lord?’

He heard whispers from the tables and then the thump of a cup on wood, then another and another. Soon the tent was ringing with the banging of cups upon tables. The tarkhan was claiming his prize. Tamerlane looked at the tables and then raised his hand for silence. When he turned back to Luke he was grinning. He bowed giddily, straightened and nodded. ‘Tarkhan,’ he said quietly, lifting his cup in salute.

Instantly, Sotomayor was on his feet and had run the length of the table to climb from the dais and reach Maria. Amidst the cheering and banging, and with Tamerlane distracted by more wine, he led her down the walkway and out of the tent. There was just Zoe left.

She was dressed in a simple white garment of silk that looked more like a bed-gown than a dress and she was barefoot. The gown was open at the top and the curve of her breasts rose from its top button in two perfect arcs. In the light of the lanterns, her skin was a wash of amber and her hair blacker than panther-pelt; she stood with her head held high and an expression of calm amusement on her face. She was looking straight at Tamerlane and if she was afraid, not one muscle in her body betrayed it.

Tamerlane was leaning against a table, his arms spread out to either side of him like buttresses, and he was watching her through half-closed eyes. He was moving the top half of his body from side to side and every now and then his chin would fall suddenly to his chest. He was breathing heavily through open lips and his brow was beaded with sweat. Despina was kneeling at his feet, her body very still and a wine jug in her hand. She had a gash at her temple and streaks of blood on her cheek and she too was watching Zoe.

‘Who are you?’ Tamerlane growled.

Zoe tipped her head to one side as if considering the question. Then she smiled. ‘Does it matter?’

The two slowly appraised each other and gradually the tent fell silent around them. Men sensed that some new entertainment was imminent and strained their necks to see.

Tamerlane frowned. ‘Do you know who
I
am?’

Zoe’s head went over to the other shoulder as if these questions were a game to be played. ‘Ah, now that does matter,’ she said quietly. ‘You are Temur, Sword of Islam, Lord of the Celestial Conjunction and master of everyone in this tent, including Bayezid.’ She paused and smiled again. ‘Including me.’

Then, very slowly, she walked towards Tamerlane, placing each careful foot in front of the other as if stepping on glass. When she reached him, she undid the buttons at her front one by one until the garment fell open. Then she placed two hands on her shoulders, her elbows pointing at Tamerlane, and, with the slightest of movements, pushed the silk away so that the whole dress slithered to the ground. ‘Including me.’

She was naked.

Naked except for a cord at her neck from which hung a
pendant nestling within the valley of her breasts. The pendant was of three gold circles joined and it glowed against her satin skin as if painted there.

The Celestial Conjunction. Temur’s sign
.

Tamerlane stared at it, transfixed, his eyes behind their glasses vast with lust. His hand went to his crotch and stayed there, the palm flat against silk that was moving as it hadn’t for months. ‘Where did you get that?’ he whispered.

‘It’s my birth-sign,’ she said softly. ‘And yours.’

Then she walked towards him and knelt at his feet. She took the wine jug from Despina and the cup that had been with it. She poured wine into the cup and rose, offering it to Tamerlane. ‘You will need a new cup-bearer, lord,’ she said. ‘Your last one is hurt.’

Luke watched it all with appalled fascination, hardly daring to breathe. Zoe had decided to survive in the way she did better than any woman in the world. She had decided to seduce the man who ruled the earth.

And it seemed to have worked. Zoe turned slowly, allowing the lantern light to play itself across the curves of her exquisite body, and began to walk towards the dais. Tamerlane followed her in a trance, his lame leg dragging on the floor and one hand still clamped to his crotch. When they got there, she led him round to his place and then sat herself demurely at his feet, the wine jug still in her hand.

She glanced up at Luke and within those dark, dark eyes was a sort of triumph. It was the look that Tamerlane had had above Bayezid’s cage, only quieter. It was the look of conquest. Luke stared at her for some time, her face sometimes becoming two. Then he felt a surge of nausea rise from his stomach and knew that, very soon, he would vomit.

He rose to his feet. With one hand on the table, he began to lurch away from Tamerlane and his new pet. He needed air and the fixed certainty of the heavens above to give bearing to the capricious world around him.

I must get outside
.

He reached the end of the dais and somehow made it to the ground without falling. He walked in front of Barbi and heard him call his name from somewhere far away and he saw, from the corner of his eye, the figure of Tamerlane reach over the table to him. But he kept walking. He passed vats of stew with eyeless skulls that leered at him and burnt himself on the sides of braziers and crashed into slaves bearing wine. But he kept on walking.

Then he was at the tent’s entrance and it was if an island had risen magically from the waves in front of a spent swimmer. He staggered the last few yards and went out into the night and saw that the stars had occupied the teetering earth as well as the heavens. Stretching all around him to the horizon were the fires of an immeasurable army that had won a great battle and was drinking to remember and to forget it.

Luke fell to the ground and rolled over on to his back and took great lungfuls of the dry desert air. He turned his head slowly from side to side, taking in the boundless expanse of the firmament.

Anna, I am coming
.

It was then that Tamerlane disappeared.

Fifty thousand lay dead on the field of Ankara and long after the crows had picked out their eyes, Tamerlane kept to his tent, refusing access to all but those who provided the necessities for living: food, wine, cool sherbet and water to wash from his body the messy business of love.

Zoe’s talented lips and fingers had managed to do what no other woman had in years: to bring Tamerlane to shuddering climax. And she hadn’t been permitted to step outside the tent while she could bestow such a blessing. Tamerlane was infatuated.

Bibi Khanum was not summoned from Samarcand, as was the custom, and it was the elephants that carried back the news of her husband’s greatest victory, staying on to haul stone for her gigantic mosque. All of them but two.

A message was sent to the army to move to Kutahya and somehow Yakub learnt that he must prepare his palace for Tamerlane’s personal use. So the tents were packed up and put on to the wagons, the siege engines hitched to the oxen and
the long, long line of Mongol horsemen, their wives, children and slaves behind them, began to snake its way west into the land of the Germiyans.

But if Yakub had thought that his change of sides would spare the fields and villages of his beylik, he was wrong. The Mongols continued their pilgrimage of rape and murder and the horizon that stretched behind this savage army was black with the smoke of its destruction.

Yakub was beside himself with rage. But Tamerlane was still in his tent at Ankara and Shulen had taken Mohammed Sultan into the fortress there, prepared to use every skill she possessed to heal the man she now called brother. Luke, too, had gone there to recover fully from his head wound. Khan-zada went to nurse them both.

Maria had chosen to go with the army. More accurately, she’d chosen to go with the Castilian Sotomayor to whom she’d become attached. Both thought that their chances of reaching Castile together would be higher the closer they got. Meanwhile, she was appointed handmaiden to Zoe.

*

After a month, Tamerlane emerged from his tent looking happier than he had in years. The pains of age had disappeared and he’d forgotten Shulen and the magic of her lotions. He summoned his courtiers and declared that he would make the journey west to Kutahya by elephant, taking Zoe, her ointments and some poetry along for his entertainment. He set forth in an enormous canopied howdah, reclining with Zoe amidst cushions, porringers of honey and a servant who poured iced sherbet and murmured the sonnets of the Persian Hafiz into his ear. In the second elephant’s howdah rode Shahrukh, Pir Mohammed and Tamerlane’s grandson Ulugh Beg. The
boy was Shahrukh’s eight-year-old son and had an interest in astrology; at night, when they camped, he would describe the stars to his grandfather as the old man lay beneath their majesty. Behind the elephants came a jornufa, an ostrich and a cage that contained the Sultan of an empire that no longer existed. Behind them marched a guard of gautchin with three Varangians at their head.

The main army was outside Kutahya and was growing restless. It had secured a great victory, perhaps the greatest ever won, and it wanted to go home. The generals had sent messages to Pir Mohammed urging him to ask his grandfather about his plans. Now the time had come for Pir Mohammed to act.

Zoe was reclining next to Tamerlane on cushions big and soft enough to absorb the elephant’s sway. It was a warm day and she wore a thoub of almost transparent cotton. She had a little lectern poised below her breasts from which she was reading aloud from the
Kama Sutra
, her left hand turning the pages. Her right hand was invisible beneath Tamerlane’s housecoat. Curtains hung around the howdah and one inside. The servant was, for now, on the other side of this, singing to a stringed instrument.

Tamerlane grunted and lay back against the cushions and Zoe stopped reading and withdrew her hand. It was, she had learnt, a good time to arrange things. ‘We have only three Varangians in our party,’ she said, discreetly wiping her hand on the curtain. ‘I noticed them this morning as we set off. Was there not another?’

Tamerlane’s closed eyes formed small arcs of pleasure and he was breathing quickly, his great chest rising to part and close his housecoat. Small beads of sweat teetered on the banks
of his forehead before coursing to his beard. He didn’t seem to have heard her.

‘The Varangians’ leader,’ she tried again.

‘He’s at Ankara,’ he said. ‘With my grandson.’ Then he remembered something. ‘And his wife.’

‘Except that she’s not his wife,’ Zoe said. ‘He lied to you, lord. They both did.’

Tamerlane opened his eyes to watch Zoe pour them both wine from a pitcher held steady in a clever gimbal by her side. He frowned. ‘How do you know this?’

The truth was she didn’t, for sure. But she’d known Luke from birth and had seen what had happened with Anna. She knew that he and Shulen were a lie.

‘I just know, lord.’

Tamerlane took the wine. ‘Should I torture the Varangians to tell me the truth?’ he asked.

Zoe pretended to consider this. She shook her head. ‘No, they’ve done you no wrong. You should release them from their oaths.’

‘And the other?’

‘He has lied to you. He should explain himself.’

Tamerlane nodded. ‘When he gets here.’ He drank. ‘He wants me to go to Chios.’

Zoe had suspected this. Indeed, she’d hoped to guide the conversation to this very place, pausing only to secure the Varangians’ release. ‘It’s a good idea, lord. It is an island I have long desired to see.’

Tamerlane’s eyes twinkled. His hand pushed aside the lectern and arrived on her breast, squeezing. She gasped convincingly. ‘Desired? Would you like it?’

Zoe stretched like a cat. She placed her hand on his, pressing
it down. ‘I deserve no such thing, lord,’ she murmured. ‘Anyway, it’s not yours to give. Yet.’ She moved her hand south.

‘No, too soon. I am old.’

‘Not so old,’ she whispered, turning to his ear. Her hand continued south and its fingers curled around soft flesh. ‘You should summon the Varangian to explain himself,’ she said again. ‘Soon.’

Zoe stroked and pressed and teased and all the while wondered what she was doing. She knew the game her hand played but not her mind. Why did she want Luke back? To share in her triumph? Why had she gone to Allaedin ali-Bey of the Karamanids to get him back for Suleyman? Why had she tried again with the younger di Vetriano, and again with the Mongol envoy? Why had she worked so hard to keep Anna away from him, only arranging for her to go into Constantinople when she’d guessed she might be sent somewhere further?

Her hand rose and dipped in rhythm and her thoughts reached an awful realisation.

I cannot help myself
.

The world shifted and her hand lost its grip. Something large had bumped against the side of their elephant. She rolled away and lifted the curtain to see Pir Mohammed leaning out from his howdah.

‘Grandfather,’ he called over her, ‘may I speak with you?’

‘Your grandfather is busy,’ she said, closing the curtain.

Pir Mohammed tried again. ‘Lord, the generals wish to know your plans.’

Zoe glanced at Tamerlane, who was scowling at the wine jug that had left its gimbal and was now resting against his puddled thigh. The servant had dared to draw his curtain and was frantically mopping with his sleeve.

‘Your grandson wants to know where we’re going, lord,’ she said, shooing away the servant and applying her own sleeve to the work. ‘Shall I say Chios? Will you meet the Christian powers there?’

Tamerlane grunted and she rose to her knees and lifted the curtain again.