Silk Road (11 page)

The packhorses Josseran had brought from Acre had long since died.

It had been a harrowing journey, day after day, week after week,
in the saddle, their escorts setting a murderous pace. There was only one way a Tatar knew how to ride and that was at a gallop, taking just a few minutes’ rest every two hours. Sometimes they would travel up to fifty miles a day.

Each of them had brought with him from Aleppo at least five horses, the bridle of each one loosely knotted around the neck of the horse on its left, the last animal in the line led right-handed by the rider. They used each horse for two days before resting it.

Josseran had been given his own string of Tatar ponies. But their flat hammering run left him saddle-sore and exhausted after the easy gallop of the Persians he was accustomed to riding, and Kismet herself could not keep up, even unsaddled.

The Tatars employed short stirrups, made of leather, and stood in the saddle, hour after hour, their sinuous legs never seeming to tire. Josseran had tried to imitate them but after a few minutes his thigh muscles cramped and so he let himself sag in the hard, wooden saddle and was jolted and shaken until his bones rattled. By noon every day the pain had settled into his joints; first his knees, and then his spine, until by late afternoon it seemed that his whole body was on fire.

But these Tatars seemed more at ease on horseback than they did on their short bow legs; he had even seen them sleep in the saddle. They controlled their mounts by pressure of their calves on the horse’s flanks, and because they could ride without using the reins they could even fire arrows at full gallop. This was why they wore such light armour, he realized; they had no interest in conventional hand-to-hand combat. They could let their arrows do their killing for them, at a distance. Even the Templars would not stand a chance in battle against cavalry like this.

He had never known warriors like them. They were able to survive on so little. Sometimes they would pass the whole day without stopping for food. And such food. It invariably consisted of a few chunks of boiled mutton, eaten almost raw.

He had always prided himself on his strength and endurance, but he had come to dread the mornings and the prospect of another unrelenting battering in the saddle. There were times he even wondered if he would survive to see this legendary Qaraqorum. As for William, his skin had turned grey, and Josseran
had to lift him off of his horse at the end of every day. But, sure in his faith, he gave himself up to it again each morning like a true martyr.

And as long as the damned friar could endure it, so could he.

W
HAT
J
OSSERAN HAD
seen of these Tatars so far had persuaded him that an alliance was not only advisable, it was essential. No Christian army could defeat them on horseback, or even halt their advance, certainly not with the forces they had in Outremer.

If the Crusaders could not defeat the Tatar cavalry on the battlefield, their only alternative would be to take refuge behind the walls of their castles. But if the number and size of the Tatar siege machines he had seen at Aleppo was any indication, then even Acre and Castle Pilgrim might not long withstand them.

Yet Qaraqorum was so far away. By the time they sat down to finally talk with this Khan of Khans, there might not be a Christian or Saracen left alive in the Holy Land to strike the treaty.

After they crossed the Elburz Mountains into Persia he saw for himself the consequences of resistance.

At the caravan city of Merv not a building was left standing. Chinggis Khan had laid the city waste many years ago. After the population surrendered, he had ordered that each Tatar soldier must slay three hundred Persians by his own hand. The command was applied to the letter. Later he burned the great library, feeding the fire with 150,000 ancient books. It was said that the glow of the resulting inferno could be seen across the desert in Bukhara.

They crossed yet another desert, this one even thirstier than those they had seen in Syria, just frozen waves of sand dotted with clumps of dry saxaul bushes. At night they saw a glow on the horizon to the north-east, which Juchi said came from a fire lit in the tower of the Kalyan minaret in Bukhara. It was the tallest building in the whole
world, he told him, and it had a brick lantern with sixteen arches at the very top that served as a beacon for merchant caravans in the desert at night.

Josseran dismissed the claim as the typically florid exaggeration of the Mohammedans, but when they finally arrived at the great city he found it was true.

The Kalyan minaret was a finger of baked and banded terracotta brickwork that soared giddyingly into the heavens. Just below the scalloped corbels of the muezzin’s gallery there was a necklace of glazed blue tiles in flowing Kufic script. ‘It is known also as the Tower of Death,’ Juchi said. ‘The Uzbek rulers who once reigned here used to toss their prisoners from the top of the minaret down there into the
Registan
.’

It was an astonishing building. Even Chinggis Khan was impressed by it, Juchi said, for it was the only building in Bukhara that he spared, that and the Friday mosque, and even that had scorch marks on the walls.

The rest of the city had been built since the time of Chinggis. It still possessed a desolate air, as if Chinggis and his murdering hordes had passed through just days before. It had a stench like Paris or Rome and the water in the canals was stagnant and green. The houses were drab, chalk-pale, built from whitewashed clay, with crooked door frames. There were few Persian faces; the population here had dark skins and almond eyes: Tatars and Kirghiz and Uzbeks.

The land outside the ruined walls was still desolate. Just an hour’s ride from the
Registan
they came upon a pyramid built from human skulls, now bleached by the sun and picked clean by scavengers.

‘Dear God,’ Josseran murmured.

They had hired an Arab guide for this part of the journey and he looked over his shoulder, to ensure Juchi and his soldiers were not within hearing. ‘Before the Tatars, everywhere you looked, there was green. Now everything is dying. Everything!’

The plain was hung with a mournful stillness. It was as if the massacres had happened only yesterday, and the corpses were still rotting in the fields.

‘The Tatars did all this?’

He nodded. ‘The
qanats
,’ he said, using the Persian word for the underground wells that fed the desert, ‘were maintained by poor farmers. The Tatars butchered them all, as if they were sheep. Now there is no one to dig out the silt from the wells and so the land has been murdered, too.’

‘They killed everyone?’

‘No. The poets, the artisans, the physicians, these they took back with them to Qaraqorum. But everyone else.’ He shrugged and nodded toward the pyramid of bones. ‘They even killed the animals.’

Who are these people? Josseran thought. They have no mercy for anyone. The further we travel, the more futile our embassy seems. If I could return to Thomas Bérard now, what should I tell him? No one in Acre or Rome could imagine a kingdom like this. It stretched to the end of the world and far beyond. In France he might ride from Troyes to Marseille in two weeks. Here two weeks did not even get you out of the desert.

‘We shall save these people for Christ,’ William said.

‘We shall be lucky to save ourselves’ Josseran muttered and turned his horse from the grisly monolith.

T
HEY CROSSED A
great plain and villages of whitewashed clay. Occasionally they saw the ruins of a mosque or the solitary arch of a caravanserai, testament to the bloody passing of Chinggis Khan fifty years before. But finally the deserts were behind them. They followed a green river basin towards Samarkand.

The caravan city was circled by snow-lit mountains. The ribbed domes of Mohammedan churches slept under silver poplars, the
Registan
a riot of bazaars within the dun walls of merchant warehouses and travellers’ inns. This city, too, had been rebuilt after the ravages of the Tatars, the sun-baked bricks of the madrassahs and mosques newly decorated with a faience of peacock blue and vivid turquoise that sparkled in the winter sun.

Josseran stood on the roof of their
han
, watching the dawn slip its dirty yellow fingers over the multi-domed roofs of the bazaar and into the warren of arcades. The tiled dome of a mosque glittered like ice, the black needle of a minaret was silhouetted against a single cold star. The muezzin climbed to the roof of the tower and began the
azan
, the call to prayer. It echoed across the roofs of the city.

‘
Auzbillahi mina shaitani rajim, bismillah rahmani rahim . . .
’

‘Listen to them. They warble like a man having his teeth pulled,’ William said.

Josseran turned around. The friar emerged from the shadows, like a ghost. He finished tying the cord of his cowled robe.

‘It is a hymn very much like our own plainsong,’ Josseran said. ‘It rises and falls and is just as melodious.’

‘Like one of
ours
?’ William growled.

‘You think it barbarous because you do not understand it. I have lived in the Holy Land these five years. It is a hymn they repeat every
day at dawn, the same words, the same harmony. They seek their god as we seek ours.’

‘They do not have a god, Templar. There is only one God and He is the God of the one and true faith.’

Josseran made out the ungainly shape of a stork, nesting in the roof of a nearby minaret, a sight as familiar to him here as it was in Acre. He would miss the storks if he ever went back to France, he realized. Perhaps it is true, perhaps I have lived too long among the Saracen and I am infected with their heresies.

‘I only mean to say that they are not godless, as some believe.’

‘If they do not love Christ, then how can they be anything but godless?’

Josseran did not answer.

‘We are a long way from Acre here,’ William went on, ‘but we shall return soon enough and I shall be forced to report on what you say. You would be wise to guard your tongue.’

A pox on all priests, Josseran thought. And the thought occurred to him: perhaps I shall not go back, if God is kind. But then, when in all my years have I ever seen a merciful God?