Silk Road (3 page)

Khutelun did not spare him a glance. She walked her horse over him and trotted back through the defile.

Qaidu stared at the dead goat lying at his feet. He nudged it with his boot, almost as if expecting the lifeless meat to spring to life. Finally he looked up at his daughter. ‘So. You won.’

‘Jebei is a fool.’

Qaidu looked at Jebei’s father, sitting stone-faced on his horse, by providence too far away to hear this summation of his son’s character. ‘He is the
son of a khan
.’

‘The wind blows cold on princes and goats alike.’

Khutelun saw her brothers watching from the doorway of her father’s yurt, their disappointment at the outcome of the contest plain to read. ‘If only Tekudai was more like you,’ Qaidu said to her under his breath. Khutelun grinned beneath the purple scarf. He could not have paid her a higher compliment.

After Jebei had left the camp with his father and escort, to return to the frozen wastes of Lake Baikal, the clan decided to rename the defile where Khutelun had won her ride. From that day it was no longer known as the Place Where The Ass Died.

It became, instead, The Place Where the Ass Was Felled by a Goat.

the Templar fortress at Acre

in the year of the Incarnation of Our Lord 1260

the Feast of the Epiphany

J
OSSERAN
S
ARRAZINI, ALONE
and on his knees. A single oil lamp burned in the pre-dawn darkness of the chapel, its flame reflected in the black and gold image of the Madonna above the altar. This giant with close-cropped chestnut hair bowed his head, lips moving silently in prayer as he asked for absolution for that one sin for which he could not forgive himself.

In his mind he was far from the dusty streets and olive presses of Palestine; instead he heard the creaking of snow-heavy boughs, the smell of damp furs and the chill of cold stone walls.

‘I knew it was wrong but I could not resist,’ he murmured.

It had happened one morning soon after the feast of the Nativity. She had wanted to go riding in the forest and, at his father’s request, he had agreed to escort her. She rode a chestnut mare, its disposition as haughty and silken as her own. Ever since she had come to live with Josseran and his father at the manor, scarcely a friendly word had passed between them.

She gave him no outward sign that his presence made any deeper impression on her than did her groomsman’s.

They rode deep into the forest and her mare found a rabbit’s burrow and stumbled. She fell from her horse and lay still on the frozen ground. He leaped from his own mount, fearing she had broken bones. But as he bent over her, her eyes blinked open, wide and black as sin, and he felt his belly turn to warm grease.

She smiled. He would never forget it.

She said that it was just her ankle that was hurt, and commanded him to help her back into the saddle of her horse.

Was the temptation irresistible or was it simply that he did not resist? Even as his arms went around her he felt the heat of her body and on an impulse he tried to snatch a kiss from her lips. He thought she would push him away, but instead she pulled him on top of her. He groaned, unable to stop himself. His manhood, as yet untried, was hard as oak and the frost-hard ground might as well have been a bearskin rug and a feather bolster.

Suddenly and to his great astonishment, he was inside her.

And what did he now remember of their encounter? Just the drumming of blood in his ears, the stamping of the horses as they pawed at the hard ground, the salt taste of her hot tongue in his mouth.

She racked him on the sweet stretching of her intimate flesh. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a grimace that was more pained than pleasured. Like an animal.

He tried to hold back from the peak but he was swept along with it, cursing his youth and inexperience. He spilled himself quickly, the oily warmth emptying his belly, leaving him hollow and weak.

She pushed him roughly away and he lay panting on his back, staring at the washed blue sky, feeling the cold frost melting into his cambric shirt. She pulled down her skirts, limped to her horse and remounted, without his assistance. Then she rode away, leaving him there with the juices of their bodies smeared on his thigh.

If it had been one of the servant girls there would have been no harm in it. But she was not. When he finally dragged himself to his feet he heard the Devil’s laughter ringing in his ears and the weight of guilt had already settled in his belly like an ingot of lead.

On the way back through the forest he cried for what he had done. Yet within an hour of his return to the castle he was plotting to do the Devil’s work once more.

W
ILLIAM OF
A
UGSBURG
had been in the Holy Land for just two days and he was scandalized.

Acre was part of the Crusader state of Jerusalem and he had come here expecting to find a bastion of piety; instead the knights and lords charged with the protection of this sacred place disported themselves no better than Saracens.

He had arrived on a Venetian merchant galley a few days before. As he stood on the poop beside the captain, watching the great fortress rise from the sea, he was overcome. Here was Palestine, ‘Outremer’ – ‘Over the Sea’, as the Franks called it – the sacred birthplace of Our Lord. At last he would step in the footprints of the prophets. He gripped the wooden rail, his knuckles white.

My Lord, my God, let me serve Thee. Let me die for Thee, if it is Thy will.

The sails whipped in the wind as the helmsman leaned on the long tiller. Sailors clambered up the rigging to their positions on the fore and main masts. As they entered the harbour, he watched the waves send sprays of foam high up the walls of the great fort.

Beyond the Crusader turrets and barbicans William saw the domes of the Mohammedan mosques and the towers of the minarets. Their presence served as a reminder that even here the Lord was under siege. The Saracen halls had long since been consecrated as Christian churches, but the thick castle walls were all that lay between the pilgrims and the godless hordes. With Jerusalem lost, Acre was a symbol of hope to everyone in Christendom, an outpost of God among the heathen.

And he was to be its saviour.

But the heady promise of his arrival had not been fulfilled. Far from being an outpost of the sacred, the city was just another
stinking, hot Saracen town. The narrow streets were crowded with heathen, the turbans and chadors of the Jews and Mohammedans bobbing everywhere, the alleys choked with their filth and excrement, the stench that rose from the cobblestone alleys almost tangible. The bazaars were clamorous from dawn to dusk with the jibber-jabber of the hawkers.

The swarthy, hook-nosed Mohammedans stared back at him from under their keffiyehs, their hawk eyes glittering with venom. He felt sullied by their looks, if not threatened, for the Templar sentries stood watch at every gateway of the city, distinctive in their white surcoats with red cross pattée.

The number and brazenness of the heathen astonished him. But it was the lords of Acre themselves who confounded him, as they would any good Christian. The palaces in which they lived were decked with marble, the walls furnished with silk carpets and high ceilings. They lived lives of sumptuous decadence, an offence to any God-fearing Christian.

They had even insulted him on the evening of his arrival by offering him a bath.

They wore loose silk robes and sometimes even turbans, in imitation of the Saracens. Their wives dressed like Muslims, with veils and jewelled tunics and flowing robes, and they employed kohl and perfumes like the common houris of Damascus.

It was hardly what he had expected to find when he left Rome.

The holy cause in Outremer had met with disaster upon disaster over the last two decades. Jerusalem, which had been wrested from the infidel at the urging of the Pope two centuries before, was once more lost to the Saracen, sacked by a horde of Turks in the pay of Sultan Ayub in 1244. It was just a decade ago that Louis IX of France had himself taken up the Cross to save the Holy City from the heathen but his expedition had found disaster in the Nile delta and Louis himself had been taken prisoner and held for ransom.

William had thought to find those beleaguered garrisons yet in Christian hands – Acre, Antioch, Jaffa, Sidon – expending all their might and energy on the recapture of the Holy City. Instead they seemed more taken with commerce, trading openly with the Saracens and keeping friendly relations with them. The merchants of Genoa, Pisa and Venice even battled with one another over trade routes.

The great mosque of Acre had been converted, quite properly, into a Christian church, but to William’s horror he discovered a side chapel that had been set aside for the Mohammedans to worship in. He had been further outraged to discover that the mosque at the Oxen’s Well had not been consecrated at all and that the Mohammedans still prayed there openly; there was a Christian altar
alongside
that of the heathens.

The city was not the repudiation to the Saracen that he had expected to find. There were even prostitutes and vendors of hashish on the streets.

But he was on the Pope’s special embassy and he could not allow the decadence that had insinuated itself here to deter him from his commission. And judging by the news he had just received, he had not a moment to lose.