Silk Road (69 page)

Not my baby.

They dragged her out of the yurt to where the horses were already waiting, saddled to ride. It was a beautiful morning, the sun not quite risen, the moon still a pale ghost on the desert.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she screamed. ‘Why are you doing this?’

They bound her arms behind her back with leather thongs and threw her on a litter that they had tied between two of their horses. They took her perhaps no more than three or four
li
from the yurt. Then they hauled her from the litter and dragged her across the sand.

She screamed, racked by another contraction, but they paid her suffering no heed.

There was a shallow depression, still sunk in black shadow. It was here they threw her down and one of the men held her while the other bound her legs with rope around her knees and her ankles. Then they applied leather thongs around her thighs and heavier leather ties around her pelvis, binding them so tightly she cried out in pain.

‘What are you doing?’ she cried at them. ‘Tell me what is happening! What have I done?’

They walked back to their horses. Their officer stared at her for a long time, perhaps to ensure that his men had performed their task to the exact specifications, and then they galloped away across the plain.

Miao-yen gasped at the shock of another birth-pain, and when it was over and she opened her eyes again the soldiers were no more than specks on a featureless horizon.

As the sun rose she screamed her protest to the everlasting Blue Sky, shouting over and over the words of the paternoster, taught to her by Our-Father-Who-Art-in-Heaven, for she knew she had
never sinned against her father or her husband, and Josseran’s priest had told her that the innocent were never punished. If you will but call out the name of God, he had said, you will be saved.

Lyon, France

in the year of the Incarnation of Our Lord 1293

T
HE MONK’S EYES
turned towards the abbot.

‘Now you know the most terrible thing I have done. I took her, while she was near death, thinking only the Devil and I would know what I had done. I was wrong.’ His eyes followed the shadows of the candle to the corner of the room. ‘The thongs they tied around her thighs and her belly would not allow the child to be born. It is a unique punishment among the nomads of those lands. Finally the babe is forced away from the natural path of its birthing, upwards, into the vitals and the heart. It kills the mother and, with her death, the infant dies also. How long it took for Miao-yen to die, no one can know. As no one can ever know how indescribably she must have suffered.’

He paused, and his breath rattled in his lungs.

‘The Templar was right, of course. When I returned to Acre history had already overtaken our mission. Soon after we left on our great journey to the East, the Tatar hordes from the north attacked Poland. Lublin and Cracow were sacked, and when he heard the news the Pope proclaimed a crusade against the Tatars. The Holy Father also declared those Christians who had sided with the Tatars in Palestine excommunicate. So the Haute Cour stayed their hand when the Mamluks met the Tatars at Ain Jalut and defeated them, driving Hülegü from Syria. Now of course the Saracens have all the Holy Land and our one chance to defeat them was lost.’

‘And the Templar and this Tatar witch?’

‘No one could have survived such a fall. Although the water was deep there were great boulders beneath the surface. Even if the rocks
did not crush them, the torrent ran so fast they must have drowned. And yet . . .’

The abbot leaned closer. ‘What?’

‘And yet Sartaq told me when he returned that afternoon that he thought he’d seen two heads bobbing in the water, far downstream. Were they alive or were they dead? He could not be sure. And neither can I be sure, not completely. Ten years later, when I visited Acre for the last time, I heard a story of a Mohammedan merchant who had just returned from Baghdad and claimed he had met a Frank with flame-red hair who was living with the Tatars somewhere at the Roof of the World. Perhaps it was he, or perhaps it was just another of the legends that fly the steppe, without any more substance than the dust devils and the clouds.’

He smiled, revealing rotten teeth. His breath had the taint of death on it. The abbot recoiled from the bed but the monk held on to him, gripping the edge of his robe between his fingers. ‘I often picture him. Is it not strange? I lied to him that last night in Kashgar. If he had returned with me to Acre I would certainly have denounced him to my fellow Inquisitors as a heretic and blasphemer. Yet now I think back on him as perhaps my greatest friend. I even smile when I think of him living there beyond redemption, beyond faith, in the arms of his barbarian witch, sire of his own heathen brood.’

He closed his eyes.

‘And so hear this my confession, in the year of the Incarnation of Our Saviour twelve hundred and ninety-three. I have slept with my sins these thirty-three years; I can bear them no more. Soon the candle will gutter and die and leave me here in the darkness. I have often looked from this window towards the east and my thoughts have travelled to the places I knew in those days. There is snow on the sill tonight; somewhere there will be snow on the Roof of the World and the Tatars will lead their herds down the valleys once again for the winter. I remember them, my companions, in the days of my glory and my sin. Pray for me now, I beg you, as I go to meet my judge.’

The abbot hurried from the cell. The monk’s confession had chilled him to the bone; all this talk of idolaters and strange lands and devil-women on horseback. The ravings of a sinful and enfeebled mind! He believed none of it. He doubted if this old man had ever been any further east than Venice. Yet as he hurried down the darkened cloister he felt a sudden chill on his face, as if a wind had sprung from nowhere, and he imagined he had brushed against the Devil himself.

arban
: a Tatar platoon of ten soldiers.

argol
: dried camel droppings used to make a fire.

Borcan
: the Tatar name for the Buddha.

bonze
: monk.

chador
: garment worn by Islamic women covering the entire body.

chai-khana
a teahouse.

darughachi
: resident commissioners. Local men employed by the Tatars to administer their government in the area and collect taxes.

del
: a quilted wrap-around gown worn by the Tatar.

fondachis
: the warehouses of the Italian merchant communes in the Palestine states.

gebi
: round flat stones found in the deserts of central Asia.

han
: caravanserai located inside a town or city.

iwan
: vaulted entrance to a mosque.

jegun
: a Tatar military unit of one hundred men, made up of ten
arban
.

karez
: a well linked to an underwater irrigation channel; found near Turpan in the Taklimakan desert. The Persian name is
qanat
.

keffiyeh
: traditional Arab headdress.

kesig
: Khubilai Khan’s imperial bodyguard.

khang
: raised platform of mud brick under which a fire can be lit and sometimes used as a bed.

khuriltai
: meeting called to anoint a new khan after the death of a reigning khan.

kibitka
: ox-drawn wagon used by the Tatars for transporting their yurts.

Kufic
: Arabic calligraphy used on monuments.

league
: three nautical miles.

li
: approximately one-third of a mile.

manap
: village headman.

maidan
: an open field.

magadai
: literally ‘Belonging to God’, a Mongol suicide squadron.

mingan
: a Tatar military unit of one thousand soldiers.

muezzin
: a Muslim official who summons the faithful to prayer from the minaret.

ordu
: the household; by law a Tatar could have four wives, with a household for each, although he could have any number of concubines.

Registan
: ‘sandy place’, central square in a Silk Road oasis.

rod
: approximately five and a half yards.

the Rule
: the strict laws that governed the daily life of the Templars.

stupa
: Buddhist tomb or mausoleum with characteristic bulbous shape.

touman
: a Tatar military unit of ten thousand men.

yassaq
: the code of laws as promulgated by Chinggis Khan.