The Lost Prophecies (10 page)

I snatch the kumiss from the Tartar’s hand and, tipping the leather sack up, I throw my head back. The raw, milky-white fluid gurgles out of the sack and hits the back of my throat like a well-aimed arrow. I relish the sting on my tongue and the fizz as the kumiss gurgles down. Drinking half-fermented mare’s milk is an acquired taste, but one to which I have adjusted. When you’re thousands of miles from a good Rhenish, and the craving’s on you, you’ll drink anything that’ll guarantee to get you legless. Too much of it, though, and you end up seeing stars. Still and all, that’s better than sharing your quarters with a dead man.

I should explain. The year is Ren-Xu – the Tartar year of the dog – and the year 660 for Mohammedans. To you and me it is the ninth year of Doge Renier Zeno’s governance of Venice, the second year of Pope Urban the IV’s reign, and one thousand two hundred and sixty-two years since the birth of Christ. Or at least I think it is. I have been away from civilization for too long now. And I have lost count of the days that have passed, like a sailor lost at sea. The mare’s milk brew hasn’t helped in keeping my head straight either. All I can say for sure is that it is several months since Friar Giovanni Alberoni, a fellow Venetian (albeit from that sharp, shingle strip that edges the lagoon), picked me up out of the gutter in Sudak.

‘Niccolo Zuliani? Is it really you? I can hardly recognize you.’

‘No, I’m not
. .
. who you say. My name’s
. .
. Carrara, Francesco Carrara.’

‘Nonsense. I know Francesco Carrara. He’s at least twenty years older than you, and considerably larger in girth.’

I was so addled at the time that I didn’t quibble any further over my embarrassment at being found in that state. Nor about the friar’s reinstatement of my real name, which I had avoided using for some time. In Venice it was the name of a wanted man. Alberoni always calls me Niccolo in that formal, stuffy way of his. My true friends use the more familiar Nick just as my English mother did, but for the moment I was glad to be Niccolo again at least. He helped me get to my feet and supported my enfeebled body.

‘I’m glad I found you. I have a proposition for you.’ So it was that the gutter in Sudak became the crossroads of my life. Sudak is in Gothia, by the way – some call it Crimea – on the northern side of the Black Sea close to the icy fastnesses of Russia, which are controlled by the Golden Horde. Its main claim to fame is as a point of contact between us Latins and those mysterious Tartars of the East. It was there the good friar nursed me back to something resembling health and fired my imagination with the prospect of plundering the fabled wealth of the Tartar Empire. Well, to be honest (a trait some say I lack, though they tend to be prejudiced, having been outwitted by me in some deal or other) – to be honest, I was the one wanting to do the plundering. Alberoni wanted to penetrate the distant depths of the Empire in order to spread the word of God to the heathen.

Myself, I go for more modest scenarios in order to make a living. I had been living in Sudak, albeit rather poorly, off a scam that we Venetians call ‘the long trade’. Don’t ask me why. The trick is to set up a company in a false name, or with a gullible but reputable fool as a front. Using the fool’s reputation, you then obtain goods on credit over a long period, paying small deposits to keep your creditors happy. Then you rapidly sell off everything you have stored very cheaply, and finally disappear in order to avoid those creditors. Leaving the front man to take the blame. Simple, as long as you can hold your nerve. I lost mine when I was threatened by a big bear of a fur trader from Russia and came out with nothing. I should have stuck to honest trading, especially as the only other time I had reached for the stars had been an unmitigated disaster too. You may recall that I tried to rig the Doge’s election to no avail, ending up with a murder rap. In short, that’s why I had been holed up in Sudak using fat old Carrara’s name as my own.

But that’s all in the past now. Tonight I have to set about saving my own neck from the noose in connection with another murder. Though neck and noose are not exactly precise references. If I am found guilty of murder, the Tartars whose company I am forced to bear in this snowstorm will either tie me up to two horses and thrash them until they fly in opposite directions, taking pieces of me with them, or, if they deem me sufficiently noble, will wrap me in a carpet and merely trample me to death. The carpet treatment is to prevent my noble blood from despoiling the earth.

I suddenly feel dizzy and take another pull from the skin of kumiss to drive such thoughts from my head. I think of the body lying in the snowdrift outside. When the storm abates, he will be interred, and all traces of his existence under heaven obliterated from his Tartar god, Tengri. But before that happens, the barbarous bastards who claim to be his comrades will make an end of me. Which, if you think about it, is pretty unfair as it must have been one of them who slaughtered him. So, the thing is, I wouldn’t mind so much facing death, but I did not kill the man. Then neither do I have the faintest idea who did. Yet I must find out, or suffer the consequences of being named the murderer myself.

I reluctantly set aside the skin of kumiss and huddle down in the warm goatskins beside the fire in the centre of the stove-house. I stare into the flames as they crackle and pop and rue the reasons that brought me to this pretty pass.

Back in Sudak, the good Friar Alberoni had let me into a secret.

‘I have a book of prophecies made ages ago by a Celtic priest. And if I interpret it correctly, there is a verse or two about the Tartars that guide my mission.’

He rummaged in the bundles that half-filled the floor in his lodgings overlooking the harbour. He seemed to have all sorts of gewgaws for trading with the Tartars – beads and furs mainly. As though they were primitives who could be bought for a few trinkets. I knew better. If the stories I had heard were true, it seemed that they themselves had more treasures than we could imagine. Items of great value like pearls, and precious stones, cloth of gold and silk, as well as strange items like black stones that could be lit and would burn for days. What would they want with beads and trinkets? But the stories were that they were interested in everything the West had to offer and were prepared to trade for the things they couldn’t gain by conquest.

A cold wind ruffled the wave-tops in the harbour, and I stared out over the Ghelan Sea. I fondly imagined that my gaze could stretch through the straits at the sea’s western extremity, across the ancient lands of the Greeks and into the Adriatic and Venice. Where fair Caterina Dolfin awaited my return. Or not, if my deepest, darkest moods were to be believed. Why should she wait for me, when I was as poor as a lagoon fisherman, and a marked man to boot?

‘Here it is.’

I sighed and turned my gaze back to the confines of the room. Alberoni was waving a darkly bound tome at me.

‘This is the Black Book of Brân – prophecies that go back hundreds of years. But still speak truths to us today. Listen.’

He proceeded to recite one of the quatrains, which were all in Latin. Now it may surprise you to know that I knew the Church language myself. It may shock you even more to learn that I know it because I studied once for the priesthood. That was before the jingle of money diverted me on to a more lucrative path and broke my mother’s heart. She had been set on me being a priest. Anyway, the poem, if I recall went something like this:

This he took for justification for his holy embassy to the pagan Tartars, even when I pointed out that they rode under a banner of nine yak-tails, not a skull.

‘Don’t quibble, Niccolo. They have left enough skulls behind them for it to be true. And the rest fits – the storm of the pagan hordes sweeping across the world. And if the West joins hands – we can bring righteousness to them.’

I sniffed in disdain. ‘You can make any events fit such vague ramblings. Have any of these prophecies actually come true?’

Alberoni’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes, yes. They say that at the end of the last century a rebellion in England was clearly prophesied. If the scribe of the book lived in Ireland in the seventh century, how could he know about such an event?’

A little mouse of doubt began to scurry across my brain. I needed to reassure myself that a book of prophecies written in a far-off land hundreds of years ago was nonsense.

‘Let me see.’

I took the thin but oddly heavy book from his reluctant grasp, flicking carelessly through the pages. Scanning the verses quickly and choosing one at random, I stabbed a finger at a quatrain.

‘Take this one, for example.

‘Three Popes murdered? It’s ridiculous. Or this:

I had intended to pour scorn on the prophecies, but suddenly this quatrain struck a chord, as if my choice had not been random after all but directed by a hidden hand. ‘Tartarus’ for the Tartars? And did the ‘
Latin traders
’ refer to me? Something had made me shudder when I read the last line too. It spoke of a personal foretaste of doom. Outside, a chilly wind whipped across the window opening, and I pretended my shivering was all to do with the plummeting temperature.Then I started to examine the book more closely. I could see straight away that it was not several hundred years old. The pages were relatively crisp and the illuminations bright and clear. I chortled.

‘The book is not ancient at all. No wonder the faker could insert a verse about an event sixty-something years ago. It was already in his past. This is like the letter that some claim to have seen that Prester John wrote to the West. The one that would make him over a hundred and fifty years old.’

Alberoni’s face went red. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, he had good reason to believe in the well-known Prester John myth. It centred on a letter purporting to come from the Far East, where a Christian ruler awaited his call to come and save the West in its hour of most need. To me, it was a neat forgery by an expert who made his money selling hope to the fearful. My mother had told me fairy tales of a similar king hiding under the earth in England. I didn’t believe that either. But lots of people are gullible when it comes to forlorn hopes. And a good con man can make plenty of money pandering to them. This Black Book looked like a similar scam.

Alberoni snatched it back from my disbelieving hands.

‘It’s not the original book. Did I ever say it was? No. It’s a copy made in the west of England by a scribe with a fair hand, which was then taken to Rome to add to the glories of the library at the Vatican. That is where I . . . found it. Languishing in a dusty corner. Unread and unappreciated.’

‘And they just let you have it?’

I had an inkling that Alberoni had not obtained the book legitimately. He scowled.

‘It was cast aside because there was some tale that the scribe was possessed with evil.’

That was all he would say, and I knew then that he had stolen it from under the nose of the Vatican librarian. His hesitancy over revealing the book’s recent history – when he realized he had gone too far – spoke volumes to me. And that was when I decided to steal this Black Book of Brân from him in my turn. His offer of a long and arduous journey to the ends of the earth, even with the possibility of profitable trade at the end of it, didn’t stack up against a quick buck. I was still recovering from my drunken bingeing over the failure of the long trade. A fast and dirty deal appealed to me more at the time. I knew I could sell it to make some money, and so start trading again. I mean, if it had fooled Friar Alberoni, then it would fool another priest eager for its contents. And how could he object or protest, if he had filched it himself in the first place? So I hope you’re now beginning to understand how I came to be stuck in a Russian stove-house with a drunken Orthodox priest and a dead Tartar.

As soon as Alberoni’s back was turned that day in Sudak, I grabbed the book and was off on my toes. I know, you’re telling me that a trader like me should have planned it more cleverly and waited for the best opportunity. But don’t forget I had not heard the jingle of coinage for a while, and I was thirsty. I didn’t have the time to plan it more neatly than that. However, I did have a good idea whom I would sell this little treasure to, so the theft wasn’t completely stupid. I had first heard of this mad priest who lived on the banks of the Dnieper river from a gang of Russian traders in fur – one of whom had later threatened to detach my head from my body if I didn’t return the furs he had given me on a sale-or-return basis. He had got wind of my long trade scam and caused the collapse of the whole deal. But before that, I had been his drinking companion. Him and a bunch of the hairy giants. I had spent a drunken night with them in Sudak planning how I might find an opening to trade with the Tartars.

Everyone else west of Sudak thought the Tartars were hounds from hell. But here on the wild frontier – the entrepôt where West met East and anything was up for sale – these fearful demons who held the yoke of Rus’s slavery were just another possible business partner. And a Venetian never passed up a chance for a deal. The Russian traders, all as hairy as the furs they dealt in and as smelly, swore that a certain Father Kyrill was well in with the local Tartar lord. He had a reputation not only as a wise prophet but also more practically as a healer. For these reasons he was welcomed at the court of the local khan. It seemed the Tartars loved a heady mixture of religion, magic and prophecy, and Father Kyrill obligingly supplied it. He thus held the key to lucrative trading with his master based at Sarai on the Volga. When he wasn’t at Sarai, the priest lived in a cave above the banks of the river Dnieper near Kherson. And positively drooled over anything to do with omens and prophecies that came his way. He could use it to impress his Tartar overlords. I reckoned I could kill two birds with one stone therefore. I would use the Black Book of Brân to buy Father Kyrill, who would then lead me to the Tartars’ main encampment and the boss of the Golden Horde. I didn’t know then that I would encounter the Tartars sooner than I had anticipated.