Silk Road (30 page)

‘So Borcan is not a god?’

‘He is a man who has found his way to the source of God. He understands the Spirit of the Blue Sky.’

Josseran shook his head. ‘I do not know what to make of all this,’ he said. He turned back to her. ‘Why did you bring me here?’

‘I do not know. I myself have been here only once before. I was still a girl then, I was accompanying my father to Qaraqorum. He showed me this. I remembered it as we rode and I thought somehow . . . somehow you would understand it.’

‘But you do not believe in this idol . . . this Borcan?’

‘There are many religions and each has its own truths. No, I am not a follower of Borcan. But is it not beautiful here?’

She thinks I will understand.
Like him, then, she felt some bond between them, some indefinable sympathy. I am a Christian knight and a Templar; she is a savage, a Tatar, who knows none of the gentleness and modesty of a Christian woman. And yet, yes, she is right, we do understand each other somehow.

‘This way,’ she whispered.

In the next cave the images danced and joined. Josseran almost reeled back. The walls were covered with the tempera couplings of a man and a woman. The erect phallus of the male had been delicately and faithfully reproduced; his joinings with the maid were joyous and acrobatic. The sunlight here was filtered through the narrow passages, it threw a golden aura on the frieze, bringing the shadowy lovemaking of the idols to shimmering life.

‘What is wrong?’ she whispered.

‘The Devil’s work!’

‘The artist only portrays a likeness similar to your recent encounters with that woman and her two daughters.’

‘It is sinful.’

‘You tell me it is sinful yet two nights ago you abandoned yourself to those women with little hesitation. Surely I do not understand what it is to be a Christian.’ He could not see her face in the twilight of the cavern but he heard the reproof in her voice.

‘William says sex is the Devil’s tool. What I did was wrong.’

‘What you did was natural. It was only wrong if the woman’s husband did not know what you did.’ She turned back to the frieze. ‘Look at this picture here. Do you see? The god so shamelessly
employing the Devil’s tool is Shiva, the god of personal destiny. We each of us have a destiny, Borcan says, yet we also have choice.’ She ran a finger lightly across the tempera surface. ‘Have you not thought of us joined together in this way, as Shiva is joined with his wife? Have you not sometimes thought of this as your destiny? And as mine?’

His voice caught in his throat. ‘You know I have.’

‘And yet I am not given to you in marriage, can never be. Is that not also a sin for you, Christian?’

‘Why do you taunt me?’

She stood closer to the painting, where the lord she called Shiva mounted his wife like a mare. ‘This hunger. It destroys our rest but we cannot rid ourselves of it. You and your shaman say you know the path better than we Tatars and yet you are maddened by your natures as a man lost in the desert is tormented by his thirst.’

He could not deny that.

She laid her hand on his shoulder. ‘We must go now.’

He was angry. Women should be modest, championed, protected. This savage lady was none of those things. So why was he so drawn to her? First she made him doubt his religion, now she made him doubt even his own heart. And yet, in truth, she only gave voice to every doubt, every rebellious thought he had ever had and never had the courage to speak. She was the siren call to the part of his soul he had kept hidden all his life. He was overwhelmed by blasphemous thoughts and heretical notions and a desperate longing for something that was beyond his reach.

‘We must go,’ she repeated.

He did not move. His hands hung at his sides.

‘Christian?’

‘I left Acre to bring the friar to your prince Hülegü. I thought I should be returned inside the walls within the month. I had not wanted any of this.’

‘When we begin any journey, we cannot know where that road may lead us. Obstacles fall across the way and force us to other paths. It is the way of things. Come. We must go. It will be dark soon.’

He followed her out of the cave. Outside, the sun was a copper ball and the valley was in shadow. A ghost moon hovered in a sky of
exquisite colour. He reached out his hand towards it, felt as if it was close enough to touch.

He followed Khutelun down the trail, leaving the idols to keep their lonely vigil on the mountain for another night.

O
NE
-E
YE POINTED
to the north. ‘The Flaming Mountains,’ he said.

A range of red hills stretched towards the horizon as far as he could see. Gullies were scoured into their face by countless rivers, making flame patterns in the red clay. Through the haze of the afternoon the mountains indeed appeared like a wall of fire.

And still the worst of the desert was before them.

Josseran walked in the shade of his camel’s flank rather than endure the constant jarring of the hard wooden saddle and the torture of the sun. He heard William panting behind him.

‘A pleasant day for a walk, Brother William.’

‘I am in agony.’

‘A condition much prized before God. One day you will be canonized. It will all seem of no account then.’

‘Do not mock me, Templar.’

Josseran almost pitied him. The friar’s face was blistered from the sun, his beard was matted and the flesh had wasted off his face, heat and exhaustion and piety had taken a terrible toll. ‘I had not meant to mock you.’

‘I fear I was wrong to entrust my life to you.’

‘You are still alive, are you not? Do not forget who it was that saved you in those accursed mountains. Though I have yet to receive a word of thanks for it.’

‘It was God’s will that I lived. Perhaps He means me to be the instrument of your salvation. Though I see you resist it at every turn. You broke your word to me. You said you would confess your sins to me last night.’

‘My sins will keep.’

‘Where did you go with the Tatar witch?’

‘She wished to show me some cave paintings these followers of Borcan had left in a cave.’

‘You fornicated with her, I know it! Stay away from her, Templar! Woman is the gate of the Devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of the serpent.’

‘Then why did the Lord create Eve, churchman?’

‘She was put on the earth to preserve our species and look after our children and our homes. She was also created as temptress to test our holiness. All evil comes to the world through Woman.’

‘Is that what you think, Brother William? Because it seems to me that it comes to us through men. I have not seen women butcher children and violate other women but I have seen men do it. Even men with crosses sewn on to their surcoats.’

‘If these women and children you speak of were Saracen, then you will know that the Pope has given a special dispensation to those who rid the world of unbelievers. It is called
malecide
, the killing of evil ones. Therefore it is not sinful. But we are not talking of the sin of violence. We are talking of the sin of lust.’

‘Lust does not seem such a terrible thing to me when you have seen men with their entrails out. Does it not say in the Bible “Thou shalt not kill”?’

‘You wish to debate theology with me, Templar? I tell you, a man may not always be mild. Did the Lord not cast the moneychangers out of the Temple? It is not a sin to rid the world of sin.’

‘I know a sin when I see one. I know when a man butchers another and sells his children to slavers, then that is a sin, whether his victims are Franks or Saracens. And how can a babe be evil? It was God’s will that it was born to a Mohammedan, was it not? And what of the Christian knight who chops off the head of that infant after raping the babe’s mother and disembowelling her? Does he then go straight to heaven? Is that the justice and truth of God?’

Josseran pulled hard on the camel’s nose string and scrambled on its neck. He pulled himself up and settled himself on the hard wooden saddle, preferring the torment of the sun and the jarring of the camel’s back to the opinions of the pious.

T
HE PLAIN WAS
pure ochre now, soft rolling dunes made up of fine grains of sand that found their way into the ears and the eyes, and left filmy, glistening layers on the clothing and skin. The great wilderness yawned before them, and they were swallowed by a heart-breaking silence.

Sunset threw black pools of shadow across the dunes. The camels knelt in the sand, roaring and snapping, while One-Eye removed the loads. The ropes had rubbed sores under the animals’ chests, and the wounds ran with pus and some were infested with maggots. No wonder they were so ill-tempered, Josseran thought.

Josseran and William went off to collect
argol
for the fires. Josseran heard a groan, and when he looked around he saw William staring at his hands in disgust. The
argol
he had found had not been sun-dried. In fact it was very fresh indeed.

One of the Tatars saw his mistake and laughed. The others joined in.

William smeared the excrement off his hands and on to Satan’s tattered hide. The camel roared its protest at this rough handling and tried to bite him. William stalked away. But there was nowhere for dignified retreat, no tree or rock for concealment, and so he just kept walking.

‘Bring him back,’ Khutelun said to Josseran. ‘Soon it will be night. He will lose himself in the desert.’

Josseran went after him. But William’s sense of self-preservation was better developed than she had given him credit for. He had stopped, still in sight of the camels. He was on his knees, his
head bowed. ‘God asks too much of me,’ he said as Josseran approached.

‘It is only a little digested cud, Brother William.’

‘It is not the filth on my hands. My back feels as if it has been racked, my nether parts are on fire, every bone in my body is weary. How can you endure this?’

‘I am a knight and a soldier. It is expected of me.’

‘You shame me,’ he murmured.

‘Also,’ Josseran added, ‘I had a woman the other night. It is good for the spirits.’

It was all the medicine William needed. ‘May God forgive you,’ William croaked and jumped back to his feet. ‘You are without shame, Templar! You fornicate and you blaspheme and you shall answer for your heretical opinions when we return to Acre!’ He brushed past Josseran with a crazed look in his eye. ‘All right, you heathens!’ he shouted as he stamped back towards the caravan, ‘I shall come and pick up more shit for you!’ He waved his hands above his head like a madman. ‘We shall all bury ourselves in shit!’