Silk Road (63 page)

William took Josseran to one side. ‘What am I to do?’ he moaned. ‘I cannot pray for a heathen!’

‘Pray then, for a human soul in distress.’

‘What you ask is impossible!’

‘Will you mortally insult our escort by refusing them? Do whatever you will and hope for the best, then, for I believe the result will be the same.’

‘What does he say?’ Sartaq snapped.

‘He fears he may fail you.’

‘His magic worked well enough on Mar Salah. Besides, nothing else has helped her. Remind him that if the princess dies, we may be forced to linger here for fifty winters.’

‘I cannot do this!’ William repeated.

‘Is he ready?’ Sartaq said.

‘He is ready,’ Josseran answered.

Sartaq opened the door to the chamber and Josseran steered William through the door. The room must have once served as the
private quarters of a Mohammedan prince or princess, Josseran thought, for it was wondrously appointed, unlike his own bare cell. There was a ribbon of Arabic script around the arched windows, and the mud-brick walls were decorated with a ceramic frieze of geometric design, ox-blood on wax yellow.

Miao-yen lay on a bed in the centre of the room, apparently asleep. She seemed lost in this vast chamber. There were braziers lit in the corners, but the crackling poplar branches could not take the chill from the room.

Sartaq refused to step over the threshold, afraid of the spirits that hovered around Miao-yen’s body. Josseran stood back and William went alone to her bedside. He looked around, alarmed. ‘Where are her physicians?’

‘Sartaq says they have failed to heal her so he has banished them.’

William licked his thin white lips. ‘I tell you I cannot do this! She has not received the sacrament of baptism.’

‘We cannot offend our hosts! Is it so great a burden to ask you to pray for her? You spend enough of your time on your knees!’

What had so unnerved him? Josseran wondered. Did he fear contagion himself? But if her sickness was of a kind that was spread by her vapours then surely all of her maidservants would be swooning by now?

Josseran looked at the tiny figure in the bed. She deserved better than to die here in this lonely oasis, while yet a child. In some unfathomable part of his being, he still believed that the supplications of a priest, even those of such a vicious cleric as William, were worth to God a hundred of any commoner’s prayers.

‘Do what you can for her,’ Josseran said and turned for the door.

William caught his sleeve. ‘You are leaving me here?’

‘I am no shaman. It is up to you now to work the miracle.’

‘I told you, I cannot pray for her! God will not bestir Himself for a heathen!’

‘She is not a heathen, as you yourself know. She is just a young girl and she is sick! You can make the appearance of compassion, can you not?’ He went out, closing the heavy door with a crash that seemed to echo through the entire fort.

W
ILLIAM KNELT BESIDE
the bed and began to recite the paternoster. But he stumbled on the words and could not finish. The Devil was here in this room, in all his stinking subterfuge. He saw him smirking from the shadows, knowing too well his thoughts before he knew them himself.

He moved closer to the bed.

In sleep there is the resemblance of death, and in death the victim is forever silent. The thought came to him unbidden: he could do anything he wished with this woman; should he reach out and touch her no one would know.

Impossible now to contemplate the Infinite, to concentrate his thoughts on anything but his own compulsion. He looked around to reassure himself that the door was closed, the room empty. He tentatively reached out his hand. It was as if it was no longer a part of him. He watched it, horrified as if it was some huge, pale spider making its way across the coverlets.

His finger touched the marble flesh of the girl’s arm, and then jerked away suddenly as if it had been scalded.

Miao-yen did not wake; the shallow rhythm of her breathing did not change. Again William glanced guiltily around.

Motes of dust drifted through the yellow chevrons of light from the latticed windows.

His fingers pinched Miao-yen’s earlobe before jerking back again; then they grew bolder; they stroked her hand, even pulled at some of the tiny, golden hairs on her forearm until they came away from the skin. But still she did not stir.

William stood up, agitated, and paced the room, continually glancing at the door. No Tatar but a shaman would enter the room
of a sick person, Josseran had said. And even they had been banned from her presence.

‘I did not ask for this,’ he said aloud and wrung his hands in prayer. But there was no answer from God and the demons that had haunted him now came to take total possession.

Fergana Valley

The trance was brought on with hashish smoke and koumiss. Khutelun danced alone in her yurt until the spirits came and carried her with them to the eternal Blue Sky. Freed of the bonds of the earth, soaring through the air on the back of a black mare, she rode with the barbarian warrior, Joss-ran; she felt his arms around her as they plunged into the yawning embrace of the clouds.

She dreamed that they rode above the mountains to a high pasture where she joined with him in the long rich grass of summer. It was an image so real that even as she lay on the thick rugs of her yurt, lost in her reverie, her nostrils quivered with the foreign smell of him, and she opened her arms to receive his embrace.

Something moved inside her and she groaned and thrashed in pain; a bloodied child slipped from her body, bronzed like a Person but with the gold-red hair of the Christian.

‘Joss-ran.’

It was morning when she woke from the dream. It was dark and the embers of the fire were cold. She sat up, shivering, and stared around the yurt, disoriented.

She had entered the world of the spirits at the behest of her father, in order to discover the will of the gods concerning Alghu and Ariq Böke. But the image of Josseran and the child had drowned out the whisper of every other intuition. She could not comprehend what she had just experienced.

Her skin was slick and there was warmth and dampness in her loins. She rose unsteadily to her feet and stumbled outside.

A broken moon hovered above the snow-white hills. He was still out there somewhere. She knew now without question that there was a silver cord that joined them, and one day the wind would blow the seed towards the flower and they would meet again, after all.

Kashgar

It was clear to William that the princess Miao-yen was near the end. How many times had he come to this room, how many prayers had he whispered in her name? She was dying. God was not about to bestir himself for a painted heathen.

She looked dead already. Her breath was barely discernible.

His fingers slid over her skin, smooth as ivory, hot with fever. Emboldened by familiarity with its sweet terrain, it continued its explorations, settling finally on the bud of the girl’s breast.

Some barricade within him crumbled down; there was no one to ever see, no one to ever know. Even the object of his desire would not be witness to his fumblings. This fragile princess with her painted face had been offered to him on this altar as his private plaything, his to possess without consequence. Soon she would give up her spirit to the darkness and whatever sins he committed would be buried with her.

Or so the voice in his head reasoned.

He reached beneath the silk of the gown and gasped when his fingertips touched the hot and supple flesh of her thigh. He hesitated, before continuing his exploration. His hand was shaking uncontrollably, his mouth was dry, his mind empty of anything beyond the sensations of the moment, blind to salvation or even reason.

He set aside his Bible and lay down on the bed beside her. He placed her compliant arms around his shoulders and kissed her painted cheek. And as the shadows crept across the room he gave himself over to the terrible urgings of his soul.

J
OSSERAN HAD ALL
his life trained regularly in martial discipline, in close combat and in horsemanship. So he overcame the boredom of the long winter months of inactivity with a self-imposed regime, maintaining his sharpness in the saddle as best he could.

Every afternoon he took his horse to the maidan below the fort and drilled alone with sword and lance. A discovery he had made in the local bazaar had helped him immeasurably. The local merchants stored watermelons by hanging them in slings from bamboo poles so that they remained succulent almost through winter. Every day he bought half a score of these fruit and took them out to the orchard on the other side of the maidan and skewered them on long poles. He would then ride at speed between the mulberry trees and attempt to slice cleanly through a melon with his sword without breaking the horse’s stride.

When all the fruit had been thus vanquished he dismounted his black stallion and gave her a curry with the wooden blade the Tatars used to groom their horses. It was the same pony Khutelun had brought him the night of his escape from Qaidu’s camp. He cared for him well, although he had no particular affection for the beast, for he was irritable and sometimes vicious. He had named him William.

He heard hoofbeats and looked up. Sartaq rode across the maidan, in the distinctive straight-legged Tatar style. When he reached the orchard he reined in his pony and jumped down, picking his way through the skeletons of the trees. When he saw the wreckage of the mutilated fruit in the dust he looked at Josseran and grinned.

‘If you Christians ever go to war against watermelons, they should watch out.’

‘I pretend the melons are your head,’ Josseran said. ‘It helps my aim.’

Sartaq grinned again. ‘I have good news,’ he said. ‘Your shaman has proved his power.’

Josseran tried to hide his surprise. William had led him to believe that she was on the point of death. ‘She fares better?’

‘This Wey-ram,’ Sartaq said, using the Tatar pronunciation of ‘William’, ‘for all his strangeness, has powerful magic.’

Powerful magic? Josseran believed the princess would recover or die, as God willed, regardless of the good friar’s prayers, but he said: ‘I never doubted the efficacy of his powers.’

Sartaq could not hide his relief. At last there was an end in sight to their journey. ‘As soon as the snows melt we will cross the Roof of the World to Alghu’s court at Bukhara. From there we will send you on your way to the western lands.’

It was more than a year since he had seen Acre. He wondered what had taken place there during his absence. His hosts would tell him nothing, perhaps because they knew nothing themselves. Outremer was another world to them. Had Hülegü made a treaty with the Haute Cour after all, without Josseran’s efforts? Or had he swept on? When he and William reached Acre would they find just smoking ruins?

Josseran did not want to go back to Outremer. He knew he would have to face the friar’s accusations of heresy and blasphemy in front of the Council. The fact that he had saved the wretched man’s life twice would count for nothing with that intractable churchman. He cursed himself now for speaking so freely and making of the friar an enemy.