Imperial Fire (29 page)

In the brief cool after dawn, Wayland was out hunting game on a badlands ridge when he spied a swirl of dust to the east. A rider approaching hard, kicking up a cloud that trailed back in a long plume. Wayland scrambled down to the track and the horseman pulled up in a squirt of gravel. It was one of the Turkmen trailblazers, unrecognisable beneath a carapace of grime, his eyes red wounds and his lips like roasted leather.

‘Yeke?’

‘Good news, my friend, blessings be upon you. We found the caravan trail after two days and reached wells a day later.’ Yeke struck his chest. ‘Didn’t I say I’d find water?’

‘I never doubted you,’ Wayland said. He lobbed up his water bottle and Yeke swallowed half its contents before emptying the rest over his head. The runnels carved through the dust made him look like a disinterred ghoul.

‘Where are your companions?’

‘Back at the encampment, eating, drinking and making eyes at the lovely ladies. I left them yesterday evening and rode all night, so keen was I to bring the news to Lord Vallon.’

Wayland stroked the exhausted horse’s neck. ‘Don’t expect much rest after your long ride. Vallon frets to be on his way.’

Yeke punched his left shoulder with his right fist. ‘Pah! A Seljuk doesn’t need a bed if he has a saddle.’

His horse turned beneath him and Yeke, only half-conscious, began drifting back the way he’d come. Wayland took the horse’s bridle and steered it in the right direction. He had to shake Yeke awake when they entered the camp.

On receiving the Seljuk’s report, Vallon ordered a night march that set out as the sun squatted on the Black Lake’s horizon. Turning their backs on that sunset, none of the men thought that this might be their last sight of the sea. Even if such an intimation had crossed their minds, there was no way of forecasting which of them would survive the coming months to stand in wonderment on the shore of an ocean across the other side of the world.

Each trooper carried water for three days and a week’s reserve slopped in the casks aboard the wagons. Wayland jogged along at the head of the column, invigorated by being on the move again, dreamy in the small hours as the landscape floated past in a mist of starlight.

At night the temperature fell close to freezing. Dawn came up in steely blues before the sun rose in a molten ball and the horizons began to wobble. When the landscape dissolved in white heat, the column halted to seek shelter under skeletal saxaul shrubs. When the sun touched the contours again, the men rose to face the next stage with resignation leavened by coarse humour and flashes of fantasy.

‘Imagine if we were to ride over that next ridge and find ourselves looking down at a splendid city surrounded by vineyards and orchards and pleasure gardens.’

‘Why stop there? Imagine it’s a city without men, ruled by Amazons who yearn for bold soldiers with big dicks.’

‘That rules you out on both counts.’

‘Let a fellow dream. Did I tell you that in this city they serve wine that transports you to paradise, where every wish comes true?’

‘I’d settle for a bath house and a clean bed.’

‘Don’t listen to Lucien. He’d bitch if he was seated in heaven at the right hand of the archangel Gabriel.’

‘Not much fornicating while Gabriel’s got his eye on you. Anyway, it’s not sex I crave. It’s decent food. What does this city have to make my mouth water?’

‘Ambrosia, my friend. Food for the gods.’

Wayland drifted past this exchange and others like it, the troopers acknowledging his passing with lofted hands, looking after him with speculative expressions.

‘He’s a strange one,’ a soldier said. ‘Comes and goes like a ghost.’

‘Be grateful he rides with us. You saw how well he shoots a bow, and he can read the trail of man or beast better than the Turkmen. As a child he ran wild with wolves. Don’t take my word for it. Ask Hero.’

‘He’s another odd chap. Blinks and bumbles and mutters like a man in his dotage.’

‘Hey, I won’t hear a word against Master Hero. He salved a boil in my bum crack and didn’t turn a hair. I’ll never forget it.’

‘Now you’ve shared that image, neither will I.’

‘He’s a proper surgeon, not the usual sawbones. Teaches at the university in Salerno. God knows why he gave up such a cushy berth to join this adventure.’

‘Don’t be fooled by his gentle manners. He’s as tough as whipcord. They say he drew an arrow from a friend shot through the lungs.’

‘Did the fellow live?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Speaking personally, though I’ve spilled a fair amount of blood in combat, I could never wield a surgeon’s knife. Hell, I come over faint if I cut myself shaving.’

‘Well, here we are on the ridge and there ain’t no city nor gardens nor maidens lining up to greet us.’

‘Next one, or the one after that. On a journey as long as ours, we’re bound to strike it lucky sooner or later. Stands to reason.’

‘You want to bet?’

The column crawled through a clay desert eroded into fantastic shapes before entering a region of sand dunes. Rain was only a fading memory, but around brackish waterholes the land still grew green, the oases criss-crossed by the slots of gazelles and the pads of the lions and wolves that preyed on them. Humans dwelt here, too. Several times the troopers saw shining dust palls stirred up by nomads driving their flocks away from the invaders.

It took four days to reach the caravan trail. Wagons had broken down, their axles snapped or their hubs ground to wonky ovals. Vallon wouldn’t abandon them and ordered the mechanics to carry out makeshift repairs with iron sleeves, leather washers and wooden wedges.

Wayland was first to spot the nomad encampment – a score of yurts along the shore of a dried-up lake surrounded by groaning camels and three flocks of bawling sheep guarded by dogs and youngsters.

One of the Turkmen outriders galloped out to greet the column. ‘We’d almost given up on your coming.’

‘Where’s the water?’ Wayland said, scratching the back of his neck where the rubbing of his filthy collar had produced sores.

The Turkman wheeled his horse and cocked his hand.

Wayland rode into the camp, breathing in the bitter-sweet smell of dung fires. Dogs flew at him and Wayland’s hound locked jaws with one in a brief tussle before driving it away cowed and bleeding. Moments later the hound stood wagging its tail in front of a nomad child.

The herders had observed the hound’s imposition of its dominance with curiously inert expressions, as if their struggle with nature had taught them that it was pointless to take sides. The men wore goat-hair caps and cotton robes over baggy trousers. The women appeared to be either young and sappy or old and withered – no middle age.

A nomad guided the advance party to a well rimmed with paving stones. Wayland peered into the black bore. He dropped a stone into it and waited for it to hit the bottom. Not a sound. The nomad grinned and lowered a leather bucket attached to a braided wool rope with its free end coiled in a stack three feet high. Grinning all the while, he paid out the rope, a process that took so long half the force had ridden in before the rope went slack. Gathering up the free end, the nomad tossed it over a wooden crossbar and tied it to a camel. A boy drove the beast away with a stick and both were small in the distance before the bucket rose swaying from the depths with its load of bitter water. Hero had joined Wayland and in the spirit of curiosity he paced out the length of rope.

‘More than seven hundred feet,’ he said. ‘How did they sink a well so deep without engines or proper tools?’

On receiving the question, the nomad looked at both foreigners as if they were simpletons and made energetic digging gestures.

‘Good Lord,’ said Hero. ‘It must have taken decades. Imagine sitting in a cradle hundreds of feet below ground, chipping away with bits of flint and iron.’

The nomad pointed north-east and Wayland translated. ‘He says some wells are sunk more than a thousand feet.’

Hero shook his head in wonder. ‘I must set down these particulars while they’re fresh in my mind. Why are you laughing?’

For a few bolts of cloth and a bag of faience beads, the expedition purchased half a dozen sheep which they roasted in firepits over glowing beds of saxaul branches. After feasting, the troopers sat talking quietly under the stars until a three-man orchestra drawn from their company struck up an impromptu tune on syrinx, flute and zither. Well fed, pleasantly drowsy, Wayland flicked a finger in time to the melody.

The music faltered and the audience stirred. Wayland opened his eyes to find Zuleyka occupying the space in front of the ensemble. Since landing, he’d kept out of her way, but she hadn’t stayed out of his thoughts. She took the flautist’s instrument and blew an air that seemed to have been playing in Wayland’s head all his life. She handed back the flute, spread her arms wide and tapped one foot while the musicians struck up. She looked at the ground, nodding until they’d found their tempo, and then tossed back her head, clicked her fingers and went into a rapture.

Wayland rose and so did every other man. It was as if the music travelled up Zuleyka’s body. First her feet seemed to levitate, then her hips shivered before the current reached her arms. They waved in graceful articulations, suggesting all manner of images, sacred and profane. She dropped her arms to her side and swayed like a flame, her shoulders performing a dance of their own. A sharp cry from her, a lover’s exhortation, quickened the music and Zuleyka’s movements grew more ecstatic.

She wore only a pair of thin bloomers and a top cropped below her breasts, leaving her midriff bare. She began to rotate her belly, at the same time fluttering her hips. Both gyrations settled into voluptuous undulations that left nothing to the imagination.

Outlanders and Vikings both drew closer like moths to a lamp.

‘Imagine a night with her,’ said a trooper. ‘She’d suck out your soul.’

Wayland shot an angry glance at the speaker. Zuleyka’s performance amazed him more than it aroused. How could she move one part of her body independently of the rest?

The audience beat time, more than a hundred warriors exhorting Zuleyka to a climax.

‘She’s looking at me,’ said a man to Wayland’s right.

‘No, she isn’t. Her eyes are fixed on the Englishman.’

Wayland’s skin tightened. The gypsy girl’s eyes were indeed looking in his direction.

‘Stop this obscene display!’
 

Vallon strode into the circle, rigid with anger. The music ceased and a sigh went up from the audience. Zuleyka relaxed, sucked in breaths and walked away on quick feet, the dog appointed to protect her virtue ambling at her side with its tail wagging like a banner.

‘Get to your beds,’ Vallon ordered. His gaze scoured around and settled on Wayland. There could be no doubt who he blamed for this assault on discipline, this flagrant undermining of the Outlanders’ moral health.

With so many men and beasts to be supplied from a single source, the drawers of water were still labouring next morning to replenish the expedition’s vessels. Vallon negotiated for a dozen camels and their drivers to accompany the force as far as the Oxus, with more beasts and helpers to be recruited along the way. Their guide was an old man who told the general, his voice whistling around a single tooth, that brigands infested the trail, falling on caravans as wolves descended on sheepfolds.

So the expedition’s next encounter with the inhabitants came as a benign surprise. On a track beaten out of nowhere a wedding party passed from the opposite direction, a dozen two-humped camels shuffling along draped with flatweave trappings and harness jingling with bells of beaten silver, the women’s faces hidden under horsehair veils, the bride crowned with a magnificent silver headdress, her long black tresses hanging to the end of her camisole. The Outlanders drew aside to let the procession pass and watched it diminish and disappear into the shrivelled landscape.

That evening Wayland was resoling a shoe in the sun’s last radiance when a tall silhouette passed across the light.

‘Vallon,’ he said, pulling a stitch tight. ‘I’ve been thinking about arranging a hunting party.’

The figure stopped and for a moment Wayland thought the general had taken offence at his casual address.

‘Are you speaking to me?’ Lucas said. There was no one else within earshot.

Wayland shielded his eyes and laughed. ‘The sun was in my eyes. At first glance I took you for the general.’

‘I never thought eyes as sharp as yours could trick you,’ Lucas said. He seemed to be pinned to the spot.

Wayland rose smiling. ‘Actually, there is a resemblance. Something about the jawline, your nose. I don’t know. Something.’

Lucas scrubbed his hand down his face. ‘My nose is bust. I don’t look anything like the general.’

If he’d walked away then, Wayland would have forgotten the minor embarrassment. As it was, Lucas remained transfixed and had to wrench himself round by conscious effort. When he’d walked some distance, he stopped, shoulders tense, before hurrying on his way.

Wayland’s forehead furrowed. No, it couldn’t be, he told himself. Yet his eyes rarely deceived him. From a mile off he could distinguish a pigeon from a hawk, and if it were the latter, he could tell by the rhythm of its wings whether it was cruising or hunting.

Not long after this encounter he happened upon Gorka grilling skewered mutton over a fire.

Wayland massaged his hands in the heat. ‘Lucas,’ he said. ‘I believe he’s from your part of the world.’

Gorka grew guarded. ‘What’s he done now?’

Wayland dropped to his haunches. ‘Nothing as far as I know. I’m just curious why a lad from the back of beyond would travel all the way to Byzantium to take military service.’

Gorka turned the skewer. Fat flared into flame. ‘Plenty of recruits have travelled further. For a lad who wants to get on in life, there ain’t many opportunities in a place like Osse. I should know. I grew up two valleys away.’

‘Is Osse in Aquitaine?’