Imperial Fire (37 page)

‘Another thing,’ Wayland said. ‘I bought Zuleyka on the Caspian coast. Legally she’s mine.’

‘I’ve yet to see your money.’

‘In which case, the gypsy maiden remains your property. Consider that.’

Vallon glanced at Wayland and as quickly looked away. ‘One thing’s for certain. That girl’s no maiden.’

The Ark’s massive inward-sloping walls discouraged further speech. They ascended a ramp and passed through a huge portal bastioned on each side with towers connected by walkways. Beyond it a long passage bored towards a sunlit court. The walls amplified the clopping hooves. Chains and manacles lay coiled in cell-like recesses on each side.

They emerged onto a terrace of dazzling white marble and the Bukharan commander led his charges on a diagonal to one of the façades fronting the courtyard. Guards relieved Vallon of his sword.

‘I want a receipt.’

The commander began to demur. Vallon spoke through his teeth. ‘I represent His Imperial Majesty Alexius Comnenus. Give me a receipt.’

A scribe hastily summoned penned the document and then the commander hurried Vallon and his co-defendants into the court. The vaulted chamber must have been thirty yards long and as many feet high. At the far end, on a throne behind a rank of guards, sat the Kazi Kalan or chief justice, holding in his lap an axe of office larger and more splendid than the one the trade secretary had carried. Vallon marched towards him and didn’t halt until the guards blocked his progress with a wall of pikes. Vallon glared at the justice – a glandular man with a beard cut like an axe and sad fish-like eyes above sacs the colour of plums. He sat half-sideways swathed in a white silk gown voluminous enough to make a caique’s sail, its folds so artfully hung that it must have taken a team of dressers half a morning to arrange.

To the right of the chief justice and his legal team stood Yusuf the trade secretary, looking uncomfortable. To the left a knot of scowling men surrounded the plaintiff, a tall cadaverous figure whose hennaed beard bore an unfortunate resemblance to pubic hair. Vallon loathed him at first sight.

He pointed at him. ‘Is this the thief? Is this the rogue?’

The prosecuting team twitched in surprise. One of them, with a face like the crack of doom, stepped forward. ‘Sa’id al-Qushair is the plaintiff, the gentleman who has brought serious charges against you. The men attending him are his witnesses.’

‘What charges?’

‘Trespass, assault, theft and other gross violations.’

Vallon snorted. ‘Completely baseless.’

‘That is for this court to establish.’

For the rest of the morning, the prosecutor laid out the case against Vallon, calling one witness after the other. All agreed that two days ago, in the early hours, three armed men – soldiers under Vallon’s command – had entered the plaintiff’s residence by stealth, breaking into the harem quarters and injuring one of the plaintiff’s senior wives before carrying away by force a young slave woman recently acquired by the plaintiff. The men of the household had given pursuit, but the kidnappers had escaped after killing one of the plaintiff’s horses. A savage hound had been involved, too.

Vallon stood tapping his empty scabbard while the evidence mounted up, occasionally darting evil looks at the plaintiff, who responded with appeals to God or mock lunges at Vallon.

The last witness stood down and the prosecutor turned to Vallon.

‘Those are the charges. Do you deny them?’

‘I deny them all. My men didn’t steal Zuleyka. How could I steal my own property?’ Vallon pointed at Hauk. ‘I purchased the girl from this gentleman two months ago on the west coast of the Caspian Sea. Ask him.’

They did, and Hauk established that he had indeed sold Zuleyka to Vallon.

The chief justice summoned his legal team and there followed a lengthy conference concerning laws criminal and civil, tort, points of jurisprudence and nomology as they bore on the case of slaves who escaped from one owner only to find themselves under another’s bondage – citing precedents going back to the time of Muhammad.

By the time the group separated – like spiders having sucked the life from a fly, Vallon thought – the shadows had shifted a long way round the chamber. By then he’d decided that the chief justice wasn’t a healthy man. He looked as if he wanted nothing more than to lie down. A servant fanned him with osprey feathers.

The prosecutor approached Vallon. ‘While no one doubts your claim that you bought the slave, the fact that you lost her several weeks ago is a significant factor. The plaintiff bought her in good faith. He had no idea that the girl had once been your property.’

‘He does now and I have no intention of relinquishing my title. I note that you refer to the girl not as his slave, but as “that which his right hand owns”. If he wants to contest my title, let him do it with his right hand at a time and place of his choosing.’

The prosecutor thumped his staff. ‘General, this is a court of law and won’t be mocked.’

Vallon pointed. ‘If I stole that jewel in your hat and sold it to a merchant who then sold it to a third party, who would be the rightful owner?’

‘Me of course.’

‘Precisely.’

‘But that doesn’t mean I would be entitled to take it back by force. I would have sought redress in law, knowing that…’ a bow to the chief justice ‘… it would be administered impartially.’

‘I wish to question His Eminence the Trade Secretary.’

Yusuf stepped forward in a guarded manner.

Vallon went straight for the throat. ‘The day we arrived at Bukhara, I informed you that one of my men, together with a slave girl, had been carried off by sand dwellers and might at that very moment be languishing in the slave market. I beseeched you to enquire after them and restore them to their rightful place.’

‘I have a vague memory of your request. I don’t recall you mentioning a slave girl.’

‘Did you or didn’t you follow up my request?’

‘I did, with no success.’

Vallon smiled at the audience. ‘You couldn’t have been trying very hard. You only had to despatch an underling to the slave dormitory to find that my trooper was being held there pending his sale in a public auction.’

‘General —’

Vallon’s voice rose. ‘It took my men two days – two days – to track down my trooper in the very act of being sold off in full view of the populace.’ Vallon hoisted Hero’s arm. ‘The man who found him – this gentleman here – was obliged to pay the sum of seventy solidi to restore one of my own soldiers to my ranks. And who was the bidder who pushed the price up to such a ridiculous level?’ Vallon flung out a hand. ‘Him. The so-called plaintiff, the same man who only the day before had illegally deprived me of my mistress. Not content with stealing one item of my property, he wanted to steal two.’

‘General —’

‘Let me make clear how heinous this man’s crimes are. He went to desperate lengths to enslave a man he knew full well was a trooper in my command, a soldier pledged to serve your ally, His Imperial Majesty Alexius Comnenus. As I understand Islamic law, taking slaves in war is a right sanctioned by God. Is Bukhara at war with Constantinople? Shall I warn my men to guard against imminent attack?’

‘General, I must protest —’

‘I haven’t finished. And this only two days after stealing my mistress. Yes, my noble friends. My mistress. Unlike the plaintiff, who apparently herds women as a peasant farms goats, Zuleyka is the only love of my life. My heart broke in two the day those sand devils ripped her from my side.’ Vallon kissed his hands and cupped them to heaven. ‘I give thanks to your Divine Glory that in your infinite favour you restored my beloved.’

The prosecutor turned a sickly look on the chief justice. That august official beckoned the lawyers with a wave of his axe. When they’d finished their deliberations, the prosecutor addressed Vallon.

‘His Excellency concedes that the case has some complicating features and adjourns it for one week until certain facts can be established and case law examined. Until then, you and your men are restricted to barracks and you will hand over the slave girl to this court.’

Vallon glanced at Wayland. ‘Do you have her?’

‘Yes.’

Vallon drew breath. ‘Having suffered heartbreak before being reunited with my beloved, I won’t part with her again. Never!’ He struck his empty scabbard. ‘You’ll have to tear her from across my dead body.’

Very clearly in the shocked silence, the chief justice’s stomach rumbled.

‘Keep going,’ Hero murmured.

Vallon advanced a step. ‘As for confining my men to barracks, I’ll comply until we leave – in three days’ time.’

‘General, the chief justice has ruled that you remain in Bukhara until the next hearing.’

‘In three days’ time, I’ll lead my men out of Bukhara, fulfilling the trust placed on me by my imperial master. I can’t believe you’ll oppose my departure with force just to satisfy the vanity and venality of that thieving scoundrel.’

The chief justice sagged; the trade secretary scuffed a palm over his mouth and spoke to the prosecutor. The prosecutor led the plaintiff around the chamber, yanking his elbow and hissing into his ear. Learning that the trial was not going his way, the man gave vent to awful tantrums – not at all the behaviour to endear himself to the learned advocates. The prosecutor returned him weeping and tearing his beard to his friends before approaching Vallon with a pasted-on smile.

‘We can settle the dispute.’

‘Dispute? A moment ago it was a serious crime.’

‘General, don’t throw away your advantage. Offer the plaintiff money by way of restitution.’

‘Pay the rogue for my own property?’

‘It’s the only way to end the case quickly.’

‘If I pay the thief, you’ll let my expedition leave?’

‘Yes. The sooner the better.’

Vallon put on a mulish look. ‘How much?’

‘Sixty solidi for the girl, twenty for the horse, ten for the assault. Call it a round hundred.’

‘Ridiculous! What about recompense for the wrongs that wretch has done me? If he’s defiled my mistress, how much compensation does that entitle me to? There isn’t enough gold in Bukhara to outweigh the insult.’

The trade secretary intervened. ‘You want to leave. We want you gone. It’s a small price to pay.’

Vallon looked at the roof, now dimming in evening light. ‘Out of my duty to the emperor and for the sake of my men, I concede.’ He snapped a finger at Hero. ‘Pay the devil.’

Before whirling on his heel, Vallon thanked the chief justice. ‘Your Excellency, I withdraw any aspersions I might have cast on Bukharan justice. You have fulfilled the function of a judge in a manner that sets you on a pinnacle as an example of impartiality, justice and kindness to the people of God the Exalted.’

‘That’s enough,’ the prosecutor snarled.

The trade secretary caught up with Vallon at the door. ‘In the unlikely event that you survive your journey to China, I advise you not to return by way of Bukhara. You’ll find the gates closed against you.’

Hero managed to contain his laughter until they were in the Registan. ‘I didn’t know you had so many words in you. You would have been a match for Cicero.’

Vallon didn’t laugh. He directed a venomous glare at Wayland. ‘We escaped by the skin of our teeth. More than once you’ve told me that you’re not subject to my command. Very well. Since you don’t feel loyalty to me, don’t expect me to offer you my protection. You may as well leave, taking your slut with you.’

He raked spurs down his horse’s flanks.

‘You don’t mean that,’ Hero called. ‘Hey, stop.’

Vallon kept going.

Word of Wayland’s raid and Vallon’s courtroom theatrics spread through the squadron, producing much merriment. Lucas’s comrades greeted him with a kind of dazed admiration and told him that he was the most expensive trooper in the history of the Byzantine army. They were pleased to have Zuleyka back, too. What particularly tickled them was that this was the third time she’d been delivered from bondage. It reinforced their suspicions that she possessed uncanny powers and made them keep a respectful distance. Besides, they believed that Wayland had laid claim to the girl – or perhaps, said some, it was the other way round.

The trial had another outcome. Fearing retaliation by the vengeful plaintiff or the smarting Bukharan high-ups, Hauk decided to postpone his journey back to the Caspian and throw his lot in with Vallon for one more stage. His men would accompany the expedition as far as Samarkand, where they’d add to their trade stuffs before returning to the ships by a route that avoided Bukhara.

With only three days to make ready the caravan, the men worked night and day laying in stores. Many of the troopers’ mounts and pack animals were used up and had to be traded in against fresh stock. Here the Sogdians demonstrated their worth. Shennu – Vallon had dropped the ‘An’, a Chinese surname meaning ‘from Bukhara’ – accompanied the general to a horse fair in the Registan.

‘They’re ugly brutes,’ Wulfstan said, surveying the shaggy, mallet-headed, crested-mane, mouse-coloured beasts. ‘I’ve drowned better-looking dogs.’

‘They’re bred for desert travel,’ Shennu said. ‘Wild tarpans crossed with Turkmen stock. They’ll survive for weeks in conditions that would kill your Greek horses in days. Their hooves are so hard they don’t even need shoeing.’

Vallon eyed the horses. ‘Even so, I don’t intend to ride into Kaifeng with my spurs dragging in the dust.’

Shennu sized him up. ‘If you have deep pockets, you can buy the finest steeds on earth right now, right here.’

‘Show me.’

Shennu led Vallon’s party to a corral ringed by a more affluent class of buyer. Wulfstan whistled when he saw the horses. Mainly grey or bay in colour, they matched Byzantine cavalry mounts in size and, but for a rather large head and very straight forelegs, they were splendidly proportioned, with eyes radiating spirit and intelligence.

‘Ferghana horses,’ Shennu said. The Chinese believe they are half-dragon, born in water and capable of carrying their riders to heaven. They’re reserved for the aristocracy.’

Vallon pointed at a sweating gelding. ‘How much will that one fetch?’

‘You have a good eye for horses.’

‘So I should. I’m a cavalryman.’

‘It won’t come cheap.’

‘Pay whatever it takes.’

‘That might be more than you bargained for, but if you bring the horse to Kaifeng in sound condition, you’ll sell it for many times the price you pay today.’

Vallon folded his arms over his chest while a groom put the Ferghana through its paces. Hands shot up, registering bids. Shennu didn’t make any gesture that went beyond his eyebrows.

‘Are we in the bidding?’ Vallon demanded.

‘Of course. The agent for a rich dealer is driving the price up.’

Vallon wiped his palms on his thighs. ‘Match him.’

Shennu stood calm while the other bidders shouted and waved their hands. Finally the crowd fell quiet and the auctioneer swung his head left and right before, like a pendulum coming to rest, he fixed his eyes on Vallon.

‘The horse is yours,’ Shennu said. ‘Congratulations.’

‘How much?’

‘Forty-seven solidi.’

‘Christ,’ Vallon said.

‘It’s not as much as we paid for Lucas,’ Aiken pointed out.

At midnight before the dawn departure, everyone in the caravanserai was up, saddling horses, greasing cart axles, attending to the scores of tasks required to get the caravan underway. One hundred and seventy-four Bactrian camels sat couched in the courtyard, submitting with haughty indifference while twenty-nine native handlers, including women and children, lashed loads onto them. Each camel could carry forty pounds more than a horse and could travel twice as far at half the pace on quarter as much water.

Shennu came over to Vallon. ‘We’re ready.’

It was still dark, the storks’ nests crowning the ribat’s towers ragged silhouettes against the greying stars. Vallon mounted his heavenly horse, rode to the gate and stood in his stirrups.

‘Men, we’re on our way to China. Stay faithful to our mission and to each other and you can look forward to returning home laden with riches and honours.’

His troops cheered. Vallon gestured to the gatekeepers to open up. ‘And God save us,’ he said, passing through.

The camels travelled in strings up to ten strong and the last of them were still pacing out of the city when Vallon heard the first call to prayer rising faint behind them on the plain.

Josselin caught up. ‘It looks like three Turkmen have deserted.’

‘I expected to lose more.’

‘After a week’s whoring and feasting, the men have forgotten the misery of desert travel. They’re excited to be riding the Silk Road.’

Vallon grunted. ‘They won’t be so eager in a month’s time.’ He glanced back down the column. ‘Is Master Wayland still with us?’

‘He is, sir, riding in the rear with the gypsy girl. Do you want to send a message?’

Vallon hadn’t exchanged a word with the Englishman since the trial. Working in his quarters late at night, he’d often looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps, hoping it was Wayland come to make peace. He never did. Vallon shortened rein and headed for the rising sun. ‘No.’

A week later the expedition camped five miles outside Samarkand. After the dramas in Bukhara, Vallon had no intention of letting his men inside another city so soon. Hauk entered the general’s tent after supper and sat for some time in silence, nursing a beaker of wine.

‘This really is our last meeting,’ he said at last. ‘A part of me wishes I was going with you, but my men are homesick. It’s been nearly two years since they left their hearths.’

‘Do you have a family?’

‘My foes killed them.’

‘I have a wife and two daughters in Constantinople.’

‘I’ll pray for your safe return. Farewell.’

Vallon looked up when the Viking was at the door. ‘Farewell to you, Hauk Eiriksson.’

From Samarkand they travelled east by way of the Ferghana Valley, sweating in humid heat. They halted for two days at Osh to re-provision and then climbed through an outlier of the Pamirs, passing fields where horse-breeding nomads had taken to cultivating lucerne for their herds. The path steepened and narrowed. Four days’ climbing brought the caravan gasping in the thin air to a rocky pass strewn with rags of snow and littered with the bones of animals and men who’d gambled on a fair-weather crossing and paid with their lives.

The path switchbacked over the ranges, gradually descending, at one point squeezing through a marble gorge so narrow that the camels’ loads brushed the sides of walls polished smooth as silk by the traffic of centuries.

Seven days after leaving Osh, Vallon looked out from the last pass across the rust-coloured wastes of the Taklamakan, the desert that had swallowed the previous expedition. Shennu told him that its name meant ‘you go in, but you don’t come out’.

A trooper shouted and Vallon turned and spotted horsemen rising over the shoulder. They were too few to be a threat and were riding in a way that told him they were fleeing rather than following.

‘It’s Hauk and his men,’ Wulfstan said.

Vallon counted twenty-eight, eight fewer than the number who’d gone their own way at Samarkand.

The Viking leader rode up, his silk suit torn and stained with dried blood.

‘What happened?’ Vallon said.

‘An argument over a trinket whose value I wouldn’t set at five dirhams turned into a battle.’

‘Are they pursuing you?’

Hauk spat. ‘Not unless they want more of the same. For every man I’ve lost, those bastards lost three.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘It seems that fate conspires to prevent me returning home,’ Hauk said. He peered into the dust-filtered wastes of the vast in-between. ‘How far is it to China?’

‘At least four months to the border, probably another two to the capital.’

‘Hero told me there’s a sea route from China to the western seas.’

‘I wouldn’t stake my life on its existence.’

Hauk glanced back. ‘And I wouldn’t hazard it returning through Samarkand and Bukhara.’

Three of his men were wounded, two seriously. One had taken an arrow through his lungs and died within the day. The other casualty was Rorik, Hauk’s giant lieutenant. Hero examined him and decided there was nothing he could do to save him. A soldier had rammed a spear into the back of his thigh, auguring the barbed blade and ripping out a hole large enough to accommodate a child’s fist.

Pus oozed from the blackened and fly-blown flesh. Hero shook his head at Aiken standing at a distance with one hand over his nose to ward off the stench.

‘Gangrene.’

‘I’m not done for yet,’ Rorik said. ‘The memory of my attacker’s eyes when I popped them out of his head will keep me going.’

Each day for the next six days Hero cleaned and dressed the wound, astonished that someone so corrupted by death wouldn’t yield to its embrace. By the time the expedition approached Yarkand, he almost wished that the Viking would die. Rorik’s foul rantings offended almost as much as his rotting ham.

The next day, certain it must be Rorik’s last, Hero went through the motions of bathing the wound when it seemed to quiver like a diabolical hatchling. He threw himself back in disgust as Rorik’s thigh ruptured, expelling a mess of rotting flesh and a shard of iron. A trickle of clean blood followed.

Rorik opened one bloodshot eye. Already it looked less crazed.

‘You have no right to be alive,’ Hero said.

‘Yes, I have. The coward attacked me when I wasn’t looking.’

At Kashgar Shennu hired new camels and drivers. Here the Silk Road divided, one branch winding north of the desert under the Tian Shan Mountains, the other skirting the southern rim within sight of the Kun Lun range. A hundred rivers flowed into the Taklamakan and none flowed out. Shennu told Vallon that in the middle of the desert lay cities buried under sand, the mummified corpses of their fair-haired citizens dead a thousand years.

They took the southern route. The July sun, dull with the ash of its own burning, bored down, making travel by day intolerable. Each evening the caravan master waited until shadows overtook the lingering blue of the desert sky before giving the signal to depart. The handlers climbed to their feet, collected their hobbled beasts and drove them towards their loads where, by jerking on their head-ropes, they forced them to their knees. Then two men lifted the load onto the pack saddle and secured it with two loops and a peg. They struck the tents and stowed them on the beasts that carried the camp equipment, then string by string, the caravan moved off, the bells of the camels clonking and the drivers picking up a song that might last all night or stop for no reason, leaving only the
shush-shush
of the camels’ pads brushing through sand.

At daybreak or soon after, the long procession would reach the next oasis or well and the drivers would lead the camels forward in lines to drink from troughs filled with water hauled up in caulked wicker baskets. Then they would drive the camels out to forage on the spiky vegetation and the camp would fall into fitful sleep until the sun sank to the western horizon. So it continued, day after day, night after night, week after week.

Riding half asleep at night through the desert, Vallon sometimes imagined that he was treading a path above the earth, the stars lying awash beneath him. Other nights the moon-blanched sands closed in until he was travelling down a lane bounded by high hedges and overhanging trees. His eyes focused on some destination that never arrived, drifting further and further into unconsciousness until a sudden jolt jerked him back to a reality almost as outlandish as his dreams.

One night Vallon and Aiken fell in with Hero and the two Sogdians. ‘Shennu says we should reach Khotan within a week,’ Hero said.

‘The day we met I said that a journey was just a tiresome passage between one place and another. I wasn’t wrong.’

Hero laughed. ‘Admit it. A part of you is beginning to believe that we’ll really reach China.’

Vallon turned to Shennu. ‘Tell us more about its people.’

‘They are a contradictory race. Deeply conservative, revering their ancestors and traditions, yet inventive beyond belief. They believe their emperor is appointed by the Mandate of Heaven. At the same time they consider him mortal and therefore fallible, which gives his subjects the right to overthrow him if disaster strikes the empire. That’s why, though they value harmony, the empire has suffered so many upheavals. The real power lies with the scholar officials, civil servants selected by examination. In theory, competition is open to all and promotion is by merit. In practice, most candidates and top officials are the sons of aristocrats.’

‘What position do the military occupy?’

‘The ruling class regard them as a necessary evil. To be frank, they despise them. Many of the commanders are foreigners and the rank and file are largely drawn from the dispossessed and criminals. The imperial circle prefers to pay off enemies rather than confront them. China is like a large honey pot surrounded by swarms of flies. The Chinese can’t swat every fly, so they drip honey into the mouths of the flies’ masters and hope that will satisfy them. Of course having tasted drips of honey, the flies want to drink deep from the source.’

‘Who are these flies?’ Vallon said.

‘Horse nomads. Tanguts in the west, Khitans to the north. To placate them, the emperor lavishes wealth on them at the expense of his subjects.’

Vallon gave Hero a jaundiced smile. ‘That sounds familiar.’

They rode on in silence for a while. ‘Will you teach us Chinese?’ Aiken asked.