Swords From the West (47 page)

The grotesquely striped and bedraggled figure of the fool squatted midway up the pyramid of skulls. His teeth were chattering and his long arms shot out from his body in frenzied exhortation.

Bembo had seized the first vantage-point to hand. Now he gazed hopefully and imploringly at Michael. "Conjure the demons, Brother Michael; weave the spell you told us of-"

The half-moment of quiet was what Michael sought. He lifted his empty left hand and shouted one word in Turki.

"Ambassadors!"

One or two of the riders looked at him in surprise. Michael had learned in Bayezid's camp that in the Tatar country envoys to the khans or chiefs were inviolate. Ordinarily merciless, the Tatar war chiefs took pride in the number of emissaries from other lands that came to them with tribute.

And in several instances the Tatars kept faith better than the monarchs of Europe. They respected an envoy and were bitter in their rage against enemies who slew Tatar emissaries.

"Ambassadors are here," repeated Michael. "Are you dogs, to worry the stranger who comes with gifts?"

Those who understood his words repeated them to the others. The leader heard and rose from Rudolfo to stride to Michael.

His men joined him. They were short, brawny warriors, wearing furs and leather over their mail, and with bronze helmets bearing pointed guards that came down over brow and nose. Scarcely less black than their lamb'swool kaftans were their faces, with slant hard eyes and thin mustaches.

Their short swords were broader at the end than the hilt, and each had a target of bull's hide on his left arm. Michael saw that the empty saddles bore quivers and bows.

"Well conjured, Brother Michael," chattered Bembo. "The charm was a mighty charm. I will aid you."

He started to scramble down from his mount when one of the warriors seized his leg and jerked him to earth, staring at him with ox-like curiosity. Bembo's zeal dwindled.

He skipped away. The Tatar, no taller than the hunchback, made after him with the rolling gait of one better accustomed to a horse's back than the earth.

"I am Gutchluk, a noyon'
of the White Horde," growled the leader to Michael. "I heard your bellow. Whom seek you?"

Michael hesitated, for he did not know the name of the monarch of Tatary.

"The sultan?" queried Gutchluk. "Say so and we will sit you in the fire, for the sultan has made prisoner some of the lords of Tatary and our Horde is angered."

"Nay," said Michael promptly.

"At Cabasica your men said they were merchants."

"I am not a merchant. I seek the khan."

At this Gutchluk's expression changed.

"Tamerlane the Great," he cried. "You go to the Lord of the World?"

"Tamerlane the Great," repeated Michael.

The warriors who had been pawing over the stores now desisted and came over to the fire, bringing with them Rudolfo, who was watchful and alert in spite of his bruises.

Gutchluk stared at his captives for a space, grunting under his breath as an animal does when disturbed.

"So be it," he made decision. "We will take you and your gifts to the Mighty One and you can spit out your speeches to him."

With that the Tatars fell to ransacking the half-empty pots and sacks of food, gorging themselves enormously. Soranzi, who crept from hiding in the rocks, marveled at this and at the callous way in which the men of the Horde stepped on bodies of the slain. He sought Michael and found him talking to Clavijo.

"Now, my lord the liar," the Breton was saying; "here must you serve yourself. Lie roundly and mightily at Tamerlane's court or you are lost."

He withdrew to talk long with Bembo, while Rudolfo slept in company with the Tatars who were not on watch by the fire and where the horses were picketed.

Before an hour had passed Soranzi, who had been intent on binding up his goods again, saw that Bembo sat alone. Michael was not to be seen.

The Breton had seized a moment when the sentries were away from the fire to move back into the darkness of the outer gorge. He had marked the position of the outpost Gutchluk had placed and circled this with care for he had a healthy respect for the keen senses of the Tatar watchers.

Nor did he make the mistake of attempting to take a horse from the pickets. Instead he felt his way patiently out of the ravine at the place where they had entered it. He found the grave he had dug, and its cross. Then he crossed the plateau to the woods on the western side.

The first glimmer of dawn showed him one of the horses belonging to the Venetians that had strayed out to the grass during the fight. This he mounted and rode back along the trail Rudolfo had taken. Once he paused to dismount and search in the thicket for something. He emerged with the sword he had taken from Gutchluk twenty-four hours ago.

Thrusting this through his belt, he continued on to the west.

Michael had not left the camp because he feared retribution by Gutchluk for his attack upon the Tatar leader at this spot. Gutchluk had been following the Venetians, and Michael had surprised him and overcome him fairly. This would raise rather than lower him in the other's esteem.

But Michael was aware that emissaries to a Central Asian monarch were always detained for a long space before given an audience. The more important the ambassadors, the longer the delay. It would be weeks before Clavijo and his companions could hold speech with Tamerlane.

Meanwhile Gutchluk had said that the sultan and the khan were at the point of war. Michael, if he was to have a hand in events, could not afford to be kept idle in the Tatar camp. Moreover the foolish resistance of Rudolfo's men had lowered the status of the Venetians.

If Tamerlane was the man Michael thought him, it would take more than trade goods wrung from the captives to gain his ear. So Michael must bring to Tamerlane more than that.

Gutchluk had said that Bayezid and all his power was at Angora.

Was not this a good omen? Michael smiled, reflecting that he had sworn to the sultan that he would return to his court.

Now as he rode he kept swinging his right arm stiffly at his side. The blood was beginning to run through thinned veins and before long he would be able to use his crippled arm.

Chapter X

The Topaz Ring

It was as if Clavijo and his party had been snatched up by a hurricane. They were swept down from the gorge called the Gate of Shadows, swept out to the south upon the high, rolling steppe of Iran where the receding hills of Mazandaran showed purple against the sky to the north.

Beyond these same hills, farther to the north, stretched the Sea of Sarai-the Caspian-about which Clavijo had permitted his tongue to wag and which he had never seen, although Michael Bearn had bitter knowledge of it.

The Tatars halted for nothing, except a snatch of sleep at the hamlets of sheepherders or the bare walls of a Moslem khan by a caravan track. They, so Gutchluk explained by signs, were anxious to leave the borderland of the Turk behind. Not on their own account, for the men of the sultan were dogs, but to safeguard the precious persons of the ambassadors.

So they passed over the dry grass of Iran, away from the clay valleys and the groves of the land that was called Kuhistan, in Persia, and many interminable lines of clumsy camels they saw passing over the steppe at night, and many ant-like bodies of Tatar warriors mounted on shaggy ponies inimitably swift of foot. And Clavijo and his people marveled. The Tatars had swung to the right and were journeying now toward the setting sun.

But they saw naught of the city with brazen walls or the gold trees or the fountains of wine of the earthly paradise that Clavijo had called Cathay.

"Hic ignotus sum quia possum," quoth Bembo the jester blithely three weeks later. "Here we are the barbarians, and the barbarians are the great lords and signors. Lord Gutchluk quarters us i' this penthouse and furnishes us a live ox, that we, poor Frankish outlanders, may eat in our cage like the hunting leopards I saw dragged past i' their leash this day at time o' mass."

They were, in fact, at a serai where a huge fire glowed over which the Tatars roasted the pieces of animals whole. The serai was almost the only building in what seemed to the travelers to be the encampment of a limitless army. For two weeks they had been kept waiting, in the midst of this army.

Bembo was like a man born anew. Gutchluk and the other Tatars had treated him respectfully, for he bore himself boldly and had clad his person in new finery from the stores.

"The mummery is on, i' faith," grinned the jester. "Aye, each buffoon of us has his part to play. Behold Signor Dominus, the consul-general Clavijo-the great lord-treasurer, proveditore, Soranzi-likewise Rudolfo, the lord-general and master of armies. And most of all, behold Bembo, the wise councilor, the privy coz, the whisperer of kings. Without him, my hearties, the rooks would be emptying your eye sockets back in yonder Inn o' the Skull."

Clavijo frowned.

"Tamerlane will see us this noon," he said. "We have been kept waiting long."

"Aye, verily. The delay measures our importance i' the eyes o' these gentlefolk. Two days agone Lord Gutchluk and a baron who looks like a prince of Eblis took our gifts to the king, along with the camels of a khan of Karabak and the painted giant beasts with a tail where their nose should be-the beasts that are gifts from a lord of Khorassan. Now our turn has come and you must lie cleverly or be fed to the beasts, see you?"

"We can say we are an embassy from Venice."

"Nay, San Marco forbid. Firstly, the council, hearing that we who are mere voyagers have usurped ambassadorial role, would slit our throats. Secondly, there would be no need o' that, for Tamerlane would have us tied to the ground for his giant beasts to walk upon."

Bembo smiled at the consternation written in the Spaniard's face.

"Signor Gutchluk," he explained, "confessed to me not an hour since that recently certain merchants of Venice penetrated so far as Damascus and endeavored to sell nostrums and false sovereign waters i' the fashion o' mountebanks, and to claim exemption from taxes and gifts as is their wont. The Tatars threw them into the river. So, my cousins, we cannot be Venetians for the word rings so ill i' the ears of these barbarians as the Venetian nostrums i' their bellies."

They were silent at that, looking blackly at the man whose tale had brought them-Soranzi, Rudolf o, and the injured Gian-hither.

"I tell you," swore Rudolf o, "that Bearn has betrayed us. Why else is he escaped here hence with a whole skin, leaving us to damnation?"

Michael's departure from the Gate of Shadows had puzzled the Tatar guards as well as Rudolfo. The warriors had searched for him briefly without result and had then pressed on to their army. What mattered it to them if one of the Franks chose to part company with them, so long as the chief ambassadors, as they considered Clavijo and Rudolfo, and the all-important gifts remained?

"He will return to us this night or the morrow," asserted Bembo stoutly. "He pledged it me the night he left us. Who are we that we should know his comings or that which he seeks in this land?"

"'Twere wiser, methinks, to question who he is." Rudolfo strode surlily back and forth in front of the clay platform by the fire on which Bembo squatted.

So pliable is human nature that Clavijo and Soranzi had come to look upon the condottiere as a possible protector in their plight. At least they feared the Tatars-who seemed to them like animals-more than they feared Rudolfo, now that Michael had vanished.

"Is he not leagued with these pagan demons?" demanded the Italian. "What will his coming avail us? Nay, we must trust to our wits to cut a way out of this coil. I have heard the Sultan of the Turks, whose power is not far from this camp, is a rich monarch, different from these beasts. Now if we could-"

He broke off as Bembo chuckled.

"So this is Cathay!" grinned the jester. "We must be bewitched, for we saw naught of Clavijo's golden city."

The Spaniard winced.

"Your master swore we would be safe here," he said uneasily. The coming ordeal of the audience with Tamerlane weighed on the three of them. Bembo alone was careless.

Having the gift of tongues, the jester had conversed in broken Greek with Gutchluk and his faith in Michael was strong.

"My master is a true man," he insisted. "He said he would join us at Tamerlane's court at the first of the new moon. He will keep his word."

Here they looked up as Gutchluk entered with another powerful warrior in black armor; the man Bembo had termed a prince of Eblis. The ambassadors were summoned by Tamerlane, who awaited them.

They mounted and rode through the Tatar encampment, seeing on every hand nothing but horses, sleeping warriors, smiths who labored at smoking forges, herders who guided great masses of cattle hither and yon in the dust.

Then a vista of round tents opened before them. Some of these were on massive wagons; some bore standards of fluttering yaks' tails. It was a veritable city of tents.

Hard-faced men glanced at them casually; black slaves made haste to get out of their way. Once a line of elephants passed, hauling sleds on which were wooden machines of war, unknown to them.

It seemed to the cringing Soranzi that they had invaded a city of beasts. He heard a lion roar from the cages where Tamerlane's animals were kept. He saw giraffes brought from Africa penned in a staked enclosure. Yet his merchant's eye noted the barbaric splendor of gold-inlaid armor, jeweled weapons, costly rugs spread within the tents and women's cloaks fashioned of ostrich feathers.

What kind of monarch, he thought, ruled over this hive-like multitude of pagans?

Tamerlane the Great, King of Kings, Lord of the East and West, extended a gnarled hand across the chessboard and touched his opponent's king.

"Shah rohk," he said. "The game is mine."

He freed a long ruby from one bent finger and handed it to the man who knelt across the board from him-a silk-clad Chinese general who had come from the edge of the Gobi to pay homage.

Few could match wits even with fair success with the Tatar conqueror, for Timur-i-leng*
had fashioned himself a board with many times the usual number of squares and men.