Free Silk Road by Colin Falconer

strike the treaty.

    After they crossed the Elburz Mountains into Persia he saw for himself the consequences of resistance.
    At the caravan city of Merv not a building was left standing. Chinggis Khan had laid the city waste many years ago. After the population surrendered, he had ordered that each Tatar soldier must slay three hundred Persians by his own hand. The command was applied to the letter. Later he burned the great library, feeding the fire with 150,000 ancient books. It was said that the glow of the resulting inferno could be seen across the desert in Bukhara.
    They crossed yet another desert, this one even thirstier than those they had seen in Syria, just frozen waves of sand dotted with clumps of dry saxaul bushes. At night they saw a glow on the horizon to the north-east, which Juchi said came from a fire lit in the tower of the Kalyan minaret in Bukhara. It was the tallest building in the wholeworld, he told him, and it had a brick lantern with sixteen arches at the very top that served as a beacon for merchant caravans in the desert at night.
    Josseran dismissed the claim as the typically florid exaggeration of the Mohammedans, but when they finally arrived at the great city he found it was true.
    The Kalyan minaret was a finger of baked and banded terracotta brickwork that soared giddyingly into the heavens. Just below the scalloped corbels of the muezzin’s gallery there was a necklace of glazed blue tiles in flowing Kufic script. ‘It is known also as the Tower of Death,’ Juchi said. ‘The Uzbek rulers who once reigned here used to toss their prisoners from the top of the minaret down there into the
Registan
.’
    It was an astonishing building. Even Chinggis Khan was impressed by it, Juchi said, for it was the only building in Bukhara that he spared, that and the Friday mosque, and even that had scorch marks on the walls.

    The rest of the city had been built since the time of Chinggis. It still possessed a desolate air, as if Chinggis and his murdering hordes had passed through just days before. It had a stench like Paris or Rome and the water in the canals was stagnant and green. The houses were drab, chalk-pale, built from whitewashed clay, with crooked door frames. There were few Persian faces; the population here had dark skins and almond eyes: Tatars and Kirghiz and Uzbeks.
    The land outside the ruined walls was still desolate. Just an hour’s ride from the
Registan
they came upon a pyramid built from human skulls, now bleached by the sun and picked clean by scavengers.
    ‘Dear God,’ Josseran murmured.
    They had hired an Arab guide for this part of the journey and he looked over his shoulder, to ensure Juchi and his soldiers were not within hearing. ‘Before the Tatars, everywhere you looked, there was green. Now everything is dying. Everything!’
    The plain was hung with a mournful stillness. It was as if the massacres had happened only yesterday, and the corpses were still rotting in the fields.
    ‘The Tatars did all this?’
    He nodded. ‘The
qanats
,’ he said, using the Persian word for the underground wells that fed the desert, ‘were maintained by poor farmers. The Tatars butchered them all, as if they were sheep. Now there is no one to dig out the silt from the wells and so the land has been murdered, too.’
    ‘They killed everyone?’
    ‘No. The poets, the artisans, the physicians, these they took back with them to Qaraqorum. But everyone else.’ He shrugged and nodded toward the pyramid of bones. ‘They even killed the animals.’
    Who are these people? Josseran thought. They have no mercy for anyone. The further we travel, the more futile our embassy seems. If I could return to Thomas Bérard now, what should I tell him? No one in Acre or Rome could imagine a kingdom like this. It stretched to the end of the world and far beyond. In France he might ride from Troyes to Marseille in two weeks. Here two weeks did not even get you out of the desert.
    ‘We shall save these