Free Silk Road by Colin Falconer Page B

‘will not survive the journey.’
    ‘
Deus le volt
,’ Josseran whispered, in French. God wills it.
    ‘You would like to see his blood run.’
    ‘He is too niggardly to bleed.’
    Juchi looked over his shoulder. ‘It is getting dark. Where is he?’
    ‘Is he not with his horse?’
    But William was not with his horse, nor was he inside the tent. They searched the camp but there was no sign of him.
    Josseran found him by the river, the top half of his cloak stripped down, holding a switch he had torn from a poplar tree. His back was livid and striped with red weals. Josseran watchedfrom Kismet’s saddle as the friar flailed the branch over his shoulder.
    As he worked the scourge he was chanting, in time with the strokes, although Josseran could not make out the words.
    ‘I would have thought the rigours of our journey are chastisement enough, even for a man of God,’ Josseran said.
    William turned, startled. He was shivering with cold. ‘It is the flesh that causes us to sin. It is right that the flesh should suffer for it.’
    ‘And what sins have you committed this day? You have spent the whole time in the saddle of a horse.’
    William threw down the stripling and struggled back into his robe. ‘The body is our enemy.’
    ‘Our enemy? If that is so, it would seem to me yours has suffered enough from carrying you around these last few months.’
    William finished dressing himself. He had so far spurned the felt boots of the Tatars and his sandalled feet were almost black with cold.
    ‘Is this day’s journey not torment enough for you?’
    The friar struggled up the bank. ‘Do they say how much further we must travel?’
    ‘It may be that by the time we return to the Holy Land our beards will be white and even the Saracens will be too old to mount their horses and chase us.’
    William trembled in the bitter upland wind, his blood staining the back of his robe. Josseran felt both awe and revulsion in equal parts. There was something almost carnal in this passion for pain.
    ‘Are you not afraid of what is beyond the mountains, Templar?’ William said.
    ‘I am afraid of God and I am afraid of his judgement. Besides that, I do not fear anything on this earth, or any man.’
    ‘But I am not talking of men. Some say that in the land of Cathay there are creatures with heads like dogs who bark and speak at the same time. Others say there are ants as big as cattle. They burrow in the earth for gold and tear anyone who comes across them to pieces with their pincers.’
    ‘I have heard these same stories but I have never met any man who has been to this Cathay and seen such things with his owneyes.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘In Samarkand you said to me that we would soon be returned to Acre. Lately, I must confess, I think we shall never return at all.’
    ‘Then we fly straight to the arms of the Lord.’
    ‘Well, I hope he has a fire warming,’ Josseran muttered under his breath, ‘for I have never been as cold in my life.’

XXII

    T HEIR NEW ESCORT appeared from a world of cloud and ice.
    There was a squadron of perhaps twenty riders. They wore fur caps with earflaps, some of them with dome-shaped helmets over the top. Their long felt coats hung down their horses’ flanks almost to their boots. Arrows bristled in the wooden quivers on their backs; a triangular pennant hung limp from the point of a lance.
    Steam rose from the horses; snow drifted slowly from a sky the colour of steel.
    Their officer spurred forward. He had a purple silk scarf wrapped around his hair and face to protect him from the cold. With one movement he pulled the scarf aside.
    Josseran was startled. It was not a man.
    Her lips parted in a smile that lacked kindness and she turned to Juchi. ‘So these are the barbarians,’ she said, in her own language, thinking he could not understand. Her almond-shaped eyes had been darkened with kohl but there was nothing alluring about them. They were the hard eyes of a horse trader