Immortal at the Edge of the World (20 page)

The second was the letters of introduction, which he may or may not have had. Depending on what they said they
could
have been extremely valuable, because they served as a form of identification for the carrier of said letters. If you had one, and it was from an important person, and it declared that you were someone who spoke for that important person, you could travel quite a long way in style. Yet our new friend was alone in a roadside monastery, not dining with princes and great men of power. This either meant that Fa Xi Han wasn’t nearly as important as he thought—which was what I suspected—or Xuangang didn’t know how to properly exploit letters of introduction. Provided he still had them at all.

Third, there was no such thing as the court of the great Abbasid. The Abbasid Caliphate was the Islamic dynasty of the time—and for some time after—but it was not a singular economic force in the same way the dynastic emperor of China was. Really, outside the Chinese court there was no monolithic economic force left. The Abbasid dynastic courts were economically and militarily independent in most respects, and the Eastern Roman Empire of Constantinople either owned its resources or taxed its resources. It did not deal with merchants and exporters directly; it only taxed them.

“You will forgive my impertinence, I hope,” Hsu said. “But this wealth of which you speak does not seem apparent just now.”

“It was stolen from me. I traveled with silks of the highest quality, and I hired the finest men to help me transport it, but not a half-day’s ride from here I lost it all. And so now, once my belly has been filled, I will return to my dray and ride back to the court of Fa Xi Han and admit my failure, and he will take my life in exchange. And I will be glad to give it to him.”

“What of the men you hired?” I asked.

“Slain, or fled. We were ambushed by skilled highwaymen, and vastly outnumbered. I barely escaped with my life. Temporarily, as is clear.”

Hsu coughed, and shot me a knowing look. I had the same thought. Something about this smelled rotten.

“Xuangang, my friend,” I said, “as you expect to be traveling to your honorable death soon, would you share with us the intent of your journey to the court of the great Abbasid?”

“Very well. I was to negotiate an open trade arrangement for a medicinal spice known as amomum.”

“Black cardamom,” Hsu said.

“Locally, yes. But not of the sort grown by the Hindus. This is from the Javanese and the Malays. It is much better, and Fa Xi Han controls it.”

“You were negotiating a spice trade arrangement, then?” Hsu asked.

“Yes, exactly.”

“With the Caliphate directly?”

“That was the intention.”

“Honorable Xuangang, it is possible we may be able to aid you,” I said, trying very hard not to smile. “But first I need to ask you about these letters of introduction. Do you still have them?”

*
 
*
 
*

He did still have them. They were five identical
to whom it may concern
letters to be used at the discretion of the holder. Each letter was written in three languages, and each said the same thing—the holder, Xuangang, speaks for Fa Xi Han on all matters, and Fa Xi Han serves at the behest of the emperor himself.

The letters were probably more valuable than the silks he had lost. But if those silks were of as high quality as he said, they would help negotiations greatly because they served as proof of the wealth behind the letters. Hsu and I assumed that nobody outside the Malaysian peninsula, Java, and parts of China had ever heard of Fa Xi Han, so showing that he had some nice silks would be important.

After talking to Xuangang, Hsu and I convened privately, promising the broken and somewhat foolish man to help but not yet knowing exactly the best way to go about it.

“We should probably just kill him,” Hsu said after considering it carefully for approximately the time it took to get some privacy. “As long as he doesn’t bleed on any of the letters we will be fine without him.”

“I agree that he’s entirely prepared to die already, and if we do it here it will be no less honorable than if it happened to him in the court of Fa Xi Han, or back on the highway. But if we want to find those robbers and the silks we’re going to need his help first. We also know next to nothing about selling cardamom.”

“Do you suppose he does? The idiot took the Road with
local
help to guard a small fortune. He would have needed twenty men just to get through the Khyber Pass, and probably fifty, and he would have had to be related to three-quarters of them to have had a chance. I don’t think he has any wisdom whatsoever to share with us.”

From where we were talking we could see him. He still looked like a man who was about to drown himself in his rice bowl. “I don’t think we need to kill him. But clearly he cannot continue to be Xuangang of the court of Fa Xi Han.”

“How do you suppose he will react to this information?”

“I don’t think he needs to know that right now, do you?”

We returned to Xuangang and spent the rest of the evening convincing him not to leave at sunrise to ride home to his certain death.

“You are only two men,” he said. “You can’t expect me to believe you alone are capable of finding and overcoming the same brigands that slew the best men I could hire?”

“We have additional resources at our disposal,” Hsu said.

“But why would you help me? You would be risking your lives.”

“As it turns out, we are looking for a way to involve ourselves in the spice trade, and you have provided us with just the kind of association we require.”

“I’m not really . . . authorized to discuss a partnership,” he stammered.

I had to put my hand on Hsu’s sword arm to keep him in check.

I said, “Honorable Xuangang, please believe me when I tell you that an association with us will be more profitable to you and your patron than anything you were prepared to negotiate for individually. And we will find your silk.”

*
 
*
 
*

One thing that goes underappreciated in today’s world is how much nothing there used to be. These days you can’t turn around without hitting something, be it man-made or mankind itself. But in the days when the Silk Road trade routes were lively and active it wasn’t like an actual road populated by people walking and riding in one direction or another. It was a lot of nothing separated by even more nothing with occasional dots of something here and there. It wasn’t unusual to be able to go for multiple days without coming across anything or anybody in either direction.

This was why the monasteries were so useful. They were the first effort by anybody to consolidate and coordinate hospitality for travelers. Not that they were really consolidated—the monastic orders didn’t really talk to one another and some were in competition philosophically—but they were all put in place with the same intent.

Appropriately, then, when Xuangang crossed the border of China he went to a monastery to hire the best men he could find. What he found instead were the first men he could find.

“They are all dead,” he told Hsu when Hsu tried, quite patiently, to get more information about these men out of him. Hsu still preferred killing Xuangang, forgetting the silks, and seeing what we could do with the letters. Nearly everyone in our party agreed with him, especially after having spent a little time with the Chinaman. It turned out he was just exactly learned enough to be insufferable, but not enough to
know
that he was.

They took turns offering to kill him. Indira offered to do it in such a way that Xuangang might quite enjoy it. I was still pretty sure he had some use, though.

“Let me see if I can explain this to you in a way that you will understand,” Hsu said. “You hired a number of men that you had only just met, took their word for it that they were trustworthy, and showed them a fortune in silk. You
then
asked them to take you down a secluded path at night.”

Xuangang looked aghast. “These were honorable men!”

“You see a band of brave men who died defending you. I see a small band of performers who became rich without having to shed a drop of blood.”

“Impossible! You have mistaken me for a fool. Why would you think such a thing?”

“I think this is so because in the same position as the men you hired, it is what I would have done. As would any one of us.”

The elf woman—her name was Lassa—added, “Except we would have killed you.”

Once we’d gotten Xuangang to grasp this basic notion, we started taking him from monastery to monastery, looking for familiar faces from the band of brave men who all died defending him. It was nearly a week before he saw one of them, which was nearly a week of listening to him tell us over and over again how wrong we were. He appeared to have no instinct for self-preservation whatsoever.

The hardest part after that was trying to seem like an easy mark without being too obvious about it. Ideally we would have sent Xuangang back in, because he was the only one who could really pull off the naïve traveler routine. But that was obviously not an option, so we had one of the men in our band—a Roman named Aurus—play the role. Aurus wasn’t stupid but he was incredibly dull and that often came off as stupid, so we figured he’d be okay. He didn’t even particularly mind the characterization.

We didn’t need Aurus to do a whole lot anyway. We already knew the
modus operandi
of our target audience, we just had to play along with it. To that end, our Roman cohort claimed to be a wayward traveler trying to get to China with a lot of gold to trade for spice. There was a risk that the robbers would ask to see the gold before agreeing—Aurus carried a few coins with him to sell the story, but we had no fortune otherwise—but the men who approached him were so eager to jump into an agreement that it was never an issue. I guess after they had made a killing off Xuangang they were ready to perform the same act. If I were one of them I’d wonder how it was possible to come across two once-in-a-lifetime opportunities within a few days, but I’m not a highway robber. Maybe this happens all the time.

It had been our intention to lay an ambush, but we didn’t have to bother, because after two of the men Xuangang recognized spoke with Aurus they left the monastery and headed up into the hillside—we were in an unkind mountainous region that I believe is now part of Afghanistan—to an encampment at the mouth of a cave. We knew this because we had a vampire and it was night, and vampires are very good at tracking people at night. They are not so good at it during the day, when it’s sort of a pain to have one around because they basically have to be bundled up and carried, but worth keeping when you need someone who is fast, has heightened senses, and can follow a man across an open rocky hillside without being detected.

So we didn’t bother with the ambush. Instead, we surrounded the cave and shouted until they came out, which was much more efficient.

“Who are you?” came the response from a man I presumed was the leader of their band. He stood at the mouth of the cave before a low fire that served as the only illumination on a moonless night. He was large and looked very capable, but he was only a man and we had things in our group that were a lot more than just men.

“We’re here for the silks,” I said. Xuangang was standing beside me, and when we stepped into the firelight and the robber saw him he doubled over in laughter.

“The silks,” he repeated.

“Do you still have them?” I asked.

“Yes, they’re in the cave. We haven’t had a chance to do much with them yet.” To Xuangang he said, “You make new friends fast.”

“You are a dishonor to your family,” the Chinaman said.

“You’re not the first person to say so. You realize they’re going to kill you, right? After they’ve gotten the silk.”

Xuangang looked at me, a little flicker of fear in his eyes. “I trust these men,” he said.

“Well,” the robber said, “you are a fool for your trust. And we are fools for having let you live. But if you survive
this
night you are the luckiest fool I have ever met.” He looked at me and drew his sword. “Shall we have at it, then?”

In a fight like this it’s always a good idea to be on the side of the team with a vampire, two goblins, and an elf, if at all possible. I was, and so it really wasn’t much of a fight. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes of heavy skirmishing and then another half hour of cleanup. There were only twelve of them, and we killed them all, as one does. Not killing them would have been downright disrespectful, and would have resulted in us watching our backs for the rest of our lives.

The only person for whom all this was unexpected was Xuangang, who did not fully appreciate the sort of beings he had fallen in with until then. He was a little rattled.

I lost track of him during the fight, busy as I was with people who could actually kill me. After it was done I was busy making sure we found the silks—we did, in the back of the cave, in an ornately carved box that was also worth quite a bit—and making sure we hadn’t lost anyone. Evidently, sometime after witnessing Sven the depressed vampire rip someone’s head off, Xuangang decided it was in his best interest to escape into the hills. He made it about twenty feet before Aurus caught up with him. When Hsu and I reached them the Chinaman was busy throwing up the rice he’d had at the monastery.