Imperial Fire (31 page)

Vallon pinched his lips and stared across the huge landscape. He flicked a hand towards the guide. ‘Ask him what’s out there.’

The old man replied with eloquent hand movements.

Wayland half-smiled. ‘He says nothing but djinns live in the desert.’

Vallon’s gaze remained fixed on the awful vista. ‘There’s no need to give chase. The nomads will take them to the nearest slave market. That’s Khiva. We’ll look for them there.’

‘The nomads will be travelling light on familiar ground,’ Wayland said. ‘They’ll reach Khiva long before we do.’

‘The same holds true if you pursue them. They already have half a day’s start.’

‘They’ll be travelling at a camel’s pace. Horsemen can ride twice as fast.’

Vallon squinted at Wayland. ‘You really mean it.’

‘I was in charge of the hunt. Lucas and Zuleyka are my responsibility.’

The desert was already beginning to quake under the sun’s heat.

‘You won’t survive two days on your own. Select six men hardened to these conditions. If you haven’t caught up with your quarry by sunset tomorrow, you must return.’

Wayland nodded. ‘Sunset tomorrow.’

He and his men left carrying three gallons of water apiece, with more on two spare mounts. They rode as hard as conditions allowed, the trail easy to follow at first, the nomads moving at a good pace. Wayland’s hopes of catching up by nightfall were dashed when the sand ran out into gravel fields and rock shelves. All he had left to go on were scattered clues – pellets of camel dung, a saxaul branch snapped by a pannier, discarded pistachio shells. Unless the nomads eased up tomorrow, he wouldn’t overtake them before Vallon’s deadline.

Next morning they faced a fitful headwind and went on over glazed clay pans so hard that hooves made no impression. Spurts of sand skittered over the polished surface as if gliding on ice. All day they rode, the sun glowing like a great ashen coal, the horsemen treading their indigo shadows until at last they came to the shores of a dry lake where all signs that man had passed vanished. The wind stiffened, forcing the squad to ride with faces masked, and at sunset the dust whipped up by the gusts painted the sky startling shades of rose, amber and purple.

Wayland had no choice but to turn back. The search party had used up more than half their water and knew they wouldn’t find any more before they returned to the caravan trail. Some of the horses were lame. Wayland’s dog had worn its pads raw. On the morning following, Wayland mounted up, cast one last look over the arid wastes and led his team south.

Six days it took them to catch up with the expedition, and if they’d had to endure a seventh, not all of them would have survived. Hero salved Wayland’s blistered face and bathed his eyes before the Englishman reported to Vallon.

The general assisted Wayland onto a stool. ‘You did your best.’

Wayland kneaded his eyes. ‘I haven’t given up all hope. As you said, the slavers will probably take Lucas and Zuleyka to Khiva.’

‘We’re not going to Khiva,’ Vallon said.

Wayland stared.

‘I’ve changed our plans,’ Vallon said. ‘We can cut a week off our journey by aiming for Bukhara, further up the Oxus.’

‘You can’t just abandon —’

Vallon’s voice was gentle yet firm. ‘I’m responsible for the lives of more than a hundred men. The Vikings grow more disenchanted with every day that passes.’

‘I told you not to throw in your lot with them.’

‘Vikings or no Vikings, I’m not in a position to divert my force. We ride for Bukhara.’

Wayland spoke through a fog of weariness. ‘You might come to regret that decision.’

‘Meaning?’

Wayland opened his mouth and found that the words wouldn’t come.

‘Well?’ Vallon said.

Wayland knew he couldn’t voice his suspicions. Suppose he was wrong about Lucas and the general rode to Khiva only to discover that the lad was what he claimed to be – a Pyrenean horse-breeder’s son. Or, Wayland thought, suppose he was right and Vallon journeyed to Khiva to find that Lucas wasn’t there.

‘Nothing,’ Wayland said. ‘I’m too tired to think straight.’

Yeke had shot his fourth arrow at full gallop, bringing the kulan staggering to its knees in a gulley more than a mile from the start of the hunt. He leaped off his horse and stabbed his knife into the beast’s jugular. Blood spouted in a jet and the kulan thrashed, a horrible whistling issuing from its neck. Lucas caught up as the beast’s spasms relaxed into death.

‘Well aimed, Yeke, but don’t forget who lodged the first arrow.’

The Seljuk was collecting the kulan’s blood in a leather bowl he seemed to carry for just that purpose. He jabbed his blade towards the ridge. ‘Fetch help,’ he said in his limited Greek.

‘You go,’ Lucas told Zuleyka.

She rode away into the dusk. With one deep stroke, Yeke unseamed the carcass and began to pull out its intestines.

‘Let me help,’ said Lucas.

Yeke waved him away and pointed towards the mouth of the gulley. ‘Light a fire.’

Lucas kindled shrub into life and tossed a couple of stout branches on the fire before making his way back to Yeke. It was almost too dark to see the ground beneath his feet and he took his direction from the keening song the Seljuk was singing over the kulan.

Something whirred in the night, cutting off Yeke’s lament. Gravel rasped and the hairs on the back of Lucas’s neck stood up. Drawing his sword, he peered about, unable to make out anything except the fire.

‘Yeke?’

Sword held ready, he crept forward. A clatter ahead of him made him lunge around. ‘Who’s that?’

Shrieks from behind obliterated his senses. He whirled and registered two onrushing shapes before a blow to the temple dropped him cold.

He recovered consciousness to find a ratty face staring down at him with a smile of the utmost satisfaction. He fumbled for his sword and couldn’t find it. Hands pinioned him from behind and frogmarched him towards the carcass. Behind him he could hear other men kicking out the fire.

He glimpsed Yeke sprawled face-down, two arrows sprouting from his back and a black stain spreading around his head. A nomad crouched by the kulan, butchering its hindquarters. Two more surged past, driving Zuleyka and her horse between them.

His captors heaved him into the saddle, bound his hands so that he could only just manage the reins, and tied his legs under Aster’s belly. The leader gave a shrill command and one of his men whipped Aster into motion.

With the back of his hands, Lucas felt the lump swelling on his temple. He was too sick and dazed to work out what was happening. The attack had come from nowhere, that grating the only warning.

‘Zuleyka,’ he said in a slurred voice. ‘Are you all right? Who are they? What do they want with us?’

The only word he understood from her reply was ‘slave’.

‘I’m no one’s slave.’

A nomad backhanded him in the mouth and wagged his finger in admonition.

Lucas threw up and wiped blood and vomit from his mouth. ‘Wag away, you black-hearted heathen. I’m slave to no man, and I’ll prove it by cutting your heart out and feeding it down your throat.’

The man couldn’t have understood but laughed as if he’d heard such empty claims before.

The nomads met up with three generations of their kin at a waterhole. Women ululated and fell to their knees and kissed the raiders’ hands and wrung their knuckles in thanks to Almighty God who’d delivered these tender infidels into their hands. The leader cut short their celebrations and ordered them to strike camp with all haste. Judging by the looks they kept throwing back, they expected pursuit.

They rode all night without stopping, some of the nomads veering off to lay false trails, the constellations wheeling one way then the other. Twice, one of Lucas’s captors shoved a waterbottle to his mouth. The first time he refused; the second he drank all he could and would have drunk more if the slaver hadn’t pulled the bottle away.

Sunrise exposed the extent of the captives’ plight, the shrivelled landscape spreading away to the uttermost rim of the earth. The leader drove his clan on with birdlike cries, sparing neither women, children nor prisoners. They negotiated a withered forest of shrubs that looked like they’d been consumed by fire and then bleached by a thousand years of drought. They rode through other trees with stubby trunks capped with a rim of branches like broken parasol frames, every third or fourth tree a perch for small owls with pupils slotted against the sun.

They crossed fly-specked barrens and mineral flats polished like mica, the sun’s reflected rays boring into Lucas’s skull. A boy relieved his suffering by daubing his eye sockets with a mixture of soot and tallow. The lad also hooded Aster’s head. Afterwards he rode alongside Lucas, pulling grotesque faces in an attempt to elicit a response.

Lucas regarded his tormentor through smarting eyes. ‘Young as you are, I’ll stake you out in the midday sun with your eyes pinned open until they coddle like eggs.’

Another night fell and still they continued, riding in silence over a parched inland sea as white as bone. Lucas read the stars and concluded that the slavers were heading north-east – to Khiva.

It must have been getting towards dawn when two riders caught up from the south, delivering information that sent the clan into another paroxysm of prayer and thanks.

Lucas rubbed his cracked lips. ‘The search party has turned back,’ he told Zuleyka. He spat to relieve the gummy dryness in his mouth. ‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t need anyone’s help to escape.’

Zuleyka pointed into the vast emptiness.
Where to
?

Only now did the leader relax the pace. Soon after sunrise the raiders halted and fell to digging a pit in the sand. Four feet down they came to water where no one else would have thought to look for it. The men rigged homespun awnings and dragged Lucas under one of them. From its shade he watched while a mother and daughter pegged together a loom and began knotting a rug, exchanging domestic chit-chat.

A kick brought him out of a sickly doze. He shielded his eyes against another sunset to find the leader and his men grinning down at him. The clan chief was nondescript, pinched features framed by a scraggy beard.

‘What are you looking at?’

The man cupped Lucas’s chin and turned his head about for the benefit of the onlookers. They nodded and muttered in appreciation.

‘Get your filthy hands off me.’

At an order from the leader, two of the nomads hauled Lucas to his feet and stripped him bare. As he struggled, he heard Zuleyka scream and saw a party of older women hustling her behind a screen. A blade against his windpipe silenced his protests.

His captors examined him in every particular, the clan leader squatting at a distance to assess his prisoner’s worth. So far as Lucas could tell from the nomads’ guffaws, they considered him a prime specimen who’d fetch a good price at market and bring pleasure to his next master’s maids.

The leader ordered his men to cover Lucas. A crone tottered up, and from her unrestrained delight, Lucas gathered that Zuleyka had also passed the most intimate examination and been judged a prize commodity.

He’d eaten only crusts since capture and was ravenous. The acrid smell of firewood sweetened into the aroma of roasting meat. A nomad brought him a skewer and he sank his teeth into the charred flesh, the juices squirting in his mouth.

After eating he called Zuleyka’s name and received no answer. She’d been segregated into the women’s care and from that time on he’d only glimpse her at a distance, with no chance to exchange words.

The camp fell still and he lay looking up at the stars, spinning lurid fantasies of escape and revenge.

Days of desert travel stretched into weeks and Lucas’s flame-hard certainty of escaping dwindled to a spark. His captors watched over him night and day, even at stool. It didn’t matter if they let him go. Zuleyka was right. The wilderness offered no refuge.

Hope flared anew when his abductors struck a trail and they began encountering other travellers. Far from hiding their crime, Lucas’s captors exulted in it, showing off their prizes to everyone they met. One fleshy merchant riding a white mule with fine saddlebags pulled up with his bevy of guards and negotiated to buy Lucas. The ratty brigand leader broke off the prolonged haggling, telling the merchant that the Frank would fetch twice the offered price in the slave mart.

Lucas had picked up enough of the Turkmen’s language to understand that they’d decided to sell their captives in Bukhara. Another four days’ ride brought them to the shores of the Oxus and they followed the south bank eastward, along a fringe of reedy jungle. The leader spent a day negotiating with a ferryman to take them across the river. Lucas tried to tell the bandit that whatever value he set on his captives, Vallon would pay three times as much to get them back. The desert bandit didn’t seem to understand the concept of money. He’d probably never handled a coin in his life.

Beyond the Oxus, the road to the capital led through rolling savannah dotted with pistachio trees and fields of wild poppies. The arid lands softened into a fertile plain watered by a grid of canals. Lucas rode through melon fields and groves of pomegranates and at noon one day he saw the walls of the Bukhara oasis spread forty miles across the plain. Another two days’ riding and he entered the city proper through walls that bulged out every hundred yards in watchtowers.

Once inside its ramparts, threading the crowded thoroughfares, the nomad bandits shrank into bumpkin status, riding in a huddle and casting nervous glances and half-hearted blows at the touts who plucked at their stirrups.

A dizzying sortie through the metropolis ended in a walled plaza surrounded by windowless barracks. Guards drew the studded gate shut and the city’s clamour fell to a murmur. An agent and his men came out and listened with feigned boredom while the sand-dwelling brigand extolled his captives’ qualities. When he’d finished his pitch, the agent despatched a man who returned with a bolt of cotton and a few small strips of copper which he pitched at the brigand’s feet.

The man wailed and stamped his feet. He appealed to God to right this injustice. But in the world of merchants, the law of Mammon stands paramount, and the official’s bully boys drove the bandit away with goods lower in value than Vallon would have exchanged for a sheep.

In the empty square the official appraised his purchases before ordering his men to lead Lucas and Zuleyka away in opposite directions.

Lucas’s keepers pushed him into a stinking vaulted dungeon and shoved him onto a low shelf cut into the walls. They fettered one leg to an iron ring set into the floor and then left. A few tapers cast a dismal glow over at least thirty other prisoners slouched in hopeless postures. None of them took more than dull and fleeting notice of the newcomer.

‘Does anyone here speak French?’

Other than a witless gibbering, no one answered.

‘Greek, then. Anyone speak Greek?’

‘What do you want?’ a voice said from the shadows.

‘What is this place?’

‘It’s the antechamber to heaven. What do you think it is?’

Lucas slumped against the greasy wall. ‘When do they take us to market?’

‘Not long. They don’t want us eating away their profits.’

‘Is there any way out?’

A harrowed laugh. ‘Oh, yes. Only this morning, one of us escaped and is now at rest in the bosom of our Lord. How did you end up in this hellhole?’

‘I was a trooper in a Byzantine expedition to China. I was out hunting when —’ Lucas broke off. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘I can’t believe those fools in Constantinople would throw good troops after bad. I was roped into the same mission more than a year ago and it was a disaster from beginning to end. Our commander was a ninny who thought he could order Turkmen about as if they were dogs.’

‘What happened?’

‘Most of my comrades were killed in an ambush, the survivors sold into slavery. I’m one of the last to go to market. In a month this pit will be full of your comrades.’

Lucas lunged against his fetters. ‘You’re wrong there. My commander is no fool or coward. He’s…’

‘Yes? What?’

Lucas dissolved. ‘He’s my father.’

Lucas woke to find himself under lamplit review by an elegant gentleman with spotless robes and a snow-white beard cut along the oval of his chin. He spoke in Greek from behind a silver pomander.

‘Who are you and where do you hail from?’

‘I’m Lucas of Osse, trooper in the army of General Vallon, leader of a diplomatic mission commissioned by His Imperial Majesty Alexius Comnenus, ruler of the West. If my companions haven’t arrived by now, expect them any day. They’ll be looking for me, and if they discover that you’ve sold me into slavery, expect a savage reckoning. I’m General Vallon’s son. Do you hear me? His son.’

The slaver elevated an eyebrow and withdrew. A tear squeezed from Lucas’s eye. When Wayland had challenged him, he’d denied his kinship with Vallon. Wayland wouldn’t take his suspicions to the general. Vallon would never know that for three months his own son had been riding in his company.

Food when it came was rusks served in thin gruel. On the third day, warders washed Lucas, cut his hair and dressed him in a coarse clean gown. The attendants led him and a dozen other shackled men into blinding sunlight. The square had been thrown open to traders who’d set up booths and stalls around the auction ring. Citizens going about their business observed the clanking file of slaves with no more interest than they would have eyed a herd of sheep on its way to slaughter. Lucas tried to square his shoulders. Whoever bought him would rue the day he laid claim on Lucas of Osse.