Imperial Fire (39 page)

She’d outgrown her basket by then and he jessed her legs and carried her unleashed on his gloved fist. A morning of supporting her with his arm crooked left it so numb that he could hardly move it. At Keriya, the next oasis, he weighed the eagle on a corn merchant’s balance. She tilted the scales at eleven catties, equivalent to fourteen English pounds – and she hadn’t stopped growing. Wayland commissioned a carpenter to make a T-perch four feet high, its base footed in a leather socket stitched to his saddle.

He rode forth on the next stage with the eagle clutching her perch, wings spread in an eight-foot span, her eyes fastening on everything that flowed into her vision. The troopers liked to see her at the head of the column, imagining that she was the flesh-and-blood equivalent of the standards carried by their military forebears, the Roman legions of old.

One of the Sogdians added an intriguing twist. ‘This isn’t the first time the Roman eagle has travelled the Silk Road,’ he told Wayland. ‘Long ago a Roman army fought a battle with a race called the Parthians at Carrhae in Afghanistan. The Parthians defeated the legions and sold the survivors. Many of them were transported east, even as far as China, where they founded a colony that retained their language and customs for centuries. One of my ancestors encountered them on his first journey to China. They’re only a memory now, but you can still find Roman armour on sale in bazaars.’

‘How do you Sogdians preserve such long memories, Shennu?’

‘From the day we can understand speech, our elders teach us our history. What happened here? Who can you trust in this oasis? Who to avoid? Which wells supply water fit only for camels and which wells provide water sweet enough for men? What time of day does the river freeze in the mountains, lowering the level and making it safe to cross? It’s a father’s duty to pass on such knowledge. I remember my grandfather telling me about the first Chinese traveller to reach Afghanistan. His name was Zhang Qian and he made the journey a thousand years ago, but to hear my grandfather tell the tale, you’d have thought the two of them travelled together. By the way, I’m Yexi. My cousin is riding with the general.’

Later that day the eagle launched into her first clumsy flight. Buoyed up by a gust of wind, she let go of her perch and flapped away south into sand country, feet dangling and scuffing the ground in an attempt to land. She hadn’t learned how to stop. A hundred-foot-high dune blocked her path. She tried to clear it, ran out of strength and tumbled tail over beak not far below the top. Wayland jumped off his horse and climbed after her.

The eagle had scrabbled up to the crest and stood looking about as if she owned the wilderness. Wayland picked her up and laid his cheek against her head, breathing in her scent, wondering not for the first time why a creature with such a carnal appetite exhaled the odour of spring gorse.

‘That’s enough liberty for now,’ he said. ‘From now on you wear a leash and hood and only fly at my bidding.’ He rested a while, the sweat on his forehead drying in a hot headwind that blew a yellow mist from the tops of the sandhills. To the south the haze that had hidden the Kun Lun range for weeks drew aside, exposing a panorama of icy peaks.

Lucas flogged up. ‘I thought you’d lost her.’

‘She has a long way to go before she finds independence. My task is to teach her to hunt before casting her loose.’

‘You intend letting her go?’

Wayland didn’t answer.

‘What are you looking at?’

Wayland had stood, peering at a flock of vultures spiralling about half a mile to the south. One of them dropped out of the formation and fell on cupped wings. Another followed. Three more joined the carousel from different directions and more dots were converging.

Lucas followed his gaze. ‘Probably a camel or wild ass.’

‘A dead camel doesn’t attract fifty vultures. That’s a scene of slaughter.’

They laboured over four dunes before running down to a gravel terrace cut by an arid stream bed. Wayland followed the course, guided by the vortex of carrion birds and the occasional whiff of putrid flesh. Around the next bend twenty vultures trundled into clumsy flight.

‘Christ,’ Lucas said.

Twelve bloated and blackened bodies lay strewn over the stony bench on one side of the watercourse. Their murderers had decapitated some of them and the heads lay at hideous angles, glaucous eyes staring sightless at the sun and a droning fog of flies hovering over the carnage. Two wolves were feasting on the decomposing corpses. One of them fled when Wayland shouted. The other, riddled with mange, chopped its teeth at him and continued tugging at a baby clasped in the arms of its dead mother until Lucas ran at it with drawn sword. It abandoned its prey and crabbed humpbacked into the dunes.

Lucas smothered his nose against the stench. ‘Who were they?’

Wayland squinted around. ‘Tibetan traders or pilgrims to judge from their costume.’

‘Who killed them?’

‘Bandits. Perhaps the same gang who wiped out the last Greek expedition.’

‘We’d better warn Vallon.’

‘You go. I’ll try to make sense of these tracks.’

Wayland quartered the ground, reading the clues. Lucas had dropped from sight when the dog came pattering up. ‘Faithless hound,’ Wayland said. He bent its head towards a faint impression. ‘One member of the party escaped. Seek.’

With a yelp the dog ran down the stream bed, pausing to pick up scent and looking back at Wayland for encouragement.

‘You’re on the right track. Keep going,’

Quarter of a mile down the gulley the dog flung itself round and froze, its muzzle pointing towards a hole in the bank. A wolf’s den. Wayland slid into the stream bed and squatted before the entrance.

‘You can come out. The bandits have gone. I won’t hurt you.’

Nothing stirred.

‘I know you’re in there. It’s a lot cooler inside than out. I’m burning up. Put me out of my torment.’

The dog pranced around the hole, barking. Wayland called it off and slung a goatskin waterbottle through the entrance. ‘You have to come out some time.’

He was holding the eagle on his left fist, his dog panting by his side when two hands gripped each side of the entrance and a dust-smothered head emerged. Wayland dragged the survivor clear and stood him upright. His eyes were deranged by shock and tears had carved channels through his dust mask.

‘Let’s get you back.’

A voice called and Wayland turned to see a squad of troopers crest the nearest dune. Lucas plunged down, lost his balance and tumbled the last thirty feet.

Wayland rolled his eyes. ‘Do you always have to be so impetuous?’

Lucas shook his head and blinked. ‘Who is he?’

‘Take his other arm and we’ll find out when we return to the caravan.’

A night under Hero’s care restored the survivor. Washed, watered, fed and rested, he turned out to be a young Tibetan with features Greek sculptors would have loved to carve in marble. Raven-black hair hung down to his shoulders. His name was Yonden and he told his story in a ruined caravanserai while rats scuttled and chittered in the shadows.

At the age of sixteen, he’d entered a Buddhist monastery in the south of Tibet, within sight of a mountain range called the Himalayas. Two years before, an elderly monk had professed a wish to make a last pilgrimage to a shrine in a Buddhist cave complex called Dunyuang, on the northern branch of the Silk Road. The abbot had chosen Yonden to accompany the monk as his servant and secretary. They’d been two years on the journey, seeking alms and hospitality in return for prayers, horoscopes and medicines. When they reached Dunyuang, the monk told Yonden that he’d reached his last destination on earth and wouldn’t be returning to Tibet. He gave himself up to prayer and fasting and within a week his spirit left him so peacefully that the closest observer couldn’t have decided the moment when his soul slipped from his human shell into divine nothingness.

Shennu translated, conveying Yonden’s conflicted emotions – his grief at his master’s death, his awe at the manner in which the monk had sloughed off his mortal mantle, his resentment that the holy man had left him penniless to make the journey back to the Tibetan monastery.

‘It was a test and I failed it,’ Yonden said. ‘Without my spiritual guardian, I fell into bad habits. I gambled and succumbed to temptations of the flesh.’

‘Tell us more about them,’ Wulfstan said, savaging a mutton shank. ‘I’m partial to tales of sin and redemption.’ He looked around the company. ‘What?’

‘Excuse me,’ Vallon said. ‘I have to discuss tomorrow’s stage with the centurions.’

‘I had nothing but the clothes on my back when I reached Keriya,’ Yonden continued. ‘Not even that. For my last meal I’d scraped the tallow off my boots and boiled it for soup. At the cheapest lodging I could find I met a party of Tibetan traders returning to the Chang Thang after exchanging yak tails and medicinal herbs for copper and iron. Three gold prospectors had joined them and offered to guide us. They led us with the sole intention of slaughtering every soul in a place where no one would see their crime.’ Yonden put his hands together and bowed at Wayland. ‘If this gentleman hadn’t found me, their evil would have gone unnoticed on earth.’

Wulfstan prodded Shennu. ‘I want to hear more about his sinning.’

‘What will you do now?’ Wayland asked.

‘Thanks to you, I can return to my monastery and seek the true path.’

Wayland stood and pulled his gown over his shoulders. Even in summer, the Taklamakan nights were cold.

‘Don’t you want to hear the end of Yonden’s story?’ Hero said.

‘It hasn’t ended yet.’

Wayland made a hood for Freya out of antelope hide, stitching the seams together through their thickness, then soaking the leather and moulding it to shape on a wooden block he carved himself. The hood fitted well, shutting out alarming sights. Not that Freya was fearful of the world. She’d been wrenched from the wild so young that she regarded the strange environment into which she’d been plunged as natural. Unlike every other hawk that Wayland had trained, she didn’t need manning to make her tame. After being scooped out of an eyrie, stuffed into a sack and displayed on a butcher’s stall, there was little left to frighten her.

That made her the easiest bird Wayland had ever trained and the most dangerous. Long after she would have been driven away by her parents, she quivered her wings at Wayland and piped for food like a baby. At the same time she’d learned to guard her territory. This encompassed a narrow circle around her perch. If anyone but Wayland trespassed within a dozen feet, she puffed up, raised her hackles and dared the intruder to advance closer. No one did.

Another thing. She hated dogs, Wayland’s included. At the sight of it, her plumage flattened like mail and then distended until she appeared twice her actual size. One day Wayland’s hound strayed into her territory. Freya flew at him and raked his shoulder, hooking one hind talon under the skin. The dog would have killed her if Wayland hadn’t grabbed its muzzle and ripped the talon out. From that day on, dog and eagle regarded each other with cautious hatred.

Having seen how dangerous Freya could be, Wayland shouldn’t have let his guard slip. He was feeding her on a hare’s hind leg, riding alongside Lucas and exchanging idle conversation, when he judged that the eagle had eaten enough and pulled the meat away.

He didn’t see her foot flash out, didn’t register anything until four talons locked on his right hand with a force that seemed to pump all the blood in his body through his head. The shock dashed Freya’s food from his hand. The eagle, conditioned to think that her rations came directly from Wayland, paid no attention to the meat and tightened her grip.

He didn’t panic or struggle. Hands manacled, eyes watering, he waited until the homicidal light in Freya’s eyes dimmed and she relaxed her hold and stepped back onto his gauntlet.
Kewp
, she said, and scratched the underside of her neck with the delicacy of a dowager.

Lucas stared at him. ‘Your face has gone as pale as clay.’

Wayland groaned and flexed his hand. Freya’s talons hadn’t even punctured flesh, but they’d left deep blue-black indentations and his hand was puffing up.

By evening it was swollen to twice its normal size and he was nursing it while he sat around a campfire, paying little attention to the conversation until Hero put a question to Shennu.

‘On our journey to the northlands, we found a letter written by a man who called himself Prester John, ruler of a Christian kingdom somewhere in the East. Have you heard the legend?’

Shennu inhaled the smoke from a shrub he’d picked in the desert. ‘I know the name, know the story and have heard of men who followed it to their deaths.’

‘It doesn’t exist, then.’

Shennu blew smoke at the stars. ‘I can’t say. There are strange realms hidden in the mountains to the south and west. Everyone has heard of Shambhala, a Buddhist paradise whose inhabitants live forever unless they leave their kingdom. My grandfather told me that the path to it is easy to follow at first, but the closer you approach, the more uncertain the way until at last you find yourself in an icy valley with no way forward and no possibility of returning.’

Vallon, silent until then, looked up. ‘I told you ten years ago that Prester John’s letter was a hoax. We’ve travelled further than almost any man who’s lived and none of us has seen the unicorns and dragons and Cyclops the priest king describes.’

Shennu raised a hand for silence. ‘The young lama has more to say.’ The Sogdian listened, nodding and clarifying before translating.

‘This is a story I’ve never heard before. Yonden says that many generations ago, a Christian hermit sought enlightenment in a Buddhist monastery deep within the Himalayas.’

‘A Nestorian, no doubt,’ Vallon said. ‘We’ve seen their communities all along the Silk Road. Heresy breeds like rats.’

‘Hush,’ Hero said. ‘I want to hear more.’

Shennu’s questioning ended with Yonden sketching the sign of the cross. Wayland and Hero exchanged stares, then pulled closer.

‘Has Yonden ever met a Christian?’ Hero asked.