The Towers of Samarcand (24 page)

They had reached a square where a pitiful fountain dribbled water from its spout. There were people here setting up market stalls but the produce displayed on them was thin.

‘You could say’, she went on, looking around her, ‘that these are the lucky ones. Temur killed millions when he led his hordes this way. Ten years ago, these cities were emptied. Now they’ve been filled with widows and orphans from the devastated lands around.’

They left the city as fast as they could. It was a day’s ride to Mashhad and Luke wanted to reach it before dark. It would be their last staging post before the Kara Kum desert and they would need to change their horses for camels to cross it.

So far, they’d seen nothing of their pursuers. They had no way of knowing how much time had been bought for them by the assassins, but it was unlikely that they’d been able to travel faster than the Varangians. Luke supposed they must be fewer by now, limited by the horses left for them at the various staging posts. He prayed none were on Eskalon.

The camels would present a problem. They couldn’t cross the desert without them but anyone chasing them on horseback would catch up with them in hours. And, of course, their pursuers didn’t need to cross the desert. It was time to confront these creatures of Miran Shah.

They left Mashhad at dawn in possession of a long wagon. After the horses, the camels’ rolling gait seemed slow.

‘Don’t they go any faster?’ asked Nikolas, his hand between his bottom and the cushion on which he sat.

Matthew said: ‘I had no idea you were so keen to get to Tamerlane.’

The four Varangians were silent after that, each thinking of what was to come. Their task was to persuade the most dangerous man on earth to do what he didn’t want to do: to come west. It seemed impossible that they’d survive such a task. Luke rode behind his three friends, watching them sway like drunks at a wedding. At least he’d come near to being a man of the steppe, while they were still fair-haired giants from the west, as alien to Tamerlane as mercy.

They came down through the mountains late in the afternoon, the black sands of the Kara Kum spread before them like a burnt offering. By evening, they’d arrived at a narrow defile with high hills on either side. They pushed the wagon on to its side and blocked the road.

‘It won’t fool them, but they should be riding fast enough
for it to confuse,’ said Luke, wiping his brow. ‘And that may be all we need.’

‘How far behind are they, do you think?’ asked Matthew.

Luke shrugged. ‘Who knows? But the camels have slowed us down a lot.’

‘We’d better get into the hills then,’ Matthew said. ‘We know what to do.’

They led their camels back the way they’d come and tethered them. Luke unstrapped his sword and bow and pointed them to their positions.

They were just in time. As he was arranging his arrows beside him, Luke saw a cloud of dust rise from the foothills. Half an hour later, he heard the drumming of hooves and, soon afterwards, the jingle of harness. Then they came into view. The riders were pushing their horses hard, desperate to reach their quarry before the sands of the desert engulfed them.

There were five of them. Five men only, riding without armour or anything that would slow their pursuit, five men with swords strapped to their backs and bows by their sides. They had come so close to catching them up.

Now they saw the wagon and their horses reared up as they reined them in. Luke closed his eyes for a second’s relief. None of them was Eskalon. ‘All right. Let’s bring them down.’

Luke aimed Torguk’s bow as Nikolas and Shulen did the same. Three arrows were loosed and three horses fell, bringing their riders with them. But the men were good. They jumped from their horses as they fell and took cover behind their twisting bodies. Meanwhile the two remaining riders galloped back to find cover. The three in front let fly their arrows, forcing the Varagians to duck below their rocks. The two behind dismounted and began climbing the hillside to outflank them.

But it was all too late. The men sent by Miran Shah had expected a woman and her servants. Instead they had Varangians. The men on the hillside were halfway up when Arcadius and Matthew emerged from behind their boulders and fired into them at point-blank range. The men were dead when they fell.

Meanwhile, the three in front lay with their backs exposed, not knowing the fate of their comrades. Matthew and Arcadius had time to reload and move to positions from which they could not miss.

In a minute, it was all over. Their pursuers were no longer pursuing them and the Varangians had two new horses. Already, birds were circling above the corpses and flies humming around the arrows that protruded from their bodies. There was blood on the ground and the air smelt of death. Only the desert now lay between them and Bokhara. And beyond Bokhara lay Samarcand.

But the desert ahead was three hundred miles of scalding desolation, with few staging posts and fewer oases. Travelling as fast as they were able with camels, it would take at least two weeks to cross. Luke knew that it would be their greatest challenge yet. He looked over at Arcadius, who had sat down on the ground, staring at it. His friend was sickening.

‘We stop and rest here. And tonight we cook.’

Their mistake was not leaving immediately to journey on through the night.

In Mashhad, they’d bought tents to shield them from the sun and Khan-zada had warned them of the merciless heat of the Kara Kum; they should travel at night and sleep through the day. But Luke had judged Arcadius too tired to go on. So they left at dawn, the twelve humps of their six camels undulating down the last slope of the Alburz Mountains like a lumpen snake, the two horses behind. An hour later they were out in the fractured hinterland of the desert, watching lizards disappear before them and tufts of brittle grass fade to nothing. Then there was sand and stone and more sand.

At first the land was flat and hard and their camels stepped with measured ease amongst the rocks and the ride was not without comfort. But soon the landscape around them began to rise into dunes, carved to arabesques by the wind. By mid-morning, the heat was unbearable, the leather of their saddles too hot to touch. The sun above them was a pulsing furnace, different from the one that had risen that morning. This was a malignant force, a purveyor of death not a giver of life.

Luke saw Arcadius hunched over his camel’s hump and called a halt. ‘We’ll put up the tents while we still can and rest. We move on at dusk.’

They slept fitfully in heat that was searing even in shadow. The camels sat together and yawned and grunted as they chewed their oats and Arcadius mumbled and groaned in his half-sleep. As the sun went down, they rose and ate and took down the tents and soon were on their way under a generous moon and the first pinpricks of stars.

They rode all night and grew dizzy watching the vast canvas of the heavens, connecting the stars into shapes they recognised, trying to pull patterns from the scatterings between. They didn’t speak because their voices were too thin and their messages too feeble to intrude upon such majesty. Even their camels, heads high beneath the moon, confined themselves to the sounds of movement and defecation.

And as Venus rose to lead them into morning, Luke heard a faint tune. It was Khan-zada singing and her song was a sad one, a plaintive caress offered to her fellow riders that made them think of home and of loss. Luke thought of Anna and Shulen thought of Luke. But Khan-zada’s song was to one who was long dead: Jahangir, whom she’d loved more than life itself.

The days and nights joined head to tail like the camels beneath them. They rose at sundown and walked or rode until dawn, when they stopped to eat and then sleep. Except that they never really slept. The heat was too great for anything more than a sort of delirium, a hybrid state between the conscious and unconscious in which they cried out to no one of things buried deep.

All the time, Arcadius grew worse. He hardly spoke at all
now and rode with his shoulders slumped, staring at the hump before him. Matthew and Nikolas took position either side of him to make sure he didn’t fall. In the mornings, it became more and more difficult to persuade him to continue. His friends glanced at each other, worry in their eyes.

They travelled for a week before they came to Merv, once the largest city on earth. It had made the mistake of opening its gates to Tule, son of Genghis, who had butchered the population nearly two hundred years past. The city was a place of ghosts and Khan-zada hurried them through.

A week later, they had entered and left Chardzhou and had crossed the Amu Darya River, which the Greeks had called the Oxus, and were only days from reaching Bokhara. But Arcadius had got much worse. He was beset by tremors and headaches and would eat nothing. It was dusk when the camels put their heads into the sand.

Luke said: ‘I’ve seen this before.’

The sandstorm was on them before they’d had time to secure the tents, the scream of the wind rushing towards them like an army of howling dead. It hit them hard and they bent double from its impact, their feet stamping for footholds. Luke had taken Shulen’s hand and Matthew was trying to shield Khan-zada, his big back to the storm. Only the camels seemed likely to withstand the onslaught.

‘We need to find cover!’ yelled Matthew into Luke’s ear.

‘Yes, but where?’

‘No,’ shouted Khan-zada from behind, ‘we must keep moving. There’s no shelter and if we stay here we’ll be buried alive.’

It seemed impossible but they had to do it. Staggering headfirst into the chaos, Matthew and Luke half carrying Arcadius, they led their camels and horses in a direction they
hoped was east. The sand stung every part of their bodies, drilling their heads and shoulders and filling their eyes and ears and every fold of their garments. They could see nothing but the dim outlines of camel and man ahead and could hear only the roar of the storm and the snap of their garments. At last they could go no further and sat huddled behind their camels, closing their eyes against the raging world outside.

The storm continued through the night and most of the next day, and when it was over, they were buried in sand and numb with exhaustion. It had finished as suddenly as it had begun. A giant hole had opened in the ground and sucked the wind back into hell. The Varangians began to dig their way out of the sand. Luke saw that Arcadius hadn’t moved.

‘Matthew, help me.’

They rose and staggered over to their friend, pulling the sand from his hunched frame. His back was rising and falling. He was breathing.

Matthew lay back. ‘Thank God.’

Luke lifted Arcadius’s head. His face was a mask of sand, his eyes closed. He gently wiped the sand away with his sleeve. ‘Arcadius?’

One eye opened. It gained focus, blinking, and recognition came into it. Arcadius smiled slowly. ‘Can I have some water?’

Luke’s skin was already in his hand. He lifted it to his friend’s lips. ‘Here. Drink.’

Arcadius drank and then let his head fall back against Luke’s chest. He was already asleep. Luke lowered him slowly to the ground and rose. He walked over to sit with Shulen. ‘I don’t know if Arcadius can do much more.’

Khan-zada rose and came to sit next to them. She took a
small flask from her cloak. ‘Give him this. It will help him go on. For a time.’

Luke took the flask and got up. He looked beyond his friends to where he expected the camels to be. Four of their six camels had gone, and both of the horses.

Nikolas said: ‘It must have happened during the storm.’

Luke shook his head. ‘They could be miles away by now, in any direction.’

‘What were they carrying?’ asked Shulen.

‘That’s the bad news,’ said Nikolas. ‘All of the food and most of the water.’

Matthew rose and went to stand by Luke. ‘What are we going to live on?’

‘Food is not the problem. We can kill a camel if we have to. It’s the water. How much do we have left?’

Not much. Two skins, half-full, between six of them.

‘How far are we from Bokhara?’ asked Nikolas. ‘It can’t be too far.’

‘If we knew where we were,’ said Khan-zada, ‘it would be no more than two days away. We could get there on the water we have. But the storm has forced us from the road. We don’t know which way to go.’ She glanced at Arcadius. ‘And we have a sick friend.’

Luke had produced Ibn Khaldun’s map and laid it flat on the ground. He pointed to a black square on it. ‘The oasis at Bokhara is large, is it not? So a wide area around the city will be cultivated, with many villages. Even if we can’t get back to the road, if we head north-east, we should get to it. We can use the stars.’

But Khan-zada was shaking her head. ‘There will be no stars,’ she said quietly. ‘A storm such as that throws too much into the sky. It will be overcast for days.’

They were all silent for a long while, sitting in a circle in the sand. The storm had left their throats dry but no one mentioned water. Luke looked up at the leaden sky and then at the vast sea around them. There was nothing there: no hill, no tree, no blade of grass; nothing but mile after mile of black sand. And night was coming. Black on black.

‘Well, we can’t stay here,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘The wind came from the east and I remember which direction that was. We need to move.’

Drinking a cup of water each, they tightened the remaining two camels’ loads and wrapped themselves against the night cold. Luke and Khan-zada woke Arcadius and gave him water. Arcadius rose, as if in a trance, and allowed himself to be supported by Matthew and Nikolas. They put him on to one of the camels and each held an ankle either side.

They set off but the going was much harder than it had been. The sand off the road was deep and every footstep an effort. Even the camels stumbled and sank to their haunches in drifts. Later, when it was dark and there were no stars to watch over them, Luke and Shulen walked side by side.

‘We can’t do this, can we?’ she asked quietly. ‘We cannot reach Bokhara before the water runs out, can we?’