The Towers of Samarcand (48 page)

‘Brother?’ he whispered. ‘
Brother?
’ He took a step backwards, looking wildly from one to the other of the women, a thousand thoughts crowding his mind. He turned to his mother. ‘Someone else … before Jahangir? You …?’

His mother nodded again. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Shulen is your sister. Now go.’

*

Outside, the situation was desperate. Luke was using his shield to block the swipes of a huge studded mace swung by a knight whose armour was splattered with filth. His other hand held his dragon sword, poised for the moment to strike. Beside him stood Matthew, axe in one hand and sword in the other.

Mohammed Sultan had emerged from the tent with no helmet and a look of madness on his face. He glanced up and down the barricade. ‘Luke!’ he yelled, leaping forward with his sword raised above him.

Within seconds the three men were fighting side by side, Luke in the centre. The ground before them was piled with dead and wounded and slippery with their blood.

‘Is the battle lost?’ yelled the Prince, ramming his pommel into the visor of a knight who’d got too close.

Luke ducked to escape a blow from another mace. He glanced at the Prince. ‘I don’t know. But your helmet, lord. Where’s your helmet?’

Luke was the only one of the three with a shield. He saw that there was something reckless in the way the Prince was fighting. He edged closer to him, ready to give protection should it be needed. He glanced at Matthew. Luke was leaving his friend exposed but what choice did he have? Mohammed Sultan was not acting like one who wanted to survive the battle.

‘If the Serbs are at the camp, then the day must be lost,’ shouted the Prince. ‘Suleyman will have charged from the other side to surround us.’

It seemed likely but it made little difference. They were fighting for their lives.

‘Luke,’ Mohammed Sultan went on, ‘I know now why Shulen …’ He’d delivered a blow to the neck of a knight and found his mouth suddenly filled with the man’s blood. He spat it out and tried again. ‘She’s my sister.’

‘Who is your sister?’ panted Luke.

‘Shulen. Shulen is my sister.’ He parried an axe-swipe and plunged his sword under the cuirass of a knight arching to strike.

The statement was ill timed. Luke heard it and suddenly he was on his knees with blood in his nostrils and stars before his eyes. He’d been struck hard on his helmet. He heard a roar above him as the Prince leapt forward and a scream as his attacker was brought down.

When he could see again, Luke looked up at Mohammed Sultan. He seemed super-human, possessed of the strength of six men. His sword was everywhere, swinging and blocking
and finding the gaps in which to thrust. A mound of dead and dying lay around him. But he was beginning to tire.

Luke got to his feet, shaking his head to clear his vision and wiping the blood from his nose. He felt drained of strength. He saw that he, Matthew and Mohammed Sultan were now an island amidst a sea of Serbians. The Mongol line had broken and Temur’s men were behind them, falling back on the tents, furiously contesting every inch of the way.

Luke took a deep breath. ‘We have to get back!’ he yelled into Matthew’s ear. ‘We’re cut off!’

Matthew glanced behind him and nodded. His head was caked in dirt and blood. He grabbed Luke’s shield to protect them both from the hail of blows, just in time. A sword came from nowhere and Luke managed to parry it. But he was seeing double and his head was splitting with pain. ‘I don’t think I can do much more,’ he said.

On his other side, Mohammed Sultan was in trouble too. Luke could hear his breathing. It was short and rasping, air drawn through a throat swollen with thirst. He was tiring fast. Luke saw a Serbian in black armour pointing a long tube. His mind flashed back to the kourtchi report in the morning.

The black-steels have handguns
.

He wrenched the shield from Matthew. But he was too late. There was a deafening bang and the heir to Tamerlane lay on the ground.

Luke looked down. Mohammed Sultan was quite still. He swayed on his feet and Matthew caught him as he fell. The Serbian knights around them had stopped fighting. They too were in awe of this terrible new weapon. They formed an exhausted ring around Mohammed Sultan, their shoulders rising and falling with fatigue. One of them removed his helmet.

It was Prince Lazarević. He looked at Luke without animosity. ‘Give yourself up,’ he said in Greek, leaning on his sword, his handsome face streaked black between locks of filthy hair. ‘You have fought bravely. Your friend is dead and you are wounded. Don’t follow him.’

Luke was staring at the still-smoking weapon. Then at Lazarević.

You don’t know who he is
.

There was a shout from the Mongol lines behind. The battle in that direction seemed to have stopped as well. A woman riding a big horse was making her way towards them and the Serbians were parting to let her pass. Luke stared in disbelief.

Shulen. Shulen riding Eskalon
.

She entered the ring around Mohammed Sultan and stopped the horse before Prince Lazarević. With one fluid movement, she dismounted and passed the reins to Matthew. She looked down at the body and then up at the Serbian Prince.

‘He is my brother,’ she said simply, her face without emotion. ‘Let me take him home.’

Lazarević stared at her and then down at the ground. ‘Who is he, lady?’

‘He is my brother,’ she said again, ‘and he deserves better than this for his grave.’

The Serbian Prince stared at her for a long time. Then, very slowly, he nodded. ‘Take him.’

It was then that Luke saw Shulen was not alone. Standing unhurt behind her were Arcadius and Nikolas and they stepped forward and gently lifted the body of the prince on to the back of the horse. They held his body in place as Eskalon was led back towards the tents. Matthew came over to Luke. ‘You’re hurt. You should retire.’

Luke turned to his oldest friend. ‘Matthew, the shield …’

His friend shook his head. ‘It’s not important. Leave this battle. You’re wounded.’

Luke hardly heard him. Waves of dizziness were sweeping over him and his sight was still blurred. He could only think of how he hadn’t protected his best friend with his shield. He saw Shulen walk up to Prince Lazarević and take his mailed hands in hers. He heard her say: ‘Wait until we get back to the tents.’

Mongols and Serbians watched her go. Men in bloodstained armour watched a thin girl of mysterious beauty walk back to the tents behind a horse, both picking their careful way through a ground littered with dead.

Matthew took Luke’s arm. ‘Luke, you’re wounded. Stop now.’

There was another bang, the signal for the battle to begin again, and Matthew found himself parrying two blows. Once he’d cleared some ground, he began to push Luke to the rear. A roar came from behind and then Arcadius and Nikolas were beside them, fighting like devils, repelling the Serbs while Luke stumbled back to the tents. He got there in time to see Mohammed Sultan lifted from Eskalon. His eyes were closed and his face very pale. Khan-zada was waiting for him, her face a mask of horror.

Luke turned to Matthew. His head was in agony. He said again, ‘Matthew, the shield …’

There was something unreadable in Matthew’s eyes. ‘Luke, we can talk of that later. There is a battle to fight.’

‘Is it lost?’

Matthew shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It looks like Suleyman has charged our left wing with his Kapikulu and the gazi tribes. It looks bad.’

‘And Tamerlane?’

‘The janissaries were advancing on him behind a swarm of bashibozouks. I don’t know if he held.’

Luke looked at the two lines of men before him, embraced in a whirl of weaponry. There were more explosions and more Mongols fell to the earth with holes in their heads. All along the line, the Mongol soldiers were giving way. Inch by inch they were losing ground; it would be only minutes before the Serbians were at the tents.

Matthew said, ‘I’m going back to fight. Don’t try to follow me.’

Luke opened his mouth but nothing emerged. Then he fell to his knees and vomited. He sank his head in his hands and stared at the ground. It was shaking.

More hooves. More Serbians to finish us off
.

He staggered to his feet. He looked towards where the thunder was coming from. It came from behind the knights, from the other side of the low hill on which the camp had been set. It was the thunder of thousands upon thousands of horses and there could be little doubt from which army they came.

‘Gazis!’ screamed a Mongol to Luke’s left.

Luke strained to see above the tide of crests and flailing weaponry.

‘Gazis!’ The cry was taken up along both lines. The wild men of the steppe were charging to help their Serbian allies.

But the gazis weren’t slowing as they approached the rear of the Serbian ranks. With blood-curdling yells, they fell upon the knights and the men-at-arms. The exhausted Serbs tried to turn but it was too late. The horsemen tore into their ranks with their swords whirling above them, mowing them down like ripe wheat and driving them into a mass of bloody chaos. In the crush, the Serbs’ handguns were useless and their
armour worse. Men fell and couldn’t rise, suffocating in their steel beneath the heels of their comrades. It was slaughter.

The Mongols surged forward slashing their way towards these new, unexpected allies, summoning every reserve of strength to win this battle, bellowing with the hope of a new outcome.

At first, it stayed in the balance. The Serbs were well armoured and fought well. But Prince Lazarević’s men were tired and they were outnumbered and surrounded. For another hour, they battled with a ferocity that belied their heavy armour. Then quite suddenly it was over. There was no one left to kill.

*

It was the middle of the day and the relentless heat of the sun bore down upon a camp full of heaped corpses, raising a stench that even the vultures seemed unwilling to approach. All around the tents were bodies twisted into the contortions of death, pile upon pile of men who had risen that morning to see blood in the sky and had watched it flow in rivers on the ground by afternoon.

To one side stood Luke, his helmet thrown to the ground and his face streaked with blood. He was sick from his wound and sick with relief. He heard footsteps approach him and managed to look up. Before him stood the chief of the Germiyans in a deel that still bore the imprint of the armour he’d cast to one side. Its sleeves and neck were spattered with filth and above them the battered face was grinning.

Luke was the first to speak. ‘Have we won?’

Yakub nodded. ‘I did as I said I would. We followed Suleyman’s Kapikulu, then rode across to come up behind the Serbians.’ He stepped forward and took Luke’s shoulders in his hands. He was frowning. ‘But you’re hurt.’

Luke shook his head. The pain was unbearable. He said, ‘Bayezid?’

‘On a hill with his janissaries. Temur has surrounded it.’

‘And Suleyman?’

‘Fled the field.’

Luke nodded. There was a sound behind him and he remembered something. He turned to find Shulen standing in front of the tent. ‘Is he alive?’ he asked, dreading the answer. She was wiping her hands on a towel and Luke saw that the blood reached far up her arms.

She nodded. ‘But it’s bad. We had to remove the stone that was fired into him.’ She glanced past him and he knew who she was looking for.

He turned to see Tamerlane approaching on a horse, a cloth held to his face. Next to him rode Pir Mohammed, his head crudely bandaged and his mail slashed in a dozen places. Carried behind them were the Horsehairs of two armies. Tamerlane dismounted stiffly and looked around him, his face devoid of expression. He looked twenty years older. He walked up to Shulen and took her hands. ‘Is he inside?’ he asked quietly.

‘Yes,’ she said and turned to open the tent door.

Before he entered, Tamerlane paused and turned about, his old milky eyes settling on Luke. He motioned for him to come forward. When Luke was kneeling in front of him, he placed two hands on his shoulders, bending forward so that their faces were very close.

‘Tarkhan,’ he said. ‘You know what that is, Greek?’

Luke nodded.

‘It means’, said Tamerlane, ‘that you can commit the same crime nine times before I kill you for it.’ He paused. ‘You are tarkhan now, Greek, and you will sit at my right hand tonight.’

On the evening after the great battle, Luke awoke from the deepest of sleeps to find that he couldn’t see. Nor could he move his limbs. In the darkness, every part of him seemed cut or bruised or too painful to lift and, at first, he wondered whether he’d survived the day.

Worst of all was his head, which throbbed with an intensity beyond enduring. Slowly he raised his hands to the bandage around his temples and lowered his fingers to his eyes. Gently, gently he prised them apart.

He was in a tent he knew: Khan-zada’s. A woman he didn’t know was kneeling next to the bed and behind her stood a steaming copper bath. ‘Who are you?’ he asked in Turkic.

There was no answer. He repeated the question in Greek.

The woman rose with grace. ‘I have been sent by your emperor,’ she replied, inclining her head lightly. ‘I was part of the Sultan’s harem and now it would seem I am part of his.’

Luke looked at her. She was dressed in a long, richly embroidered tunic of the kind worn by the Byzantine nobility. She reminded him of Fiorenza.

Slowly, he raised himself to his elbow. ‘What were you sent
to do?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes. His throat was dry and his mouth felt lined with dirt and dried blood. His head was breaking apart.

‘To wash you, to anoint you with healing oils and to prepare you for the banquet.’ There was no emotion in her voice.

‘Well, thank you but I can wash myself. Do you have any water to drink?’

The girl turned and came back with a beaker of water and a cup. ‘You might as well let me put the oils on you. I’m good at it and you’ll feel much better afterwards. Drink.’