Hawk Quest

Anatolia
XLVI

They approached the shores of Anatolia in falling darkness. A range of forested hills smothered in cloud rose from the narrow coastal strip. Nearly fifty miles to the east a navigation beacon twinkled on the cape above Sinop. No other lights.

‘You’re sure this is the right place?’ Vallon said.

Hero nodded. ‘Bardas has put in here several times to pick up timber. He says this is where Jason and his Argonauts landed in their quest for the Golden Fleece. Xenophon passed through it on his march with the Ten Thousand. We’re treading in the footsteps of gods and heroes.’

Vallon smiled. ‘Let’s keep it down to earth. How do we get through the mountains?’

‘A track used by loggers leads up through the hills. We’ll pass a few hamlets. If we ride all night, we should reach uninhabited country by dawn. We cross the range through a pass between two high peaks. After that we keep heading south.’

Vallon heard the slow surge and wash of waves breaking along the shore. He looked over his shoulder. ‘Are the horses ready?’

‘Saddling the last one,’ Wayland answered from the hold.

Vallon saw Drogo’s brooding figure standing amidships. ‘Settle our account with Bardas,’ he told Hero.

When he returned, the coast was close enough for Vallon to see surf foaming around headlands.

‘All done,’ Hero said. ‘That’s us almost cleared out.’

‘I don’t think silver will be much use to us where we’re going.’

They entered a bay between two wooded promontories. Bardas waited until the last moment before striking the sail. The Wanderer slid on to the beach and Wayland and Syth ran up it to check that the coast was clear. The crew fitted a ramp from the hold to the foredeck. They coaxed the six horses up it, then the crew laid the ramp against the gunwale and Vallon and Hero led each horse down to the beach.

Syth ran back. ‘Nobody’s about. Wayland’s found the track.’

Bardas bade them farewell, shaking each man’s hand and blessing them. When he came to Syth, he took off his crucifix and placed it around her neck. ‘It was my mother’s,’ he told her. ‘I would have passed it on to my daughter if I’d been blessed with a girl child.’ She kissed the ugly old seadog on his cheek and he touched the spot as if she’d bestowed a benison.

The crew pushed out the ship and climbed aboard.

‘Mount up,’ Vallon said.

The Wanderer was pulling away into the dark when they heard a heavy splash.

Hero turned and groaned. ‘You know what that is, don’t you?’

Vallon cursed and drew his sword. He dismounted and ran to the sea’s edge, peering into the night.

‘We can’t let him come with us,’ said Hero. ‘He’ll ruin whatever chance we have of freeing Walter.’

Drogo waded out of the sea and halted in front of them. Vallon raised his sword. ‘I gave you a chance when you’d have granted none. Now you leave me no choice.’

Drogo stood with empty hands outstretched. ‘Go on then. Kill me. What purpose will it serve? You don’t have the ransom. Your efforts have been nothing but vanity and I want to be there to witness your humiliation.’

‘Why should I give you that satisfaction?’

Drogo advanced within striking distance. ‘I can’t do you harm now, and you forget the good I did you. Without me and Fulk at your side, you wouldn’t have reached Novgorod. If Fulk hadn’t held off the Cumans, you’d have perished at the ford.’

Caitlin clutched Vallon’s sleeve. ‘Don’t listen to him.’

Vallon unhanded her and gripped Drogo by his tunic. ‘Let me tell you something. I undertook this expedition in a spirit of penitence. Don’t sneer. I swore not to take life except when I and my company stood in dire danger. That’s the only reason I didn’t kill you back in Iceland.’

‘Then I won’t give you any reason to break your oath.’

Vallon shoved him away. ‘Take the spare horse. Stay out of my sight.’

Vallon remounted and turned his back on the sea for the last time. Hero rode beside him. ‘What will Walter think when we arrive at the Emir’s camp with his hated step-brother?’

‘I don’t care what Walter thinks. I don’t even know the man. Drogo’s right. This venture has been nothing but vanity and delusion.’

‘Even if it’s for nothing, I’ll still feel proud the day you lead us into Suleyman’s court. Nobody has made such an epic journey as us.’

‘It cost Richard and Raul their lives.’

‘Richard never regretted his decision to join you. Nor do I.’

They had entered the forest. Vallon reached out and squeezed Hero’s arm. ‘That gives me some comfort.’

Hero leaned closer. ‘And Drogo doesn’t know about the lost gospel. Perhaps fortune still has a trick or two to play.’

Wayland led the way up through the trees. The horses’ hooves jarred on the stony track and they hadn’t gone far when a dog began to bark and a voice challenged them. Twice more they woke households. At one of them two watchdogs ran snarling out of the darkness and frightened the horses before Wayland drove them off. All night they climbed through evergreen oaks and sweet chestnuts. When dawn broke they could see no settlements and halted beside a stream in a limestone gorge.

After eating, they slept until noon and then continued upwards through pines softened by mist. The vapours thickened, swirling cold and grey from the summit. Pockets of snow appeared and the horses panted in the thinning air.

They emerged from the mist and saw the two peaks dazzling in a rift of clouds. They climbed towards the pass, the snow up to the horses’ hocks. At the top of the snowfield a raptor with the silhouette of a giant falcon glided low and slow across their path, one wing almost brushing the snow. Its head shone gold in the sun and it looked at them with blood-red eyes set in a black and bearded mask, gazing with such intensity that each traveller felt as if he or she had been singled out for judgement.

They slogged over the pass, their shadows stretching long and thin in the shallow light. Beyond the watershed the range fell in thinly wooded spurs that ran out onto an arid upland plateau, a world of horizontals receding in a rosy bloom. Even as they watched, the sun’s glow faded and the land chilled to a sullen grey. They led their horses down through cold shadows and were still above the snowline when it grew too dark to see. Wayland found a shelter under a ledge pitted with old hearths and strewn with ancient bones. The flames from their fire played on the walls, animating paintings of animals and hunters dead ten thousand years.

Next morning they completed their descent and set off across the plateau. They rode all day, always the same drab vista unfolding before them. Towards evening they came to the top of a scarp and spied the bat’s-wing shapes of nomad tents scattered across the basin below. Dozens of them under a drift of smoke. They made a lengthy detour and bivouacked in a badlands gully. The company ate their rations and stared into the red core of the fire wherein the thoughts of wilderness travellers are forged.

‘How much food have we got left?’ Vallon asked Hero.

‘Enough to scrape by for another day or two.’

‘I’ve run out of food for the haggard,’ Wayland said.

Vallon stirred the fire with a branch. ‘We won’t avoid the nomads for much longer. We’ll give ourselves up at the next camp and ask them to send a messenger to the Emir.’

‘They might kill us,’ said Drogo.

‘The Emir gave Cosmas some sort of safe conduct,’ Vallon said to Hero. ‘Do you still have it?’

‘It’s in my chest.’

‘Keep it to hand.’

‘Nomads can’t read,’ said Drogo.

‘They’ll recognise the Emir’s seal.’

‘What if they belong to a rival clan?’

Vallon pitched the branch into the fire. ‘Drogo, why don’t you shut up?’

Noon next day found them slouching up a glissade of shale towards a col, the horses making slow going on the loose rock. A vile wind blew grit into their faces so that they rode with eyes asquint and didn’t see the mounted Seljuks rise up silent as cats until they were right beneath them. There were six — no, twice that number. And as the vagrants cast about, more of them appeared until a crescent of twenty horse soldiers blocked the path. They sat their horses with casual aplomb, lances held vertical, the pennants below the iron heads buzzing in the wind. All of them carried double-curved bows slung from their belts or laid across their saddles. For sidearms they wore swords or maces, and each man bore a circular wooden shield on his back.

‘Nobody move.’

Hero scrabbled in his tunic while trying to keep his eye on the Seljuks. He found the safe conduct and held it up. ‘From the Emir Suleyman,’ he called in Arabic. ‘Look, his tughra.’

Like oil separating on water, the Seljuk formation formed into two columns. They descended on their neat-stepping horses and closed in. Broad, hairless faces patinated with soot and lanolin. Quick agate eyes. They wore quilted wrapover topcoats divided below the waist, felt breeches tucked into high boots, conical hats with fur brims. Some were mantled in sheepskins against the cold.

One of them plucked the document from Hero’s hand and passed it to an officer wearing a surcoat of patterned silk. He was barely out of his teens, his face as shiny as an apple. He studied the seal and held it out for his men to inspect.

They agreed that it was Suleyman’s tughra and his name passed from lip to lip.

The young Seljuk captain addressed Hero in his guttural tongue.

‘I don’t understand your language,’ Hero said. ‘Do any of your men speak Arabic?’

The captain summoned a rider with features darker and sharper than those of his comrades. The man rode up to Hero. ‘What do you want with his Excellency?’

Hero gave thanks for that ‘Excellency’. It suggested that these Seljuks were in the Emir’s service. ‘We’re travelling to his Excellency’s headquarters to deliver a ransom for a soldier captured at Manzikert.’

That was a word they recognised. They grinned and nudged each other while the Arabic speaker translated for his captain. Then he turned back to Hero. ‘What ransom have you brought?’

Wayland was holding the caged haggard on his saddle. Hero pointed at it. ‘Shaheen,’ he said. ‘Noble hawk.’ He didn’t know the Arabic for gyrfalcon.

The Seljuk captain drew his sword and lifted the drape off the cage with the point. The startled falcon thrashed and the captain recoiled. His men laughed. The captain laughed too before making a closer inspection. ‘Sonqur,’ he told his men. ‘Chagan sonqur.’

He appraised the travellers anew, skating over the two women and finally settling on Vallon. His gaze took in the jewelled pommel of Vallon’s sword and he raised his eyes and gave the merest tilt of his chin. Vallon nodded back. At a terse command the Seljuks formed up around the prisoners. Another command and they were off, two of the horse warriors galloping away over the col to carry the news of their capture ahead.

The Seljuks rode without rest and they were still riding long past dark, their prisoners reeling in the saddle. Snow began to fall. Vallon was beginning to wonder if they intended to ride blind through the night when from somewhere ahead a dog began to bark and a man’s voice hailed them. Somehow the Seljuks had found a nomad camp. The captain ordered the company to dismount. While his men led their horses away, he ushered them into a wool tent. Groggy with cold and exhaustion, they took off their footwear and collapsed around the hearth.

In the background, three generations of nomads hurried about, preparing food. Most of the company were asleep where they sat when the tentholder attended by his family carried in a stew of chickpeas swimming in mutton fat. At Wayland’s bidding, Hero told the Seljuk captain that the falcon hadn’t eaten for two days. One of his men went out and returned carrying a live cockerel by its legs. Wayland wrung its neck and quartered it and took the haggard out of its cage and fed it. The Seljuks paid scrupulous attention, exchanging admiring comments. The mood grew relaxed. The captain told them that his name was Chinua, meaning ‘Wolf’, and that he’d fought at Manzikert and killed many Greeks. He asked his prisoners how they’d reached Anatolia and Hero managed to tell something of their tale, the Seljuks listening with great interest, embellishing the fragments they understood as if it were a story they’d heard at their grandparents’ knee.

Some of the nomads were already astir when Vallon woke and went out into the night. The snow had ceased and a million stars swarmed in the blue-black sky. The air cut like a knife and his feet creaked on the frozen crust. He was halfway through a luxurious piss when a clutch of icy hummocks in front of him buckled like monster hatch-lings and three camels lurched to their feet with plates of snow sliding off their flanks. Snow thatched their eyelashes and small icicles hung from their muzzles.

They were on their way again before dawn, riding up a wide river valley occupied by overwintering nomads. Two more days of this and they breasted a stony rim and saw vanishing over the horizon a milky blue lake rimmed with mineral flats of the purest white. Tuz Golu, Chinua told them. The great Salt Lake. They camped on its eastern shore by an ancient tower and continued south next morning along the remains of a paved road built by the Romans. The lake had no outlet and the rivers that fed it seeped in from the south through a wild tract of reed beds and swamp. They rode on over a flat plain that ended in a sea of shadows beneath a mountain capped with two icy cones. The sun was throwing the slopes into relief when they turned west on a broad highway. They passed other travellers heading in both directions and as the last flush of pink faded on the twin peaks behind them, they clattered through the brick portal of a caravanserai on the Silk Road east of Konya.

They slept in a dormitory with other travellers and were back on the Konya road before dawn. Ten miles further on they left the highway, turning north on the plain along a river lined with poplars. They passed black hair tents and rode through flocks of fat-tailed sheep and shaggy goats guarded by dogs. The crystalline flats of Salt Lake were back in sight when Chinua rose in his saddle and pointed towards a tented city rising from the plain.

‘Suleyman.’

Hero grinned at Vallon. ‘Well, we made it.’

Watching the complex of pavilions and kiosks draw closer, Vallon had the sense of an impending collision. He’d been travelling so long that he’d forgotten that even the longest journey must end.