‘Well, we did it!’ Father Antony declared, as the two monks looked back at Jiayuguan, the imposing gateway at the end of China’s Great Wall, ‘the mouth’ that marked the western limits of the Celestial Kingdom.
Thus far, the mission had proceeded without a hitch. The year-long journey to China, in the train of an ambassador of the Son of Heaven, had been tedious but safe, the task of collecting the precious eggs requiring only vigilance and caution. Two holy men from Rome’s distant Empire aroused respectful curiosity but not suspicion. Now, beyond the security of an ordered state, they were faced with an arduous odyssey through harsh terrain, beset with perils from brigands and wild beasts, until they reached the Persian frontier and civilization once again. After that, the remainder of the journey through the well-policed Empire of the Shah-an-Shah to the Roman ports on the eastern Euxine coast should be smoothly uneventful. Meanwhile, being part of a small caravan of merchants bound for Persia with a freight of spices, jade and silk offered a measure of security. To defray expenses, they could draw on generous funds supplied by the imperial Treasury — the beautiful gold coins of Justinian, recognized as international currency everywhere, from Beijing to Britannia, from Gaul to Zanzibar.
The first stage of the journey, on the western fringes of the Gobi Desert, lay through a dreary tract of red earth seamed with gullies and pimpled with low, stony hills. After several weeks, this arid emptiness gave way to scanty pastureland: a corridor of tawny steppe running between the Tien Shan — ‘the Heavenly Mountains’ to the north — and to the south the feared Taklamakan, the desert ‘You Enter and Never Return’ in the language of the Uighur, the wild, nomadic local people.
The journey of Fathers Hieronymus and Antony from Jiayuguan to Constantinople
The days passed in a blur of repeated rituals. First, after a scanty breakfast of dried apricots and leathery strips of dried mutton, loading up the camels — evil-tempered, shaggy brutes with two humps; then, several hours plodding through steppeland relieved occasionally by stands of pine or willow, the haunt of wolves and wild boar; a midday meal followed by an extended rest period against the hottest part of the day; and another march in the late afternoon till camp was pitched an hour before the setting of the sun.
There were occasional breaks in the monotony of the journey: stopovers at the towns which punctuated the Silk Road — Turpan, Korla, Kuqa, Aksur, each with its colourful market filled with noisy crowds, and traders selling everything from spices and harnesses to rock salt, skins, and cummin. Once, they witnessed a game of buzgashi — a ferocious tussle between mounted herdsmen for the carcass of a sheep.
At last they came to the oasis town of Kashgar, where the route divided — one path leading north and east for Samarkand and Persia, the other south for India. Taking the northern route, the caravan struck up a treeless valley into the Pamir Mountains, a bleak wasteland of barren crags and stony defiles, dominated by the distant, towering mass of Mush-taq-ata*, its snow-clad peak soaring above a tangle of saw-toothed ridges. Here, animals had grown huge as a defence against the cold — outsize yaks, sheep with five-foot horns, a dread species of enormous bear.
One night, the caravan, camped on an alluvial plain beside a glacial lake, was disturbed by a commotion in the camel lines. Rushing to the spot, the merchants were confronted, in the flickering light of the camp fire, by a horrifying sight — a bear of vast size attacking the tethered beasts, two of them reduced to shredded corpses. Standing on its hind legs, the creature, jaws agape revealing rows of vicious fangs, reared high above the terrified camels; even as the merchants looked on in helpless horror, another beast was clubbed down, half-decapitated by a blow from the monster’s paw armed with razor claws. Breaking loose, the remaining camels charged off into the night, their frantic braying fading at last into silence.
The bear now turned its attention to the men who, retreating to the fire, managed to fend off its furious lunges with blazing brands. At last, as though satisfied with the carnage it had wrought, the creature abandoned its attack and lumbered on its way.
In the morning, the shocked and devastated merchants recaptured three of the six fugitive camels (of the others two had fallen into a gully and broken their necks; the third was never found) and recovered what could be salvaged of their scattered merchandise — much of which was damaged beyond repair. Cacheing this, they bade farewell to the two monks and sadly turned their faces to the east, intending to return when they had built up another caravan in China.
The two monks now faced the daunting prospect of crossing the high Pamirs alone. Weeks later, starving, exhausted, and suffering from frostbite, they staggered into Samarkand as penniless beggars, having been relieved en route by bandits of their funds (but fortunately not their staves). In the bustling metropolis they were able to join another caravan bound for Persia, their medical skills enabling them to earn their passage money. The remainder of the journey, through Transoxiana, Turkestan, and Persia to the Euxine coast where, at the great new Roman port of Petra Justinianopolis* they took ship for Constantinople, was uneventful. A year almost to the day since leaving China, they disembarked at the quayside of the Golden Horn.
The mission proved an unqualified success. Under the close and expert supervision of the monks, the eggs were hatched at the proper season by the heat of dung, and a thriving industry was rapidly established, soon producing silk of a quality to equal China’s, but costing infinitely less than the imported cloth.
* The Indian navigator.
* Ceylon/Sri Lanka.
* Mount Kongur.
* Formerly just Petra, it was renamed and extended after being captured from the Persians, who had occupied Lazica. (See Chapter 23.)
THIRTY
With this sign, you shall conquer
At Damian’s wine shop in the harbour area between the Bosphorus and Golden Horn, the talk was all about a terrifying crisis that had suddenly, it seemed, blown up out of nowhere. A barbaric horde of mounted nomads originating from the steppes of Central Asia had crossed the frozen Danube, swept through the Balkans into Thrace, looting and killing as they went, smashed through the Long Walls* (damaged in a recent earthquake), and were even now advancing on the capital itself. Daily, panic-stricken refugees crowded into the city, creating a major problem for the authorities to lodge and feed them, and sapping the morale of the citizens.
‘They say the Huns have crossed the river Athyras,’ declared a burly coppersmith. ‘Christ, that’s less than twenty miles away.’
‘They’re not Huns, you know,’ corrected a youth from the University, ‘slumming it’ in Damian’s with some of his fellow students. ‘They’re Kotrigurs — led by one Zabergan, their chief.’
‘Same difference, mate. Slant-eyed yellow bastards, with these ruddy great pigtails down their backs. They eat Roman babies for breakfast, so I’ve heard.’
‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death!’ bellowed Scripture Simon. ‘And Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with — ’