Silk and Song Page 3

  The boy’s chin trembled and then firmed. “I buried him.”

  “How did they not see you?” Wu Li indicated the sword with his chin. “Or the sword?”

  “He fell on me, to hide me from them.” The boy drew in a shaky breath, and Wu Li could only imagine how the moments had passed for the boy, held motionless beneath the dying weight of his father. “And then before they could search him the wind came and blew the sand. I let it cover me.” He swallowed and looked away. “Us. I think I must have fallen asleep.”

  Lost consciousness, more like, Wu Li thought.

  “When the storm stopped, I woke up and they were gone. So,” the boy said drearily, “I buried him, and I took his sword, and I walked until I found water.”

  Shu Ming made a soft sound of distress, and Wu Li knew she was picturing in her mind the small, desolate figure alone on the trackless yellow sands, beneath the scorch of an unforgiving sun. “How did you find water?”

  “There were birds,” the boy said. “I followed them.”

  “Lucky,” Deshi said in Mandarin.

  Smart, Wu Li thought. “And your mother?” he said.

  The boy’s face contorted with the effort not to cry. “They took her. They took all the women. And the camels and the horses that weren’t killed in the fighting.” His head drooped. “I looked for tracks, but the wind blew them all away.”

  Wu Li raised his head and met Shu Ming’s eyes. “How long ago was that?”

  The boy squinted at the rising sun. “Eight days? Nine?” He shook his head, exhaustion showing plainly on his face. “I buried myself in the sand every night to keep warm, and again every day when the sun got too hot to bear.”

  “You did well,” Wu Li said.

  The boy’s head jerked up. “I hid,” he said with bitter emphasis.

  “And you’re alive,” Wu Li said.

  The boy stared at him. “I didn’t even try to fight them.”

  “You’re alive,” Wu Li said again. “What made you show yourself this morning?”

  The boy reddened and he glared at Johanna. “She peed on me!”

  Johanna, who had been rapt with interest at the tale thus far, went red again in her own turn. “I didn’t know you were there!”

  Everyone burst into laughter, except for the two combatants. Wu Li recovered first, and said mildly, “Well, Jaufre, we will be glad to offer you safe passage to Kashgar, if that is your wish.” Again he gave the illusion of Jaufre having a choice, and Jaufre, who was old enough to know better, was grateful for this sparing of his dignity, even if he was too young to put a name to it.

  Wu Li looked up at the circle of faces. “Finish your breakfasts, water the camels and fill the water skins. We move on as soon as we strike camp.”

  He didn’t say what he was thinking, what they were all thinking. With Persian bandits marauding this far east, the sooner they were behind caravansary walls, the better.

  They were away in half an hour, the boy Jaufre in the saddle behind Johanna, the sword strapped to the saddlebag behind him. It was difficult to remain aloof in such close proximity. He smelled, but it wouldn’t have been polite to say so and besides, it wasn’t his fault. After a while she said in a stiff little voice, “My name is Johanna.”

  She’d given up hope of a response to her overture when he said, “Johanna. Johanna? There was a queen named Johanna once. Or so my father told me.”

  “Really?”

  “She was the sister of a great warrior king named Richard the Lionheart,” Jaufre said. His voice was dull, but he seemed determined to pay his passage on the back of her camel with the full story. “They were from my father’s country, an island far to the west. She was sent to marry the king of another island. And then he died, and she was held hostage, and her brother had to rescue her.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I don’t remember all of it. She was shipwrecked on the way home and her brother had to rescue her again, and then she almost married two other kings, and then she did marry a count of the Franks, and led his army while he was away.”

  “And then what?”

  “I think she became a nun.”

  “What’s a nun?”

  Jaufre seemed to wake up a little at this question. “You don’t know what a nun is?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “Well, it’s—she is like a monk, only she’s a woman.”

  “Oh.” All the monks Johanna had met were Buddhists, and male. It was hard to imagine a woman dressed in a skimpy orange robe and bare feet whose only possession was a wooden bowl used for both eating and begging. She wondered if the other Johanna had had to shave her head, like the monks did, and if so, what kept her crown on afterward.

  They rode in silence after that. From time to time during that first long day, as the road passed swiftly beneath, she would seek out the familiar, reassuring figures of her mother and her father.

  To have lost one was unthinkable. To lose both? Unendurable.

  “You will stay with us,” she said to the horizon of undulating sand, to the bleached blue of the sky overhead, to the rump of Deshi’s camel. She was staking a claim.

  Jaufre, drained from his ordeal and hypnotized by the rhythm of the camel’s swaying gait, had fallen asleep with his head on her shoulder, drooling a little from the corner of his mouth.

  “You will stay with us,” she said again, more softly this time, but with even more conviction.

  He snored, too.

  4

  THERE WERE NO STORIES or singing around the fire that night or any other between there and Kashgar. They reached the city in three days instead of five, pushing their mounts hard, making dry camps with everyone taking turns on watch during the night, arms to hand, even Johanna and her small bow, no one getting much sleep. Johanna saw the relief on her father’s face when the high walls of the city came into view.

  They halted in the yard of the large caravansary that sat just outside the city walls. Dusty camels knelt, bawling out their hunger and ostlers moved in a continual dance to remain just out of reach of their snapping yellow teeth.

  A young woman approached, neat in clean robes correctly tied, and bowed. “It is good to see you safely arrived, Master Wu.” She bowed to Shu Ming. “Sister.”

  “It is good to have arrived safely, Shasha,” Wu Li said with a certain grimness. “Your own journey?”

  “Without incident, master. Niu Gang and I made excellent time.” Her tone and expression were bland but her eyes were sharp as they scanned the rest of the party, noting the addition of Jaufre perched behind Johanna with interest but no surprise. “I have secured rooms for our party and hired staff for our stay. Niu Gang is arranging feed for the camels with the stable master. Six merchants, including the venerable Wen Yan, have requested first looks at our goods, and the magistrate requests an appointment at your earliest convenience.”

  Wu’s expression eased and he gave her a formal bow. “As always, Shu Shao, you reward my trust tenfold.”

  She bent her head without embarrassment and without arrogance, accepting the compliment as no more or less her due. Jaufre, looking on, thought that she wore the assurance of a woman many years her senior. Johanna, too, seemed to him much older than her six.

  But then Jaufre, though he did not realize it then, felt like an old man himself. A life lived on the Road encouraged the early acquisition of skills of all kinds. You either survived it or you did not. If you did, you matured fast.

  Wu Li busied himself with supervising the unloading of the bolts of silk and bales of tea and crates of porcelain. Shu Shao led Shu Ming and Johanna to their rooms. They were on the second floor, in a corner. Shu Ming opened the shutters of two windows that looked out over a garden with a blue-tiled fountain tinkling in the middle of it.

  “Very nice,” Shu Ming said. “How much are we paying?”

  “No more than we can afford.”

  The two women smiled at each other.

  Their hair was draw
n severely back into identical thick braids, but there any similarity ended. Shu Ming was taller, her hair a tawny mass with gold glints, her eyes a golden brown. Shu Shao’s hair was smooth and black, her face a round-cheeked oval of olive skin, with tilted eyes as dark as her hair. Shu Ming moved with unconscious grace, her eyelashes casting long shadows on her cheeks. Shu Shao moved with economy and purpose, and her gaze was direct, alert and missed nothing. Shu Ming smelled of peonies in full bloom. Shu Shao smelled of peonies, too, and of ginger and ginseng and licorice and cinnamon. Shu Shao was nearer in age to Johanna but her assurance and self-possession made her seem older than both of them.

  “Mother?”

  Shu Ming turned to smooth back a curl that had escaped from Johanna’s fat bronze braid. “What is it, my love?”

  Johanna raised serious eyes to her mother’s. “I think Jaufre should stay with us.”

  The hand stilled.

  “Jaufre is the boy?” Shu Shao said.

  Shu Ming nodded. “And why is that exactly?” she said to Johanna.

  Johanna was only six, and the complexities of human emotion were as yet beyond her articulation. “Because we found him,” she said. “Because he belongs to us.”

  “He belongs to himself, Johanna,” Shu Ming said, but her voice was gentle.

  “He doesn’t have anyone else, mother.” Eyes a shade darker than her own were openly pleading. “There is no one he knows here in Kashgar, and no family or home waiting for him in Baghdad. There is only us.”

  Shu Ming was silent for a moment.

  It was a great grief to her that thus far Johanna had been the only child she had been able to carry to term, and her only child to have survived birth. Married to Wu Li almost before she could remember as a matter of survival, it was her very great fortune to have been joined to someone who loved her and cared for her enough to take her with him on his journeys, to have not taken, at least not yet, another wife or concubine. He had never betrayed by word or deed his wish for more children, for a son to inherit his father’s business, to carry his father’s line forward into immortality, to honor his father’s and his father’s bones. She looked into Johanna’s eyes, and she feared what the future had in store for her daughter. A woman alone, without family, was in peril by her very existence on the earth.

  She thought of Jaufre, that fierce young boy who had been ready to take on Wu Li and Deshi the Scout and their entire caravan in defense of himself and his father’s sword.

  Young as she had been, Shu Ming never forgot the days and weeks she had spent in the cells below the palace in Cambaluc, of the things she had seen, of the things her mother had done for a drop of water or a grain of rice. She alone in Wu Li’s entourage truly understood the repressed horror that dulled Jaufre’s eyes.

  Given his ordeal, there would have been no reproaches if all he had done was eat and sleep and ride over the past three days, but instead he had contributed to the daily work of the caravan with ability and determination. He knew as well as Johanna the knots required to secure a pack on a camel’s back and he didn’t balk at joining her in collecting dried dung from the Road for that night’s campfire. Shu Ming had spared a bit of water to clean off the worst of the dirt and had cobbled together a change of clothing, so his appearance was much improved. She liked both the erectness of his spine and the directness of his gaze, and found him well-spoken when addressed.

  He also looked a lot more like her daughter than almost anyone else they knew back in Cambaluc, with the exception of those foreign merchants and priests who always clustered about the royal court, seeking attention and favor.

  She reminded herself that he was scarcely older than her daughter, and smiled at Johanna. “Let us see what your father says.”

  Johanna smiled. She knew what that meant, and she danced away to tell Jaufre he was coming home with them.

  His brow knotted. “I can’t come with you, Johanna,” he said.

  “Why not?” she said, dismayed.

  “I have to find my mother,” he said.

  When called before Wu Li that evening after dinner, he repeated himself. “I have to find my mother.”

  Wu Li looked at the small, militant figure planted in front of him, and knew respect, even an odd sense of pride in this foundling. Still, he could not allow the boy to go haring off into the blue. Chances were he would only end up in a slave market, too. But it would be much better if the boy came to that realization on his own. “Do you know where she has been taken?”

  The boy hesitated, and then gave his head a reluctant shake.

  “Do you have a plan as to where to begin to look?”

  A longer pause. Another shake of the head.

  Wu Li sat back, scratching his chin in a thoughtful manner. “I see. Well, I can put some inquiries to people I know here in Kashgar. We will need a description. Did you look like her?”

  “No. She had dark hair and eyes. I look like my father.” The firm chin gave just a suspicion of a quiver before his face resumed its determined cast.

  “Was she Persian?”

  “Greek,” the boy said. “My father was from Britannia.”

  “A Crusader?” Wu Li said. Or the son of one, perhaps, as the last Christian outpost in the Levant had fallen to the Mamluks over twenty years before.

  “A Templar.”

  “Ah.” A lapsed one, then, as Templars were supposed to be celibate. It happened. Wu Li’s agent in Antioch was a former Templar who had renounced Christianity for Islam and embraced the notion of multiple wives and unlimited concubines with tireless enthusiasm. “About your mother,” he said. “The slave market in Kashgar is the largest between here and Kabul. It is possible she and the others captured from your caravan will be brought here to be sold.” He reflected briefly on how much such a sale might bring. Generally speaking, a woman who had had a child would not fetch the highest price, which was reserved for virgins. But Jaufre was a handsome lad and had probably had equally handsome parents. Wu Li could only hope that if his mother was found that the price would not be beyond the reach of his purse, as he well knew that he would be expected to meet it by wife and daughter both. “What is your mother’s name?”

  “Agalia,” the boy said. “It means joy in Greek.”

  “Pretty,” Wu Li said, keeping his inevitable reflections to himself.

  The boy left, step light with hope.

  “Do you really think it is possible we may find her here?” Shu Ming said later.

  Wu Li shrugged. “It is possible. But not likely. And we must be very careful. Slavery is not illegal in Kashgar.”

  She was combing her damp hair with the intricately carved sandalwood comb he had brought her from Mysore the year Johanna was born, the only year she had not traveled with him. Yet again he was conscious of the gratitude due his father, who had chosen so well for his son’s bride. The condemning looks that her obvious foreign blood drew in Cambaluc, the shunning by the Chinese community there, it was all worth it for a life spent with a woman like this at his side. Beautiful, intelligent, adventurous. What more could one want in a mate?

  And they weren’t in Cambaluc now. He stretched out on the bed and put his hands behind his back to watch her as she bent over, her hair hanging almost to the floor, and began with short, patient strokes to disentangle first the very ends of the thick mane, working slowly up to her scalp. When she was finished she stood up straight and tossed her hair back, where it fell in a flyaway cloud of shining brown curls, with the most intriguing streaks of gold and bronze and cinnamon. She was flushed and smiling, having felt his eyes on her all the while, knowing how much he enjoyed watching her at this particular task.

  The first night at their destination was always a special night, no matter how tired or travelworn they were. The first night was a celebration of the return of privacy after weeks and sometimes months spent sleeping in tents in the open or in caravansary rooms shared with ten others. The ritual included bathing, clean clothes, a meal of local delicacies they
could eat sitting on clean mats, a long, delicious night in a clean, comfortable bed, and no need to set a guard or to rise too early the following morning.

  She was wrapped in the Robe of a Thousand Larks, a garment of gold silk elaborately embroidered in silk thread with the brilliant colors of many larks in many attitudes, yellow throats arched, plump orange chests puffed out, black and yellow banded wings spread in flight, green heads cocked to one side, red beaks open in song. Bordered with brilliant flowers and green leaves and black branches, bound closely to the waist with a matching sash, it seemed to Wu Li that the robe made all the light in the world gather in this one room solely to illuminate Shu Ming’s slender, elegant figure.

  And it made his hands itch to loosen the knot of that sash.

  She set the comb carefully to one side and walked to him, and the whereabouts of Jaufre’s mother and indeed everything else were forgotten for the rest of the evening.

  The next morning he presented himself at the magistrate’s office as requested and saw with pleasure and not a little relief that the magistrate was not alone. “Ogodei!”

  He stepped forward and the two men exchanged a hearty embrace. From a corner of his eye he took note of the magistrate’s visible relaxation, and he hid a smile. Having a captain of a Mongol ten thousand in one’s backyard was never a cause for joy unconfined.

  “Wu Li, my good friend.” A man of ability, vigor and stamina, the Mongol chief was dressed in soldier’s robes, his long black mustaches rivaling Bayan’s own. He looked fit and bronzed from long days spent in the saddle, patrolling the western borders of the Khan’s vast empire. “I find you, as always, far from home.”

  Wu Li laughed. “The last time was, when? Khuree, at the summer court, at the ceremony of the gifts?”

  “Worse!” Ogodei covered his eyes and gave a dramatic shudder. “In Kinsai last fall. You had just returned from Cipangu, that far and obstinate country, laden with fine pearls and full of plans as to where and to whom to sell them.” He laughed, throwing back his head. “As I recall, you sold some to me.”