Swords From the West (8 page)

That day Tron's cavalcade was in company with the Armenians and the envoy from Persia. As all of them rode horses, they had drawn a little ahead of Yashim's kafila and the other laden camels, the horses making better going in the snow. A squad of ten Tatar warriors accompanied the envoy, who had besides a score of his own followers, nobles and servants. From the rock pinnacles on their flank a cloud of horsemen swept down upon them without warning of any kind.

Yelling like demons of the wastes, the raiders raced toward the caravan track. They numbered several score, perhaps a hundred, and they carried lances with tufts of horsehair beneath the points. They bestrode shaggy ponies and were so wrapped in dark skins and leather that they seemed to be animated beasts, tearing in for the kill.

In the caravan the Armenians huddled together like sheep, while the servants shrieked in terror. Only the Tatars, who had been half asleep until then, acted in silence. Their squad came together at a single command. The riders drew bows from their hip cases, strung them and sent shaft after shaft whirring into the raiders.

Separating to escape the deadly arrows, the nomads drove at the ends of the caravan. Some Armenians, kneeling in helpless terror, were ridden down, lanced or clubbed, to writhe on the ground.

Tron, pale but calm enough, had urged his horse toward the Persian prince, while the envoy's escort snatched out their weapons, crying upon Allah. Nial had got his great shield on his arm and had drawn his sword, wishing heartily for a good charger between his knees instead of the hired pony.

"What devils are these?" he asked the Genoese.

"Tribesmen. Nogais raiding after the winter-ha!"

The raiders plunged in among the Persian horsemen, stabbing with their light lances and hacking with their short, curved swords. Horses wheeled and reared, as iron crashed upon leather shields and a man screamed.

Nial drove his pony into the mass of them. His shield was proof against the lance points, and his long sword slashed over the shorter sabers of the nomads. He turned slowly in a half circle, upon his shield side, checking the jumps of his startled pony and beating off the tribesmen who rushed him. They drew back before the steady lashing of his sword, and the Persian swordsmen formed around him.

"char-ghar-ghar!"

The Nogais clamored like gulls, swooping about their prey. But their round leather shields broke under the weapons of the warriors of the caravan, and they had no heart for a hand-to-hand fight. When saddles began to empty they hung back, and the Tatar guards, who had cleared their end of the skirmish, sent a volley of arrows among them that tore through furs and leather like paper. The Nogais turned away, snarling.

Nial had watched them with steady eyes. He had marked a tall bay horse with a fine head. As they drew away he urged his pony forward, parried the slash of a saber, and came knee to knee with the rider of the bay horse. The man tried to shorten his lance, then reached instead for a knife.

They were too close together for a sword thrust, but Nial smashed the tribesman between the eyes with the pommel of his sword before the knife could touch him. The man reeled from the saddle. Nial caught the reins he let fall and turned swiftly to rejoin his friends of the caravan.

"Kai!" cried a Tatar who had watched him. "The boy bath taken a horse from his enemy. That was done like a man."

By the time Nial had mounted his new charger, the raiders had withdrawn beyond reach of the Tatar arrows. They hovered before the rocks, shouting and whipping up their courage for a fresh charge, when Yashim's kafila hastened up, attracted by the sound of fighting.

The Turkoman warriors raced their ponies forward to snatch spoil from whichever side might have had the worst of it. They turned upon the Nogais, who fled like wild dogs before a wolf pack. The men of the caravan sheathed their weapons and went to examine the wounded and claim the spoil upon the ground. Many came to look at Nial's prize, saying that it was a Kabarda, a racing breed.

"Eh," said Paolo Tron, "you have skill with a sword, Messer Nial. We can get forty byzants for the horse in Sarai."

"Here-" Nial laughed-"'tis better to have a horse than forty byzants."

Flushed with excitement, he examined the saddle, which had worn silver work upon the horn and the short shovel-stirrups. He did not heed Yashim's camels that paced past him with creaking loads, until a soft voice called to him:

"0 lord of swordsmen, what need hast thou of a little dagger? Give it back, I pray. In the garden of Mahmoud the Blind, the horsedealer-" the camel had passed with its screened hamper-"in Sarai."

Nial recognized Shedda's voice. He had kept the dagger, a slender thing of pliant steel inlaid with a gold inscription, in his wallet. And she dared ask for it!

"Nay," he called after the voice, "even an ass will not drink twice of bitter water."

Paolo Tron had faced serai thieves and tribesmen with cool courage; but now, with only the open road ahead of him, he became ill at ease.

"In two days," he told Nial, "we shall be over the rivers, if the ice holds."

They were coming out of the barren land to a rolling plain where villages nestled in the hollows, and Tron decided to push ahead of the others. The road itself became crowded. Trains of fur-laden sledges came in from the North, and immense herds of horses and cattle appeared out of the plain.

Once Tron's band had to draw aside when a high-pitched shout echoed down the line of caravans. Nial saw a rider go past on a white horse, dark with sweat and mud. The man was plying his short whip as a racer does to keep up a horse's pace at the finish. He wore no furs or armor and carried no weapons.

His stooped body was bound tight in oiled leather, and bands covered his forehead and mouth, while silver bells chimed on his girdle. With a cry, "Make way," and a thudding of hoofs, he was gone.

"A courier of the khan," Tron explained, as they turned back into the road. "He can take the road from a prince."

"He comes from the great khan?"

"Messer Nial, little know you of what lies before you. The great khan, Kublai, hath his city at Kambalu in the far land of Cathay, which is a year's journey to the edge of the world. Ha, so! 'Tis under the very rising of the sun, and no man of Christendom hath seen it, or hath lived to tell of it again."

"Yet Sarai-"

"Is the city of Barka Khan. He rules the Golden Horde, which is here upon the threshold of the East. Aye, he is master from Christendom to the Roof of the World, where even the valleys lie above the cloud level. But content you, young warrior. For if your king of England were here in this land, he might serve Barka Khan as Master of the Herds, no more. For the Tatars who came out of Cathay have overthrown all that lay in their path. They have divided into different Hordes. But in Sarai Barka Khan hath stored the treasures stripped from a hundred palaces."

"What manner of man is he?"

Tron glanced about him and shook his head.

"Guard your words! Even in Sarai there will be men who know our speech. They are the spies of the Golden Horde. As for the khan, he is a man of great courage, who is ever with the army. For the present he is away, at war with the I1-khan in the south. Yet men say that Barka Khan often rides through his lands with his face hidden. He listens to the talk in serais and taverns, and marks down here a man to be slain, and there one to be tortured for information. So it is well to see much, and say little."

At the bank of the first river the merchant reined in and pointed. The dark road led across a two-mile-wide sweep of glistening white. Ships drawn up for the winter on the far shore looked like specks. A line of men and beasts threaded over the frozen breast of the great river, all going east.

"The first," Tron muttered. "Already, perhaps, the ice hath gone out of its mouth, down in the heart of the sands."

And Nial knew that when the ice broke there would be no crossing the mighty stream for weeks.

"Nay, lords," quoth a high voice behind them, "this is the second gate, where the wise turn back."

On a shaggy riding camel, Mardi Dobro grinned at them, perched sidewise on a roped quilt. And he leaned down to hold out an empty begging bowl to them.

"Away!" Tron snarled. "I will pay nothing."

"Look beyond the gate, 0 lord of nothing. The wolves are sitting on their haunches, the vultures are hovering in the air. I have eyes to see!"

In spite of himself Tron glanced around, and Mardi Dobro struck his camel, urging it past them.

"Ye may see nothing," he cried over his shoulder, "but they are there."

"A mad mountebank," the Genoese muttered.

The next day they crossed a second, smaller river. Climbing the eastern bank, Nial halted with an exclamation. The dark line of the road stretched straight to the east, between twin lakes. Far in the distance he made out a gray wall, dwarfed by the immense white wall of mountains behind it.

"The city of Sarai," Tron said, "and the palace of the Golden Horde."

Sarai had grown up around the ordu, or camp, of the Tatars fifty years before when Juchi, the son of Genghis Khan, first conquered and then settled in the vast steppes between the Caspian Sea and the northern forests. The Tatars had made their headquarters in this spot between the lakes and within reach of the rivers; and the first huddle of sheds had spread out into wide streets, where Moslems and Kipchak desert men had their quarters beside the shops of traders from Cathay and barbarians from the mountains. Upon the height overlooking the lake, the Tatar khans had built a walled-in palace, with gilded domes rising where the yurt summits had stood. These domes, and the wealth they contained, had given their name to the Golden Horde.

Tron did not wish to stay in the Moslem quarter; he selected a room in a small house kept by a Greek near the cemetery under the palace height. They stabled their horses in the courtyard shed, and when the chests had been carried into their chamber the Genoese shut the door and looked to see if the horn window was fast. Then he went to warm his hands over the smoking brazier.

"Messer Nial," he said slowly, "you have lost me my stock of jewels; and so you have sworn to make good the loss, and also to aid me in my venture."

"Aye, so."

"There is danger to be faced, and a great reward."

Nial looked up inquiringly from the handful of nuts he was cracking. And Tron made up his mind to speak openly. The young swordsman trusted him and could not betray him in any event.

"I have come to Sarai," he explained, "not to sell jewels but to get one. A single one that hath no equal, not even in the markets of Constantinople."

"Who has such a thing to sell?"

"I could not buy it." Tron's beard twitched in a smile. "Nor could anyone. 'Tis an emerald, cut in the shape of a lion's head. I have seen it, and it would fill your open hand. Surely its weight must be over a hundred piccoli."

"An emerald?" Nial knew little of precious stones.

"Aye. Flawed perhaps, but still a stone unlike any other. It came from Ind, where it was cut for an emperor. Then, in the wars, it was carried off to Baghdad, where it was kept in the treasury of the caliphs. Barka Khan brought it away from the sack of Baghdad twenty years ago. They call it the Green Lion. That is why it may not be bought; and so I mean to take it."

As Nial was silent, he added:

"I know not what the Green Lion would fetch in the West. Only the emperor in Constantinople or the treasury of Rome could buy it. But meseems your profit would be not less than five thousand byzants of Venetian weight."

"A great sum," said Nial quietly. He understood now why Tron had not turned back after the theft of the jewel sack. Such stones were as kernels of corn beside this one.

"With it you could live as a man of gentle blood, with horses and followers and a palazzo, in Genoa. Eh, you could buy yourself a delicate young woman slave with sound teeth and sweet breath."

Nial smiled at the merchant's idea of luxury. And Tron, excited by his scheme, misinterpreted the smile.

"I know well what I say, Messer Nial. Two years ago I saw the Green Lion where it is kept in the Altyn-dar, the Gold House, or treasury of the Horde. At that time I judged its worth. A simple, swift venture, and the great jewel is in our hands, with no one to hold suspicion or make a hue and cry against us. 'Tis a sure game we will play. What say you, young sir?"

Cracking the nuts between his fingers, Nial answered without hesitation:

"It likes me not. Your ventures are your own, Messer Paolo, but I have not put my hand to theft yet."

Nial's grandsire had come out of Scotland upon the crusade and, although neither he nor his father had set eyes upon the land of their kin, the boy had been taught the strict code of clean knighthood. Raised as a lord's son in the castle among the Arab peasantry, Nial had never been allowed to forget this code. A crusader's word must stand, and he must back, at need, his word with his weapons. He must take the toll of hazard, and might keep what he could wrest openly from others, his enemies. But to steal would be to cheat his own inner sense of honor.

Tron eyed him warily.

"You have slain a man unknown to you to take his horse, aye, the bay charger which you cherish-yet you will not lift hand to carry off a treasure!"

"The one was fairly done." Nial frowned, stubbornly. He was not skilled in argument. "We were e'en beset by those pagan horsemen who outnumbered us."

"And here we be, two against two hundred thousand! Bethink you, my stripling. 'Tis no placid monastery here, where brother smiles on brother. Nor is it a garden of paradise, as many ignorant ones in the West have dreamed. Here the law is only one-the strong take, and the weak yield. This very Green Lion was reft from Ind by the caliphs, and torn from them by the bloody hands of the khans. Would you say that was fairly done?"

"As to that," Nial responded gravely, "I know not. But to snatch a jewel is foul work, fit for a purse cutter."

"Is it indeed?" The Genoese rose to pace the chamber, with a quizzical smile. He was more certain than ever that Nial was the man he needed. "Think you a mump or scrag nipper could get even a sight of this Green Lion? Think you so? By all the bones upon every altar, I swear that only a warrior dare attempt it. And only a man with courage of steel can do the trick. Now hear how the thing lies."