James Heneage - The Towers of Samarcand

Shulen .

Luke looked around him in astonishment. The ger was small and its walls were covered in the skins of different animals. It was tidy and warm and at its centre stood a brazier that threw a scattered light on to everything around. To one side was a low bed and on it lay the old man. Low sounds came from his lips like a chant.

‘The boy needs you,’ said Luke as he laid the frozen body on to the soft pelt. ‘They say you can heal.’ He looked at her but her face was empty of emotion. ‘Can you help him?’

He leant towards her but she recoiled like a snake. She bared her teeth and growled and her hands came up, her fingers splayed like claws.

‘Shulen …’

She hissed something and swayed back and forth on her heels as if preparing to strike. She pointed at the door.

‘The boy will die …’

She sprang forward and pulled the door open. The storm rushed in, lifting the skins from the walls and scattering coals from the fire across the carpet. The air smelt of burnt wool. Luke looked desperately at the girl. Her eyes were entirely white.

She will keep him .

He looked back at the boy. He’d stopped moving. There was no time to waste. Luke stumbled out into the night and heard the thud of slammed wood behind. He looked about him but could see nothing. There was no light beyond an occasional spasm from the sky. He sat on the ground and gathered his cloak around him. What should he do? He couldn’t go back to Torguk and Berta, having left their son to the mercy of the witch. And Shulen would rather the boy froze to death than let Luke stay in her tent. He had no option but to wait. But to wait here meant death: his joints were already stiffening in the cold.

The door opened and he felt heat against his back. He turned to see two skins flung in his direction. He rose quickly but the door shut and her name died on his lips. He picked up the furs and wrapped them around him as tightly as his numbed hands would allow.

*

Later, Luke tried to remember how long he’d lain outside the shaman’s ger that night. It could have been one hour or six. All he remembered was the cold: the cold that seemed to freeze the very blood in his veins. The throbbing agony of frostbite in his fingers and toes made him cry out at first, made him dream of plunging them into the hot embers of Shulen’s fire. But soon his head cleared, the messages of pain freezing on their journey to his mind. He tried to fight the drift into nothingness that stole up his body like a vine; tried to conjure back the pain that might keep him alive. But the tide was too strong and he felt an overwhelming longing for sleep, for the oblivion that would finish it all. His last thought was of someone far away.

Anna .

*

But it wasn’t Anna that looked down on him when he awoke some time later. He was inside the shaman’s tent and he was warm and his naked body was touched by fine fur and the air around him was heavy with the scent of herbs.

Shulen was kneeling on the rug beside him and the fire was behind her so that he could not see her face. She was completely still and the caftan hung from her shoulders without moving. He could see dark shadows below small breasts. He wondered if she was even breathing. Held between her hands was a small earthenware bowl, steaming.

Luke raised himself to his elbow and tried to say something but no sound came from his mouth. The storm outside seemed to have blown itself out and he glanced up at the toghona and could see no glimmer of dawn beyond it. He looked around the tent and saw the boy lying next to the man on the bed. He saw the rise and fall of his little chest, the even breathing of a child in the peace of sleep.

Then he remembered the night and a pain so great that he’d never believed he would be free of it. He stretched his fingers, then his toes. They were there and warm and he could feel the texture of the fur and wondered why he’d never marvelled at its softness before.

He tried to speak again but a wave of dizziness rippled over him and his eyelids grew heavy and the smell of herbs made him weak with longing. He lay his head back down on the fur and imagined himself upon the back of Eskalon, his face pressed to the warm muscle of the horse’s neck, a wind scented with Greece in his nose and in his hair. He was falling asleep again and he didn’t want to. There was so much that was new here … so much he didn’t understand. He had to talk to Shulen.

Shulen .

He opened his eyes and she had gone. His eyes travelled the tent walls, roving over the skins and furs and, below them, the trays of dried herbs, neatly lined in rows. She was not there.

She had disappeared.

CHIOS, SPRING 1397

On the island of Chios, Fiorenza, Princess of Trebizond, was standing on the balcony of her home at Sklavia beneath a sky of piercing blue flecked with gossamer clouds. She was awaiting her husband’s return.

She was dressed for a summer’s day in a chemise of finest lawn; her hair was gathered to her head and she had woven flowers of the season into the golden ball. Eight months of pregnancy were behind her and she carried what was in front with precision, her fingers entwined across her belly like a belt. She knew that thirty-two was old for childbirth so she ate ginger comfits and took no chances with the heir to Marchese Longo.

But the days were tedious and she had Lara to thank in making them less so. Since her marriage to Dimitri, the girl had become her friend. Fiorenza knew a great deal about healing oils and Lara, through her husband, knew everything about mastic. Chios was full of snakes and together they’d worked to produce an antidote for every one of their poisons. They were nearly finished.

She’d been looking out for Marchese Longo to the south, for him riding up from the village of Mesta, which she’d been told had been attacked by corsairs. Her usual calm was breezed with uncertainty. The dogs could feel it. Longo’s two hounds, one black, one white, sat watching her with their heads on one side and their ears hooped in question. They moved from shade to shade. Occasionally one would whine.

It was early in the day and a plate of something lay untouched on the table beside her. She looked down at it and saw water pooled like mercury in a lettuce leaf. There was rain still in the pergola’d vine above, the same rain she’d heard outside her window in the hour before dawn. She’d been awoken by a kick and had lain on her side, hoping for more kicks but feeling instead the nudge of unease.

She turned and walked over to the other side of the balcony, the dogs following her. On this side, she could see over the terraces of gardens, vineyards and citrus groves to the broad plain of the Kambos below where the families of the campagna enjoyed their estates. It was a landscape criss-crossed with walls and irrigation channels and in between sat the mansions of rich men surrounded by the red earth that fed and irrigated them. She remembered that Luke had a house there somewhere and tried to think where.

Luke .

Was it really only eight months that he’d been gone? She looked down at the road that wound its way up to the gates of the Sklavia estate and remembered watching him ride up it two years before, remembered the first mumbled greeting on the steps to the terrace. And she remembered a golden time of only him when she’d taught a Greek boy of no learning but infinite talent to become a man capable of anything.

A donkey brayed in the orchards below and the bell tower next to their little church sounded the hour. A light wind carried the sounds to her with the smell of newly cut grass. A butterfly hovered over a bush to her front and she remembered others in a valley where Luke’s learning had reached its fulfilment. She looked down at the curve of her belly.