expensive breeches and tunics, cloaks and felt hats, the hunting gear of rich folk, slapping gloved hands, their breath steaming. The rest were servants and slaves, dressed drably but as warmly as they could manage. Uzzia wore her travelling clothes, including her precious quilted cloak. She carried a couple of throwing spears. She handed one to Avatak; it was a light, well-balanced javelin.
They made their way through the gate. Outside, on the wide, well-made road leading south from the city, more attendants had assembled horses — a whole herd of them, saddled, or harnessed to carriages. An attendant from Bolghai’s household brought Avatak and Uzzia a horse each. The man had more weapons strapped to his back, including stout stabbing spears.
Avatak started to see the scale of this expedition, stretching off down the road. There had to be thousands of riders here, thousands of horses and attendants, and carts bristling with weapons, with javelins and stabbing spears and blades. Back in Coldland hunting parties were no more than a few men and boys, gathered together on a whim. This was more like an army assembling for war. And Avatak saw an expensive-looking pavilion, bright colours under the clear blue sky, mounted on top of what looked like a rock, a fat grey boulder. No, not a rock — it moved, slow yet oddly graceful. It was some tremendous beast.
Again he smelled smoke as the wind shifted. Heads turned to the north, and faces wore worried frowns. He suspected there were plenty of folk who would rather not be riding off with the Khan to play at hunting on this particular day. But the Khan’s whim overrode all other considerations, and the hunters began to mount their horses and carriages.
Horns sounded, and there was a cheer, noisy if unenthusiastic. The Khan’s great grey beast was the first to move. It really was like a boulder, walking on legs like cut-off tree trunks, with flapping ears and a long nose that trailed to the ground. A boy, dark, slight and skinny, rode behind its huge head, slapping the beast’s ears with a switch to make it go this way and that. The Khan himself was invisible inside the tent of silk and wool strapped to its back, but the tent tipped this way and that as the animal plodded, and Avatak could not imagine that it would be a comfortable ride. The beast was an astonishing sight, and would have been even if it had not had the most powerful man in the world in a box on its back. But Avatak had seen nothing but astonishing sights since he had been brought away from Coldland.
‘Where is Pyxeas?’
Uzzia, riding beside him, shrugged. ‘With his colleague Bolghai, I imagine. Immersed in his numbers and his theories. As happy as he ever is.’
Avatak knew that the old man was agitating to be away, to return to the west. It would be a journey back over the roof of the world, Avatak supposed, and the sooner they started the better. But meanwhile, here he was hunting with the Khan. ‘Why are we here? You and I.’
‘Because we have both been observed to fare well in the games in the palace, I with the javelin, you with the stabbing spears.’
He grunted. ‘None of those sleepy, overfed beasts we faced in the games would be a match for the great bears of Coldland.’
‘Be that as it may, you have caught the eye of the Khan’s attendants. And today we are here as the guests of Bolghai.’
‘Why?’
‘So that Bolghai himself does not have to travel. I suspect Bolghai has more pressing business in Daidu. Most people do.’
‘Not the Khan, it seems.’
‘No. Not the Khan.’
The procession was a great crowd, trailing the Khan on his boulder-beast. The ride continued through the morning, across a landscape of woodland and open plains, a land dotted with farms — though the plain looked parched, many farms abandoned, the woodland hacked for firewood. Twice the progress was interrupted for hunting. Horns sounded, scouts rode off — and then the animals would appear, to great excitement. The first was a band of wild boar, ugly, bristling creatures that ran squealing across the road. The Khan had his curtains thrown back so he could see, and allowed his barons to run down the boar. Then a magnificent stag was sighted. A cage was revealed on a cart, and opened to release a hunting animal, a lithe cat that Uzzia believed had been brought from Africa. The cat was ferociously fast, and Avatak saw the Khan stand up in his pavilion so he could see it chase down the stag.
Uzzia was not impressed. ‘I spoke to the attendants. They go ahead into the country, hunters, beaters, trappers. They flush out the game, round it up. They even cage the beasts to be released when the Khan rides by. This is not true hunting. This is a rich man’s indulgence. This particular Khan is a man of civilisation, of letters, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But he plays at being what his ancestors once were, a wild man of the steppe. I hope he remembers his limitations.’
As noon approached there was a commotion ahead. The progress of the caravan was not slowed, but Avatak heard shouting, brisk, impatient commands, and the unmistakable ring of swords being pulled from scabbards.
He saw a band of people beside the road, adults, old folk, children, families. Some of them had carts or mules laden with carpets, furniture; others carried goods on their backs. Avatak saw one thin old woman in a neat floor- length silk gown, expensively made but very dusty, with a bird in a bronze cage perched on her head. To let the Khan pass they had been cleared from the road.
‘Nestspills,’ Uzzia murmured.
‘From where?’
‘Daidu, of course. Or its suburbs. Where else? There have been rumours about this all winter, in the taverns and the suburbs, that as soon as the winter relented half the population would be off, heading south.’
There were cries of ‘Crane! Crane!’
All eyes turned to the sky, where a pair of the big ungainly birds were flapping over. The Khan threw back his curtains once more and released a bird from his arm, a huge, muscular-looking falcon. In Daidu, only the Khan was allowed to keep birds of prey, and this was a breed of falcon unique to Cathay. The falcon shot into the air and dived down on one of the cranes. There was an explosion of feathers, and the birds, locked together, tumbled from the sky. The watching nobles whooped and applauded, the nestspills utterly forgotten.
At the end of the day Avatak at last glimpsed the Khan’s lodge, in the middle of the great hunting ground. It was a band of brilliant colour along the southern horizon, tents and pavilions and yurts; it was as he had imagined Genghis’ yurt-capital of Karakorum to have been, before it was broken up. There was much activity, smoke rising from a hundred hearths, men on foot and horseback moving everywhere. Uzzia said there were traders in these districts who raised huge nations of dogs, to be ready to provide thousands of hounds at a time to the Khan on demand. The great hunts could span an area as wide as Northland itself, she said, though Avatak wasn’t sure he believed that.
But in the event he saw no more of the Khan’s hunt. No sooner had they reached the lodge than messengers came riding down from the north, from Daidu, demanding an audience with the Khan. The rumours spread quickly of trouble in the city. The bulk of the party turned around immediately, led by the Khan on his boulder-beast. Nobles hurried to change their horses, and attendants sparked torches.
As dusk gathered, Uzzia and Avatak joined the ride. Uzzia murmured, ‘So much for this foolish jaunt. Stay close to me.’
Behind them, Avatak heard thousands of dogs howl at the rising, ice-ringed moon.
54
Having ridden all day, now they rode through the night back to the capital. Avatak wondered how many plans were being curtailed and abandoned like this, around the world, because of the weather.
It was almost morning again when the van of the hunting party approached the gate in the southern wall. That great plume of smoke from the north loomed taller than ever, and flames leapt high in the dawn light. As they neared Daidu the Khan’s caravan had to battle through a thickening crowd of nestspills pouring south from the city, a flood compared to the trickle they’d overtaken yesterday. Some of the nestspills actually jeered at the Khan, and shook their fists. All of these were Cathay, Avatak saw. But the protestors melted into the crowd when the Khan’s
