Patrick O’Brian 3-Book Adventure Collection: The Road to Samarcand, The Golden Ocean, The Unknown Shore. Patrick O’Brian
there as a ship in full sail. They reached it early the next morning, and the column halted. Derrick saw a broad, rough road running straight as an arrow from one edge of the world to the next, and the building stood at its side. They were on the Old Silk Road at last, a road of immeasurable antiquity, once used by innumerable caravans, but now almost deserted.
Here they were beyond the range of the Chinese bandits, and here the escort turned back, carrying the expedition’s last presents and letters to Hsien Lu, now far away in the east. It seemed strange when the soldiers were gone: they had grown used to their company.
Derrick explored the low stone building with Chingiz. It appeared to have been built solely for the convenience of horses: there were magnificent stables, but only a few bare rooms for men.
‘I wonder why they built this?’ said Derrick.
‘He had it made for horses and messengers,’ replied Chingiz.
‘Who?’
‘Why, my ancestor, of course,’ said Chingiz, looking surprised.
‘You often speak of your ancestor,’ said Derrick, ‘as if you only had one. Who was he?’
‘He was Khan of the Golden Horde, Emperor of China and Lord of the World.’
‘Hm,’ said Derrick, looking sideways at Chingiz. He was almost sure that the Mongol was either boasting or pulling his leg; but when he mentioned it to Sullivan, his uncle said, ‘Oh, yes. He is descended from the great Khan, all right. Chingiz Khan, or Gengis, as some say, took one of his wives from among the Kokonor Mongols before he was a great man at all: if I remember rightly, it must have been when he was about your age.’
‘And was he Emperor of China and Lord of the World?’
‘Well, he broke through the Great Wall and took Peking, but I rather imagine that it was his grandson Kubilai who was the first Mongol emperor of all China. As for being Lord of the World, well, he certainly didn’t rule in Kansas City – nor in Dublin, for that matter – but he certainly made a good attempt at it. He did rule from Peking to Persia, and maybe beyond: but you ought to ask the Professor if you want to get all the details straight. All I know is that he built this house, and hundreds more all along to beyond Samarcand, and that he had good horses in every one of them and men ready to go out at a moment’s notice to carry messages at a full gallop to the next place, so that he could pass the word from one end of his empire to another in no time at all – or not much, anyway.’
‘Yes,’ said the Professor, when they talked about the Great Khan that evening, ‘he was a very successful man in his way. That is to say, in his wars he caused the death of eighteen million people. He made at least eighteen million homes miserable, and he ravaged a larger tract of country than any man before or since: he did it so thoroughly that what was once useful land is now desert, and will be desert for ever. He was a very successful man in that he accomplished all that he set out to do. But if I were descended from him, I should regard it as my greatest shame, and I should conceal the fact. You may smile, Derrick,’ he said very seriously, ‘but suppose you had a small house of your own, and some fields that gave you your living, and suppose that you belonged to a country that threatened no one. And then suppose one morning you found a troop of savage, hostile men feeding their horses on the crops that were to keep you through the winter, taking away and slaughtering your cattle and then coming to your house, bursting in, stealing all the things you valued and had possessed, perhaps, all your life – things that had been earned or made by your father and grandfather and handed down to you – robbing and then burning the house for fun. Then suppose they killed your children and your wife, and carried you away to work or fight for them for the rest of your life. You would not consider those men very admirable characters, would you? No, nor do I. However hard you try to imagine that misery you will not realise a hundredth part of it: but if you do your best, and then multiply that wretchedness by eighteen million, you will have a remote hint of a conception of how much misery a man who wages aggressive war can cause, and you will begin to understand why I should not be proud of being descended from Chingiz Khan, or any other aggressive barbarian, whatever century or nation he may belong to.’
‘But what about Hsien Lu, sir?’
‘My dear boy, do you not see the essential difference between aggression and self-defence? I have a high regard for the character of a soldier – not that Hsien Lu is a very shining example of that character, perhaps – but none at all for the character of a bully and a thief. A man has a right and a duty to defend his home and his country from attack: if his country is attacked he must defend it, and if he defends it well he is worthy of the highest praise. But if, on the other hand, he sets out to conquer other people – and he will always choose what he considers a weaker nation – then, for all I can see, he instantly degrades himself to the level of a destructive pest, a kind of vermin that should be destroyed as quickly as possible.’
‘I entirely agree with you,’ said Sullivan. ‘Aggressive war is the great crime of the world.’
‘You’re right. And in my opinion much too much fuss is made about bravery,’ said Ross, who was as brave as a lion himself. ‘A man without it is precious little use; but a man may have any amount of it and still be a mean, base creature, a gangster or a half-witted, illiterate barbarian.’
‘Like Chingiz Khan,’ said Sullivan, with a smile. ‘That settles your hero’s hash, Derrick. Now you had better go below – cut along to bed, I mean – or you will never be up in time.’
The road led on and on, climbing very gradually until they were on a high plateau, and the air was hard and keen.
‘We are coming into my own country,’ said Chingiz, sniffing the wind.
Every day or so they passed one of the Great Khan’s relays, and often they camped in them for the night. The sides of the road were littered with the white bones of horses and camels, and sometimes the picked skeletons of forgotten men, bones that had accumulated through the centuries until now a traveller could hardly go a mile without a grim reminder of his mortality. It was a striking proof of the road’s antiquity and of the great numbers it once had carried. If there had been much vegetation, the bones would hardly have been seen, but there was almost none. Now and then a few patches of low thorn bushes broke the monotony of the even plateau, but there was never a tree to be seen at all, and, as Olaf remarked, a man would be hard put to it to hang himself there.
It was a strange, deserted world. Sometimes they saw great herds of wild horses, turning and wheeling like cavalry regiments at a distance, but they never approached, any more than the rare steppe-antelopes. They rode day after day without seeing a single trace of a man, and it almost seemed that the rest of humanity had perished, leaving them in a deserted world. Smoke on the horizon or the track of camels that had passed recently became an event.
Derrick, as the Professor had promised, embarked on the delights of Greek as they rode steadily along in the early morning, and twice a day, under the supervision of Ross, he shot the sun and worked out their precise position, as if they were navigating a ship; he was also unable to escape his mathematics, but in spite of that he spent most of his time with the Mongols. He knew his chestnut pony very well by now, and by dint of hard riding all day and every day, he could almost hold his own with Chingiz as a horseman. He dressed as a Mongol, for their clothes were far and away the most practical for their own country, and he grew to fit the deep Mongol saddle and to feel entirely at home in boots with felt soles several inches thick – the only boots that would really be comfortable in the strange Mongol stirrups. He now habitually greased his face as they did against the biting wind, and he rolled in his walk without having to think of it. He acquired a taste for koumiss, and although he still found it hard to repress a shudder, he could eat horse-flesh with the best of them. What was more important, he grew, by continual practice, to speak Mongol with such fluency that he no longer had to think of the words. His Mongol was very far from correct, but it came easily, and it improved every day.
On and on they went, day after day. The grass of the plain became more and more sparse: it no longer covered the ground, and between the tussocks lay sand that deadened the footfall of their beasts and swirled up to fill