Patrick O’Brian 3-Book Adventure Collection: The Road to Samarcand, The Golden Ocean, The Unknown Shore. Patrick O’Brian
‘What do you make of that?’ he asked.
Derrick made out a single horseman on the skyline. ‘It is not one of our people,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Sullivan. ‘It looks to me more like a Kazak, from his lance. It is strange to see one here. We are a long way from their country.’
Through the bleak lands beyond the great marshes the column pursued its steady road. Day after day they went straight over the high steppe or the half-desert where the cold sand blew perpetually over the dun earth: they no longer dug in the minor sites that the Professor had marked, and although he said that there were still three or four places where they must certainly stop, he said it without conviction. He was in a ferment about the jade, and his chief wish was to get it safely back to the museum: he carried the pick of the collection about his person, and the rest he confided to Li Han, who sewed the pieces into his quilted cotton clothes and walked about as though he were treading on eggs. The Professor had already begun a rough catalogue of the jades, and every night the lamp burnt until after midnight in his yurt. He said, ‘Our aim must now be to reach Samarcand as early as possible: fortunately, the worst of our journey is over, and we have only the Takla Makan to traverse or to circumvent, and then, I understand, the rest of the road is comparatively simple.’
‘Only the Takla Makan!’ exclaimed Sullivan, thinking of that howling desert. ‘Only the Takla Makan.’ But seeing the Professor’s anxious face he added, ‘Yes, you are quite right. Once we have got that behind us, the rest should not be too difficult.’
When he was alone with Ross he said, ‘Are they still there?’
‘I saw them at break of day,’ said Ross, ‘but I have not seen them since. It may be that we are wrong – growing over-anxious and seeing boggles behind every door, like bairns.’
‘I hope so,’ replied Sullivan, scanning the horizon. Ever since they had left the swamps he had had the impression that they were being followed. Sometimes it was a group of horsemen who kept so far away that they might have been antelopes or the tall wild asses of the steppe, and sometimes it was a single rider; but Sullivan and Ross had powerful glasses, and the form that might have been a distant antelope to a naked eye showed up as a Tartar in the binoculars, a Tartar with the head-dress and the lance of a Kazak.
Yet when some days later they met with the immense herds of the Churungdzai and camped for the night with the tribesmen, they heard nothing of the Kazaks; they felt that their suspicions had been mistaken, and they were glad that they had not mentioned them to the others. The Churungdzai were a tribe related to the Kokonor horde: they were as friendly as could be, and they gave news of Hulagu Khan. He was a week’s journey to the north, on the edge of the Takla Makan, and they thought that he might come south to cut their route near the place called the Kirgiz Tomb.
It took them nearly the whole of the next day to pass through the innumerable herds of the Churungdzai, although they were but a tenth part of the tribe’s wealth, but by the evening they were alone on the steppe again, and in the days that followed, the old, calm routine settled down as though there had been no change.
Derrick had traded some ammunition for a hawking eagle with one of the Churungdzai, and with the great bird on his arm he rode out with Chingiz to see what they could find for the pot. The eagle was big enough to strike down an antelope, and Derrick, at intervals of working out the problem in trigonometry that Ross had set him for his morning’s task, had thought that he had seen some on the far edge of the sky.
‘You must ride with your right arm across your saddle-bow,’ said Chingiz, and Derrick quickly realised that he was right. He had been trying to imitate the Mongol’s way of carrying his falcon with his arm free at his side, and each time that his arm had moved under the much greater weight of the eagle, the huge talons had gripped his muscles through the thick glove that he wore as the hooded eagle stirred to keep its balance.
They had gone almost out of sight of their caravan, and Derrick was riding more easily, when they heard the drumming of horse’s hooves: it was Sullivan, coming up fast to join them.
‘I thought I would come and see how your new purchase behaves,’ he said, drawing alongside. ‘Is it any good, Chingiz?’
‘I hope so,’ said Chingiz, looking at the eagle with his beady eyes narrowed still further. ‘But it is very small.’
‘Small!’ cried Derrick, thinking of the steely grip of those talons, and how they had gripped him to the bone when the bird was merely sitting there, with no intention of doing harm. ‘Small! What do you think we are going to hunt? Elephants?’
‘My father has an eagle twice that size,’ said Chingiz, stroking his little peregrine.
‘Yes,’ said Sullivan, ‘but your father is a Khan, and drinks the milk of white mares. Naturally he has a larger eagle than anybody else.’
‘And my ancestor,’ said Chingiz, who was not altogether pleased about Derrick’s eagle, ‘had one four times the size of my father’s.’
‘That must have been difficult to carry,’ observed Derrick.
‘Not for my ancestor,’ replied Chingiz, firmly. ‘He had two on each arm.’
Derrick was about to say something, but he checked himself. He had learnt by now that if he pulled Chingiz’s leg the results were likely to be rapid and bloody.
‘Did your ancestor ever have any trouble with the Kazaks?’ asked Sullivan.
‘No,’ said Chingiz. ‘He built a tower of ten thousand Kazak skulls – Maiman Kazaks, they were – and then he never had any trouble with them at all.’
‘Ten thousand?’ asked Derrick.
‘Yes,’ said Chingiz, ‘ten thousand. You will see them when we come to the rocky country soon: they are still there, at the place called the Kazak Tomb.’
Sullivan nodded. He had seen it.
Suddenly Chingiz shouted, ‘Loose, loose, loose!’ While they had been talking an antelope had sprung up out of a single patch of shade, and now it was flying towards the horizon. Derrick tore at the jesses, the leather thongs that held the eagle to his arm, but he was unhandy with his left hand, and his pony was too excited to stand.
‘Cast off,’ cried Sullivan. ‘Look alive, boy.’
Chang barked, the pony shied, and it was minutes before Derrick had the eagle in the air. By this time the antelope was no more than a swiftly-moving mist of flying sand.
The eagle towered, its huge wings making a bar of shadow over them, and circled high, with its wing-tips flaring in the wind. It seemed to take some time to make up its mind, and they could see its head turned from side to side as it scanned the plain; but then, with no perceptible movement of its wings, it began to travel down the sky, faster and faster, as if it were sliding down an oiled groove. They galloped at full stretch below it, with their reins loose and their horses racing at the height of their speed, but it left them as if they were standing still. On and on it went, growing smaller in the distance; then Derrick saw it mount again and stoop.
Chingiz was up first, but the eagle had already lifted, and it was floating easily in the sky. ‘Call him,’ Chingiz shouted to Derrick, and when Derrick had called the eagle without effect, the Mongol cried, ‘Lure him, lure him as fast as you can.’
Derrick unslung the lure from his saddle, a stuffed piece of felt on a short length of rope, and he whirled it in the air, calling still. The eagle looked, dropped twenty feet, hesitated and rose again.
‘He sees something,’ said Chingiz. ‘We must follow.’ He stopped for a moment to hoist the little antelope across his saddle-bow – the eagle had broken its back with one gripe of its claws – and they rode slowly after the towering eagle, calling and luring, but in vain.
They were so busy