for lunch, Nasruddin Salih had slipped back out of the hotel, turned left outside the doors and walked swiftly up the narrow street towards the roundabout which marked the northern end of Maxim Gorky Boulevard. A couple of hundred metres down the wide avenue, in the twenty-metre-wide strip of park which ran between its two lanes, he reached the bank of four public telephones.
The two at either end were in use, one by a blonde Russian woman in jeans and T-shirt, the other by an Uzbek man in a white shirt and a tyubeteyka embroidered skullcap. In the adjoining children’s play area two Tajik children were contesting possession of a ball with their volume controls set on maximum.
Nasruddin walked a few more metres past the telephones and sat down on a convenient bench to wait. He was sweating profusely, he realized, and maybe not just from the heat. Still, it was hot, and more than once that morning he had envied Mike Copley his ridiculous shorts.
The Uzbek had finished his call. Nasruddin got up and walked swiftly across to the available phone. The Russian woman was telling someone about an experience the night before, alternating breathless revelations with peals of laughter. These people had no sense of shame, Nasruddin thought.
He dialled the first number.
Talib answered almost instantly. ‘Yes?’ the Uzbek asked.
‘There are no problems,’ Nasruddin told him.
‘God be praised,’ Talib said, and hung up.
Nasruddin heard footsteps behind him, and turned, slower than his nerves wished. It was only the Tajik boy’s father, come to collect their ball, which had rolled to within a few feet of the telephones. Nasruddin smiled at him, waited until the man had retrieved the ball, and then turned back to dial the other number. The Russian woman was now facing in his direction, nipples pressing against the tight T-shirt, still absorbed in her conversation.
He dialled and turned away from her. This time the phone rang several times before it was picked up, each ring heightening Nasruddin’s nervousness.
‘Sayriddin?’ he asked, struggling to keep the anger out of his voice.
‘Assalamu alaikam, Nasruddin…’
‘Yes, yes. You are ready? You know what to do?’ Though if he didn’t by this time, then God would surely abandon them…
‘Of course. I deliver the message this evening, one hour after I hear from Talib. On Thursday morning I check Voice of the People. If there is nothing there I try again the next day. When I see it, then I call you at the number you gave me.’
‘Good. God be with you.’
‘And you, brother.’
Nasruddin hung up, and noticed that the Russian woman had gone. In her place was a young Uzbek, no more than seventeen by the look of him. He was wearing a sharp suit with three pens prominent in the top pocket. It sounded as if he was trying to sell someone a second-hand tractor.
Nasruddin looked at his watch. It was still only ten to one – time to get back to the hotel and have some lunch. But he didn’t feel hungry. Nor did he fancy small talk with the members of the party.
He sat down again on the bench, and watched the world go by. The uneasy blend of Asian and European which was Samarkand still felt nothing like home to him, even though one side of his family had roots in the town which went back almost a century. A great-great-grandfather had originally come as a trader, encouraged by the bloody peace the English had imposed on Afghanistan in the late nineteenth century. Nasruddin’s side of the family had come to England instead, much later, in the mid 1950s. He himself had been born in Bradford in 1966, heard about his relatives in far-off Samarkand as a young adolescent, and had determined even then to visit them if ever the chance arose.
And here he was.
Two Uzbek women were walking towards him, both clothed head to foot in the Muslim paranca, eyes glinting behind the horsehair mesh which covered their faces. There was something so graceful about them, something so beautiful. Nasruddin turned his eyes away, and found himself remembering the pictures in Playboy which he and the others had studied so intently in the toilets at school. He watched the two women walking away, their bodies swaying in the loose black garments. When English friends had argued with him about such things he had never felt certain in his heart of the rightness of his views. But at this moment he did.
Not that it mattered. He had always been certain that the other way, the Western way, the obsession with sex, could never work. It had brought only grief in its wake – broken families, prostitution, rape, sexual abuse, AIDS…the list was endless. Whatever God expected of humanity, it was not that. In the words of one of his favourite songs as a teenager, that was the road to nowhere.
And whatever befell him and the others over the next few days, he had no doubt that they were on the right road.
He made his way slowly back to the hotel, arriving in time to supervise the boarding of the tour bus for the two-hour ride to Shakhrisabz. He watched with amusement as they all claimed the same places they had occupied that morning and the previous afternoon, and idly wondered what would happen to anyone daring enough to claim someone else’s.
Now that the dice were cast he felt, somewhat to his surprise and much to his relief, rather less nervous than he had.
Docherty also registered the guide’s change of mood, but let it slip from his mind as the views unfolding through the bus window claimed more and more of his attention. They were soon out of Samarkand, driving down a straight, metalled road between cherry orchards. Groups of men were gathered in the shade, often seated on the bed-like platforms called kravats.
‘Do you think they’re waiting for the cherries to ripen?’ Docherty asked Isabel.
‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘The women probably do all the picking.’
‘Aye, but someone has to supervise them,’ Docherty argued.
She pinched the back of his neck.
The orchards soon disappeared, giving way to parched fields of grain. As the road slowly rose towards the mountains they could see the valley of the Zerafshan behind them, a receding strip of vegetation running from east to west in a yellow-brown sea, the domes of Samarkand like blue map pins in the green swathe.
‘What do you know about Shakhrisabz?’ Isabel asked.
‘Not a lot,’ Docherty said. ‘It was Tamerlane’s home town – that’s about all.’
‘There’s the ruins of his palace,’ Mike Copley volunteered, open guide book in his lap. ‘It says the only thing left is part of the entrance arch, but that that’s awesome enough.’
‘The son of a bitch didn’t do anything by halves,’ Sam Jennings commented. ‘I was reading in this’ – he held up the paperback biography – ‘about his war with the Ottoman Turks. Do you want to hear the story?’ he asked, with the boyish enthusiasm which seemed to make light of his years.
‘Go on, educate us,’ Copley told him.
‘Well, the Ottoman Turks’ leader Bayazid was just about to take Constantinople when a messenger from Tamerlane arrives on horseback. The message, basically, says that Tamerlane is the ruler of the world, and he wants Bayazid to recognize the fact. Bayazid has heard of Tamerlane,
