itself in anticipation, so he can hardly believe some desert bandit’s going to give him any trouble. He sends back a message telling Tamerlane to go procreate himself.
‘A few weeks later the news arrives that Tamerlane’s army is halfway across Turkey. Bayazid’s cheesed, but realizes he has to take time out to deal with the upstart, and he leads his two hundred thousand crack troops across Anatolia to meet Tamerlane. When the armies are a few miles apart the Turks get themselves in formation and wait. At which point Tamerlane’s army hits them from every conceivable side. A few hours later Bayazid is on his way to Samarkand in a cage. And the Turkish conquest of Constantinople gets put back fifty years, which probably saves the rest of Europe from Islam.’
The American smiled in pleasure at his story.
‘I think it’s a shame the way someone like Tamerlane gets glorified,’ his wife said. ‘In Samarkand he’s becoming the new Lenin – there are statues everywhere. The man turned cities into mountains of skulls, for God’s sake. He can’t be the only hero the Uzbeks have in their past.’
‘He wasn’t an Uzbek,’ Charles Ogley said, his irritable voice floating back from the front seat. ‘None of the Uzbeks’ heroes are. Nawaii, Naqshband, Avicenna. The Uzbeks didn’t get here until the end of the fifteenth century.’
Docherty, Mike Copley and Sam Jennings exchanged glances.
‘So who was here before them, Professor?’ Copley asked.
‘Mostly other Turkic peoples, some Mongols, probably a few Arabs, even some Chinese. A mixture.’
‘Maybe countries should learn to do without heroes,’ Sarah Holcroft said, almost defiantly.
‘Sounds good to me,’ Alice Jennings said.
Ogley’s grunt didn’t sound like agreement.
There were few signs of vegetation now, and fewer signs of farming. A lone donkey tied to a roadside fence brayed at them as they went past. The mountains rose like a wall in front of the bus.
The next hour offered a ride to remember, as the bus clambered up one side of the mountain range to the six-thousand-foot Tashtakaracha Pass, and then gingerly wound its way down the other. On their left were tantalizing glimpses of higher snow-capped ranges.
‘China’s on the other side of that lot,’ Copley observed.
They arrived at Shakhrisabz soon after three-thirty. ‘The name means “green city”,’ Nasruddin told them, and it did seem beautifully luxuriant after the desert and bare mountains. The bus deposited them in a car park, which turned out to occupy only a small part of the site of Tamerlane’s intended home away from home, the Ak Saray Palace. It would have been bigger than Hampden Park, Docherty decided.
As Copley’s book had said, all that remained of the edifice was a section of wall and archway. The latter, covered in blue, white and gold mosaics, loomed forty metres into the blue sky. Awesome was the word.
The other sights – another blue-domed mosque, a couple of mausoleums, a covered market – all paled in comparison. At around five-thirty, with the light beginning to take on a golden tinge, they stopped for a drink at the Ak Saray café. ‘We’ll leave for Samarkand in twenty minutes,’ Nasruddin said, before disappearing back outside.
The tourists sipped their mint tea and watched the sun sliding down over the western desert horizon. As the jagged-edged tower of Tamerlane’s gateway darkened against the yellow sky Docherty felt at peace with the world.
He smiled across the table at Isabel. Twelve years now, he thought, twelve years of the sort of happiness he hadn’t expected to find anywhere, let alone behind enemy lines in Argentina during the Falklands War.
It was an incredible story. At the beginning of the war Isabel, an exiled opponent of the Junta living in London, had agreed to return home as a spy, her love of country outweighed by hatred of its political masters. Docherty had been the leader of one of the two SAS patrols dropped on the mainland to monitor take-offs from the Argentinian airfields, and the two of them had ended up escaping together across the Andes into Chile, already lovers and more than halfway to being in love. Since then they’d married and had two children, Ricardo and Marie, who were spending these ten days with Docherty’s elder sister in Glasgow.
Isabel had made and mostly abandoned a career in compiling and writing travel guides, while Docherty had stayed on in the SAS until the early winter of 1992. Pulled out of retirement for the Bosnian mission a month later, his second goodbye to the Regiment in January 1993 had been final. Now, eighteen months later, the couple were preparing to move to Chile, where she had the offer of a job.
Chile, of course, was a long way from anywhere, and they had decided to undertake this Central Asian trip while they still could. It hadn’t been cheap, but it wasn’t that expensive either, considering the distances involved. The collapse of the Soviet Union had presumably opened the way for young entrepreneurs to compete in this market. Men like Nasruddin, Docherty thought, and idly wondered where their tour operator and guide had got to.
Nasruddin had crossed the road to the car park, and walked across to where two cars, a Volga and a rusting Soviet-made Fiat, were parked side by side under a large mulberry tree. There was no one in the cars, but behind them, in the circle of shade offered by the tree, six men were sitting cross-legged in a rough circle. Four of them were dressed modern Uzbek-style in cotton shirts, cotton trousers and embroidered skullcaps, but the other two were wearing the more traditional ankle-length robes and turbans.
As Nasruddin appeared the men’s faces jerked guiltily towards him, as if they were a bunch of schoolboys caught playing cards behind the bicycle sheds. Recognition eased the faces somewhat, but the tension in the group was still palpable.
‘Everything is going as expected,’ Nasruddin told them, squatting down and looking across the circle at Talib Khamidov. His cousin gave him a tight smile in return, which did little to soften the lines of his hawkish face.
‘They all came?’ Akbar Makhamov asked anxiously, ‘the Americans too?’ Despite Nasruddin’s assurances the others had feared that the two septuagenarians would sit out the side-trip to Shakhrisabz.
‘Yes. I told you they would come.’
‘God is with us,’ Makhamov muttered. The bearded Tajik was the other third of the group’s unofficial ruling triumvirate. He came from a rich Samarkand family, and like many such youths in the Muslim world, had not been disowned by his father for demonstrating a youthful excess of religious zeal. His family had not objected to his studying in Iran for several years, and on his return in 1992 Akbar had been given the prodigal son treatment. Over the last year, however, his father’s patience had begun wearing a little thin, though nothing like as thin as it would have done had he known the family money was being spent on second-hand AK47s and walkie-talkies for a mass kidnapping.
‘Everyone knows their duties?’ Nasruddin asked, looking round the circle.
They all did.
‘God be with us,’ Nasruddin murmured, getting to his feet. He caught Talib’s eyes once more, and took strength from the determination that he saw there.
He walked back to the tour bus, and found the driver behind his wheel, smoking a cigarette and reading one of the newly popular ‘romantic’ graphic novels. Nasruddin was angered by both activities, but managed to restrain himself from sounding it.
‘I
