The Count of Jaffa, whose tower stood on the borders and who was therefore rarely quit of strife, convoyed him a stage or two on his way.It was a slender company: two Franciscans bearing the present of Louis to the Khakan--a chapel-tent of scarlet cloth embroidered inside with pictures of the Annunciation and the Passion; two sumpter mules with baggage; Aimery's squire, a lad from the Boulonnais; and Aimery himself mounted on a Barbary horse warranted to go far on little fodder.The lord of Jaffa turned back when the snows of Lebanon were falling behind on their right.He had nodded towards the mountains.
"There lives the Old Man and his Ishmaelites.Fear nothing, for his fangs are drawn." And when Aimery asked the cause of the impotence of the renowned Assassins, he was told--"That Khakan whom ye seek."After that they made good speed to the city of Antioch, where not so long before angels from heaven had appeared as knights in white armour to do battle for the forlorn Crusaders.There they were welcomed by the Prince and sent forward into Armenia, guided by the posts of the Constable of that harassed kingdom.Everywhere the fame of the Tartars had gone abroad, and with each mile they journeyed the tales became stranger.Conquerers and warriors beyond doubt, but grotesque paladins for the Cross.Men whispered their name with averted faces, and in the eyes of the travelled ones there was the terror of sights remembered outside the mortal pale.
Aimery's heart was stout, but he brooded much as the road climbed into the mountains.Far off in Cyprus the Khakan had seemed a humble devotee at Christ's footstool, asking only to serve and learn; but now he had grown to some monstrous Cyclops beyond the stature of man, a portent like a thundercloud brooding over unnumbered miles.Besides, the young lord was homesick, and had long thoughts of Alix his wife and the son she had borne him.As he looked at the stony hills he remembered that it would now be springtide in Picardy, when the young green of the willows fringed every watercourse and the plovers were calling on the windy downs.
The Constable of Armenia dwelt in a castle of hewn stone about which a little city clustered, with mountains on every side to darken the sky, He was as swarthy as a Saracen and had a long nose like a Jew, but he was a good Christian and a wise ruler, though commonly at odds with his cousin of Antioch.From him Aimery had more precise news of the Khakan.
There were two, said the Constable."One who rules all Western Asia east of the Sultan's principates.Him they call the Ilkhan for title, and Houlagou for name.His armies have eaten up the Chorasmians and the Muscovites and will presently bite their way into Christendom, unless God change their heart.By the Gospels, they are less and more than men.
Swinish drinkers and gluttons, they rise from their orgies to sweep the earth like a flame.Here inside our palisade of rock we wait fearfully.""And the other?" Aimery asked.
"Ah, he is as much the greater as the sun is greater than a star.Kublai they name him, and he is in some sort the lord of Houlagou.I have never met the man who has seen him, for he dwells as far beyond the Ilkhan as the Ilkhan is far from the Pillars of Hercules.But rumour has it that he is a clement and beneficent prince, terrible in battle, but a lover of peace and all good men.They tell wonders about his land of Cathay, where strips of parchment stamped with the King's name take the place of gold among the merchants, so strong is that King's honour.But the journey to Cambaluc, the city of Kublai, would fill a man's lifetime."One April morning they heard mass after the odd Syrian fashion, and turned their faces eastward.The Constable's guides led them through the mountains, up long sword-cuts of valleys and under frowning snowdrifts, or across stony barrens where wretched beehive huts huddled by the shores of unquiet lakes.Presently they came into summer, and found meadows of young grass and green forests on the hills' skirts, and saw wide plains die into the blueness of morning.There the guides left them, and the little cavalcade moved east into unknown anarchies.
The sky grew like brass over their heads, and the land baked and rutted with the sun's heat.It seemed a country empty of man, though sometimes they came on derelict ploughlands and towns of crumbling brick charred and glazed by fire.In sweltering days they struggled through flats where the grass was often higher than a horse's withers, and forded the tawny streams which brought down the snows of the hills.Now and then they would pass wandering herdsmen, who fled to some earth-burrow at their appearance.The Constable had bidden them make for the rising sun, saying that sooner or later they would foregather with the Khakan's scouts.But days passed into weeks and weeks into months, and still they moved through a tenantless waste.They husbanded jealously the food they had brought, but the store ran low, and there were days of empty stomachs and light heads.Unless, like the King of Babylon, they were to eat grass in the fashion of beasts, it seemed they must soon famish.
