Three Arched Bridge

8

AWEEK LATER the master of roads and bridges bought the stretch of highway that belonged to our lord, Two other emissaries had been journeying without rest for three months and more through the domains of princes, counts, and pashas, buying up the great western highway that had once been called the Via Egnatia and was now called the Road of the Balkans, after the name the Turks have recently given to the entire peninsula, which comes from the word mountain. More than by the desire of the Ottomans to cover under one name the countries and peoples of the peninsula, as if subsequently to devour them more easily, I was amazed by our readiness to accept the new name. 1 always thought that this was a bad sign, and now 1 am convinced that it is worse than that,

Now down this road came its purchasers, their clothes and hair whitened by its dust. They had so far purchased more than half of it, piece by piece, and perhaps they would travel all summer to buy it all They paid for it in fourteen kinds of coinage — Venetian ducats, dinars, drachmas, lire, groschen, and so forth — making their calculations in eleven languages, not counting dialects, This was because the road passed through some forty principalities, great and small, and so far they had visited twenty-six of them, More than buying it, they seemed to be winding the old roadway, so gouged and pitted by winters, summers, and neglect, onto a reel

The highway was older than anyone could remember. In the past three hundred years or so, almost all the holy crusades had passed along it. They said that two of the leaders of the First Crusade, Robert Giscard, Count of Normandy, and Robert, Count of Flanders, had spent a night at the inn a thousand paces down the road from us, which since then had been called the Inn of the Two Roberts,

Tens of thousands of knights of the Second Crusade had also passed this way, and then the Third Crusade, headed by Frederick Barbarossa, or Barbullushi as our yokels called him. Then came the interminable hordes of the Children’s Crusade, the Fifth Crusade, the Seventh and Eighth, the knights of the Order of the Templars, the Order of St. John the Hospitalier, and the Teutonic Order. Very old men remembered these last, not from the time when they were traveling to Jerusalem, but from about forty years ago, when they passed this way on their return to Europe.

A sorrier array of men had never been seen, as old Ajkuna said. Slowly, silently, they rode on their great horses, with breastplates patched with all kinds of scrap, which squeaked, krr, krr, as they rode, sometimes dripping rust in wet weather. They were returning northward to their own countries, with that creaking like a lament, leaving trickles of rust on the road like drops of discolored blood. Old Ajkuna said that when they saw the first of their ranks, people began to call, “Ah, the ‘Jermans’ are coming, the ‘Jermans’ are coming.” One hundred and fifty years had passed since they came this way on their journey to Jerusalem; but the stories about them that had passed from mouth to mouth were so accurate that people recognized the “Jermans” as soon as they appeared again. Very old people said that this was what they were called when they first came — “Jermans,” or people who talk as if in jerm, in delirium. Yet many people seem to have liked this name, since they say it is now used everywhere. According to our old men, these people have even begun to call their own country Jermani, which means the place where people gabble in delirium, or land of jerm. However, I do not believe that this name has such an origin.

All these things came to my mind fragmentarily as the agreement was being concluded. They paid for every piece, yard by yard, in Venetian ducats, and in the end departed very pleased, as if they had acquired the road for nothing. And so, with muddied hair and filthy clothes, they went on their way.

The Dutch monk had told me that the beast of the land, having gorged himself on the crocodile’s heart, left the beast dead under its useless scales and, with bloodied muzzle, wandered off through the grassland as if drunk.