Caravan To Xanadu

CHAPTER 3

THE LEPER

How could I go about raising one thousand gold bezants? It was not as hard a task as raising a sunken ship out of the sea, or as easy as to raise the Devil out of Hell—it would require amazing luck, but not a miracle. My best chance, I thought, was to find a speculator who would hazard twelve hundred or so—the difference to be spent in trade goods—on the long shot of a twentyfold return. The Polo name was well regarded on the Rialto. Should Nicolo succeed in taking it from me, I would still be half a gentleman, because my mother’s family, the Carpini of Perugia, were impoverished but noble—indeed they outranked the Polos several steps. I knew some tricks that might impress a potential investor with sporting tastes—some of them of real value in navigation, others of an alchemical sort, such as invisible writing, which Venetians would think just the thing for swindling uncouth heathen, but which actually were better known in Islam than in Christendom. As for my age, most scions of merchant families made their first ventures at sixteen.

Much and perhaps all depended on my allowance of time. In this regard, I had one great stroke of luck—the appointment of one hundred learned priests to follow the Polo brothers to Cathay must await the election of a new Pope to succeed Clement IV. If this were not delayed, it was still unthinkable that the vast business of their assemblage and dispatch could be completed this year, so Nicolo had set next spring as a starting date.

The news of the brothers’ return caused a great flurry on the Rialto. They were received by the Doge, who professed more than a passing interest in the enterprise, and they dealt with Papal Legates and other great folk, who promised their support of the great mission when the throne of San Pietro was again filled. Meanwhile the pair had moved into the Casa Polo, the mansion where I was born. Hence came worthies and adventurers of all sorts, every one itching for Oriental treasure; and my uncle Zane and his son Leo buzzed about like bluebottle flies around a dunghill.

Yet I was soon impressed by a momentous fact. This flurry was like choppy waves on the lagoon rather than rolling billows. The Venetian people did not begin to grasp the significance of what Nicolo and Maffeo had done. I could hardly believe it of my gay, bright-eyed, quick-minded fellow citizens, and even Mustapha Sheik could not explain it fully. It appeared that their horizon spread no further than Denmark to the north, Portugal to the west, the High Altai to the south, and the eastern shores of the Caspian to the east. Beyond this was Vagueness washed by the Ocean Sea. Regardless of all reports to the contrary, they chose to believe that the remainder of the land was ruled by a stupendous Christian monarch, Prester John. If Nicolo and Maffeo had brought back chests of jewels as big as walnuts, the toe of a roc, a live unicorn, and a monkey without a tail, they would have rocked the town. But they had nothing to show but a bag or two of coins and a quaint-looking gold tablet bearing outlandish marks.

Not that our business men disbelieved the story—or so they proclaimed. It could be true as Gospel for all they knew. Polo was a good name, and some fishermen off Brindisi had seen a mermaid only a month before. But with bandits on land and pirates at sea, tempests, rocks, jerry-built boats, import duties, wages out of sight, and the Genoese bastards to top off all the rest, their policy was to retrench rather than expand. For their part, and not to mince the matter, any merchant who sent a bottom beyond Alexandria or the Crimea should wear a cockscomb.

In one part of my mind and heart, more passionate and less logical than the rest, I rejoiced at this dubiosity. I did not want any rush to join the venture, lest I lose out on its great prize or be left behind. But always I fetched up against the adamant fact that the fewer folk who became aroused, the less my chance of finding a financier.

Mustapha Sheik had given me quarters in his house to be closer to the moneylenders of Spinalunga. Actually, the Jews were far more likely to risk capital in an enterprise of this kind than the Christians—I did not know why, unless they were more cosmopolitan in outlook and more learned. I began going to them, and in almost every case was cordially received and eagerly heard. Most were reluctant to refuse outright and several delayed the decision; yet with the passing weeks I found not one who would risk one hundred bezants, let alone a thousand. One of the major reasons was the revival of the Saracen power after its late defeat—they feared that Constantinople and even Jerusalem might be retaken. Another argument gave proof of the Jews’ grasp of Oriental affairs, but this was no comfort to me—that there was a great deal of rivalry between the descendants of Genghis Khan for the overlordship, and this might break into open war.^[5] A third difficulty, and perhaps the greatest, proved that the Jews were equally informed on the keyhole chitchat of Venice. Why did not my own father and uncle pay my way, or advance me the moneys out of my patrimony?

The moon did not cease her waxing and waning, the whole host of stars moved a little with the seasons, and the planets seemed to wander where they listed, although their courses were as inexorably fixed as the very sun’s. I could hardly believe that half a year had passed since my father’s return—and afterwhile, a full year. On the day of his return, I had known myself for a man. After sixteen, I walked and talked so that no one doubted it. Another summer’s end found me seventeen and no nearer Cathay than the last summer; but neither, thank God, was my sire.

The Legates were uncommonly slow at electing a new Pope. The Polo brothers worried over their repute with Kublai Khan; he might easily be led to think them scoundrelly adventurers who had had no intention of obeying his sublime commands. This anxiety preyed upon them all the more in the gathering quiet of the Casa Polo. The portico no longer swarmed with would-be wanderers to the world’s end. Captains of galleys had stopped vying with one another in offering their services, and the Doge had graver business on his mind. The return of the two travelers from very Cathay had begun to look like a nine-day wonder. When they passed a knot of merchants on the Rialto, sometimes there was elbowing, and even winks, behind their backs. But if sometimes Maffeo turned and looked, Nicolo never did.

Fall winds blew and bit, and the wild geese returned. The brothers determined to set forth in mid-April, new Pope or no. Meanwhile my doors of hope were closing one by one. Only one, always the widest and the brightest, still stood wide.

“Marco my son, how much would you risk for a thousand pieces of gold?” asked Mustapha Sheik when the mid-March morning sun burst through the casement glass and ensilvered his long beard.

“I’d lay my life on the toss of a coin and grievous sin on my soul,” I answered.

“The risk to your skin is not that heavy in the venture I’m thinking of, but it’s far from light and my belly faints at the thought. There are those who’d say your soul’s risk would be even greater, but with all due respect to Christian dogma, I think it will come through unscathed. And for the love of Allah, don’t hang on my words as though they were a life line thrown to you in a sinking ship. If you don’t get to go with the Polo brothers, what will you do?”

“I’ll take service with a merchant, the best I can get, and wait till my ship comes in.”

“Will your heart be broken?”

“No, only cracked a little.” But my errant Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

“Do you know that if I had the gold, I’d put it in your hands, not to spare you a cracked heart, but as an offering to Allah—God, you say—for my sins?”

“I don’t ken you, master.”

“Why should you? It’s a matter between Him and me. It’s the light I see, which may be a will-o’-the-wisp, yet I must believe it for my soul’s sake. I want you to go, Marco Polo. To that end, I’ll lend you a hundred bezants, which will pay what you owe to your uncle Zane and furnish you for the thing I have in mind. You can repay the sum, if the chance comes, to the School of Averroës in Morocco.”

“If I live long enough, I will.”

“I’ve been pondering the matter since leaf fall. A month ago, you could as well pine for a roc’s egg, as did Aladdin’s bride, as for help from me. A fortnight past, I saw hope glimmering dimly at the bottom of the well, but I had no bucket to go down. As late as a week ago, the difficulties of the venture loomed so great, and the danger so deadly, that I couldn’t bring myself to broach the matter to you. Now one of the dragons guarding the treasure has been given a bone to gnaw. Even so, many dragons remain, and perhaps the treasure itself is as visionary as the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end.”

Mustapha Sheik spoke calmly, as was his wont. But his eyes, so black in contrast with his beard, glimmered like jet.

“Bismillah!” I cried, like a good Moslem.

“In the city of Medina I knew slightly a merchant of the common name of Haran-din. He had become rich by buying and selling slaves. On one of his voyages he was captured by a Venetian and himself sold as a galley slave. Being much too old for the labor, he expected to be thrown to the sharks within a twelve month, but no such mercy was vouchsafed him. Within two moons a patch of skin on his hand showed silvery as the moon. So he was delivered from his bench and put in the lazar house of Chioggia. In a few weeks more, perhaps in a few days, he will be freed from there also, by a more kind delivery, but one he won’t welcome in that place.”

“Death?” I asked.

“Truly. But he doesn’t want to meet him there. He wants the appointment to be in Zara, on the shores of Hungary, across the Adriatic from Rimini.”

“Why there, Mustapha Sheik?”

He was always patient with my questions. “Because in Zara there is a Mohammedan mosque containing a relic from Mecca. You may ask how it comes there, in a Christian state. Because Stephen, the king, wedded a Cuman woman, whose people swore to become Christians, but who are half Mohammedans, half pagans. When those leaning toward Allah desired to raise a temple, he gave them leave. Haran-din prays that he may kiss this relic, a stone fixed in the walls, which once lay upon the Hill of Mercy, and which touched the Prophet’s foot when he shouted ‘Labbeyka!’ unto God. And he sent me word that whoever brings him forth into the light and bears him to Zara and enables him to kiss the stone before he dies, him he will make his heir.”

“I wish you’d told me sooner, Mustapha Sheik. Now the time grows short.”

“It would have grown long if you had undertaken the venture even a week ago. A warden, Captain Vico, knew that Haran-din had secret wealth, but it was useless to torture him because the malady was so far advanced that he could no longer feel pain, and that is the nature of this most strange and awful affliction. He knew too that Haran-din had conspired to escape, whereby to dispose of his treasure, so he laid a cunning trap to kill anyone who stole his way to the prison bars. But Haran-din gave him a jewel that a certain Jew had kept for him, wherefor this Vico promised, on the forfeit of his soul to be burned by demons through eternity if he breaks faith, to leave open an outer gate at such a time as to circumvent the outer guard. Thus only the inner guard will remain to be eluded, which Haran-din declares would not be difficult for a resolute, resourceful, and cunning man.”

“If so, why doesn’t the warden arrange for a confederate to deliver Haran-din and so share in the reward?”

“Because Haran-din will trust only another Mohammedan or a Jew, with whom Captain Vico has no dealings and whom he himself would not trust.”

“Why won’t Haran-din trust a Christian?”

“Because he believes that a good Christian would free him from the lazar house only to let him die in some odor of sanctity, in a last attempt to save his soul, and the common run of Christians would not dare touch his leprous hand.”

“Am I neither one?” I asked with a grin.

“You’re a most mongrel mixture of good and bad, to my soul’s joy.”

“Do you think he’ll trust me?”

“I’ll put a mark on your hand that he will trust.”

“And I must touch Haran-din’s hand?”

“You must clasp it, for the way is long and dim, and he is nigh blind. You may cover it with a cloth, but that will only assuage your horror of it, not reduce the danger of contagion.”

“I’ll defy the inner guard with a merry heart, as well as other perils of the way, but that danger chills me to the marrow of my bones.”

“I too am chilled to the dried hollow of my old bones, but take comfort in the belief—well-nigh the knowledge—that the dreadful chance is far less than most Christians believe, and for this one exposure would hardly be one in ten.”

As I heard the thrilling words there had been visions before my eyes, and these had half eclipsed my view of the speaker’s face. It came clear to me now, and suddenly my joy in him clutched at my heart like the deep-toned wondrous music of San Marco. He was very old, I thought, and his beard was as white as the snow that sometimes blows on the northeast wind off the Julian Alps. The bald spot on his crown was hidden under a black cap, but his head was like an old crag half covered with snowdrift. While the parchment of his face was rich with secret writing, its drawn look now, and the strange brilliance of his eyes, told me that he had just fought a grievous battle—and he had won. But I dared not speak of it yet.

“One in ten!” I cried. “Why, that’s nothing.”

He shook his head as though his voice had failed him, and tears stood in his eyes.

“Even if it turns out rainbow gold, I’ll not be sorry I chased it at that rate,” I said quickly.

“I don’t think it is. Unless his malady has deranged his mind—and one of its most awful attributes is enduring sanity to the very last—he wouldn’t lie to me who has broken bread with him, and eaten salt. He writes me that he has one jewel left. It was paid him on an old debt a year ago, and put in the charge of a certain Jew dwelling in Spinalunga. It is a pearl among pearls, he told me, and if it were shown to a connoisseur buying for a king, it should bring one thousand bezants, if not more.”

I thought for a time that I could get out of asking him my final question, since it would hurt his thin old throat to answer it. It was forced upon me because we loved each other.

“Mustapha Sheik, why do you tell me of this, knowing that if I win my prize or lose my life, we will be parted?”

“What choice do I have, Marco? Have you forgotten how you came on our ship? My mariners told you I was sick—you saw the terror in their faces, and for all you knew I was stricken with the Black Death—yet you went into my darkened cabin and ministered to me.”

“But I didn’t come for that. I wish I had, but I came only—I don’t know why I came!”

“I think I know what compulsion brought you there, and I wouldn’t have it changed. It’s the same that will help to bring you to the earth’s ends, if you live. Yet you ministered to an old and ailing Infidel. Now the wheel has turned full circle, and you must do so once more, and as a beginning, not an end. It is like the repetition, in reverse, of a figure in a wondrous weaving. And the weaver is Fate.”

2

Mustapha Sheik furnished me with a carefully drawn plan of the lazar house at Chioggia, showing its doors, stairways, guardrooms, and corridors, and approaches from both canals and alleys. Its legend contained instruction in the times and procedures of mounting and changing watch, the casting of food into the cells, the passage of the dung cart through the halls, and the midnight carry-out of corpses. It had been prepared by a Jewish architect before he died of jail fever, and I thought that if his ghost still haunted the fetid halls, he would be glad of its employment in this need.

Although Mustapha had doctored my fathers letter and tutored me in the wile, stratagems were foreign to his nature. His life had been one long honoring Truth, and he could not readily twist it even in good cause. My mind was far more devious, and in that way—although I was still too close to the woods to see the trees—typically Venetian. Venice was one great countinghouse. For a quick profit, we would sell a throne in Heaven or buy a gridiron in Hell. It was I, not he, who thought of the device that might earn the victory.

The odds in my favor might be two to one, good enough for an adventurer of my age. But not so for this desert man who had lived to be old. He made me go over the scheme piece by piece, forward and backward and inside out, to find its weaknesses. His quiet questions as to what I would do in such and such a case prepared me for the trial. At last it was as though I were clad in armor.

Two mornings later I was at the fish dock at sunrise, watching the smacks come in under gay-hued sails. Fisherfolk are happy folk wherever you find them, living exciting lives and dying quick deaths, daring and debonair; and these, being Venetians besides, could not endure a moment’s drabness even on a darkling sea in storm. When visitors remarked on the blazing red or burning orange of their sails, their gay reply was that they wished to be seen a bit farther than they could be smelled. When my head ached over the hardest problem of the whole venture—where to find a lieutenant equal to the challenge—this valiance caught my eyes like a beacon fire.

The sail cloth was no more gorgeous than the cargoes. Some of the decks were banked with shining tunny, opalescent dolphin, or rainbow-hued wrasse. Others, boarded high, held sardines as numberless as silver coins in the treasure vault of a Sultan. Herring, sea bream, and sole mixed with red mullet, and pop-eyed cod consorted with angelfish to catch the sun.

It was not long before the boat I was waiting for came in with a load of blue-silver mackerel, the finest in our waters. There was no finer boat in our fishing fleet than this, bravely named Grazia da San Pietro. Always she skipped along with a great air, partly to please the tall young man at the steering oar. He was brown-skinned, black-eyed, limber as a roebuck, quick as a chamois.

“God be with you, Felix!” I called.

Although we had not sailed together for a good while now, we retained kindly feelings toward each other. However, we had found these hard to express. Our occasional meetings brought forth the usual routine questions and stock answers, a lewd anecdote or two, promises to frolic soon, and a noisy, fast farewell. In truth our roads had forked sharply soon after Mustapha Sheik had become my guide and master.

“Good day to you, Marco, and what are you doing in this hell of smells? I thought you’d be in a countinghouse, sniffing frankincense and myrrh.”

“I want to talk to you, when you’ve the leisure.”

Leaving the slippery chores to his crew, he followed me into an ale booth. When we had drunk, I reminded him of our brave voyage to Mustapha’s zebec, five years before.

“Do you remember what booty we bore off?” I asked.

“As though it were yesterday. We had six grossi change from the gold piece after you’d brought the drug, and we spent it on sweetmeats.”

“How would you like to help another sick man and win one hundred lire for yourself and the same for your crew?”

So I told him of my plan, omitting only the amount of the prize that I hoped to win. Truly I need not have taken the latter precaution; one hundred lire loomed large in his sight, and he never questioned my right to a lion’s share. This was all the more surprising to me, considering that he seemed better fitted to lead the enterprise than I was.

I looked at him in sudden and sharp envy. Physical grace in man and perhaps in woman is not merely a matter of harmony with time and event; it is also an awareness of surplus strength. While I had been learning, he had been living. It was more true that he had learned by living, while I had lived to learn. He had discovered the secrets of the fish, whereby they could not escape his net. Very rarely could the weather take him by surprise; it could not help signaling its intentions to his trained eyes. These last had been keened by the daily sharpening of use. His ears were two sleepless watchdogs and the sea their sounding board. His nose was a wonderful thing, an ineffable gift of God, for thereby he found a thousand interests and excitements. Whether on land or on water he was poised, alert, cool, confident, and well oriented. Attacking or attacked, he was a formidable adversary, a trained fighter.

I saw him clearly, and the shadow that he cast across my mind. Apart from his hate, Nicolo Polo was well briefed in not wanting to make me a member of the company adventuring to Cathay. If I could pay my way he would suffer me to do so; he had persuaded himself that I could not earn it. I was not enough like Felix.

“I’ll have a go at it with you,” Felix told me. “But don’t ask me to touch a leper. It would make me puke.”

An hour short of midnight, Felix’s crew rowed the Grazia da San Pietro into the canal that approached the lazar house from the lagoon. My outer clothes, although worn thin, and bought cheap, looked finer than any I had ever worn, fit for a patrician’s son. Underneath were the gay-colored shirt and hard-woven woolen breeches favored by fishermen. After bathing with oil and soap until, he said, he smelled sweet as the Doge’s bride, Felix had similar garments next to his skin and a gondolier’s habit without. We left the ship in the shadow of a little-used bridge, climbed onto the bank, and at the next bridge hailed a vacant gondola. While I hung back in the gloom, Felix spoke the first lines of our play.

“My master will pay double for your boat,” he told the gondolier, “but only under specified conditions.”

“I’ll hear ’em and decide,” the fellow answered grumpily.

“He’s a young nobleman, as you can well suppose, and he’ll meet tonight a young wife of—let us say someone of a station equal to his own. He wishes me to conduct them for a matter of two hours while you take your ease in an inn. So to attract no attention, I have put off my master’s livery and donned the habit of a public gondolier, but it was one that I wore before I entered his service, and you need have no fear for your craft, for he’ll pay for every speck of paint I knock from her fat sides.”

Already Felix had exceeded his instructions. The matter was the same, but couched in livelier language. Indeed he imitated perfectly a high-spirited rascally servingman of a lecherous young lord. I was afraid that the show was too good for the boat owner to believe.

At least the man was no kill-joy. Like a true Venetian, he entered into the game.

“A young nobleman, say you! I’ve had an old nobleman, a member of the Council if you must know, board me unmasked with the wedded daughter of a princely house. Wild horses couldn’t drag from me what happened thereafter, but if I were one to gossip——”

He paused, as though in fair play.

“God knows an oyster is a public crier compared to you, and my master trusts you further than his own grandma,” Felix cried, rising to the occasion. “It’s his sensibilities, not his reputation, that demand the privacy. If you won’t respect them, say so, and I’ll look elsewhere.”

“I’m a man of sensibilities myself.”

I waited Felix’s reply with as much pleasant expectancy as the gondolier. Fishermen are famed both as delightful liars and as skilled at repartee.

“Then you’ll sympathize with my master? You know the sort that must break their bladders before they find ease in an open boat. He’ll turn his back on his best friend even in the wildwood, and as for sitting next to a lady in a public jakes, why, he’d sink through the boards. When he’s frolicking with a light-o’-love, the squeak of a mouse will unman him. So you can imagine that with arms laden with forbidden fruit and a stranger behind his table——”

“Say no more, my friend. Only pay me in advance, with an extra grosso to spend in entertainment while I wait, and leave my mother—for she bears me as tenderly as my dam once did—moored under San Paolo’s bridge.”

3

It was a pleasant beginning for our adventure, and, we trusted, a good omen. But our cheer began to pall as we drew near the fortresslike pile that housed the living dead. Truly Venice was famed for the good health of its citizenry, doubtless by the blessing of San Marco, yet there were enough lazars of all sorts to pack it full as a dunghill is with worms. It stood in a gloomy backwater among towers fending off the sun; its stones were gray with cold slime; silt and seaweed fouled its doorways. Every window was barred, and all were dark except those of the guardrooms, which were bright enough for a gala night. The air became tainted an arrow cast distant. As we drew nearer a company of rats swam in a V-shape pack across our bows, climbed onto a dock, and vanished in a crack in the wall. There were at least fifty of the loathsome beasts following a captain as big as a half-grown cat, and I wondered to what feast they had been summoned.

We tied the gondola to a piling where I had seen others of its like in the last few days, and where presumably it would attract no attention. Then, lowering our caps and pulling up our neck-cloths, we made our way to a recess near the iron gate known as Dead Man’s Portal, where a rushlight flickered and cast a rigadoon of shadows. This gate should open about midnight to let the outer guard bear the day’s accumulation of corpses to the charnel boats, from which they were thrown into a mass grave. Ordinarily the door would be locked behind them by Messer Vico, the junior warden, and opened only for their readmittance. Since we had sent him a prearranged signal, we could expect him to omit the precaution tonight as though by a fault of memory. The dead had to be identified by a town watchman at the end of the alley, prayed over, and shrouded before being stowed on the boats, so we could count on at least a half an hour to effect Haran-din’s rescue.

My wait very soon grew chill. Since the night was warm, I could only attribute this fact to cold sweat. To try to conceal it from Felix, I kept up a pretense of gay whisperings, but apparently he saw through it, or perhaps was himself under more strain than his debonair manner revealed. In any case he brought forth a leathern flask containing a pint of strong wine, which we shared with great pleasure.

We were enjoying its warmth when we were given a great scare as well. An officer of some kind, bearing a pike, emerged from the shadows and came toward us along the moonlit quay. If we ran the day was lost; if he found us and raised an outcry, our fix would be even worse; if he attacked us there might be an added load for the charnel boat. Our best hope was that he would pass by without seeing us. And it seemed to be winning when he stopped, held his weapon ready, and spoke in low tones.

“I’d a notion I’d find you here.”

“Who are you, friend?” I asked.

“Captain Vico, the junior warden. I received the signal, and thought I’d take a look at you, and if you appeared a gentleman, I’d lend you a hand.”

I knew the smell of this full well, and it was greasy.

“When are you going to unlock the door?” I asked with growing boldness. I did not know its source or whether it was quite real. Anyway, it had an instantaneous effect on Messer Vico.

“The bolt’s slid already, but the coast’s not clear until the guards bring out the stuff.”

“You’ve a ring of keys on your belt. Does one of them unlock the Infidel’s cell?”

“No, signor, only the keys of the outer rooms. But the lock will be easy to break, and you’ll have plenty of time, some of which is by my special provision.”

His low voice had become gleeful in an obnoxious way. It was like the happy croak of vultures as they hop toward carrion. I did not want to ask him how he had lengthened the time, but saw no way to dodge it.

“How did you work it, Captain?”

“In a way you’d never think of. Last night I had the kitchen knaves fix a mess of kale, green and half-cooked. Maybe you know it will burst your belly with colic, and flux you worse than spoiled fish. I don’t mean you, your Honor. I mean them who has to eat it, when they’ve nothing else.”

“I see.”

“I gave it to half a dozen wretches with one foot and four toes in the grave. Old folk wasting away still crave their victuals—some of ’em more than blacksmiths—but they wouldn’t have touched the stuff if I hadn’t sanded their mush for two days running. Would you call that slipshod work, young sir, or would you call it foresight?”

“I don’t know what to call it till I know your purpose.”

“You haven’t guessed it yet? When a body’s tottering on the brink, a breath o’ wind sends him over.”

“They died?”

“Whist!”

Messer Vico had cocked his head to listen to a grating sound from the iron gate. As it swung open, he stood forth as though to oversee the proceeding. Two by two came the burly guards, each pair carrying a bier on which lay a naked corpse. Somehow I had thought they would all be old men, but what I took for a beardless gaffer with frail limbs showed in the rushlight as a wasted crone. Then I saw a male child among the number and then a fair-haired damsel—newly wedded, perhaps, or a virgin bride of Death.

“Ain’t that the wench who came to nurse her father, and wouldn’t pay your rent for a soft, warm bed?” Captain Vico called jovially to one of her pallbearers.

“The very one,” the bravo answered. “Instead she warmed herself catching fever, which was hot enough, and now she’s gone to join him in a hard, cold bed.”

I thought the pale parade would never end. It did, though, at last—when I had counted nine. Behind them marched six idle guardsmen of a full squad of twenty-four. The shapes faded into the darkness; and the noise of jests and laughter and complaints over shirking fair shares of the load grew faint and indistinguishable. There was still a flickering half-circle of shadows before the rushlight, but done was the awful dance of jumping jacks on the wet stone.

Captain Vico returned to us with a proud smile.

“Wait a minute more in case one of ’em glances back,” he advised. “You’ve time to take your time, as you plainly see.”

“There are more than usual?” I asked. My voice sounded strained.

“Several more. But I reckoned there might be.” The side of his face drew—I saw it in the deep, cold gloom, and I could guess that it indicated a long, knowing wink.

“Six more?”

The question caused Felix to look at me in a startled way.

Captain Vico shook his head. “Sometimes they’ve got more life in them than you reckon, but there were three that got here sooner than they would have, including one that I had least counted on.”

“The old woman?”

“We’d better get on the move——” Felix broke in.

“Why, you’ve time to sit and play a game of chess. Young gentleman, how did you know it was her?”

“I saw you look surprised as they brought her out.”

“You’ve sharp eyes, and no mistake! Them old women are the greatest lingerers in the house. Well, it turned out you didn’t need the extra ones, but many a night there’s only two or three, and I’ve seen the night when we drew a blank. My only aim was to help you win, and I had no notion of asking a share in the prize. But if you’ve thirty lire handy——”

I did have, and I had considered handing them to him. Instead my hand found other work to do, it seemed on its own volition. I had been hating the creature with a swiftly expanding hate, and suddenly he fell down. I had hardly heard the thud of my fist against his cheekbone—perhaps I had aimed at the eye that had winked—before I hated myself for the reckless act. Quite possibly it would wreck our scheme.

“Devils in hell!” Felix broke out in a low-voiced violence. “Do you want to hang us all?”

“I’m sorry——”

Felix jerked a cloth from around his neck and a cord from his pocket. “See, he’s coming to already,” he grumbled as he crouched with busy hands beside the fallen man. “For the love of God, Marco, the next time you hit a man, hit him in the jaw.”

With unbelievable swiftness he fixed a gag in the warden’s mouth and tied his wrists and ankles. Thrusting him into the darkest part of the recess, we dashed for the iron gate. It opened readily and Felix led the way into the dim hall. Soon we both stopped, sickened by the foul air and appalled by the gloom. Here and there a low-burning lamp was bracketed to the wall, but these only caused deeps and shallows of darkness that bewildered the mind. There were black openings that might be corridors, gratings, and barred doors.

“Which way?” Felix whispered.

I could not tell him, but by standing still and shutting fear out of my heart, I looked at the map that Mustapha Sheik had furnished me. I did not do so with my hands and outward eyes, but inside my head where I had stored it, line by line, and with the eyes of the mind. This was the thing I could do, the part I was good for. I was not a good captain but I would make an excellent councilor. . . .

In a moment I knew which one of the black holes to make for. Beyond was a door, as sure as the devil, and a steep stairway. . . . At its head opened a long hall; with the flickering light it seemed a mile long. Through this gloom we sped, I counting eleven cells. At the twelfth we stopped.

“Haran-din?” I called into its fetid dark.

“Shair Allah (The justice of God)!”

Under my surcoat was an iron bar. I took it out and thrust it through the ring of the big padlock and began to pry. There was no result but a grating noise and then a clang as the iron slipped and struck the cell door. With a grunt of disgust, Felix took it out of my hands. He placed it carefully, his elbow came down against the powerful upward twist of his forearm, and the lock broke off.

My eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom and I feared to turn them on the inmate of the cell. Many a leper becomes a living carcass, half dismembered. Haran-din had the white form of the disease, so that most of his skin was silvery-looking, picking up the vestiges of light so that it appeared to have a phosphorescent glow. He was naked except for a breachclout and a round cap.

“Come quickly,” I murmured in the silence.

It seemed that he too should be able to see in the pale dark, so long had it been his medium. Instead he groped his way toward the door. I was reaching to help him when he gave forth a wail like some strange swamp fowl. Out of the gloom rose a fast football of stone. I had hardly time to turn when three keepers, carrying pointed sticks, burst out of a black passage.

A few seconds ago, Felix and I had been taut as harpstrings with force we could not free. There had been nothing to spend it on after the lock broke; the action of the adventure had been reduced to a snail’s pace. Suddenly we were in a swirl of violence. The guards flung themselves on us, their weapons raised to strike us.

They would have done better to employ them as spears. The most likely reason they did not was a humanly interesting one to be considered only in peaceful leisure. These fellows were not knights, to level lances at the foe, but base keepers of half-dead folk. They used their sticks to prod with through the bars, whereby they were greatly feared and hated, terrible weapons indeed to the poor wretches who could only grunt and shriek and beg for mercy. In truth they were like the forks employed by demons in Hell, for there too the damned are bound in iron and cannot fight back. But well the villains knew that Felix and I differed greatly from their usual prey. Losing faith in their sticking and stabbing, they hoisted them like clubs.

Before their wielders could strike us, we were at grips with them. They were three to our two, but whatever terror was in me was transmuted first to excitement, then to fierce joy. Perhaps I realized it was not a fight to the death. If they carried daggers they did not draw them, partly perhaps because they took me for a nobleman whose kniving would be avenged inside or outside the law, mainly for care of their own skins.

While Felix held his own against two of the wretches, I grappled with the other. We had been fighting an endless time, it seemed, before I dared believe I was his master, and at that instant events took a new turn. More likely not twenty seconds had gone by since the attack began, but these were so furious that none of the three guardsmen had breath to call for help. Suddenly one of Felix’s pair broke from his grasp and went sprinting down the hall.

“Help! Help!” he shouted at the top of his voice.

Then for the first time I saw what a wolf in strength and swiftness Felix was. I had better compare him to some splendid denizen of the deep, such as a great gleaming swordfish whose shadow in the water is the nightmare of the sharks, and which causes their teeth to chatter like castanets. For in battling the sea and its creatures, these graces had come upon him. The giant threshing tunny had taught him nimbleness, and the writhing tentacles of the octopus had proved the strength of his hands.

Although the second man tried to hold him, Felix flung him from him in one wrench, then darted in pursuit of the runaway. I trow he was not two ticks of a clock behind him at the start, and although they vanished almost instantly in the shadows, I had no trouble following the race. The volume of the quarry’s shouts for help had not begun to reduce when they suddenly stopped.

Yet a heavy trouble began to lie on my exultant spirit. What was the good of winning the brabble if we lost the prize? The turmoil had slacked off, with Felix’s man groaning and clutching his knee, and my fellow panting and grunting, although not struggling very hard, in my grasp. And in this quiet I could vision the half-score or so stout watchmen in various parts of the building having heard the shouts, and rushing to their fellows’ help. The wonder was that they had not already appeared.

“Get away as fast as you can!” I shouted to Haran-din in his native tongue. “The outer gate’s unlocked.”

“Nay, I can’t keep my course in the murky gloom,” he answered calmly.

“Try it anyway, for the love of God! The alarm’s raised now, and the pack will be upon us——”

“I think not. The watchmen doze at their posts, and they’ll pay no mind to calls for help. Why, the halls ring with them day and night as some poor soul is prodded or beaten, or belike is devil-ridden.”

Although I could hardly believe the more hopeful words, the rest that he spoke had curious results. Pinning my man down with one arm and one knee, I struck him in the face with my free fist. It was a short blow, but the hardest I had ever dealt, and I aimed it where Felix had bade me, at his jawbone. A marvel to me was the way he wilted. It was a lesson in human vulnerability I would not soon forget.

Just then Felix appeared, dragging by the collar the fellow he had chased. He too was hors de combat, and his capturer lost no time in heaving him into an empty cell whose door stood ajar. It came to me that one of the nine corpses on their way to the Potter’s Field had been found here tonight, and its heaving-out had left the cage for our convenience, and that the new-freed soul that had lately dwelt in the cankered flesh made merry on its flight to Heaven over the upshot. Swearing by San Pietro, the patron of fishermen, Felix seized my sleeping beauty by the scruff of the neck and dropped him beside his own. When the last of the three, awake but harmless, had joined his mates, my copemate shut the door and shot the padlock.

He was more than my copemate, I thought, half in warmheartedness I could not stay, half in a great dismay. He had proved himself the captain of the venture.

Meanwhile I had got my hand on Haran-din’s arm and was tugging him out of the cell. God knew I could hardly bear to touch the silver skin, and to grasp it tightly was unspeakably worse, because there was no firm flesh inside, only a moving jelly. Still, I did not let go. Sick in the belly, faint in the heart, I led him up the hall, down the steep stairs, through the anterooms. It was a thing I could do, and I did it. Although it was not of the splendid order of the things Felix could do, I felt fierce pride.

Our pace seemed no faster than a turtle’s as it makes across hot sand toward the cool sea. I dared not tug too hard on Haran-din’s arm, lest it pull out of its socket. Felix, pacing ahead of us only to turn back and wait our crawl, begged and cursed in vain. We could hurry no more than the black oxen of Time. Even so, the star of the gateway grew and brightened.

At last we passed through it, and the still-tainted air that Haran-din breathed must have seemed as sweet as the perfume of Paradise to a hero newly slain for Allah’s glory.

4

I got my Infidel into the gondola and Felix pushed off. No longer did we look the part of a Venetian lordling and his rascal—our faces, hands, and garments were smeared with jail filth—nor smell it either, unless I missed my guess. So there was nothing to stop us from heaving together on the oar. Truly our fat duck cut the water on the way to the rendezvous. Her owner, the voluble gondolier, had never raced her so fast to get to a fire.

When we came up to the Grazia da San Pietro, not one of her crew would lay hand on the lazar. Only by help of a rope passed around his waist was I able to hoist him aboard. My first thought was to leave the gondola adrift, but since our course lay toward San Paolo’s bridge, I decided to tow her for a little so the stink would get out of her and her jocund owner could retrieve her before he cast too many curses on our heads. She slowed our passage only a minute or two before I cut her loose. Now the breeze would ground her within a cable’s length of her destination.

I got two pieces of worn sail out of a cubby. One I spread on the hard boards for Haran-din to lie on; with the other I covered his pale, wasted form. It was a poor bed at best, I thought; but perhaps he could not feel its hardness beneath his rotted bones. If he needed no covering against the cool breeze and the cold splashings, at least it shielded him from our sight. But perhaps he was as insensible to this as to the rest, and the mercy was wholly ours.

As I thought of this, a sudden weakness came upon me, and I leaned against the rail, my eyes streaming tears. At last I must lean over, ghastly sick. Still I did not seem lowered in the estimation of the oarsmen, rough, lewd, hard-bitten fellows though they were. Not one of them glanced at me; instead they talked quietly to one another above their stroke.

The ship sped, and soon we were well away. The moon set, and still no bell towers clanged an alarm, and only owls and bats could find us in this close dark. Surely we could rest our fears till sunrise provided the rowers did not rest their arms; and by then I hoped we would be seven leagues out on the Adriatic—perhaps much farther if Neptune gave us a fair wind and tide. If so, we would be out of danger except for provost galleys set on our track. Since there was no indication that our means of flight had been discovered, we had every prospect of a clean escape.

No great danger lay in Captain Vico. He had not seen my face and had laid himself open to a beheading on the charge of receiving bribes. The guards we had laid out had had only dim looks at us in the fetid gloom.

The ebb tide had turned back soon after our setting forth, and now before a southeast wind was making into the Gulf of Venice with far more power than usual. And this was the wind we had most hoped to be spared, since it was directly contrary to our course. It was rising a little with the tide. While there was not the slightest sign of a brewing gale, our rowers were hard put to it to make headway. This would have roweled our nerves even on a lawful journey, with no gnashing of teeth behind us. Our destination, Zara, lay nearly sixty leagues beyond Chioggia—two days’ sail in the best of weathers. Now, as the dawn cracked, we had barely cleared the shoals off the mouth of the Adige.

I had hoped we would be a speck in the great glittering blue of the Adriatic long before this, instead of, as Felix put it, two shouts and a halloo from port.

“There’s a ship on our larboard stern,” I told him.

He peered a good ten seconds. “I don’t make her out,” he answered. “Are you sure she’s not a low-hanging skean of mist?”

“I’m sure. And her course is due east.”

Felix looked flabbergasted. “What kind of eyes have you, to make out a sail I can’t?”

Well, Mustapha Sheik had told me they were the sharpest he had ever seen on man, woman, or child.

“She’s close-reefed,” I told him, trying to get back part of the capital I had lost tonight. “From her lines, I’d call her a bireme.”

Meanwhile the light was clearing with that glorious rush of first spring dawns. Felix flung salt water from a draw bucket into his eyes, then rinsed it out with fresh water.

“I can see her now,” he told me. “But I couldn’t if you hadn’t showed me where to look.”

“I doubt if she can see us. We’re against the shore and she’s against the morning. If you hug a little more on a south’ard course we may give her the slip.”

He called orders to that effect. Meanwhile I got a spying tube—a hollow stick which, pressed against the eye socket and peered through, cut off all dazzling light and usually assisted vision.

“She’s a bireme of about forty benches,” I reported. That meant twenty on a side, each with two oarsmen. “Her high castle and long beak show she’s a fighter. If she isn’t a marine provost I’ll eat her pennant.”

“What would she be doing out here this time of day?” Felix asked, wide-eyed.

“She might be attending to her duty, chasing rovers and smugglers. On the other hand she might be looking for a heathen smuggled out of a lazar house.”

“By our Blessèd Mary, if someone saw us get off the gondola, our heads’ll roll in the Piazzetta before another tide!”

“That’s a lot of trouble for the state to go to for one Infidel leper,” I told my comrade when my head had cleared. “Still there’s no proof we’ve been seen. The provost marshal’s first thought would be that his own tribe stole him, on a holy venture, so he’d send out a galley to look for a zebec or a dhow. However, for lack of either, she might search every boat that journeys east.”

“She’s changed her course more southerly, and she’ll be sure to see us when the sunrise lights our oar blades.”

“Then we’d better be afishing, like honest men.”

So we heaved our two-hundred-pound hook to anchor in twenty fathoms. Two fellows ran out a short net as though to make a trial cast. Felix and I had already shelled the outer garments concealing our fishers’ dress, and with a grim look, he rolled up the foul rigs, fastened the bundle to a net weight, and tossed it overboard. The rest of us watched what might be a sea-dragon with eighty legs, who might come fishing for us.

From the hump on the dragon’s back there rose what looked like three stiff hairs. The number increased to a thick patch as more and more spyers mounted the galley’s castle.

“She’s seen us, but she’s keeping her course,” Felix muttered.

“Keep praying to San Pietro! If her master is an easy-going lubber, he’ll pass us by, but if he’s a veteran of Trepani——”

Then the color ran out of Felix’s face like red wine from a broken glass.

“God in Heaven, she’s veering this way!”

My face blanched the like, if the cold sweat beading there was any sign. My terror was quite likely greater because it spread further—it gave me eyes to see not only our arrest and ironing, but our behanding at Santa Croce, our dragging to the Piazzetta on the tails of horses, and our beheading between the pillars.^[6] If our lifting of Haran-din would be counted only theft of first offense, we would get off with a flogging and being branded on the hand. But the same eyes searched desperately for hope, and for this—in my great need—they turned cold and sharp.

“We’d better cut the anchor rope and run for it,” Felix gasped. “There’s a little mist blowing and if it thickens, maybe we’ll fade out.”

That would betray our guilt, and the chance of hiding did not seem one in ten. Still, we must be ready to run if we were not able to gull the galley captain into letting us pass.

“Call to the fishers to haul in, but free the fish under water, so they won’t gleam in the sun.”

“That’ll take time. What’s the sense of it? Why not let the net go?”

“To make it look like a water haul, so we’ll have an excuse to change grounds.”

But this could be our last trick. If the galley veered to intercept us, there was no risk too desperate to run.

Five minutes crawled away before the net was stowed and the dinghy made fast. Although the galley’s oarsmen were stroking at half-speed—as if she were making toward us only for lack of a better object—she loomed larger and looked fiercer than before. Truly she had not gained three cable lengths against the brisk wind and heavy tide, and was still a good league distant.

Felix ordered oars out. I had thought to request an easy gait, so as not to show fear, but thereby I would show fear of his refusal, which was enough to make him refuse in his present quandary. So with a faintness of heart concealed in a strong voice, I made it my command.

Then we watched like wild geese watching a distant fowler. Every rower’s head was turned at exactly the same angle as he bent to his oar. The shape that the galley showed us shortened with terrible slowness. She might be only giving a little way to the head wind. . . . Suddenly I scorned such wishwash, and knew well we were under chase.

“Now is the time for speed,” I told Felix.

But before he could give the command to the cockswain, there rose from the deck a wild, frantic cry.

“Wait, wait, for the love of God!”

All hands heard terror in the yell, but only I understood the language, and I could not begin to see its sense. If there had been a mist cloud on the water big enough to hide a rowboat I would have paid it no attention. Instead the sun was sucking up what little haze there was, the only clouds were scattered and bright, and there was no sign anywhere but of fair weather. It looked to be foul enough for us, after two or so hours’ run at desperate speed. I believed it would take a miracle to deliver us from capture, and why should we expect it? We were serving a foul Infidel against the Christian law. In spite of Haran-din’s pitifulness, no reasonable man would believe in the saint’s intervention in his behalf.

“Bid the men keep the same stroke for a moment more,” I told Felix.

I saw no revolt in his face and instead the dim glimmer of a hope. Perhaps he thought this silvery Infidel might work a charm.

“What is it?” I asked Haran-din. “Speak quickly!”

“Is a provost galley bearing down on us? I think the rowers said so.”

“Yes, and we must run.”

“What good to run with twelve legs against a hundred? Can’t you hide me?”

“There’s no hope of that.”

“Then show mercy in Allah’s name, and don’t let them take me alive!”

Hearing that, my heart banged my rib bones.

“Do you mean, Haran-din, that you want us to throw you overboard?”

“What is the good of that? I’ll float, and they’ll see me shining like a fish, and pick me up, and bear me back to my cell! Don’t you know my bones are eaten away and my flesh is all dry rot, light as cork?”

Horror came down upon me like a cold fog.

“Won’t you drown?” I cried.

“No, I can’t drown!” he yelled. “If I breathe water instead of air, still I’ll live. That is the way of us lepers—we can’t die by our own hands—it’s the curse of Allah, the great, the glorious! You must kill me before you cast me forth. And even then they’ll take up my body and bury it in filth.”

I had run to Haran-din’s side to help save his breath, and now Felix ran to me.

“What does he want?”

“He wants me to put my dagger through his heart.”

Haran-din caught the word “dagger” and raised a long wail.

“Fool, that won’t kill me,” he howled. “A thousand daggers of pain and woe have pierced me in vain. You must beat me to death with clubs. Make sure that no breath of life remains before you cast me forth. Don’t cut off my head, because it will be lost, and belike it must search forever for my trunk, and then I can’t ever feast in Paradise!”

I looked up from the terrible face to the remorseless foe. So long a time had passed with me kneeling here that I expected to see her looming above our mast. Instead she was still no longer than my finger. Where she had been three miles away, now she was two miles, six cable lengths. Her oarsmen maintained their same steady pace.

“Will you help me kill him?” I asked my comrade.

“No. I can’t touch him. I’ll be hanged first.”

“Hearken, young noblemen!” Haran-din broke in. And now the horror that had engrossed me let go its icy grip, because the frenzy of his face and voice had given way to calm. He spoke in a low, even tone. I held my breath lest I miss one word. My skin crept in wonder.

“My great countryman, Mustapha Sheik, sent me your name, and I have put it in a parchment as your reward,” he told me. “If the Christians take me away alive, I charge you to burn it in Mustapha’s sight, or your hands that have touched me will rot away. So if you would have my jewel, my treasure, my white pearl worthy of a king’s throne, wield your club manfully, and with a right good will!”

White-faced, Felix plucked at my sleeve. “Are you going to kill him, Marco?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Be still.”

“I’ll wait, but don’t take too long. You must drop him over the starboard rail while the rowers screen you.”

“And for your comfort, Christian, know that I’m content to die here in the sun,” Haran-din went on. “It is written that those who fall on the road to Mecca come to the same glory as those who live to shout ‘Labbeyka’ on the Hill of Mercy. It is clean here, and warm. And—and though they find and carry away my body and feed it to swine, still my pearl in your hand will not lose its luster, although it will win you only half the glory that I wished for you.”

“What must I do—what must happen—for me to win it all?”

“By great cunning, save my body from their evil hands.”

I looked around as in a daze, intending to speak to Felix of this strange thing. Then my eyes fell on a common thing and my hair rustled up on my head.

“Tell the rowers to ship their oars and drift to a stop,” I ordered.

His eyes round as doubloons, he obeyed.

“Let half the rowers stand by the capstan, to screen what I must do.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Will you help me? If you will, it will take half the sin off my soul and mayhap we’ll both be saved.”

“I can’t lay hand on the leper for good or ill.”

“This is for good. I declare it before God or may He strike me dead! Get me three fathoms of rope, the strongest aboard.”

Felix uncoiled the inch-thick yellow serpent. It was made of new hemp and would hold a boat of this size in a heavy gale. When Felix had cut off twenty feet, the boat’s forward drift had checked and she had begun to lurch sideways in the wind.

“Haran-din, will you walk with me once more?” I asked.

“Yes, my son. Wherever you lead me.”

I took his arm and raised him to his feet and led him toward the bow. Without my asking, some of the rowers walked opposite him, screening him from the eyes of watchers on the approaching galley. Truly he did not need this shield, because distance hid him still, and they were careful not to touch him.

It was then that Haran-din guessed my intention. A last terror came into his face, dreadful to behold, but I thought it changed to glory and his half-blind eyes caught fire.

“Allah! Allah! Allah!”

I think it was only a second later that all my comrades made a like discovery in the same stopped breath. Only one of them spoke—a bow oarsman, new to the sea, crying “Mother of God!”—but there rose a sound like a long sigh, and every man stood still.

I began to fix the rope. As it looped about Haran-din’s shoulder, he freed his arm, brought forth a folded parchment that he had concealed under his tight-fitting cap, and handed it to me. Then he stood deathly still. I pocketed the parchment and went on with my work. Round and round went the rope, knot after knot I tied, until the rotted body could not possibly fall from the arms of its protector until it was utterly dissolved.

“Will any of you help me heave?” I asked, when all was ready.

No man spoke or moved. The only sound was the lapping of water against the drifting ship, and the shrill of the wind.

“Forgive us, comrade,” Felix said. “We can’t help you.”

It came to me then that I did not need them. Alone I lifted the great iron anchor with its strange rider. For a second I rested it on the edge of the bow.

“Farewell, Infidel,” I said. “May you find bliss in Paradise!”

“Farewell, Christian. May God be merciful to you in Hell!” Then his voice rose in a wild triumphant shout that rang through the heavens.

“Labbeyka! Labbeyka! Allah akbar!”

I thrust lightly against the iron. It fell with a great splash. Out ran the anchor rope with a rattling rumble—ten, twenty, thirty fathoms. It slacked, and I fixed the pin. The ship drifted half her length, then heaved in vain.

“He’ll lie quietly while the galley captain’s looking us over,” I told Felix in a queer, thin, shaking voice. “Then we’ll cut the rope and leave him to Allah’s mercy.”

“Why, ’tis Heaven’s mercy too,” Felix answered in almost the same tone. Then it deepened with resurgent power. “Fishers, spread your nets!”