Caravan To Xanadu

CHAPTER 3

LORD OF THE RUINS

It is a long, desolate, and weary road from Kerman northward, and its only mercy on us was of a perverse sort. Because we had met the Karaunas, we traveled light.

Of the five merchants other than Polos who escaped alive, only two were going our way to Meshed. They, like us, were as naked of stuffs as a new-hatched jackdaw of feathers, having saved only their gold and jewels carried in saddle pouches. One of the pair gladly fell in with our notion not to lay in any more until we had crossed the desert, whereby we would need transport only for food and water for ourselves and the beasts and a few belongings. The other merchant yearned for the riches of Kerman—saddles, bridles, and harness fit for kings, embroidered pillows and quilts for favorites’ beds, and casts of falcons—but Nicolo told him that the most he could take would be a quart or two of turquoises; otherwise we would leave him to eat his goods on the road.

It would be a dreadful road to be left on. For three days’ march it was only a dusty track through desolation. We were used to gazing far and wide without seeing a human habitation; now we often looked in vain for a living leaf. It was a land accursed. The only water was green and poisonous. Riding through it on a half-crazed horse, I feared God as I never had in snow or storm, and beheld the Devil just behind my shoulder.

My heart leaped at only the sight of the moon, old and sick though she was above the waste, for she told me that this was still part and parcel of our dear world, and my tears nigh flowed from being made to think of Miranda, Mustapha, and all the rest I had lost. Perhaps God’s purpose in fashioning this desert was to remind us how little worlds were worth without people and their fellow living things.

On the first night, the sun-baked ground turned quickly cold, its heat sucked out by the moistureless air as the warmth of a man’s body is by the kiss of death. But on the second night, a hot wind blew across the sands as though to stop our mouths with dust and shrivel us to mummies. And in the gray and gruesome midnight, the merchant whom we knew as Lazarus, some sort of Syrian, the one who had yearned for the fleshpots of Kerman, rose from his bed with a dreadful cry and ran off from the camp and vanished in the murk.

We followed his footprints as demons followed ours. After we had gone a quarter of a mile, walking instead of wildly running like our quarry, we doubted whether we would find him alive. Presently we heard a noise that must be of his making, although dreadful to believe it the issue from a human throat. With harrowed souls we pushed on to behold him lying crumpled at the foot of a cliff with his head twisted about on his neck. No doubt he had stared behind him as he ran—at God only knew what pursuer—and such was his posture as he fell. He lay on his belly and side, but his face was turned to ours as we came down to him, and his pale eyes stared into ours.

We searched his belongings for some clue to his kith and kin, but we could find none, nor discover his place of habitation, nor even what God he worshiped. Then we remembered that this stretch of sunburned hell lay within the kingdom of Kerman. Its king paid tribute to a distant emperor but ruled with a haughty hand. One of his laws read that if any foreign merchant died in his domain, all of his goods above the cost of a winding sheet must go to the royal coffers.

So, sitting in the dark, Nicolo, Maffeo, our last companion, and I reckoned the worth of Lazarus’s horse, saddle, and camels, added thereto the price of his turquoises and the count of his gold, and divided the total into four shares. He was far richer than we had thought, and the windfall more than recouped the loss of our goods to the bandits. Then we wrapped his body in the cloths of his pavilion and buried it in a deep grave in the sand. There we left him, so lonely that I wean he wished for a desert wolf to updig his bones and gnaw them.

There were no wolves here, not even vultures in the way of birds, no lizards on the stone. Late in the afternoon of the third day we saw a black-and-white bird that seemed of unearthly beauty, and at sundown a long narrow strip of sparse, sear vegetation marking the course of an underground canal. It stretched farther than we could see and had holes dug here and there for travelers’ use. It had been built by slaves in the days of Nebuchadrezzar.

Here we rested and refreshed ourselves and our beasts for two days.

The desert was a little less absolute in the next four marches, we seeing some creeping things and most marvelously running things, the last being wild asses. Then we came to the good city of Ku-banan, whose name means “The Hill of the Wild Pistachios.” Here we laid in medicines and iron and steel works of surpassing quality, including mirrors that would reflect a face as perfectly as a deep, moss-grown well. It was pleasant to see people doing something besides traveling, and we were sorry to leave them when, after a fortnight’s trading, again we pressed on.

In eight days, that in my nightmares seemed eight years, we crossed another wasteland to the province of Tunocain, well peopled, and famous for the beauty of its women. Here we were shown a Holy Tree, the breaking of one twig therefrom being punished with death. Some said it supplied Adam his staff and Moses his rod, while the devil-ridden Nestorian Christians, not to be outdone, declared that the Cross had been cut from its mighty limbs. But these tales were probably mythical, while the story of the Old Man of the Mountains, who had lived and reigned in my own time, was based on truth.

He was the hereditary head of a sect of Ismaelians, themselves heretics outside of the Mohammedan fold, and according to their hocus-pocus, an incarnation of Divinity itself. By walling in the entrance to a beautiful valley between mountains, he laid out a magnificent garden, with palaces, fountains, and orchards, and even mechanical runnels from which milk or honey flowed when a tap was opened. When his mullahs spied a likely youth fit to be a member of the murderous band that served him, he was given a sleeping potion, brought within the garden, dressed in jeweled raiment, and wakened by sweet music. All-but-naked maidens of singular beauty brought him fragrant fruits, delicious viands, and exquisite wines; they danced or sang at his pleasure, and when a more rampant hunger came upon him, he could have one or all of the beauteous bevy at his nod.

After some days of this he was again drugged and restored to his former place. Pining for the Paradise he had lost, he was told by the mullahs that he had made a trial trip there, and could return if he took the Old Man of the Mountains for his god and ruler. Thus was recruited a troop of robbers whose raids enriched their master, and who slew all who stood in the way of his supreme power. Since they smoked or ate bhang, Indian hemp, which in Persia was called hashish, they called themselves the Hashishins. On Western lips, the name became Assassins, and as such was known in Venice.

The Old Man of the Mountains became the actual lord of a vast territory, only to be besieged and slain by an army sent by Hulagu Khan, brother of the Emperor Mangu Khan, eighteen years before. Of his band of Assassins, most were slain, but a few found eyries in mountain fastnesses, from which they still harry the land and rob the caravans.^[15]

A venerable silk merchant, wearing the badge of a hadji, was pointed out to me as a former member of the murderous horde, but having made a pilgrimage to Mecca and his peace with Allah, he had the favor of the Calif and hopes of a real Paradise behind the sunset.

“Is the story true?” I asked him, after he had given me a long-stored sherbet of figs.

“The garden, with its bright pavilions and gilded palaces, was as real as yon doorpost. So were the fruits, wines, and beautiful maidens. But only the dullest lumpkin ever dreamed he was in Paradise. He pretended to do so only to enjoy its blessings.”

“What disillusioned you?”

“A melon that was served me was overripe—that alone was a flaw I did not think Allah would countenance—and it fluxed me.”

So be it with every garden and every gardener that presumes to be divine!

2

We crossed the great land of Dasht-i-Lut. The old and yellow moon that had shown us the dead face of Lazarus on the desert of death rose silver-white and full, its second or third waxing, over the great caravanserai of Meshed. The city lay near the eastern borders of Persia, below the endless sands of the Kara Kum; and ten thousand caravans passed through the gates in its ninety-foot earthen wall from year to year. Within were pleasant running streams, rich hostelries, bazaars without end, and the Brides of the Oasis.

So were called the thousand beautiful young girls whom the Imam allowed to marry travelers for as long or as short a time as they remained in Meshed. Since there was always a rush of recruits, virgins were not difficult to find, many of them belonging to well-off families; however, they expected a larger bridal gift than the many-times-widowed. We merchants and many of our followers had been looking forward to the treat for long, dusty days, and we could hardly wait for our goods to be stowed ere we went wife-hunting.^[16]

I was shown the prettiest in the bevy. So a dragoman had assured me, his eyes rolled to heaven and both hands on his heart and his voice atremble with emotion, and if he had lied, by witness of my own eyes, I could cut his throat. She was a virgin in her fourteenth year. The reason that I might have her was that she had agreed to become a Bride of the Oasis only if her initiator was a presentable youth, under twenty, and of good station. And since this had straitly limited the number of candidates, her bridal gift need not be more than fifty dinars for my fortnight’s stay.

Her name was Esther and she came into her father’s rose garden to look at me through her veil. Evidently she was satisfied to take me for her mate in her bridal adventure, because the silk became caught in a rose thorn and disclosed her face. To think that I could have her for those days thrilled my flesh and, unless the Devil gulled me, exalted my soul.

She was lovely as any Venetian girl of fourteen and the slave trader Paulos Angelos would gladly have bought her for nine hundred pieces of gold.

This meeting occurred in the morning after my first night in Meshed. Abdul the dragoman promised to deliver her to my quarters in the caravanserai at sundown. All day I walked on air, but when the sun winked out of sight behind the western rocks, and the light began to dim, and the breeze off the desert blew fresh in my face, and the sand kept running through my glass, I fell hard to the ground.

Posting a boy at my door in case somebody came, I went out into the crowded square to look for Abdul. I did not find him, but before the moon was over the roof tops, I spoke with a chokoda, a kind of gate keeper, just outside the wall of Esther’s garden.

“Abdul is an underling to the serai master,” the fellow told me. “You should have dealt with the effendi himself. A great sheik looked at her, and to her great joy, she found favor in his sight. So he sent for her in a handsome hired palanquin at the fourth hour past noon.”

“But she promised to come to me.”

“I am sorry, effendi. You know the fickleness of youth.”

“You say he was a great sheik. Such are not commonly found in men under twenty.”

“She changed her mind about that condition when she saw him. But truly he is not a day over thirty.”

“Will you give me his name? I will send him a peacock plume in tribute.”

“Why, it’s no secret. He’s an ambassador to the Great Khan from Frankistan—and his name is the same as the game played on horseback by the lords of Kabul.”

“No matter. There are many fine fish in the sea.”

But I did not drop a golden hook to catch one. I would not so dance attendance on Defeat.

From Meshed, it was no great feat to get to Balkh. The distance might not be more than five hundred miles by crow flight, provided a crow could find his forage in the mountains and desert, and not stay to gorge on the melons of Shibargh. But we went on camelback and horseback and shank’s mare. We wheeled four days to pass a single well of brackish water. Then, making our way up the valley of the Upper Oxus, amid watered fields and orchards or blackened earth, we came unto Balkh, above the Hindu Kush and almost at the western gate of the mighty Pamir. This was known as the Mother of Cities. It had boasted mosques as beautiful as Samarkand’s, which were upstarts compared to the Buddhist temples and reliquaries, which were innovations compared to the shrine of Zoroaster, who had died within these walls. But only fifty years ago, the city had come into the disfavor of Genghis Khan. After promising them immunity, he caused all those who could keep pace to march onto the plain—men, women, and children to the number of fifty thousand—and slaughtered every one. The halls of the college and the towers and palaces were razed to the ground.

A few sick got well. Old men and women doddered about cleaning out the wells and gathering a little corn. Babes in the cradle grew up, and with the strangers drifting in, they catered to the caravans from Tehran or Khotan, Samarkand or Kabul. So once more there were caravanserais within the walls, along with bazaars and beast marts and wine booths and bagnios, and even people’s abodes if you looked for them. But all the attar of rose, spikenard, musk, myrrh, and frankincense borne back and forth from the sands to the snow could not sweeten its smell of death.

We spent nearly a month there, prospering well, then set forth again. About three miles beyond the city walls toward Talekan, our caravan was delayed by a sudden panic among the beasts, caused, we thought, by the smell of a leprous beggar on the road. While the baggage wallahs were reloading and roping, I rode my mare Fatima across a rubble-strewn field to the ruins of a considerable court. I was thinking of the kings that had gloried there, very Tiglath-pilesers according to their courtiers, and in their own conceits except for a small, chill doubt that sometimes smote them in the belly more than the brain. My thoughts were arrested by a stirring in the reeds around a broken water tank. Thinking it might be caused by a wild pig, as such animals frequent the long-forsaken abodes of man, good meat to us Christians and unabhorred by many good Mohammedans who gag at the thought of tame pig, I strung my bow.

The movement ceased. Since I had foolishly approached from upwind, it seemed likely the beast had smelled my mare and me and crept away. I could go no further on horseback because of the broken rock, and was at the brink of turning back when I saw Nicolo making toward me on his beautiful dappled Arab stallion Godfrey. His strung bow was handy on his back and his hand grasped a borrowed lance, a favorite arm for swine-hunting in this part of the world.

The fever took me to beat him to the kill. Quickly tieing Fatima to a shrub, I crept behind the ruins of a magnificent marble terrace, my arrow cocked and ready to draw. I hoped to surprise the quarry in what I now perceived was the remains of an aqueduct, rank with growth.

At that moment I discovered that not all the kings had gone.

3

One king remained. In many qualities honored in kings, he was the greatest of all.^[17] He was a black-maned lion, weighing a quarter of a ton, so bold that he made his lair within three hundred paces of a caravan road. At night he roamed far and wide, preying on deer, wild boars, and cattle and horses in their arid pastures, and slaughtering helpless sheep with what his fellow monarchs call the divine right of kings. Where most he showed illustrious was in hunting the wild ass, most swift and one of the most beautiful of all created things. He would stalk them, a dun shadow in the scanty grass, until he drew within a stone’s throw; then swift as a stone cast by a sling he rushed upon them. They could outrun him at full tilt, but often he overtook them before they could get their hoofs under them to fly.

Sometimes he stalked and sprang upon a man, only to be perplexed, almost frightened, a sense of something strange and evil clouding his brute brain, that so tall and seemingly such glorious quarry should die before he had half bared his fangs. Ere he had bloodied half the crooked spikes set in his great mauls, the great trophy he had sought had turned into a limp, loose bag of broken bones. Its head that had loomed so high burst apart like an ostrich egg at a glancing lash of his paw. He had no use for the awful fury and blazing power set off within him, and his veins almost burst from the thwarted surging of his blood; and to worry the dead thing made him feel silly in the sight of God.

He had not killed last night, otherwise he would have gorged, lolled back to his lair at dawn, and slept like a swine. All his stratagems had failed, and now his shame and anger as much as his hunger pangs kept him awake. He sprang from the ditch, cleared the terrace in two unbelievable bounds, and rushed upon my mare. She saw him and whirled to fly. Her stout rein broke like thread at her first leap, but death was upon her before she could stretch her legs. It was a death she had seen when a foal on the deserts of Oman, and her most evil dream.

He did not mount her and I did not see the deathblow that he gave her. One instant, they were both in extreme exertion, she to live, he to kill. There was nothing else than that, at this instant; and the ruined palace on the brown desert was its perfect setting. My eyes had never beheld such violence, and started from their sockets. The next instant, she had been hurled down with a broken neck, her killer crouching over her with his great head turning and his blazing eyes seeking some new outlet for his rapturous rage.

As his gaze met mine, I launched my arrow.

The bow and arrow is a weak weapon for such game as this. A Tatar lance or even a Toledo spear would stand me in far better stead should the beast attack me; by crouching under it and holding it firmly, his own furious rush could drive it through him as if it were thrown by a giant. An arrow may kill from a good distance if it strikes the quarry in a vital spot; but the more strong-lived beasts usually lived until inward bleeding overwhelmed their hearts, and in that interim they craved to avenge their death wound. In this case the range was short. The lion was already in his rage like a Northman gone berserk in battle, so his life force was many times magnified and he could fight on and kill after his heart had stopped and his soul had passed. If he retaliated with all his might to the sting of my arrow, I would have no time to launch another. Thus my shooting at him at all had been a most rash act; and my thoughts, flying arrow-swift, told me that this moment, among these ruins, could be my final moment.

Even so, excited strength of my arm and shoulder, pivoted against my loins, had gone into the draw, and the long English bow became a deep inverted D standing for Death. I loosed cleanly and the string thrummed. I saw the shaft in its swift dart and its plunge of half its length in the beast’s side.

He gave forth a short roar and with a sideways lunge of his head he sank his teeth in the shoulder of his dead prey. This action, eloquent of the brute brain, gave me time to snatch another arrow from my sheaf. Then it was as though I had snatched at time and missed. I counted time’s dreadful lack in an instantaneous calculation such as may be the last mental process of thousands of men meeting sudden death. The lion had recognized me as his enemy and directly moved to attack. I saw the movement start and fate had decreed I should live long enough to contemplate it as it was etched on my memory. No wild beast’s action could be more splendid, more beautiful in its perfect functioning, and more declaratory of the glory of God.

During his first bound toward me, he marshaled himself for his charge. You could think of it as girding up his loins, but he could not bear one instant’s delay in joining battle, and the efficiency of the act was a terrible testament to its ferocity. He landed with his head down, his feet under him and already driving at great speed, his tail rammed out. Speed was his extreme compulsion until he could reach me and kill me. He raced against the fury in his heart—as though it would explode unless he could straightway sink his claws and fangs in enemy flesh.^[18]

In that little interval not yet ended, I too functioned at the extreme height of my powers. My battle was not with my attacker, but with myself. I had almost no sense of a continuity of events; all seemed one explosion. Only by reaching beyond myself could I perceive the drag of time—that it had not yet gone and I must still strive on. Terror lashed at me to run. Thereby I would not see the fangs and claws as they closed in, and by my living a second or two longer, I might better the chance of an extraneous force, now bearing down upon the scene, moving in my favor. Nor could I abrogate Death by looking him in the face: I could only defy him. I was nocking my arrow now, but except for a stroke of fate I would not have time to draw.

I continued the effort in some strange and tragic defiance of known and unknown foes. My soul gave the command as though it were a haughty thing instead of the poor thing it often showed itself to be, and I obeyed.

If Fate struck, it would be by the hand of Nicolo. He had been riding fast when I first saw him; when he saw the lion he had spurred the tall dappled Arab into its utmost run. The course he had taken was intended to intercept the lion’s course at almost his last stride. Long and lean though the chance was, there was no other.

I did not believe it. Instead I actively disbelieved it without any recognizable process of thought. Nicolo might pretend to try to save me, more for my eyes than for those of onlookers, and at the last instant let me fall. This was my preconceived conviction. He had not unslung his bow—no doubt he knew as well as I did that he was not equal to the shot—and his apparent purpose was to catch the beast on his lance point. Beliefs stored in my brain denied that he could force the Arab that near his ancestral enemy.

In this last supposition, I was wrong. The stallion never faltered from the course his master had set and ran as fiercely as a troopers steed in the full charge. It had slipped my mind that many of the finest horses in Central Asia were trained to intercept running game. His neck was stretched, his ears laid back, his snowy mane rose and fell, while Nicolo rode like a dervish. The dun killer’s big black mane set off his pearl-bright fangs and he gave forth a deep-toned coughing roar. Their nearing courses gave the effect of the two lords of the desert being drawn together by some elemental force.

For any of us four who survived, the scene among the multicolored stones, under the steel-blue sky in the white sunlight of midmorning, would be one to remember always. It might return and return to the dreams of the drowsing beasts, or suddenly cast Nicolo or me into deepest reverie.

Nicolo leaned forward and half out of the saddle, thrusting the long lance. The point missed the tawny side and only gashed the beast’s shoulder with a glancing blow, but it arrested his terrible charge. As he turned to fight, the rumbling thunder in his throat changed to a short growl of surpassing violence. Then the gods must have looked down in wonder and admiration, for the stallion reared up on his hind legs, tall and taller till he loomed giantlike in form as well as in valor, and tried to strike with his forefeet.

These great events had dwarfed my own struggle to survive, but I was no bystander. Drawing my bow with my full strength, I drove an arrow as with a sledge hammer into the lion’s flank. As he whipped his maned head to bite at the shaft, Nicolo’s spear leaped forward again. Its lightning played against the tawny hide while its steel plunged deep. The beast’s great start as it pierced his vitals wrenched the weapon from Nicolo’s hand, and his throes broke the shaft.

Once more he reared up to attack, in an awful silence now, but his strength was waning fast, and a terrific blow from the screaming stallion knocked him on his back. He rolled over—tried to get up—fell back with a groan. For a moment more he lay sobbing in the dust, then he stretched his legs and his neck and tail, shuddered, and died.

“You came at a very lucky time for me,” I told Nicolo as the dust began to settle. I could not keep my voice from trembling.

“It wasn’t altogether luck,” he answered gravely and with deep calm. “I suspected that the caravan beasts smelled something more frightening than a leper. And there was talk at the caravanserai of lions hereabouts.”

My head swam and my knees almost buckled under me. To cover this, I walked over to look at Fatima, vultures’ meat now.

“You’ll need another horse,” Nicolo remarked thoughtfully.

“I wouldn’t’ve if you hadn’t arrived when you did.”

“Probably you’ll have to make out with a scrub until we get to the great horse market in Badakhshan.”

“Both the mare and I would be in the same boat,” I persisted.

“It’s said that the breed of Bucephalus was obtainable there until very recently, but the widow of the breeder killed all the pure stock in some act of revenge.” Nicolo swung down for a better view of the lion.

“I’m under great obligation to you, signor, for coming to my help,” I said, the cords of my neck taut.

“Not at all.”

“Will you accept my thanks?”

“Certainly not, when you don’t owe them.”

“Will you enlighten me as to why I don’t owe them?”

“I owed you a debt. Your quick work saved Maffeo and me as well as several others from the Karaunas. I don’t like owing debts to anyone, much less to an upstart bastard out of my wife. Now the score is paid.”

He rubbed his hands as though washing them, sprang lightly on his horse, and cantered away.