Caravan To Xanadu

CHAPTER 5

VOICES ON THE DESERT

Dropping down and down from the Pamir, we watched the snow fields and naked rock and windy grass slopes give way to parklands and forests and mountain meadows, while the weather slowly warmed.

It would cool eftsoon. The fourth summer since our spring departure from Venice was waning as inconspicuously as a common moon. But in spite of necessary rests and much unavoidable waiting, these more than three years had gained us about two-thirds the distance to Peking. Nicolo and Maffeo Polo had journeyed by another route and so had traveled no part of this road, this long road from the Levant outward, and they knew no better than I what to expect, and rarely better how to cope with it. I had become so great a strength to the company that Nicolo might save my life in some deadly pass from sheer practicality, and I was almost sure that he would not try to take it until we had crossed the last river.

A curious change had come over my mind, although so gradually I could not remember when it began. From the first I had refrained from looking back to Venice, refusing to dwell on people and events I had known there, and of late this disregard had changed to a kind of forgetfulness. At first they had come to visit my dreams, but I paid them little heed, never went back to visit them, and in time they had ceased to trouble me. It had been my desire, and it represented a victory of my will, although sometimes I felt it might prove a costly one. Lately I had found myself no longer looking forward to the Court of Kublai Khan; indeed I did not worry with matters beyond the immediate reach of road. I had no occupation, no identity, but that of a traveler. I was in no haste, neither did I want to tarry. I cared not for the next year or the next moon, but lived for the day, the hour, sometimes it seemed for no longer than the present moment.

Far and away from the far-flung Arabic civilization and its remote outposts, I heard and spoke no more its rich and beautiful tongue except as it larded Turki-Persian, the lingua franca of Central Asia, now merging into Turki-Tatar. Thus I had less cause to remember Mustapha Sheik. And if I had lost beautiful Venice, the Bride, the very Saki of the Sea, behind a lost horizon, why should I try to keep one small, yellow-haired maiden I had met there? So it was neither in her memory nor to obtain forgetfulness that at Kashgar, whose name Venice had never heard, I took a Bride of the Oasis; it was merely the custom of the road. I kept her for ten days in the caravanserai, ten more among my baggage eastward, then sent her back, weeping, with a westbound caravan.

Also in Kashgar I traded for half a gallon of jade, black, white, yellow, vermilion, and a piece or two of dark green with golden veins. It had been fished by jade divers from the Kysyk So, and it would pour through my hands and shine before my eyes long after I had forgotten my bride’s name.

At summer’s end we went to Yarkand, where almost every person has a great swelling on the side of his throat and very large, bright eyes. In the early fall, we gained the great and wonderful oasis of Khotan. The best of the fruit was already harvested; what remained was grateful to my eyes—so strangely clinging to the boughs, or heaped in baskets, red or purple or golden, as though we were back in Italy instead of down from the Pamirs—and sweet to my lips. The yellow stalks of ripe grain bent down from the weight of their bearded heads.

Beyond the oasis lies the approach to the terrible Takla Makan that sweeps east and north to join with the Gobi in what the people call the Kingdom of Evil. I thought at first this was a figure of speech, but was soon to learn it was a literal expression of their belief. They thought that in some old conflict between God and the Devil, the Prince of Darkness had seized upon this vast domain, a year’s journey long from Khotan northeast to the Manchu rivers and generally half as broad, perhaps greater than all Europe west of Constantinople.

The Devil had turned back the rain-bearing clouds, so except for some mountaintops reaching close to heaven, and still disputed ground, there was no rain, no snow, no dew for a thousand leagues. The land was turned into one vast melancholy waste with a few seepage-fed wells along its fringes, a suitable place for his legions of demons, imps, monsters, and all sorts of evil spirits.

It was said that only his worshipers could pass freely and safely, after performing flagitious rites. All other human beings, and Christians especially, entered the kingdom at great hazard to their lives and souls.

From Khotan to far Cherchen, the caravan road crosses a high plateau at the feet of the Kunlun Mountains. To the southward we caught glimpses of peaks rearing up and piercing the ethereal cirrus clouds, and one, called Muztagh Ata, the name meaning White Mountain, was sublimely beautiful. A few cattle drivers have cots along the road, and secret water holes away on the desert to which they fly when the Devil-worshipers come riding. Now the autumn winds shrilled across its sands and hard-baked clay.

This was an outer borderland of the dread Takla Makan. At Cherchen we loaded food and water for a three-day forced march, and God knew you would think that desolate stretch lay out of the world. Instead it was a corridor between the two realms, a kind of Land of Nod. At its end lay the thriving city of Lob, where there were wells and even baths, shops and caravanserais, and temples to Buddha, Allah, and the Christian God. Luxuries of most sorts could be had at exorbitant prices; only the favors of the beautiful fair-haired Turkman damsels were dirt-cheap.

Yet we knew well, by means of inklings beyond our common sense, that Lob was no common city, part of man’s world. No one dwelt here; the people came, hung for a while on the brink of Gehenna, went away, went mad, or died. Many became mystics and dreamers; others fashioned new gods and strange cults; a great number practiced sorcery and divination. A good part of the folk within the walls belonged to caravans resting here after the terrible crossing, but they had seen and heard what is not good for the souls of men, and it was a common thing for them to linger on through weeks and months and years, wasting their substance, and never return to their homes. An equal number, eastward bound, reveled in the fleshpots ere they set forth; but it came to pass that some never found the strength and the will power, each day finding a good reason to wait another day, till their bales too were empty; then they borrowed or stole for a season, and disappeared. Perhaps the Devil met them in the dead of night and persuaded them to join his legions. There were strange things. . . .

“Heed me well,” spake a Nestorian priest to Nicolo, Maffeo, and me on the eve of our setting-forth. “Not tomorrow night, or the next, or perhaps for seven nights, will you hear from the demons dwelling in the Kingdom of Evil; but they will be about you ever, and no later than the tenth night they will move against you. You will hear what seems a great company of people out in the dark. The jingle of harness, the creak of ropes, the shouts of the cameleers, even the shuffle of sand—all this will come clearly to your ears. But leave not the road or the rest ground to search for them. They will lead you to your death. And on no account shall any man straggle from the company. If his body is ever found, it will be beheaded or dismembered or deboweled by a clawlike hand.”

Nicolo looked grave, Maffeo frightened, I tried to wear a mask. But Maffeo gave the Nestorian priest two pieces of gold—to be laid on the altar—and somehow this caused the warning to ring less true.

We rose and loaded our beasts and took our places soon after midnight, so we could make our march when the winds were low and the air more clear of sand. We need not fetch water save for a two-day journey—the road lay close to the snow-capped ranges, and wells of scanty store were found at almost all caravan rests for the thirty-day march—but food for man and beast must be transported by camelback. I had known wastes of rock and snow to be bitter cold, but not the desolate sands. So the cold stars and the icy air of late fall seemed to add to the strangeness and the wickedness of the scene. And we had followed a made road less than a league when it ran out and disappeared.

Every footprint of beast or man was buried in wind-blown sand. Yet there were signs in plenty to guide our steps, strange-looking in the moonlight—an endless train of white bones. Some were of cattle and horses and camels, but frequently I saw a rib case, half filled with sand, that caused my skin to prickle, and now and then a skull too round to fit the neck of a beast.^[20]

Where seepage from mountain snows fed underground veins, tamarisk bushes found root. These would bind fast a pile of sand, more would be blown onto it by the wind, so that green-topped mounds, twice man’s height, dotted the plain. Sometimes there were stretches of loose clay on which no beast, bird, reptile, or insect cast its shadow. Mostly the Takla Makan was a waste of sand dunes, the larger running east and west, crisscrossed with smaller ones, so that the effect was that of a sea of sand arrested by enchantment in an instant of wildest tumult.

We should have waited at Lob for the intense cold of winter. If we had, we could have loaded our camels with ice, perhaps to save us from death from thirst in some awful pass, or, held to our faces in a dust storm, to help us to survive the worst pass of all. No, there was greater calamity than this to be met on the desert, although it smote with great rarity at this time of the year. It was called a dry fog, and was a lowering of dust-laden air that sometimes hung for days, from which there was no flight. If the fog was light, the traveler suffered torments past description. If heavy, he quickly smothered and died.

On and on into this earthly hell we forced our way. From dark to dawn the sand was cold as snow, the wind bit to the bone despite our woolen barracans; it was as though we wandered on the opposite side of the moon, divorced from the sun. The sun’s rising brought a gentle warmth, but on many a day it turned to parching heat, with the sand burning our feet and the dust hot in our eyes, nostrils, and mouth. The worst was our solitude among the dunes and the white bones under the dust-darkened sky. Our realization of the world of God and man dimmed every day; ever more credible became our sense of having passed its bourns into a realm of dreadful dreams, more awful than any we had ever dreamed, which had come true.

Various people in the caravan began to see visions and hear voices. Some were illusionary, I thought—not one of us, unless it be Nicolo, was in his perfect mind—but many were strange twistings by our fancies of real sights and sounds. What appeared as lakes, surrounded by lush meadows and verdant trees, was a common phantom; many-towered castles and walled cities hung in the empty air; one day our whole party saw what seemed an armed host on the march. Banners fluttered in the wind; horses pranced and armor gleamed; captains rode up and down the lines. I had trouble staying clear of believing this deceit and could not have done so save that ten thousand hoofs raised no dust and the army moved in an eerie silence. Perhaps such a force had passed here in some forgotten war and had been blasted by the sirocco, and this was an army of ghosts.

Demoniac faces and forms thrust out from tamarisk mounds, sworn to by every heathen in our company—and perhaps we Christians would have testified the same if we would believe our eyes. Creatures that looked half human, half beast, appeared to dodge behind the sand dunes. If we could believe our ears, zither players surrounded our camps in the deep of night, playing not in harmony, not in melody that the mind could catch, but in weird discord, harrowing our souls with the sense of unfathomable evil.

One lurid afternoon I made out some small, moving objects in the dust haze two arrow casts distant. Had they kept to the caravan road, I would have thought them survivors from some waylaid caravan, retracing the steps of their fellows by scent to some picket ground they knew. Although of camel shape, I thought, they moved too swiftly to be real, and suddenly they vanished. My head became dizzy and aching from the seeming realness of the illusion. . . .

Revulsion from this weakness came upon me quickly. Perhaps it was a deep-lodged terror of going mad. I had seen the figures, whether substance or empty air, between the road and a two-humped sand dune clearly distinguishable from any other nearby, and this lay directly toward the setting sun. I resolved to ride to the ground, see what I could see, follow my mare’s own footprints back to the road, and overtake the caravan.

Ten seconds after I had left the road my companions disappeared in a defile. I rode in the cold shadow of dunes and remembered that since this was the seventh day since we had left Lob, the Devil had only three days left of his allowance of ten to deal someone in our caravan a deadly blow. The wind seemed to be rising, lifting more dust and causing the sands to creep a little, as if with the wicked mind to cover my tracks. When I caught sight of the sun over the dunes it seemed to hang in a different place in the sky.

I rode on, my gaze fixed on the two-humped dune. Almost at its base, when I had thought a dozen times of turning back, I found the fresh track of camels, unmistakably real. Although our caravaneers had told us they were nonexistent in all this part of the Takla Makan, beyond a doubt I had seen a small herd of wild camels on some swift and portentous errand.

I regained the road and soon caught sight of the caravan. Of the many who had seen me turn out, not one looked back in concern for my befalling; the all of every man was straining ahead to the next rest, and God, by whatever name, forbid that the well be dry! I decided not to tell my fellows about the camels. I would let them think I had dropped behind to answer a call of nature, which was the truth in a deeper sense than they would know. I must be true to my own nature, such as it was; and if the Devil struck before the end of the tenth day, I could fight him a better fight if I fought alone.

2

On the following march, the course was long, rough, and dangerous to flesh and spirit. Coming to the mouth of a road out of the far Tien Shan, by an ancient well supplying brackish water, we hoped to find and fall in with other eastbound caravans, but all was silent and forsaken, and the tracks of the last comers were so nearly erased by blown sand that we could not judge their age. And in that same hour I was weighed in a balance with Nicolo and found wanting.

I was riding in the van with the head dragoman, employing my long-range eyes in finding the far-strewn markers hard to descry under the dust clouds that hid the sun. Presently they became abundant, the bones in little piles or clusters. Such neat assortments, each the bracing of a beast’s body or a man’s only a few weeks before, should have put me on my guard; instead I followed the course they set, the caravan behind me, for a good half-mile. Then Nicolo rode up beside me.

“I fear, Marco, that you’re off the road,” he said quietly.

“I think not, signor.” My brain seemed clogged with dust.

“I believe that a caravan, crazed and dying from thirst, left the road to follow a mirage. It was their last effort, and the beasts and men began to drop out like locusts flying over burning grass. I believe the road swung to the right instead of to the left, southeast instead of northeast. I saw what I thought were markers to the southeast.”

“Truly we should go southeast, and I believe we are. If we could see the sun, I think it would be over there.” I pointed to a faintly luminous patch in the sky.

“I think that’s a thinning of the dust cloud and the sun’s behind us. Since I’ve appointed you the watch, I would like to have you turn back from your own conviction. Let’s see if we can get a shadow.”

He put the point of his small dagger on his thumbnail. It cast a discernible shadow on the pink sheen, a trick I had not seen before. The sun was where he had indicated and we were heading down a devil’s road toward Death. With self-hatred in my heart, I ordered the retreat. Nicolo rode nonchalantly to his place.

Midafternoon before the midnight that would complete nine days out of Lob, we rested by a meager well below a dune-ringed plateau of sand stretching northward as far as we could see. There was only a half-measure of water for every man, none for the beasts; and many whirlwinds raising brown towers that suddenly collapsed in falling palls might foretell the dread sirocco. The most flamboyant sunset I could remember ushered in the most chill, desolate twilight. By the time the leprous moon, gourd-yellow, cleared the eastern dunes, the cameleers lay wrapped in their barracans, each beside his picketed mount, trying to dream away their hunger, thirst, and dismay before the midnight call. Between times of hanging their heads in despair, the horses neighed and stamped. Occasionally a camel raised a horrid bubbling cry that stretched every nerve in hearing to the breaking-point before it as suddenly and unaccountably subsided.

Once I thought I heard an echo of the yell up and away on the plateau.

I thought so without any great conviction. But soon after this, there was no doubt of my hearing what we called zither music all about our encampment. My gaze wheeled to Nicolo, posting accounts by the light of a sputtering tamarisk torch. He did not raise his head and some little tension in his body told me that he too heard the devilish sound.

It died away soon, and the eerie whist disclosed another sound that I had thought was only a trick of my pulse and breath. It appeared to be carried on the breeze from far out on the plateau and was imaginable as the harsh utterance of a cicadalike insect at the last dim edge of hearing. On that frontier, it rose and fell a little, never any louder than the hum of a mosquito when one is half-awake, and whatever its origin, I believed it to be a genuine sensory experience, not an auricular illusion.

I lost it for a moment, but groping in the silence, found it again. It became discernibly plainer with the passing moments, and I began to search my memory for its likeness. I had heard many natural sounds that it faintly resembled, but the one that it fitted best was the one that caused the most unpleasant tightening of my scalp. That was the sound made by a moving caravan at a good distance.

Truly I had expected to hear a sound of this general sort long before tonight. Not only the Nestorian priest had promised it; the old cameleers who had passed this way before had given me detailed accounts of its manifestation, usually associated with disaster. Trying to put myself in Mustapha’s shoes, I had thought of it as some natural sound of the desert, transmuted by human imagination into a thing of terror. But as it came clearer, I was awe-stricken by its uncanny familiarity. Drivers appeared to be shouting and cursing at their beasts the same as on any rough road, horses neighed, goaded camels uttered their inimitable complaints. I could not resist the impression that a marching caravan was much nearer than the volume of the sound would indicate, as though it was muted by some barrier other than distance—as though it broke through from some other world. But that might be an effect of its source’s being well over our heads on the sandy plateau, whereby only a kind of echo floated down to us.

The camp was waking. A few of the drivers covered their heads so they could not hear; others sat up, fingering their amulets. I rose and walked into Nicolo’s torchlight. He saw me and laid down his pen.

“Excuse me, signor, for interrupting your work,” I said.

“It was already pretty well interrupted by the sounds out yonder,” he answered in a pleasant tone. “I would almost think they’re real.”

“I do think they’re real.”

“Of course they are, in that we really hear them, not imagine them. So is the zither playing. I meant I can almost believe that there’s a caravan of living men and beasts out there in the dark.”

“I think there is.”

“Men go in search of such caravans—and never come back. You might think of them as a mirage of the ear instead of the eye. Perhaps the sound is mysteriously borne from some caravan road scores of miles distant. Listen! I fancy it’s growing a little fainter——”

I thought the same.

“I believe it’s a lost caravan within a mile of us,” I insisted, “and you should order fires built and pots clattered.”

“What will we use for fuel? There’s no dried dung—not enough tamarisk to make a torch. Would you have us set fire to our stores? Anyway, could they see it behind these dunes? As for a clatter of pans and pots, it wouldn’t carry far against the wind, and the drivers would think we were summoning the Devil and kill all three of us. But suppose it was a lost caravan, and we found it and brought it here. They’re out of water or they wouldn’t be traveling at this hour, and mad or dying. What could we do for them. What might they do to us?”

“I’m considering riding up on the plateau.”

Nicolo’s eyes glistened in the moonlight. “If you believe it’s a real caravan in distress, of course I’ll do nothing to stop you.”

I turned away and my thoughts turned inward. The sounds of men’s shouts and beasts’ cries were as plain as the shape of the camels I had seen two days before. Perhaps there was a natural sound heard often in this region that resembled the noise of a caravan on the march, but my unusually sharp ears had tonight discovered evidences, missed by other listeners, of the thing itself. I remembered the faint prints at the junction of the northern road with ours—one hard local wind might have made day-old tracks appear several weeks old. Then another memory stopped my heart.

What of the false road I had followed half a mile? If a day or two earlier another caravan had been similarly led astray and had followed the course to the last white bone, the captains might even now be seeking their lost way. Tonight they might have wandered within hearing of our encampment, and just now had yielded to despair and turned away.

But the Devil that had sent a legion of demons to call me to my destruction could put logic in my brain to make me follow on.

3

In the light of day, my mare Roxana was a lively red-bay. The night had turned her black, and it seemed I hardly knew her as I got her between my thighs, as though a hell nag had been picketed in her place to bear me to my doom. It seemed that I hardly knew myself as I made up the dunes, as though my identity had been washed out in the thin flood of moonlight, and I was some sort of puppet being led on a string by the Powers of Darkness. I felt the enmity of the sands, the wind, the strange shadows, even the moon, whom aforetime I had loved. All were ineffably menacing to the little torch of life within my breast.

Instead of one long sand dune climbing up the plateau, there was a series of dunes of increasing height and steepness, with black valleys between. I could hear nothing but my mare’s grunting and the shuffle of sand all up that strange ascent, but as we gained the plateau, the sounds I had followed became suddenly much louder and more sharply accented. These were not natural phenomena. Either a caravan of living men and animals moved to the windward, or else a legion of demons was deliberately and perfectly imitating its characteristic clamor.

The ground appeared to be weathered clay, perfectly level, covered with a finger-deep layer of wind-dropped dust. It would rise in a cloud under my mare’s hoofs, and blowing back, would fill her tracks as fast as she made them. The vision of my being lost on this awful empty tableland under the dying moon chilled my soul, there was no pity in my heart for the wanderers in torment, and I hated myself—this little shell of me that the dogs of the wind bit—for leaving the encampment. Yet savagely spurring the good beast, I rode wildly toward the sound.

If this were a feat of will, it was the last one of the episode. None was needed to ride on long after my bestormed brain told me I should have reached my goal; the reins seemed no longer in my hands. When the clamor suddenly ceased and the silence held and held as in an evil dream, I tried to think that despair had run down the line of men and beasts as I had seen it more than once on our own journeys, throttling the heart and throat of every one. Then it broke with the howling of a curse in the Turki-Persian tongue. It rose just beyond the dim rim of my sight.

I hallooed with all my might. In the next few seconds vague blotches of darkness on the pallid plain began to take shape as loaded camels frozen into immobility by my shout. Men stood beside them. Horsemen wheeled toward me. A captain came riding fast.

“Who are you?” he cried, his voice shaking with hope.

“I’m Marco Polo, a Venetian, from a caravan resting not a mile from here.”

“Are you on the road?”

“Yes.”

“Is there water?”

“There’ll be a mouthful apiece for the people. If need be, I’ll kill one of my camels for its water sack.”

“You’ll not lose by it, I’ll promise that. But give me one assurance, before God—remembering I’m half-crazed by terror and privation, and dare not believe my own eyes and ears. If you are a Venetian, you are a Christian. I am Baram, a Mussulman of Bukhara. We have rich lading—what use to try to hide it?—and we will pay well for any help you give us, and sell you what you desire without a dinar’s profit, and give good gifts besides. But swear before your God you’ll not use our weakness to rob and murder us!”

All this came forth in one shaking high-pitched burst.

“We travel under the safe-conduct of the Great Khan.”

“Allah! Allah! Allah!”

With hardly a word more, Baram turned and shouted to his followers. He fell in beside me as I turned back toward the encampment, with the whole caravan noisy in our wake. The trail of footprints was soon erased by dust, and for half the distance I had only the moon, sicker than her wont in the dust pall, to set my course on, and the beasts could not smell the water because it was down the wind. Then we caught a glimmer from an invisible moving torch. Soon the flame itself gleamed just below the rim. We rode on in silence until I made out the figure of a horseman crossing a tall sand dune. His course was a short cut from the resting ground to the place I had found the caravan.

“It’s Nicolo Polo, master of our caravan,” I told my companion.

“I thought you were the master.”

“No, I’m Marco Polo, a merchant of the company.”

“He’s looking for us too. But you are sure that he’ll treat us——”

“You need have no fear.”

Baram spurred his horse and rode ahead. The moonlight showed him clapping his hand to his forehead and his heart, a Mohammedan greeting to Nicolo that in his distress he had forgotten to give me.

“God be with you, friend,” Nicolo answered in his rich voice.

Bright pride in my victory, strangely mixed with the dark pride of concealing every shadow cast upon it, would not let me tarry to hear the talk between the two captains. As Nicolo fixed his eyes on me, I barely drew my rein.

“I promised this man that there would be a little water for him and all his people,” I said. “If it’s necessary to kill one of my camels——”

“It won’t be necessary. I have a skin bag full in my stores, and we’re only one march from one of the best wells on the road.”

I half expected him to offer some explanation for not thinking of this before, but I might have known he would not.

“By the way, Marco, your ear was better than mine in tracing the sound.”

“You might explain it by the ear for music of Antonello the Jongleur.”

“I do so, to my great regret.”

Nicolo turned to speak to Baram. I rode on to my pavilion. There, standing in the shadow, I watched the laden camels file stolidly down to our camp ground. Their drivers unloaded and picketed them; pavilions were raised; our sleepers were up and scurrying; shouts rang out. Nicolo said that there was not enough tamarisk in the camp to make a torch, but several flared in the pallid moonlight with a rigadoon of shadows. Presently it showed Ali, Nicolo’s servant, passing a dipper among the gaunt, bearded, dust-blackened newcomers, every one of whom blessed Allah ere he wet his lips. I would lie down, I thought, and go to sleep, and dream.

My will to do so failed until it was suddenly too late. A Persian lamp with the soft shine of burning palm oil came into view from behind the pavilion. It disclosed Nicolo’s steady hand and young, princely face.

“I hoped I’d find you awake,” he said. “Baram the caravan master has sent you a gift of great price. It’s a token of his gratitude for your deed tonight.”

Nicolo held out his palm bathed in amber light from the lamp’s shining on a saffron-colored jewel nearly as big as a walnut, with a score or more facets. I recognized it as a yellow sapphire, not as valuable carat for carat as slate-blue or sea-blue sapphires or those with shining stars, and of course not to be measured with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, but because of its great size worth, I believed, about a thousand gold dinars.

“It’s a noble gift,” I said, “and I accept it with many thanks.”

“Perhaps you don’t know that yellow jewels are in great esteem in Cathay—it’s a sacred color.”

“I didn’t know it, signor.”

“Baram gave me a jewel of the same color, which I’ll show you presently. They were the two most valuable single objects that he possesses, he said, although he thought mine had deteriorated during the march. For the moment it’s not much to look at—one could hardly imagine its being worth so much ready money. But in the first place, I don’t look for long teeth in a gift horse, and in the second, I think he disprizes it unduly. In the end it may be worth more than the sapphire, which doesn’t seem quite fair.”

“You’re the master of the caravan,” I said with stiff lips.

“I agree it might have been in the way of cumsha instead of gratitude—he wants us to buy all his China-bound goods, so he can make a quick return to Bukhara. He thinks his narrow escape was warning from very Allah. Actually, of course, he’s lost his nerve. But he needn’t have had the least concern as to selling his stuffs. He’s an epicure and I don’t doubt he expected to sell directly or indirectly to the Khan. His whole lading will be offered us.”

I nodded and waited.

“I think you’re entitled to first choice. That will more than recompense you if my gift proves more valuable than yours. Maffeo can have second choice, and I’ll be content with what remains. How much money have you available in gold and silver, jewels apart from this one, jade, and precious stuffs of small weight?”

“About three thousand dinars.”

“I’d suggest you venture a third or a half. He’s not eager to sell his jewels—he has only a few of the sort he gave me, and not as fine.” Nicolo gave me a pleasant smile. “But he offers us gold and silver brocade, embroideries, Samarkand of the finest, ermine and sables, bejeweled scimitars and daggers of Kerman steel, and Arabian medicines. Also a lot of ten Badakhshan horses, skin and bone but still sound.”

“I would like to see the wares,” I said.

“You may within the hour. We should be on our way soon after midnight—Baram will wait for morning to get what water seeps into the well during the night and then make a forced march to our last night’s rest. I’ve given him hashish to stimulate him for the effort, and enough to keep his men going eight or ten hours. Traveling light, they should make it without trouble. Now come with me.”

Nicolo walked beside me, talking spiritedly, to Baram’s pavilion. “This young man is very pleased with the sapphire,” Nicolo told him. “Now I’m taking him to see the gift that you gave to me.”

“It will look better when it’s polished, and it will improve in a warmer climate.”

Nicolo led me to a pavilion that I thought must be occupied by some merchant in his company. When he called for admittance in the Turki-Persian dialect, the door curtain was drawn aside by a dark, pink-palmed hand. The light showed first a young, shapely Nubian girl in the dress of an ayah. A small charcoal blazer took the chill from the felt-lined and carpeted chamber; plainly, Nicolo and Baram had had dealings here. But there was another girl lying on a heap of raspberry-colored rugs, wearing a padded coat over a shift of transparent Samarkand silk. Either the soft, yellow radiance seemed slow in falling upon her or else my eyes were briefly and strangely darkened.

As the maiden sat up, her hair fell about her shoulders. It was of much paler color than my sapphire, still the excuse for Nicolo’s jest. But at first blush it seemed strange that he would regard her of greater worth, she being so inordinately pale and gaunt from famine.

She was older, too, than the prime offerings in the slave markets. She was a young woman, not a child in her first flower—perhaps eighteen. Her eyes were pale brown and oddly set. I could hardly see her lips, they were so pallid. Her throat was slender and her breasts were small. Surely, surely I was lucky to be given a yellow emerald worth a thousand gold dinars instead of this wasted desert waif with yellow hair.

The maiden bowed her head and touched her hands to her brow in obeisance to her new master, then drew her coat closer in modesty before a visitor. When again she raised her eyes, she gazed straight forward without a trace of expression on her face. And now I could see the delicate carving of its bones.

The light fell full upon it and my eyes opened wide. Then I too was blinded by a sudden hope—almost a belief—bound round with terror. It had moved upon me under burning tears that Nicolo must not discern.