The Journeyer

THE LEVANT

1

AT the hour of vespro on a day of blue and gold, we departed from the basin of Malamoco on the Lido, the only paying passengers in a great freight galeazza, the Doge Anafesto. She was carrying arms and supplies to the Crusaders; after unloading those things and us in Acre, she would go on to Alexandria for a cargo of grain to bring back to Venice. When the ship was outside the basin, on the open Adriatic, the rowers shipped their oars while the seamen stepped the two masts and unfurled their graceful lateen sails. The spreads of canvas fluttered and snapped and then bellied full in the afternoon breeze, as white and billowy as the clouds above.

“A sublime day!” I exclaimed. “A superb ship!”

My father, never inclined to rhapsodize, replied with one of his ever ready adages: “Praise not the day until night has brought its close; praise not the inn until the next day’s awakening.”

But even on the next day, and on succeeding days, he could not deny that the ship was as decent in its accommodations as any inn on the land. In earlier years, a vessel that touched at the Holy Land would have been crowded with Christian pilgrims from every country of Europe, sleeping in rows and layers on the deck and in the hold, like sardines in a butt. However, by that time of which I am telling, the port of San Zuàne de Acre was the last and only spot in the Holy Land not yet overwhelmed by the Saracens, so all Christians except Crusaders were staying at home.

We three Polos had a cabin all to ourselves, right under the captain’s quarters in the sterncastle. The ship’s galley was provided with a livestock pen, so we and the seamen had meals of fresh meat and fowl, not salted. There was pasta of all varieties, and olive oil and onions, and good Corsican wine kept cool in the damp sand the ship carried for ballast at the bottom of the hold. All we missed was fresh-baked bread; in its place we were served hard agiàda biscuits, which cannot be bitten or chewed but have to be sucked, and that was the only fare of which we might have complained. There was a medegòto on board, to treat any ailments or injuries, and a chaplain, to hear confessions and hold masses. On the first Sunday, he preached on a text from Ecclesiasticus: “The wise man shall pass into strange countries, and good and evil shall he try in all things.”

“Tell me, please, about the strange countries yonder,” I said to my father after that mass, for he and I had really not had much time in Venice to talk just between ourselves. His reply told me more about him, however, than about any lands beyond the horizon.

“Ah, they brim with opportunities for an ambitious merchant!” he said exultantly, rubbing his hands. “Silks, jewels, spices—even the dullest tradesman dreams of those obvious things—but there are many more possibilities for a clever man. Yes, Marco. Even in coming with us only as far as the Levant, you can, if you keep your eyes open and your wits about you, perhaps begin the making of a fortune of your very own. Yes, indeed, all the lands yonder are lands of opportunity.”

“I look forward to them,” I said dutifully. “But I could learn of commerce without leaving Venice. I was thinking more of … well, adventure …”

“Adventure? Why, my boy, could there ever be any more satisfying adventure than the descrying of a commercial opportunity not yet glimpsed by others? And the seizing advantage of it? And the taking of a profit from it?”

“Of course, most satisfying, those things,” I said, not to dampen his ebullience. “But what of excitement? Exotic things seen and done? Surely in all your travels there have been many such.”

“Oh, yes. Exotic things.” He scratched meditatively in his beard. “Yes, on our way back to Venice, through Cappadocia, we came upon one instance. There grows in that land a poppy, very like our common red field poppy, but of a silvery-blue color, and from the milk of its pod can be decocted a soporific oil that is a most potent medicine. I knew it would be a useful addition to the simples employed by our Western physicians, and I foresaw a good profit to our Compagnia from that. I sought to collect some of the seeds of that poppy, intending to sow them among the crocuses in our Vèneto plantations. Now, that was an exotic thing, no xe vero? And a grand opportunity. Unfortunately, there was a war going on in Cappadocia at the time. The poppy fields were all devastated, and the populace in such disarray that I could find no one who could provide me with the seeds. Gramo de mi, an opportunity lost.”

I said, with some amazement, “You were in the middle of a war, and all that concerned you was poppy seeds?”

“Ah, war is a terrible thing. A disruption of commerce.”

“But, Father, you saw in it no opportunity for adventure?”

“You keep on about adventure,” he said tartly. “Adventure is no more than discomfort and annoyance recollected in the safety of reminiscence. Believe me, an experienced traveler makes plans and takes pains not to have such adventures. The most successful journey is a dull journey.”

“Oh,” I said. “I was rather looking forward to—well, hazards overcome … hidden things discovered … enemies bested … maidens rescued …”

“There speaks the bravo!” boomed Uncle Mafìo, joining us just then. “I hope you are disabusing him of such notions, Nico.”

“I am trying,” said my father. “Adventure, Marco, never put a bagatìn in anybody’s purse.”

“But is the purse the only thing a man is to fill?” I cried. “Should not he seek something else in life? What of his appetite for wonders and marvels?”

“No one ever found marvels by seeking them,” my uncle grunted. “They are like true love—or happiness—which, in fact, are marvels themselves. You cannot say: I will go out and have an adventure. The best you can do is put yourself in a place where it may occur.”

“Well, then,” I said. “We are bound for Acre, the city of the Crusaders, fabled for daring deeds and dark secrets and silken damsels and the life voluptuous. What better place?”

“The Crusaders!” snorted Uncle Mafìo. “Fables, indeed! The Crusaders who survived to come home had to pretend to themselves that their futile missions had been worthwhile. So they bragged of the wonders they had seen, the marvels of the far lands. About the only thing they brought back was a case of the scolamento so painful they could hardly sit a saddle.”

I said wistfully, “Acre is not a city of beauty and temptation and mystery and luxury and—?”

My father said, “Crusaders and Saracens have been fighting over San Zuàne de Acre for more than a century and a half. Imagine for yourself what it must be like. But, no, you need not. You will see it soon enough.”

So I left them, feeling rather dashed in my expectations, but not demolished. I was privately coming to the conclusion that my father had the soul of a line-ruled ledger, and my uncle was too blunt and gruff to contain any finer feelings. They would not recognize adventure if it was thrust upon them. But I would. I went and stood on the foredeck, not to miss seeing any mermaids or sea monsters that might swim by.

A sea voyage, after the first exhilarating day or so, becomes mere monotony—unless a storm enlivens it with terror, but the Mediterranean is stormy only in winter—so I occupied myself with learning all I could about the workings of a ship. In the absence of bad weather, the crew had nothing but routine work to do, so everyone from the captain to the cook willingly let me watch and ask questions and even occasionally lend a hand with the work. The men were of many different nationalities, but all spoke the Trade French—which they called Sabir—so we were able to converse.

“Do you know anything at all about sailing, boy?” one of the seamen asked me. “Do you know, for instance, which are the liveworks of a ship, and which are the deadworks?”

I thought about that, and looked up at the sails, spread out on either side of the ship like a living bird’s wings, and guessed that they must be the liveworks.

“Wrong,” said the mariner. “The liveworks are every part of a ship that is in the water. The deadworks are everything above water.”

I thought about that, and said, “But if the deadworks were to plunge under water, they could hardly then be called live. We should all be dead.”

The seaman said quickly, “Do not speak of such things!” and crossed himself.

Another said, “If you would be a seafarer, boy, you must learn the seventeen names of the seventeen winds that blow over the Mediterranean.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “At this moment, we are sailing before the etesia, which blows from the northwest. In winter, the ostralada blows fiercely from the south, and makes storms. The gregalada is the wind that blows out of Greece, and makes the sea turbulent. From the west blows the maistràl. The levante blows out of the east, out of Armeniya—”

Another seaman interrupted, “When the levante blows, you can smell the Cyclopedes.”

“Islands?” I asked.

“No. Strange people who live in Armeniya. Each of them has only one arm and one leg. It takes two of those people to use a bow and arrow. Since they cannot walk, they hop on the one leg. But if they are in a hurry, they go spinning sideways, wheeling on that hand and foot. That is why they are called the Cyclopedes, the wheel-feet.”

Besides telling me of many other marvels, the seamen also taught me to play the guessing and gambling game called venturina, which was devised by mariners to while away long and boring voyages. They must endure many such voyages, for venturina is an exceedingly long and boring game, and no player can win or lose more than a few soldi in the course of it.

When I later asked my uncle if, in his travels, he had ever encountered curiosities like the wheel-feet Armeniyans, he laughed and sneered. “Bah! No seaman ever ventures farther into a foreign port than the nearest dockside wineshop or whorehouse. So when he is asked what sights he saw abroad, he must invent things. Only a marcolfo who would believe a woman would believe a seaman!”

So from then on I listened only tolerantly, with half an ear, when the mariners told of landward wonders, but I still gave full attention when they spoke of things to do with the sea and sailing. I learned their special names for common objects—the small sooty bird called in Venice a stormbird is at sea called petrelo, “little Pietro,” because, like the saint, it seems to walk on the water—and I learned the rhymes which seamen use when talking of the weather—

Sera rosa e bianco matino:

Alegro il pelegrino

—which is to say that a red sky in the evening or a white sky in the morning foretells good weather in the offing, hence the pilgrim is pleased. And I learned how to toss the scandàgio line, with its little ribbons of red and white at intervals along its length, to measure the depth of water under our keel. And I learned how to speak to other vessels we passed—which I was allowed to do two or three times, for there were many ships asea upon the Mediterranean—shouting in Sabir through the trumpet:

“A good voyage! What ship?”

And the reply would come hollowly back: “A good voyage! The Saint Sang, out of Bruges, homeward bound from Famagusta! And you, what ship are you?”

“The Anafesto, of Venice, outward bound for Acre and Alexandria! A good voyage!”

The ship’s steerer showed me how, through an ingenious arrangement of ropes, he single-handedly controlled both the immense steering oars, one raked down either side of the ship to the stern. “But in heavy weather,” he said, “a steerer is required on each, and they must be masters of dexterity, to swing the tillers separately and variously, but always in perfect concert, at the captain’s calls.”

The ship’s striker let me practice pounding his mallets when none of the rowers was at the oars. They seldom were. The etesia wind was so nearly constant that the oars were not often needed to help the ship make way, so the rowers had their only sustained work on that voyage in taking us out of the Malamoco basin and into the harbor of Acre. At those times they took their places—“in the mode called a zenzile,” the striker told me—three men to each of the twenty benches along each side of the vessel.

Each rower worked an oar that was separately pivoted to the ship’s outriggers, so that the shortest oars rowed inboard, the longest outboard and the medium-length oars between them. And the men did not sit, as oarsmen do, for example, in the Doge’s buzino d’oro. They stood, each with his left foot on the bench before him, while they swept the oars forward. Then they all fell back supine on the benches when they made their powerful strokes, propelling the ship in a sort of series of rushing leaps. This was done in time to the striker’s striking, a tempo that began slow, but got faster as the ship did, and the two mallets made different sounds so the rowers on one side would know when they had to pull harder than the others.

I was never let to row, for that is a job requiring such skill that apprentices are made to practice first in mock galleys set up on dry land. Because the word galeotto is so often used in Venice to mean a convict, I had always assumed that galleys and galeazze and galeotte were rowed by criminals caught and condemned to drudgery. But the striker pointed out that freight ships compete for trade on the basis of their speed and efficiency, for which they would hardly depend on reluctant forced labor. “So the merchant fleet hires only professional and experienced oarsmen,” he said. “And war ships are rowed by citizens who choose to do that service as their military obligation, instead of taking up the sword.”

The ship’s cook told me why he baked no bread. “I keep no flour in my galley,” he said. “Fine ground flour is impossible to preserve from contamination at sea. Either it breeds weevils or it gets wet. That is why the Romans first thought of making the pasta we enjoy today—because it is well-nigh imperishable. Indeed, it is said that a Roman ship’s cook invented that foodstuff, volente o nolente, when his stock of flour got soaked by an errant wave. He kneaded the mess into pasta to save it, and he rolled it thin and he cut it into strips so it would more quickly dry solid. From that beginning have come all the numerous sizes and shapes of vermicelli and maccheroni. They were a godsend to us mariner cooks, and to the landbound as well.”

The ship’s captain showed me how the needle of his bussola pointed always to the North Star, even when that star is invisible. The bussola, in those times, was just beginning to be regarded as a fixture almost as necessary for sea voyages as a ship’s San Cristoforo medal, but the instrument was yet a novelty to me. So was the periplus, which the captain also showed me, a sheaf of charts on which were drawn the curly coastlines of the whole Mediterranean, from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules, and all its subsidiary seas: the Adriatic, the Aegean and so on. Along those inked coastlines, the captain—and other captains of his acquaintance—had marked the land features visible from the sea: lighthouses, headlands, standing rocks and other such objects which would help a mariner to determine where he was. On the water areas of the charts, the captain had scribbled notations of their various depths and currents and hidden reefs. He told me that he kept changing those notations according as he found, or heard from other captains, that those depths had changed through silting up, as often happens off Egypt, or through the activity of undersea volcanoes, as often happens around Greece.

When I told my father about the periplus, he smiled and said, “Almost is better than nothing. But we have something much better than a periplus.” He brought out from our cabin an even thicker sheaf of papers. “We have the Kitab.”

My uncle said proudly, “If the captain possessed the Kitab, and if his ship could sail overland, he could go clear across Asia, to the eastern Ocean of Kithai.”

“I had this made at great expense,” said my father, handing it to me. “It was copied for us from the original, which was done by the Arab mapmaker al-Idrisi for King Ruggiero of Sicily.”

Kitab, I later discovered, means in Arabic only “a book,” but then so does our word Bible. And al-Idrisi’s Kitab, like the Holy Bible, is much more than just a book. The first page was inscribed with its full title, which I could read, for it was rendered in French: The going out of a Curious Man to explore the Regions of the Globe, its Provinces, Islands, Cities and their Dimensions and Situation; for the Instruction and Assistance of him who desires to Traverse the Earth. But all the many other words on the pages were done in the execrable worm-writing of the infidel Arab countries. Only here and there had my father or uncle penned in a legible translation of this or that place-name. Turning the pages so I could read those words, I realized something and I laughed.

“Every chart is upside down. Look, he has the foot of the Italian peninsula kicking Sicily up toward Africa.”

“In the East, everything is upside down or backward or contrary,” said my uncle. “The Arab maps are all made with south at the top. The people of Kithai call the bussola the south-pointing needle. You will get accustomed to such customs.”

“Aside from that peculiarity,” said my father, “al-Idrisi has been amazingly accurate in representing the lands of the Levant, and beyond them as far as Middle Asia. Presumably he himself once traveled those regions.”

The Kitab comprised seventy-three separate pages which, laid side by side (and upside down), showed the entire extent of the world from west to east, and a goodly part of it north and south, the whole divided by curving parallels according to climatic zones. The salt sea waters were painted in blue with choppy white lines for the waves; inland lakes were green with white waves; rivers were squiggly green ribbons. The land areas were painted dun yellow, with dots of gold leaf applied to show cities and towns. Wherever the land rose in hills and mountains, those were represented by shapes rather like caterpillars, which were colored purple, pink, and orange.

I asked, “Are the highlands of the East really so vividly colored? Purple mountaintops and—?”

As if in reply, the lookout shouted down from his basket atop the ship’s taller mast, “Terra là! Terre là!”

“You can look and see for yourself, Marco,” said my father. “The shore is in sight. Behold the Holy Land.”

2

OF course, I eventually discovered that the coloring on al-Idrisi’s maps was to indicate the height of the land, with purple representing the highest mountains, pink those of moderate altitude, and orange the lowest, and yellow land of no particular elevation. But there was nothing in the vicinity of Acre to prove this discovery by, that part of the Holy Land being an almost colorless country of low sand dunes and even lower sand flats. What color there was to the land was a dirty gray-yellow, not even a vestige of green growing there, and the city was a dirty gray-brown.

The oarsmen swept the Anafesto around the base of a lighthouse and into the meager harbor. It was awash with every sort of garbage and offal, its waters slimy and greasy, stinking of fish, fish guts and decayed fish. Beyond the docks were buildings that appeared to be made of dried mud—they were all inns and hostels, the captain told us, there being nothing in Acre that could be termed a private residence—and above those low buildings, here and there, stood the taller stone edifices of churches, monasteries, a hospital and the city’s castle. Farther landward beyond that castle was a high stone wall, stretching in a semicircle from the harbor to the sea side of the city, with a dozen towers upjutting from it. To me it looked like a dead man’s jawbone sparsely studded with teeth. On the other side of that wall, said the captain, was the encampment of the Crusader knights, and beyond that yet another and even stouter wall, fencing Acre’s point of land off from the mainland where the Saracens held sway.

“This is the last Christian holding in the Holy Land,” the ship’s priest said sadly. “And it will fall, too, whenever the infidels choose to overrun it. This eighth Crusade has been so futile that the Christians of Europe have lost their fervor for crusading. The newly arriving knights are fewer and fewer. You notice that we brought none on this passage. So Acre’s force is too small to do anything but make occasional skirmishes outside the walls.”

“Humph,” said the captain. “The knights seldom even bother to do that any more. They are all of different orders—Templars and Hospitalers and whatnot—so they much prefer to fight among themselves … when they are not scandalously disporting themselves with the Carmelitas and Clarissas.”

The chaplain winced, for no reason I could see, and said petulantly, “Sir, have a regard for my cloth.”

The captain shrugged. “Deplore it if you will, Pare, but you cannot refute it.” He turned to speak to my father. “Not only the troops are in disarray. The civilian population, what there is of it, consists entirely of suppliers and servitors to the knights. Acre’s native Arabs are too venal to be inimical to us Christians, but they are forever at odds with Acre’s native Jews. The remainder of the population is a shifting motley of Pisans and Genoese and your fellow Venetians—all rivals and all quarrelsome. If you wish to conduct your business here in peace, I suggest that you go straight to the Venetian quarter when we debark, and take lodgings there, and try not to get involved in the local discords.”

So we three gathered our belongings from the cabin and prepared to debark. The quay was crowded with ragged and dirty men, pressing close around the ship’s gangplank and waving their arms and jostling each other, crying their services in Trade French and any number of other languages:

“Carry your bags, monsieur! Lord merchant! Messere! Mirza! Sheikh khaja! …”

“Lead you to the auberge! The inn! Locanda! Karwansarai! Khane! …”

“Provide for you horses! Asses! Camels! Porters! …”

“A guide! A guide speaking Sabir! A guide speaking Farsi! …”

“A woman! A beautiful fat woman! A nun! My sister! My little brother! …”

My uncle demanded only porters, and selected four or five of the least scabrous of the men. The rest drifted away, shaking their fists and shouting imprecations:

“May Allah look upon you sideways!”

“May you choke while eating pig meat!”

“ … Eating your lover’s zab!”

“ … Your mother’s nether parts!”

The seamen unloaded our portion of the ship’s cargo, and our new porters slung our bundles on their backs or shoulders or perched them atop their heads. Uncle Mafìo commanded them, first in French, then in Farsi, to take us to the part of the city reserved for Venetians, and to the best inn there, and we all moved off along the quay.

I was not much impressed by Acre—or Akko, as its native inhabitants call it. The city was no cleaner than the harbor, being mostly of squalid buildings with the widest streets between them no wider than the narrowest alleys of Venice. In its most open areas, the city stank of old urine. Where walls closed it in, it smelled even worse, for the alleys were sinks of sewage and swill, in which gaunt dogs competed for the pickings with monster rats, abroad even in full daylight.

More overpowering than Acre’s stink was its noise. In every alley wide enough for a sitting rug to be spread, there were vendors, shoulder to shoulder, squatting behind little heaps of trashy merchandise—scarves and ribbons, shriveled oranges, overripe figs, pilgrims’ shells and palm leaves—every man of them bellowing to be heard above the others. Beggars, legless or blind or leprous, whined and sniveled and clawed at our sleeves as we passed. Asses, horses and mangy-furred camels—the first camels I had ever seen—shouldered us out of their way as they shuffled through the garbage of the narrow lanes. They all looked weary and miserable under their heavy loads, but they were driven by the drumming sticks and bawled curses of their herders. Groups of men of all nations stood about conversing at the top of their lungs. I suppose some of their talk dealt with mundane matters of trade, or the war, or maybe just the weather, but their conversations were so clamorous as to be indistinguishable from raging quarrels.

I said to my father, when we were in a street wide enough for us to walk abreast, “You said that you were bringing trade goods’ on this journey. I did not see any merchandise put aboard the Anafesto in Venice, and I do not see anything of that nature now. Is it still on the ship?”

He shook his head. “To have brought a pack train’s load of goods would have been to tempt the innumerable bandits and thieves between us and our destination.” He hefted the one small pack he was carrying at that moment, having refused to relinquish it to any of the porters. “Instead, we are carrying something light and inconspicuous, but of great trading value.”

“Zafràn!” I exclaimed.

“Just so. Some in pressed bricks, some in loose hay. And also a good number of the culms.”

I laughed. “Surely you will not stop to plant them, and wait a whole year for the harvest.”

“If circumstances require, yes. One must try to be prepared against all contingencies, my boy. Who has, God helps. And other journeyers have traveled on the three-bean march.”

“What?”

My uncle spoke. “The famed and feared Chinghiz Khan, grandfather of our Kubilai, conquered most of the world in exactly that slow-marching manner. His armies and all their families had to cross the entire vast extent of Asia, and they were far too numerous to have lived off the land, whether by pillaging or scavenging. No, they carried seeds for planting, and animals fit for breeding. Whenever they had marched to the limit of their rations, and beyond the reach of their supply trains, they simply stopped and settled. They planted their grains and beans, bred their horses and cattle, and waited for the harvest and the calving. Then, again well fed and well provisioned, they moved on toward the next objective.”

I said, “I heard that they ate every tenth man of their own men.”

“Nonsense!” said my uncle. “Would any commander decimate his fighting men? He might as sensibly command them to eat their swords and spears. And the weapons would be about equally edible. I doubt that even a Mongol has teeth capable of chewing another warrior Mongol. No, they stopped and planted and harvested, and moved again, and stopped again.”

My father said, “They called that the three-bean march. And it inspired one of their war cries. Whenever the Mongols fought their way into an enemy city, Chinghiz would shout, ‘The hay is cut! Give your horses fodder!’ And that was the signal for the horde to go wild, to plunder and rape and ravage and slaughter. Thus they laid waste Tashkent and Bukhara and Kiev and many another great city. It is said that when the Mongols took Herat, in India Aryana, they butchered every last one of its inhabitants, to the number of nearly two million. Ten times the population of Venice! Of course, of Indians such a diminution is hardly worth remark.”

“The three-bean march sounds efficient enough,” I conceded, “but intolerably slow.”

“He who endures, wins,” said my father. “That slow march took the Mongols all the way to the borders of Poland and Romania.”

“And all the way to here,” added my uncle. We were just then passing two swarthy men in clothing that appeared to be made of hides, much too heavy and hot for the climate. To them Uncle Mafìo said, “Sain bina.”

They both looked slightly startled, but one of them responded, “Mendu, sain bina!”

“What language was that?” I asked.

“Mongol,” said my uncle. “Those two are Mongols.”

I stared at him, then turned to stare at the men. They were also walking with their heads turned, looking wonderingly back at us. The streets of Acre teemed with so many people of exotic features and complexions and raiment that I could not yet distinguish one kind of foreigner from another. But those were Mongols? The orda, the orco, the bogle, the terror of my childhood? The bane of Christianity and menace to all Western civilization? Why, they might have been merchants of Venice, exchanging a “bon zorno” with us as we all promenaded on the Riva Ca’ de Dio. Of course, they did not look like merchants of Venice. Those two men had eyes like slits in faces like well-tanned leather … .

“Those are Mongols?” I said, thinking of the miles and the millions of corpses they must have tramped across to get to the Holy Land. “What are they doing here?”

“I have no idea,” said my father. “I daresay we will find out in good time.”

“Here in Acre,” said my uncle, “as in Constantinople, there seem to be at least a few persons of every nationality on earth. Yonder goes a black man, a Nubian or an Ethiope. And that woman there is certainly an Armeniyan: each of her breasts is exactly as large as her head. The man with her I would say is a Persian. Now, the Jews and Arabs I can never tell apart, except by their garb. That one yonder has on his head a white tulband, which Islam forbids to Jews and Christians, so he has to be a Muslim … .”

His speculations were interrupted because we were almost run down by a war horse ridden at an uncaring canter through the tangled streets. The eight-pointed cross on the rider’s surcoat identified him as a Knight of the Order of the Hospital of San Zuàne of Jerusalem. He went past with a noise of jingling chain mail and creaking leather, but with no apology for his rudeness and not even a nod to us brother Christians.

We came to the square of buildings set aside for Venetians, and the porters led us to one of the several inns there. Its landlord met us at the entrance, and he and my father exchanged some deep bows and flowery greetings. Though the landlord was an Arab, he spoke in Venetian: “Peace be upon you, my lords.”

My father said, “And on you, peace.”

“May Allah give you strength.”

“Strong have we become.”

“The day is blessed which brings you to my door, my lords. But Allah has led you to choose well. My khane has clean beds, and a hammam for your refreshment, and the best food in Akko. Even now, a lamb is being stuffed with pistachios for the evening meal. I have the honor to be your servant, and my miserable name is Ishaq, may you speak it with not too much contempt.”

We introduced ourselves, and each of us thereafter was addressed by the landlord and servants as Sheikh Folo, because the Arabs have no p in their own language, and find it difficult to make the sound when speaking any other. As we Folos were disposing our belongings about our room, I asked my father and uncle, “Why is a Saracen so hospitable to us, his enemies?”

My uncle said, “Not all Arabs are engaged in this jihad—which is their name for a holy war against Christianity. The ones here in Acre are profiting too much from it to take sides, even with their fellow Muslims.”

“There are good Arabs and there are bad,” said my father. “The ones now fighting to oust all Christians from the Holy Land—from the entire eastern Mediterranean—are actually the Mamluks of Egypt, and they are very bad Arabs indeed.”

When we had unpacked the things necessary for our stay in Acre, we went to the inn’s hammam. And the hammam, I think, must rank with those other great Arabian inventions: arithmetic and its numbers and the abaco for counting. Essentially a hammam is only a room full of steam, generated by throwing water on fire-hot stones. But after we had sat for a time on benches in that room, sweating copiously, half a dozen menservants came in and said, “Health and delight to you, lords, from this bath!” and directed us to lie prostrate on the benches. Then, two men to each of us, their four hands wearing gloves made of coarse hemp, they rubbed us all over, briskly and for a long time. As they rubbed, the accumulated salt and dirt of our voyage was scraped off our skin in long gray rolls. We might have deemed that sufficient for cleanliness, but they kept on rubbing, and more dirt came out of our pores, like thin gray worms.

When we were exuding no more grayness, and were steamed and rubbed to redness, the men offered to depilate us of our body hair. My father declined that treatment, and so did I. I had already that day shaved off what skimpy whiskers I had, and I wished to keep what other hair I possessed. Uncle Mafìo, after a moment’s consideration, told the servants to remove his artichoke escutcheon, but not to tamper with his beard or chest hair. So two of the men, the two youngest and most handsome, hastened to the task. They applied a dun-colored ointment to his crotch area, and the thick thatch of hair there began to disappear like smoke. Almost immediately, he was as bald in that place as was Doris Tagiabue.

“That salve is magical,” he said admiringly, looking down at himself.

“In truth it is, Sheikh Folo,” said one of the young men, smiling so that he leered. “The removal of the hair makes your zab more visible, as prominent and as pretty as a war lance. A veritable torch to guide your lover to you in the night. It is a pity that the Sheikh is not circumcised, so that his zab’s bright plum might be more readily observed and admired and—”

“Enough of that! Tell me, can this ointment be purchased?”

“Certainly. You have but to order me, Sheikh. and I will run to the apothecary for a fresh jar of the mumum. Or many jars.”

My father said, “You see it as a commodity, Mafìo? But there would be scant market for it in Venice. A Venetian treasures every least bloom on the peach.”

“But we are going eastward, Nico. Remember, many of those Eastern peoples regard body hair as a blemish on either sex. If this mumum is not too costly here, we could turn a considerable profit there.” He said to his rubber, “Please stop fondling me, boy, and get on with the bathing.”

So the men washed us all over, using a creamy sort of soap, and washed our hair and beards in fragrant rose water, and dried us with great fleecy, musk-scented towels. When we were dressed again, they gave us cool drinks of sweetened lemon-juice sharbat, to restore our internal moisture, which by then had been depleted by all the heat. I left the hammam feeling cleaner than I had ever felt before, and I was grateful for the Arabs’ invention of that facility. I made frequent use of that one, and others thereafter, and the only complaint I might ever have had was that so many of the Arab people themselves preferred filth and fetor to the cleanness available in the hammam.

The landlord Ishaq had spoken the truth about the khane’s food being good, though of course we were paying enough that he could profitably have fed us on ambrosia and nectar. That first night’s meal was the lamb stuffed with pistachios, also rice and a dish of cucumbers sliced and dripped with lemon juice, and afterwards a confection of sugared pomegranate pulp mixed with grated almonds and delicately perfumed. It was all delicious, but I was most taken by the accompanying beverage. Ishaq told me it is an infusion from ripe berries in hot water, and is called qahwah. That Arabic word means “wine,” which qahwah is not, for the Arabs’ religion forbids them wine. Only in color is the qahwah winelike, a deep garnet-brown, rather resembling a Barolo of the Piedmont, but it does not have Barolo’s strong flavor or its faint aftertaste of violets. Neither is it sweet or sour, like some other wines. Neither does it intoxicate like wine, or make the head to ache the next day. But it does gladden the heart and enliven the senses and—so said Ishaq—a few glasses of qahwah enable a traveler or a warrior to march or fight untiringly for hours on end.

The meal was served upon a cloth around which we sat on the floor, and it was served without any table implements. So we used our belt knives for cutting and slicing, as we would have employed table knives at home, and used the knife points to spear our bits of meat, in place of the little metal skewers we would have had at home. Lacking skewers or spoons, we ate the lamb’s stuffing and the rice and the sweet with our fingers.

“Only the thumb and first two fingers of the right hand,” my father cautioned me in a low voice. “The left hand’s fingers are considered by the Arabs nasty, for they are reserved to the wiping of one’s behind. Also, sit only upon your left haunch, take only small portions of the food with your fingers, chew well each mouthful, and look not at your fellow diners while they eat, lest you embarrass them and make them lose their appetite.”

There is much to be read in an Arab’s use of his hands, as I gradually learned. If, while he is speaking, he strokes his beard, his most precious possession, then he is swearing by his beard that his words are truthful. If he puts his index finger to his eye, it is his sign of assent to your words or consent to your command. If he puts his hand to his head, he is vowing that his head will answer for any disobedience. If, however, he makes any of those gestures with his left hand, he is merely mocking you, and if he touches you with that left hand, it is the direst insult.

3

SOME days later, when we had ascertained that the commander of the Crusaders was in the city’s castle, we went to pay our courtesy call upon him. The forecourt of the castle was full of knights of the various orders, some merely lounging about, others gambling with dice, others chatting or quarreling, still others quite visibly drunk for that early in the day. None seemed to be about to dash out and do battle with the Saracens, or eager to do so, or sorry that he was not doing so. When my father had explained our mission to the two drowsy-looking knights guarding the castle door, they said nothing, but only jerked their heads for us to enter. Inside, my father explained our business to one lackey and squire after another, in one hall after another, until we were ushered into a room hung with battle flags and told to wait. After a time, a lady entered. She was about thirty years of age, not pretty but gracious of demeanor, and wearing a gold coronet. She said, in Castilian-accented French, “I am Princess Eleanor.”

“Nicolò Polo,” said my father, bowing. “And my brother Mafìo and my son Marco.” And for the sixth or seventh time, he told why we were seeking audience.

The lady said, with admiration and a little apprehension, “Going all the way to Cathay? Dear me, I hope my husband will not volunteer to go with you. He does love to travel, and he does abhor this dismal Acre.” The room door opened again, admitting a man of about her age. “Here he is now. Prince Edward. My love, these are—”

“The Polo family,” he said brusquely, with an Anglo accent. “You came in on the supply ship.” He too wore a coronet, and a surcoat emblazoned with the cross of San Zorzi. “What can I do for you?” He stressed the last word as if we were only the latest in a long procession of appellants.

For the seventh or eighth time, my father explained, concluding, “We merely ask Your Royal Highness to introduce us to the chief prelate among your Crusader chaplains. We would ask him for the loan of some of his priests.”

“You may have all of them, as far as I am concerned. And all the Crusaders as well. Eleanor, my dear, would you ask the Archdeacon to join us?”

As the Princess left the room, my uncle said boldly, “Your Royal Highness appears less than pleased with this crusade.”

Edward grimaced. “It has been one disaster after another. Our latest best hope was the leadership of the pious French Louis, since he was so successful with the previous Crusade, but he sickened and died on his way here. His brother took his place, but Charles is only a politician, and spends all his time negotiating. For his own advantage, I might add. Every Christian monarch embroiled in this mess is seeking only to advance his own interests, not those of Christianity. Small wonder the knights are disillusioned and lackadaisical.”

My father remarked, “Those outside do not look particularly enterprising.”

“What few have not gone home in disgust, I can only seldom pry from their wenches’ beds, to make a sally among the foe. And even in the field, they prefer bed to battle. One night not long ago, they slept while a Saracen hashishi slipped through the pickets and into my tent, can you imagine that? And I do not wear a sword under my nightshirt. I had to snatch up a pricket candlestick and stab him with that.” The Prince sighed profoundly. “As the situation stands, I must resort to politicking myself. I am presently treating with an embassy of Mongols, hoping to enlist their alliance against our common enemy of Islam.”

“So that is it,” said my uncle. “We had marveled to see a couple of Mongols in the city.”

My father began hopefully, “Then our mission closely accords with the aims of Your Royal—”

The door opened again and the Princess Eleanor returned, bringing with her a tall and quite old man wearing a splendidly embroidered dalmatic. Prince Edward made the introductions:

“The Venerable Tebaldo Visconti, Archdeacon of Liege. This good man despaired of the impiety of his fellow churchmen in Flanders, and applied for a papal legacy to accompany me hither. Teo, these are some near countrymen of your own Piacenza. The Polos of Venice.”

“Yes, indeed, i Pantaleoni,” said the old man, calling us by the sneering nickname with which the citizens of rival cities refer to Venetians. “Are you here to further your vile republic’s trade with the enemy infidels?”

“Come now, Teo,” said the Prince, looking amused.

“Really, Teo,” said the Princess, looking embarrassed. “I told you: the gentlemen are not here to trade at all.”

“To do what wickedness, then?” said the Archdeacon. “I will believe anything but good of Venice. Liege was evil enough, but Venice is notorious as the Babylon of Europe. A city of avaricious men and salacious women.”

He seemed to be glaring straight at me, as if he knew of my recent adventures in that Babylon. I started to protest in my defense that I was not avaricious, but my father spoke first, and placatively :

“Perhaps our city is rightly so known, Your Reverence. Tuti semo fati de carne. But we are not traveling on behalf of Venice. We bear a request from the Khan of All Khans of the Mongols, and it can only redound to the good of all Europe and Mother Church.” He went on to explain why Kubilai had asked for missionary priests. Visconti heard him out, but then asked haughtily:

“Why do you apply to me, Polo? I am only in deacon’s orders, an appointed administrator, not even an ordained priest.”

He was not even polite, moreover, and I hoped my father would tell him so. But he said only, “You are the highest ranking Christian churchman in the Holy Land. The Pope’s legate.”

“There is no Pope,” Visconti retorted. “And until an apostolic authority is chosen, who am I to delegate a hundred priests to go into the far unknown, at the whim of a heathen barbarian?”

“Come now, Teo,” said the Prince again. “I think we have in our entourage more chaplains than we have fighting men. Surely we can spare some of them, for a good purpose.”

“If it is a good purpose, Your Grace,” said the Archdeacon, scowling. “Remember, these are Venetians proposing it. And this is not the first such proposal. Some twenty-five years ago, the Mongols made a similar overture, and directly to Rome. One of their Khans, one named Kuyuk, a cousin to this Kubilai, sent a letter to Pope Innocent asking—no, demanding—that His Holiness and all the monarchs of the West come to him, in a body, to render homage and submission. Naturally he was ignored. But that is the kind of invitation the Mongols proffer, and when it comes by the agency of a Venetian …”

“Despise our provenance, if you will,” said my father, still equably. “If there were no fault in the world, there could be no pardon. But please, Your Reverence, do not despise this opportunity. The Khakhan Kubilai asks nothing but that your priests come and preach their religion. I have here the missive written by the Khan’s scribe at the Khan’s dictation. Does Your Reverence read Farsi?”

“No,” said Visconti, adding a snort of exasperation. “It will require an interpreter.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Very well. Let us retire to another room while it is read to me. No need to waste the time of Their Graces.”

So he and my father adjourned for their conference. Prince Edward and Princess Eleanor, as if to make up for the Archdeacon’s bad manners, stayed long enough to make some conversation with me and Uncle Mafìo. The Princess asked me :

“Do you read Farsi, young Marco?”

“No, my Lady—Your Royal Highness. That language is written in the Arabic alphabet, the fish-worm writing, and I cannot make sense of it.”

“Whether you read it or not,” said the Prince, “you had better learn to speak Farsi, if you are going eastward with your father. Farsi is the common trade tongue of all of Asia, just as French is in the Mediterranean lands.”

The Princess asked my uncle, “Where do you go from here, Monsieur Polo?”

“If we get the priests we want, Your Royal Highness, we will lead them to the court of the Khakhan Kubilai. Which means we must somehow make our way past the Saracens inland.”

“Oh, you should get the priests,” said Prince Edward. “You could probably have nuns, too, if you want them. Teo will be glad to rid himself of all of them, for they are the cause of his ill humor. You must not let his behavior dismay you. Teo is from Piacenza, so you can hardly be surprised by his attitude toward Venice. He is also a godly and pious old gentleman, staunch in his disapproval of sin. So, even in the best of humors, he is a trial to us mere mortals.”

I said impertinently, “I was hoping that my father would talk back to him, just as ill-humoredly.”

“Your father may be wiser than you are,” said Princess Eleanor. “The rumor is that Teobaldo may be the next Pope.”

“What?” I blurted, so surprised that I forgot to use her due address. “But he just said that he is not even a priest!”

“Also he is a very old man,” she said. “But that seems to be his chief qualification. The Conclave is at a standstill because, as usual, every faction has its own favorite candidate. The laity are growing clamorous; they demand a Pope. Visconti would be at least acceptable to them, and to the cardinals as well. So, if the Conclave remains much longer at impasse, it is expected to choose Teo because he is old. Thus there will be a Pope at Rome, but not for too long. Just long enough for the various factions to do their secret maneuvers and machinations and settle which favorite will don the beehive tiara when our Visconti dies under it.”

Prince Edward said mischievously, “Teo will die in a hurry, of an apoplexy, if he finds Rome to be anything like Liege or Acre—or Venice.”

My uncle said, smiling, “Babylonian, you mean?”

“Yes. That is why I think you will get the priests you want. Visconti may make a show of grumbling, but he will not grieve at seeing these Acre priests go far, far away from him. All the monastic orders are in residence here to serve the needs of the fighting men, of course, but they have taken a rather liberal view of that duty. In addition to their hospital ministrations and spiritual solacements, they are providing some services that would dismay the saintly founders of their orders. You can imagine which of the men’s needs the Carmelitas and Clarissas are taking care of, and most lucratively, too. Meanwhile, the monks and friars are getting rich by trading illicitly with the natives, even peddling the provisions and medical supplies donated to their monasteries by the good-hearted Christians back in Europe. Meanwhile, also, the priests are selling indulgences and trafficking in absurd superstitions. Have you seen one of these?”

He took out a slip of scarlet paper and handed it to Uncle Mafìo, who unfolded it and read aloud:

“‘Bless, O God, sanctify this paper that it may frustrate the work of the Devil. He who upon his person carries this paper writ with Holy Word shall be free from the visitation of Satan.’”

“There is a ready market for such daubs, among men going into battle,” the Prince said drily. “Men of both sides, since Satan is the adversary of Muslims as well as Christians. The priests will also, for a price—for an English groat or an Arabian dinar—treat a wound with holy water. Any man’s wound, and no matter if it is the gash of a sword or a sore of the venereal pox. The latter is the more frequent.”

“Be glad you will soon get out of Acre,” sighed the Princess. “Would that we could.”

Uncle Mafìo thanked them for our audience, and he and I took our leave. He told me he was going back to the khane, for he wished to learn more about the availability of the mumum ointment. I set out merely to wander about the city, in hope of hearing some Farsi words and memorizing them, as Prince Edward had recommended. As it happened, I learned some that the Prince might not have approved of.

I fell in with three native boys of about my own age, whose names were Ibrahim, Daud and Naser. They did not have much grasp of French, but we managed to communicate—boys always will—in this case with gestures and facial expressions. We roamed together through the streets, and I would point to this or that object and speak the name by which I knew it, in French or Venetian, and then ask, “Farsi?” and they would tell me its name in that language, sometimes having to consult among themselves as to what that name was. Thus I learned that a merchant or a trader or a vendor is called a khaja, and all young boys are ashbal or “lion cubs,” and all young girls are zaharat or “little flowers,” and a pistachio nut is a fistuk, and a camel is a shutur, and so on: Farsi words that would be useful anywhere in my Eastern journeying. It was later that I learned the others.

We passed a shop where an Arab khaja offered writing materials for sale, including fine parchments and even finer vellums, and also papers of various qualities, from the flimsy Indian rice-made to the Khorasan flax-made to the expensive Moorish kind called cloth parchment because it is so smooth and elegant. I chose what I could afford, a medium grade but sturdy, and had the khaja cut it into small pieces that I could easily carry or pack. I also bought some rubric chalks to write with when I had no time to prepare pen and ink. And I began then to set down my first lexicon of unfamiliar words. Later, I would begin to make note of the names of places I passed through and people I met, and then incidents which occurred, and in time my papers came to constitute a log of all my travels and adventures.

It was by then past midday, and I was bareheaded in the hot sun, and I began to perspire. The boys noticed and, giggling, suggested by gesture that I was warm because of my comical clothing. They seemed to find particularly funny the fact that my spindly legs were exposed to public view but tightly enclosed in my Venetian hose. So I indicated that I found equally risible their baggy and voluminous robes, and suggested that they must be more uncomfortably warm than I was. They argued back that theirs was the only practical dress for that climate. Finally, to test our arguments, we went into a secluded alley cul-de-sac and Daud and I exchanged clothes.

Naturally, when we stripped down to the skin, another disparity between Christian and Muslim became evident, and there was much mutual examination and many exclamations in our different languages. I had not known before exactly what mutilation was involved in circumcision, and they had never before seen a male over the age of thirteen with his fava still wearing its capèla. We all minutely scrutinized the difference between me and Daud—how his fava, because it was always exposed, was dry and shiny and almost scaly, and stuck with bits of lint and fluff; while mine, enclosable or exposable at my whim, was more pliant and velvety to the touch, even when, because of all the attention it was getting, my organ rose erect and firm.

The three Arab boys made excited remarks which seemed to mean “Let us try this new thing,” and that made no sense to me. So the naked Daud sought to demonstrate, reaching behind him to take my candelòto in his hand, then directing it toward his scrawny backside which, bending over, he wiggled at me, meanwhile saying in a seductive voice, “Kus! Baghlah! Kus!” Ibrahim and Naser laughed at that and made poking gestures with their middle fingers and shouted, “Ghunj! Ghunj!” I still comprehended nothing of the words or byplay, but I resented Daud’s taking liberties with my person. I loosed his hand and shoved it away, then hurried to cover myself by getting into the clothes he had doffed. The boys all shrugged good-naturedly at my Christian prudery, and Daud put on my clothes.

The nether garment of an Arab is, like the hose of a Venetian, a forked pair of leg-envelopers. They go from the waist, where they tie with a cord, down to the ankles, where they are snug, but in between they are vastly capacious instead of tight. The boys told me that the Farsi word for that garment is pai-jamah, but the best they could do by way of a French translation was troussés. The Arab upper garment is a long-sleeved shirt, not much different from ours except in its loose and blousy fit. And over that goes an aba, a sort of light surcoat with slits for the arms to go through, and the rest of it hanging loose around the body, almost to the ground. The Arab shoes are like ours, except that they are made to fit any foot, being of considerable length, the unoccupied portion of which curls up and backward over the foot. On the head goes a kaffiyah, a square of cloth large enough to hang well below the shoulders at the sides and back, and it is held on with a cord loosely bound around the head.

To my surprise, I did feel cooler in that ensemble. I wore it for some while before Daud and I exchanged again, and I continued to feel cooler than in my Venetian garb. The many layers of the clothing, instead of being stifling to the skin as I would have expected, seem somehow to entrap what cool air there is and to be a barrier against the sun’s warming it. The clothes, being loose, are quite comfortable and not constrictive.

Because those clothes are so loose, and so easily made looser yet, I could not understand why the Arab boys—and all Arab males of every age—urinate as they do. They squat when they make water, in the same way women do. And furthermore they do it just anywhere, as blandly regardless of the people passing as those passersby are of them. When I expressed curiosity and distaste, the boys wanted to know how a Christian makes water. I indicated that we do it standing up, and preferably invisible inside a licet closet. They made me understand that such a vertical position is called unclean by their holy book, the Quran—and further, that an Arab dislikes to go inside a privy, or mustarah, except when he has to do the more substantial evacuation of his bowels, because privies are dangerous places. On learning that, I expressed still more curiosity, so the boys explained. Muslims, like Christians, believe in devils and demons that emanate from the underworld—beings called jinn and afarit—and those beings can most easily climb up from the underworld by way of the pit dug under a mustarah. It sounded reasonable. For a long time afterward, I could not crouch comfortably over a licet hole for dread of feeling the clutch of talons from underneath.

The street clothes of an Arab man may be ugly to our eyes, but they are less so than the street clothes of an Arab woman. And hers are uglier because they are so unfemininely indistinguishable from his. She wears identically voluminous troussés and shirt and aba, but instead of a kaffiyah headcloth she wears a chador, or veil, which hangs from the crown of her head almost to her feet, before and behind and all around her. Some women wear a black chador thin enough so that they can see dimly through it without being seen themselves; others wear a heavier chador with a narrow slit opening in front of their eyes. Swathed in all those layers of clothes and veil, a woman’s form is only a sort of walking heap. Indeed, unless she is walking, a non-Arab can hardly tell which is her front and which her back.

With grimaces and gestures, I managed to convey a question to my companions. Suppose that, in the manner of Venetian young men, they should go strolling about the streets to ogle the beautiful young women —how would they know if a woman was beautiful?

They gave me to understand that the prime mark of beauty in a Muslim woman is not the comeliness of her face or her eyes or her figure in general. It is the massive amplitude of her hips and her behind. To the experienced eye, the boys assured me, those great quivery rotundities are discernible even in a woman’s street garb. But they warned me not to be misled by appearances; many women, they indicated, falsely padded out their haunches and buttocks to a counterfeit immensity.

I put another question. Suppose that, in the manner of Venetian young men, Ibrahim and Naser and Daud wished to strike up an acquaintance with a beautiful stranger—how would they go about it?

That inquiry seemed to puzzle them slightly. They asked me to elaborate. Did I mean a beautiful strange woman?

Yes. Certainly. What else should I mean?

Not, perchance, a beautiful strange man or boy?

I had earlier suspected, and now I was becoming sure, that I had fallen in with a troop of fledgling Don Metas and Sior Monas. I was not unduly surprised, for I knew that the site of the erstwhile city of Sodom was not far distant to the east of Acre.

The boys were again giggling at my Christian naivete. From their pantomime and their rudimentary French, I gathered that—in the view of Islam and its holy Quran—women had been created solely so that men could beget male children upon them. Except for the occasional wealthy ruling sheikh, who could afford to collect and keep a whole hive of certified virgins, to be used one time apiece and then discarded, few Muslim men utilized women for their sexual enjoyment. Why should they? There were so many men and boys to be had, more plump and beautiful than any woman. Other considerations aside, a male lover was preferable to a female simply because he was male.

There, for an example of the worth intrinsic in the male—they pointed out to me a walking heap of clothing that was a woman, carrying a baby in an extra looped swath of cloth—they could ascertain that the child was a boy baby, because its face was entirely obscured by a crawling swarm of flies. Did I not wonder, they inquired, why the mother did not shoo away the flies? I might have suggested “sheer sloth,” but the boys went on to explain. The mother liked having the flies cover the baby’s face because it was a male infant. Any malicious jinn or afarit hovering about would not easily see that the baby was a valuable male child, hence would be less likely to attack it with a disease or a curse or some other affliction. If the baby had been a girl child, the mother would uncaringly flick the flies away, and let the evil beings see it unobscured, because no demons would bother to molest a female, and the mother would not greatly care even if they did.

Well, fortunately being a male myself, I supposed I had to concur in the prevailing opinion that males were vastly superior to females, and infinitely more to be treasured. Nevertheless, I had had some small sexual experience, which had led me to conclude that a woman or girl was useful and desirable and functional in that respect. If she was or could be nothing else in the world, as a receptacle she was incomparable, even necessary, even indispensable.

Not a bit of it, the boys indicated, laughing yet again at my simple-mindedness. Even as a receptacle, any Muslim male was far more sexually responsive and delightful than any Muslim female, whose parts had been properly deadened by circumcision.

“Wait a moment,” I conveyed to the boys. “You mean the males’ circumcision somehow causes … ?”

No, no, no. They shook their heads firmly. They meant the circumcision of the females. I shook my own head. I could not imagine how such an operation could be performed on a creature that possesses no Christian candelòto or Muslim zab or even an infantile bimbìn. I was thoroughly mystified, and I told them so.

With an air of amused indulgence, they pointed out—pointing toward their own truncated organs—that the trimming of a boy’s foreskin was done merely to mark him as a Muslim. But, in every Muslim family of better than beggar or slave status, every female infant was subjected to an equivalent trimming in the cause of feminine decency. To illustrate: it was a terrible revilement to call another man the “son of an uncircumcised mother.” I was still mystified.

“Toutes les bonnes femmes—tabzir de leurs zambur,” they repeated over and over. They said that the tabzir, whatever that was, was done to divest a baby girl of her zambur, whatever that was, so that when she was grown to womanhood she would be devoid of unseemly yearnings, hence disinclined to adultery. She would be forever chaste and above suspicion, as every bonne femme of Islam should be: a passive pulp with no function but to dribble out as many male children as possible in her bleak lifetime. No doubt that was a commendable end result, but I still did not understand the boys’ attempted explication of the tabzir means that effected it.

So I changed the subject and put another question. Suppose that, in the manner of Venetian young men, Ibrahim or Daud or Naser did want a woman, not a man or boy—and a woman not condemned to numbness and torpor—how would they go about finding one?

Naser and Daud snickered contemptuously. Ibrahim raised his eyebrows in disdainful inquiry, and at the same time raised his middle finger and moved it up and down.

“Yes,” I said, nodding. “That sort of woman, if that is the only sort with any life left in her.”

Though limited in their means of communication, the boys made it all too plain that, to find such a shameful woman, I should have to seek among the Christian women resident in Acre. Not that I should have to seek very strenuously, for there were many of those sluts. I had only to go—they pointed—to that building directly across the market square we stood in at that moment.

I said angrily, “That is a convent! A house of Christian nuns!”

They shrugged and stroked imaginary beards, asserting that they had spoken truly. And just then the door of the convent opened and a man and a woman came out into the square. He was a Crusader knight, wearing the surcoat insigne of the Order of San Làzaro. She was unveiled, obviously not an Arab woman, and she wore the white mantle and brown habit of the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Both of them were flushed of face and reeling with wine.

Then, of course, but only then, did I recall having heard two previous mentions of the “scandalous” Carmelitas and Clarissas. I had ignorantly assumed that the references were to the names of particular women. But now it was clear that what had been meant were the Carmelite sisters and those other nuns, the Minoresses of the Order of San Francesco, affectionately nicknamed Clarissas.

Feeling as if I had been personally disgraced in the eyes of the three infidel boys, I abruptly said goodbye to them. At that, they clamored and gestured insistently for me to join them soon again, indicating that then they would show me something really marvelous. I gave them a noncommittal reply, and made my way through the streets and alleys back to the khane.

4

I arrived there at the same time my father was returning from his conference with the Archdeacon at the castle. As we aproached our chamber, a young man came out of it, the hammam rubber who had attended Uncle Mafìo on our first day at the khane. He gave us a radiant smile and said, “Salaam aleikum,” and my father properly responded, “Wa aleikum es-salaam.”

Uncle Mafìo was in the room, apparently just in the process of putting on fresh clothes for the evening meal. In his hearty way, he began talking as soon as we entered:

“I had the boy bring me a new jar of the depilatory mumum, for determination of its constituents. It consists only of orpiment and quicklime, pounded together in a little olive oil, with a touch of musk added to make its aroma more pleasant. We could easily compound it ourselves, but its price here is so cheap that that is hardly worth our while. I told the boy to fetch me four dozen of the little jars. What of our priests, Nico?”

My father sighed. “Visconti seems ready enough to delegate every priest in Acre to go away with us. But he feels that, in fairness, they themselves should have something to say about making such a long and arduous journey. So he will only exert himself to the extent of asking for volunteers. He will let us know how many or how few they will be.”

On one of the subsequent days, it happened that we were the only guests in residence at the khane, so my father genially asked the proprietor if he would do us the honor of joining us at our supper cloth.

“Your words are before my eyes, Sheikh Folo,” said Ishaq, arranging his vast troussés so he could fold his legs to sit.

“And perhaps the Sheikha, your good wife, would join us?” said my uncle. “That is your wife, is it not, in the kitchen?”

“She is indeed, Sheikh Folo. But she would not offend the decencies by presuming to eat in the company of men.”

“Of course,” said my uncle. “Forgive me. I was forgetting the decencies.”

“As the Prophet has said (may blessing and peace be upon him) : ‘I stood at the gate of Heaven and saw that most of its inhabitants were paupers. I stood at the gate of Hell and saw that most of its inhabitants were women.’”

“Um, yes. Well, perhaps your children might join us, then, as company for Marco here. If you have children.”

“Alas, I have none,” Ishaq said dolefully. “I have only three daughters. My wife is a baghlah, and barren. Gentlemen, will you permit me humbly to petition grace upon this supper?” We all bowed our heads, and he muttered, “Allah ekber rakmet,” adding in Venetian, “Allah is great, we thank Him.”

We began helping ourselves to the mutton slices cooked with tomatoes and pearl onions, and to the baked cucumbers stuffed with rice and nuts. As we did so, I said to the landlord, “Excuse me, Sheikh Ishaq. May I ask you a question?”

He nodded affably. “Pleasure me with some command, young Sheikh.”

“That word you used in speaking of your lady wife. Baghlah. I have heard it before. What does it mean?”

He looked a trifle discomfited. “A baghlah is a female mule. The word is also used to speak of a woman likewise infertile. Ah, I perceive that you think it a harsh word for me to use of my wife. And you are right. She is, after all, an excellent woman in other respects. You gentlemen may have noticed how magnificently moonlike is her behind. Wonderfully big and ponderously heavy. It forces her to sit down when she would stand up, and to sit up when she would lie down. Yes, an excellent woman. She also has beautiful hair, though you cannot have seen that. Longer and more luxuriant than my beard. No doubt you are aware that Allah appointed one of His angels to do nothing but stand by His throne and praise Him on that account. The angel has no other employment. He simply and constantly praises Allah for His having dispensed beards to men and long tresses to women.”

When he paused for a moment in his prattle, I said, “I have heard another word. Kus. What is that?”

The servant who was waiting upon us made a strangled noise and Ishaq looked even more discomfited. “That is a very low word for—this is hardly a topic fit for mealtime discussion. I will not repeat the word, but it is a low term for the even lower parts of a woman.”

“And ghunj?” I asked. “What is ghunj?”

The waiter gasped and hurriedly left the room, and Ishaq looked discomfited to the point of distress. “Where have you been spending your time, young Sheikh? That is also a low word. It means—it means the movement a woman makes. A woman or a—that is to say, the passive partner. The word refers to the movement made during—Allah forgive me—during the act of sexual congress.”

Uncle Mafìo snorted and said, “My saputèlo nephew is eager to acquire new words, that he may be more useful when he travels with us into far regions.”

Ishaq murmured, “As the Prophet has said (peace be upon him): ‘A companion is the best provision for the road.’”

“There are a couple of other words—” I began.

“And, as the saying goes on,” Ishaq growled, “‘Even bad company is better than none.’ But really, young Sheikh Folo, I must decline to translate any more of your acquisitions.”

My father spoke then, and changed the subject to something innocuous, and our meal progressed to the sweet, a conserve of crystallized apricots, dates and citron rind, perfumed with amber. So I did not find out the meaning of those mysterious words tabzir and zambur until a long time afterward. When the meal ended, with qahwah and sharbat to drink, Ishaq again said the grace—unlike us Christians, the infidels do that at the close of a meal as well as at the beginning—“Allah ekber rakmet” and, with an air of relief, left our company.

When, some days later, my father, my uncle and I went again to Acre castle at the summons of the Archdeacon, he met us in assemblage with the Prince and Princess, and also two men wearing the white habits and black mantles of the Order of Friars Preachers of San Domènico. When we had all exchanged greetings, the Archdeacon Visconti introduced the newcomers:

“Fra Nicolò of Vicenza and Fra Guglielmo of Tripoli. They have volunteered to accompany you, Messeri Polo.”

Whatever disappointment he may have felt, my father dissembled, saying only, “I am grateful to you, Brothers, and I welcome you to our party. But may I inquire why you have volunteered to join our mission?”

One of them said, in rather a petulant voice, “Because we are disgusted with the behavior of our Christian fellows here in Acre.”

The other said, in the same tone, “We look forward to the cleaner and purer air of Far Tartary.”

“Thank you, Brothers,” my father said, still politely. “Now, would you excuse our having a private word with His Reverence and Their Royal Highnesses?”

The two friars sniffed as if offended, but left the room. To the Archdeacon, my father then quoted the Bible, “The harvest indeed is great, but the laborers are few.”

Visconti countered with the quotation, “Where there are two or three gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.”

“But, Your Reverence, I asked for priests.”

“And no priest volunteered. These two, however, are Preaching Friars. As such, they are empowered to undertake practically any ecclesiastical task—from founding a church to settling a matrimonial dispute. Their powers of consecration and absolution are somewhat limited, of course, and they cannot confer ordination, but you would have to take along a bishop for that. I am sorry for the fewness of the volunteers, but I cannot in conscience conscript or compel any others. Have you any further complaint?”

My father hesitated, but my uncle boldly spoke up, “Yes, Your Reverence. The friars admit they are not going for any positive purpose. They wish simply to get away from this dissolute city.”

“Just like Saint Paul,” the Archdeacon said drily. “I refer you to the Book of Acts of the Apostles. This city was in those times called Ptolemais, and Paul once set foot here, and evidently he could stand the place for only a single day.”

Princess Eleanor said fervently, “Amen!” and Prince Edward chuckled in sympathy.

“You have your choice,” Visconti said to us. “You can apply elsewhere, or you can await the election of a Pope and apply to him. Or you can accept the services of the two Dominican brothers. They declare that they will be ready and eager to leave on the morrow.”

“We accept them, of course, Your Reverence,” said my father. “And we thank you for your good offices.”

“Now,” said Prince Edward. “You must get beyond the Saracen lands in order to go eastward. There is one best route.”

“We would be gratified to know it,” said Uncle Mafìo. He had brought with him the Kitab of al-Idrisi, and he opened it to the pages showing Acre and its environs.

“A good map,” the Prince said approvingly. “Look you, then. To go east from here, you must first go north, to skirt around the Mamluks inland.” Like every other Christian, the Prince held the pages upside down to put north at the top. “But the major ports nearest to the northward: Beirut, Tripoli, Latakia …”—he tapped the gilded dots on the map which represented those seaports—“if they have not already fallen to the Saracens, they are heavily under siege. You must go—let me calculate: more than two hundred English miles—north along the coast. To this place in Lesser Armeniya.” He tapped a spot on the map which apparently did not merit a gilded dot. “There, where the Orontes River debouches into the sea, is the old port of Suvediye. It is inhabited by Christian Armeniyans and peaceable Avedi Arabs, and the Mamluks have not yet got near it.”

“That was once a major port of the Roman Empire, called Selucia,” said the Archdeacon. “It has since been called Ayas and Ajazzo and many other names. Of course, you will go to Suvediye by sea, not along the coast itself.”

“Yes,” said the Prince. “There is an English ship leaving here for Cyprus on tomorrow’s evening tide. I will instruct the captain to go by way of Suvediye, and to take you and your friars along. I will give you a letter to the Ostikan, the governor of Suvediye, bidding him see to your safe conduct.” He directed our attention again to the Kitab. “When you have procured pack animals in Suvediye, you will go inland through the river pass—here—then east to the Euphrates River. You should have an easy journey down the Euphrates valley to Baghdad. And from Baghdad, there are diverse routes to the farther eastward.”

My father and uncle stayed on at the castle while the Prince wrote the letter of safe conduct. But they let me make my farewells to His Reverence and Their Royal Highnesses, so that I might take my leave and spend that last day in Acre as I pleased. I did not see the Archdeacon or the Prince and Princess again, but I did hear news of them. My father, my uncle and I had not been long gone from the Levant when we got word that the Archdeacon Visconti had been elected Pope of the Church of Rome, and had taken the papal name of Gregory X. About the same time, Prince Edward gave up the Crusade as a lost cause, and sailed for home. He had got as far as Sicily when he too received some news: that his father had died and that he was King of England. So, all unknowing, I had been acquainted with two of the men of highest eminence in Europe. But I have never much preened in that brief acquaintance. After all, I was later to meet men in the East whose eminence made midgets of Popes and kings.

When I left the castle that day, it was at one of the five hours when Arabs pray to their god Allah, and the beadles whom they call muedhdhin were perched on every tower and high rooftop, loudly but monotonously intoning the chants that announce those hours. Everywhere—in shops and doorways and in the dusty street—men of the Islamic faith were unfolding tatty little rugs and kneeling on them. Turning their faces to the southeast, they pressed those faces to the ground between their hands, while they elevated their rear ends in the air. At those hours, any man you could look in the face instead of the rump had to be a Christian or a Jew.

As soon as everyone in Acre was vertical again, I spotted my three acquaintances of a week or so before. Ibrahim, Naser and Daud had seen me go into the castle and had waited near its entrance for me to emerge. They were all shiny-eyed with eagerness to show me the great marvel they had promised. First, they conveyed to me, I must eat something they had brought. Naser was carrying a little leather bag, which proved to contain a quantity of figs preserved in sesame oil. I liked figs well enough, but these were so oil-soaked that they were pulpy and slimy and disagreeable in the mouth. Nevertheless, the boys insisted that I must ingest them as preparation for the revelation to come, so I forced myself to swallow four or five of the dreadful things.

Then the boys led me on a roundabout way through the streets and alleys. It began to seem a very long way, and I began to feel very weary in my limbs and addled in my mind. I wondered if the hot sun was affecting my bare head or if the figs had been somehow tainted. My vision was disturbed; the people and buildings about me seemed to sway and distort themselves in odd ways. My ears sang as if I were beset by swarms of flies. My feet stumbled on every least irregularity in our path, and I pleaded with the boys to let me stop and rest for a bit. But they, still insistent and excited, took my arms and helped me plod along. I understood from them that my muzziness was indeed an effect of the specially pickled figs, and that it was necessary to what was to come next.

I found myself dragged to an open but very dark doorway, and I started obediently to enter. But the boys set up an angry uproar, and I interpreted it to mean something like “You stupid infidel, you must take off your shoes and enter barefooted”—from which I assumed the building must be one of the houses of worship the Muslims call a masjid. Since I was not wearing shoes, but soled hose, I had to strip myself naked from the waist down. I clutched my tunic and stretched it as far down over my exposed self as I could, meanwhile wondering woozily why it should be more acceptable to enter a masjid with one’s privates bare than with one’s feet shod. Anyway, the boys did not hesitate, but propelled me through the doorway and inside the place.

Never having been in a masjid, I did not know what to expect, but I was vaguely surprised to find it absolutely unlighted and empty of worshipers or anybody else. All I could see in the dim interior was a row of immense stoneware jars, nearly as tall as I was, standing against one wall. The boys led me to the jar at the end of the row and bade me get into it.

I had been slightly apprehensive—being outnumbered and half nude and not in full command of myself—that the juvenile Sodomites perhaps had designs upon my body, and I was prepared to fight. But what they proposed struck me as more hilarious than outrageous. When I asked for an explanation, they simply continued to motion at the massive jar, and I was too fuddled to balk. Instead, even while laughing at the preposterousness of what I was doing, I let the boys boost me up to a sitting position on the lip of the jar, and swung my feet over and let myself down into it.

Not until I was inside it did I perceive that the jar contained a fluid, because there was no splash or sudden feeling of coldness or wetness. But the jar was at least half filled with oil, so nearly at body warmth that I hardly felt it until my immersion raised its level to my throat. It really felt rather pleasant: emollient and enveloping and smooth and soothing, especially around my tired legs and my sensitively exposed private parts. That realization roused me a little. Was this a prelude peculiar to some strange and exotic sexual rite? Well, thus far at least, it felt good and I did not complain.

Only my head protruded from the collar of the jar, and my fingers still rested on its rim. The boys laughingly pushed my hands inside with me, and then produced something they must have found nearby: a large disk of wood with hinges, rather like a portable pillory. Before I could protest or dodge, they fitted the thing around my neck and closed it shut. It made a lid for the jar I stood in, and, though it was not uncomfortably constrictive around my neck, it somehow had clamped onto the jar so securely that I could not dislodge or lift it.

“What is this?” I demanded, as I sloshed my arms around inside the jar and vainly shoved upward against the wooden lid. I could slosh and shove only slowly, as sometimes one moves in a dream, because of the warm oil’s viscosity. My confused senses finally registered the sesame smell of that oil. Like the figs I had earlier been made to eat, I had apparently been put to steep in sesame oil. “What is this?” I shouted again.

“Va istadan! Attendez!” commanded the boys, making gestures for me to stand patient in my jar and wait.

“Wait?” I bellowed. “Wait for what?”

“Attendez le sorcier,” said Naser with a giggle. Then he and Daud ran out through the gray oblong that was the door to the outside.

“Wait for the wizard?” I repeated in mystification. “Wait for how long?”

Ibrahim lingered long enough to hold up some fingers for me to count. I peered through the gloom and saw that he had splayed the fingers of both hands.

“Ten?” I said. “Ten what?” He too edged backward toward the door, meanwhile closing his fingers and flicking them open again—four times. “Forty?” I said desperately. “Forty what? Quarante à propos de quoi?”

“Chihil ruz,” he said. “Quarante jours.” And he disappeared out the door.

“Wait for forty days?” I wailed, but got no answer.

All three boys were gone and, it seemed evident, not just to hide from me for a while. I was left alone in my pickling jar in the dark room, with the smell of the sesame oil in my nose, and the loathsome taste of figs and sesame in my mouth, and still a whirl of confusion in my mind. I tried hard to think what all this meant. Wait for the wizard? No doubt it was a boyish prank, something to do with Arab custom. The khane landlord Ishaq would probably explain it to me, with many a laugh at my gullibility. But what kind of prank could keep me immured for forty days? I would miss tomorrow’s ship and be marooned in Acre, and Ishaq would have ample time to explain Arab customs to me at leisure. Or would I have vanished in the clutches of the wizard? Did the infidel Muslim religion, unlike the rectitudinous Christian, allow wizards to practice their evil arts unmolested? I tried to imagine what a Muslim wizard would want with a bottled Christian. I hoped I would not find out. Would my father and uncle come looking for me before they sailed? Would they find me before the wizard did? Would anybody?

Just then somebody did. A shadowy shape, larger than any of the boys, loomed in the gray doorway. It paused there, as if waiting for its eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then moved slowly toward my jar. It was tall and bulky—and ominous. I felt as if I were contracting, or shriveling, inside the jar, and wished I could retract my head below the lid.

When the man got close enough, I saw that he wore clothes of the Arab style, except that he had no cords binding his headcloth. He had a curly red-gray beard like a sort of fungus, and he stared at me with bright blackberry eyes. When he spoke the traditional greeting of peace-be-with-you, I noticed even in my befuddlement that he pronounced it slightly differently from the Arab manner: “Shalom aleichem.”

“Are you the wizard?” I whispered, so frightened that I said it in Venetian. I cleared my throat and repeated it in French.

“Do I look like a wizard?” he demanded in a rasping voice.

“No,” I whispered, though I had no idea what a wizard ought to look like. I cleared my throat again and said, “You look more like someone I used to know.”

“And you,” he said scornfully, “seem to seek out smaller and ever smaller prison cells.”

“How did you know—?”

“I saw those three little mamzarim manhandle you in here. This place is well and infamously known.”

“I meant—”

“And I saw them leave again without you, just the three of them. You would not be the first fair-haired and blue-eyed lad to come in here and never come out again.”

“Surely there are not many hereabouts with eyes and hair not black.”

“Precisely. You are a rarity in these parts, and the oracle must speak through a rarity.”

I was already confused enough. I think I just blinked at him. He bent down out of my sight for a moment, and then reappeared, holding the leather bag that Naser must have dropped when he departed. The man reached into it and took out an oil-dripping fig. I nearly retched at sight of it.

“They find such a boy,” he said. “They bring him here and soak him in sesame oil, and they feed him only these oil-soaked figs. At the end of forty days and nights, he has become macerated as soft as a fig. So soft that his head can be easily lifted off his body.” He demonstrated, twisting the fig in his fingers so that, with a squishy noise just barely audible, it came in two.

“Whatever for?” I said breathlessly. I seemed to feel my body softening below the wooden lid, becoming waxy and malleable like the fig, already sagging, preparing to part from my neck stump with a squishy noise and sink slowly to rest on the bottom of the jar. “I mean, why kill a perfect stranger, and in such a way?”

“It does not kill him, so they say. It is an affair of black sorcery.” He dropped the bag and the pieces of fig and wiped his fingers on the hem of his gown. “At any rate, the head part of him goes on living.”

“What?”

“The wizard props the severed head in that niche in the wall yonder, on a comfortable bed of olivewood ashes. He burns incense before it, and chants magic words, and after a while the head speaks. On command, it will foretell famines or bounteous harvests, forthcoming wars or times of peace, all manner of useful prophecies like that.”

I began to laugh, at last realizing that he was merely joining in the prank that had been played on me, and prolonging it.

“Very well,” I said between laughs. “You have paralyzed me with terror, old cellmate. I am uncontrollably pissing and adulterating this fine oil. But now, enough. When I last saw you, Mordecai, I did not know you would flee this far from Venice. But you are here, and I am glad to see you, and you have had your joke. Now release me, and we will go and drink a qahwah together and talk of our adventures since last we met.” He did not move; he simply stood and looked sorrowfully at me. “Mordecai, enough!”

“My name is Levi,” he said. “Poor lad, you are already ensorceled to the point of derangement.”

“Mordecai, Levi, whoever you are!” I ranted, beginning to feel a touch of panic. “Lift this accursed lid and let me out!”

“I? I will not touch that terephah uncleanness,” he said, fastidiously taking a step backward. “I am not a filthy Arab. I am a Jew.”

My disquiet and anger and exasperation were beginning to clear my head, but they were not influencing me to be tactful. I said, “Did you come here, then, only to entertain me in my confinement? Are you going to leave me here for the idiot Arabs? Is a Jew as idiotically superstitious as they are?”

He grunted, “Al tidàg,” and left me. He trudged across the chamber and out through the gray doorway opening. I looked after him, appalled. Did al tidàg mean something like be-damned-to-you? He was probably my only hope of rescue, and I had insulted him.

But he came back almost immediately, and he was carrying a heavy bar of metal. “Al tidàg,” he said again, and then thought to translate: “Do not worry. I will get you out, as I am bidden, but I must do it without touching the uncleanness. Happily for you, I am a blacksmith, and my smithy is just across the way. This bar will do it. Stand firm, now, young Marco, so you do not fall when it breaks.”

He swung the bar and, at the moment it crashed against the jar, he leapt well to one side, so that his garments would not be defiled by the resultant cascade of oil. The jar shattered with a great noise, and I swayed unsteadily, as the pieces and all the oil fell away from me. The wooden lid suddenly weighed heavily on my neck. But, since I could now reach my hands to the upper surface of it, I quickly found and undid the catches that held it closed, and I dropped the wooden disk in the spreading pool of oil at my feet.

“Will you not get into trouble over this?” I asked, indicating the mess all about us. Very elaborately, Levi shrugged his shoulders, his hands and his fungoid eyebrows. I went on, “You called me by name, and you said something about having been bidden to rescue me from this danger.”

“Not from this danger specifically,” he said. “The word was merely to try to keep Marco Polo out of trouble. There were also some words of description—that you could easily be recognized by your proximity to the nearest available trouble.”

“That is interesting. The word from whom?”

“I have no idea. I gather that you once helped some Jew get out of a bad spot. And the proverb says that the reward of a mitzva is another mitzva.”

“Ah, as I suspected: old Mordecai Cartafilo.”

Levi said, almost peevishly, “That could be no Jew. Mordecai is a name from ancient Babylon. And Cartafilo is a gentile name.”

“He said he was a Jew, and so he seemed to be, and that was the name he used.”

“Next you will say that he wandered, as well.”

Puzzled, I said, “Well, he did tell me that he had traveled extensively.”

“Khakma,” he said, which rasping noise I took to be a word of derision. “That is a fable concocted by fabulists of the goyim. There is not one immortal wandering Jew. The Lamed-vav are mortal, but there are always thirty-six of them going secretly and helpfully about the world.”

I was disinclined to linger in that dark place while Levi argued about fables. I said, “You are a fine one to sneer at fabulists, after your ludicrous tale of wizards and talking heads.”

He gave me a long look, and scratched thoughtfully in his curly beard. “Ludicrous?” He held out to me his metal bar. “Here. I do not wish to put my feet in the oil. You break the next jar in the row.”

I hesitated for a moment. Even if this place was just an ordinary masjid house of worship, we had already considerably desecrated it. But then I thought: one jar, two jars, what matter? And I swung the bar as hard as I could, and the second jar broke with a brittle smash, and loosed its surge of sesame oil with a splash, and something else hit the ground with a thick, moist thud. I bent over to see it better, and then hastily recoiled, and said to Levi, “Come, let us go away.”

On the threshold I found my hose where I had discarded them, and I gratefully put them on again. I did not mind that they got instantly soaked with the oil clinging to me; the rest of my garb already was sopping and clammy. I thanked Levi for his having rescued me, and for his explication of Arabian sorcery. He bade me “lechàim and bon voyage,” and cautioned me not to depend on the relayed word of a nonexistent Jew to keep me forever out of every trouble. Then he went off to his forge and I hastened back toward the inn, looking repeatedly over my shoulder in case I should be seen and pursued by the three Arab boys or the wizard for whom they had captured me. I no longer believed the adventure to have been a prank, and I no longer contemned the sorcery as a fable.

When Levi watched me break that second jar, he did not ask me what it was I bent to peer at among its shards, and I did not try to tell him, and I cannot tell it clearly even yet. The place was very dark, as I have said. But the object that fell onto the ground with that sickening wet plop was a human body. What I saw and can tell about it is that the corpse was naked, and had been a male, not full grown to manhood. Also it lay oddly on the ground, like a sack made of skin, a sack that had been emptied of its contents. I mean it looked more than soft, it looked flaccid, as if somehow all its bones had been extracted, or dissolved. The only other thing I could see was that the body had no head. I have never since that time been able to eat figs or anything flavored with sesame.

5

THE next afternoon, my father paid our bill to landlord Ishaq, who accepted the money with the words, “May Allah smother you with gifts, Sheikh Folo, and repay every generous act of yours.” And my uncle distributed to the khane servants the gratuities of smaller money, which are in all the East called by the Farsi word bakhshish. He gave the largest amount to the hammam rubber who had introduced him to the mumum ointment, and that young man thanked him with the words, “May Allah conduct you through every hazard and keep you ever smiling.” And all the staff, Ishaq and the servants together, stood in the inn door to wave after us with many other cries:

“May Allah flatten the road before you!”

“May you travel as upon a silken carpet!” and the like.

So our expedition proceeded northward up the Levantine coast, and I congratulated myself on having got out of Acre intact, and I trusted that I had had my one and last encounter with sorcery.

That short sea voyage was unremarkable, as we stayed in sight of the shore the whole way, and that shore is everywhere much the same to look at: dun-colored dunes with dun-colored hills behind them, the occasional dun-colored mud hut or village of mud huts almost imperceptible against the landscape. The cities we sailed past were slightly more distinguishable, since each was marked by a Crusaders’ castle. The most noticeable from the sea was the city of Beirut, it being sizable and set upon an outjutting point of land, but I judged it to be inferior, as a city, even to Acre.

My father and uncle occupied themselves on shipboard with making lists of the equipment and supplies they should have to procure in Suvediye. I occupied myself mainly in chatting with the crew; although most of them were Englishmen, they of course spoke the Sabir of travelers and traders. The Brothers Guglielmo and Nicolò occupied themselves in talking to each other, and talking endlessly, about the iniquities of Acre and how thankful they were to God for His having let them decamp from there. Of all the complaints they might have aired in regard to Acre, they seemed most exercised about the unchaste and licentious behavior of the resident Clarissas and Carmelitas. But, from what I overheard of their lamentations, they sounded more like hurt husbands or rejected suitors of those nuns than like their brothers in Christ. Lest I sound disrespectful of a noble calling, I will say no more about my impressions of the two friars. For they deserted our expedition before we got any farther than Suvediye.

That city was a poor and small place. To judge from the ruins and remains of a much larger city standing around it, Suvediye had gradually been reduced from what grandeur it may have had in Roman times, or perhaps earlier, when Alexander had come its way. The reason for its diminishment was not far to seek. Our own ship, not a large one, had to anchor well out in the little bay, and we passengers had to be brought ashore in a skiff, because the harbor was so badly silted and shallowed by the outflow of the Orontes River there. I do not know if Suvediye still is a functioning seaport, but at that time it clearly did not have very many more years in which to be so.

For all the city’s puniness and poor prospects, Suvediye’s inhabitant Armeniyans seemed to regard it as the equal of a Venice or a Bruges. Though only one other ship was anchored there when ours arrived, the port officials behaved as if their harbor roads were thronged with vessels, and all requiring the most scrupulous attention. A fat and greasy Armeniyan inspector came bustling aboard, his arms laden with papers, while we five passengers were in the process of debarking. He insisted on counting us—five—and all our packs and bundles, and entered the numbers in a ledger. Then he let us go, and began to pester the English captain for the information with which to fill out innumerable other manifests of cargo, origin, destination and so forth.

There was no Crusaders’ castle in Suvediye, so we five—pushing our way through the city’s throngs of beggars—went directly to the palace of the Ostikan, or governor, to present our letters from Prince Edward. I charitably call the Ostikan’s residence a palace; it was in fact a rather shabby building, but it was respectable in extent and two stories in height. After numerous entry guards and reception clerks and under-officials had severally demonstrated their importance, each of them delaying us with an officious show of fuss, we were finally conducted into the palace throne room. I charitably call it a throne room, for the Ostikan sat on no imposing throne, but lolled on what is called a daiwan, which is only a heap of cushions. In spite of the day’s warmth, he repeatedly rubbed his hands over a brazier of coals before him. In a corner, a young man sat on the floor, using a large knife to cut his toenails. Those nails must have been exceedingly horny; each gave a loud thwack as it was cut off, and then went whiz and fell elsewhere in the room with an audible click.

The Ostikan’s name was Hampig Bagratunian, but his name was the only wonderful thing about him. He was small and wizened and, like all Armeniyans, he had no back to his head. It was flat there, as if his head had been designed to hang on a wall. He did not look at all like a governor of anything, and he was as clerkly as his clerks in tongue-clucking fussiness. Unlike an Arab or a Jew, who obey their religions’ injunctions to entertain strangers with a good grace, the Christian Armeniyan received us with unconcealed annoyance.

When he had read the letter, he said in Sabir, “Just because I am a fellow monarch”—casually inflating his rank to regality—“any other prince seems to think he can rid himself of a bother by shunting it on to me.”

We politely said nothing. A toenail went thwack, whiz, click.

Ostikan Hampig continued, “Here you arrive on the very eve of my son’s wedding”—he indicated the toenail cutter—“when I have countless other things to attend to, and guests coming from all over the Levant, trying not to get themselves slaughtered by the Mamluks on their way, and all the festivities to arrange, and …” He went on listing the botherations to which our arrival had added another.

His son carved off a final clamorous toenail, then looked up and said, “Wait, Father.”

The Ostikan, interrupted in his recital, said, “Yes, Kagig?”

Kagig got up from where he sat, but did not quite rise erect. Instead, he began to roam about the room, bent over, as if to give us a good view of the flat back of his head. He picked up something, and I realized that he was for some reason retrieving his pared bits of toenail. While he worked, he said over his shoulder to the Ostikan, “These strangers brought two churchmen with them.”

“Yes, so they did,” his father said impatiently. “What of it?”

One of the toenail crescents had landed near my own foot; I picked it up and gave it to Kagig. He nodded and, seeming satisfied that he had all the bits, he sat down beside his father on the daiwan, brushing the horny scraps from his hand into the brazier. “There,” he said. “No sorcerer will use those to conjure against me.” The toenails seemed still determined not to die quietly: they sizzled and popped among the coals.

“What about these churchmen, my boy?” Hampig inquired again, paternally stroking his son’s backless head.

“Well, we have old Dimirjian to conduct my nuptial mass,” Kagig said languidly. “But every common peasant has one priest to do the marrying of him. Suppose I had three …”

“Hm,” said his father, turning his eyes to the Brothers Nicolò and Guglielmo; they stared haughtily back at him. “Yes, that would add to the pomp of the occasion.” To my father and uncle he said, “You may not be unwelcome, after all. Are these clerics empowered to confer the sacrament of matrimony?”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” said my father. “These are Friars Preachers.”

“They could serve the mass as acolytes suffragan to the Metropolitan Dimirjian. And they should feel honored to participate. My son is marrying a pshi—a Princess—of the Adighei. What you call the Circassians.”

“A people famous for their beauty,” said Uncle Mafìo. “But … Christian?”

“My son’s betrothed has taken instruction from the Metropolitan Dimirjian himself, and Confirmation and First Communion. The Princess Seosseres is now a Christian.”

“And a beautiful Christian indeed,” said Kagig, smacking his liver-like lips. “People stop in their footsteps when they see her—even Muslims and other infidels—and bow their heads and thank the Creator for having created the Pshi Seosseres.”

“Well?” Hampig said to us. “The wedding is tomorrow.”

My father said, “I am sure the frati will be honored to participate. Your Excellency has only to bid me, and I will bid them serve.”

The two frati looked somewhat indignant at not having been personally consulted during the conversation, but they raised no objection.

“Good,” said the Ostikan. “We shall have three ecclesiastics at the nuptials, and two of them foreigners from afar. Yes, that will impress my guests and my subjects. On that condition, then, messieurs, you will—”

“We will remain here in Suvediye for the royal wedding,” said Uncle Mafìo, smoothly dropping in the adjective. “Of course, we will desire to continue our journey immediately afterward. And so, of course, Your Excellency will meantime have helped to expedite our procurement of mounts and supplies.”

“Er … yes … of course,” said Hampig, looking fussed at having been given some conditions in return. He rang a bell by his hand, and one of the under-officials entered. “This is my palace steward, messieurs. Arpad, you will show these gentlemen to quarters here in the palace, then introduce the friars to the Metropolitan, then accompany the gentlemen to the market and render whatever assistance they may require.” He turned again to us. “Very well, then. I welcome you to Suvediye, messieurs, and I formally invite you to the royal wedding and all the attendant festivities.”

So Arpad led us to two chambers on the upper floor, one for us and one for the friars. As soon as we had unpacked enough of our belongings for a brief stay, we went downstairs again and handed the Brothers over to the Metropolitan Dimirjian. He was a large old man, the backlessness of whose head was less remarkable than what could be seen on the forward side of it: a massive nose, a weighty underslung jaw, overslung eyebrows and long fleshy ears. When he had taken the friars off to rehearse them in the morrow’s ritual, my father, my uncle and I went with Steward Arpad to the Suvediye marketplace.

“You might as well get used to calling it the bazàr,” he said helpfully. “That is the Farsi word used from here to the eastward. You are buying at a good time, for the wedding has attracted vendors from everywhere, hawking every conceivable thing, so you will have ample choice of goods. But I beg that you will let me assist you in the bargaining for your selections. Gods knows the Arab merchants are tricksters and swindlers, but the Armeniyans are so much shiftier that only a fellow Armeniyan dares deal with them. The Arabs would merely cheat you naked. The Armeniyans would flay you of your very skins.”

“The chief thing we need is riding animals,” said my uncle. “They can carry us and what goods we have, as well.”

“I suggest horses,” said Arpad. “You may wish to change them later for camels, when you have much desert to cross. But for now, since your next destination is Baghdad, no hard journey, horses will be more speedy, and much more easy to handle than camels. Mules would be even better, but I doubt that you wish to spend what they would cost.”

In much of the East, as in civilized Europe, the mule, because it is so gentle and amenable and intelligent, is the preferred mount of men and ladies of high degree—meaning the very rich—so a mule breeder unblushingly asks exorbitant prices for his animals. My father and uncle agreed that they did not care to pay such prices, that horses would have to do for us.

So we visited the several rope corrals set up around the outskirts of the bazàr, where could be bought all sorts of riding and pack animals: mules, asses, horses of every breed from the exquisite Arabian to the heftiest drafter, and also camels and their cousins, the sleek racing dromedaries. After examining many horses, my father and uncle and the steward settled on five—two geldings and three mares—of good appearance and conformation, not so heavy as the draft animals but nowhere near so elegant as the fine-boned Arabians.

Buying five horses meant five separate dickerings. So there in the Suvediye bazàr, for the first time, I witnessed a procedure that I was eventually to become weary of, for I had to endure it in every bazàr of the East. I mean the curious Eastern manner of transacting a purchase. Although the steward Arpad kindly did it for us that time, it was a prolonged and tedious affair.

Arpad and the horse trader each extended a hand to the other, letting their long sleeves drape over the meeting hands to make them invisible to anyone looking on—and in any bazàr there are always countless loiterers with nothing better to do than to watch other people’s business dealings. Then Arpad and the trader each wiggled and tapped his hidden fingers against the other’s hidden hand, the trader signaling the price he wanted, Arpad the price he would give. Although I learned the signals and remember them well, I will not set them out in all their intricacy. Suffice it to say that one man first taps to indicate either single digits or tens or hundreds, and thus, by subsequently tapping thrice, say, indicates either three or thirty or three hundred. And so on. The system allows the signaling even of fractions, and even of the different values when buyer and merchant must deal in different currencies, say dinars and ducats.

By exchanging the taps, the horse trader gradually reduced his demand, and the steward gradually increased his offer. In this way, they worked their way through all the reasonable prices and unreasonable extortions conceivable. In the East, the various sorts of prices even have names: the great price, the small price, the city price, the beautiful price, the fixed price, the good price—and an infinity of others. When they reached a mutually acceptable deal for the first horse, they had to repeat the process for each of the four others, and in each case the steward had to consult at intervals with us, not to exceed his authority or our purse.

Any of those sessions could easily have been conducted in spoken words, but that is never done, for the secrecy of the hand-and-sleeve method benefits both buyer and seller, since no one else ever knows the original asking price or the final price agreed on. Thus a buyer sometimes can drive a merchant down to a figure the merchant would be ashamed to speak aloud, but he may finally sell at that price, knowing that any next prospective buyer will not know of it and cannot take advantage of it. Or a buyer, so eager to acquire some item that he will not haggle much over the price, can pay it knowing that he will not be jeered by the bystanders for a spendthrift fool.

Our five transactions were not completed until the sun was almost down, leaving us not time enough that day even to buy saddles for the horses, not to mention the many other necessities on our lists. We had to return to the palace, to visit its hammam and get thoroughly clean before donning our best clothes for the evening meal. For it was to be a banquet, Arpad told us, the traditional all-male celebration on the eve of a wedding. While we were being rubbed and pummeled in the hammam, my father said anxiously to my uncle:

“Mafìo, we must present some sort of celebratory gift to the Ostikan or his son or his son’s bride, if not a gift to each of them. I cannot think what might be suitable. Worse, I cannot think what we might afford. Our budget was much depleted by the purchase of those mounts, and we have many other things yet to buy.”

“No fear. I had already given that some thought,” said my uncle, sounding confident as usual. “I looked into the kitchen where the banquet is being prepared. For color and condiment, the cooks are using what they told me was safflower. I tasted it and—can you imagine?—it is nothing but common càrtamo, bastard zafràn. They have none of the real thing. So we will give the Ostikan a brick of our good golden zafràn, and it should delight him more than the golden trinkets everyone else will be giving.”

For all its decrepitude, the palace had a commendably large dining hall, and that night it needed it, because just the males among the Ostikan’s guests made a tremendous crowd. They were mostly Armeniyans and Arabs—the former including the “royal” Bagratunian family and its relations, from close to remote; plus the palace and government officials; plus what I suppose passed for the nobility of Suvediye; plus legions of visitors from elsewhere in Lesser Armeniya and the rest of the Levant. The Arabs seemed all to be of the Avedi tribe, which must have been a huge tribe, for all the Arabs claimed to be sheikhs of high or lower degree. My father, my uncle, the two Dominicans and myself were not the only foreigners, for all of the bride’s Circassian family had come south from the Caucasus Mountains for the occasion. I might say that they were—as is reputed of all Circassians—a strikingly handsome people, and by far the best looking men in the company that night.

The banquet actually consisted of two separate meals, served simultaneously, each meal comprising numberless courses. Those courses served to us and the Armeniyan Christians were the most various, because they were not limited by any infidel superstitions. The courses set before the Muslim guests had to exclude the many foods their Quran forbids them to eat—pork, of course, and shellfish, and every meat from every sort of creature that lives in a hole, whether a hole in the ground, a hole in a tree or a hole in the underwater mud.

I paid no particular attention to what the Arab guests were given to eat, but I recall that our Christian main course was a young camel calf stuffed with a lamb which was stuffed with a goose which was stuffed with minced pork, pistachios, raisins, pine seeds and spices. There were also stuffed aubergines and stuffed marrows and stuffed vine leaves. For drink, there were sharbats made with still-frozen snow, brought from God knows where and by God knows what swift means and at God knows what cost. The sharbats were of different navors—lemon, rose, quince, peach—and all perfumed with nard and frankincense. For sweets, there were pastries rich with butter and honey and as crisp as honeycombs, and a paste called halwah, made of powdered almonds, and lime tarts, and little cakes unbelievably made of rose petals and orange blossoms, and a conserve of dates stuffed with almonds and cloves. There was also the uniquely wonderful qahwah. There were wines of many different colors, and other intoxicating liquors.

The Christians speedily got drunk on those drinks, and the Arabs and Circassians were not far behind them. It is well known that the Muslims’ Quran forbids them to drink wine, but it is not so well known that many Muslims observe that stricture precisely to the letter of the law. I will explain. Since wine must have been the only intoxicant in the world at the time the Prophet Muhammad wrote the Quran, it did not occur to him to proscribe every inebriating substance that might subsequently be discovered or invented. Thus many Muslims, even the most rigidly religious in other respects, feel at liberty—especially on festive occasions—to drink any intoxicant not, like wine, made from grapes, and also to chew the herb they variously call hashish, banj, bhang and ghanja, which is quite as potently deranging as any wine.

Since that night’s banquet was well provided with vivacious drinks never dreamed of by the Prophet—a sparkling urine-colored liquid called abijau, which is brewed from grain, and araq, which is wrung from dates, and something called medhu, which is an essence of honey, and also gummy wads of hashish for chewing—the Arabs and Circassians, except for a few elderly holy men among them, became just as addled and jolly and argumentative and lachrymose as did all the Christians. Well, not all the Christians; my uncle got notably bleary and inclined to sing, but my father and I and the friars abstained.

There was a band of musicians—or acrobats, it was hard to say which, for they did the most astonishing capers and tricks and contortions while they played. Their instruments were bagpipes and drums and long-necked lutes, and I would have called their music a dreadful caterwauling, except that I suppose it was admirable that they could play at all while they were doing somersaults and walking on their hands and bounding on and off each other’s shoulders.

The guests knelt or squatted or half-reclined on daiwan pillows around the dining cloths which covered every square inch of the floor, except in the narrow aisles where the servers and servants moved about in a sort of crouch. The guests got up, one or a group of them after another, to carry to the Ostikan and his son, who sat on a dais raised a little above the rest of the company, the gifts they had brought for the occasion. They knelt and bowed their heads and raised up in their hands ewers and platters and dishes of gold and silver, and jeweled brooches and tiaras and tulband medallions, and fabrics of silk threaded with gold, and many other fine things.

I discovered that night that, in the lands of the East, the recipient of a gift must give in return not just thanks but a gift at least as rich as that which he is given. I was to see that exchange take place often and often thereafter, and to see many a donor walk away with something incalculably more valuable than what he gave. But that night I was more amused than impressed by the practice. For the Ostikan Hampig, having the soul of a clerk, complied with the custom simply by giving to each new donor some object from the pile of valuables he had been given by earlier givers. It amounted to nothing more than a brisk shuffle of the gifts, so that, in effect, the guests would all go home with the same goods they had brought—only each would go home with someone else’s.

Hampig made only one departure from that routine, when it came our turn to get up and advance to the dais. As my uncle had predicted, the Ostikan was so overjoyed to receive our brick of zafràn that he bade his son Kagig get up and run to fetch something extraordinary to give in return. Kagig came back with three objects that looked—as a brick of zafràn does at first glance—rather commonplace. They appeared to be merely three small leather purses. But when Hampig handed them reverently to my father, we saw that they were the cods of musk deer, tightly packed with the precious grains of musk obtained from those deer. The three deer scrota were provided with long rawhide strings, for a reason which Hampig explained:

“If you know the value of these cods, messieurs, you will tie them behind your own testicles, and wear them there, hidden for safekeeping during your journey.”

My father gave sincere thanks for the gift, and my uncle made a drunkenly fulsome speech of gratitude that might have gone on endlessly, except that he got to coughing. I did not realize how really precious that gift was, and how untypical of the clerkly Hampig, until my father told me later that the value of the three cods full of musk was easily equal to what we had spent that day in the bazàr.

When we made our last bows to the Ostikan and left the dais, his son came lurching along, to join us at our cloth. It was of course quite far from the dais of honor, down among some barbarous-looking lesser guests, perhaps some poor country relations. Kagig, who was by then as drunk as anyone else in the hall, told us he wished to sit with us for a while, because his soon-to-be bride resembled us more than she did him or any of his people. Being a Circassian, Seosseres was fair of skin, he said, with chestnut hair and features of incomparable beauty. He went on at great length about her beauty: “More beautiful than the moon!” and her gentleness: “Gentler than the west wind!” and her sweetness: “Sweeter than the fragrance of the rose!” and her various other virtues:

“She is fourteen years of age, which may be somewhat overripe for marriage, but she is as virgin as any unpierced and unstrung pearl. She is educated and can talk well on a number of subjects about which I, even I, know nothing. Philosophy and logic, the canons of the great physician ibn Sina, the poems of Majnun and Laila, the mathematics called geometry and al-jebr …”

I think we listeners were rightly doubtful that the Pshi Seosseres could be so sublime. If so, why would she be willing to marry an uncouth Armeniyan with liver lips and no back to his head and a dedication to keeping his toenails safe from sorcerers? And I think our dubiety must have shown in our faces, and Kagig must have seen it, for he finally got up, staggered from the hall and clumped upstairs to fetch the Princess from her sequestered chamber. When he dragged her down, hauling on one of her wrists, she was trying maidenly to hold back, yet trying also not to put up an unwifely show of fight. He brought her into the hall and stood her in front of the company, and stripped off the chador that covered her face.

If all the guests had not been occupied with the viands before them, and most of them sodden with drink, probably someone would have prevented Kagig’s act of boorishness. The girl’s forced entry certainly caused a muttering in the hall, loudest and angriest among her male relations. Several Muslim holy men covered their faces, and several Christian elders averted theirs. But the rest of us, while we might deplore Kagig’s breach of good behavior, were able to be pleasured by the result of it. For the Pshi Seosseres was indeed an outstanding representative of her famously handsome people.

Her hair was long and wavy, her figure breathtakingly superb, her face so lovely that its light adornments of al-kohl around the eyes and red berry juice on the lips were quite unnecessary. The girl’s fair skin blushed pink in her embarrassment, and she only briefly let us see her qahwah-brown eyes before she lowered them and kept them lowered. Still we could gaze upon her unblemished brow and long lashes and perfect nose and winsome mouth and delicate chin. Kagig held her standing there for at least a full minute, while he made clownish bows and gestures of presentation. Then, as soon as he let go her wrist, she fled the hall and disappeared from our sight.

The Armeniyans, it is said, were once good men and valiant, and did dauntless deeds of arms. But in our time they are but poor simulacra of men, and good at nothing, unless it be drinking and bazàr-cheating. So I had heard, and so the Ostikan’s son demonstrated. I do not mean his exposure to the male banqueters of his bride-to-be; I mean what happened afterward.

When Seosseres had gone, Kagig flopped down again at our cloth, between me and my father, and looked around with a self-satisfied smirk, and asked of all within hearing, “What did you think of her, eh?” The girl’s male relations sitting nearby responded only with black looks; other men in our vicinity merely murmured respectful remarks of praise. Kagig preened as if they had been complimenting him, and proceeded to get even more drunk and even more vile. His continued eulogies on his Princess began to dwell less on the beauty of her face than on the attractiveness of some other parts of her, and his smirks became open leers, and his liver lips drooled. Before long, he was so besotted with wine and lust that he was muttering, “Why wait? Why should I wait for old Dimirjian to croak words over us? I am her husband in all but title. Tonight, tomorrow night, what difference … ?”

And suddenly he unfolded himself from the pillows and staggered again out of the hall and lumbered loudly up the stairs. As I have said, the palace was of no very sturdy construction. So anyone in the hall who bothered to direct an ear—as I did—could hear what happened next. However, none of the other guests, not even the Ostikan or the Circassians who might have been most interested, seemed to notice Kagig’s abrupt departure or the subsequent sounds. I did, and so did my still sober father and our two frati. Listening carefully, I heard distant thumps and little cries and indistinct commands and thin protests and then some more thumps that became a regular and insistent pulse of thumps. My father and the friars rose up from the cloth, and so did I, and we all helped Uncle Mafìo get up, and the five of us made our salutations to the host Hampig—who was drunk and quite uncaring if we left or stayed—and we departed to our own quarters.

We Polos spent the next morning in the bazàr again, and again accompanied by the steward Arpad. It was heroic of him to be still assisting us, for he clearly was suffering from the bibulous night before. But, headache notwithstanding, he performed capably as our hand-and-sleeve bargainer in another tedious series of interminable transactions. We bought saddles and saddle panniers and bridles and blankets, and had them and our horses delivered by bazàr boys to the palace stables, to be ready for our decamping. We bought leather water bags, and many sacks of dried fruits and raisins, and large goat cheeses sheathed against spoilage by heavy wax coatings. At Arpad’s suggestion, we bought a thing called a kamàl. It was only a palm-sized rectangle of wood strips, like a small and empty picture frame, with a long string depending from it.

“Any journeyer,” said Arpad, “can determine from the sun or the stars the directions of north, east, west and south. You are going eastward, and you will be able to judge each day’s progress eastward by your traveling pace. But it will sometimes be difficult to judge how far north or south of due east you have gone, and that is what the kamàl can tell you.”

My father and uncle made noises of surprise and interest. Arpad tenderly held his head in both hands, for it evidently hurt him when noises were made.

“The Arabs are infidels,” he said, “and unworthy of respect or admiration, but they did invent this useful device. Here, you will have the use of it, young Monsieur Marco, and I will show you how. Tonight, when the stars come out, you face north and hold the kamàl up at arm’s length. Move it back and forth from your face until the lower edge of the frame rests on the northern horizon and the North Star sits just on top of the frame. Then tie a knot in the string so that when you hold the knot in your teeth the string is at such a length that you always hold the rectangle out at that same distance from your eye.”

“Very well, Steward Arpad,” I said obediently. “Then what?”

“As you travel eastward from here, the land is almost all flat, so you will always have a more or less level horizon. Each night, hold the kamàl out to the length of the string’s knot and position the rectangle’s lower bar on the northern horizon. If the North Star is still on the upper bar, you are due east of Suvediye here. If the star is perceptibly above the wooden bar, you have veered to the north of east. If the star is below that bar, you have wandered to the south.”

“Cazza beta!” my uncle exclaimed in admiration.

“The kamàl can do even more,” said the steward. “Put a tag marked Suvediye on that first knot you make, young Marco. Then, when you reach Baghdad, do the same positioning of the rectangle away from or closer to your face, so that it just fits between the northern horizon and the North Star, and tie another knot in the string at that distance, and mark the knot Baghdad. If you continue to do that, making and marking a new horizon-knot for each destination as you reach it, you will always know—as you go on eastward—whether you are north or south of your last stopping place, or any of your previous stopping places.”

Deeming the kamàl a most useful addition to our equipment, we gladly paid for it—after Arpad and the merchant had done their long bargaining and set the price at a laughably few copper shahis. We went on to buy numerous other things we thought we would need on the road. And, thanks to the Ostikan’s musk-cod replenishment of our budget, we even bought a few extra comforts and small luxuries that we might otherwise have done without.

Not until that afternoon did we see again any of the other participants in the previous night’s banquet. That was when we all gathered in Suvediye’s Church of San Gregorio for the nuptial mass. To judge from the haggard faces in the congregation, and an occasional subdued groan, most of the men were, like Arpad, still feeling the effects of their indulgence at that banquet. The bridegroom-to-be looked worst of all. I might have expected him to look satisfied or smug or guilty, but he merely looked more lumpish than usual. The bride-to-be was so heavily veiled that I could not see her expression, but her handsome mother and the various other female relations all exhibited extremely angry eyes glaring through the slits of their chador veils.

The wedding went off without incident, and our two frati, almost unrecognizable in the garish vestments of the Armeniyan Church, ably supported the Metropolitan in his conduct of the service. Afterwards, the wedding party and the whole congregation trooped from the church to the palace again for another banquet. This time, of course, the female guests—all of them except the female Muslims—also were allowed to partake. Again there were entertainments: the tumblers with their music, and conjurers and singers and dancers. While the evening was yet young, the newly married couple—he looking pained and she looking more woebegone than even a bride of that lout should have looked—had their hands joined by the Metropolitan and, after he said an Armeniyan prayer over them, trudged away upstairs to their bridal chamber, trailed by some halfhearted rude jesting and cheering from the guests.

This time there was enough noise in the hall—the musicians and dancers making most of it—that not even my inquisitive ear could catch any sounds identifiable as denoting the consummation of the marriage. But after a while there came a number of heavy thuds and something suspiciously like a distant scream, audible even above the music. And suddenly, there came Kagig again, his clothes disheveled, as if they had been once doffed and then thrown on again just anyhow. He came stamping angrily down the stairs and into the hall. He strode straight to the nearest jar of wine and, disdaining a cup, drained it to the vertical.

I was not the only one who watched his entrance. But I think the other guests, astounded at seeing a husband deserting his bride on their wedding night, at first tried to pretend he was not there among them. However, he began loudly to curse and swear—or that is what the Armeniyan words sounded like to me—and none could ignore his presence. The Circassians again began to growl, and the Ostikan Hampig cried anxiously something like, “What on earth is wrong, Kagig?”

“Wrong!” the young man exclaimed—or so I was told later; he was too distraught to speak anything but Armeniyan. “My new wife is revealed to be a harlot, that is what is wrong!”

Several people ejaculated protests and refutations, and the Circassians exclaimed what was probably “Liar!” and “How dare you?”

“Do you think I could not tell?” Kagig raged, as I was later told. “She wept all during the ceremony, behind her veil, for she knew what I was soon to discover! She wept when we went together to our chamber, for the moment of revelation was at hand! She wept as she and I undressed, for she was at the brink of her perfidy’s disclosure! She wept even more loudly when I embraced her. And at the crucial moment, she did not give the cry that must be cried! So I investigated, and I could feel no maidenhead in her, and I saw no spot of blood upon the bed, and—”

One of Seosseres’ male relatives interrupted him, shouting, “Oh, mongrel dog of an Armeniyan, do you not remember?”

“I remember that I was promised a virgin! Not your shouting nor her weeping can change the fact that she had been had by some man before me!”

“You accursed defamer! You nothing!” shouted the Circassians, frothing from the lips. “Our sister Seosseres has never been near a man before!” They were all trying to get at Kagig, but other guests were holding them back.

“Then she has made love to a phallocrypt!” Kagig shouted wildly. “A tent peg or a cucumber or one of those haramlik carvings! But that is the only kind of thing that will ever love her again!”

“Oh, putridity! Oh, spew!” the Circassians bellowed, struggling against the holders-back. “Have you harmed our sister?”

“I should have!” he grumbled. “I should have cut out her duplicious tongue and thrust it up between her legs. I should have boiled oil and poured it into the defiled hole. I should have nailed her alive to the palace gate.”

At that, several of his own relatives seized him and shook him roughly, demanding, “Never mind that! What did you do?”

He fought loose of them, and petulantly shrugged his clothes back into an approximation of place. “I did only what a cuckolded husband is entitled to do, and I shall sue for annulment of this mock marriage!”

Not just the Circassians, but also the Arabs and Armeniyans shouted at him every kind of filthy name and revilement. There was so much commotion and tearing of hair and beards and rending of garments that it was several minutes before anyone could collect himself to speak coherently and tell the detestable husband what, in his drunkenness, he had done and then forgotten. It was his father, the Ostikan Hampig, who, weeping, told him :

“Oh, unfortunate Kagig, it was you who deflowered the maiden! Last night, on your wedding eve. You thought it would be clever and amusing to anticipate your husbandly rights. You went upstairs and forced her to bed, and you boasted of it afterward in this very room. It cost me dearly to persuade these her people not to slay you and anticipate her widowhood. The Princess is guiltless of any sin. It was you! You yourself!”

The cries in the hall redoubled:

“Pig!”

“Carrion!”

“Putrescence!”

And Kagig turned pale and his thick lips twitched, and for the first time in my knowledge of him he acted like a man. He showed genuine chagrin and he called for retribution as if he meant it, crying, “May the coals of Hell lie hot upon my head! I truly loved the beautiful Seosseres, and I have cut off her nose and her lips!”

6

MY father plucked at my sleeve, and he and I and my uncle slipped discreetly through the roiling crowd and out of the dining hall.

“This is not bread to my teeth,” said my father, frowning. “The Ostikan is in bad trouble, and any sovereign in trouble can make things trebly troublous for everyone around him.”

I said, “Surely he cannot blame us for anything.”

“When the head hurts, the whole body may suffer. I think it best that we get our horses loaded for a departure at first light. Let us go to our chamber and start packing.”

There we were joined by the two Dominicans, who spoke loudly of their nausea and disgust at what Kagig had done, as if only they of us all had sensibilities to be offended.

“Ho ho,” said Uncle Mafìo without humor. “These are fellow Christians. You have yet to meet some real barbarians.”

“That is what most disturbs us,” said Brother Guglielmo. “We understand that such horrendous cruelties are common practices in farther Tartary.”

My father remarked placidly that he had known of atrocities having been committed in the West, as well.

“Nevertheless,” said Brother Nicolò, “we fear that we could not competently minister to such monsters as you would have us go among. We wish to be excused from our preaching mission.”

“Would you now?” My uncle coughed and hawked and spat. “You wish to desert before we are even underway? Well, wish all you like. We have committed ourselves, and so have you.”

Brother Guglielmo said frostily, “Perhaps Fra Nico did not put it strongly enough. We are not asking your permission, Messeri, we are telling you our decision. The conversion of such raw savages would require more—more authority than we possess. And the Scriptures say: Turn away thy foot from evil. He that touches pitch shall be defiled with it. We decline to accompany you any farther.”

“You could not have supposed that this would be an easy or enjoyable mission,” said my father. “As the old saying has it, nobody goes to Heaven on a cushion.”

“A cushion? Fichèvelo!” boomed my uncle, thereby suggesting a unique use for a cushion. “We have paid good money to buy horses for these two manfroditi!”

“Calling us filthy names is not likely to persuade us,” said Brother Nicolò with hauteur. “In the manner of the Apostle Paolo, we do shun profane and vain babblings. The ship which brought us here is now preparing to sail on to Cyprus, and we will be aboard.”

My uncle would have blustered on, probably using still more words that sacerdoti seldom get to hear, but my father gestured him to silence, saying:

“We wanted emissaries of the Church to prove to Kubilai Khan the worth and superiority of Christianity over other religions. These sheep in priestly clothing would hardly be the best examples to show him. Go to your ship, Brothers, and God go with you.”

“And God and you go quickly!” snarled my uncle. When they had gathered up their belongings and left the chambers, he grumbled, “Those two merely seized upon our venture as an excuse to get away from the wicked women of Acre. Now they welcome this ugly incident here as an excuse to get away from us. We were bidden to bring a hundred priests, and we got two spineless old zitelle. Now we do not even have them.”

“Well, it is less hurtful losing the two than a hundred,” said my father. “The proverb says it is better to fall from a window than from the roof.”

“I can bear losing those two,” said Uncle Mafìo. “But now what? Do we go on? Without any clerics for the Khan?”

“We promised him we would return,” said my father. “And we have already been long away. If we do not go back, the Khan will lose faith in any Westerner’s word. He may bar the gates against all traveling merchants, including us, and we are merchants before anything else. We have no priests to take, but we do have enough capital—our zafràn and Hampig’s musk—that we can multiply it yonder into an estimable fortune. I say yes, let us go on. We shall simply tell Kubilai that our Church was in disarray during this papal interregnum. It is true enough.”

“I concur,” said Uncle Mafìo. “We go on. But what about this sprout?”

They both looked at me.

“He cannot return yet to Venice,” my father mused. “And the English ship is sailing on to England. But he could change at Cyprus to some vessel headed for Constantinople … .”

I said quickly, “I will not sail even to Cyprus with those two poltroon Dominicans. I might be tempted to do them some injury, and that would be a sacrilege, and that would imperil my hope of Heaven.”

Uncle Mafìo laughed and said, “But if we leave him here, and those Circassians start a blood feud with the Armeniyans, Marco may get to Heaven sooner than one might have hoped.”

My father sighed and said to me, “You will come with us as far as Baghdad. There we will seek out a merchant train headed westward by way of Constantinople. You will go to visit your Uncle Marco. You can either stay with him until we return or, if you hear that a new Doge has succeeded Tiepolo, you can take ship for Venice.”

I think only we, of all the people then inhabiting Hampig’s palace, even tried to sleep that night. And we slept but little, for the whole building kept shaking to the tread of heavy feet and the shouting of angry voices. The Circassian guests had all put on clothes of the sky-blue color they affect for mourning, but evidently they were unmournfully storming about the building, threatening to wreak some vengeance for the mutilation of their Seosseres, and the Armeniyans were as loudly trying to placate them, or at least shout them down. The turmoil was still undiminished when we rode out of the palace stable yard, eastward into the dawn. I do not know what finally became of the people we left behind there: whether the two craven friars got safely away to Cyprus, or whether the wretched Bagratunians ever did suffer any retaliation from the Princess’s people. I have never heard of any of them since that day. And on that day I truthfully was not worrying about them, but about staying in my saddle.

I had never in my life been transported by any conveyance other than water craft. So my father bridled and saddled my mare for me, and made me watch the procedure, telling me that I should have to do that job myself thereafter. Then he showed me how to mount, and the proper side of the animal from which to do it. I imitated his demonstration. I put my left foot into the stirrup, bounced briefly on my right foot, bounded high with enthusiasm, swung my right leg over, came down with a smack astride the hard seat, and gave a wild ululation of pain. Each of us was, as instructed by the Ostikan, wearing one of the leather cods of musk tied so that it hung under our crotch, and it was that that I thumped down on—and I thought for an agonized and writhing few minutes that it had cost me my own personal cod.

My father and uncle abruptly turned away, their shoulders shaking, to attend to their own mounts. I gradually recovered, and rearranged the musk pouch so it would not again endanger my vitals. Realizing that I was for the first time perched atop an animal, I rather wished that I had commenced with one not so tall, an ass perhaps, for I seemed to be teetering very high and insecurely far above the ground away down there. But I stayed in the saddle while my father and uncle also mounted, and each of them took the lead rope of one of the two extra horses, on which we had loaded all our packs and traveling gear. We rode out of the yard and toward the river, just as the day was breaking.

At the bank, we turned upriver toward the cleft in the hills where it came from inland. Very soon the troubled city of Suvediye was behind us, and then so were the ruins of earlier Suvediyes, and we were in the Orontes valley. It was a lovely warm morning, and the valley was lush with vegetation—green orchards of fruit trees separating extensive fields of spring-sown barley, now golden ripe for harvesting. Even that early in the day, the women workers were out and cutting the grain. We could see only a few of them, bent over their knives, but we knew that many were working there, from the multitudinous clicking noise. Because in Armeniya all the field hands are female, and because barley stalks are coarse and rough and injurious to their skin, the women wore wooden tubes on their fingers while they worked. In their numbers and their busyness, those fingers made a pervasive rattle that could have been mistaken for a fire crackling through the grain.

When we got beyond the cultivated lands, the valley was still verdant and colorful and full of life. There were the vast, spreading, dark-green plane trees, called hereabouts chinar trees, of welcome deep shade; and vividly green tiger-thistles; and the bountiful, silver-leaved, thorny trees called zizafun, from which a traveler can pluck the plumlike golden jujube fruit, good to eat whether fresh or dried. There were herds of goats munching the tiger-thistles; and on every goatherd’s’ mud hut there was the scraggly rooftop nest of a stork; and there were whole nations of pigeons, in every flock as many of them as in all of Venice; and there were the golden eagles, almost always on the wing, because they are so clumsy and vulnerable when they light, having to run and struggle and beat their pinions for a long way before they can get aloft again.

In the East, an overland journey is called by the Farsi word karwan. We were on one of the principal east—west karwan routes, so at easy intervals of about every sixth farsakh—which is to say about every fifteen miles—there stood one of the stopping places called a karwansarai. Although we rode leisurely, not pushing ourselves or our horses, we could always depend on finding, about sundown, one of those places on the Orontes riverside.

I do not remember the first of them very well, for that night I was mainly occupied with my own discomfort. During our first day on the trail we had not made our horses move faster than a walking gait, and I had thought I was enjoying a comfortable ride, and I several times dismounted and mounted again without noticing that the ride was affecting me in the least. However, at the karwansarai, when I finally got down from the saddle for the night, I found that I was sore and suffering. My backside hurt as if it had been thrashed, the inner sides of my legs were chafed and burning, the thews inside my thighs were so stretched and aching that I felt as if I would forever after walk bowlegged. But the discomfort gradually ebbed, and in a few days I could ride my horse at a walk and at intermittent canters and gallops—or even at the trot, which is the roughest gait—all the day long, if necessary, without feeling any ill effect. That was a pleasing development, except that, no longer being intent on my own misery, I could take more notice of the miseries of putting up each night at a karwansarai.

It is a sort of combination inn for traveling people and stable or corral for their animals, though the accommodations for men and animals are not, in their comfort and cleanliness, easily distinguishable. No doubt that is because each such establishment must be of a size and readiness to receive and provide for a hundred times more people and beasts than we comprised. On several nights, indeed, we shared a karwansarai with a veritable throng of merchants, Arabs or Persians, traveling in karwan with countless horses, mules, asses, camels and dromedaries, all heavy laden, hungry, thirsty and sleepy. Nevertheless, I would as soon eat the dry fodder stocked for the animals as the meals set before the humans, and rather sleep in the stable straw than on one of the webbed-rope affairs called a bed.

The first two or three such places we came to had signboards identifying each as a “Christian rest house.” They were run by Armeniyan monks, and were filthy and verminous and smelly, but the meals at least had the virtue of variety in their composition. Farther eastward, each karwansarai was run by Arabs and bore a signboard announcing, “Here, the true and pure religion.” Those establishments were a trifle cleaner and better kept, but the Muslim meals were monotonously unvarying—mutton, rice, a bread the exact size and shape and texture and taste of a wicker chair seat, and weak, warm, much-watered sharbats for drink.

Only a few days out of Suvediye, we came to the riverside town of Antakya. When one is making a journey across country, any community appearing on the horizon ahead is a welcome sight, and even a beautiful one from a distance. But that beauty lent by distance is all too often dispelled by closer approach. Antakya was, like every other town in those regions, ugly and dirty and dull and swarming with beggars. But it had the one distinction of having given its name to the surrounding land: Antioch, as it is called in the Bible. In other times, when the region was a part of Alexander’s empire, that land was called Syria. At the time of our passing through, it was an adjunct of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, or what still remained of that kingdom, which has since fallen entirely under the rule of the Mamluk Saracens. Anyway, I tried to look at Antakya and all of Antioch, or Syria, as Alexander might have regarded it, for I was mightily excited to be traveling one of the karwan trails that Alexander the Great once had trodden.

There at Antakya, the Orontes River bends due south. So we left it at that point and kept on bearing east, to another and much larger town, but also a dreary one—Haleb, called Aleppo by Westerners. We stayed the night in a karwansarai there and, because the landlord strongly advised that we would ride more comfortably if we changed our traveling costume, we bought from him Arab garments for each of us. When we left Aleppo, and for a long time afterward, we wore the full garb, from kaffiyah headcloth to the baggy leg coverings. That costume really is more comfortable for a man riding horseback than a tight Venetian tunic and hose. And from a distance at least, we looked like three of the nomad Arabs who call themselves the empty-landers, or bedawin.

Since most of the karwansarai keepers in those regions are Arabs, I of course learned many Arab words. But those landlords also spoke the universal trade language of Asia, which is Farsi, and we were getting nearer every day to the land of Persia, where Farsi is the native tongue. So, to help me more quickly pick up that language, my father and uncle did their best to converse always in what they knew of Farsi, instead of our own Venetian or the other jargon of Sabir French. And I did learn. In truth, I found Farsi considerably less difficult than some of the other tongues I had to contend with later on. Also, it must be supposed that young people acquire new languages more easily than do their elders, for it was not long before I was speaking Farsi far more fluently than either my father or my uncle did.

Somewhere east of Aleppo, we came to the next river, the Furat, which is better known as the Euphrates, named in the Book of Genesis as one of the four rivers of the Garden of Eden. I do not dispute the Bible, but I saw little that was gardenlike along the entire great length of the Furat. Where we joined it, to follow it downstream to the southeastward, that river does not, like the Orontes, flow through a pleasant valley; it merely wanders vagrantly through a flat country which is one immense pasture of grass for herds of goats and sheep. That is a useful enough function for a country, but it makes an extremely uninteresting terrain to travel across. One rejoices to see the occasional grove of olive trees or date palms, and one can see even a single isolated tree from a great distance before reaching it.

Over that level land a breeze blows almost constantly from the east, and, there being deserts far to the eastward, even that light breeze comes heavily freighted with a fine gray dust. Since only the far-apart trees and the infrequent travelers stick up above the low grass, it is on those things that the drifting dust collects. Our horses put their muzzles down and drooped their ears and closed their eyes and kept their direction by keeping the breeze on their left shoulders as they ambled along. We riders wrapped our abas tightly about our bodies and our kaffiyahs across our faces, and still we had dust making our eyelids gritty and our skins scratchy, clogging our nostrils and crunching between our teeth. I realized why my father and uncle and most other journeyers let their beards grow, for to shave each day in such conditions is a painful drudgery. But my own beard was yet too scanty to grow out handsomely. So I tried Uncle Mafìo’s depilatory mumum, and it worked well, and I continued to use the salve in preference to a razor.

But I think my most enduring recollection of that dust-laden Eden was the sight of a pigeon one day lighting in a tree there: when the bird touched the branch it puffed up a cloud of dust as if it had lighted in a flour barrel.

I will set down here two other things that came into my mind during that long ride down the River Furat:

One is that the world is large. That may seem no very original observation, but it had just then begun to dawn upon me with the awesomeness of revelation. I had heretofore lived in the constricted city of Venice, which in all of history has never sprawled beyond its seawalls and never can—so it gives us Venetians a sense of being enclosed in safety and snugness; in coziness, if you will. Although Venice fronts upon the Adriatic, the sea’s horizon seems not impossibly far away. Even aboard ship, I saw that horizon staying fixed on every side; there was no sense of progression toward it or away from it. But traveling overland is different. The contour of the horizon changes constantly, and one is always moving toward or away from some landmark. In just the early weeks of our riding, we approached and arrived at and traversed and left again several different towns or villages, several contrasting kinds of countryside, several separate rivers. And always we realized that there was more beyond: more countries, more cities, more rivers. The world’s land is visibly bigger than any empty ocean. It is vast and diverse, and always promising yet more vastness and diversity to come, and then producing them and promising more. The overland journeyer knows the same sensation that a man feels when he is stark naked—a fine sense of unfettered freedom, but also a sense of being vulnerable, unprotected and, compared to the world about him, very small.

The other thing I wish to say here is that maps lie. Even the best of maps, those in the Kitab of al-Idrisi, are liars, and they cannot help being liars. That is because everything shown on a map appears measurable by the same standards, and that is a delusion. For one instance, suppose your journey must take you over a mountain. The map can warn you of that mountain before you get to it, and even indicate more or less how high and wide and long it is, but the map cannot tell you what will be the conditions of terrain and weather when you get there, or what condition you will be in. A mountain that can be easily scaled on a good day in high summer by a young man in prime health may be a mountain considerably more forbidding in the cold and gales of winter, to a man enfeebled by age or illness and wearied by all the country he has already traversed. Because the limited representations of a map are thus deceptive, it may take a journeyer longer to travel the last little fingerbreadth of distance across a map than it took him to travel all the many hand-spans previous.

Of course, we had no such difficulties on that journey to Baghdad, since we had only to follow the River Furat downstream through the flat grassland. We did get out the Kitab at intervals, but just to see how its maps conformed to the actuality about us—and they did, with commendable accuracy—and sometimes my father or uncle would add markings to them to indicate useful landmarks which the maps omitted: bends of the river, islands in it, things like that. And every few nights, though it was not then needed, I would get out the kamàl we had bought. Extending it toward the North Star at the length of the knot I had tied in the string at Suvediye, and laying the lower bar of the wooden rectangle on the flat horizon, I saw each time that the star was farther down below the upper bar of the frame. It indicated what we knew: that we were moving south of east.

Everywhere in that country, we were continually crossing the invisible borders of one little nation after another, the nations being likewise invisible except in name. It is the same in all the Levant lands: the larger expanses are labeled on maps as Armeniya, Antioch, the Holy Land and so on, but within those areas the local folk recognize innumerable smaller expanses, and give them names and call them nations and dignify their paltry chieftains with resounding titles. In my childhood Bible classes, I had heard of such Levantine kingdoms as Samaria and Tyre and Israel, and I had envisioned them as mighty lands of awesome extent, and their kings Ahab and Hiram and Saul as monarchs over vast populations. And now I was learning, from the natives we met along our way, that I was traversing such self-proclaimed nations as Nabaj and Bishri and Khubbaz, ruled by various kings and sultans and atabegs and sheikhs.

But any of those nations could be crossed in a ride of a day or two, and they were drab and featureless and poor and full of beggars and otherwise scantily populated, and the one “king” we encountered there was merely the oldest goatherd in a bedawi tribe of goatherding Arabs. Not a single one of all those crammed-together fragment kingdoms and sheikhdoms in that part of the world is larger than the Republic of Venice. And Venice, though thriving and important, occupies but a handful of islands and a meager portion of the Adriatic coast. I gradually came to realize that all those biblical kings, too—even the great ones like Solomon and David—had ruled domains that in the Western world would be called only confini or counties or parishes. The great migrations recorded in the Bible must really have been negligible wanderings like those of the modern goatherding tribes I had seen. The great wars of which the Bible tells must really have been trifling skirmishes between puny armies to settle insignificant disputes between those petty kings. It made me wonder why the Lord God had bothered, in those olden times, to send fires and tempests and prophets and plagues to influence the destinies of such fence-corner nations.

7

ON two nights in that country, we deliberately skirted the nearest karwansarai and camped outdoors on our own. It was something we would later have to do, when we got into even less populous regions, so my father and uncle thought I should start having the experience in an easy terrain and clement weather. Also, all three of us were by then getting extremely tired of filth and mutton. So, on each of those nights, we made pallets of our blankets, with our saddles for pillows, and laid a fire for cooking, and turned our horses free to graze, hobbling their front legs together so they could not wander far.

I had already learned from my much-traveled father and uncle some of the tricks of traveling. For example, they had taught me always to carry my bedding in one saddle pannier and my clothing in another, and always to keep the two apart. Since a traveler has to use his own blankets at every karwansarai, they inevitably get full of fleas and lice and bedbugs. Those vermin are a torment even when one sleeps the usual deep sleep of exhaustion, but they would be intolerable when one is dressed and awake and about. So, getting naked out of bed each morning, I would pick myself clean of the accumulated bugs, and then, having carefully kept my clothing apart from the bedding, I could put on either used or clean garments without their having been contaminated. When we did not stay at a karwansarai, but made our own camp, I learned other things. I remember, the first night we camped, I started to tilt one of the water bags for a good long drink, but my father stopped me.

“Why?” I said. “We have one of the blessed rivers of Eden with which to refill it.”

“Better get used to thirst when it is not necessary,” he said, “for you will have to when it is. Just wait and I will show you something.”

He built a fire of branches hacked with his belt knife from a convenient zizafun tree, the thorny wood of which burns hot and quickly, and he let it burn until the wood was all charcoal but not yet ashes. Then he scraped most of the charcoal to one side, and laid new branches on what was left, to make up the fire again. He let the removed charcoal cool, then crushed it to powder and heaped that onto a cloth and put the cloth like a sieve over the mouth of one of the pottery bowls we had brought. He handed me another bowl and bade me go and fill it from the river.

“Taste that Eden water,” he said, when I fetched it.

I did and said. “Muddy. Some insects. But not bad water.”

“Watch. I will make it better.” He poured it slowly through the charcoal and cloth into the other bowl.

When it had finished its slow trickling, I tasted it again from that bowl. “Yes. Clear and good. It even tastes cooler.”

“Remember that trick,” he said. “Many times your only source of water will be putrid or vile with salts or even suspect of poison. That trick will render it potable at least, and harmless, if not delicious. However, in the deserts where the water is worst, there is usually no wood to burn. Therefore, try always to carry a supply of charcoal with you. It can be used over and over again before it gets saturated and ineffectual.”

The reason we made our outdoor camp only twice during the journey down the Furat was that, while my father could strain insects and impurities out of the water, he could not remove the birds from the air, and I have mentioned that that country abounds in golden eagles.

On that day of which I speak, my uncle had, by good luck, come upon a large hare in the grass, and it stood immobile and trembling in that moment of surprise, and he whipped out and threw his belt knife, and killed the creature. It was on that account—having our own provender for a non-mutton meal—that we decided to make the first camp. But when Uncle Mafìo skewered the skinned hare on a zizafun stick and hung it over the fire, and it began to sizzle and its aroma rose with the smoke into the air, we got as much of a surprise as the hare had got.

There came a loud, rustling, swooshing noise from out of the night sky above us. Before we could even look up, a blur of brown flashed in an arc down between us, through the firelight and upward into the darkness again. At the same instant, there was a sound like plop! and the fire flew all apart in a spray of sparks and ashes, and the hare was gone, complete with its stick, and we heard a triumphant barking yell, “Kya!”

“Malevolenza!” exclaimed my uncle, picking up a large feather from the remains of the fire. “A damned thieving eagle! Acrimonia!” And that night we had to make our meal on some hard salt pork from our packs.

The same thing, or very near it, happened the second time we stayed outdoors. That camping was occasioned by our having bought, from a passing family of bedawin Arabs, a haunch of fresh-killed camel calf. When we put that on the fire, and the eagles espied it, another of them came in a rush. The moment my uncle heard the first rustle of its pinions in the air, he made a dive to throw himself protectively over the cooking meat. That saved our meal for us, but nearly lost us Uncle Mafìo.

A golden eagle has wings that spread wider than a man’s outstretched arms, and it weighs about as much as a fair-sized dog, so when it comes plummeting down—when it stoops, as the hawkers say—it is a formidable projectile. That one hit the back of my uncle’s head, fortunately only with its wing and not with its talons, but that was a blow heavy enough to knock him sprawling across the fire. My father and I dragged him out, and beat the sparks out of his smoldering aba, and he had to shake his head for a time to get his senses back, and then he cursed magnificently, until he went into a fit of coughing. Meanwhile, I stood over the spitted meat, ostentatiously swinging a heavy branch, and the eagles stayed away, so we did manage to cook and eat the meal. But we decided that, as long as we were in eagle country, we would stifle our revulsions and spend each night in a karwansarai from then on.

“You are wise to do so,” said the next night’s landlord to us, as we ate yet another nasty meal of mutton and rice. We were the only guests that night, so he conversed while he swept the day’s collected dust out the door. His name was Hasan Badr-al-Din, which did not suit him at all, for it means Beauty of Faith’s Moon. He was wizened and gnarled, like an old olive tree. He had a face as leathery and wrinkled as a cobbler’s apron, and a wispy beard like a nimbus of wrinkles that could not find room on his face. He went on, “It is not good to be out of doors and unprotected at night in the lands of the Mulahidat, the Misguided Ones.”

“What are the Misguided Ones?” I asked, sipping a sharbat so bitter that it must have been made of green fruit.

Beauty of Faith’s Moon was now going about the room, sprinkling water to lay the remaining dust. “You perhaps have heard them called hashishiyin. The killers who kill for the Old Man of the Mountain.”

“What mountain?” growled my uncle. “This land is flatter than a halycon sea.”

“He has always been called that—the Sheikh ul-Jibal—though no one knows really where he lives. Whether his castle is really on a mountain or not.”

“He does not live,” said my father. “That old nuisance was slain by the Ilkhan Hulagu when the Mongols came this way fifteen years ago.”

“True,” said the aged Beauty. “Yet not true. That was the Old Man Rokn-ed-Din Kurshah. But there is always another Old Man, you know.”

“I did not know.”

“Oh, yes, indeed. And an Old Man still commands the Mulahidat, though some of the Misguided must be old men themselves by now. He hires them out to the faithful who have need of their services. I hear that the Mamluks of Egypt paid high to have a hashishi slay that English Prince who leads the Christian Crusaders.”

“Then they wasted their money,” said Uncle Mafìo. “The Englishman slew the sassìn.”

Beauty shrugged and said, “Another will try, and another, until it is done. The Old Man will command, and they will obey.”

“Why?” I asked, and swallowed a wad of rice that tasted of taint. “Why should any man risk his own life to kill at the behest of another man?”

“Ah. To understand that, young Sheikh, you must know something of the Holy Quran.” He came and sat down at our cloth, as if pleased to explain. “In that Book, the Prophet (blessing and peace be upon him) makes a promise to the men of the Faith. He promises to every man that, if he is unswervingly devout, then once in his life he will enjoy one miraculous night, the Night of the Possible, in which he will be granted his every desire.” The old man arranged his wrinkles in a smile, a smile that was half happy and half melancholy. “A night replete with ease and luxury, with marvelous food and drink and banj, with beautiful and compliant haura women and boys, with renewed youth and virility for the zina enjoyment of them. Thus, every man who believes will live his life in fierce devoutness, and hope for that Night of the Possible.”

He stopped, and seemed to lose himself in contemplation. After a moment, Uncle Mafìo said, “It is an appealing dream.”

Beauty said distantly, “Dreams are the painted pictures in the book of sleep.”

Again we waited, then I said, “But I do not see what that has to do with—”

“The Old Man of the Mountain,” he said, as if coming abruptly awake. “The Old Man gives that Night of the Possible. Then he holds out promise of still other such nights.”

My father, my uncle and I exchanged glances of amusement.

“Do not doubt it!” the landlord said testily. “The Old Man, or one of his Mulahidat recruiters, will find a qualified man—a strong and bold man—and will slip a potent bit of banj into his food or drink. When the man swoons to sleep, he is spirited away to the Castle ul-Jibal. He wakes to find himself in the most lovely garden imaginable, surrounded by comely lads and ladies. Those haura feed him rich viands and more of the hashish and even forbidden wines. They sing and dance enchantingly, and reveal their nippled breasts, their smooth bellies, their inviting bottoms. They seduce him to such raptures of lovemaking that at last he swoons again. And again he is spirited away—back to his former place and life, which is humdrum at best, and more probably dismal. Like the life of a karwansarai keeper.”

My father yawned and said, “I begin to comprehend. As the saying goes, he has been given cake and a kick.”

“Yes. He has now partaken of the Night of the Possible, and he yearns to do so again. He wishes and begs and prays for that, and the recruiters come and tantalize him until he promises to do anything. He is set a task—to slay some enemy of the Faith, to steal or rob for the enrichment of the Old Man’s coffers, to waylay infidels intruding on the lands of the Mulahidat. If he successfully performs that task, he is rewarded with another Night of the Possible. And after each subsequent deed of devotion, another night and another.”

“Each of which,” said my skeptical uncle, “is really nothing but a hashish dream. Misguided, indeed.”

“Oh, unbeliever!” Beauty chided him. “Tell me, by your beard, can you distinguish between the memory of a delightful dream and the memory of a delightful occurrence? Each exists only in your memory. Telling of them to another, how could you prove which happened when you were awake and which when you were asleep?”

Uncle Mafìo said affably, “I will let you know tomorrow, for I am sleepy now.” He stood up, with a massive stretch and a gaping yawn.

It was rather earlier in the night than we were accustomed to go to bed, but I and my father also were yawning, so we all followed Beauty of Faith’s Moon as he led us down a long hall and—because we were the only guests—allotted us each a separate room, and quite clean, with clean straw on the floor. “Rooms deliberately well apart from each other,” he said, “so that your snores will not disturb each other, and your dreams will not get intertangled.”

Nevertheless, my own dream was tangled enough. I slept and dreamed that I awoke from my sleep, to find myself, like a recruit of the Misguided Ones, in a dreamlike garden, for it was full of flowers I had never seen when awake. Among the sunlit flower beds danced dancers so dreamily beautiful that one could not say, or care, whether they were girls or boys. In a dreamy languor, I joined the dance and found, as often happens in dreams, that my every step and prance and movement was dreamily slow, as if the air were sesame oil.

That thought was so repugnant—even in my dream I remembered my experience with sesame oil—that the sunlit garden instantly became a bosky palace corridor, down which I was dancing in pursuit of a dancing girl whose face was the face of the Lady Ilaria. But when she pirouetted into a room and I followed through the only door and caught her there, her face got old and warty and sprouted a red-gray beard like a fungus. She said, “Salamelèch” in a man’s deep voice, and I was not in a palace chamber, or even a bedroom of a karwansarai, but in the dark, cramped cell of the Venice Vulcano. Old Mordecai Cartafilo said, “Misguided One, will you never learn the bloodthirstiness of beauty?” and gave me a square white cracker to eat.

Its dryness was choking and its taste was nauseous. I retched so convulsively that I woke myself up—really awoke this time, in the karwansarai room, to find that I was not dreaming the nausea. Evidently our meal’s mutton or something had been tainted, for I was about to be violently sick. I scrambled out of my blankets and ran naked and barefoot down the midnight hall to the little back room with the hole in the ground. I hung my head over it, too wretched to recoil from the stink or to fear that a demon jinni might reach up out of the depths and snatch at me. As quietly as I could, I vomited up a vile green mess and, after wiping the tears from my eyes and getting my breath back, I padded quietly toward my room again. The hall took me past the door of the chamber my uncle had been given, and I heard a muttering behind it.

Giddy anyway, I leaned against the wall there and gave ear to the noise. It was partly my uncle’s snoring and partly a sibilant low speaking of words. I wondered how he could snore and talk at the same time, so I listened more intently. The words were Farsi, so I could not make out all of them. But when the voice, sounding astonished, spoke louder, I clearly heard:

“Garlic? The infidels pretend to be merchants, but they carry only worthless garlic?”

I touched the door of the room, and it was unlatched. It swung easily and silently open. Inside, there was a small light moving, and when I peered I could see that it was a wick lamp in the hand of Beauty of Faith’s Moon, and he was bending over my uncle’s saddle panniers, piled in a corner of the room. The landlord was obviously seeking to steal from us, and he had opened the packs and found the precious culms of zafràn and had mistaken them for garlic.

I was more amused than angry, and I held my tongue, so as to see what he would do next. Still muttering, telling himself that the unbeliever probably had taken his purse and true valuables to bed with him, the old man sidled over beside the bed and, with his free hand, began cautiously groping about beneath Uncle Mafìo’s blankets. He encountered something, for he gave a start, and again spoke aloud in astonishment:

“By the ninety-nine attributes of Allah, but this infidel is hung like a horse!”

Sick though I still felt, I very nearly giggled at that, and my uncle smiled in his sleep as if he enjoyed the fondling.

“Not only an untrimmed long zab,” the thief continued to marvel, “but also—praise Allah in His munificence even to the unworthy—two sacks of balls!”

I might really have giggled then, but in the next moment the situation ceased to be amusing. I saw in the lamplight the glint of metal, as old Beauty drew a knife from his robes and lifted it. I did not know whether he intended to trim my uncle’s zab or to amputate his supernumerary scrotum or to cut his throat, and I did not wait to find out. I stepped forward and swung my fist and hit the thief hard in the back of his neck. I might have expected the blow to incapacitate such a fragile old specimen, but he was not so delicate as he looked. He fell sideways, but rolled like an acrobat and came up from the floor slashing the blade at me. It was more by happenstance than by deftness that I caught his wrist. I twisted it, and wrenched at his hand, and found the knife in my own hand, and used it. At that, he did fall down and stay down, groaning and burbling.

The scuffle had been brief, but not silent, yet my uncle had slept through it, and he still slept, still smiling in his sleep. Appalled by what I had just done, as well as by what had almost been done, I felt very alone in the room and badly needed a supporting ally. Though my hands were trembling, I shook Uncle Mafìo, and had to shake him violently to bring him to consciousness. I realized now that the more than ordinarily nasty evening meal had been heavily laced with banj. We would all three have been dead but for the dream that had wakened me to the danger and made me disgorge the drug.

My uncle finally, unwillingly, began to come awake, smiling and murmuring, “The flowers … the dancers … the fingers and lips playing on my flute …” Then he blinked and exclaimed, “Dio me varda! Marco, that was not you?”

“No, Zio Mafìo,” I said, in my agitation speaking Venetian. “You were in peril. We are still in peril. Please wake up!”

“Adrìo de vu!” he said crossly. “Why have you snatched me from that wondrous garden?”

“I believe it was the garden of the hashishiyin. And I have just stabbed a Misguided One.”

“Our host!” cried my uncle, sitting up and seeing the crumpled form on the floor. “Oh, scagaròn, what have you done? Are you playing bravo again?”

“No, Zio, look. That is his own knife sticking in him. He was about to kill you for your cod of musk.” As I related the circumstances, I began to weep.

Uncle Mafìo bent over the old man and examined him, growling, “Right in the belly. Not dead, but dying.” Then he turned to me and said kindly, “There, there, boy. Stop slobbering. Go and wake your father.”

Beauty of Faith’s Moon was nothing to weep over, alive or dead or dying. But he was the first man I ever slew with my own hand, and the killing of another human being is no trivial milestone in a man’s career. As I went to fetch my father out of the hashish garden, I was thinking how more than ever I was glad that, back in Venice, another hand had thrust the sword into my guiltless earlier prey. For I had just learned one thing about killing a man, or at least about killing him with a blade. It slides into the victim’s belly easily enough, almost eagerly, almost of its own accord. But there it is instantly seized by the violated muscles, held as tightly as another tool of mine had once been clasped in the virgin flesh of the girl Doris. I had pushed the knife into old Beauty with no effort whatever, but I could not withdraw it again when I had done so. And in that instant I had known a sickening realization: that a deed so ugly and so easily done cannot thereafter be undone. It made killing seem rather less gallant and dashing and bravìsimo than I had imagined it to be.

When I had, with difficulty, roused my father, I took him to the scene of the crime. Uncle Mafìo had laid the landlord on his own pallet of blankets, despite the flow of blood, and had composed Beauty’s limbs for death, and the two of them were conversing, it seemed companionably. The old man was the only one of us who had any clothes on. He looked up at me, his murderer, and he must have seen the traces of tears on my face, for he said:

“Do not feel bad, young infidel. You have slain the most Misguided One of all. I have done a terrible wrong. The Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him) enjoins us to treat a guest with the most reverent care and respect. Though he be the lowliest darwish, or even an unbeliever, and though there be only one crumb in the house, and though the host’s family and children go hungry, the guest must be given that crumb. Be he a sworn enemy, he must be accorded every hospitality and safeguard while he is under one’s roof. My disobedience to that holy law would have deprived me of my Night of the Possible, even did I live. In my avarice, I acted hastily, and I have sinned, and for that sin I beg forgiveness.”

I tried to say that I gave the forgiveness, but I choked on a sob, and in the next moment I was glad of that, for he continued:

“I could as easily have drugged your breakfast meal in the morning, and let you get some way upon the road before you fell. Then I could have robbed and murdered you under the open sky instead of under my roof, and it would have been a deed of virtue, and pleasing to Allah. But I did not. Though in all my lifetime before now I have lived devoutly in the Faith and have slain many other infidels to the greater glory of Islam, this one impiety will cost me my eternity in the Paradise of Djennet, with its haura beauties and perpetual happiness and unfettered indulgence. And for that loss, I grieve sincerely. I should have killed you in fitter fashion.”

Well, those words at any rate stopped my weeping. We all stared stonily at the landlord as again he went on :

“But you have yourselves a chance at virtue. When I am dead, do me the kindness of wrapping me in a winding sheet. Take me to the main room and lay me in the middle of it, in the prescribed position. Wind my tulband over my face, and place me so my feet are turned to the south, toward the Holy Kaaba in Mecca.”

My father and uncle looked at each other, and they shrugged, but we were all glad they made no promise, for the old fiend now spoke his last words:

“Having done that, vile dogs, you will die virtuous, when my brothers of the Mulahidat come and find me here dead with a knife wound in my gut, and they follow the tracks of your horses and hunt you down and do to you what I failed to do Salaam aleikum.”

His voice had not at all weakened, but, after perversely calling peace upon us, Beauty of Faith’s Moon closed his eyes and died. And, that being the first deathbed I had ever stood close to, I first learned then that most deaths are as ugly as most killings. For in dying, Beauty unbeautifully and copiously evacuated both his bladder and his bowels, befouling his garments and the blankets and filling the room with a ghastly stench.

A disgusting indignity is not what any person would wish to be last remembered for. But I have since attended many dyings and—except in the rare case when there has been opportunity of a purge aforetime—that is how all human beings make their farewell to life; even the strongest and bravest of men, the fairest and purest of women, whether they die a violent death or go serenely in their sleep.

We stepped outside the room to breathe clean air, and my father sighed. “Well. Now what?”

“First of all,” said my uncle, untying the thongs of his musk cod, “let us relieve ourselves of these uncomfortable danglers. It is clear that they will be as safe inside our packs—or no less safe—and anyway I would rather lose the musk than again imperil my own dear cod.”

My father muttered, “Worry about balls when we may be about to lose our heads?”

I said, “I am sorry, Father, Uncle. If we are to be hunted by the surviving Misguided Ones, then I did wrong to kill that one.”

“Nonsense,” said my father. “Had you not awakened and acted with celerity, we would not even have lived to be hunted.”

“It is true that you are impetuous, Marco,” said Uncle Mafìo. “But if a man stopped to consider all the consequences of his every action before he acted, he would be a very old man before he ever did any damned thing at all. Nico, I think that we might keep this fortunately impetuous young man as our companion. Let him not be tucked safe away in Constantinople or Venice, but let him come with us clear to Kithai. However, you are his father. It is for you to say.”

“I am inclined to concur, Mafìo,” said my father. And to me, “If you wish to come along, Marco …” I grinned broadly at him. “Then you come. You deserve to come. You did well this night.”

“Perhaps better than well,” said my uncle thoughtfully. “That bricòn vechio called himself the most Misguided One of all. Is it not possible he meant also the chief one of them all? The latest and reigning Sheikh ul-Jibal? An old man he certainly was.”

“The Old Man of the Mountain?” I exclaimed. “I slew him?”

“We cannot know,” said my father. “Not unless the other hashishiyin tell us when they catch up to us. I am not that eager to know.”

“They must not catch us,” said Uncle Mafìo. “We have already been remiss, coming this far into alien country with no weapons but our work knives.”

My father said, “They will not catch us if they have no reason to chase after us. We have only to remove the reason. Let the next comers find the karwansarai deserted. Let them presume that the landlord is afield on an errand—killing a sheep for the larder, perhaps. It could be days before those next guests come, and days more before they begin to wonder where the landlord is. By the time any of the Misguided Ones get involved in the search for him, and by the time they give up looking for him and start to suspect foul play, we shall be long gone and far away and beyond their tracing.”

“Take the old Beauty with us?” asked my uncle.

“And risk an embarrassing encounter before we have gone far at all?” My father shook his head. “Nor can we just drop him down the well here, or hide him or bury him. Any arriving guest will go first to the water. And any Arab has a nose like a staghound, to sniff out a hiding place or fresh-turned earth.”

“Not on land, not in water,” said my uncle. “There is only one alternative. I had better do it before I put any clothes on.”

“Yes,” said my father, and he turned to me. “Marco, go through this whole establishment and search out some blankets to replace those of your uncle. While you are at it, see if you can find any sort of weapons we can carry when we go.”

The command was obviously given just to get me out of the way while they did what they did next. And it took me quite a while to comply, for the karwansarai was old, and must have had a long succession of owners, each of whom had built and added on new portions. The main building was a warren of hallways and rooms and closets and nooks, and there were also stables and sheds and sheep pens and other outbuildings. But the old man, evidently having felt secure in his drugs and deceits, had not taken much trouble to hide his possessions. To judge from the armory of weapons and provisions, he had been, if not the veritable Old Man, at least a main supplier of the Mulahidat.

I first selected the best two woolen blankets from the considerable stock of traveling gear. Then I searched among the weapons and, though I could not find any straight swords of the type we Venetians were accustomed to, I picked out the shiniest and sharpest of the local sort. This was a broad and curved blade—more of a saber, since it was sharp only on the outcurved edge—called the shimshir, which means “silent lion.” I took three of them, one for each of us, and belts with loops from which to hang them. I could have further enriched our purses, for Beauty had secreted a small fortune in the form of bags of dried banj, bricks of compacted banj, and flagons of oil of banj. But I left all that where it was.

The dawn was breaking outdoors when I brought my acquisitions to the main room, where we had dined the night before. My father was preparing a breakfast meal at the brazier, and being most carefully selective of the ingredients. Just as I entered the room, I heard a series of noises from the yard outside: a long, rustling whistle, a loud klop! and a screeching yell of kya! Then my uncle came in from that yard, still naked, his skin spattered with blood spots, his beard smelling of smoke, and he saying with satisfaction:

“That was the last of the old devil, and it went as he wished. I have burned his garments and the blankets, and dispersed the ashes. We can depart as soon as we have dressed and eaten.”

I realized, of course, that Beauty of Faith’s Moon had been given no laying-out, but an extremely un-Muslim obsequy, and that made me curious as to what Uncle Mafìo meant by “went as he wished.” I asked him, and he chuckled and said:

“The last of him went flying southward. Toward Mecca.”