The Journeyer

BAGHDAD

1

WE kept on downstream along the Furat, still southeastward, now traversing a particularly unappealing stretch of country where the river had cut its channel through solid basalt rock—a land bleak and black and barren even of grass, pigeons and eagles—but we were not pursued by the Misguided Ones or anyone else. And gradually, as if in celebration of our deliverance from danger, the countryside became more pleasant and hospitable. The terrain began perceptibly to rise up on either side of the river, until it was flowing through a wide and verdant valley. There were orchards and forests, pastures and farms, flowers and fruits. But the orchards were as shaggy and untended as the native forests, the farms as overgrown and weedy as the fields of wild flowers. The land’s owners had all gone away, and the only people we met in that valley were nomad families of bedawin shepherds, the landless and rootless roamers, roaming in that valley as they roamed in the grasslands. There were nowhere any settled folk, nobody working to keep the once domesticated land from reverting to wilderness.

“It is the doing of the Mongols,” said my father. “When the Ilkhan Hulagu—that is to say, the Lesser Khan Hulagu, brother to our friend Kubilai—when he swept through this land and overthrew the Persian Empire, most of the Persians fled or fell before him, and the survivors have not yet returned to rework their lands. But the nomad Arabs and Kurdi are like the grass on which they live and in search of which they wander. The bedawin bend uncaringly before any wind that blows—whether it be a gentle breeze or the fierce simùm—but they rebound as does the grass. To the nomads it matters not who rules the land, and it never will matter to them until the end of time, as long as the land itself remains.”

I turned in my saddle, looking at the land all about us, the richest, most fertile, most promising land we had yet seen in our journey, and I asked, “Who does rule Persia now?”

“When Hulagu died, his son Abagha succeeded as Ilkhan, and he has established a new capital in the northern city of Maragheh instead of in Baghdad. Although the Persian Empire is now a part of the Mongol Khanate, it is still divided into Shahnates, as before, for convenience of administration. But each Shah is subordinate to the Ilkhan Abagha, just as Abagha is subordinate to the Khakhan Kubilai.”

I was impressed. I knew we were yet many months of hard travel distant from the court city of that Khakhan Kubilai. But already, here in the western reaches of Persia, already we were within the borders of the domain of that far distant Khan. In school, I had bent my most admiring and enthusiastic study on The Book of Alexander, so I knew that Persia was once a part of that conqueror’s empire, and his empire was so extensive as to earn him the sobriquet of “the Great.” But the lands won and held by that Macedonian comprised a mere fragment of the world, compared to the immensities conquered by Chinghiz Khan, and further enlarged by his conqueror sons, and still further enlarged by his conqueror grandsons, into the unimaginably immense Mongol Empire over which the grandson Kubilai now reigned as Khan of All Khans.

I believe that not the ancient Pharaones nor the ambitious Alexander nor the avaricious Caesars could have dreamed that so much world existed, so they could hardly have dreamed of acquiring it. As for all the later Western rulers, their ambitions and acquisitions have been even more paltry. Alongside the Mongol Empire, the entire continent called Europe seems merely a small and crowded peninsula, and all its nations, like those of the Levant, only so many peevishly self-important little provinces. From the eminence on which the Khakhan sits enthroned, my native Republic of Venice, proud of its glory and grandeur, must appear as trivial as the Suvediye cranny of the Ostikan Hampig. If the history keepers will continue to dignify Alexander as the Great, surely they ought to acknowledge Kubilai as the immeasurably Greater. That is not for me to say. But what I can say is that, on my entrance into Persia, I was thrilled to realize that I, mere Marco Polo, was setting foot in the most far-flung empire ever ruled by one man in all the years in which the world of men has existed.

“When we get to Baghdad,” my father went on, “we will show to the current Shah, whoever he may be, the letter we carry from Kubilai. And the Shah will have to make us welcome, as accredited ambassadors of his overlord.”

So we proceeded on down the Furat, watching the valley get ever more marked with the traces of civilization, for hereabouts it was crisscrossed by many irrigation canals branching off the river. However, the towering wooden wheels in the canals were not being turned by men or animals or any other agency; they stood still, the clay jugs around their rims not lifting and pouring any water. In the widest and most verdant part of that valley, the Furat makes its nearest approach to the other great south-running river of that country, the Dijlah, sometimes called Tigris, which is supposedly one of the other rivers of the Garden of Eden. If that is so, then the land between the two rivers would presumably be the site of that biblical garden. And if that is so, then the garden, when we saw it, was as empty of resident men and women as it was immediately after the expulsion of Adam and Eve.

In that vicinity, we turned our horses eastward from the Furat and rode the intervening ten farsakhs to the Dijlah, and crossed that river on the bridge there—made of empty boat hulls supporting a plank roadway —to Baghdad on the eastern bank.

The city’s population, like that of the surrounding countryside, had been grievously diminished during Hulagu’s siege and capture of it. But in the fifteen or so ensuing years, much of its populace had returned and repaired what damage it had suffered. City merchants, it seems, are more resilient than country farmers. Like the primitive bedawin, civilized tradesmen seem to recover quickly from the prostrations of disaster. In the case of Baghdad, that may have been because so many of its merchants were not passive and fatalistic Muslims, but irrepressibly energetic Jews and Christians—some of them having come originally from Venice and even more of them from Genoa.

Or perhaps Baghdad recovered because it is such a necessary city, at an important crossroads of trade. Besides being a western terminus of the Silk Road which comes overland, it is a northern terminus of the sea route from the Indies. The city is not itself on the seaside, of course, but its Dijlah River bears a heavy traffic of large river boats, sailing downstream with the current or being poled upriver against it, going to and coming from Basra in the south, on the Persian Gulf, where the seagoing Arab ships make landfall. Anyway, whatever the beneficent reason, Baghdad was, when we arrived there, what it had been before the Mongols came: a rich and vital and busy trading center.

It was as beautiful as it was busy. Of the Eastern cities I had seen so far, Baghdad was the most reminiscent of my native Venice. Its Dijlah waterfront was as thronged and tumultuous and littered and odorous as the Riva of Venice, though the vessels to be seen here—all of them built and manned by Arabs—were nowise comparable to ours. They were alarmingly shoddy craft to be entrusted to the water, built entirely without pegs or nails or iron fastenings of any fashion, their hull planking instead stitched together by ropes of some coarse fiber. Their seams and interstices were not plugged watertight with pitch, but with a sort of lard made from fish oil. Even the biggest of those boats had only a single steering oar, and it was not very manipulable since it was firmly hinged at mid-stern. Another deplorable thing about those Arab boats was the unfastidious way their cargoes were stored. After filling the hold with a load of, as it may be, all foodstuffs—dates and fruits and grains and such—the Arab boatmen might then crowd the deck above the hold with a herd of livestock. That frequently consisted of fine Arabian horses, and they are beauteous beasts, but they evacuate themselves as often and as hugely as any other horses, and their droppings would dribble and seep between the planks onto the cargo of edibles belowdecks.

Baghdad is not, like Venice, interlaced with canals, but its streets are constantly sprinkled with water to lay the dust, so they have a humid fragrance reminiscent to me of canals. And the city has a great many open squares equivalent to Venice’s piazze. Some are bazàr marketplaces, but most are public gardens, for the Persians are passionately fond of gardens. (I learned there that the Farsi word meaning garden, pairi-daeza, became our Bible’s word Paradise.) Those public gardens have benches for passersby to rest on, and streamlets running through, and many birds in residence, and trees and shrubs and perfumed plants and luminous Sowers—roses especially, for the Persians are passionately fond of roses. (They call any and every flower a gul, though that Farsi word means specifically a rose.) Likewise, the palaces of noble families and the larger houses of rich merchant families are built around private gardens as big as the public ones, and as full of roses and birds, and as nearly like earthly Paradises.

I suppose I had got it into my head that the words Muslim and Arab were interchangeable, and therefore that any Muslim community must be indistinguishable—in matters of filth and vermin and beggars and stench—from the Arab cities, towns and villages I had passed through. I was agreeably surprised to find that the Persians, although their religion is Islam, are more inclined to keep their buildings and streets and garments and persons clean. That, with the abundance of flowers everywhere, and a comparative fewness of beggars, made Baghdad a most pleasant and even nice-smelling city—except, of necessity, around the waterfront and the bazàr markets.

Although much of Baghdad’s architecture was of course peculiarly Eastern, even that was not entirely exotic to my Western eyes. I saw a great deal of that lacy filigree “arabesco” stonework which Venice has also adopted for some of its building fronts. Baghdad being still a Muslim city, even after its absorption into the Khanate—for the Mongols, unlike most conquerors, do not anywhere impose any change of religion —it was studded with those great Muslim masjid temples of worship. But their immense domes were not much different from the domes of San Marco and the other churches of Venice. Their slender manarat towers were not too dissimilar to the campanili of Venice, only being generally round instead of square in cross-section, and having little balconies at their tops, from which the muedhdhin beadles shouted at intervals to announce the hours of prayer.

Those muedhdhin in Baghdad, incidentally, were all blind men. I inquired whether that was a necessary qualification for the post, something demanded by Islam, and was told it was not. Blind men were engaged as the prayer-calling beadles for two pragmatic reasons. Being unfit for most other employments, they could not demand much pay for the work. And they could not take sinful advantage of their literally high position: they could not look down to ogle any decent woman who ascended to her rooftop to doff her veil—or more of her coverings—for a private sunbath.

In their interiors, the masjid temples differ notably from our Christian churches. In none of them, anywhere, is there ever to be found any statue or painting or other recognizable image. Though Islam recognizes, I think, as many angels and saints and prophets as Christianity does, it will allow no representation of them, or of any other creature alive or which ever has lived. Muslims believe that their Allah, like our Lord God, created all things living. But, unlike us Christians, they maintain that all creation, even in paint or wood or stone imitation of life, must be forever reserved to Allah. Their Quran warns them that on Judgment Day any maker of any such image will be commanded to bring that image to life; if the maker cannot do that, and of course he cannot, he will be damned to Hell for his presumption in having made it. Therefore, although a Muslim masjid—or palace or home—is always rich in decoration, those decorations are never pictures of anything; they consist only of patterns and colors and intricate arabeschi. Sometimes, though, the patterns are discernible as being woven of the Arabic fish-worm letters and spelling out some phrase or verse from the Quran.

(I learned these several uncommonly odd things about Islam—and I learned many other uncommonly odd things besides—because, during my stay in Baghdad, I acquired first one and then another uncommonly odd teacher, and I will tell of them in their turn.)

I was particularly taken with one form of decoration I saw in the interior rooms of every public and private building in Baghdad. I should say that I first saw it there, but afterward I saw it in other palaces, homes and temples throughout Persia and throughout much of the rest of the East. I should think it might be advantageously adopted by any people anywhere which loves a garden, and what people does not love a garden?

What it is, is a way to bring a garden indoors, though never having to tend or weed or water it. Called in Persia a qali, it is a sort of carpet or tapicierie made to lie on a floor or hang on a wall, but it is unlike any such work we know in the West. The qali is colored in all the colors of a bounteous garden, and its figures form the shapes of multitudes of flowers, vines, trellises, leaves—everything to be found in a garden—all disposed in pleasing designs and arrangements. (In keeping with the Quran’s ban on images, however, a Persian qali is made so that the flowers are not recognizable as any known existing flowers.) At first sight of a qali, I thought the garden must be painted or embroidered upon it. But, on examination, I found that all that intricacy was woven into it. I marveled that any tapicier could contrive such a fanciful thing with mere warp and weft of dyed yarns, and it was some while before I learned the marvelous manner in which it is done.

But I have already got ahead of my chronicle.

We three led our five horses across the wobbling and undulating boat bridge which spanned the Dijlah River. At the Baghdad waterfront, teeming with men of all complexions and costumes and languages, we accosted the first one we saw wearing Western clothes. He was a Genoan, but I should remark that, out East, all Westerners get along convivially enough—even Genoans and Venetians, albeit they are rivals in trade and even though their home republics may be embroiled in one of their frequent sea wars. The Genoan merchant amiably told us the name of the incumbent Shah—he gave it as “Shahinshah Zaman Mirza” —and directed us to the palace “in the Karkh quarter, which is the exclusively royal quarter of the city.”

We rode thither, and found the palace in a gated garden, and made ourselves known to the guards at the gate. Those guards wore helmets that seemed to be of solid gold—but could not have been, or their weight would have been intolerable—and, even if only of plated wood or leather, were objects of great value. They were also objects of interest, being fashioned to give their wearers a wealth of curly golden hair and side whiskers. One of the guards went inside the gate and through the garden to the palace. When he returned and beckoned to us, another guard took charge of our horses, and we entered.

We were led to a chamber richly hung and carpeted with brilliant qali, where the Shahinshah half-sat and half-reclined on a heap of daiwan cushions of equally vivid colors and fine fabrics. He himself was not gaudily garbed; from tulband to slippers, his dress was a uniform pale brown. That is the Persian color of mourning, and the Shah always wore pale brown now in mourning for his lost empire. We were somewhat surprised—this being a Muslim household—to see that a woman occupied another heap of pillows beside him, and there were also two other females in the room. We made the proper bows of salaam and, still bowed down, my father greeted the Shahinshah in the Farsi tongue, then raised up upon his two hands the letter of Kubilai Khan. The Shah took it and read aloud its salutation:

“‘Most Serene, most Puissant, most High, Noble, Illustrious, Honorable, Wise and Prudent Emperors, Ilkhani, Shahi, Kings, Lords, Princes, Dukes, Earls, Barons and Knights, as also Magistrates, Officers, Justicians and Regents of all good cities and places, whether ecclesiastic or secular, who shall see these patents or hear them read …’”

When he had perused the whole thing, the Shahinshah bade us welcome, addressing each of us as “Mirza Polo.” That was a little confusing, as I had understood Mirza to be one of his names. But I gradually gathered that he was using the word as a respectful honorific, as the Arabs use Sheikh. And eventually I realized that Mirza before a name means only what Messer does in Venice; when it is appended after the name, it signifies royalty. The Shah’s name was actually and simply Zaman, and his full title of Shahinshah meant Shah of All Shahs, and he introduced the lady beside him as his Royal First Wife, or Shahryar, by the name of Zahd.

That was very nearly all he got to say that day, because, once she was introduced into the conversation, the Shahryar Zahd proved to be effusively and endlessly talkative. First interrupting, then overriding her husband, she gave us her own welcome to Persia and to Baghdad and to the palace, and she sent our accompanying guard back to the gate, and she hammered a little gong at her side to summon a palace maggiordomo whom she told us was called a wazir, and she instructed the wazir to prepare quarters for us in the palace and assign palace servants to us, and she introduced us to the other two females in the room: one her mother, the other the eldest daughter of herself and the Shah Zaman, and she informed us that she herself, Zahd Mirza, was a direct descendant of the fabled Balkis, Queen of Sabaea—and, of course, so were her mother and daughter—and she reminded us that the famous encounter of Queen Balkis with the Padshah Solaiman was recorded in the annals of Islam as well as those of Judaism and Christianity (which remark enabled me to recognize the biblical Queen of Sheba and King Solomon), and she further informed us that the Sabaean Queen Balkis herself was a jinniyeh, descended from a demon named Eblis, who was chief jinni of all the demon jinn, and furthermore …

“Tell us, Mirza Polo,” the Shah said, almost desperately, to my father, “something of your journey thus far.”

My father obligingly began an account of our travels, but he had not even got us out of the Venice lagoon when the Shahryar Zahd pounced in with a lyrical description of some pieces of Murano glass she had recently bought from a Venetian merchant in downtown Baghdad, and that reminded her of an old but little-known Persian tale of a glassblower who, once upon a time, fashioned a horse of blown glass and persuaded a jinni to make some magic by which the horse was enabled to fly like a bird, and …

The tale was interesting enough, but unbelievable, so I let my attention wander to the other two females in the room. The women’s very presence in a meeting of men—not to mention the Shahryar’s unquenchable garrulity—was evidence that the Persians did not shield and sequester and stifle their womenfolk as most other Muslims do. Each woman’s eyes were visible above a mere half-veil of chador, which was diaphanous anyway and did not conceal her nose and mouth and chin. On their upper bodies they wore blouse and waistcoat, and on their lower limbs the voluminous pai-jamah. However, those garments were not thick and many-layered as on Arab women, but gossamer light and translucent, so the shapes of their bodies could be easily discerned and appreciated.

I gave only one look at the aged grandmother: wrinkled, bony, hunched, almost bald, toothlessly champing her granulated lips, her eyes red and gummy, her withered paps flapping against slatted ribs. One look at the crone was enough for me. But her daughter, the Shahryar Zahd Mirza, was an exceptionally handsome woman, anyway when she was not talking, and her daughter was a superbly beautiful and shapely girl about my own age. She was the Crown Princess or Shahzrad, and named Magas, which means Moth, and subtitled with the royal Mirza. I have neglected to say that the Persians are not, like Arabs, of dark and muddy complexion. Though they all have blue-black hair, and the men wear blue-black beards like Uncle Mafìo’s, their skin is as fair as any Venetian’s, and many have eyes of lighter color than brown. The Shahzrad Magas Mirza was at that moment taking my measure with eyes of emerald green.

“Speaking of horses,” said the Shah, seizing on the tail of the flying-horse tale, before his wife could be reminded of some other story. “You gentlemen should consider trading your horses for camels before you leave Baghdad. Eastward of here you must cross the Dasht-e-Kavir, a vast and terrible desert. Horses cannot endure the—”

“The Mongols’ horses did,” his wife sharply contradicted him. “A Mongol goes everywhere on a horse, and no Mongol would ever bestride a camel. I will tell you how they despise and mistreat camels. While they were besieging this city, the Mongols captured a herd of camels somewhere, and they loaded them with bales of dry grass, and set that hay afire, and stampeded the poor beasts into our streets. The camels, their own fur and humps of fat burning as well, ran mad in agony and could not be caught. So they careered up and down our streets, setting fire to much of Baghdad, before the flames ate into them and reached their vitals, and they collapsed and died.”

“Or,” said the Shah to us, when the Shahryar paused to take a breath, “your journey could be much shortened if you went part way by sea. You might wish to go southeast from here, to Basra—or even farther down the Gulf, to Hormuz—and take passage on some ship sailing to India.”

“In Hormuz,” said the Shahryar Zahd, “every man has only a thumb and the two outer fingers on his right hand. I will tell you why. That seaport city has for ages treasured its importance and its independence, so its every adult male citizen has always been trained as an archer to defend it. When the Mongols under the Ilkhan Hulagu laid seige to Hormuz, the Ilkhan made an offer to the city fathers. Hulagu said he would let Hormuz stand, and retain its independence, and keep its citizen archers, if only the city fathers would lend him those bowmen for long enough to help him conquer Baghdad. Then, he promised, he would let the men come home to Hormuz and be its staunch defense again. The city fathers agreed to that proposal, and all its men—however reluctantly—joined Hulagu in his siege of this city, and fought well for him, and eventually our beloved Baghdad fell.”

She and the Shah both sighed deeply.

“Well,” she went on, “Hulagu had been so impressed by the valor and prowess of the Hormuz men that he then sent them to bed with all the young Mongol women who always accompany the Mongol armies. Hulagu wished to add the potency of the Hormuz seed to the Mongol birthlines, you see. After a few nights of that enforced cohabitation, when Hulagu presumed his females had been sufficiently impregnated, he kept his promise and freed the archers to go home to Hormuz. But before he let them depart, he had every man’s two bowstring fingers amputated. In effect, Hulagu took the fruit from the trees and then felled the trees. Those mutilated men could make no defense of Hormuz at all, and of course that city soon became, like our dear defeated Baghdad, a possession of the Mongol Khanate.”

“My dear,” said the Shah, looking flustered. “These gentlemen are emissaries of that Khanate. The letter they showed me is a ferman from the Khakhan Kubilai himself. I very much doubt that they are amused to hear tales of the Mongols’—er—misbehavior.”

“Oh, you can freely say atrocities, Shah Zaman,” my uncle boomed heartily. “We are still Venetians, not adoptive Mongols nor apologists for them.”

“Then I should tell you,” said the Shahryar, again leaning eagerly forward, “the ghastly way Hulagu treated our Qalif al-Mustasim Billah, the holiest man of Islam.” The Shah breathed another sigh, and fixed his gaze on a remote corner of the room. “As perhaps you know, Mirza Polo, Baghdad was to Islam what Rome is to Christianity. And the Qalif of Baghdad was to Muslims what your Pope is to you Christians. So, when Hulagu laid siege here, it was to the Qalif Mustasim that he proposed surrender terms, not to the Shah Zaman.” She flicked a disparaging glance at her husband. “Hulagu offered to lift the siege if the Qalif acceded to certain demands, among them the handing over of much gold. The Qalif refused, saying, ‘Our gold sustains our Holy Islam.’ And the reigning Shah did not overrule that decision.”

“How could I?” that Shah said weakly, as if it was an argument much argued previously. “The spiritual leader outranks the temporal.”

His wife went implacably on. “Baghdad might have withstood the Mongols and their Hormuz allies, but it could not withstand the hunger imposed by a siege. Our people ate everything edible, even the city rats, but the people got weaker and weaker, and many died and the rest could fight no longer. When the city inevitably fell, Hulagu imprisoned the Qalif Mustasim in solitary confinement, and let him get even hungrier. At last the holy old man had to beg for food. Hulagu with his ówn hands gave him a plate full of gold coins, and the Qalif whimpered, ‘No man can eat gold.’ And Hulagu said, ‘You called it sustenance when I asked for it. Did it sustain your holy city? Pray, then, that it will sustain you.’ And he had the gold melted, and he poured that glowing-hot liquid metal down the old man’s throat, killing him horribly. Mustasim was the last of the Qalifate, which had endured for more than five hundred years, and Baghdad is no longer the capital either of Persia or of Islam.”

We dutifully shook our heads in commiseration, which encouraged the Shahryar to add:

“As an illustration of how low the Shahnate has been brought: this my husband, Shah Zaman, who was once Shahinshah of all the Empire of Persia, is now a pigeon keeper and cherry picker!”

“My dear … ,” said the Shah.

“It is true. One of the lesser Khans—somewhere to the eastward; we have never even met this Ilkhan—has a taste for ripe cherries. He is also a fancier of pigeons, and his pigeons are trained always to fly home to him from wherever they may be transported. So there are now some hundred of those feathered rats in a dovecote behind the palace stables, and for each there is a tiny silken bag. My Emperor husband has instructions. Next summer when our orchards ripen, we are to pick the cherries, put one or two of them into each of those little bags, fasten the bags to the legs of the pigeons and let the birds free. Like the rukh bird carrying off men and lions and princesses, the pigeons will carry our cherries to the waiting Ilkhan. If we do not pay that humiliating tribute, he will doubtless come rampaging from out of the east and lay our city waste again.”

“My dear, I am sure the gentlemen are now weary of—of traveling hither,” said the Shah, sounding weary himself. He struck the gong to summon the wazir once more, and said to us, “You will wish to rest and refresh yourselves. Then, if you will do me the honor, we will foregather again at the evening meal.”

The wazir, a middle-aged and melancholy man named Jamshid, showed us to our chambers, a suite of three rooms with doors between. They were well furnished, with many qali on the floors and walls, and windows of stone tracery inset with glass, and soft beds of quilts and pillows. Our packs had already been removed from our horses and brought there.

“And here is a manservant for each of you,” said the Wazir Jamshid, producing three lissome, beardless young men. “They are all expert in the Indian art of champna, which they will perform for you after you have been to the hammam.”

“Ah, yes,” said Uncle Mafìo, sounding pleased. “We have not enjoyed a shampoo, Nico, since we came through Tazhikistan.”

So again we had the thorough cleansing and refreshment of a hammam, an elegantly appointed one this time, in which our three young men served as our rubbers. And afterward we lay nude on our separate beds in our separate rooms for what was called the champna—or shampoo, as my uncle had pronounced it. I had no idea what to expect; it had sounded like a dance performance. But it proved to be a vigorous rubbing and pummeling and kneading of my entire body, more energetically done than the hammam rubbing, and with the intent not of extruding dirt from the skin, but of exercising every part in a manner to make one feel even healthier and more invigorated than a hammam bath can do.

My young servant, Karim, pounded and pinched and tweaked me, and at first it was painful. But after a while, my muscles and joints and sinews, stiffened by long riding, began to uncoil and unknot under that assault, and gradually I lay at ease and enjoyed it, and felt myself beginning to tingle with vitality. As a matter of fact, one impertinent part of me became obtrusively alive, and I was embarrassed. Then I was startled, for Karim with an evidently practiced hand started to exercise that also.

“I can do that for myself,” I snapped, “if I deem it necessary.”

He shrugged delicately and said, “As the Mirza commands. When the Mirza commands,” and concentrated on less intimate parts of me.

He finished the mauling at last, and I lay half wanting to doze, half wanting to leap up and do athletic feats, and he asked to be excused.

“To attend the Mirza your uncle,” he explained. “For such a massive man, it will require all three of us to give him an adequate champna.”

I graciously gave him leave, and abandoned myself to my drowsiness. I think my father also slept the afternoon away, but Uncle Mafìo must have had a most thorough working-over, for the three young men were just leaving his room when Jamshid came to see us dressed for the evening meal. He brought for us new and myrrh-scented clothing of the Persian style: the lightweight pai-jamah, and loose shirts with tight cuffs, and, to wear over the shirts, beautifully embroidered short waistcoats, and kamarbands to go tightly about our waists, and silk shoes with upturned, curly, pointed toes, and tulbands instead of hanging kaffiyah headcloths. My father and uncle each proficiently and neatly wound his tulband around his head, but young Karim had to instruct me in the winding and tucking of mine. When we were dressed, we all looked exceptionally handsome and nobly Mirza and genuinely Persian.

2

WAZIR Jamshid led us to a large but not overpowering dining hall, lighted with torches and ringed about with servants and attendants. They were all males, and only the Shah Zaman joined us at the sumptuously laid dining cloth. I was rather relieved to see that the palace household was not so unorthodox that females were allowed to violate Muslim custom and routinely sit down to eat with men. We and the Shah had a meal uninterrupted by the facundities of the Shahryar, and he only once referred to her:

“The First Wife, being of royal Sabaean blood, has never reconciled herself to the fact that this Shahnate was heretofore subordinate to the Qalif and now is subordinate to the Khanate. Like a fine-bred Arabian mare, the Shahryar Zahd bucks at being harnessed. But otherwise she is an excellent consort, and more tender than the tail of a fat-tailed sheep.”

His barnyard similes perhaps explained, but to my mind did not excuse, her seeming to be the cock of that yard, and he the much-pecked hen. Nevertheless, the Shah was a congenial fellow, and he drank with us like a Christian, and he was a knowledgeable conversationalist when he was unencumbered of his wife. At my remark that I was thrilled to be following the trails which Alexander the Great had trodden, the Shah said:

“Those trails of his ended not far from here, you know, after Alexander had returned from his conquest of India’s Kashmir and Sind and the Panjab. Only fourteen farsakhs south of here are the ruins of Babylon, where he died. Of a fever brought on, it is said, by his having drunk too much of our wine of Shiraz.”

I thanked the Shah for the information, but I privately wondered how anyone could drink a killing amount of that sticky liquid. Even in Venice I had heard travelers extol their remembrance of the wine of Shiraz, and it is much praised in song and fable, but we were drinking it at that very meal, and I thought it fell far short of its reputation. That wine is an unappetizing orange in color, and cloyingly sweet, and thick as treacle. A man would have to be determined on drunkenness, I decided, to drink very much of it.

The other elements of the meal, though, were unqualifiedly superb. There was chicken cooked in pomegranate juice, and lamb cubed and marinated and broiled in a manner called kabab, and a rose-flavored sharbat cold with snow, and a billowy, trembling confection like a fluffed-up nougat, made of fine white flour, cream, honey, daintily flavored with oil of pistachio, and called a balesh. After the meal, we lolled among our cushions and sipped an exquisite liqueur expressed from rose petals, while we watched two court wrestlers, naked and shiny and slippery with almond oil, try to bend each other double or break each other in half. Then, when they had escaped the performance unharmed, we listened to a court minstrel play on a stringed instrument called al-ud, very like a lute, while he recited Persian poems, of which I can recall only that their every line ended in a mouselike squeak or a mournful sob.

When that torment was concluded, I was given leave by the elder men to go and amuse myself, if I wished. I did so, leaving my father and uncle discussing with the Shah the various land and water routes they might take after Baghdad. I left the room and walked down a long corridor, where were many closed doors guarded by giant men holding spears or shimshir sabers. They all wore the sort of helmet I had seen at the palace gates, but some of the guards had faces of African black or Arab brown, ill according with the helmets’ gold-sculptured tresses.

At the end of the corridor was an unguarded archway giving onto the outdoor garden, and I went there. The smooth gravel pathways and lush flower beds were softly illuminated by a full moon that was like a great pearl displayed on the black velvet of the night. I wandered idly about, admiring the unfamiliar blooms made even more new to me by the pearl light shining on them. Then I came to something so novel as to be astonishing: a flower bed that was visibly and all on its own doing something. I stopped to watch and ponder what appeared to be an unvegetably deliberate behavior. The flower bed was a tremendous circular area, divided piewise into twelve slices, each segment planted densely with a different variety of flowers. All of them were at the blooming stage, but in ten of the slices the flowers had closed their blossoms, as many flowers do at night. However, in one segment, some pale pink flowers were just then folding their petals, and in the adjoining segment some large white flowers were at the same time just opening their blossoms and loosing on the night a heady perfume.

“It is the gulsa’at,” said a voice that might also have been perfumed. I turned to see the young and comely Shahzrad and, standing some way behind her, the aged grandmother. Princess Moth went on, “Gulsa’at means the flower dial. In your country, you have sand glasses and water glasses to tell the hours, do you not?”

“Yes, Shahzrad Magas Mirza,” I said, taking care to use her whole regalia of address.

“You may call me Moth,” she said, with a sweet smile visible through her sheer chador. She indicated the gulsa’at. “This flower dial also tells the hours, but it never has to be turned or refilled. Each kind of flower in that round bed naturally opens at a certain hour of the day or night, and closes at another. They are selected for their regularity of habit, and planted here in proper sequence and—lo! They silently announce each of the twelve hours we count from sunset to sunset.”

I said daringly, “It is a thing as beautiful as you are, Princess Moth.”

“My father the Shah takes a delight in measuring time,” she said. “Yonder is the palace masjid in which we worship, but it is also a calendar. In one wall it has openings so the sun in its rounds shines its light each dawn through one after another to tell the day and the month.”

Somewhat similarly, I was sidling around the girl, to put her between me and the moon, so its light shone through her filmy garments and outlined her delectable body. The old grandmother evidently perceived my intention, for she grinned her gums evilly at me.

“And yonder, beyond,” the Princess continued, “is the anderun where reside all my father’s other wives and concubines. He has more than three hundred, so he can have a different one almost every night of the year if he chooses. However, he prefers my mother, the First Wife, except that she talks all night. So he only takes one of the others to bed when he wishes to have a good night’s sleep.”

Looking at the Shahzrad’s moon-revealed body, I felt my own body again stirring as vivaciously as it had done during the champna. I was glad I was not wearing tight Venetian hose, or I would have bulged them most disgracefully. Dressed as I was in ample pai-jamah, I did not think my arousal could have been visible. But the Princess Moth must have sensed it anyway, for to my shocked amazement she said:

“You would like to take me to bed and make zina, would you not?”

I stammered and stuttered, and managed to say, “Surely you should not speak so, Princess, in the presence of your royal grandmother! I assume she is your”—I did not know the Farsi word, so I said it in French—“your chaperon?”

The Shahzrad made an airy gesture. “The old woman is as deaf as that gulsa’at. Be not concerned, but answer me. You would like to put your zab into my mihrab, no?”

I swallowed and gulped. “I could hardly be so presumptuous … I mean, a Royal Highness …”

She nodded and said briskly, “I believe we can arrange something of the sort. No, do not grab at me. The grandmother can see, if she cannot hear. We must be discreet. I will ask my father’s permission to be your guide while you are here, to show you the delights of Baghdad. I can be a very good guide to those delights. You will see.”

And with that, she drifted away down the moonlit garden, leaving me shaken and shaking. I might say vibrant. When I tottered to my room, Karim was waiting to help me doff the unfamiliar Persian clothes, and he laughed and made noises of admiration and said:

“Surely now the young Mirza will allow me to complete the relaxing champna!” and he poured almond oil into his hand, and he did so with expertness, and I fell languidly into sleep.

The next day I slept late, and so did my father and uncle, for their consultation with Shah Zaman had lasted well into the night. As we ate our breakfast meal, brought by the servants to our suite, they told me that they were contemplating the Shah’s suggestion that we go by sea as far as the Indies. But they would first have to find out if it was practicable. They would each go to one of the Gulf ports—my father to Hormuz, my uncle to Basra—and see if, as the Shah believed, an Arab trader-captain could be persuaded to allow passage to us rival Venetian traders.

“When we have investigated,” said my father, “we will regather here in Baghdad, because the Shah will be wanting us to carry many gifts from him to the Khakhan. So you, Marco, can come along with either one of us to the Gulf, or you can await our return here.”

Thinking of the Shahzrad Magas, but having the good sense not to mention her, I said I thought I would stay. I would take the opportunity to get better acquainted with Baghdad.

Uncle Mafìo snorted. “In the way that you got so well acquainted with Venice when we were last away? Truly, not so very many Venetians get to know the interior of the Vulcano.” To my father he said, “Is it prudent, Nico, to leave this malanòso alone in an alien city?”

“Alone?” I protested. “I have the servant Karim and”—I again refrained from mentioning the Princess Moth—“and the whole palace guard.”

“They are responsible to the Shah, not to you or us,” said my father. “If you should get into trouble again …”

I indignantly reminded him that my most recent trouble had involved my saving them from being slaughtered in their sleep, and they had praised me for it, and that was why I was still in their company, and—

My father sternly interrupted with a proverb, “One sees better backwards than forwards. We are not going to set a warden over you, my boy. But I think it would be a good idea to buy a slave to be your personal servant and see to your best interests. We will go to the bazàr.”

The melancholy Wazir Jamshid walked with us, to interpret for us if our command of Farsi should prove inadequate. Along the way he explained several curious things I was seeing for the first time. For example, in eyeing the other men on the streets, I observed that they did not allow their blue-black beards to go gray or white as they aged. Every elderly man I saw had a beard of a violent pink-orange color, like Shiraz wine. Jamshid told me that it was done with a dye made from the leaves of a shrub called hinna, and he said the hinna was also much used by women as a cosmetic and by carters to adorn their horses. I should mention that the horses used in Baghdad for carriage and cartage are not the fine Arabians used for riding. They are tiny little ponies, not much bigger than mastiff dogs, and they do look very pretty with their flowing manes and tails dyed that brilliant pink-orange color.

There were, on the Baghdad streets, men of many other nations than Persia. Some wore Western clothes and had faces, like ours, that would have been white had they not been sun-darkened. Some had black faces, some brown, some a sort of tan-yellow hue, and there were many whose faces were like weathered leather. Those were the Mongols of the occupying garrison, all dressed in armor of varnished hides or metal chain mail, and striding contemptuously through the street crowds, shoving aside anybody who stepped in their way. Also on the streets were many women, also of various complexions, the Persians only lightly veiled, and others not wearing chador at all, a strange thing to see in a Muslim city. But, even in liberal Baghdad, no woman walked alone; whatever her race or nationality, she was attended either by one or several other women or by a male attendant of considerable bulk and beardless face.

I was so bedazzled by the Baghdad bazàr that I could hardly believe the city had been conquered and plundered and held to tribute by the Mongols. It must have recovered commendably from its recent impoverishment, for it was the richest and most thriving center of commerce I had yet seen, far surpassing every marketplace of Venice in the variety and abundance and value of the goods for sale.

The cloth merchants stood proudly among bales and bolts of fabrics woven of silk and wool and Ankara-goat hair and cotton and linen and fine camel hair and sturdier camelot. There were more exotic Eastern fabrics like mussoline from Mosul and dungri from India and bokhram from Bukhara and demesq from Damascus. The book merchants displayed volumes of fine vellum and parchment and paper, gorgeously engrossed in many colors and gold leaf besides. Most of the books, being copies of the works of Persian authors like Sadi and Nimazi, and of course written in Farsi and rendered in the convulsed-worm Arabic lettering, were incomprehensible to me. But one of them, titled Iskandarnama, I could recognize from its illuminations as being a Persian version of my favorite reading, The Book of Alexander.

The bazàr’s apothecaries stocked jars and phials of cosmetics for men and women: black al-kohl and green malachite and brown summaq and red hinna and eye-brightening collyrium washes, and perfumes of nard and myrrh and frankincense and rose attar. There were tiny bags of an almost impalpably fine grit which Jamshid said was fern seed, to be employed by those who knew the proper accompaniment of magical incantations, to make their corporeal persons invisible. There was an oil called teryak, expressed from the petals and pods of poppy flowers, which Jamshid said physicians prescribed for the relief of cramps and other pains, but which any person depressed by age or misery could buy and drink as an easy way out of an unbearable life.

The bazàr was also shiny and glittering and coruscating with precious metals and gems and jewelry. But of all the treasures for sale there, I was most taken with a particular sort. There was a merchant who dealt exclusively in sets of a certain board game. In Venice it is unimaginatively called the Game of Squares, and it is played with cheap pieces carved of ordinary woods. In Persia that game is called the War of the Shahi, and the playing sets are works of art, priced beyond the reach of all but a real Shah or someone of equal wealth. A typical board offered for sale by that Baghdad merchant was of alternate ebony and ivory squares, expensive all by itself. The pieces on one side of it—the Shah and his General, the two elephants, the two horsemen, the two rukhi warriors and the eight peyadeh foot soldiers—were made of gem-encrusted gold, the sixteen facing pieces across the board being of gem-encrusted silver. The price asked for that set I cannot remember, but it was staggering. He had other Shahi sets variously fashioned of porcelain and jade and rare woods and pure crystal, and all of those pieces were sculptured as exquisitely as if they had been miniature statues of living monarchs and generals and their men at arms.

There were merchants of livestock—of horses and ponies and asses and camels, of course, but also of other beasts. Some of them I had known only by repute and never seen before that day, such as a big and shaggy bear, which I thought resembled my Uncle Mafìo; a delicate kind of deer called a qazèl, which people bought to grace their gardens; and a yellow wild dog called a shaqàl, which a hunter could tame and train to stop and kill a charging boar. (A Persian hunter will go alone and with only a knife to challenge a savage lion, but he is timid of meeting a wild pig. Since a Muslim recoils even from speaking of pig meat, he would deem it a death horrific beyond imagination if he should die at the tusks of a boar.) Also in the livestock market was the shuturmurq, which means “camel-bird,” and it certainly did look like a mongrel offspring of those two different creatures. The camel-bird has the body and feathers and beak of a giant goose, but its neck is unfeathered and long, like a camel’s, and its two legs are ungainly long, like a camel’s four, and its splayed feet are as big as a camel’s pads, and it can no more fly than a camel can. Jamshid said the shuturmurq was caught and kept for the one pretty thing it can supply: the billowy plumes it grows on its rump. There were also apes for sale, of the sort which uncouth seamen sometimes bring to Venice, where they are called simiazze: those apes as big and ugly as Ethiope children. Jamshid called that animal nedjis, which means “unspeakably unclean,” but he did not tell me why it was so named or why anyone, even a seaman, would buy such a thing.

In the bazàr were many fardarbab, or tomorrow-tellers. They were shriveled, orange-bearded old men who squatted behind trays of carefully smoothed sand. A client who paid a coin would shake the tray and the sand would ripple into patterns which the old man would read and interpret. There were also many of the darwish holy beggars, as ragged, scabby, filthy and evil-looking as those in any other Eastern city. Here in Baghdad they had an additional attribute: they danced and skipped and howled and whirled and convulsed as violently as any epilept in a seizure. It was, I suppose, at least some entertainment in return for the bakhshish they beseeched.

Before we could even inspect any of the bazàr’s wares, we had to be interviewed by a market official called the revenue-farmer, and satisfy him that we possessed both the means to buy and also the means to pay the jizya, which is a tax levied on non-Muslim sellers and buyers alike. Wazir Jamshid, although he was himself a court official, privately confided to us that all such petty officials and civil servants were despised by the people and were called batlanim, which means “the idle ones.” When my father produced for that idle one a cod of musk, surely wealth enough to pay for a Shahi set at least, the revenue-farmer grumbled suspiciously:

“Got it from an Armeniyan, you say? Then it probably contains not the deer’s musk, but his chopped liver. It must be tested.”

The idle one took out a needle and thread and a clove of garlic. He threaded the needle and ran it several times through and through the garlic, until the thread was reeking with the garlic odor. Then he took the musk cod and ran the needle and thread just once through it. He sniffed at the thread and looked surprised.

“The smell is all gone, totally absorbed. Verily, you have genuine musk. Where on this earth did you meet an honest Armeniyan?” And he gave us a ferman, a paper authorizing us to trade in the Baghdad bazàr.

Jamshid took us to the slave pen of a Persian dealer who he said was trustworthy, and we stood among the crowd of other prospective purchasers and mere lookers-on, while the dealer detailed the lineage, history, attributes and merits of each slave brought to the block by his burly assistants.

“Here is a standard eunuch,” he said, presenting an obese and shiny black man, who looked quite cheerful for a slave. “Guaranteed placid and amenable to orders and never known to steal more than the allowable. He would make an excellent servant. However, if you seek a veritable Keeper of the Keys, here is a perfect eunuch.” He presented a young white man, blond and muscular, who was quite handsome but who looked as melancholy as a slave might be expected to look. “You are invited to examine the merchandise.”

My uncle said to the wazir, “I know, of course, what a eunuch is. We have castròni in our own country, sweet-singing boys neutered so they will always sing sweetly. But how can a totally sexless creature be differentiated as standard and perfect? Is it because one is an Ethiope and the other a Russniak?”

“No, Mirza Polo,” said Jamshid, and he explained in French, so we would not be confounded by unfamiliar Farsi words. “The eunuque ordinaire is deprived of his testicles when he is yet a baby, to make him grow up docile and obedient and not contrary of nature. It is easily done. A thread is tied tightly around the roots of a boy infant’s scrotum, and in a matter of weeks that cod withers, turns black and drops off. That is quite enough to make him become a good servant of general utility.”

“What more could a master want?” said Uncle Mafìo, perhaps sincerely, perhaps sarcastically.

“Well, to be a Keeper of the Keys, the eunuque extraordinaire is preferred. For he must live in and watch over the anderun, the quarters in which reside his master’s wives and concubines. And those women, especially if they are not often favored in the matter of the master’s bed, can be most enterprising and inventive, even with inert male flesh. So that sort of slave must be shorn of all his equipment—the rod as well as the stones. And that removal is a serious operation, not so easily done. Look yonder and observe. The merchandise is being examined.”

We looked. The dealer had directed the two slaves to drop their pai-jamah, and they stood with their crotches exposed to the scrutiny of an elderly Persian Jew. The fat black man was hairless down there, and bagless, but he did have a member of respectable size, though of a repellent black and purple color. I supposed that a woman of the anderun, if she was so desperate for a man and so depraved as to want that thing inside her, might contrive some kind of splint to stiffen it. But the far more presentable young Russniak had not even a flaccid appendage. He showed only a growth of blond artichoke hair, and something like the tip of a small white stick grotesquely protruding from the hair, and otherwise his groin was as featureless as a woman’s.

“Bruto barabào!” grunted Uncle Mafìo. “How is it done, Jamshid?”

As expressionlessly as if he was reading from a medical text, the wazir said, “The slave is taken into a room dense with the smoke of smoldering banj leaves, and he is set in a hot bath and he is given teryak to sip, all that done to dull his sense of pain. The hakim doing the operation takes a long ribbon and winds it tightly about him, starting at the tip of the slave’s penis and wrapping inward to the roots, bundling in with it the cod of testicles, so that the organs make a single package. Then, using a keenly sharp blade, the hakim removes that whole beribboned package with a single slicing stroke. He immediately applies to the wound a styptic of powdered raisins, puffball fungus and alum. When the bleeding stops, he inserts a clean quill, which will stay there during the slave’s whole life. For the chief danger of the operation is that the urinary passage may close in the healing. If, by the third or fourth day afterward, the slave has not passed water through the quill, he is certain to die. And sad to say, that does occur in perhaps three out of five cases.”

“Capòn mal caponà!” exclaimed my father. “It sounds gruesome. You have actually witnessed such a procedure?”

“Yes,” said Jamshid. “I watched with some interest when it was done to me.”

I should have realized that that accounted for his always melancholy aspect, and I should have kept silent. Instead I blurted, “But you are not fat, Wazir, and you have a full beard!”

He did not rebuke my impertinence. He replied, “Those who endure castration in infancy never grow a beard, and their bodies grow corpulent and feminine of contour, often even growing heavy breasts. But when the operation is done after a slave’s passing puberty, he remains masculine, at least in outward appearance. I was a full-grown man, with a wife and son, when our farm was raided by Kurdi slave-takers. The Kurdi sought only robust worker slaves, so my wife and little boy were spared. They were merely raped several times apiece, and then slain.”

An appalled silence ensued and might have got uncomfortable, but Jamshid added, almost offhandedly, “Ah, well, can I complain? I might have been a mere millet farmer to this day. But having been relieved of a man’s natural desires—to sow and cultivate land and lineage—I was freed to cultivate my intellect instead. Now I have risen to become Wazir to the Shahinshah of Persia, and that is no small attainment.”

Having so graciously dismissed the subject, he summoned the slave dealer to come and give ear to our requirements. The dealer left his assistants to oversee the inspection of the two slaves already on display, and came smiling and rubbing his hands together.

I had half hoped that my father would buy for me a comely girl slave, who could be more than a servant, or at least a young man of my own age, who would be a congenial companion. But of course he told the dealer not what I might want, but what he wanted for me :

“An older man, well versed in travel, but still agile enough to travel farther yet. Wise in the ways of the East, so that he can both safeguard and instruct my son. And I think”—he flicked a sympathetic glance at the wazir—“not a eunuch. I had rather not help to perpetuate that practice.”

“I have the very man, messieurs,” said the dealer, speaking good French. “Mature but not old, wily but not willful, experienced but not inflexible to command. Now, where has he got to? He was here just moments ago … .”

We followed him about through his herd—or herds, I should say, for there were a considerable number of slaves in the pen, and also a number of the tiny hinna’ed Persian horses which drew his wagons from town to town. The pen was partly fenced and partly enclosed by those canvas-hooped wagons, in which he and his assistants and his merchandise traveled by day and slept by night.

“The ideal slave for you, messieurs, this man,” the dealer went on, as he kept looking around. “He has belonged to numerous masters, hence has traveled widely and knows many lands. He speaks several tongues, and has a vast repertoire of useful talents. But where is he?”

We continued circulating among the men and women slaves, who had lengths of light chain connecting their ankle rings, and among the midget horses, which were not fettered. The dealer began to look slightly embarrassed at having misplaced the very slave he was trying to peddle.

“I had loosed him from the skein,” he muttered, “and shackled him to one of my mares, which he was currying for me—”

He was interrupted by a loud, piercing, prolonged equine whinny. With a ripple of orange mane and tail, a little horse came flying out through the front flaps of one of the covered wagons. Literally, it was in flight for a moment, like the magic glass horse of which the Shahryar Zahd had told us, for it had to bound from the interior of the wagon bed and clear the driver’s bench and the dashboard to get to the ground below. As it made that high arcing bound, a chain attached to its rear leg came trailing in the same looping arc, and at the other end of the chain a man popped out legs-first through the canvas flaps, like a stopper yanked from a bottle. The man also flew over the front of the wagon and hit the ground in a thump of dust. Because the horse tried to flee farther yet, the man got dragged about and raised quite a cloud of dust before the slave dealer could catch the frightened animal’s bridle and bring that brief entertainment to a halt.

The little horse’s orange mane was silkily combed, but its orange tail was disheveled. So were the man’s nether regions, for his pai-jamah were down around his feet. He sat for a moment, too winded to do anything but make several faint exclamations in several languages. Then he hastily rearranged his garments, as the slave dealer came and stood over him and bellowed imprecations and kicked him until he got upright. The slave was about my father’s age, but his scruffy beard appeared to be only about two weeks’ growth and did not adequately conceal a receding chin. He had bright, shifty pig’s eyes and a large fleshy nose that drooped over fleshy lips. He was no taller than I, but much thicker, with a paunch that drooped as did his nose. All in all, he looked something like a camelbird.

“My newly acquired mare!” the dealer was raging, in Farsi, still kicking the slave. “You indescribable wretch!”

“The mischievous horse was wandering, master,” whined the wretch, his arms raised protectively around his head. “I had to follow—”

“The horse wandered up? And climbed into a wagon? You lie to me as readily as you lie with innocent animals! You execrable pervert!”

“But give me due credit, master,” whimpered the pervert. “Your mare could have gone farther, and been lost. Or I could have gone with her, and escaped.”

“Bismillah, I wish you had! You are an insult to the noble institution of slavery!”

“Then sell me, master,” sniveled the insult. “Foist me onto some unsuspecting purchaser and get me out of your sight.”

“Estag farullah!” the dealer prayed toward Heaven at the top of his voice. “Allah pardon me my sins, I thought I had done just that. These gentlemen might have bought you, abomination, but now they have seen you caught in the act of raping my best mare!”

“Oh, I dispute that accusation, master,” said the abomination, daring to speak with an air of righteous indignation. “I have known much better mares.”

Speechless of words, the dealer clenched his fists and teeth and roared, “Arrrgh!”

Jamshid interrupted this singular colloquy, saying sternly, “Mirza Dealer, I assured the messieurs that you were a trustworthy seller of dependable merchandise.”

“Before Allah, that I am, Wazir! I would not sell, I would not give them this walking pustule! I would not sell him to the harridan wife Awwa of the Devil Shaitan, I swear it, now that I know his true nature. I sincerely apologize to you, messieurs. And so will this creature apologize. You hear me? Apologize for that disgraceful exhibition. Abase yourself! Speak, Nostril!”

“Nostril?” we all exclaimed.

“It is my name, good masters,” said the slave, unapologetically. “I have other names, but I am most often called Nostril, and for a reason.”

He put a grimy finger to his blob of nose and pushed up the tip of it so we could see that instead of two nostrils he had only one large one. It would have been a sight repulsive enough, but was made more so by the profusion of snotty hair growing out of it.

“A minor punishment I once incurred for an even more minor misdemeanor. But be not prejudiced against me on that account, kind masters. As you can perceive, I am otherwise a distinguished figure of a man, and I have countless virtues besides. I was by profession a seaman, before I fell into slavery, and I have traveled everywhere, from my native Sind to the farthermost shores of—”

“Gèsu Marìa Isèpo,” said Uncle Mafìo, marveling. “The man’s tongue is as limber as his middle leg!”

We all stood fascinated and let Nostril babble on. “I would still be traveling, but for my misfortunate seizure by slavers. I was making love to a female shaqàl when the slave-raiders attacked, and you gentlemen doubtless know how a bitch’s mihrab enclasps the loving zab and holds it trapped. So I could not run very fast, with the shaqàl bitch dangling from my front and bouncing and squawling. So I was caught, and my sea career ended and my slave career began. But I say in all modesty that I quickly became a nonpareil slave. You will have remarked that I am now speaking in Sabir, your trade language of the West—and now hearken, auspicious masters, I am speaking in Farsi, the trade language of the East. I am also fluent in my native Sindi, in Pashtun, in Hindi and Panjabi. I speak also a passable Arabic, and can get along in several of the Turki dialects and—”

“Do you never shut up in any of them?” asked my father.

Nostril went on, unheeding. “And I have many more qualities and talents of which I have not begun yet to speak. I am good with horses, as you must have noticed. I grew up with horses and—”

“You just said you were a seaman,” my uncle pointed out.

“That was after I grew up, perspicacious master. I am also an expert with camels. I can cast and divine horoscopes in the Arab manner or the Persian or the Indian. I have refused offers from the most exclusive hammams to hire them my services as a rubber unsurpassed. I can dye gray beards with hinna, or remove wrinkles by applying quicksilver salve. With my single nostril I can play a flute more sweetly than any musician with his mouth. Also, employing that orifice in a certain other fashion—”

In unison, my father and uncle and the wazir severally exclaimed:

“Dio me varda!” and

“This man would disgust a maggot!” and

“Remove him, Mirza Dealer! He is a blot on Baghdad! Stake him out somewhere for the vultures!”

“I hear and obey, Wazir,” said the dealer. “After I have shown you some other wares, perhaps?”

“It is late,” said Jamshid, instead of what he might have said about the dealer and his wares. “We are expected back at the palace. Come, messieurs. There is always tomorrow.”

“And tomorrow will be a cleaner day,” said the dealer, glaring vengefully at the slave.

So we left the slave pen and the bazàr and wended our way through the streets and garden squares. We were nearly back at the palace before Uncle Mafìo thought to remark:

“You know? That despicable scoundrel Nostril never did apologize.”

3

AGAIN we had our servants dress us in our best new raiment, and again we joined the Shah Zaman for the evening meal, and again it was a delicious repast, again excepting the Shiraz wine. I remember that the concluding course was a confection of sheriye, which are a sort of pasta ribbons like our fetucine, these cooked in cream with almonds and pistachios and tiny slivers of gold and silver foil so very thin and dainty that they were to be eaten along with the rest of the sweet.

While we dined, the Shah told us that his Royal First Daughter, the Shahzrad Magas, had asked his permission, and he had given it, to act as my companion and guide, to show me the sights of the city and its environs—with of course the additional company of a lady chaperon—as long as I should be in Baghdad. My father gave me a sidelong glance, but thanked the Shah for his and the Princess’s kindness. My father further declared that, since I would obviously be in good hands, it would be unnecessary to buy a slave to look after me. So he would head southward the very next morning toward Hormuz, and Mafìo toward Basra.

I saw them off at dawn, each of them riding away in the company of a palace guard assigned by the Shah to be their servants and protectors on the journey. Then I went to the palace garden, where the Shahzrad Magas waited, again with her grandmother discreetly shadowing, to give me my first day of sightseeing under her tutelage. I made her a very formal greeting of salaam, and said nothing of what else she had hinted at giving me, and neither did she speak of it for a while.

“Dawn is a good time to see our palace masjid,” she said, and escorted me to that temple of worship, where she bade me admire the exterior of it, which was admirable indeed. The immense dome was covered with a mosaic of blue and silver tiles and topped with a golden knob, all shining in the sunrise. The manaret spire was like an elaborate giant candlestick, richly chased and engraved and inlaid with glowing gemstones.

At that moment I formed a private surmise, and I would speak of it here.

I already knew that Muslim men are bidden to keep their women sequestered and useless and mute and veiled from all eyes—in pardah, as the Persians call that lifelong suppression of their females. I knew that, by decree of the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran he wrote, a woman is merely one of a man’s chattels, like his sword or his goats or his wardrobe, and she differs only in being the one of his chattels with which he occasionally couples, and that with the sole purpose of siring children, and those valued only when they are male, like him. The majority of devout Muslims, men and women alike, must not speak of sexual relations between them, or even the relation of mutual companionship, though a man might be leeringly frank about his relations with other men.

But I decided, on that morning when I gazed at the palace masjid, that Islam’s strictures against the normal expression of normal sexuality has not been able to stifle all expression of it. Look at any masjid and you will see each dome copied from the female human breast, its aroused nipple erect to the sky, and in each manaret a representation of the male organ, likewise joyously erect. I might be mistaken in discerning those similarities, but I do not think so. The Quran has decreed inequality between men and women. It has made indecent and unmentionable the natural relation between them, and distorted it most shamefully. But Islam’s own temples bravely declare that the Prophet was wrong, and that Allah made man and woman to cleave to each other and to be of one flesh.

The Princess and I went inside the masjid’s wonderfully high and broad central chamber, and it was beautifully decorated, though of course entirely with patterns, not pictures or statues. The walls were covered with mosaic designs made of blue lapis lazura alternating with white marble, so the chamber was a soft and restful pale-blue place.

Just as there are no images in Muslim temples, there also are no altars, no priests, no musicians or choristers, no apparatus of the ceremonial, like censers and fonts and candelabra. There are no masses or communions or other such rites, and a Muslim congregation observes only one ritual rule: in praying, they all prostrate themselves in the direction of the holy city Mecca, birthplace of their Prophet Muhammad. Since Mecca lies southwest of Baghdad, that masjid’s farther wall was to the southwest, and in the center of it was a shallow niche, a little taller than a man, also tiled blue and white.

“That is the mihrab,” said Princess Moth. “Though Islam has no priests, we are sometimes addressed by a visiting wise man. Perhaps an imam, one whose deep study of the Quran has made him an authority on its spiritual tenets. Or a mufti, who is similarly an expert on the temporal laws laid down by the Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him). Or a hajji, one who has made the long hajj pilgrimage to Holy Mecca. And to lead our devotions, the wise man takes position yonder in the mihrab.”

I said, “I thought the word mihrab meant—” and then I stopped, and the Princess smiled naughtily at me.

I was about to say that I had thought the word mihrab meant a woman’s most private part, what a Venetian girl had once vulgarly called her pota, and a Venetian lady had more fastidiously called her mona. But then I took notice of the shape of that mihrab niche in the masjid wall. It was shaped exactly like a woman’s genital orifice, slightly oval in outline and narrowing at the top to close in a pointed arch. I have been inside many another masjid, and in every one that niche is so shaped. I believe it to be an additional corroboration of my theory that human sexuality has influenced Islamic architecture. Of course I do not know—and I doubt that any Muslim knows—which use of the word mihrab came first: the ecclesiastical or the bawdy.

“And there,” said Princess Moth, pointing upward, “are the windows which make the sun tell the passing days.”

Sure enough, there were openings carefully spaced about the upper periphery of the dome, and the new-risen sun was sending a beam across to the dome’s opposite inner side, where there were inset slabs with Arabic writings entwined in their mosaics. The Princess read aloud the words where the beam rested. According to that evidence, the present day was, in the Muslim reckoning, the third day of the month Jumada Second in the 670th year of Muhammad’s Hijra, or, in the Persian calendar, the 199th year of the Jalali Era. Then Princess Moth and I together, with much muttering and counting on our fingers, did the calculations necessary to convert the date to the Christian reckoning.

“Today is the twentieth of the month September!” I exclaimed. “It is my birthday!”

She congratulated me and said, “You Christians sometimes are given gifts on your birthdays, are you not, as we are?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Then I will give you a gift this very night, if you are brave enough to run some risk in receiving it. I will give you a night of zina.”

“What is zina?” I asked, though I suspected I knew.

“It is illicit intercourse between a man and a woman. It is haram, which means forbidden. If you are to receive the gift, I must sneak you into my chamber in the anderun of the palace women, which is also haram.”

“I will brave any risk!” I cried wholeheartedly. Then I thought of something. “But … excuse me for asking, Princess Moth. But I have been informed that Muslim women are somehow deprived of—of their enthusiasm for zina. I have been told that they are, well, somehow circumcised, though I cannot imagine how.”

“Oh, yes, tabzir,” she said casually. “That is done to the general run of women, yes, when they are infants. But not to any infants of royal blood, or any who could in future become the wives or concubines of a royal court. It was certainly not done to me.”

“I am happy for you,” I said, and meant it. “But what is done to those unfortunate females? What is tabzir?”

“Let me show you,” she said.

I was startled, expecting her to undress, right then and there, so I made a cautionary gesture at the lurking grandmother. But Moth only grinned at me and stepped to the preacher’s niche in the masjid wall, saying, “Are you much acquainted with the anatomy of a female person? Then you know that here”—she pointed at the top of the arch—“toward the front of her mihrab opening, a woman has a tender buttonlike protrusion. It is called the zambur.”

“Ah,” I said, enlightened at last. “In Venice it is called the lumaghèta.” I tried to sound as clinical as a physician, but I know I blushed as I spoke.

“The exact position of the zambur may vary slightly in different women,” Moth went on, herself unblushingly clinical. “And the size of it may vary considerably. My own zambur is commendably large, and in arousal it extends to the length of my little finger’s first joint.”

Just the thought of it made me arouse and extend. Since the grandmother was present, I was again grateful for my voluminous nether garments.

The Princess blithely continued, “So I am much in demand by the other women of the anderun, because my zambur can service them almost as well as a man’s zab. And women’s play is halal, which means allowable, not haram.”

And if my face had been pink before, it must have been maroon by now. But if Princess Moth noticed, it did not deter her.

“In every woman, that is her most sensitive place, the very nub of her sexual excitability. Without the arousal of her zambur, she is unresponsive in the sexual embrace. And lacking any enjoyment of that act, she does not yearn for it. That of course is the reason for the tabzir—the circumcision, as you called it. In a grown woman, until she is very much aroused, the zambur is modestly hidden between the closed lips of her mihrab. But in an infant female, that zambur protrudes beyond the little baby lips. An attending hakim can very easily snip it off with just a scissors.”

“Dear God!” I exclaimed, my own arousal going instantly limp from horror. “That is not circumcision. That is the making of a female eunuch!”

“Very like it,” she agreed, as if it were not horrible at all. “The child grows up to be a woman virtuously cold and devoid of sexual response, or even any desire for it. The perfect Muslim wife.”

“Perfect?! What husband would want such a wife?”

“A Muslim husband,” she said simply. “That wife will never commit adultery and make him a cuckold. She is incapable of contemplating an act of zina, or anything else haram. She will not even tease her husband to anger by flirting with another man. If she correctly keeps pardah, she will never even see another man—until she gives birth to a man-child. You understand, tabzir does not hamper her function of maternity. She can become a mother, and in that she is superior to a eunuch, who cannot become a father.”

“Even so, it is a ghastly fate for a woman.”

“It is the fate decreed by the Prophet (may blessing and peace be upon him). Nevertheless, I am thankful that we upper classes are exempted from many such inconveniences visited upon the common folk. Now, about your birthday gift, young Mirza Marco …”

“I wish it was already night,” I said, glancing up at the slow-creeping sunbeam. “This will be the longest birthday of my life, waiting for night and zina with you.”

“Oh, not with me!”

“What?”

She giggled. “Well, not exactly with me.”

Bewildered, I said again, “What?”

“You distracted me, Marco, asking about the tabzir, so I did not explain the gift I am giving you. Before I explain, you must bear in mind that I am a virgin.”

I started pettishly to say, “You have not been talking like—” but she laid a finger across my lips.

“True, I am not tabzir and I am not cold and perhaps you would call me not entirely virtuous, since I am inviting you to do something haram. It is true, too, that I have a most charming zambur, and I dearly love to exercise it, but only in ways halal which will not diminish my virginity. In addition to my zambur, you see, I have all my parts, including my sangar. That maiden membrane has not been breached, and never will be until I wed some royal Prince. It must not be breached, or no Prince would have me. I should be lucky if I were not beheaded for letting myself be despoiled. No, Marco, do not even dream of consummating the zina with me.”

“I am confused, Princess Moth. You distinctly said you would sneak me into your chamber … .”

“And so I shall. And I shall remain with you there to assist you in zina with my sister.”

“With your sister?!”

“Hush! The old grandmother is deaf, but sometimes she can read simple words from the lips. Now keep silent and listen. My father has many wives, so I have many sisters. One of them is amenable to zina. In fact, she can never get enough of it. And it is she who will be your birthday gift.”

“But if she is also a royal Princess, why is her virginity not equally—?”

“I said keep silent. Yes, she is as royal as I, but there is a reason why she does not treasure maidenhood as I do. You will know everything tonight. But until tonight I will say no more, and if you pester me with questions I will rescind the gift. Now, Marco, let us enjoy the day. Let me command a coachman to take us for a ride about the city.”

The coach, when it came for us, was really only a dainty cart on two high wheels, drawn by a single midget Persian horse. Its driver helped me hoist the infirm old grandmother up to sit beside him at the front, and the Princess and I sat on the inside seat. As the cart rolled down the garden drive and out through the palace gates into Baghdad, Moth remarked that she had not yet had anything of breakfast to eat, opened a cloth bag, took from it some greenish-yellow fruits, and bit into one and offered another to me.

“Banyan,” she called it. “A variety of fig.”

I winced at the word fig, and politely declined, not bothering to mention my Acre misadventure that had made figs repulsive to me. Moth looked sulky when I refused, and I asked her why.

“Do you know,” she said, leaning close and whispering so the coachman would not hear, “that this is the forbidden fruit with which Eve seduced Adam?”

I whispered back, “I prefer the seduction without the fruit. And speaking of which—”

“I told you not to speak of it. Not until tonight.”

Several other times during the morning’s ride, I tried to broach that subject, but every time she ignored me, speaking only to call my attention to this or that point of interest and to tell me informative things about it.

She said, “Here we are in the bazàr, which you have already visited, but perhaps you do not recognize it now, all empty and deserted and silent. That is because today is Jumè—Friday, as you call it—which Allah appointed to be the day of rest, and there is no doing of trade or business or labor.”

And she said, “That grassy parkland which you see yonder is a graveyard, which we call a City of the Silent.”

And she said, “That large building is the House of Delusion, a charitable institution founded by my father the Shah. In it are confined and cared for all the persons who go insane, as many persons do in the hot summertime. They are regularly examined by a hakim, and if they ever regain their reason, they are set free again.”

In the outer skirts of the city, we crossed a bridge over a small stream, and I was struck by the color of that water, which was a most unusually deep blue for mere water. Then we crossed another stream, and it was a most unwaterly vivid green. But not until we had crossed yet another, and it was as red as blood, did I make any comment.

The Princess explained, “The waters of all the streams out here are colored by the dyes of the makers of qali. You have never seen a qali made? You must see.” And she gave directions to the coachman.

I would have expected to be taken back into Baghdad, and to some city workshop, but the cart went farther still into the countryside, and came to a stop beside a hill that had a low cave entrance halfway up it. Moth and I got down from the cart, climbed the hill and ducked our heads to go into the hole.

We had to go crouching through a short, dark tunnel, but then we came out inside the hill, and into a vastly wide and high rock cavern, full of people, its floor cluttered with work tables and benches and dye vats. The cavern was dark until my eyes got accustomed to its half-light, cast by innumerable candles and lamps and torches. The lamps were set on the various pieces of furniture, the torches were ensconced at intervals around the rock walls, some of the candles were stuck to the rocks by their own drip, and other candles were carried about in the hands of the multitude of workers.

I said to the Princess, “I thought this was a day of rest.”

“For Muslims,” she said. “These are all slaves, Christian Russniaks and Lezghians and such. They are allowed their due sabbath on Sundays.”

Only a few of the slaves were grown men and women, and they worked at various tasks, like the stirring of the dye vats, on the floor of the cavern. All the rest were children, and they worked while floating high in the air. That may sound like one of the Shahryar Zahd’s stories of magic, but it was a fact. From the high dome of the cavern hung a giant comb of strings, hundreds of strings, parallel and close together, a vertical web as high and as wide as the entire cavern’s height and width. It was obviously the weft for a qali which, when finished, would carpet some immense palace chamber or ballroom. High up against that wall of weft, hung in loops of rope that depended from somewhere even higher in the roof darkness, dangled a crowd of children.

The little boys and girls were all naked—because of the heat of the air up there, Princess Moth told me—and they were suspended across the width of the work, but at various levels, some higher and some lower. Up there, the qali was partially completed, from its hem at the top of the weft down to those levels where the children worked, and I could see that it was, even at that early stage of progress, a qali of a most intricate and varicolored flower-garden design. Each of the dangling children had a candle stuck on its head with the wax, and all were busily engaged, but at what I could not discern; they seemed to be plucking with their little fingers at the unfinished lower edge of the qali.

The Princess said, “They are weaving the warp threads through the weft. Each slave holds a shuttle and a hank of thread of a single color. He or she weaves it through and makes it tight, in the order required by the design.”

“How in the world,” I asked, “can one child know when and where to contribute his bit, among so many other slaves and threads, and in such a complex work?”

“The qali master sings to them,” she said. “Our arrival interrupted him. There, he begins again.”

It was a wonderful thing. The man called the qali master sat before a table on which was spread a tremendous sheet of paper. It was ruled in countless neat little squares, over which was superimposed a drawing of the qali’s entire intended design, with the innumerable different colors indicated. The qali master read aloud from that design, singing something on this order:

“One, red! … Thirteen, blue! … Forty-five, brown! …”

Except that what he chanted was far more complicated than that. It had to be audible away up there near the cavern roof, and it had to be unmistakably understood by each boy and girl it called upon, and it had to have a cadence that kept them all working in rhythm. While the words addressed one slave child after another, out of the great many of them, and told each one when to bring in his individual shuttle, the singing of the words either in a high tone or a low tone told that slave how far across the weft to warp his thread and when to knot it. In that marvelous manner of working, the slaves would bring the qali, thread by thread, line by line, all the way down to the cavern floor, and when it was finished it would be as perfect in execution as if it had been painted by a single artist.

“Just that one qali can eventually cost many slaves,” said the Princess, as we turned to leave the cavern. “The weavers must be as young as possible, so they are light of weight and have tiny, agile fingers. But it is not easy to teach such demanding work to such young boys and girls. Also, they frequently swoon from the heat up yonder, and fall and break and die. Or, if they live long enough, they are almost sure to go blind from the close work and poor light. And for every one lost, another slave child must be already trained and standing by.”

“I can understand,” I said, “why even the smallest qali is so valuable.”

“But just imagine what one would cost,” she said, as we emerged again into the sunlight, “if we had to employ real people.”

4

THE cart took us back to the city, and through it, and again into the palace gardens. Once or twice more I tried to pry from the Princess some hint of what would happen in the nighttime, but she remained adamant against my curiosity. Not until we got down from the cart, and she and her grandmother were leaving me to go to their anderun quarters, did she refer to our rendezvous.

“At moonrise,” she said. “By the gulsa’at again.”

I had a minor ordeal to go through before then. When I got to my room, the servant Karim informed me that I was to be accorded the honor of dining that evening with the Shah Zaman and his Shahryar Zahd. It was no doubt a signal kindness on their part, considering my youth and my insignificance in the absence of my ambassadorial father and uncle. But I confess that I did not much esteem the honor, and I sat wishing that the meal would hasten to its conclusion. For one reason, I felt slightly uncomfortable in the presence of the parents of the girl who had invited me to zina later that night. (Of the other girl, who would somehow share in the zina, I knew the Shah had to be the father, but I could not guess who might be her mother.) Also, I was literally salivating at the prospect of that which was to occur, even though I did not know exactly what was to occur. With my tongue glands thus uncontrollably gushing, I could hardly eat of the fine meal, let alone make sustained conversation. Fortunately, the Shahryar’s loquacity precluded my having to say more than an occasional “Yes, Your Majesty” and “Is that a fact?” and “Do tell.” For she did tell; nothing could have stopped her telling; but she told not many facts, I think.

“So,” she said, “today you visited the makers of qali.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“You know, in olden times there were magic qali which were capable of carrying a man through the air.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Yes, a man could step onto a qali and command it to take him to some far, far distant part of the world. And off it would fly, over mountains and seas and deserts, whisking him there in the twinkling of an eyelid.”

“Do tell.”

“Yes. I will tell you the story of a Prince. His Princess lover was abducted by the giant rukh bird, and he was desolate. So he procured from a jinni one of the magic qali and …”

And finally the story was over, and finally so was the meal, and finally so was my impatient waiting, and, like the story Prince, I hurried to my Princess lover. She was at the flower dial, and for the first time she was unaccompanied by her crone chaperon. She took my hand and led me along the garden paths and around the palace to a wing of it I had not known existed. Its doors were guarded like all the other palace entrances, but Princess Moth and I merely had to wait in the concealment of a flowery shrub until both the guards turned their heads. They did so in unison, and almost as if they were doing it on command, and I wondered if Moth had bribed them. She and I flitted inside unseen, or at least unchallenged, and she led me along several corridors oddly empty of guards, and around corners, and finally through an unguarded door.

We were in her chambers, a place hung with many splendid qali and with filmy, transparent curtains and draperies in the many colors of sharbats, looped and swathed and swagged in a delicious confusion, but all carefully kept clear of the lamps burning among them. The room was carpeted almost from wall to wall with sharbat-colored cushions, so many that I could not tell which were daiwan and which composed the Princess’s bed.

“Welcome to my chambers, Mirza Marco,” she said. “And to this.”

And somehow she undid what must have been a single knot or clasp sustaining all her clothes, for they all dropped away from her at once. She stood before me in the warm lamplight, garbed only in her beauty and her provocative smile and her seeming surrender and one ornament, one only, a spray of three brilliant red cherries in the elaborately arranged black hair of her head.

Against the pale sharbat colors of the room, the Princess stood out vividly red and black and green and white: the cherries red upon her black tresses, her eyes green and their long lashes black and her lips red in her ivory face, her nipples red and her nether curls black against the ivory body. She smiled more broadly as she watched my gaze wander down her naked body and up again, to rest on the three living ornaments in her hair, and she murmured:

“As bright as rubies, are they not? But more precious than rubies, for the cherries will wither. Or will they instead”—she asked it seductively, running the red tip of her tongue across her red upper lip—“will they be eaten?” She laughed then.

I was panting as if I had run all the way across Baghdad to that enchanted chamber. Clumsily I moved toward her, and she let me approach to her arm’s length, for that was where her hand stopped me, reaching out to touch my foremost approaching part.

“Good,” she said, approving what she had touched. “Quite ready and eager for zina. Take off your clothes, Marco, while I attend to the lamps.”

I obediently disrobed, though keeping my fascinated eyes on her the while. She moved gracefully about the room, snuffing one wick after another. When for a moment Moth stood before one of the lamps, though she stood with her legs neatly together, I could see a tiny triangle of lamplight shine like a beckoning beacon between her upper thighs and her artichoke mount, and I remembered what a Venetian boy had said long ago: that such was the mark of “a woman of the most utterly desirable bedworthiness.” When all the lamps were extinguished, she came back through the darkness to me.

“I wish you had left the lamps alight,” I said. “You are beautiful, Moth, and I delight in looking at you.”

“Ah, but lamp flames are fatal to moths,” she said, and laughed. “There is enough moonlight coming through the window for you to see me, and see nothing else. Now—”

“Now!” I echoed in total and joyful accord, and I lunged, but she dodged adroitly.

“Wait, Marco! You forget, I am not your birthday gift.”

“Yes,” I mumbled. “I was forgetting. Your sister. I remember now. But why are you stripped naked, Moth, if it is she who—?”

“I said I would explain tonight. And I will, if you will restrain your groping. Hear me now. This sister of mine, being also a royal Princess, did not have to endure the mutilation of tabzir when she was a baby, because it was expected that she would someday marry royalty. Therefore, she is a complete female, unimpaired in her organs, with all of a female’s needs and desires and capabilities. Unfortunately, the dear girl grew up to be ugly. Dreadfully ugly. I cannot tell you how ugly.”

I said wonderingly, “I have seen no one like that about the palace.”

“Of course not. She would not wish to be seen. She is excruciatingly ugly, but tender of heart. So she keeps forever to her chambers here in the anderun, not to chance meeting even a child or a eunuch and frightening the wits out of such a one.”

“Mare mia,” I muttered. “Just how is she ugly, Moth? Only in the face? Or is she deformed? Hunchbacked? What?”

“Hush! She waits just outside the door, and she might hear.”

I lowered my voice. “What is this thing’s—what is this girl’s name?”

“The Princess Shams, and that is also a pity, for the word means Sunlight. However, let us not dwell on her devastating ugliness. Suffice it to say that this poor sister long ago gave up hope of making any sort of marriage, or even of attracting a transient lover. No man could look at her in the light, or feel her in the dark, and still keep his lance atilt for zina.”

“Che braga!” I muttered, feeling a frisson of chill. If Moth had not been still visible to me, only dimly but alluringly, my own lance might have drooped then.

“Nevertheless, I assure you that her feminine parts are quite normal. And they quite normally wish to be filled and fulfilled. That is why she and I contrived a plan. And, because I love my sister Shams, I conspire with her in that plan. Whenever she espies from her hiding place a man who wakens her yearning, I invite him here and—”

“You have done this before!” I bleated in dismay.

“Imbecile infidel, of course we have! Many and many a time. That is why I can promise you will enjoy it. Because so many other men have.”

“You said it was a birthday gift—”

“Do you disdain a gift because it comes from a generous giver of gifts? Be still and listen. What we do is this. You lie down, on your back. I lie across your waist, staying always in your view. While you and I fondle and frolic—and we will do everything but the ultimate thing—my sister creeps quietly in and contents herself with your lower half. You never see Shams or touch her, except with your zab, and it encounters nothing repugnant. Meanwhile, you see and feel only me. And you and I will excite each other to a delirium, so that when the zina is accomplished down there, you will never know it is not me you are having it with.”

“This is grotesque.”

“You may of course decline the gift,” she said coldly. But she moved close, so that her breast touched me, and it was anything but cold. “Or you can give me and yourself a delight, and at the same time do a good deed for a poor creature doomed always to darkness and nonentity. Well … do you decline it?” Her hand reached for the answer. “Ah, I thought you would not. I knew you for a kindly man. Very well, Marco, let us lie down.”

We did so. I lay on my back, as instructed, and Moth draped her upper body across my waist, so I could not see below it, and we commenced the preludes of music-making. She lightly stroked her fingertips over my face and through my hair and over my chest, and I did the same to her, and every time we touched, everywhere we touched, we felt the sort of tingling shock one can feel by briskly rubbing a cat’s fur the wrong way. But there was no wrong way she could have fondled me—or I her, as I discovered. Her nipples got perkily swollen under my touch, and even in the dim light I could see the dilation of her eyes, and I could taste that her lips were engorged with passion.

“Why do you call it music-making?” she softly asked at one point. “It is far nicer than music.”

“Well, yes,” I said, after thinking about it. “I had forgotten the kind of music you have here in Persia … .”

Now and then, she would extend a hand behind her, to stroke the part of me she was shielding from my sight, and each time that gave me a deliciously urgent start, and each time she withdrew her hand just in time, or I should have made spruzzo into the air. She let me reach a hand down to her own parts, only whispering in a quaver, “Careful with the fingers. Only the zambur. Not inside, remember.” And that fondling made her several times come to paroxysm.

And later she was straddling my chest, her body upright, her nether curls soft against my face, so that her mihrab was within reach of my tongue, and she whispered, “A tongue cannot break the sangar membrane. You may do with your tongue all you can do.” Though the Princess wore no perfume, that part of her was coolly fragrant, like fresh fern or lettuce. And she had not exaggerated in speaking of her zambur; it was like having the tip of another tongue meet mine there, and lick and flick and probe in response to mine. And that sent Moth into a constant paroxysm, only waxing and waning slightly in intensity, like the wordless singing she did in accompaniment.

Delirium, Moth had said, and delirium it became. I truly believed, when I made spruzzo the first time, that I was somehow doing it inside her mihrab, even though the mihrab was still close and warm and wet against my mouth. Not until my wits began to collect again did I realize that another female person had to be astride my lower body, and it had to be the seclusive sister Shams. I could not see her, and I did not try to or want to, but from her light weight upon me I could deduce that the other Princess must be small and fragile. I turned my mouth from Moth’s avidly thrusting mount to ask, “Is your sister much younger than you are?”

As if coming reluctantly back from far distances, she paused in her ecstasy just long enough to say, in a breathless small voice, “Not … very much …”

And then she dissolved into her distances again, and I resumed doing my best to send her ever farther and higher, and I repeatedly joined her in that soaring exultation, and I made my subsequent several spruzzi into the alien mihrab, not really caring whose it was, but retaining enough consciousness to hope vaguely that the younger and ugly Princess Sunlight was enjoying her employment of me as much as I was enjoying it.

The tripartite zina went on for a long time. After all, the Princess Moth and I were in the springtime of our youth, and we could keep on exciting each other to renewed flowerings, and the Princess Shams gleefully (I assumed) gathered in my every bouquet. But at last even the seemingly insatiable Moth seemed sated, and her tremors dwindled, and so did my zab finally dwindle and sink to weary rest. That member felt quite raw and chafed by then, and my tongue ached at its roots, and my whole body felt empty and expended. Moth and I lay still for a while of recuperation, she limp upon my chest, with her hair disposed across my face. The three ornamenting cherries had long before been shaken loose and lost. While we lay there, I was conscious of a smeary wet kiss being bestowed upon my belly skin, and then there was a brief rustling sound as Shams scuttled unseen out of the room.

I got up and dressed, and Princess Moth slipped into a scanty little tunic that did nothing really to cover her nakedness, and she led me again through the anderun corridors and out into the gardens. From a manaret somewhere, the day’s first muedhdhin was warbling the call to the hour-before-sunrise prayer. Still unchallenged by any guards, I found my own way through the gardens to the palace wing where my chamber was. The servant Karim was conscientiously waiting awake for me. He helped me undress for bed, and he made some awed exclamations when he saw my extremely spent condition.

“So the young Mirza’s lance found its target,” he said, but he did not ask any audacious questions. He only sniffled a bit, seeming aggrieved that I would not be having further need for his small ministrations, and he went to his own bed.

My father and uncle were absent from Baghdad for three weeks or more. During that time, I spent almost every day being escorted about and shown interesting things by the Shahzrad Magas, with her grandmother trailing, and almost every night I spent indulging in zina with both of the royal sisters, Moth and Sunlight.

In the daytime, the Princess and I did such things as going to the House of Delusion, that building which combined a hospital and a prison. We went there on a Friday, the day of rest when the place was much frequented by citizens at leisure, and also by foreign visitors from elsewhere, as one of the chief amusements of Baghdad. People came in families and in groups shepherded by guides, and at the door everyone was given by the doorkeeper a large smock to cover his clothes. Then all would stroll through the building, being lectured by the guides on the several kinds of madness exhibited by the men and women inmates, all of us laughing at their antics or commenting on them. Some of those antics were truly risible, and some were pitiable, and others were entertainingly lewd, but other doings were merely dirty. For example, a number of the deranged men and women appeared to resent us visitors, and pelted us with anything that came to their hand. Since all those inmates were sensibly kept naked and empty-handed, their only available missiles were their own body wastes. That was the reason for the doorman’s distribution of smocks, and we were glad to be wearing them.

Sometimes in the nights in the Princess’s chamber, I felt like some kind of inmate myself, subjected to supervision and exhortation. On perhaps the third or fourth of those occasions, early in the night’s proceedings, before the sister crept in, when Moth and I had just disrobed and were enjoying our preliminary play, she stopped her roving hands to hold my roving own, and said:

“My sister Shams would beg a favor of you, Marco.”

“I was afraid of this,” I said. “She wishes to dispense with you as intermediary, and take your place up front.”

“No, no. She would never. She and I are both happy with the arrangement as it is. Except for one small detail.”

I only grunted, being wary.

“I told you, Marco, that Sunlight has had zina often and often. So often and so vigorously that, well, the poor girl’s mihrab opening has been quite enlarged by that indulgence. To speak frankly, she is as open down there as a woman who has borne many children. Her pleasure in our zina would be much increased if your zab were in a sense enlarged by—”

“No!” I said firmly, and began to wriggle, trying to move crabwise out from under Moth. “I will not submit to any tampering—”

“Wait!” she protested. “Hold still. I suggest no such thing.”

“I do not know what you have in mind, or why,” I said, still wriggling. “I have seen the zab of numerous Eastern men, and my own is already superior. I refuse any—”

“I said be still! You have an admirable zab, Marco. It quite fills my hand. And I am sure that in length and girth it satisfies Shams. She suggests only a refinement of performance.”

Now that was vexatious. “No other woman ever complained of my performance!” I shouted. “If this one is as ugly as you say she is, I suggest that she is hardly in a position to be critical of whatever she can get!”

“Hark to who is being critical!” Moth mocked me. “Have you any notion how many men dream, and dream fruitlessly, of ever lying with a royal Princess? Ever even once seeing a Princess with her face unveiled? And here you have two of them lying with you absolutely naked and compliant each night! You would presume to deny one of them a small whim?”

“Well … ,” I said, chastened. “What is the whim?”

“There is a way to heighten the pleasure of a woman who has a large orifice. It enhances not the zab itself, but the—what do you call the blunt head of it?”

“In Venetian it is the fava, the broad bean. I think in Farsi that is the lubya.”

“Very well. Now, I noticed of course that you are uncircumcised, and that is good, for this refinement cannot be accomplished with a circumcised zab. All you do is this.” And she did it, tightening her hand around my zab and pulling the capèla skin back as far as it would go, and then a trifle farther. “See? It makes the broad bean bulge more grandly broad.”

“And it is uncomfortable, almost to hurting.”

“Only briefly, Marco, and bearably. Just do that as you first insert it. Shams says it gives to her mihrab lips that fine first feeling of being spread apart. Sort of a welcome violation, she says. Women enjoy that, I think, though of course I cannot know until I am married.”

“Dio me varda,” I muttered.

“And of course you do not have to do it, and risk touching Sunlight’s ugly body. She will do that little stretching and broadening for you, with her own hand. She merely wished your permission.”

“Would Shams wish anything further?” I asked acidly. “For a monster, she seems uncommonly finicking.”

“Hark at you!” Moth mocked me again. “Here you are, in company that any other man would envy you. Being taught by royalty a trick of sex that most men never learn. You will be grateful, Marco, someday when you desire to give pleasure to a woman of large or slack mihrab, you will be grateful that you learned how. And so will she be grateful. Now, before Sunlight arrives, make me grateful a time or two, in other ways … .”

5

ON some days, for entertainment and edification, Moth and I attended the sittings of the royal court of justice. It was called simply the Daiwan, from its profusion of daiwan pillows on which sat the Shah Zaman and the Wazir Jamshid and various elderly muftis of Muslim law, and sometimes some visiting Mongol emissaries of the Ilkhan Abagha. Before them were brought criminals to be tried, and citizens with complaints to be heard or boons to be asked, and the Shah and his wazir and the other officials would listen to the charges or pleas or supplications, and then would confer, and then would render their judgments or devisements or sentences.

I found the Daiwan instructive, as a mere onlooker. But had I been a criminal, I would have dreaded being hauled there. And had I been a citizen with a grievance, it would have had to be a towering grievance before I should have dared to take it to the Daiwan. For on the open terrace just outside that room stood a tremendous burning brazier, and on it was a giant cauldron of oil heated to bubbling, and beside it waited a number of robust palace guards and the Shah’s official executioner, ready to put it to use. Princess Moth confided to me that its use was sanctioned, not only for convicted evildoers, but also for those citizens who brought false charges or spiteful complaints or gave untruthful testimony. The vat guards looked fearsome enough, but the executioner was a figure calculated to inspire terror. He was hooded and masked and garbed all in a red as red as Hell fire.

I saw only one malefactor actually sentenced to the vat. I would have judged him less harshly, but then I am not a Muslim. He was a wealthy Persian merchant whose household anderun consisted of the allowable four wives and the usual numerous concubines besides. The offense with which he was charged was read aloud: “Khalwat.” That means only “compromising proximity,” but the details of the indictment were more enlightening. The merchant was accused of having made zina with two of his concubines at the same time, while his four wives and a third concubine were let to watch, and all together those circumstances were haram under Muslim law.

Listening to the charges, I felt distinctly sympathetic to the defendant, but distinctly uneasy in my own person, since I was almost every night making zina with two women not my wives. But I stole a look at my companion Princess Moth, and saw in her face neither guilt nor apprehension. I gradually learned from the proceedings that even the most vilely haram offense is not punishable by Muslim law unless at least four eyewitnesses testify to its having been committed. The merchant had willingly, or pridefully, or stupidly, let five women observe his prowess and later, out of pique or jealousy or some other feminine reason, they had brought the khalwat complaint against him. So the five women also got to observe his being taken, kicking and screaming, out to the terrace and pitched alive into the seething oil. I will not dwell on the subsequent few minutes.

Not all the punishments decreed by the Daiwan were so extraordinary. Some were nicely devised to fit the crimes involved. One day a baker was hauled before the court and convicted of having given his customers short weight of bread, and he was sentenced to be crammed into his own oven and baked to death. Another time, a man was brought in for the singular offense of having stepped on a scrap of paper as he walked along the street. His accuser was a boy who, walking behind the man, had picked up that paper and discovered that the name of Allah was among the words written on it. The defendant pleaded that he had only unwittingly committed that insult to almighty Allah, but other witnesses testified that he was an incorrigible blasphemer. They said he had often been seen to lay other books atop his copy of the Quran, and had sometimes even held the Holy Book below his waist level, and once had held it with his left hand. So he was sentenced to be trodden, like the piece of paper, by the executioner and the guards until he was dead.

But only during the Daiwan sittings was the Shah’s palace a place of pious dread. On more frequent religious occasions, the palace was the scene of galas and gaiety. The Persians recognize some seven thousand old-time prophets of Islam, and accord to every one of them a day of celebration. On the dates honoring the more major prophets, the Shah would give parties, usually inviting all the royalty and nobility of Baghdad, but sometimes throwing open the palace grounds to all comers.

Though I was not royal or noble, and not Muslim, I was a palace resident, and I attended several of those feste. I recall one night’s holiday celebration of some long-defunct prophet, which celebration was held outdoors in the palace gardens. Every guest was given not the usual pile of daiwan cushions to sit or recline upon, but an individual, high-heaped mound of fresh and fragrant rose petals. Every branch of every tree was outlined in candles affixed to the bark, and that candlelight shone through the leaves in every shade and hue of green. Every flower bed was full of candelabra, and their candles’ light shone through the multitudes of different blossoms in every shade and hue of every color. All those candles were sufficient to make the garden almost as bright and colorful as it was in daytime. But, in addition, the Shah’s servants had beforehand collected every little tortoise and turtle to be bought in the bazàr or caught by children in the countryside, and had affixed a candle to the carapace of each one, and had let all those thousands of creatures loose to crawl about the gardens as moving points of illumination.

As always, there was more and richer food and drink provided than I had ever seen laid out at any Western festa. Among the entertainments there were players of musical instruments, many of which I had never seen or heard before, and to their music dancers danced and singers sang. The male dancers re-created, with lances and sabers and much foot stamping, famous battles of famous Persian warriors of the past, like Rustam and Sohrab. The female dancers scarcely moved their feet at all, but convulsed their breasts and bellies in a manner to make a watcher’s eyeballs spin. The singers sang no songs of a religious nature—Islam frowns on that—but quite the other sort; I mean exceedingly bawdy songs. There were also bear trainers with agile and acrobatic bears, and snake charmers making the hooded snakes called najhaya to dance in their baskets, and fardarbab telling the tomorrows in their trays of sand, and shaukhran clowns comically garbed and capering and reciting or acting out lewd jests.

When I had got quite addled on the date liquor araq, I dismissed my Christian scruples against divination, and applied to one of the fardarbab, an old Arab or Jew with a funguslike beard, and asked what he could see in my future. But he must have recognized me for a good Christian unbeliever in his sorcerous art, for he only looked once into the shaken sand and growled, “Beware the bloodthirstiness of the beautiful,” which told me nothing of my future at all, though I recalled having heard something like that before, in the past. So I laughed jeeringly at the old fraud, and stood up and twirled and pirouetted away from him, and fell down, and Karim came and supported me to my bedchamber.

That was one of the nights on which the Princesses Moth and Sunlight and I did not convene. On another occasion, Moth told me to find something else to do with my next few nights, because she was enduring her moon curse.

“Moon curse?” I echoed.

She said impatiently, “The female bleeding.”

“And what is that?” I asked, truly never having heard of it before then.

Her green eyes gave me a sidelong look of amused exasperation, and she said fondly, “Fool. Like all young men, you perceive a beautiful woman as a pure and perfect thing—like the race of little winged beings called the peri. The delicate peri do not even eat, but live on the fragrance they inhale from flowers, and therefore they never have to urinate or defecate. Just so, you think a beautiful woman can have none of the imperfections or nastinesses common to the rest of humankind.”

I shrugged. “Is it bad to think that way?”

“Oh, I would not say that, for we beautiful women often take advantage of that masculine delusion. But a delusion it is, Marco, and I will now betray my sex and disabuse you of it. Hear me.”

She explained what happens to a girl child at about the age of ten, which turns her into a woman, and goes on happening to her thereafter, once in every moon of the year.

“Really?” I said. “I never knew. All women?”

“Yes, and they must bear that moon curse until they get old and dry up in every respect. The curse is also accompanied by cramps and backaches and ill temper. A woman is morose and hateful during that time, and a wise woman keeps herself away from other people, or drugged to stupefaction with teryak or banj, until the curse passes.”

“It sounds frightful.”

Moth laughed, but without humor. “Far more frightful for the woman if there comes a moon when she is not cursed. For that means she is pregnant. And of the damps and leaks and disgusts and embarrassments which then ensue, I will not even begin to speak. I am feeling morose and ill-tempered and hateful, and I will betake myself to seclusion. You go away, Marco, and make merry and enjoy your body’s freedom, like all damned disencumbered men, and leave me to my woman’s misery.”

Despite the Princess Moth’s depiction of the weaknesses of her sex, I could not then, or ever since then, think of a beautiful woman as being inherently flawed or faulty—or at least not until she proved herself to be so, as the Lady Ilaria once had done, and thereby had lost all my esteem. Out here in the East, I was still learning new ways to appreciate beautiful women, and still making new discoveries about them, and I was disinclined to disparage them.

To illustrate: when I was younger, I had believed that the physical beauty of a woman resided only in such easily observable features as her face and breasts and legs and buttocks, and in less easily observable ones like a pretty and inviting (and accessible) artichoke mound and medallion and mihrab. But by this time, I had had enough women to realize that there were more subtle points of physical beauty. To mention just one: I am particularly fond of the delicate sinews that extend from a woman’s groin along the inner sides of her thighs when she opens them apart. I also had come to realize that, even in the features common to all beautiful women, there are differences which are discernible, and exciting for being so. Every beautiful woman has beautiful breasts and nipples, but there are innumerable variations in size and shape and proportions and coloration, all beautiful. Every beautiful woman has a beautiful mihrab, but oh, how delectably different each is from another: in its placement forward or underneath, in its tint and downiness of the outer lips, in its purse-likeness and purse-tightness of closure, in its zambur’s position and size and erectability … .

Perhaps I make myself sound more lecherous than gallant. But I only wish to emphasize that I never could and never did and never will disprize the beautiful women of this world—not even then, in Baghdad, when the Princess Moth, although herself one of them, did her best to show me their worst. For instance, one day she arranged for me to sneak into the palace anderun, not for our nighttime frolic, but in the afternoon, because I had said to her:

“Moth, do you remember that merchant whom we saw executed for his haram method of making zina? Is that the sort of thing that usually goes on in an anderun?”

She gave me one of her green looks and said, “Come and see for yourself.”

On that occasion, indubitably, she had to have bribed the guards and eunuchs to look the other way, for she did not merely get me unseen into that wing of the palace, but also put me into a corridor wall’s closet which had two peepholes drilled to look into either of two large and voluptuously furnished chambers. I peeped through one hole and then the other; both rooms were empty at the moment.

Moth said, “Those are communal rooms, where the women can congregate when they weary of being alone in their separate quarters. And this closet is one of the many watch places throughout the anderun where a eunuch takes station at intervals. He watches for quarrels or fights among the women, or other sorts of misbehavior, and reports them to my mother, the Royal First Wife, who is responsible for order being kept. The eunuch will not be in here today, and I will now go and let the women know that. Then we shall watch together and see what advantage they may take of the warder’s absence.”

She went away and then returned, and we stood back to back in the close space, each with an eye to one of the holes. For a long time nothing happened. Then four women came into the room I was watching, and disposed themselves here and there on the daiwan cushions. They were all about the age of the Shahryar Zahd, and about equally as handsome. One woman was apparently a native Persian, for she had ivory skin and night-black hair, but eyes as blue as lapis lazura. Another I took to be an Armeniyan, for each of her breasts was exactly the size of her head. Another was a black woman, Ethiope or Nubian, and she of course had paddle feet and spindly calves and a behind like a balcony, but she was otherwise fairly comely: pretty face with not too-everted lips, shapely bosom and fine long hands. And the fourth woman was so dusky of skin and dark of eyes that she must have been an Arab.

But the women’s believing themselves to be not under scrutiny, and free to do what they liked, did not provoke any libertine throwing off of restraint or modesty. Except that none wore the chador, they were all fully clothed, and remained so, and they were not joined by any sneaked-in lovers. The black woman and the Arab had brought with them some kind of hand-held needlework, and occupied themselves with that lethargic pastime. The Persian sat with pots and brushes and little implements, and painstakingly manicured the finger and toe nails of the Armeniyan, and when that was done, both the women began coloring the palms of their hands and soles of their feet with hinna dye.

I was very soon bored to apathy, and so were the four women—I I could see them yawn and hear them belch and smell them breaking wind—and I wondered why I had entertained any spicy suspicions of Babylonian orgies in a house full of women, just because all the women belonged to one man. Clearly, when so many women had nothing to do but wait for a summons from their master, there literally was nothing else for them to do. They could only loll about, no more enterprising or vivacious than vegetables, until the infrequent calls for the exercise of their animal parts. I might as well have been watching a row of cabbages going to seed, and I turned in the closet to say something like that to the Princess.

But she was grinning lasciviously, and she put a cautionary finger to her lips, then pointed it at her peephole. I leaned over and looked through, and barely suppressed an exclamation of surprise. That room had two occupants, one of them female, a girl considerably younger than any of my room’s four—and also much prettier, perhaps because more of her was visible. She had taken off her pai-jamah and anything else she wore under that garment, and was bare from the waist down. She was another dusky-skinned Arab, but her pretty face was now pink with exertion. The male occupant of the room was one of those child-sized simiazze apes, so hairy all over that I would not have known it for a male, except that the girl was fervently working with one hand to encourage the animal’s maleness. She eventually accomplished that, but the ape only looked stupidly at the upright small evidence, and the girl had to work just as strenuously to show him what to do with it, and where. But eventually that too was accomplished, while Moth and I took turns observing through the peephole.

When the ridiculous performance was concluded, the Arab girl wiped herself with a cloth, and then wiped at some scratches her partner had inflicted on her. Then she pulled on her pai-jamah and led the ape shuffling and hopping out of the room. Moth and I struggled from our closet, which had got quite warm and humid, out into the corridor where we could talk unheard by the four women still in the other room.

I said, “No wonder the wazir told me that animal is called the unspeakably unclean.”

“Oh, Jamshid is just envious,” the Princess said lightly. “It can do what he cannot.”

“But not very well. Its zab was even smaller than an Arab’s. Anyway, I should think a decent woman would rather employ the finger of a eunuch than the zab of an ape.”

“Indeed, some do. And also you know now why my zambur is so much in demand. There are many women here who must wait a long and hungry time between summonses from the Shah. That is why the Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him) long ago instituted the tabzir. So that decent women should not be urged by their yearnings to unwifely resorts.”

“I think, if I were Shah, I should much prefer my women’s resorting to each other’s zambur than to a random zab. Why, suppose that Arab girl gets pregnant by that ape! What revolting kind of offspring would she have?” The awful thought brought an even more awful one to my mind. “Per Cristo, suppose your gruesome sister Shams gets pregnant by me! Would I have to marry her?”

“Be not alarmed, Marco. Every woman here, of whatever nation, has her own native specific against such an occurrence.”

I stared. “They know how to prevent conception?”

“With varying degrees of success, but all better than relying on chance. An Arab woman, for example, before making zina, pushes inside herself a plug of wool soaked in the juice of weeping willow. A Persian woman lines her inner self with the delicate white membrane from under the rind of a pomegranate.”

“How abominably sinful,” I said, as a Christian should. “Which works better?”

“Surely the Persian way is preferable, if only because it is more comfortable for both partners. Shams uses it, and I will wager that you never have felt it.”

“No.”

“But imagine ramming your tender lubya against that thick woolen plug inside an Arab woman. Anyway, I should distrust the efficacy of that method. What would an Arab woman know about preventing conception? Unless an Arab man wants to make a baby, he never does zina with his woman except through her rear entrance, as he is accustomed to using other men and boys, and they him.”

I was relieved to learn that the Princess Shams was not going to be fruitful and multiply her ugliness, thanks to her pomegranate preventive, though by rights I should have been disquieted, because I was thereby participating in one of the most abhorrent and mortal sins a Christian can commit. At some time in my travels, or when I returned home to Venice, I should again be in the vicinity of a Christian priest, and I should be obliged to make confession. Of course the priest would belabor me with penances for my having fornicated with two unmarried women at one time, but that was only a venial sin in comparison to the other. I could well foresee his horror when I confessed that, through the wicked arts of the East, I had been enabled to copulate for the sheer enjoyment of the act, with no Christian intention or expectation of progeny resulting from it.

Needless to say, I went on sinfully enjoying it. If there was any slight thing that hampered my total and complete enjoyment, it was not any nagging sense of guilt. It was my natural wish that each of my zina consummations could take place inside the Princess Moth to whom I was making love, and not in the unloved, unlovely Princess Shams. However, when Moth sternly repulsed my few tentative hints in that regard, I had the good sense to stop making them. I would not risk losing a happy situation out of greed for an unattainable happier one. What I did instead, I invented for myself a story, of a kind that might have been told by the story-telling Shahryar Zahd.

In my mind’s story, I made Sunlight not what she was, the ugliest female person in Persia, but the most gloriously beautiful. I made her so beautiful that Allah in His wisdom decreed: “It is unthinkable that the divine beauty and the blessed love of the Princess Shams should be limited to the enjoyment of any one man alone.” And that was why Shams was not married, and never would be. In obedience to almighty Allah, she was constrained to dispense her favors to all good and deserving suitors, and that was why I was currently the favored one. For a while, I utilized that story only when necessary. During most of each night’s zina, I had no need of anything more than the real loveliness and closeness of the Princess Moth to stir and sustain my ardor. But then, when our mutual play had made the delicious pressure mount inside me until it could no longer be contained, and I had to let it go, then I brought to mind my invented, alternate, imaginary, unreally sublime Princess Sunlight, and made her the receptacle of my surge and my love.

As I say, that sufficed me for a while. But after that while, I gradually fell prey to a sort of mild lunacy; I began to wonder if my story might not be something near the truth. Getting increasingly demented, I began to suspect a deep secret here, and to suspect that, by the workings of my subtle mind, I had been the first and only to uncover that secret. Eventually, I had got so deranged that I began making new hints to Moth : hinting that I really would like to see her unseeable sister. Moth looked worried and agitated when I did that, and even more so when I daringly began mentioning her sister’s name on occasions when we were in the presence of her parents and grandmother.

“I have had the honor of meeting most of your royal family, Your Majesty,” I would say to the Shah Zaman or the Shahryar Zahd, and then add in an offhand manner, “Except, I think, the estimable Princess Shams.”

“Shams?” he or she would say guardedly, and would look about in a shifty sort of way, and Moth would begin talking volubly to distract us all, while she rudely and almost literally elbowed me out of whatever room we were in.

God knows where that behavior might finally have got me—perhaps committed to the House of Delusion—but then my father and uncle returned to Baghdad, and it was time for me to say farewell to all three of my zina partners: to Moth and Shams and my story-made Shams.

6

MY father and uncle returned together, having met somewhere on the roads north from the Gulf. On first setting eyes on me, before we even exchanged a greeting, my uncle jovially roared out:

“Ecco Marco! For a wonder, still alive and still vertical and still at liberty! Are you not in any trouble then, scagaròn?”

I replied, “Not yet, I think,” and went to make sure I would not be. I sought out the Princess Moth and told her that our liaisons were at an end. “I can no longer stay out at night without causing suspicion.”

“It is too bad,” she pouted. “My sister has by no means tired of our zina.”

“Nor have I, Shahzrad Magas Mirza. But in truth I am much weakened by it. And now I must regain my strength for the rest of our journey.”

“Yes, you do look somewhat strained and haggard. Very well, I give you leave to desist. We will say our formal farewells before you depart.”

So my father and uncle and I sat down with the Shah, and they told him they had decided against taking the sea route to shorten our way eastward.

“We thank you sincerely, Shah Zaman, for having made the suggestion,” my father said. “But there is an old Venetian proverb. Loda el mar e tiente a la tera.”

“Which means—?” the Shah said affably.

“Laud the sea and attend to the land. In more general application it means: Praise the mighty and the dangerous, but cling to the small and secure. Now, Mafìo and I have done much sailing on mighty seas, but never aboard such ships as those of the Arab traders. No overland route could be less safe or more risky.”

“The Arabs,” said my uncle, “build their ocean-going ships in exactly the same slipshod way they build their ramshackle river boats, which Your Majesty sees here at Baghdad. All tied and fish-glued together, not a bit of metal in the construction. And deckloads of horses or goats dropping their merda into the passenger cabins below. Maybe an Arab is ignorant enough to venture to sea in such a squalid and rickety cockleshell, but we are not.”

“You are perhaps wise not to do so,” said the Shahryar Zahd, coming into the room at that moment, although we were a gathering of men. “I will tell you a tale … .”

She told several, and all of them concerned a certain Sindbad the Sailor, who had suffered a series of unlikely adventures—with a giant rukh bird, and with an Old Sheikh of the Sea, and with a fish as big as an island, and I do not remember what else. But the point of her recitation was that Sindbad’s every adventure had proceeded from his repeatedly taking passage on Arab ships, and each of those craft getting wrecked at sea, and his surviving to drift alone onto some uncharted shore.

“Thank you, my dear,” said the Shah, when she had concluded the sixth or seventh of the Sindbad tales. Before she might begin another, he said to my father and uncle, “Was your trip to the Gulf entirely unprofitable, then?”

“Oh, no,” said my father. “There was much of interest to see and to learn and to procure. For example, I bought this fine and keen new shimshir saber in Neyriz, and its artificer told me it was made of steel from Your Majesty’s iron mines nearby. His words bewildered me. I said to him, ‘Surely you mean steel mines.’ And he said, ‘No, we take the iron from the mines and put it into an ingenious sort of furnace, and the iron becomes steel.’ And I said, ‘What? You would have me believe that if I put an ass into a furnace it will come out a horse?’ And the artificer had to make much explanation to convince me. In solemn truth, Your Majesty, I and all of Europe have always believed that steel was a totally different and much superior metal to mere iron.”

“No,” said the Shah, smiling. “Steel is but iron much refined by a process which perhaps your Europe has not yet learned.”

“So I improved my education there in Neyriz,” said my father. “Also, my trip took me through Shiraz, of course, and its extensive vineyards, and I sampled all the famous wines in the very wineries where they are produced. I also sampled—” He paused, and glanced at the Shahryar Zahd. “Also, there are in Shiraz more comely women, and more of them, than in any city I have visited.”

“Yes,” said the lady. “I was born there myself. It is a proverb of Persia that if you seek a beautiful woman, look in Shiraz; if you seek a beautiful boy, look in Kashan. You will be passing through Kashan as you go on eastward.”

“Ah,” said Uncle Mafìo. “And for my part, I found a new thing in Basra. The oil called naft, which comes not from olives or nuts or fish or fat, but seeps from the very ground. It burns more brightly than other oils, and for a longer time, and with no suffocating odor. I filled several flasks with it, to light our journey’s nights, and perhaps also to astonish others like myself who never saw such a substance before.”

“Regarding your journey,” said the Shah. “Now that you have decided to continue overland, remember my warning of the Dasht-e-Kavir, the Great Salt Desert to the eastward. This late autumn season is the best time of year in which to cross it, but truthfully there is no good time. I have suggested camels for your karwan, and I suggest five of them. One for each of you and your personal panniers, one for your puller, one for the burden of your main packs. The wazir will go with you tomorrow to the bazàr and help you choose them, and he will pay for them, and I will accept your horses in exchange for that payment.”

“That is kind of Your Majesty,” said my father. “Just one thing—we have no camel-puller.”

“Unless you are well versed in the management of those beasts, you will need one. I probably can help you with that item, too. But first get the camels.”

So the next day, we three went again to the bazàr in company with Jamshid. The camel market was an extensive square area set off by itself, and it had a raised skirting of stone laid around it. The camels for sale were all arrayed standing with their forefeet on that shelf of stone, to make them seem to stand taller and prouder. That market was vastly more noisy than any other part of the bazàr, for to the customary shouting and quarreling of buyers and sellers were added the angry bellowing and mournful groans of the camels, as their muzzles were repeatedly seized and twisted to make them demonstrate their agility in kneeling and rising. Jamshid made that test and many others. He tweaked the camels’ humps and felt up and down their legs and peered into their nostrils. After examining almost every full-grown beast on sale that day, he had five of them led apart, a bull and four cows. To my father he said:

“See if you agree with my selection, Mirza Polo. You will note that all have much larger forefeet than rear feet, a sure sign of superior staying power. Also they are all clean of nose worms. Always keep a watch for that infestation, and if you ever see worms, dust the nostrils well with pepper.”

Since my father and uncle owned to no expertness in camel trading, they were pleased to concur in the wazir’s selections. The merchant sent an assistant to lead the camels, hitched together in single file, to the palace stables, and we followed at our leisure.

At the palace, the Shah Zaman and Shahryar Zahd were waiting for us, in a room well heaped with gifts they wished us to convey for them to the Khakhan Kubilai. There were tightly rolled qali of the highest quality, and caskets of jewels, and platters and ewers of exquisitely worked gold, and shimshirs of Neyriz steel in gem-encrusted scabbards, and for the Khakhan’s women polished looking glasses also of Neyriz steel, and cosmetics of al-kohl and hinna, and leather flasks of Shiraz wine, and tenderly wrapped cuttings of the palace garden’s most prized roses, and also cuttings of seedless banj plants and of the poppies from which teryak is made. The most striking of all the gifts was a board on which some court artist had painted the portrait of a man, a man grim and ascetic of mien, but blind, his eyeballs being all white. It was the only delineation of any animate being I had ever seen in a Muslim country.

The Shah said, “It is a likeness of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him). There are many Muslims in the Khakhan’s realms, and many have no idea what the Prophet (blessing and peace be his) looked like in life. You will take this to show them.”

“Excuse me,” said Uncle Mafìo, with uncharacteristic hesitancy. “I thought lifelike images were forbidden by Islam. And an image of the very Prophet himself … ?”

The Shahryar Zahd explained, “It does not live until the eyes are painted in. You will engage some artist to do that just before you present the picture to the Khan. It requires only two brown dots painted onto the eyeballs.”

The Shah added, “And the picture itself is painted in magic tinctures which in a few months will begin to fade, until the picture totally disappears. Thus it cannot become an image of worship, like those you Christians revere, which are forbidden because they are unnecessary to our more civilized religion.”

“The portrait,” said my father, “will be a gift unique among all the gifts the Khan is forever receiving. Your Majesties have been more than generous in your tribute.”

“I should have liked to send him also some virgin Shiraz girls and Kashan boys,” mused the Shah. “But I have tried to do that before, and somehow they never arrive at his court. Virgins must be difficult of transport.”

“I just hope we can transport all this,” said my uncle, gesturing.

“Oh, yes, with no trouble,” said the Wazir Jamshid. “Any one of your new camels will easily carry all that burden, and carry it at the pace of eight farsakhs in a day, and for three days between drinks of water, if that be necessary. Assuming, of course, that you have a competent camel-puller.”

“Which now you do have,” said the Shah. “Another gift of mine, and this one is for you, gentlemen.” He signaled to the guard at the door and the guard went out. “A slave which I myself only recently acquired, bought for me by one of my court eunuchs.”

My father murmured, “Your Majesty’s generosity continues to abound, and to astound.”

“Ah, well,” said the Shah modestly. “What is one slave between friends? Even a slave which cost me five hundred dinars?”

The guard returned with that slave, who immediately fell to the floor in salaam, and cried shrilly, “Allah be praised! We meet again, good masters!”

“Sia budelà!” exclaimed Uncle Mafìo. “That is the reptile we recoiled from buying!”

“The creature Nostril!” exclaimed the wazir. “Really, my Lord Shah, how did you come to acquire this excrescence?”

“I think the eunuch fell enamored of him,” the Shah said sourly. “But I have not. So he is yours, gentlemen.”

“Well … ,” said my father and uncle, uncomfortable and unwilling to give offense.

“I have never known a slave more rebellious and odious,” said the Shah, dropping any pretense of lauding his gift. “He curses and reviles me in half a dozen languages which I do not comprehend, except that the word pork occurs in all of them.”

“He has also been insolent to me,” said the Shahryar. “Fancy a slave criticizing the sweetness of his mistress’s voice.”

“The Prophet (on whom be all peace and blessing),” said the creature Nostril, as if ruminating aloud to himself. “The Prophet called that house accursed where a woman’s voice could be heard outside its doors.”

The Shahryar glared venomously at him, and the Shah said, “You hear? Well, the eunuch who bought him unbidden has been pulled asunder by four wild horses. The eunuch was expendable, having been born under this roof to one of my other slaves, and having cost nothing. But this son of a bitch shaqàl cost five hundred dinars, and should be more usefully disposed of. You gentlemen need a camel-puller, and he claims to be one.”

“Verily!” cried the son of a bitch shaqàl. “Good masters, I grew up with camels, and I love them like my sisters—”

“That,” said my uncle, “I believe.”

“Answer me this, slave!” Jamshid barked at him. “A camel kneels to be loaded. It groans and complains mightily at each new weight of the loading. How do you know when to load it no further?”

“That is easy, Wazir Mirza. When it ceases to grumble, you have laid upon it the last straw it will bear.”

Jamshid shrugged. “He knows camels.”

“Well … ,” mumbled my father and uncle.

The Shah said flatly, “You take him with you, gentlemen, or you stand by and watch while he goes to the vat.”

“The vat?” inquired my father, who knew not what that was.

“Let us take him, Father,” I said, speaking up for the first time. I did not say it with enthusiasm, but I could not have watched again an execution by boiling oil, even of this obnoxious vermin.

“Allah will reward you, young Master Mirza!” cried the vermin. “Oh, ornament upon perfection, you are as compassionate as the old-time darwish Bayazid, who while traveling found an ant caught in the lint of his navel, and went hundreds of farsakhs back to his starting place, to return that abducted ant to its home nest, and—”

“Be silent!” bellowed my uncle. “We will take you, for we would rid our friend the Shah Zaman of your reeking presence. But I warn you, putridity, you will enjoy precious little compassion!”

“I am content!” cried the putridity. “The words of vituperation and beatings bestowed by a sage are more to be valued than the flattery and flowers lavished by the ignorant. And furthermore—”

“Gèsu,” my uncle said wearily. “You will be beaten not on your buttocks but on your clattering tongue. Your Majesty, we will depart at dawn tomorrow, and take this stench speedily out of your vicinity.”

Early the next morning, Karim and our other two servants dressed us in good sturdy traveling garb in the Persian style, and helped us pack our personal belongings, and presented us with a large hamper of fine foods and wines and other delicacies, prepared by the palace cooks so that the viands would keep well and sustain us for a good part of our way. Then all three servants indulged in a performance of wild grief, as if we had been their lifelong beloved masters and were leaving them forever. They prostrated themselves in salaams and tore off their tulbands and beat their bare heads on the floor, and did not desist until my father distributed bakhshish among them, at which they saw us off with broad smiles and commendations to the protection of Allah.

At the palace stable, we found that Nostril had, without command or beating or supervision, got our riding camels saddled and the pack camel loaded. He had even carefully wrapped and arranged all the gifts being sent by the Shah, so they would not fall or jar against each other or be dirtied by the dust of the road, and, so far as we could determine, he had not stolen a single item from among them.

Instead of complimenting him, my uncle said sternly, “You scoundrel, you think to please us now and cozen us into leniency, so that we will be easygoing when you regress into your natural sloth. But I warn you, Nostril, we will expect this sort of efficiency, and—”

The slave interrupted, but obsequiously. “A good master makes a good servant, and gets from him service and obedience in direct proportion to the respect and trust accorded him.”

“From all report,” said my father, “you have not very well served your recent owners—the Shah, the slave dealer …”

“Ah, good Master Mirza Polo, I have been too long pent in cities and households, and my spirit gets crabbed by confinement. I was made by Allah to be a wanderer. Once I learned that you gentlemen are journeyers, I bent every effort to get myself expelled from this palace and attached to your karwan.”

“Hm,” said my father and uncle, skeptically.

“In so doing, I knew I risked an even more immediate release—like a dunking in the oil vat. But this young Mirza Marco saved me from that, and he will never regret it. To you elder masters, I will be the obedient servant, but to him I will be the devoted mentor. I will stand between him and harm, as he did for me, and I will sedulously instruct him in the wisdoms of the road.”

So here was the second of the uncommon teachers I acquired in Baghdad. I heartily wished that it could have been another as comely and companionable and desirable as the Princess Moth. I was not much pleased at the prospect of being the ward of this scruffy slave, and possibly having some of his nasty attributes rub off on me. But I was disinclined to wound him by saying those things aloud, and I responded merely by making a face of tolerant acceptance.

“Mind, I do not claim to be a good man,” said Nostril, as if he had overheard my thoughts. “I am a man of the world, and not all my tastes and habits are acceptable in polite society. Doubtless you will have frequent occasion to chide me or beat me. But a good traveler, that I am. And now that I shall be again upon the open road, you will appreciate my usefulness. You will see!”

So we three went to make our final and formal leavetakings of the Shah and the Shahryar and her old mother and the Shahzrad Magas. They had all risen early on purpose, and they said their farewells as feelingly as if we had been real guests instead of merely bearers of the Khakhan’s ferman who had to be accommodated.

“These are the papers of ownership of that slave,” said the Shah Zaman, giving them to my father. “You will cross many borders from here eastward, and the border guards may require to know the identities of all in your karwan. Now goodbye, good friends, and may you walk always in the shadow of Allah.”

Princess Moth said to us all, but with a special smile for me, “May you never meet an afriti or an evil jinni on the way, but only the sweet and perfect peri.”

The grandmother nodded a mute goodbye, but the Shahryar Zahd said a leavetaking almost as long as one of her stories, concluding fulsomely, “Your departure leaves all of us here bereft.”

At that, I made bold to say to her, “There is one here in the palace to whom I would like my personal regards conveyed.” I confess, I was still slightly bemazed by my own made-up story about the Princess Sunlight, and by my delusion that I had almost uncovered some long-kept secret regarding her. Anyway, whether or not she was as sublimely beautiful as I had made her in my mind, she had been my unflagging lover, and it was only politeness to make especial farewell to her. “Would you give her my fond goodbye, Your Lady Majesty? I do not think the Princess Shams is your own daughter, but—”

“Really,” said the Shahryar, with a giggle. “My daughter, indeed. You jest, young Mirza Marco, to leave us all laughing in good humor. I am sure you must be aware that the Shahrpiryar is the only Persian Princess named Shams.”

I said uncertainly, “I have never heard that title before.” I was puzzled, having noticed that the Princess Moth had retreated to a corner of the room and muffled her face in the qali draperies, only her green eyes visible and sparkling naughtily, as she tried to contain the laughter that was nearly doubling her over.

“The title Shahrpiryar,” said her mother, “means the Dowager Princess Shams, the Venerable Royal Matriarch.” She gestured. “My mother here.”

Speechless with astonishment and horror and revulsion, I stared at the Shahrpiryar Shams, the wrinkled, balding, mottled, shrunken, moldy, decrepit, unspeakably old grandmother. She responded to my eye-extruding stare with a lascivious and gloating smile that bared her withered gray gums. Then, as if to make sure I did not fail of realization, she slowly ran the tip of her mossy tongue across her granulated upper lip.

I think I may have reeled where I stood, but somehow I followed my father and uncle out of the room without falling unconscious or vomiting on the alabaster floor. I only vaguely heard the cheery, laughing, mocking goodbyes Moth called after me, for I was hearing inside my head other mocking noises—my own fatuous query, “Is your sister much younger than you are?” and my imagined Allah’s decree about “the divine beauty of the Princess Shams” and the fardarbab’s sand reading, “Beware the bloodthirstiness of the beautiful …”

Well, this latest encounter with beauty had cost me no blood, and I daresay no one ever died of disgust or humiliation. If anything, the experience served to keep my blood long astir and red and vigorous afterward, for my every recollection of those nights in the anderun of the palace of Baghdad made my blood suffuse me with a blazing red blush.

7

THE wazir, riding a horse, accompanied our little camel train for the isteqbal—the half a day’s journey—which the Persians traditionally perform as a courteous escort for departing guests. During that morning’s ride, Jamshid several times solicitously remarked on my mien of glazed eyes and slack jaw. My father and uncle and the slave Nostril also several times inquired if I was being made ill by the rolling gait of my camel. To each I made some evasive reply; I could not admit that I was simply stunned by the knowledge that for the past three weeks or so I had been blissfully coupling with a drooling hag some sixty years older than myself.

However, because I was young, I was resilient. After a while, I convinced myself that no real harm had been done—except perhaps to my self-esteem—and that neither of the Princesses was likely to gossip and make me a universal laughingstock. By the time Jamshid gave us his final “salaam aleikum” and turned his horse back for Baghdad, I was able again to look about me and see the country through which we were riding. We were then, and would be for some time, in a land of pleasantly green valleys winding among cool blue hills. That was good, for it enabled us to get used to our camels before we should reach the harder going in the desert.

I will mention that riding a camel is no more difficult than riding a horse, once one has acquired a head for the much higher altitude where one is perched. A camel walks with a mincing gait and wears a supercilious sneer, exactly like certain men of a certain sort. That gait is easy for even a new rider to adjust to, and the riding is easiest done with both legs on the same side, in the way a woman rides a horse sidesaddle, one’s forward leg crooked around the saddle bow. The camel is reined, not with a bridle, but with a line tied to a wooden peg permanently fixed in its snout. The camel’s sneer gives it a look of haughty intelligence, but that is entirely spurious. One must constantly be aware that a camel is among the most stupid of beasts. An intelligent horse may take a notion to play pranks, to vex or unseat its rider. A camel would never be capable of such an idea, but neither does it have a horse’s good sense to watch its way and sidestep avoidable hazards. A camel’s rider must stay alert and guide it even around obvious rocks and holes, lest it fall or snap a leg.

As we had been doing ever since Acre, we were still traveling through country that was as new to my father and uncle as it was to me, because they had earlier crossed Asia, both going eastward and returning home, by a much more northerly route. Therefore, with whatever misgivings, they left our direction to the slave Nostril, who claimed to have traversed this country many times in his life of wandering. And so he must have done, for he confidently led us along, and did not pause at the frequent branchings of the trail, but always seemed to know which fork to take. Precisely at that first day’s sundown, he brought us to a comfortably appointed karwansarai. By way of rewarding Nostril’s good conduct, we did not make him put up in the stable with the camels, but paid for him to eat and sleep in the main building of the establishment.

As we sat about the dining cloth that night, my father studied the papers the Shah had given us, and said:

“I remember your telling us, Nostril, that you have borne other names. It appears from these documents that you have served each of your previous masters under a different one. Sindbad. Ali Babar. Ali-ad-Din. They are all nicer sounding names than Nostril. By which would you prefer that we call you?”

“By none of them, if you please, Master Nicolò. They all belong to past and forgotten phases of my life. Sindbad, for example, refers only to the land of Sind where I was born. I long ago left that name behind.”

I said, “The Shahryan Zahd told us some stories about the adventures of another habitual journeyer who called himself Sindbad the Sailor. Could that possibly have been you?”

“Someone very like me, perhaps, for the man was clearly a liar.” He chuckled at his own self-deprecation. “You gentlemen are from the marine republic of Venice, so you must know that no seaman ever calls himself a sailor. Always seaman or mariner, sailor being a landsman’s ignorant word. If that Sindbad could not get his own by-name correct, then his stories must be suspect.”

My father persisted, “I must inscribe on this paper some name for you under our ownership … .”

“Put down Nostril, good master,” he said airily. “That has been my name ever since the contretemps which earned it for me. You gentlemen might not believe it, but I was a surpassingly handsome man before that mutilation of my nose ruined my looks.”

He went on at great length about how handsome he had been when he still had two nostrils, and how sought after by women enamored of his manly beauty. In his early days, as Sindbad, he said, he had so entranced a lovely girl that she had risked her life to save him from an island peopled by winged and wicked men. Later, as Ali Babar, he had been captured by a band of thieves and thrust into a jar of sesame oil, and would have had his talking head pulled off his softened neck but that another lovely girl, beguiled by his charm, had rescued him from the jar and the thieves. As Ali-ad-Din, he with his handsome looks had emboldened yet another comely girl to save him from the clutches of an afriti commanded by an evil sorcerer … .

Well, the tales were as implausible as any told by the Shahryar Zahd, but no more implausible than his assertion that he had once been a good-looking man. No one could have believed that. Had he had the normal two nostrils, or three, or none, it would not have improved his resemblance to a large-beaked, chinless, pot-bellied shuturmurq camelbird, made even more comical by a stubble of beard under its beak. He went on even more incredibly, embellishing his claim of physical appeal by claiming to have done exploits of bravery and ingenuity and fortitude. We listened politely, but we knew all his rodomontata to be—as my father said later—“All vine and no grapes.”

Some days afterward, when my uncle compared our eastward progress against the maps in the Kitab of al-Idrisi, he announced that we had arrived at a historic place. According to his calculations, we were somewhere very near the spot, recorded in The Book of Alexander, where, during the conqueror’s march across Persia, the Amazon Queen Thalestris had come with her host of warrior women to greet and pay homage to him. We could only take Uncle Mafìo’s word, for there was in that place no monument to commemorate the occasion.

In after years, I have often been asked whether I in my journeyings ever found the nation of Amazonia, or, as some call it, the Land of Femynye. Not there in Persia, I did not. Later, in the Mongol domains, I met many warrior women, but they were all subservient to their menfolk. I have also been often asked whether, out yonder in those far lands, I ever met the Prete Zuàne, called in other languages Presbyter Johannes and Prester John, that reverend and mighty man so shrouded in myth and fable and legend and enigma.

For more than a hundred years, the Western world has been hearing rumor and report of him: a direct descendant of the royal Magi who first worshiped the Christ child, hence himself royal and devoutly Christian, and furthermore wealthy and powerful and wise. As the Christian monarch of a reputedly immense Christian realm, he has been a figure to tantalize Western imagination. Given our fragmented West, of many and little nations, ruled by comparatively petty kings and dukes and such, forever warring against each other—and a Christianity continually sprouting new and schismatic and antagonistic sects—we needs must look with wistful admiration on a vast congeries of peoples all peaceably united under one ruler and one supreme pontiff, and both of those embodied in one majestic man.

Also, whenever our West has been beleaguered by heathen savages swarming out of the East—Huns, Tàtars, Mongols, the Muslim Saracens —we have fervently hoped and prayed that the Prete Zuàne would emerge from his still farther East and come up behind the invaders with his legions of Christian warriors, so that those heathens would be caught and crushed between his armies and ours. But the Prete Zuàne never has ventured out of his mysterious fastnesses, neither to help the Christian West in its recurrent times of need nor even to make demonstration of his existence in reality. Does he then exist, and if so, who is he? Does he really hold sway over a far-off Christian empire, and if so, where is it?

I have already speculated, in my earlier published chronicle of my travels, that the Prete Zuàne did exist, in a sense, and in that sense may still exist, but he is not and never was a Christian potentate.

Back when the Mongols were only separate and disorganized tribes, they called each tribal chief a Khan. When the many tribes united under the fearsome Chinghiz, he became the only Eastern monarch ruling over an empire resembling the one rumored to belong to the Prete Zuàne. Since the time of Chinghiz, that Mongol Khanate was ruled in part or in whole by various of his descendants, before his grandson Kubilai became Khakhan and enlarged it even further and consolidated it more firmly. All of those Mongol rulers down the years had different names, but all were titled Khan or Khakhan.

Now, I invite you to notice how easily the spoken or written word Khan or Khakhan could be misread or misheard as Zuàne or John or Johannes. Suppose a long-ago Christian traveler in the East misheard it so. He naturally would be reminded of the sainted Apostle of that name. It would be no small wonder if he thereafter believed he had heard mention of a priest or bishop named for the Apostle. He had only to mingle the misapprehension with the reality—the extent and power and wealth of the Mongol Khanate—and by the time he went home to the West he would have been eager to tell of an imaginary Prete Zuàne ruling an imaginary Christian empire.

Well, if I am right, the Khans probably did inspire the legend, through no doing of their own, but they are not Christians. And they never have owned any of the fabulous possessions ascribed to that Prete Zuàne—the enchanted mirror in which he spies on the distant doings of his enemies, the magic medicaments with which he can cure any mortal ill, his man-eating warriors who are invincible because they can subsist only on the enemies they vanquish—all those other fanciful marvels so reminiscent of the Shahryar Zahd’s stories.

This is not to say that there are no Christians in the East. There are, and many of them, individuals and groups and entire communities of Christians, to be found everywhere from the Mediterranean Levant to the farther shores of Kithai, and they are of all colors, from white to dun and brown and black. Unfortunately, they are all communicants of the Eastern Church, which is to say followers of the doctrines of the fifth-century schismatic Abbot Nestorius, which is to say heretics in the eyes of us Christians of the Roman Church. For the Nestorians deny the Virgin Mary the title of Mother of God, they do not allow a crucifix in their churches, and they revere the despised Nestorius as a saint. They practice many other heresies besides. Their priests are not celibate, many of them are married, and all are simoniacs, for they will not administer any of the sacraments except for a fee of money paid. The Nestorians’ only tie with us real Christians is that they worship the same Lord God, and recognize Christ as His Son.

That at least made them seem more kin to me and my father and uncle than did the far more numerous surrounding worshipers of Allah or Buddha or even more alien divinities. So we tried not to abhor the Nestorians too much—even while we disputed their doctrines—and they were usually hospitable and helpful to us.

If indeed the Prete Zuàne existed in actuality, not just in the Western imagination—and if, as rumored, he were a descendant of one of the Magi kings—then we ought to have found him during our traverse of Persia, for that is where the Magi lived, and it was from Persia that they followed the Nativity star to Bethlehem. However, that would have made the Prete Zuàne a Nestorian, since those are the only sorts of Christians existing in those parts. And in fact we did find among the Persians a Christian elder of that name, but he could hardly have been the Prete Zuàne of the legend.

His name was Vizan, which is the Persian rendition of the name rendered elsewhere Zuàne or Giovanni or Johannes or John. He had been born into the royalty of Persia—had indeed been born a Shahzadè, or Prince—but in his youth he had embraced the Eastern Church, which meant renouncing not only Islam, but also his title and heritage and wealth and privilege and right to succession in the Shahnate. All of that he had forsworn, to join a roving tribe of Nestorian bedawin. Now a very old man, he was that tribe’s elder and leader and acknowledged Presbyter. We found him to be a good man and a wise man, and altogether an admirable man. In those particulars he well fit the character of the fabled Prete Zuàne. But he reigned over no broad and rich and populous domain, only a ragtag tribe of some twenty impoverished and landless shepherd families.

We encountered that bunch of sheep herders on a night when there was no karwansarai nearby, and they invited us to share their camping ground in the middle of their herd, and so we spent that evening in the company of their Presbyter Vizan.

While he and we made our simple meal around a small fire, my father and uncle engaged him in a theological discussion, and they ably discredited and demolished many of the old bedawi’s most cherished heresies. But he seemed not in the least dismayed or ready to discard the shreds they left of his beliefs. Instead, he cheerfully turned the conversation to the Baghdad court we had recently inhabited, and asked after all there, who were of course his royal relatives. We told him that they were well and thriving and happy, although understandably chafing under the overlordship of the Khanate. Old Vizan seemed pleased with the news, though no whit nostalgic for that life of courtly ease he had long ago given up. Only when Uncle Mafìo chanced to mention the Shahrpiryar Shams—making me inwardly flinch—did the ancient shepherd-bishop heave a sigh that might have denoted regret.

“The Dowager Princess still lives, then?” he said. “Why, she would be nearly eighty years of age by now, as I am.” And I flinched again.

He was silent for a time, and he took a stick and stirred the fire, and stared thoughtfully into its heart, and then he said, “Doubtless the Shahrpiryar Shams no longer shows it—and you good brethren may not credit my telling of it—but that Princess Sunlight in her youth was the most beautiful woman in Persia, perhaps the most beautiful of all time.”

My father and uncle murmured noncommittally. I was still flinching at my all too vivid recollection of the wrecked and ravaged crone.

“Ah, when she and I and the world were young,” said old Vizan, dreamily. “I was then still Shahzadè of Tabriz and she was the Shahzrad, first daughter of the Shah of Kerman. The report of her loveliness brought me from Tabriz, and brought innumerable other princes from as far away as Sabaea and the Kashmir, and none was disappointed when he saw her.”

Under my breath, I made an impolite noise of scoffing incredulity, not loud enough for him to hear.

“I could tell you of that maiden’s radiant eyes and rose lips and willow grace, but that would not begin to picture her for you. Why, just to look at her could heat a man to fever and yet refresh him at the same time. She was like—like a field of clover that has been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain. Yes. That is the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth, and always when I come upon that fragrance I remember the young and beautiful Princess Shams.”

Comparing a woman to clover: how like a rustic and unimaginative shepherd, I thought. Surely the old man’s wits had been dulled if not scrambled by his decades of association with nothing but greasy sheep and greasier Nestorians.

“There was not a man in all Persia who would not have risked a drubbing from the Kerman palace guards, just to sneak near and steal a glimpse of Princess Sunlight walking in her garden. To have seen her uncovered of her chador veil, a man would have given his very life. In the remote hope of a smile from her, why, a man would have relinquished his immortal soul. As for any further intimacy, that would have been an unthinkable thought, even for the multitude of princes already hopelessly in love with her.”

I sat staring at Vizan, amazed and unbelieving. The old hag I had spent so many nights naked with—a vision unattainable and inviolable? Impossible! Ludicrous!

“There were so many suitors, and all so anguished in their yearning, that the tender-hearted Shams could not or would not choose from among them, and thus blight the lives of all the rest. Neither could her father the Shah, for a long time, choose for her; he was so besieged by so many, each imploring more eloquently, each pressing upon him more precious gifts. That tumult of courtship went on literally for years. Any other maiden would have fretted at the passing of her springtime, and she not yet wed. But Shams only grew the more rose-beautiful and willow-graceful and clover-sweet as the time went on.”

I still sat and stared at him, but my skepticism was slowly giving way to wonder. My lover had been all that? So exquisitely desirable to this man and to other men in that long-gone time, so exquisitely memorable that she was not yet forgotten, by this one at least, even now at the approaching end of his life?

Uncle Mafìo went to speak, and got to coughing, but at last cleared his throat and asked, “What was the outcome of that crowded courtship?”

“Oh, it had to come to a conclusion at last. Her father the Shah—with her approval, I trust—finally chose for her the Shahzadè of Shiraz. He and Shams were wed, and the whole Persian Empire—all but the rejected suitors—celebrated with joyous holiday. However, for a long time the marriage had no issue. I strongly suspect that the bridegroom was so overwhelmed by his good fortune, and by the pure beauty of his bride, that it was a long time before he could perform the consummation. It was not until after his father died, and he had succeeded as Shah in Shiraz, and Shams was thirty or older, that she gave birth to their only child, and then only a daughter. She was also handsome, so I have heard, but nothing like her mother. That was Zahd, who is now Shahryar of Baghdad, and I think has a nearly grown daughter of her own.”

“Yes,” I said faintly.

Vizan went on, “Had it not been for those events I have recounted—had the Princess Shams chosen otherwise—I might still be …” He poked at the fire again, but it was now only embers fast fading. “Ah, well. I was inspired to go away into the wilderness, and to seek. And I sought, and I found the true religion, and these my wandering brethren, and with them a new life. I think I have lived it well, and have been a good Christian. I have some small hope of Heaven … and in Heaven, who knows … ?”

His voice seemed to fail him. He said no more, not even a good-night, and got up from among us and walked away—wafting his smell of sheep wool and sheep dip and sheep manure—and disappeared into his much-weathered, many-patched little tent. No, I never did take him to be the Prete Zuàne of the legends.

When my father and uncle had also gone to roll into their blankets, I sat on by the darkening embers of the fire, thinking, trying to reconcile in my mind the derelict old grandmother and she who was the Princess Sunlight, unsurpassable in beauty. I was confused. If Vizan saw her now, would he see the aged and ugly crone, or the glorious maiden she once had been? And I, should I keep on feeling disgust because, in her old age, hardly even recognizable as female, she still felt feminine hungers? Or should I pity her for the deceit she had to employ now to slake them, when once she could have had any prince for the beckoning?

To look at it another way, should I congratulate myself and delight in the knowledge that I had enjoyed the Princess Sunlight for whom a whole generation of men had yearned in vain? But, trying to think along that line, I found myself wrenching present time into past time, and past into present, and confronting even more insubstantial questions—I was led to wonder: does immortality reside in memory?—and with such deep metaphysic my mind was incapable of grappling.

My mind still is, as most minds are. But I know one thing now which I did not then. I know it from my own experience and knowledge of myself. A man stays always the same age, somewhere down inside himself. Only the outside of him grows older—his wrapping of body, and its integument, which is the whole world. Inwardly he attains to a certain age, and stays there throughout his whole remaining life. That perpetual inner age may vary, I suppose, with different individuals. But in general I suspect that it gets fixed at early maturity, when the mind has reached adult awareness and acuity, but has not yet been calloused by habit and disillusion; when the body is newly full-grown and feeling the fires of life, but not yet any of life’s ashes. The calendar and his glass and the solicitude of his juniors may tell a man that he is old, and he can see for himself that the world and all around him have aged, but secretly he knows that he is still a youth of eighteen or twenty.

And what I have said of a man, I have said because a man is what I am. It must be even more true of a woman, to whom youth and beauty and vitality are so much more to be treasured and conserved. I am sure there is not anywhere a woman of advanced age who has not inside her a maiden of tender years. I believe that the Princess Shams, even when I knew her, could see in her glass the radiant eyes and rose lips and willow grace that her suitor Vizan still could see, more than half a century after parting from her, and could smell the fragrance of clover after rain, the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth.