Three Arched Bridge

4

THREE WEEKS LATER I was summoned urgently to the count. His great house, fortified at every corner with turrets, was only one hour’s journey away. When I arrived, they told me to go straight up to the armorial hall, where our liege lord usually received princes and other nobles whose journeys brought them through his lands.

In the hall were the count, one of his scribes, our bishop, and two unknown houseguests dressed in tight-fitting jerkins, in fashion who knows where.

The count looked annoyed. His eyes were bloodshot for lack of sleep, and 1 remembered that his only daughter had recently fallen ill. No doubt the two strangers were doctors, come from who knew where*

“I can’t get through to them at all,” he said as soon as I entered. “You know lots of languages. Maybe you can help.”

The new arrivals did indeed speak the most horrible tongue. My ears had never heard such a babble. Slowly I began to untangle the strands. I noticed that their numbers were Latin and their verbs generally Greek or Slav, while they used Albanian for the names of things, and now and then a word of German, They used no adjectives,

With difficulty 1 began to grasp what they were trying to say. They had both been sent by their master to our liege lord, the count of the Gjikas, with a particular mission. They had heard of the sign sent by the Almighty for the construction of a bridge over the Ujana e Keqe, and they were prepared to build it — or in other words he, their master, was — if the count would give them permission. In short, they were prepared to build a stone bridge over the Ujana e Keqe within a period of two years, to buy the land where it would stand, and to pay the count a regular annual tax on the profits they would earn from it. If the count agreed, this would all be laid down in a detailed agreement (item by item and point by point, as they put it) that would be signed by both sides and confirmed with their seals.

They broke off their speech to produce their seal, which one of them drew from inside his strange jerkin.

“We must heed the sign of the Almighty,” they said, almost in one voice.

The count, with weary, bloodshot eyes, looked first at the bishop and then at his own secretary. But their gaze appeared somewhat blurred by this mystery.

“And who is this master of yours?” our liege lord asked.

They started off again with a tangle of words, but the threads were this time so snagged that it took me twice as long to comb them out. They explained that their master was neither a duke, nor a baron, nor a prince, but was a rich man who had recently bought the old bitumen mines abandoned since the time of the Romans, and had also bought the larger part of the equally ancient great highway, which he intended to repair. He has no title, they said, but he has money.

Interrupting each other, they noted down on a piece of paper the sums they would give to buy the land and the sum of the annual tax for the use of the bridge.

“But the main thing is that the sign sent by the Almighty must be obeyed,” one of them said.

The sums noted on the paper were fabulous, and everyone knew that our liege lord’s revenue had recently declined. Moreover, his daughter had been ill for two months, and the doctors could not diagnose her malady.

Our liege lord and the bishop repeatedly caught each other’s eye. The count’s thoughts were clearly wandering from his empty exchequer to his sick daughter, and the bridge these strangers were offering was the sole remedy for both.

They started talking again about the heavenly message conveyed by the vagrant. In our parts, they call that wretch’s ailment moon-sickness, one of them explained, whereas here, as far as I can gather, it is called earth-sickness. However, it is virtually one and the same. These very names show clearly that everywhere they consider it a superior disorder, or divine, as one might say.

Our count did not think matters over for long. He said that he accepted the agreement, and gave the order to his scribe to put it down in writing, in Albanian and Latin. He then invited us all for luncheon. It was the most bitter luncheon I have ever eaten in my life, and this was because of the houseguests, whose speech became more and more tangled, while I had to unravel it for hours on end.