The Journeyer

the rectangle out at that same distance from your eye.”

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

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

“Cazza beta!” my uncle exclaimed in admiration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cries in the hall redoubled:

“Pig!”

“Carrion!”

“Putrescence!”

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

6

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

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

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

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

There we were joined by the two Dominicans, who spoke loudly of their nausea and disgust at what Kagig