The Journeyer

“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 Nicolo. 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