The Journeyer

different beasts. What is it, then, Marco?”

I knit my brow and pretended to think ponderously, and then said, “I give it up.”

Aziz crowed with triumphant laughter, and opened his mouth to speak. But then his mouth opened wider, and his big eyes got bigger. So did the eyes and mouths of my father and uncle. Nostril and I had to spin about to see what they were staring at.

Three shaggy brown men had materialized out of the night’s dry fog, and were regarding us with slit eyes in expressionless faces. They wore skins and leathers, not Arab garments, and they must have ridden far and fast, for they were coated with dust caked by perspiration, and they stank even from the distance where they stood.

“Sain bina,” said my uncle, the first to recover from his surprise, and he slowly got to his feet.

“Mendu, sain bina,” said one of the strangers, looking faintly surprised himself.

My father also stood up, and he and Uncle Mafio made gestures of welcome, and they went on speaking to the intruders in a language I did not comprehend. The shaggy men drew three horses by their reins out of the fog behind them, and led the animals to the spring. Not until the horses had been watered did the men take a drink.

Nostril, Aziz and I got up from the fire, and let the strangers take our places. My father and uncle sat down with them, and got out food from our packs and offered it, and continued sitting and talking while the visitors ate voraciously. I scrutinized the newcome three as well as I could while standing discreetly apart from the confabulation. They were of short but sturdy stature. Their faces were the color and texture of tanned kid leather, and two of them had long but wispy mustaches; none wore a beard. Their coarse black hair was womanly long, and plaited into numerous braids. Their eyes, I repeat, were mere slits, so very narrowly slitted that I wondered how they could see out of them. Each man carried a short and sharply curved-and-recurved bow slung on his back, with its bowstring across his chest, and a quiver of short arrows for it, and at his waist what was either a short sword or a long knife.

I recognized, now, that the men were Mongols, for I had seen the occasional Mongol by this time, and this land was, although nominally Persia, a province of the Mongol Khanate. But why were three Mongols prowling out here in the wilderness? They did not seem to be bandits or to mean us any harm—or at least my father and uncle had quickly talked them out of any such notion. And why were they in such an apparent hurry? In the everlasting desert, no man hurries.

But these men stayed in the oasis only long enough to eat to repletion. And they might not have halted for even that long, except that our foodstuffs, unappealing though they were, must have seemed real viands and delicacies to the Mongols, for these men carried no traveling rations at all except strips of jerked horsemeat like rawhide bootlaces. My father and uncle, to judge from their gesturings, were cordially and almost insistently inviting the newcomers to rest for a while, but the Mongols only shook their shaggy heads and grunted as they devoured mutton and cheese and fruits. Then they rose, belched appreciatively, gathered up the reins of their horses and remounted.

The horses rather resembled the men, being exceptionally shaggy and wild-looking and almost as small as the hinna’ed horses of Baghdad, but much more stocky and muscular. They were crusted with dried foam and dust, from having been hard ridden, but they acted as eager as their riders to be off and going again. One of the Mongols, from his saddle, jabbered to my father a lengthy speech that sounded monitory. Then they all tugged their mounts’ heads around, and cantered off southwestward, and almost instantly they were gone from our sight into the foggy dark, and the creak and jingle of their arms and harness was as instantly gone from our hearing.

“That was a military patrol,” my father made haste to tell us, perceiving that Nostril and Aziz looked quite frightened. “It seems that some bandits have lately been, er, active in this desert, and the Ilkhan Abagha desires to have them brought quickly to justice. Mafio and I, being naturally concerned for the safety of us all, tried to persuade them to stay and guard us, or even to travel for a time in our company. But they prefer to keep on the trail of the bandits, and press them hard, hoping to wear them down by thirst and hunger.”

Nostril cleared his throat and said, “Excuse me, Master Nicolo. I would of course never eavesdrop on a master, but I heard some of the conversation. Turki is one of the languages known to me, and the Mongols speak a variant of the Turki tongue. May I ask—when those Mongols mentioned bandits, did they actually say bandits?”

“No, they used a name. A tribal name, I assume. Karauna. But I take them to be—”

“Ayee, that is what I thought I heard!” Nostril keened. “And that is what I feared I heard! May Allah preserve us! The Karauna!”

Let me say here that almost all the languages I heard spoken from the Levant eastward, no matter how disparate they were in other respects, contained a word or word-element that was the same in all, and that was kara. It was variously pronounced: kara, khara, qara or k’ra, and in some languages kala, and it could have various meanings. Kara could mean black or it could mean cold or it could mean iron or it could mean evil or it could mean death—or kara could mean all those things at the same time. It might be spoken in admiration or deprecation or revilement, as for instance the Mongols were pleased to call their onetime capital city Karakoren, meaning Black Palisade, while they called a certain large and venomous spider the karakurt, meaning evil or deadly insect.

“Karauna!” Nostril repeated, almost gagging on the word. “The Black Ones, the Cold Hearts, the Iron Men, the Evil Fiends, the Death Bringers! The name is of no tribe, Master Nicolo. It was bestowed on them as a curse. The Karauna are the outcasts of other tribes—of the Turki and Kipchak of the north, the Baluchi of the south. And those peoples are bandits born, so imagine how terrible a man has to be, that he is expelled from such a tribe. Some of the Karauna are even former Mongols, and you know they must be loathly indeed, to be outcast by the Mongols. The Karauna are the soulless men, the most cruel and bloodthirsty and feared of all predators in these lands. Oh, my lords and masters, we are in awful danger!”

“Then let us extinguish the fire,” said Uncle Mafio. “In truth, Nico, we have been sauntering rather blithely through this desert. I will break out swords from the packs, and I suggest we begin tonight to take turns at guard.”

I volunteered to take the first watch awake, and asked Nostril how I should recognize the Karauna if they came.

Somewhat sarcastically he said, “You may have noticed that the Mongols fastened their coats on their right side. The Turki and Baluchi and such, they lap their coats to the left.” Then his sarcasm dissolved in his dread, and he cried, “Oh, Master Marco, if you even have a chance to see them before they strike, you will have no doubt whatever. Ayee, bismillah, kheli zahmat dadam …” and, praying at the top of his lungs, he made an astonishing number of deep salaam prostrations before crawling into his tent.

When all my companions were abed, I walked, with my shimshir sword in hand, twice or thrice around the entire perimeter of the oasis, peering out as far as I could into the surrounding thick, black, foggy night. Since that darkness was so impenetrable, and since I could not possibly stand athwart all the approaches to our camp, I decided to post myself at my own tent, beside that of Aziz. The night being one of the more chilly nights of the journey, I lay prone inside my tent, under the blankets, and let just my head protrude beyond the flaps. Either Aziz was lying sleepless or I waked him with the noise of my getting settled, for he also stuck his head out, and whispered, “I am frightened, Marco, and I am cold. May I sleep next to you?”

“Yes, it is cold,” I agreed. “I am shivering even with all my clothes on. I would go and fetch more blankets, but I dislike to rouse the camels. Here, you bring your covers, Aziz, and I will take down your tent as well, to use for an extra cover. If you lie close to me, and we pile all the fabrics on us, we ought to be snug enough.”

That is what we did. Aziz wriggled out of his tent, like a little naked newt, and into mine. Working quickly in the cold, I shook the supporting rods out of his tent’s hems, and bundled the cloth in on top of him. I burrowed in beside him, leaving only my head still out, and my hands and the shimshir. Very soon I had stopped shivering, but inwardly I felt quivery in a different way, not from the chill, but from the warmth and nearness and softness of the little boy’s body. He was pressed against me in a most intimate embrace, and I suspected he had done that deliberately. In a moment I was sure of it, for he loosed the cord of my pai-jamah, and nestled his bare body against my bare bottom, and then he did something even more intimate. It made me gasp, and I heard him whisper, “Does this not warm you even more?”

Warm was not the word for it. His sister Sitare had boasted that Aziz was expert at his art, and he clearly knew how to excite the thing that Nostril had called “the almond inside,” for my member came erect as quickly and as stiffly as a tent cloth does when the rod is slid inside its hem sheath. What would have occurred next, I do not