The Journeyer

“Gesu! It occupies only a thumb span of the map. Is it worth this fuss?”

“The Ilkhan Kaidu would not maintain a garrison here if the land were worthless. And the Khakhan Kubilai will wish to see how accurately we have done our maps.”

“All right.” Sigh of exasperation. “Let us give it a good thinking over … .”

2

WE dawdled in Balkh for a time, not because it was an attractive city, but because there were high mountains to the eastward, on the way we had yet to go. And now there was snow thick on the ground even here in the lower lands, so we knew the mountains would be impassable until perhaps late in the spring. Since we had to wait out the winter somewhere, we decided that our Balkh karwansarai was a comfortable enough place to spend at least part of it.

The food was good and ample and fairly various, as it should have been, at such a crossroads of commerce. There were excellent breads, and several sorts of fish, and the meat, though it was mutton, was broiled in a tasty brochette manner called shashlik. There were savory winter melons and well-kept pomegranates, besides all the usual dried fruits. There was no qahwah in those parts, but there was another hot beverage called cha, made of steeped leaves, almost as vivifying as qahwah and equally fragrant, though in a different way, and much thinner in consistency. The staple vegetable was still beans and the only other accompaniment to the meals was the everlasting rice, but we contributed a fragment of a brick of zafran to the kitchen, and so made the rice palatable and won those cooks the praise of every other patron of that karwansarai.

Since zafran was as much of a novelty and a nonesuch in Balkh as it had been in other places, our budgets were ample for buying anything we needed or wanted. My father traded bits of the brick and hay zafran for coin of the realm and, when an occasional merchant pleaded eloquently enough, would even deign to sell him a culm or two or three, so the khaja could start growing his own crocus crop. For each culm, my father demanded and got a number of gems of beryl or lapis lazura, of which stones this land is the chief source in all the world, and those were worth a great deal of coin indeed. So we were nicely well-to-do, and had not yet so much as opened our cods of musk.

We bought for ourselves heavy winter clothing, wools and furs, made in the local style. In that locality, the main garment was the chapon, which, as need required, could serve either for an overcoat or for a blanket or for a tent. When worn as a coat, it hung to the ground all around and its capacious sleeves hung a good foot-length beyond the fingertips. It looked ungainly and comical, but what people really looked at was not the fit but the color of one’s chapon, for that told one’s wealth. The lighter the color of the chapon, the harder it was to keep clean, and the more frequently it had to be cleaned, and the more it cost for that cleaning, and so it signified that the man wearing it cared little for that cost, and a chapon of pure snow-white color meant that its wearer was a man so rich he could be criminally spendthrift. My father and uncle and I each settled for a chapon of a medium tan color, indicating something modestly between opulence and the dark-brown of the chapon we bought for our slave Nostril. We also donned the local style of boot, called the chamus, which had a tough but flexible leather sole, bound to a soft leather upper which reached to the knee, and was held on by thongs wrapped around the calf. We also traded our flatland saddles, and paid a goodly sum of coin besides, to buy new saddles with high pommels and cantles that would seat us more securely during upland riding.

What time we were not buying or trading in the bazar, we put to other uses. The slave Nostril fed and curried and combed our horses to prime condition, and we Polos made conversation with other karwan journeyers. We gave them our observations on the routes to the westward of Balkh, and those of them who had come from the east told us news of the routes and travel conditions out there. My father painstakingly wrote a letter of several pages to the Dona Fiordelisa, recounting our travels and progress and assuring her of our wellbeing, and gave it to the leader of a westbound train, to start it on the long way back to Venice. I remarked that a letter might have had a better prospect of getting there if he had posted one on the other side of the Great Salt.

“I did,” he said. “I gave one to a train going west from Kashan.”

I also remarked, without rancor, that he might have apprised my mother in the same way.

“I did,” he said again. “I wrote a letter every year, to her or to Isidoro. I had no way of knowing that they never arrived. But in those days the Mongols were still actively conquering new territories, not just occupying them, and the Silk Road was an even less reliable post route than it is now.”

In the evenings, he and my uncle put much devoted labor, as I have said, into bringing our maps up to date and place, and I did the same with my log papers of notes taken so far.

While doing that, I came upon the names of the Princesses Moth and Sunlight, away back in Baghdad, and I was made acutely aware that I had not lain with a woman since that long ago. Not that I really needed reminding; I had got quite tired of the only substitute: waging a war of the priests in the middle of every other night or so. But I have mentioned that the Mongols, having no perceptible organized religion of their own, do not interfere with the religions practiced by their tributary peoples; neither do they interfere with the laws observed by those peoples. So Balkh was still of Islam, and still abided by the sharaiyah, the law of Islam, and all of Balkh’s resident females either stayed at home in close pardah or walked abroad only in chador-muffled invisibility. For me to have brashly approached one would have meant, first, chancing the possibility that she was an aged crone like Sunlight, and worse, chancing the likely wrath of her menfolk or the imams and muftis of Islamic law.

Nostril, of course, had found one of his usual perverse (but lawful) outlets for his animal urges. In every karwan train that stopped at Balkh, each Muslim man who did not have an accompanying wife or concubine, or two or three of each, had his kuch-i-safari. That term also signifies “traveling wives,” but those really were boys, carried along to be used for wifely purposes, and there was no sharaiyah prohibition against strangers paying for a share of their favors. I knew that Nostril had hastened to do just that, for he had wheedled from me the money for it. But I was not tempted to emulate him. I had seen the kuch-i-safari, and had seen none among them to compare even remotely with the late Aziz.

So I went on wanting and wishing and lusting, and finding nothing to lust for. I could only stare hard at every walking heap I passed on the streets, and try in vain to descry what sort of female was inside that bale of clothing. Even doing no more than that, I was risking the outrage of the Balkhites. They call that idle ogling “Eve-baiting,” and condemn it as vicious.

Meanwhile, Uncle Mafio was also being celibate, almost ostentatiously so. For a while, I assumed it was because he was still grieving for Aziz. But it was soon evident that he was simply becoming too physically weak to engage in any dalliance. His persistent cough had been for some time past getting insistent. Now it would come upon him in such racking spells as to leave him feeble afterwards, and compel him to take bed rest. He looked hale enough, and he seemed still as robust as ever, and his color was good. But now, when he began to find it intolerably tiring just to walk from our karwansarai to the bazar and back, my father and I overrode his protestations and called in a hakim.

Now, that word hakim merely means “wise,” not necessarily educated in medicine or professionally qualified or experienced, and it may be given as a title to one who deserves it—say, the trusted physician to a palace court —or to one who may not, like a bazar tomorrow-teller or an old beggar who gathers and sells herbs. So we were a trifle apprehensive about finding in these parts a person of real medego skill. We had seen many Balkhites with all too obvious afflictions—the most numerous being men with dangling goiters, like scrotums or melons, under their jawhne—and that did not much inspire us with confidence in the local medicinal arts. But our karwansarai keeper fetched for us a certain Hakim Khosro, and we put Uncle Mafio in his hands.

He seemed to know what he was doing. He had to make only a brief examination diagnostic to tell my father, “Your brother is suffering from the hasht nafri. That means one-of-eight, and we call it that because one of eight will die of it. But even those mortally stricken do not often die until after a long time. The jinni of that disease is in no hurry. Your brother tells me he has had this condition for some while, and it has worsened only gradually.”

“The tisichezza it is, then,” said my father, nodding solemnly. “Where we come from, it is sometimes also called the subtle sickness. Can it be cured?”

“Seven times out of eight, yes,” said Hakim Khosro cheerfully enough. “To begin, I will need certain things from the kitchen.”

He called on the landlord to bring him eggs and millet seed and barley flour. Then he wrote some words on a number of bits of paper—“powerful verses from the Quran,” he said—and stuck those papers onto Uncle Mafio’s bare chest with dabs of egg yolk into which he had mixed the millet seed—“the jinni of this ailment seems to have