Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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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 Nicolò. 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 earned it for me. You gentlemen might not believe it, but I was a surpassingly handsome man before that mutilation of my nose ruined my looks.”

He went on at great length about how handsome he had been when he still had two nostrils, and how sought after by women enamored of his manly beauty. In his early days, as Sindbad, he said, he had so entranced a lovely girl that she had risked her life to save him from an island peopled by winged and wicked men. Later, as Ali Babar, he had been captured by a band of thieves and thrust into a jar of sesame oil, and would have had his talking head pulled off his softened neck but that another lovely girl, beguiled by his charm, had rescued him from the jar and the thieves. As Ali-ad-Din, he with his handsome looks had emboldened yet another comely girl to save him from the clutches of an afriti commanded by an evil sorcerer … .

Well, the tales were as implausible as any told by the Shahryar Zahd, but no more implausible than his assertion that he had once been a good-looking man. No one could have believed that. Had he had the normal two nostrils, or three, or none, it would not have improved his resemblance to a large-beaked, chinless, pot-bellied shuturmurq camelbird, made even more comical by a stubble of beard under its beak. He went on even more incredibly, embellishing his claim of physical appeal by claiming to have done exploits of bravery and ingenuity and fortitude. We listened politely, but we knew all his rodomontata to be—as my father said later—“All vine and no grapes.”

Some days afterward, when my uncle compared our eastward progress against the maps in the Kitab of al-Idrisi, he announced that we had arrived at a historic place. According to his calculations, we were somewhere very near the spot, recorded in The Book of Alexander,where, during the conqueror’s march across Persia, the Amazon Queen Thalestris had come with her host of warrior women to greet and pay homage to him. We could only take Uncle Mafìo’s word, for there was in that place no monument to commemorate the occasion.

In after years, I have often been asked whether I in my journeyings ever found the nation of Amazonia, or, as some call it, the Land of Femynye. Not there in Persia, I did not. Later, in the Mongol domains, I met many warrior women, but they were all subservient to their menfolk. I have also been often asked whether, out yonder in those far lands, I ever met the Prete Zuàne, called in other languages Presbyter Johannes and Prester John, that reverend and mighty man so shrouded in myth and fable and legend and enigma.

For more than a hundred years, the Western world has been hearing rumor and report of him: a direct descendant of the royal Magi who first worshiped the Christ child, hence himself royal and devoutly Christian, and furthermore wealthy and powerful and wise. As the Christian monarch of a reputedly immense Christian realm, he has been a figure to tantalize Western imagination. Given our fragmented West, of many and little nations, ruled by comparatively petty kings and dukes and such, forever warring against each other—and a Christianity continually sprouting new and schismatic and antagonistic sects—we needs must look with wistful admiration on a vast congeries of peoples all peaceably united under one ruler and one supreme pontiff, and both of those embodied in one majestic man.

Also, whenever our West has been beleaguered by heathen savages swarming out of the East—Huns, Tàtars, Mongols, the Muslim Saracens —we have fervently hoped and prayed that the Prete Zuàne would emerge from his still farther East and come up behindthe invaders with his legions of Christian warriors, so that those heathens would be caught and crushed between his armies and ours. But the Prete Zuàne never hasventured out of his mysterious fastnesses, neither to help the Christian Westin its recurrent times of need nor even to make demonstration of his existence in reality. Does he then exist, and if so, who is he? Does he really hold sway over a far-off Christian empire, and if so, where is it?

I have already speculated, in my earlier published chronicle of my travels, that the Prete Zuàne did exist, in a sense,and in that sense may still exist, but he is not and never was a Christian potentate.

Back when the Mongols were only separate and disorganized tribes, they called each tribal chief a Khan. When the many tribes united under the fearsome Chinghiz, he became the only Eastern monarch ruling over an empire resembling the one rumored to belong to the Prete Zuàne. Since the time of Chinghiz, that Mongol Khanate was ruled in part or in whole by various of his descendants, before his grandson Kubilai became Khakhan and enlarged it even further and consolidated it more firmly. All of those Mongol rulers down the years had different names, but all were titled Khan or Khakhan.

Now, I invite you to notice how easily the spoken or written word Khan or Khakhan could be misread or misheard as Zuàne or John or Johannes. Suppose a long-ago Christian traveler in the East misheard it so. He naturally would be reminded of the sainted Apostle of that name. It would be no small wonder if he thereafter believed he had heard mention of a priest or bishop named for the Apostle. He had only to mingle the misapprehension with the reality—the extent and power and wealth of the Mongol Khanate—and by the time he went home to the West he would have been eager to tell of an imaginary Prete Zuàne ruling an imaginary Christian empire.

Well, if I am right, the Khans probably did inspire the legend, through no doing of their own, but they are not Christians. And they never have owned any of the fabulous possessions ascribed to that Prete Zuàne—the enchanted mirror in which he spies on the distant doings of his enemies, the magic medicaments with which he can cure any mortal ill, his man-eating warriors who are invincible because they can subsist only on the enemies they vanquish—all those other fanciful marvels so reminiscent of the Shahryar Zahd’s stories.

This is not to say that there are no Christians in the East. There are, and many of them, individuals and groups and entire communities of Christians, to be found everywhere from the Mediterranean Levant to the farther shores of Kithai, and they are of all colors, from white to dun and brown and black. Unfortunately, they are all communicants of the Eastern Church, which is to say followers of the doctrines of the fifth-century schismatic Abbot Nestorius, which is to say heretics in the eyes of us Christians of the Roman Church. For the Nestorians deny the Virgin Mary the title of Mother of God, they do not allow a crucifix in their churches, and they revere the despised Nestorius as a saint. They practice many other heresies besides. Their priests are not celibate, many of them are married, and all are simoniacs, for they will not administer any of the sacraments except for a fee of money paid. The Nestorians’ only tie with us real Christians is that they worship the same Lord God, and recognize Christ as His Son.

That at least made them seem more kin to me and my father and uncle than did the far more numerous surrounding worshipers of Allah or Buddha or even more alien divinities. So we tried not to abhor the Nestorians too much—even while we disputed their doctrines—and they were usually hospitable and helpful to us.

If indeed the Prete Zuàne existed in actuality, not just in the Western imagination—and if, as rumored, he were a descendant of one of the Magi kings—then we ought to have found him during our traverse of Persia, for that is where the Magi lived, and it was from Persia that they followed the Nativity star to Bethlehem. However, that would have made the Prete Zuàne a Nestorian, since those are the only sorts of Christians existing in those parts. And in fact we did find among the Persians a Christian elder of that name, but he could hardly have been the Prete Zuàne of the legend.

His name was Vizan, which is the Persian rendition of the name rendered elsewhere Zuàne or Giovanni or Johannes or John. He had been born into the royalty of Persia—had indeed been born a Shahzadè, or Prince—but in his youth he had embraced the Eastern Church, which meant renouncing not only Islam, but also his title and heritage and wealth and privilege and right to succession in the Shahnate. All of that he had forsworn, to join a roving tribe of Nestorian bedawin. Now a very old man, he was that tribe’s elder and leader and acknowledged Presbyter. We found him to be a good man and a wise man, and altogether an admirable man. In those particulars he well fit the character of the fabled Prete Zuàne. But he reigned over no broad and rich and populous domain, only a ragtag tribe of some twenty impoverished and landless shepherd families.

We encountered that bunch of sheep herders on a night when there was no karwansarai nearby, and they invited us to share their camping ground in the middle of their herd, and so we spent that evening in the company of their Presbyter Vizan.

While he and we made our simple meal around a small fire, my father and uncle engaged him in a theological discussion, and they ably discredited and demolished many of the old bedawi’s most cherished heresies. But he seemed not in the least dismayed or ready to discard the shreds they left of his beliefs. Instead, he cheerfully turned the conversation to the Baghdad court we had recently inhabited, and asked after all there, who were of course his royal relatives. We told him that they were well and thriving and happy, although understandably chafing under the overlordship of the Khanate. Old Vizan seemed pleased with the news, though no whit nostalgic for that life of courtly ease he had long ago given up. Only when Uncle Mafìo chanced to mention the Shahrpiryar Shams—making me inwardly flinch—did the ancient shepherd-bishop heave a sigh that might have denoted regret.

“The Dowager Princess still lives, then?” he said. “Why, she would be nearly eighty years of age by now, as I am.” And I flinched again.

He was silent for a time, and he took a stick and stirred the fire, and stared thoughtfully into its heart, and then he said, “Doubtless the Shahrpiryar Shams no longer shows it—and you good brethren may not credit my telling of it—but that Princess Sunlight in her youth was the most beautiful woman in Persia, perhaps the most beautiful of all time.”

My father and uncle murmured noncommittally. I was still flinching at my all too vivid recollection of the wrecked and ravaged crone.

“Ah, when she and I and the world were young,” said old Vizan, dreamily. “I was then still Shahzadè of Tabriz and she was the Shahzrad, first daughter of the Shah of Kerman. The report of her loveliness brought me from Tabriz, and brought innumerable other princes from as far away as Sabaea and the Kashmir, and none was disappointed when he saw her.”

Under my breath, I made an impolite noise of scoffing incredulity, not loud enough for him to hear.

“I could tell you of that maiden’s radiant eyes and rose lips and willow grace, but that would not begin to picture her for you. Why, just to look at her could heat a man to fever and yet refresh him at the same time. She was like—like a field of clover that has been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain. Yes. That is the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth, and always when I come upon that fragrance I remember the young and beautiful Princess Shams.”

Comparing a woman to clover: how like a rustic and unimaginative shepherd, I thought. Surely the old man’s wits had been dulled if not scrambled by his decades of association with nothing but greasy sheep and greasier Nestorians.

“There was not a man in all Persia who would not have risked a drubbing from the Kerman palace guards, just to sneak near and steal a glimpse of Princess Sunlight walking in her garden. To have seen her uncovered of her chador veil, a man would have given his very life. In the remote hope of a smile from her, why, a man would have relinquished his immortal soul. As for any further intimacy, that would have been an unthinkable thought, even for the multitude of princes already hopelessly in love with her.”

I sat staring at Vizan, amazed and unbelieving. The old hag I had spent so many nights naked with—a vision unattainable and inviolable? Impossible! Ludicrous!

“There were so many suitors, and all so anguished in their yearning, that the tender-hearted Shams could not or would not choose from among them, and thus blight the lives of all the rest. Neither could her father the Shah, for a long time, choose for her; he was so besieged by so many, each imploring more eloquently, each pressing upon him more precious gifts. That tumult of courtship went on literally for years. Any other maiden would have fretted at the passing of her springtime, and she not yet wed. But Shams only grew the more rose-beautiful and willow-graceful and clover-sweet as the time went on.”

I still sat and stared at him, but my skepticism was slowly giving way to wonder. My lover had been all that? So exquisitely desirable to this man and to other men in that long-gone time, so exquisitely memorable that she was not yet forgotten, by this one at least, even now at the approaching end of his life?

Uncle Mafìo went to speak, and got to coughing, but at last cleared his throat and asked, “What was the outcome of that crowded courtship?”

“Oh, it had to come to a conclusion at last. Her father the Shah—with her approval, I trust—finally chose for her the Shahzadè of Shiraz. He and Shams were wed, and the whole Persian Empire—all but the rejected suitors—celebrated with joyous holiday. However, for a long time the marriage had no issue. I strongly suspect that the bridegroom was so overwhelmed by his good fortune, and by the pure beauty of his bride, that it was a long time before he could perform the consummation. It was not until after his father died, and he had succeeded as Shah in Shiraz, and Shams was thirty or older, that she gave birth to their only child, and then only a daughter. She was also handsome, so I have heard, but nothing like her mother. That was Zahd, who is now Shahryar of Baghdad, and I think has a nearly grown daughter of her own.”

“Yes,” I said faintly.

Vizan went on, “Had it not been for those events I have recounted—had the Princess Shams chosen otherwise—I might still be …” He poked at the fire again, but it was now only embers fast fading. “Ah, well. I was inspired to go away into the wilderness, and to seek. And I sought, and I found the true religion, and these my wandering brethren, and with them a new life. I think I have lived it well, and have been a good Christian. I have some small hope of Heaven … and in Heaven, who knows … ?”

His voice seemed to fail him. He said no more, not even a good-night, and got up from among us and walked away—wafting his smell of sheep wool and sheep dip and sheep manure—and disappeared into his much-weathered, many-patched little tent. No, I never did take him to be the Prete Zuàne of the legends.

When my father and uncle had also gone to roll into their blankets, I sat on by the darkening embers of the fire, thinking, trying to reconcile in my mind the derelict old grandmother and she who was the Princess Sunlight, unsurpassable in beauty. I was confused. If Vizan saw her now, would he see the aged and ugly crone, or the glorious maiden she once had been? And I, should I keep on feeling disgust because, in her old age, hardly even recognizable as female, she still felt feminine hungers? Or should I pity her for the deceit she had to employ now to slake them, when once she could have had any prince for the beckoning?

To look at it another way, should I congratulate myself and delight in the knowledge that I had enjoyed the Princess Sunlight for whom a whole generation of men had yearned in vain? But, trying to think along that line, I found myself wrenching present time into past time, and past into present, and confronting even more insubstantial questions—I was led to wonder: does immortality reside in memory?—and with such deep metaphysic my mind was incapable of grappling.

My mind still is, as most minds are. But I know one thing now which I did not then. I know it from my own experience and knowledge of myself. A man stays always the same age, somewhere down inside himself. Only the outside of him grows older—his wrapping of body, and its integument, which is the whole world. Inwardly he attains to a certain age, and stays there throughout his whole remaining life. That perpetual inner age may vary, I suppose, with different individuals. But in general I suspect that it gets fixed at early maturity, when the mind has reached adult awareness and acuity, but has not yet been calloused by habit and disillusion; when the body is newly full-grown and feeling the fires of life, but not yet any of life’s ashes. The calendar and his glass and the solicitude of his juniors may tell a man that he is old, and he can see for himself that the world and all around him have aged, but secretly he knows that heis still a youth of eighteen or twenty.

And what I have said of a man, I have said because a man is what I am. It must be even more true of a woman, to whom youth and beauty and vitality are so much more to be treasured and conserved. I am sure there is not anywhere a woman of advanced age who has not inside her a maiden of tender years. I believe that the Princess Shams, even when I knew her, could see in her glass the radiant eyes and rose lips and willow grace that her suitor Vizan still could see, more than half a century after parting from her, and could smell the fragrance of clover after rain, the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth.