Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 78 страниц)

BALKH

1

WE went now a little south of east, to skirt the Karakum, or Black Sands, which is another desert lying due eastward of Mashhad. We chose a route across the Karabil, or Cold Plateau, which is a long shelf of more solid and verdant land extending like a coastline between the bleak dry ocean of Black Sands to the north and the bleak escarpment of the treeless Paropamisus Mountains to the south.

It would have made a shorter journey to go straight across the Karakum desert, but we were weary of desert. And it would have been a more easeful journey if we had gone farther to the southward, through the valleys of the Paropamisus, for there we would have found accommodation in a succession of villages and towns and even cities of respectable size, such as Herat and Maimana. But we preferred to take the middle course. We were well accustomed to camping out of doors, and that high Karabil plateau must have got its name only by comparison to lower and warmer lands, for it was not terribly cold even then in early wintertime. We simply added layers of shirts and pai-jamah and abas as we needed them, and found the weather tolerable enough.

The Karabil consisted mostly of monotonous grassland, but there were also stands of trees—pistachio, zizafun, willow and conifers. We had seen many greener and more pleasant lands, and would see many others, but, after having endured the Great Salt, we found even the dull gray grass and scanty foliage of the Karabil a delight to our eyes, and our horses found it adequate for forage. After the lifeless desert, that plateau seemed to us to teem with wildlife. There were coveys of quail, and flocks of a red-legged partridge, and everywhere marmots peeking from their burrows and whistling peevishly at our passing. There were migrant geese and ducks wintering there, or at least passing through: a kind of goose with a barred head-feathering, and a duck of lovely russet and gold plumage. There were multitudes of brown lizards, some of them so immense—longer than my leg—that they frequently startled our horses.

There were herds of several different sorts of delicate qazèl, and of a large and handsome wild ass, called in that region the kulan. When we first saw it, my father said that he almost wished we could stop and capture some, and tame them, and take them back to the West for sale, as they would fetch a far better price than the mules which noblemen and ladies buy for their mounts. The kulan is veritably as big as a mule, and has the same jug head and short tail, but it is of an extraordinarily rich dark-brown coat with a pale belly, and it is beautiful. A man can never tire of watching the herds of them swiftly running and frisking and wheeling in unison. But the Karabil natives told us the kulan cannot be tamed and ridden; they value it only for its edible flesh.

We ourselves, and Uncle Mafio especially, did much hunting on that stage of our journey, to supplement our travel rations. In Mashhad we had each procured a compact Mongol-style bow and the short arrows for it, and my uncle had practiced until he was expert with that weapon. As a rule, we tried to shy clear of the herds of qazèl and kulan, for we feared they might be attended by other hunters: wolves or lions, which also abound in the Karabil. But we did occasionally risk stalking a herd, and several times brought down a qazèl, and once a kulan. Almost every day we could count on getting a goose or duck or quail or partridge. That fresh meat would have been eminently enjoyable, except for one thing.

I forget what was the first creature we brought down with an arrow, or which of us it was who got it. But when we started to carve it for spitting over our fire, we discovered that it was riddled with some kind of small blind insects, dozens of them, alive and wriggling, snugged between the skin and flesh. Disgusted, we flung it aside and made do that night with a desert-type dried-food meal. But the very next day, we brought down some other sort of game, and found it identically infested. I do not know what demon afflicts every living wild creature of the Karabil. The natives we asked could not tell us, and seemed not to care, and even expressed disdain of our queasiness. So, since all our subsequently bagged game was similarly crawly, we forced ourselves to pick out the vermin and cook and eat the meat, and it did not make us ill, and eventually we came to regard the matter as commonplace.

Another thing we might have thought bothersome—but which, after the desert, we found rather exhilarating—was that three times during our traverse of the Karabil we had to cross a river. As I recall, their names were the Tedzhen, the Kushka and the Takhta. They were not wide waters, but they were cold and deep and fast-running, tumbling down from the Paropamisus heights to the Karakum flats, where eventually they would seep into the Black Sands and disappear. At each riverside we found a karwansarai, and each provided a ferry service, of a sort I found amusing. Our horses we simply unsaddled and unloaded and let swim across the rivers, which they did with aplomb. But we travelers were taken across, one at time, with our packs, by a ferryman plying a peculiar kind of raft called a masak. Each of those craft was not much bigger than a tub and consisted of a light framework of wood, supported by a score or so of inflated goatskins.

A masak was ludicrous looking, with all the tied-off stumps of goat legs poking up among its framing poles, but I learned that there was a reason for that. Those rivers ran briskly, and the men paddling had little control over something as awkward as a masak, so it yawed and rocked and revolved and pitched wildly as it went careening on a long diagonal from one shore to the other. Each crossing took quite a while, during which time the inflated goatskins leaked and bubbled and whistled. When the masak began to get alarmingly low in the water, the ferryman would stop paddling, untie the goat legs and vigorously blow into the hide bags, one after another, until they were buoyant again, and then deftly retie them. I should amend my earlier remark and say I found that an amusing mode of ferriage afterI was on each occasion put safely aground on the other side. During the turbulent crossings, I had other feelings—compounded of giddiness, wetness, coldness, sea-sickness and expectation of imminent drowning.

At the Kushka ferry, I remember, another karwan party was preparing to cross, and we watched and wondered how it would manage, for it was traveling in a number of horse-drawn carts. But that did not deter the ferrymen. They unhitched the horses and sent them swimming for the far bank, and made several raft trips to transport the occupants and contents of the wagons. Then, as each cart was emptied, they eased it down the riverbank until its four wheels rested one apiece in four of the tubby little masaks, and they rowed it across in quaternion. That made a sight to see: each wagon dipping and dancing and whirling down the river, and its raftmen at each of its corners alternately paddling like Charon to make headway and puffing like Aeolus to keep the goatskins inflated.

I must remark that the riverside inns in the Karabil provided better ferriage than forage for their guests. At only one karwansarai did we have a decent meal, in fact something unique in our experience thus far: huge and tasty steaks carved from a fish caught in the river outside the door. The steaks were so tremendous that we marveled and asked permission to go into the kitchen for a look at the fish they had been cut from. It was called an ashyotr, and it was bigger than a big man, bigger than Uncle Mafio, and instead of scales it had a shell of bony plates, and beneath its long snout it had barbels like whiskers. In addition to giving edible flesh, the ashyotr yielded a black roe, each egg of seed-pearl size, and we ate some of that too, salted and pressed to make a relish called khavyah.

But at the other inns the food was awful, and there was no reason for it to be, given the abundance of game in that country. Every landlord of a karwansarai seemed to think that he must serve his guests something they had not lately been eating. Since we had been dining on such delicacies as game birds and wild qazèl does, the innkeepers fed us the mutton of domestic sheep. The Karabil is not sheep country, meaning that the meat had probably traveled as far from its point of origin as we had, to get to the karwansarai. Mutton had long since ceased to delight me, and this was dried and salted and tough, and there was no oil or vinegar or anything else to season it with, only pungent red meleghèta pepper, and it was invariably accompanied by beans boiled in sugar water. After enough such gaseous meals, we could probably have served instead of the goatskins to support the masak rafts. But, to say one good thing about the inns in the Karabil, they charged only for their human patrons, not for the karwan animals. That was because wood was hard to come by, and the beasts paid their own way by leaving their dung to be dried for fuel.

The next city of any consequence to which we came was Balkh, and in times past that had been a city of truly great consequence: the site of one of Alexander’s main encampments, a major station for karwan traders traveling the Silk Road, a city of crowded bazars and majestic temples and luxurious karwansarais. But it had stood in the path of the first waves of Mongols rampaging out of the fastnesses to the east—meaning that earliest Mongol Horde commanded by the invincible Chinghiz Khan—and in the year 1220 the Horde had stamped upon Balkh as a booted foot might stamp upon an ant nest.

It was more than half a century later that my father, my uncle, our slave and I arrived in Balkh, but the city had not even yet recovered from that disaster. Balkh was a grand and noble ruin, but it was still a ruin. It was perhaps as busy and thriving as of old, but its inns and granaries and warehouses were only slatternly buildings thrown together of the broken bricks and planks left after the ruination. They looked even more dingy and pathetic, standing as they did among the stumps of once towering columns, the tumbled remains of once mighty walls and the jagged shells of once perfect domes.

Of course, few of Balkh’s current inhabitants were old enough to have been there when Chinghiz sacked the city, or before, when it had been far-famed as Balkh Umn-al-Bulud, the “Mother of Cities.” But their sons and grandsons, who were now the proprietors of the inns and counting houses and other establishments, appeared as dazed and miserable as if the devastation had occurred only yesterday, and in their own seeing. When they spoke of the Mongols, they recited what must have been a litany committed to memory by every Balkhite: “Amdand u khandand u sokhtand u kushtand u burdand u raftand,” which means, “They came and they slew and they burned and they plundered and they seized their spoils and they went on.”

They had gone on, yes, but this whole land, like so many others, was still under tribute and allegiance to the Mongol Khanate. The glum demeanor of the Balkhites was understandable, since a Mongol garrison was still encamped nearby. Armed Mongol warriors strode through the bazàr crowds, remindful that the grandson of Chinghiz, the Khakhan Kubilai, still held his heavy boot poised over the city. And his appointed magistrates and tax collectors still peered watchfully over the shoulders of the Balkhites in their market stalls and money-changing booths.

I could say, as I have said before, and say it truthfully, that everywhere east of the Furat River basin, away back at the far western beginning of Persia, we journeyers had been traversing the lands of the Mongol Khanate. But if we had thus simplistically marked our maps—writing nothing but “Mongol Khanate” over that whole vast area of the world—we might as well not have kept up our maps at all. They would have been of little use to us or anyone else without more detail than that. We did expect to retrace our trail someday, when we returned home again, and we also hoped that the maps would be of use even after that, for the guidance of whole streams of commerce flowing back and forth between Venice and Kithai. So, every day or so, my father and uncle would get out our copy of the Kitab and, only after deliberation and consultation and final agreement, they would inscribe upon it the symbols for mountains and rivers and towns and deserts and other such landmarks.

That had now become a more necessary task than before. From the shores of the Levant all the way across Asia, to Balkh or hereabouts, the Arab mapmaker al-Idrisi had proved a dependable guide for us. As my father had long ago remarked, al-Idrisi himself must at some time have traveled through all those regions and seen them with his own eyes. But, from the vicinity of Balkh on eastward, al-Idrisi seemed to have relied on hearsay information from other travelers, and not very observant travelers at that. The Kitab’s more easterly map pages were notably empty of landmarks, and what major things it did show—things like rivers and mountain ranges—frequently turned out to be incorrectly located.

“Also, the maps from here on seem exceedingly small,”said my father, frowning at those pages.

“Yes, by God,” said my uncle, scratching and coughing. “There is an almighty lot more land than he indicates, between here and the eastern ocean.”

“Well,” said my father. “We must be that much more assiduous in our own mapping.”

He and Uncle Mafio could usually agree, without long debate, on the penning-in of mountains and waters and towns and deserts, because those were things we could see and judge the measure of. What required deliberation and discussion, and sometimes sheer guesswork, was the drawing-in of invisible things, which is to say the borders of nations. That was maddeningly difficult, and only partly because the spread of the Mongol Khanate had engulfed so many once-independent states and nations and even whole races as to render immaterial—except to a mapmaker—the question of where they had been, and where they had abutted, and where the lines between them had lain. It would have been difficult even if some native of each nation had come with us to pace off the bounds of it for us. I daresay that would be a troublesome job on our own Italian peninsula, where no two city-states can yet agree on each other’s limits of ownership and authority. But in central Asia the extents of the nations and their frontiers and even their names have been in flux since long before the Mongols made those matters moot.

I shall illustrate. Somewhere during our long traverse from Mashhad to Balkh, we had crossed the invisible line which, in Alexander’s time, marked the division between two lands known as Arya and Bactria. Now it marks—or at least it did until the Mongols came—the division between the lands of Greater Persia and Greater India. But let me pretend for a moment that the Mongol Khanate does not exist, and try to give some idea of the confusion attendant throughout history on that imprecise border.

India may once have been inhabited in all its vastness by the small, dark people we now know as the Indians. But long ago the incursions of more vigorous and courageous peoples pushed those original Indians into a smaller and smaller compass of land, so that nowadays the Hindu India lies far distant to the south and east of here. This northern India Aryana is the habitat of the descendants of those long-ago invaders, and they are not of the Hindu but of the Muslim religion. Every least tribe calls itself a nation and gives its nation a name and asserts that its nation has mappable borders. Most of the names hereabout end in -stan, which signifies “land of”—Khaljistan, meaning Land of the Khalji, and Pakhtunistan and Kohistan and Afghanistan and Nuristan and I disremember how many others.

In olden time, it was somewhere in this area, in either the then-Arya or the then-Bactria, that Alexander the Great, during his eastward march of conquest, met and fell enamored of and took to wife the Princess Roxana. Nobody can say exactly where that happened, or of what tribe’s “royal family” Roxana was a member. But nowadays and hereabout, every one of the local tribes—Pakhtuni, Khalji, Afghani, Kirghiz and every other—claims descent from, first, the royal line which produced Roxana and, also, the Macedonians of Alexander’s army. There may even be some cause for those claims. Although the greater number of people one sees in Balkh and its environs possess dark hair and skin and eyes, which presumably Roxana also had, there are among them many persons of fair complexion and blue or gray eyes and reddish or even yellow hair.

However, each tribe purports to be the onlytrue descendants, and on that basis claims sole sovereignty over all these lands now constituting India Aryana. To me, that seemed a devious sort of reasoning, since even Alexander was a latecomer here, and an unwelcome marauder, so all the natives here—except perhaps the Princess Roxana—should have felt about the Macedonians as they now feel about the Mongols.

The one thing we found common to all the peoples in these regions was the still later come religion of Islam. In accord with Muslim custom, then, we never got to converse with any but the malepersons, and that made Uncle Mafio skeptical of their boasts of their lineage. He quoted an old Venetian couplet:

La mare xe segura

E’l pare de ventura.

Which is to say that, while a father may claim to know, only a mother can know for certain who sired each of her children.

I have recounted this tangled and disjointed bit of history merely to indicate how it added to the other frustrations of us would-be mapmakers. Whenever my father and uncle sat down together to decide the designations to ink onto our map pages, hoping to do that tidily, the discussion might go untidily thus:

“To begin with, Mafio, this land is in the portion of the Khanate governed by the Ilkhan Kaidu. But we must be more specific.”

“How specific, Nico? We do not know what Kaidu or Kubilai or any other Mongol officially calls this region. All the Western cosmographers call it merely the India Aryana of Greater India.”

“They have never set foot upon it. The Westerner Alexander did, and he called it Bactria.”

“But most of the local folk call it Pakhtunistan.”

“On the other hand, al-Idrisi has it marked as Mazar-i-Sharif.”

“Gèsu! 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 zafràn to the kitchen, and so made the rice palatable and won those cooks the praise of every other patron of that karwansarai.

Since zafràn 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 zafràn 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 bazàr, 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 Mafìo 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 bazàr 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 bazàr 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 mèdego 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 Mafìo in his hands.

He seemedto 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 some affinity to millet seeds.” Then he had the innkeeper help him sprinkle and rub flour all over my uncle’s torso, and rolled a number of goatskins tightly around him, explaining that this was “to promote the active sweating-out of the jinni’s poisons.”

“Malevolenza,” growled my uncle. “I cannot even scratch my itching elbow.”

Then he began coughing. Either the flour dust or the excessive heat inside the goatskins sent him into a fit of coughing that was worse than ever. His arms being pinioned by the wrapping, he could not pummel his chest for relief, or even cover his mouth, so the coughing went on until it seemed he would strangle, and his ruddy face got more red, and he sprayed little flecks of blood onto the hakim’s white aba. After some time of that agony, he turned pale and swooned dead away, and I thought he hadstrangled.

“No, be not alarmed, young man,” said Hakim Khosro. “This is nature’s means of cure. The jinni of this disease will not trouble a victim when he is not conscious of being troubled. You notice, when your uncle is in the faint, he does not cough.”

“He has only to die, then,” I said skeptically, “and he is permanently cured of coughing.”

The hakim laughed, unoffended, and said, “Be not suspicious either. The hasht nafri can only be arrested in nature’s good time, and I can but lend assistance to nature. See, he wakes now, and the fit has passed.”

“Gèsu,” Uncle Mafio muttered weakly.

“For now,” the hakim went on, “the best prescriptive is rest and perspiration. He is to stay in bed except when he must go to the mustarah, and that he will do frequently, for I am also giving him a strong purgative. There are always jinn hiding in the bowels, and it does no harm to get rid of them. So, each time the patient returns from the mustarah to bed, one of you—since I will not always be here—must dust him with a new coating of barley flour and rewrap the skins about him. I will look in from time to time, to write new verses to be pasted on his chest.”