Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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To be honest, I was less interested in the footprint than in a story told to us by the shrine’s attendant bhikku (as a pongyi was called in Srihalam). He said the island was rich in gems becausethe Buddha had spent time there, and had wept for the wickedness of the world, and each of his holy tears had congealed into a ruby, an emerald or a sapphire. But, said the bhikku, those gems could not just be picked up from the ground. They had all washed into valleys in the interior of the island, and those chasms were unapproachable because they teemed and squirmed with venomous snakes. So the islanders had had to contrive an ingenious method for harvesting the precious stones.

In the mountain crags about the valleys nested eagles which preyed on the serpents. So the islanders would sneak at night among those crags and throw cuts of raw meat down into the chasms, and when the meat hit the ground down there, some few gems would stick to it. Next day, the foraging eagles would pick up and eat the meat in preference to the snakes. Then, whenever an eagle was absent from its nest, a man could climb up there and finger through the bird’s droppings and pick out the undigested rubies, sapphires and emeralds. I not only thought that an ingenious method of mining, I also thought it must be the origin of all the legends about the monster rukh bird, which allegedly snatches up and flies off with even bigger meats, includings persons and elephants. When I got back to our ship, I told my father he ought to treasure his newly acquired sapphires for more than their inherent value—for their having been got for him by the fabled rukh.

We might have stayed on longer yet in Srihalam, but one day the Lady Kukachin remarked, rather wistfully, “We have been journeying for a whole year now, and the captain tells me that we are only about two-thirds of the way to our destination.”

I knew the lady well enough by this time to know that she was not being sordidly greedy for her entitlement as Ilkhatun of Persia. She merely was eager to meet her betrothed and marry him. She was, after all, a year older now and still a spinster.

So we called an end to our tarrying, and pushed off from the pleasant island. We sailed northward, close along the western coast of India, and made the best time possible, for none of us had any desire to visit or explore any part of that land. We put in to shore only when our water barrels absolutely had to be replenished—at a fair-sized port called Quilon, and at a river-mouth port called Mangalore, where we had to anchor far offshore of the delta flats, and at a settlement scattered over seven pimples of land called the Bombay islets, and at a dismal fishing village called Kurrachi.

Kurrachi at least had good fresh water, and we made sure our tanks were topped full, because from that point we were sailing directly west again, and for some two thousand li—or I should say, now that I was back again where Persian measurements were used, about three hundred farsakhs—we were skirting the dry, dun-colored, baking, thirsty desert coast of the empty land called Baluchistan. The view of that sere coastline was only occasionally enlivened by two things peculiar to it. All year round, a south wind blows from the sea into Baluchistan, so wherever we saw a tree it was always grown in a contorted arc, bending inland, like an arm beckoning us to come ashore. The other peculiarity of that coast was its mud volcanoes: dumpy cone-shaped hills of dried mud, every so often spewing a gush of new, wet mud from the top, to slither down and slowly bake and await a new gush and a new layer. It was a most uninviting land.

But, following that drear shore, we did at last enter the Strait of Hormuz, and that led us to the city of that name, and once again I was in Persia. Hormuz was a very big and bustling city, so populous that some of its residential quarters were spilling from the mainland city center over to the islands offshore. It was also Persia’s busiest port, a forest of masts and spars, a tumult of noise and a medley of smells, most of them not nice. The ships tied up or coming and going were, of course, mostly Arab qurqurs and falukahs and dhaos, the biggest of them looking like dinghis and praus alongside our massive vessels. No doubt an occasional trading chuan had been seen here before, but surely never such a fleet as we now brought into the harbor roads. As soon as a pilot boat had fussily led us to anchorage, we were surrounded by the skiffs and scows and barges of every kind of vendor, guide, pimp and waterfront beggar, all of them screeching solicitations. And what appeared to be the entire remainder of the population of Hormuz was collected along the dockside, gawking and jabbering excitedly. However, among that mob we could see nothing like what we had expected—a resplendent gathering of nobles to welcome their new Ilkhatun-to-be.

“Curious,” muttered my father. “Surely the word of our coming raced ahead of us along the coast. And the Ilkhan Arghun must by now have been getting mightily impatient and eager.”

So, while he turned to the daunting job of commanding the debarkation of all our company and our gear, I hailed a karaji ferry skiff and, fending off the solicitors, was the first to go ashore. I accosted an intelligent-looking citizen and made inquiry. Then I immediately had myself rowed back to our ship, to tell my father and the envoy Uladai and the anxious-eyed Kukachin:

“You may wish to postpone the debarkation until we have held conference. I am sorry to be the one to bring this news, but the Ilkhan Arghun died of an illness, many months ago.”

The Lady Kukachin burst into tears, as sincerely as if the man had been her long-wedded and much-loved husband, instead of just a name to her. As the lady’s maids helped her away to her suite of cabins, and my father thoughtfully chewed on a corner of his beard, Uladai said, “Vakh! I will wager that Arghun died at the very moment my fellow envoys Koja and Apushka perished in Jawa. We should have suspected something dire.”

“We could not have done much about it, if we had,” said my father. “The question is: what do we do now about Kukachin?”

I said, “Well, there is no Arghun waiting for her. And they told me ashore that his son Ghazan is still under age to succeed to the Khanate.”

“That is correct,” said Uladai. “I suppose his Uncle Kaikhadu is ruling as Regent in the meantime.”

“So they say. And either this Kaikhadu knew nothing of his late brother’s having sent for a new wife, or he is not at all interested in exercising any levirate right to take her for himself. Anyway, he has sent no embassy to meet her and no transport for her.”

“No matter,” said Uladai. “She comes from his Lord Khakhan, so he is obliged to relieve you of her care and take her into his own. We shall take her to the capital at Maragheh. As for transportation, you carry the Khakhan’s pai-tzu. We have only to command the Shah of Hormuz to supply us with everything we require.”

And that is what we did. The local Shah received us not just dutifully but hospitably, and lodged us all in his palace—though we filled it nearly to bursting—while he assembled all his own camels and probably every other one within his domain, and loaded them with provisions and water bags, and marshaled camel-pullers for them, and also troops of his own to augment ours, and in a few days we were journeying overland, northwest toward Maragheh.

It was a traverse as long as the one my father and uncle and myself had previously made across Persia from west to east. But this time, going south to north, we had no very terrible terrain to cross, for our route took us well west of the Great Salt Desert, and we had good riding camels and copious supplies, and plenty of attendants to do every bit of work for us, and a formidable guard against any possible molesters. So it was a fairly comfortable trip, if not a very merry one. The Lady Kukachin did not wear any of the bridal finery she had brought, but every day wore brown, the Persian color of mourning, and on her pretty face wore a look that was partly apprehensive of what her fate might now be, and partly resigned to it. Since all the rest of us had got very fond of her, we worried with her, but did everything we could to make the journey easy and interesting for her.

Our route did take us through a number of places where I or my father or my uncle—or all of us together—had been before, so my father and I were constantly looking to see what changes, if any, had occurred in the years since then. Most of our stops along the way were only for a night’s sleep, but when we got to Kashan, my father and I commanded an extra day’s stay, so we could stroll about that city where we had rested before our plunge into the forbidding Dasht-e-Kavir. We led Uncle Mafìo walking with us, in a sort of meager hope that those scenes of long ago might jar him back to a semblance of what he had been long ago. But nothing in Kashan woke any glimmer in his dulled eyes, not even the “prezioni” boys and young men who were still the city’s most visible asset.

We went to the house and stable where the kindly Widow Esther had given us lodging. The place was now in the possession of a man, a nephew who had inherited it years ago, he said, when that good lady died. He showed us where she was buried—not in any Jewish, cemetery but, at her own deathbed insistence, in the herb garden behind her own abode. That was where I had watched her pounding scorpions with her slipper, while she exhorted me never to neglect any opportunity to “taste everything in this world.”

My father respectfully crossed himself, and then went on along the street, leading Uncle Mafìo, to go and look again at Kashan’s kashi-tile workshops, the which had inspired him to set up the same in Kithai, and from which our Compagnia had realized such handsome profits. But I stayed on with the widow’s nephew for a while, looking pensively down at her herb-grown grave and saying (but not aloud) :

“I followed your advice, Mirza Esther. I let no chance go by untaken. I never hesitated to follow where my curiosity beckoned. I willingly went where there was danger in beauty and beauty in danger. As you foretold, I had experiences in plenty. Many were enjoyable, some were instructive, a few I would rather have missed. But I had them, and I have them still in memory. If, as soon as tomorrow, I go to mygrave, it will be no black and silent hole. I can paint the darkness with vivid colors, and fill it with music both martial and languorous, with the flicker of swords and the flutter of kisses, with flavors and excitements and sensations, with the fragrance of a field of clover that has been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain, the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth. Yes, I can enliven eternity. Others may have to endure it; I can enjoy it. For that I thank you, Mirza Esther, and I would wish you shalom … but I think that you, too, would not be happy in an eternity of nothing but peace … .”

A black Kashan scorpion came scrabbling along the garden path, and I stepped on it for her. Then I turned to the nephew and said, “Your aunt once had a house maid named Sitarè …”

“Another of her deathbed dispositions. Every old woman is a matchmaker at heart. She found for Sitarè a husband, and had them married in this house before she died. Neb Efendi was a cobbler, a good craftsman and a good man, though a Muslim. He was also an immigrant Turki, which made him not very popular hereabout. But it also made him not a pursuer of boys, and I trust he was a good husband to Sitarè.”

“Was?”

“They moved away from here shortly afterward. He was a foreigner, and evidently folk prefer to have their shoes made and mended by their home folk, even if they are inept in their work. So Neb Efendi picked up his awls and his lasts and his new wife and departed—to his native Cappadocia, I believe. I hope they are happy there. It was a long time ago.”

Well, I was a little disappointed not to get to see Sitarè again, but only a little. She would be a matron now, of about my own middle age, and to see her might be even more of a disappointment.

So we pushed on, and eventually arrived at Maragheh. The Regent Kaikhadu did receive us, not grudgingly but not with wild enthusiasm either. He was a typical, shaggy Mongol man at arms, who clearly would have been more comfortable astride a horse, hacking with a blade at some battlefield opponent, than he was on the throne to which his brother’s death had shoved him.

“I truly did not know of Arghun’s embassy to the Khakhan,” he told us, “or you may be sure I would have had you escorted hither in great pomp and ceremony, for I am a devoted subject of the Khakhan. Indeed, it is because I have spent all my time afield, fighting the Khanate’s campaigns, that I was unaware of Arghun’s canvass for a new wife. Right this minute, I should properly be putting down a band of brigands that are rampaging over in Kurdistan. Anyway, I do not know quite what to do with this woman you have brought.”

“She is a handsome one, Lord Kaikhadu,” said the envoy Uladai. “And a good-natured one.”

“Yes, yes. But I already have wives—Mongol, Persian, Circassian, even one frightful Armeniyan—in yurtus scattered from Hormuz to Azerbaizhan.” He threw up his hands distractedly. “Well, I suppose I can inquire among my nobles … .”

“We will stay,” my father said firmly, “until we see the Lady Kukachin settled according to her station.”

But the lady took care of that herself, before we had been many days in residence at the Maragheh palace. My father and I were airing Uncle Mafìo in a rose garden one afternoon when she came running up to us, smiling for the first time since our arrival at Hormuz. She also had someone in tow: a boy, very short and ugly and pimply, but in courtier’s rich attire.

“Elder Brothers Polo,” she said breathlessly. “You need fret over me no longer. By good fortune, I have met a most wonderful man, and we plan shortly to announce our betrothal.”

“Why, that is stupendous news,” said my father, but cautiously. “I do hope, my dear, that he is of suitably high birth and position and prospects … .”

“The highest!” she said happily. “Ghazan is the son of the man I came here to wed. He will be Ilkhan himself in two years.”

“Mefe, you could not have done better! Lassar la strada vechia per la nova. Is this his page? Can he fetch the good fellow for us to meet?”

“But this is he. This is the Crown Prince Ghazan.”

My father had to swallow before he could say, “Sain bina, Your Royal Highness,” and I bowed deeply to give myself time to compose my face to sobriety.

“He is two years younger than myself,” Kukachin chattered on, not giving the boy much chance to speak for himself. “But what is two years in a lifetime of happy marriage? We will be wed as soon as he ascends to the Ilkhanate. In the meantime, you dear devoted Elder Brothers can leave me in good conscience, knowing I am in good hands, and go on about your own affairs. I shall miss you, but I shall not be lonely or despondent any more.”

We made the proper congratulations and good wishes, and the boy grinned like an ape and mumbled acknowledgment, and Kukachin beamed as if she had just won an unimaginably great trophy, and the two of them went off hand in hand.

“Well,” said my father with a shrug, “better the head of a cat than the tail of a lion.”

But Kukachin must have seen in the boy what we could not. God knows he could never have been better than a goblin for looks and physical stature—he was afterward styled in all the Mongol chronicles “Ghazan the Ugly”—but the fact that he did make history is proof that he was more than he appeared to be. He and the lady were wed when he replaced Kaikhadu as Ilkhan of Persia, and then he went on to become the ablest Ilkhan and warrior of his generation, making many wars and winning many new lands for the Khanate. Unhappily, his loving Ilkhatun Kukachin did not live to share all his triumphs and celebrity, for she died in childbirth two years or so after their marriage.

4

SO, having completed our last mission for the Khan Kubilai, my father and uncle and I pressed onward. We left at Maragheh the populous company we had so far been traveling with, but Kaikhadu generously gave us good horses and remounts and packhorses and ample provisions and an escort of a dozen mounted men of his own palace guard, to see us safely through all the Turki lands. However, as things turned out, we would have traveled more safely without that Mongol troop.

From the capital, we circled around the shores of a sea-sized lake named Urumia, which was also called the Sea of the Sunset. Then we climbed up and over the mountains which marked the northwestern frontier of Persia. One of the mountains in that range, said my father, was the biblical Mount Ararat, but it was too far off our route for me to go and climb it to see if any trace of the Ark was still there. Anyway, having recently scaled another mountain to see a footprint that might well have been Adam’s, I was now inclined to think of Noah as rather a latecomer in history. On the other side of the mountains, we descended into the Turki lands at another sea-sized lake, this one named Van, but called the Sea Beyond the Sunset.

The country hereabout, and the nations composing it, and the borders thereof, were all in flux and had been for many years. What had formerly been part of the Byzantine Empire under Christian rulers was now the Seljuk Empire under rulers of the Turki race and Muslim religion. But these eastern parts of it were also known by older names, bestowed by peoples who had inhabited these lands since time before time, who had never conceded that they were not still the rightful owners of them, and who recognized none of the vagaries of modern claimants and modern boundary lines. Thus, at the point where we emerged from Persia, we came down from the mountains into a country which could equally well be named Turki, after the race of its rulers, or the Seljuk Empire, as those Turki called it, or Cappadocia, which was its name on older maps, or Kurdistan, for the Kurdi people who populated it.

The land was a green and pleasant one, the wildest parts of it seeming hardly wild at all, but looking almost neatly cultivated, with rolling hills of meadow grass tidily separated by clumps of forest, so that the whole countryside was as trim as an artificial parkland. There was plenty of good water, in sparkling streams as well as immense blue lakes. The people here were all Kurdi, some of them farmers and villagers, but most of them nomad families following flocks of sheep or goats. They were as handsome a race as I have seen in any Islamic land. They had very black hair and eyes, but a complexion as fair as my own. The men were large and solidly built, and wore great black mustaches, and were famously fierce fighters. The Kurdi women were not particularly delicate, either, but withal were well formed and good-looking—and independent; they scorned to wear the veil or live hidden in the pardah imposed on most other women of Islam.

The Kurdi received us journeyers cordially enough—nomads usually are hospitable to other seeming nomads—but they cast unloving looks at our Mongol escorts. There were reasons for that. Besides all the other complications of national names and dominions and boundary lines, this Seljuk Empire was also in enforced vassalage to the Ilkhanate of Persia. That situation dated from the time when a traitorous Turki minister had foully murdered the King Kilij—he who was the father of my onetime princess friend Mar-Janah—and usurped the throne by promising to lay it under subjection to the then Ilkhan Abagha. So this Seljuk Empire, though nominally ruled now by a King Masud in the capital city of Erzincan, was really subordinate to Abagha’s surviving son, the Regent Kaikhadu, whose Maragheh court we had just come from and whose palace guards were accompanying us. We journeyers were welcome here; the warriors with us were not.

One might have supposed that the Kurdi—rebellious throughout history against everynon-Kurdi ruler ever imposed upon them—would have cared little whether Erzincan or Maragheh was the real ruling capital, because out here, a hundred farsakhs or more from either city, they were pretty much left unruled by anybody. But they seemed to regard the Mongols as a tyranny inflicted on top of the Turki tyranny they already chafed under, and the one to be even more hotly resented and hated. We learned how well the Kurdi could hate when, one afternoon, we stopped at an isolated hut to buy a sheep for our evening meal.

The evident proprietor of the hut was sitting in the doorway of it, holding his sheepskin robes around him as if he had a chill. My father and I and just one of our Mongols rode into the dooryard and politely dismounted, but the shepherd impolitely did not stand up. The Kurdi had a language of their own, but almost all of them spoke Turki as well, and so did our Mongol escorts, and in any case the Turki tongue was similar enough to the Mongol that I could usually understand any overheard conversation. Our Mongol asked the man if we might buy a sheep. The man, still seated, his eyes glumly on the ground, refused us.

“I think I ought not to trade with our oppressors.”

The Mongol said, “No one is oppressing you. These Ferenghi wayfarers ask a favor of you, and will pay for it, and your Allah enjoins hospitality toward wayfarers.”

The shepherd said, not in an argumentative way, but in seeming melancholy, “But the rest of you are Mongols, and you will also eat on the sheep.”

“What of that? Once you sell the animal to the Ferenghi, what matter to you what becomes of it?”

The shepherd sniffled and said, almost tearfully, “I did a favor to a passing Turki not long since. Helped him change a broken shoe on his horse. And for that I have been chastised by the Chiti Ayakkabi. A small favor for a mere Turki. Estag farullah! What will the Chiti do to me if he hears I did a favor for a Mongol?”

“Come!” snapped our escort. “Will you sell us a sheep?”

“No, I cannot.”

The Mongol sneered down at him. “You do not even stand like a man when you speak defiance. Very well, cowardly Kurdi, you refuse to sell. Then would you care to stand up and try to prevent my takinga sheep?”

“No, I cannot. But I warn you. The Chiti Ayakkabi will make you regret the robbery.”

The Mongol laughed harshly and spat in the dust in front of the seated man, then remounted and rode to cut a fat ewe out of the flock grazing in the meadow beyond the hut. I remained there, curious, staring down at the slumped and defeated-looking shepherd. I knew that Chiti meant a brigand and, as best I knew, Ayakkabi meant a shoe. I wondered what kind of bandit would style himself “the Shoe Brigand” and would occupy himself in punishing his own fellow Kurdi for giving aid and comfort to their presumed oppressors.

I managed to inquire of the man, “What did this Chiti Ayakkabi do to chastise you?”

He did not speak a reply, but showed me, lifting the skirts of his sheepskins to reveal his feet. It was evident why he had not stood to greet us, and I got some idea of why the Kurdi bandit had such a strange name. Both of the shepherd’s feet, otherwise bare, were clotted with dried blood and studded with nails—not nail heads but the upthrusting points of nails—where both his feet had been shod with iron horseshoes.

Two or three nights later, near a village called Tunceli, the Chiti Ayakkabi made us regret our robbery of the sheep. Tunceli was a village of the Kurdi, and it had only one karwansarai, and that very small and dilapidated. Since our company of fifteen riders and thirty-odd horses would have crowded it intolerably, we rode on through the village and made camp in a grassy glade beyond, convenient to a clear-flowing brook. We had eaten and rolled ourselves in our blankets and gone to sleep, leaving just one Mongol on guard, when the night erupted with bandits.

Our lone sentry had only time to bellow “ Chiti!” before he was brained with a battle-ax. The rest of us thrashed free of our bedrolls, but the brigands were among us, with blades and cudgels, and all was a confused turbulence in the dim remaining firelight. My father and I had Uncle Mafìo to thank that we were not slain as abruptly as all our Mongol troop. Those warriors thought first to snatch for their weapons, so the bandits flew first at them. But my father and I both saw Mafìo standing by the fire, looking about him in numb bemusement, and we both at the same moment threw ourselves toward him, and seized him and dragged him to the ground, so he made not such a prominent target. The next moment, something clouted me above the ear and, for me, the night went totally dark.

I woke, lying on the ground with my head cradled in a soft lap, and as my vision cleared I looked up into a female face illumined by the now built-up fire. It was not the square, strong face of a Kurdi woman, and it was framed by a tumble of hair that was not black, but dark-red. I labored to collect my wits, and said in Farsi, in a voice that croaked:

“Am I dead, and are you a peri now?”

“You are not dead, Marco Efendi. I saw you just in time to cry to the men to desist.”

“You used to call me Mirza Marco, Sitarè.”

“Marco Efendi means the same. I am more of a Kurdi now than a Persian.”

“What of my father? My uncle?”

“They are not even bruised. I am sorry you had to take a blow. Can you sit up?”

I did, though the movement threatened to make my head roll off my shoulders, and I saw my father sitting with a group of the black-mustached bandits. They had made qahwah, and he and they were drinking and chatting amiably together, with Uncle Mafìo sitting placidly by. It would have looked quite a civilized scene, except that others of the brigands were stacking the bodies of our dead Mongols like cordwood off to one side of the glade. The largest and most fiercely mustached of the newcomers, seeing me stir, came over to me and Sitare.

She said, “This is my husband, Neb Efendi, known also as Chiti Ayakkabi.”

He spoke Farsi as well as she did. “I apologize to you, Marco Efendi. I would not knowingly have attacked the man who made possible the treasure of my life.”

I was still addled in my wits, and did not know what he was talking about. But as I drank bitter black qahwah and my head gradually cleared, he and Sitarè explained. He was the Kashan cobbler whom the Almauna Esther had introduced to her maidservant Sitarè. He had loved her at first sight, but their marriage would of course have been unthinkable had Sitarè not been a virgin, and Sitarè had told him frankly that her being still intact was thanks to a certain gentlemanly Mirza Marco’s having declined to take advantage of her. I felt more than a little uncomfortable, listening to a rough and murderous bandit expressing his indebtedness for my not having preceded him in making “sikis,” as he called it, with his bride. But also, if I was ever grateful for my onetime constraint, it was now.

“Qismet, we call it,” he said. “Destiny, fate, chance. You were good to my Sitarè. Now I am being good to you.”

It further transpired that Neb Efendi, having been balked of prospering as a cobbler in Kashan—where the people did not know the difference between a noble Kurdi and a vile Turki, but would have despised him in any event—had brought his wife back here to his native Kurdistan. But here he felt also estranged, a vassal to the Turki regime which was in turn vassal to the Mongol Ilkhanate. So he had given up his trade entirely, keeping only the name of it, and turned to insurrection as the Shoe Brigand.

“I have seen some of your cobblery,” I told him. “It was—distinctive.”

He said modestly, “Bosh,” which is a Turki word meaning “you flatter me overmuch.”

But Sitarè nodded proudly. “You mean the shepherd. It was he who set us on your trail to Tunceli here. Yes, Marco Efendi, my dear and valorous Neb is determined to rouse up all Kurdi against the oppressors, and to discourage any weaklings who truckle to them.”

“I had rather divined that.”

“Do you know, Marco Efendi,” he said, thumping a fist loudly against his broad chest, “that we Kurdi are the oldest aristocracy in the world? Our tribal names go back to the days of Sumer. And all that time we have been fighting one tyranny after another. We battled the Hittites, the Assyrians, we helped Cyrus overthrow Babylon. We fought with Salah-ed-Din the Great against the first marauding Crusaders. Not forty years ago, unaided, we slaughtered twenty thousand Mongols at the battle of Arbil. But still we are not free and independent. So now it is my mission—first to throw off from Kurdistan the Mongol yoke and then the Turki.”

“I wish you success, Chiti Ayakkabi.”

“Well, my band and I are poor and ill-equipped. But your Mongols’ weapons and your good horses and the considerable treasure in their packs will help us immensely.”

“You are going to rob us? You call that being good to us?”

“I could have been less good.” He waved casually at the bloody heap of dead Mongols. “Be glad your qismet decreed otherwise.”

“Speaking of qismet,” Sitarè said brightly, to distract me, “tell me, Marco Efendi. What of my darling brother Aziz?”

We were in a precarious enough situation, I decided, that I would not hazard making it more so. Neither she nor her ferocious mate would be overjoyed to hear that her little brother had been dead for more than twenty years, that we had let him be slain by a robber band very like their own. Anyway, I was loath to sadden an old friend unnecessarily. So I lied, and lied loudly enough that my father could overhear, and not later contradict me.

“We carried Aziz to Mashhad, as you desired, Sitarè, and we guarded his chastity the whole way. There, he was fortunate enough to catch the admiring eye of a fine and prosperously fat merchant prince. We left them together, and they seemed more than fond of each other. As far as I know, they are still trading together, up and down the Silk Road between Mashhad and Balkh. Aziz would by now be a well-grown man, but I have no doubt he is still as beautiful as he was then. And as you are, Sitarè.”