The Journeyer

  When I had, with difficulty, roused my father, I took him to the scene of the crime. Uncle Mafìo had laid the landlord on his own pallet of blankets, despite the flow of blood, and had composed Beauty’s limbs for death, and the two of them were conversing, it seemed companionably. The old man was the only one of us who had any clothes on. He looked up at me, his murderer, and he must have seen the traces of tears on my face, for he said:

  “Do not feel bad, young infidel. You have slain the most Misguided One of all. I have done a terrible wrong. The Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him) enjoins us to treat a guest with the most reverent care and respect. Though he be the lowliest darwish, or even an unbeliever, and though there be only one crumb in the house, and though the host’s family and children go hungry, the guest must be given that crumb. Be he a sworn enemy, he must be accorded every hospitality and safeguard while he is under one’s roof. My disobedience to that holy law would have deprived me of my Night of the Possible, even did I live. In my avarice, I acted hastily, and I have sinned, and for that sin I beg forgiveness.”

  I tried to say that I gave the forgiveness, but I choked on a sob, and in the next moment I was glad of that, for he continued:

  “I could as easily have drugged your breakfast meal in the morning, and let you get some way upon the road before you fell. Then I could have robbed and murdered you under the open sky instead of under my roof, and it would have been a deed of virtue, and pleasing to Allah. But I did not. Though in all my lifetime before now I have lived devoutly in the Faith and have slain many other infidels to the greater glory of Islam, this one impiety will cost me my eternity in the Paradise of Djennet, with its haura beauties and perpetual happiness and unfettered indulgence. And for that loss, I grieve sincerely. I should have killed you in fitter fashion.”

  Well, those words at any rate stopped my weeping. We all stared stonily at the landlord as again he went on :

  “But you have yourselves a chance at virtue. When I am dead, do me the kindness of wrapping me in a winding sheet. Take me to the main room and lay me in the middle of it, in the prescribed position. Wind my tulband over my face, and place me so my feet are turned to the south, toward the Holy Kaaba in Mecca.”

  My father and uncle looked at each other, and they shrugged, but we were all glad they made no promise, for the old fiend now spoke his last words:

  “Having done that, vile dogs, you will die virtuous, when my brothers of the Mulahidat come and find me here dead with a knife wound in my gut, and they follow the tracks of your horses and hunt you down and do to you what I failed to do Salaam aleikum.”

  His voice had not at all weakened, but, after perversely calling peace upon us, Beauty of Faith’s Moon closed his eyes and died. And, that being the first deathbed I had ever stood close to, I first learned then that most deaths are as ugly as most killings. For in dying, Beauty unbeautifully and copiously evacuated both his bladder and his bowels, befouling his garments and the blankets and filling the room with a ghastly stench.

  A disgusting indignity is not what any person would wish to be last remembered for. But I have since attended many dyings and—except in the rare case when there has been opportunity of a purge aforetime—that is how all human beings make their farewell to life; even the strongest and bravest of men, the fairest and purest of women, whether they die a violent death or go serenely in their sleep.

  We stepped outside the room to breathe clean air, and my father sighed. “Well. Now what?”

  “First of all,” said my uncle, untying the thongs of his musk cod, “let us relieve ourselves of these uncomfortable danglers. It is clear that they will be as safe inside our packs—or no less safe—and anyway I would rather lose the musk than again imperil my own dear cod.”

  My father muttered, “Worry about balls when we may be about to lose our heads?”

  I said, “I am sorry, Father, Uncle. If we are to be hunted by the surviving Misguided Ones, then I did wrong to kill that one.”

  “Nonsense,” said my father. “Had you not awakened and acted with celerity, we would not even have lived to be hunted.”

  “It is true that you are impetuous, Marco,” said Uncle Mafìo. “But if a man stopped to consider all the consequences of his every action before he acted, he would be a very old man before he ever did any damned thing at all. Nico, I think that we might keep this fortunately impetuous young man as our companion. Let him not be tucked safe away in Constantinople or Venice, but let him come with us clear to Kithai. However, you are his father. It is for you to say.”

  “I am inclined to concur, Mafìo,” said my father. And to me, “If you wish to come along, Marco …” I grinned broadly at him. “Then you come. You deserve to come. You did well this night.”

  “Perhaps better than well,” said my uncle thoughtfully. “That bricòn vechio called himself the most Misguided One of all. Is it not possible he meant also the chief one of them all? The latest and reigning Sheikh ul-Jibal? An old man he certainly was.”

  “The Old Man of the Mountain?” I exclaimed. “I slew him?”

  “We cannot know,” said my father. “Not unless the other hashishiyin tell us when they catch up to us. I am not that eager to know.”

  “They must not catch us,” said Uncle Mafìo. “We have already been remiss, coming this far into alien country with no weapons but our work knives.”

  My father said, “They will not catch us if they have no reason to chase after us. We have only to remove the reason. Let the next comers find the karwansarai deserted. Let them presume that the landlord is afield on an errand—killing a sheep for the larder, perhaps. It could be days before those next guests come, and days more before they begin to wonder where the landlord is. By the time any of the Misguided Ones get involved in the search for him, and by the time they give up looking for him and start to suspect foul play, we shall be long gone and far away and beyond their tracing.”

  “Take the old Beauty with us?” asked my uncle.

  “And risk an embarrassing encounter before we have gone far at all?” My father shook his head. “Nor can we just drop him down the well here, or hide him or bury him. Any arriving guest will go first to the water. And any Arab has a nose like a staghound, to sniff out a hiding place or fresh-turned earth.”

  “Not on land, not in water,” said my uncle. “There is only one alternative. I had better do it before I put any clothes on.”

  “Yes,” said my father, and he turned to me. “Marco, go through this whole establishment and search out some blankets to replace those of your uncle. While you are at it, see if you can find any sort of weapons we can carry when we go.”

  The command was obviously given just to get me out of the way while they did what they did next. And it took me quite a while to comply, for the karwansarai was old, and must have had a long succession of owners, each of whom had built and added on new portions. The main building was a warren of hallways and rooms and closets and nooks, and there were also stables and sheds and sheep pens and other outbuildings. But the old man, evidently having felt secure in his drugs and deceits, had not taken much trouble to hide his possessions. To judge from the armory of weapons and provisions, he had been, if not the veritable Old Man, at least a main supplier of the Mulahidat.

  I first selected the best two woolen blankets from the considerable stock of traveling gear. Then I searched among the weapons and, though I could not find any straight swords of the type we Venetians were accustomed to, I picked out the shiniest and sharpest of the local sort. This was a broad and curved blade—more of a saber, since it was sharp only on the outcurved edge—called the shimshir, which means “silent lion.” I took three of them, one for each of us, and belts with loops from which to hang them. I could have further enriched our purses, for Beauty had secreted a small fortune in the form of bags of dried banj, bricks of compacted banj, and flagons of oil of banj. But I left all that where it was.

  The dawn was breaking outdoors when I brought my acq
uisitions to the main room, where we had dined the night before. My father was preparing a breakfast meal at the brazier, and being most carefully selective of the ingredients. Just as I entered the room, I heard a series of noises from the yard outside: a long, rustling whistle, a loud klop! and a screeching yell of kya! Then my uncle came in from that yard, still naked, his skin spattered with blood spots, his beard smelling of smoke, and he saying with satisfaction:

  “That was the last of the old devil, and it went as he wished. I have burned his garments and the blankets, and dispersed the ashes. We can depart as soon as we have dressed and eaten.”

  I realized, of course, that Beauty of Faith’s Moon had been given no laying-out, but an extremely un-Muslim obsequy, and that made me curious as to what Uncle Mafìo meant by “went as he wished.” I asked him, and he chuckled and said:

  “The last of him went flying southward. Toward Mecca.”

  BAGHDAD

  1

  WE kept on downstream along the Furat, still southeastward, now traversing a particularly unappealing stretch of country where the river had cut its channel through solid basalt rock—a land bleak and black and barren even of grass, pigeons and eagles—but we were not pursued by the Misguided Ones or anyone else. And gradually, as if in celebration of our deliverance from danger, the countryside became more pleasant and hospitable. The terrain began perceptibly to rise up on either side of the river, until it was flowing through a wide and verdant valley. There were orchards and forests, pastures and farms, flowers and fruits. But the orchards were as shaggy and untended as the native forests, the farms as overgrown and weedy as the fields of wild flowers. The land’s owners had all gone away, and the only people we met in that valley were nomad families of bedawin shepherds, the landless and rootless roamers, roaming in that valley as they roamed in the grasslands. There were nowhere any settled folk, nobody working to keep the once domesticated land from reverting to wilderness.

  “It is the doing of the Mongols,” said my father. “When the Ilkhan Hulagu—that is to say, the Lesser Khan Hulagu, brother to our friend Kubilai—when he swept through this land and overthrew the Persian Empire, most of the Persians fled or fell before him, and the survivors have not yet returned to rework their lands. But the nomad Arabs and Kurdi are like the grass on which they live and in search of which they wander. The bedawin bend uncaringly before any wind that blows—whether it be a gentle breeze or the fierce simùm—but they rebound as does the grass. To the nomads it matters not who rules the land, and it never will matter to them until the end of time, as long as the land itself remains.”

  I turned in my saddle, looking at the land all about us, the richest, most fertile, most promising land we had yet seen in our journey, and I asked, “Who does rule Persia now?”

  “When Hulagu died, his son Abagha succeeded as Ilkhan, and he has established a new capital in the northern city of Maragheh instead of in Baghdad. Although the Persian Empire is now a part of the Mongol Khanate, it is still divided into Shahnates, as before, for convenience of administration. But each Shah is subordinate to the Ilkhan Abagha, just as Abagha is subordinate to the Khakhan Kubilai.”

  I was impressed. I knew we were yet many months of hard travel distant from the court city of that Khakhan Kubilai. But already, here in the western reaches of Persia, already we were within the borders of the domain of that far distant Khan. In school, I had bent my most admiring and enthusiastic study on The Book of Alexander, so I knew that Persia was once a part of that conqueror’s empire, and his empire was so extensive as to earn him the sobriquet of “the Great.” But the lands won and held by that Macedonian comprised a mere fragment of the world, compared to the immensities conquered by Chinghiz Khan, and further enlarged by his conqueror sons, and still further enlarged by his conqueror grandsons, into the unimaginably immense Mongol Empire over which the grandson Kubilai now reigned as Khan of All Khans.

  I believe that not the ancient Pharaones nor the ambitious Alexander nor the avaricious Caesars could have dreamed that so much world existed, so they could hardly have dreamed of acquiring it. As for all the later Western rulers, their ambitions and acquisitions have been even more paltry. Alongside the Mongol Empire, the entire continent called Europe seems merely a small and crowded peninsula, and all its nations, like those of the Levant, only so many peevishly self-important little provinces. From the eminence on which the Khakhan sits enthroned, my native Republic of Venice, proud of its glory and grandeur, must appear as trivial as the Suvediye cranny of the Ostikan Hampig. If the history keepers will continue to dignify Alexander as the Great, surely they ought to acknowledge Kubilai as the immeasurably Greater. That is not for me to say. But what I can say is that, on my entrance into Persia, I was thrilled to realize that I, mere Marco Polo, was setting foot in the most far-flung empire ever ruled by one man in all the years in which the world of men has existed.

  “When we get to Baghdad,” my father went on, “we will show to the current Shah, whoever he may be, the letter we carry from Kubilai. And the Shah will have to make us welcome, as accredited ambassadors of his overlord.”

  So we proceeded on down the Furat, watching the valley get ever more marked with the traces of civilization, for hereabouts it was crisscrossed by many irrigation canals branching off the river. However, the towering wooden wheels in the canals were not being turned by men or animals or any other agency; they stood still, the clay jugs around their rims not lifting and pouring any water. In the widest and most verdant part of that valley, the Furat makes its nearest approach to the other great south-running river of that country, the Dijlah, sometimes called Tigris, which is supposedly one of the other rivers of the Garden of Eden. If that is so, then the land between the two rivers would presumably be the site of that biblical garden. And if that is so, then the garden, when we saw it, was as empty of resident men and women as it was immediately after the expulsion of Adam and Eve.

  In that vicinity, we turned our horses eastward from the Furat and rode the intervening ten farsakhs to the Dijlah, and crossed that river on the bridge there—made of empty boat hulls supporting a plank roadway —to Baghdad on the eastern bank.

  The city’s population, like that of the surrounding countryside, had been grievously diminished during Hulagu’s siege and capture of it. But in the fifteen or so ensuing years, much of its populace had returned and repaired what damage it had suffered. City merchants, it seems, are more resilient than country farmers. Like the primitive bedawin, civilized tradesmen seem to recover quickly from the prostrations of disaster. In the case of Baghdad, that may have been because so many of its merchants were not passive and fatalistic Muslims, but irrepressibly energetic Jews and Christians—some of them having come originally from Venice and even more of them from Genoa.

  Or perhaps Baghdad recovered because it is such a necessary city, at an important crossroads of trade. Besides being a western terminus of the Silk Road which comes overland, it is a northern terminus of the sea route from the Indies. The city is not itself on the seaside, of course, but its Dijlah River bears a heavy traffic of large river boats, sailing downstream with the current or being poled upriver against it, going to and coming from Basra in the south, on the Persian Gulf, where the seagoing Arab ships make landfall. Anyway, whatever the beneficent reason, Baghdad was, when we arrived there, what it had been before the Mongols came: a rich and vital and busy trading center.

  It was as beautiful as it was busy. Of the Eastern cities I had seen so far, Baghdad was the most reminiscent of my native Venice. Its Dijlah waterfront was as thronged and tumultuous and littered and odorous as the Riva of Venice, though the vessels to be seen here—all of them built and manned by Arabs—were nowise comparable to ours. They were alarmingly shoddy craft to be entrusted to the water, built entirely without pegs or nails or iron fastenings of any fashion, their hull planking instead stitched together by ropes of some coarse fiber. Their seams and interstices were not plugged watertight with pitch, but wi
th a sort of lard made from fish oil. Even the biggest of those boats had only a single steering oar, and it was not very manipulable since it was firmly hinged at mid-stern. Another deplorable thing about those Arab boats was the unfastidious way their cargoes were stored. After filling the hold with a load of, as it may be, all foodstuffs—dates and fruits and grains and such—the Arab boatmen might then crowd the deck above the hold with a herd of livestock. That frequently consisted of fine Arabian horses, and they are beauteous beasts, but they evacuate themselves as often and as hugely as any other horses, and their droppings would dribble and seep between the planks onto the cargo of edibles belowdecks.

  Baghdad is not, like Venice, interlaced with canals, but its streets are constantly sprinkled with water to lay the dust, so they have a humid fragrance reminiscent to me of canals. And the city has a great many open squares equivalent to Venice’s piazze. Some are bazàr marketplaces, but most are public gardens, for the Persians are passionately fond of gardens. (I learned there that the Farsi word meaning garden, pairi-daeza, became our Bible’s word Paradise.) Those public gardens have benches for passersby to rest on, and streamlets running through, and many birds in residence, and trees and shrubs and perfumed plants and luminous Sowers—roses especially, for the Persians are passionately fond of roses. (They call any and every flower a gul, though that Farsi word means specifically a rose.) Likewise, the palaces of noble families and the larger houses of rich merchant families are built around private gardens as big as the public ones, and as full of roses and birds, and as nearly like earthly Paradises.