Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  Three weeks after the caravan had arrived in Kashgar, they were making preparations to leave. Wu Li, Shu Ming, Shu Shao, and Deshi the Scout gathered in a group to debate the best, as in most profitable, route home.

  Wu Li had acquired a new map from a local Kashgar dealer, an Arabic map drawn more than 170 years before according to the faded date in one corner. A name was barely legible in another. “Al-Idrisi,” Johanna said haltingly, spelling it out. Wu Li had been teaching her Arabic writing, and she looked at him to see how well she had done.

  “Al-Idrisi,” her father said. “All. E. Dree. Si.”

  “Al-Idrisi,” Johanna said with more confidence.

  The map was impressive in its clean lines and sharp geographical features and even more so in its startling lack of religious icons and exhortations. What Wu Li knew of it was accurate, something that could not often be said of any map not drawn by himself or his agents. It was a reproduction, of course, and the parchment crackled with age, but he and Johanna could easily adapt it into his route book.

  The book was a collection of maps of all the routes Wu Li had ever traveled, some with his father and his father’s great friend Marco Polo, but mostly they were from later travels of his own, bound in a small volume between supple calfskin stamped with his seal. One page led to another so that to follow—or retrace—a certain route all one had to do was turn the page forward or back. Each page was annotated in Wu Li’s neat characters, the names of his agents in each location, the best vendors in oil and carpets and spices, the names of the more reasonable government officials along the way. Or the more reasonably priced ones.

  The route book was every bit as valuable a possession as Wu Li’s bao, compiled over twenty years of almost constant travel. They consulted it now in a body, himself, Shu Ming, Shu Shao, Deshi the Scout, and Johanna, with Jaufre sitting behind her, a fascinated if slightly unwilling auditor. After all, he thought, it wasn’t as if he was going with them.

  “We should take the southern route home,” Shu Shao said.

  “You never want to miss the spice market, Shasha,” Johanna said.

  Shasha smiled but did not deny it.

  “It is true,” Deshi the Scout said. “Spices are small and light and very valuable for their weight.”

  Deshi the Scout was always in favor of any commodity that was easy to pack and that would not weigh down the camels on the Road, especially not on the Road home.

  “Nutmeg,” Shu Ming murmured. It was the most precious of spices in the East, revered by any cook worthy of the name, and was held by healers to have medicinal properties as well.

  “There is all the nutmeg one could want in Kinsai,” Wu Li said.

  Shu Shao smiled. “We are not in Kinsai,” she said.

  Wu Li looked around the circle and laughed. “Is it a conspiracy, then?” Without waiting for an answer he gave a decisive nod. “The southern route, then, through Yarkent.” He shook his head. “Other than the oil, we have picked up very little in bulk here in Kashgar.” He looked at Deshi the Scout. “We should make good time.”

  Deshi the Scout nodded.

  “I have some news good enough to make us all sleep easier on the Road,” Wu Li said. “Ogodei and his ten thousand accompany us at least as far as Yarkent.”

  Wu Li saw Shu Ming’s shoulders relax. The memories of Jaufre’s caravan must have been preying on her mind. Well, and they had preyed upon his own.

  She looked up and saw him watching her, and knew her thoughts to be his own. She smiled at him.

  “And after Yarkent?” Wu Li said. “Straight home to Cambaluc?”

  There seemed to be no objection. Wu Li dismissed them to their various chores, and he and Johanna settled in to transferring the information from the new map into Wu Li’s route book. There were no roads on it, of course, and much of the distance involved had to be guessed at, but Johanna yearned for what lay at the edges of the pages. Wu Li gave an indulgent laugh. “We will travel them all one day,” he told her.

  “To the ends of the pages?” she said, her eyes drawn to the islands floating off the western edge of the map.

  He tousled her hair. “To the ends of the earth itself,” he said.

  She beamed up at him, and Jaufre knew a moment’s envy, not only for Johanna’s possession of a father still living, but for the prospect of a shore not yet seen.

  Wu Li was supervising the padding and packing of the two dozen amphorae of oil the next day when he felt a plucking at his elbow. He turned and saw a city clerk, an older man bent and shortsighted from years of stooping over his accounts. “Tabari,” he said, inclining his head courteously. “Forgive me, I did not see you standing there. How may I help you?”

  He listened to Tabari’s hurried speech with a bent head. Shu Ming, on the other side of the courtyard, saw the gathering frown beneath his polite expression.

  Tabari brought news of a beautiful woman who had fetched the highest price that year on the Kashgar slave block. He knew the names of several people who had attended the auction, and after suitable reward shared them with Wu Li.

  After an afternoon and a following morning spent knocking on Kashgar doors, bribes in hand, the one man Wu Li could find who would admit to having been present and who was willing to describe what had happened rolled his eyes and patted his heart. “Ah, you should have seen her, my friend! Not young, no, but ripe enough that the juice would run down your chin when you took a bite. Eyes so dark and liquid you could imagine diving into them, hair like black silk, and a figure—” his hands sketched an improbable shape in the air “—Oh, my friend. A proud one, too, head high, unashamed, though they stripped her for the bidding. It was fierce, I will tell you.” He sighed reminiscently.

  If only Barid the Balasagan’s purse had measured up to his appreciation for a beautiful woman, it was clear that Wu Li’s search would have ended there. Barid winked at Wu Li and gave him a nudge with his elbow. “But I know you for a stolid married man these many years, my friend. What is this, that you ask after another woman? If she knew, Shu Ming would carve out your liver and eat it while you bled to death in front of her, eh? What? A name?” He scratched his head. “Was she the one they called the Rose of Jordan? No, no, that was that skinny girl with the missing teeth. I think they called this one the Lycian Lotus. Eh? Who won? Some sheik from the west, I heard. Bedu, Turgesh.” He gave a vague wave of his hand, indicating everything west of Kashgar. “Berber, maybe. No, I didn’t catch his name. What? Who sold her?” He scratched his chin. “Anwar the Egyptian. At least he was the one looking the most satisfied at the end of the day. It’s wonderful how he manages to offer the primest of prime goods every time, eh?”

  Not so wonderful, if Anwar the Egyptian worked as a receiver of stolen goods for Persian raiders, Wu Li thought.

  Anwar the Egyptian was brusque. “She was only one of a group I bought two days before. Her buyer?” He eyed Wu Li. “Honorable Wu Li, of course I wish to be of help, but—thank you.” A jingle of coin. “Yes, I remember now. A sheik from the west. I don’t remember his name.”

  Wu Li doubted that. “Where in the west?” he said.

  The slaver shrugged. “It is a vast area, the west. Many places, many people.” His smile did not reach his eyes. “Many sheiks.”

  Wu Li suppressed a sigh and reached again into his purse.

  Anwar the Egyptian eyed the coin, gold this time, that Wu Li was fingering. “He said something about one more stop on his way home, to pick up a new sword.”

  “Do you think it was her?” Shu Ming said that evening.

  “She matches Jaufre’s description, but then so does every other woman between here and Antioch.”

  “Lycia is a place in Greece,” Shu Ming said. “I think. Or near it.”

  “Yes,” Wu Li said. “And he says his mother was Greek.”

  “And a new sword for someone rich enough to pay that much for a slave means Damascus,” Shu Ming said. “How far away is Damascus?”

  “Two thousand lea
gues and more,” Wu Li said. “Too far.”

  They sat in heavy silence for a moment.

  “You’ll have to tell him.”

  “Yes.” But he didn’t stir.

  “What troubles you, my husband?”

  “You remember why I wanted her to have a western name?”

  She was startled by what seemed to be an abrupt change of subject, because Wu Li always spoke to the purpose. “Johanna?”

  He nodded. “Johanna,” he said. He smiled a little. “Wu Johanna.”

  She smiled, too, at the incongruity, at the odd conjoining of east and west in a single name. “Of course I remember,” she said. “She looks western.” As I do, she could have said. “Her grandfather is seen in her face for any who look upon her.” She laid a hand on his arm. “I agreed with you, Li. Her face already sets her apart. It would have been silly, even cruel, to put a Chinese name to that face.”

  He nodded, his hand coming up to clasp hers. “But it is more than that, Ming. You have seen as well as I the change. In spite of the Khan’s efforts, fear and hatred of foreigners grows in Cambaluc, more every year. I have even heard talk of expelling them all, of closing the ports to foreign ships.”

  She knew what he said was true, and said nothing.

  “I fear Johanna will never find a home in Cambaluc,” he said. “I feared it when she was born. I wanted her to have a name she could wear easily if …”

  “If she lived somewhere other than Cambaluc.”

  He let out a long, slow sigh. “Yes.”

  She was silent for a moment. “She wants him to stay with us.”

  “I know,” Wu Li said. “I like what I see of the boy.”

  “As do I.”

  “And I was thinking that it would be good for her to have someone, a companion who looks like her—”

  A brother, Shu Ming thought. The brother I could not give her. The son I could not give you.

  “—a friend who will walk with her through the years. She will have all I own, but I fear it will not be enough. She is too foreign. She could be married for my fortune, and disposed of when we are gone.”

  They sat in silence for a few moments, and then Wu Li rose to his feet. “But you are right, my wife. I must tell him. The decision must be his.”

  Jaufre listened in solemn silence, Johanna sitting close by his side. In the past weeks, the two had grown inseparable. “I am sorry, Jaufre,” Wu Li said. “There is no more to be done.”

  The boy’s face was white and strained. Johanna, looking at him anxiously, understood. Both of his parents had been alive and whole and present a month before. She looked at her mother and her father sitting across from them, the tea tray between them forgotten by them all.

  Into the silence, Wu Li said, “I understand your need to find her, Jaufre, and it does you credit. But she could be anywhere now, and there is no place even for you to begin to look. ‘A sheik in the west’ is not helpful. There are hundreds of sheiks. Thousands. And your own father owned a blade of Damascus steel.”

  Wu Li glanced at Johanna, whose eyes were raised trustfully to his face. Just so had Jaufre no doubt once looked at his father, with absolute faith, certain that he could make all well. “This is my thought,” he said. “My daughter and my wife, I myself have come to value you highly. Shu Shao and Deshi the Scout both speak well of you, and I value their counsel. There is a place for you in our family. Return with us to Cambaluc, and let yourself grow into a man.” Wu Li sighed. “And when that day comes, set out in search of your mother, if it is what you still wish to do.”

  The cry was wrenched from him. “She could be dead by then, Wu Li!”

  “She could be dead now.” Wu Li felt Shu Ming’s eyes upon him. This was unlikely, they both knew. Anyone who had paid the price quoted by an awed Barid the Balasagan would have taken very great care of so valuable a property, but if Jaufre set out in pursuit he would be dead shortly thereafter of any one of a number of causes, or a slave himself, in which case his mother would be dead to him and he to her for all time. The world was vast and travel across it slow. Chances were weighted heavily against mother and son ever meeting again, but any small hope Jaufre had of it lay in joining the Wu household.

  And this, Jaufre, displaying what would become a lifelong ability to recognize the truth, however unpalatable it was and however much it cost him, came to understand for himself. When they left Kashgar three days later, he rode behind Johanna, swaying over the sand on the back of the young camel.

  If he looked over his shoulder too often, surely no one was so cruel as to mention it.

  5

  1320, Cambaluc

  THE ROUTE TO CIPANGU to trade silk for pearls, initiated by Wu Hai and carried forward with efficiency and dispatch by Wu Li, had become an annual event in the trading house of Wu. This had been a most profitable year, partially due, Wu Li had to admit, if only to himself, to Johanna’s ability to make friends wherever she went. In this case she had ingratiated herself into the society of the women pearl divers of Ama, who had taught her the art of holding her breath underwater for a long enough time as to strike terror into the hearts of her parents waiting anxiously on shore. But what could they do?

  “She’s too old to scold and too tall to beat,” Wu Li said ruefully.

  His wife gave him a fond look. “As if you have ever done either.”

  By the time they reached the Edo docks, Wu Li was concerned enough over the value of their cargo that he hired another half dozen guards from the always steady supply found on any port. One, a youngish thickset man whose black quilted armor and well-kept naginata argued a fall from samurai grace, was so anxious to board ship that he accepted the first salary offer Wu Li made. By the time they reached Kinsai, having proved his value in two encounters with pirates, he was outspoken in his belief that he was deserving of a bonus amounting to twenty-five percent of the value of the trade goods he had helped to protect. He said so, loudly, and this sounded like a fine idea to the other Nippon guards Wu Li had hired in Edo. They stood in front of him in a half-circle, hands resting on their weapons in a manner completely lacking in subtlety.

  “The value of your contribution to the success of our voyage is not in dispute, Gokudo,” Wu Li said, answering threat with courtesy. “Indeed, it was my intention to pay you a bonus of ten percent of the worth of the goods you have helped us shepherd safely to port. However.”

  His eyes hardened and he made a motion with one hand. Deshi the Scout and a dozen other retainers materialized behind the Nippon guards, armed with swords, pry bars and belaying pins.

  “Because of your greed,” Wu Li said, courtesy giving way to contempt, “and your inability to make your case for reimbursement without threat, you will receive the salary we agreed on in Edo, and not one tael more.”

  There was the promise of an incipient riot, but Wu Li’s men were in sufficient number to quell it before the Mongol authorities were alerted and all his profit went in fines for failure to keep the peace. “My thanks, Deshi,” Wu Li said, and for the first time noticed that the scout was pale and shivering. “My friend, you are ill! Return home at once and seek out Shu Shao. She will know what to do.”

  Unfortunately, in this instance, Shu Shao, already a healer of some repute, did not.

  The next morning, Shu Ming fell ill. She complained of loose stool in the morning, and three hours later she, too, was pale and shivering, her skin clammy to the touch, her heart hammering beneath her skin at a frantic, irregular pace. She complained of thirst, when her mind wasn’t wandering, which it did more and more as the day wore on. They tried giving her clear soup and tea but she couldn’t keep anything down, and by the afternoon her sodden bedclothes had to be changed every hour.

  Before nightfall, she was dead.

  So was the maid who laundered her sheets, the stable boy, Deshi the Scout, and 3,526 other citizens of Cambaluc.

  In the horrible weeks that followed, Wu Li went about looking like a ghost. Johanna attended him white-lip
ped and withdrawn. Jaufre suffered the loss of his second mother with outward calm and inward agony, taking over the mews and the stables while Shu Shao took charge of the kitchen, and all went on tiptoe for fear that the master of the house would shatter like glass at one wrong word.

  One day a month later Jaufre went out to the stables and found Johanna seated on a bale of hay next to Edyk the Portuguese, deep in earnest conversation. She looked more animated than she had since the day her mother died. Edyk was holding one of Johanna’s hands in both of his own, and as Jaufre came around the corner he raised it to his lips.

  Johanna looked up and saw Jaufre. She pulled her hand free and jumped to her feet. “Edyk has come.”

  “So I see.” The two men exchanged a cool glance.

  “I am sorry for the trouble that has visited the house of the Honorable Wu Li,” Edyk said with a formal bow.

  Jaufre inclined his head a fraction. He could not rue the lightening of sorrow on Johanna’s face, even if he suspected that their recent troubles were not what had brought Edyk the Portuguese to the house of Wu Li.

  Edyk the Portuguese was in his early twenties and, like Johanna and Jaufre, the child of expatriate Westerners, with eyes too round for Cambaluc comfort. A brawny young man, thickly-muscled, again like Johanna and Jaufre he moved with the assurance of someone accustomed to an active life. He had his father’s brown eyes and his mother’s black hair and a charming smile all his own. He was a trader, as the honorable Wu Li had been a trader, and traveling the trade routes with him Johanna had watched that smile melt feminine hearts from Kinsai to Kashgar.

  He was shorter than Jaufre by a head, which was some comfort to the crusader’s son, but he made up for his lack of height with a dynamic personality and a great deal of personal charm and energy. He was an up-and-coming merchant in Cambaluc, one of the group of foreign traders resident there by permission of the Khan who accounted for the bulk of foreign goods imported into the city. Since the death of the Great Khan, raiders on the Silk Road had moved from a rarity to a steadily increasing threat. In response, the Cambaluc merchants had banded together in a cooperative association, exchanging information on road conditions and organizing communal caravans at set times during the year. Pooling their resources, they could hire more guards, which increased their chances of a safe arrival at their destination, alive and with their goods intact, and, when they had finished their trading, a safe return home. Their profit would be less from the increased competition at their destinations, but at least they were sure of living to travel and trade another day.