“About a million of them,” Jaufre said truthfully, and when Alaric gaped at him he said, “Carved from ivory and jade of every color, painted on lacquered boxes and jars and vases, embroidered on tunics and tablecloths and robes of state. There are dragons on practically every flat surface of Cambaluc.“
It was only a slight exaggeration, at that. He and Félicien stepped around Alaric for the next hour as they inspected the personal library of a man who, judged on its contents, had as much money as he needed to buy any book he wanted, and evidently he had wanted every book he ever saw. Jaufre found a manuscript called “Historia Calamitatum” by someone named Abelard, bound together with letters between him and a woman named Eloise. What he liked best about it was that it was written in Latin on the left-hand page with what Félicien told him was a French translation on the right-hand page. He could improve his Latin and learn French at the same time from this book, and he set it to one side, wondering briefly how it had wandered so far from its country of origin.
Alaric bought his bestiary and they bought half a dozen other manuscripts, Félicien falling in love with a collection of cansos by someone called Bernart de Ventadorn, who the goliard said was a famous singer a century before. Jaufre peered over his shoulder, saw text shaped like poetry, and retreated in a hurry. He had found a travel guide to Persia, illustrated, and a couple of scrolls that weren’t quite ragged enough to substantiate the owner’s claims that they dated from ancient Rome and were by the hand of Virgil himself, telling the story of Antony and Cleopatra. This said with a wink and a nudge, both of which mystified Jaufre, but he bought them, if for rather less than the seller wished to accept.
They were about to leave when Jaufre caught sight of another manuscript tucked at the back of a high shelf. He fished it out. The covers were calfskin stretched over wooden boards and it was bound together with five lengths of thin leather straps. Opening it, he realized that the binding was much newer than the manuscript, which was tattered and torn and had pages missing, some of them probably harvested for their illustrations. The text, neatly copied, was arranged in two columns.
He flipped through it and discovered that the remaining illustrations, though somewhat faded and with most of the gilt flaked off, were still perfectly legible. More than a few were stunning, faded or not.
He turned back to the beginning. “‘Il Milione,’” he said, sounding out the words. His eyes dropped farther down the page, and he almost dropped the book.
The Travels of Marco Polo. He couldn’t read Italian but he was certainly able to puzzle out that much.
He heard a snort. “Marco Milione.”
Jaufre looked around to see Alaric reading over his shoulder. “You’re familiar with this book?”
“Who isn’t?” Alaric snorted again, with contempt even more vast than he had the first time. “Marco Milione, that’s what they call him,” he said. “A liar and a braggart. If even a quarter of what he says is true, the world is a marvelous place, indeed.” His tone indicated that he highly doubted it.
In a daze, Jaufre dickered only briefly over the price, although he would gladly have ripped out one of the rubies secreted in the hem of his trousers to meet any price the old bookseller set.
As they turned from the alley leading to the house, the small, dark man who had been following Jaufre ever since his morning among the rug merchants slipped from the shadows, knocked, and was admitted to the bookseller’s house.
Back at the caravansary Jaufre drew Shasha to one side and showed her the book by Marco Polo. Like Jaufre and Johanna, the victim of sporadic tutoring in the romance languages by a Franciscan friar who had been more interested in converting the heathen than in educating them, she recognized the name and little else. She paged through the book, pausing here and there. “Could there be more than one Marco Polo, do you think?”
“Who traveled from Venice to Cambaluc, and spent twenty years in service to Kublai Khan?” he said. “I doubt it.”
She gave an absent nod. “Wait till Johanna sees this. She’ll be thrilled.”
“I wonder…”
“What?”
“If he writes about Shu Lin. And Shu Ming.”
The answer to his question would have to wait until they learned to read Italian. Jaufre bundled his purchases away, and he and Félicien departed immediately again for the armorer Hari had spoken of, where they found eating knives, skinning knives, fighting daggers, and the curved swords of the Persians, like the one Firas wore. They were nothing fancy, but they were well crafted and looked like they would hold an edge, so Jaufre bought a dozen of the eating knives and Félicien, a little to Jaufre’s surprise, bought a long knife somewhere between a dagger and a sword, encased in a plain leather sheath. “Are you expecting trouble?”
“No,” Félicien said, buckling the blade around his waist, “but that is when trouble always comes.”
They returned to the caravansary, the sun low in the sky, to find everyone in an uproar of packing and cursing men and whinnying horses and braying donkeys and groaning camels protesting beneath their loads.
A little after dark, they set off. Félicien had his lute slung across his shoulder and as the city dropped behind them he began to play. Soon they were all singing along, or humming as in the case of Hari.
They sounded good, Jaufre thought, but not as good as if Johanna was with them.
The caravan had been increased by one rug merchant and a dozen camels. Among the handlers of the new camels was a small, dark, nondescript man who had demonstrated an ability with pack animals. He said so little that no one else with the caravan, if asked, could have said who he was or where he came from, or even what his name was, or what he was doing, other than traveling west.
10
Between the Hindu Kush and Baghdad, summer, 1323
THE MORNING AFTER GOKUDO’S EXECUTION, Johanna said, “Will you teach me the ways of the blade?”
Startled, Firas said, “Of the sword, do you mean?”
“Knife, dagger,” she said. “Perhaps not the sword, or not your sword. I was not able to lift Jaufre’s sword for any length of time, much less swing or thrust it.” She swallowed, and added with difficulty, “I could barely raise Gokudo’s naginata to do what needed to be done.”
“You managed, nonetheless,” Firas said, very dry.
“I wish to do more than manage,” she said. “Yes, I practice form every morning, as I have most of my life, and it will serve to defend myself against unarmed attackers, so long as there are only one or two. I do well enough with a bow. But I have very little skill with the blade. The Road is a dangerous place, and the more ways I have to protect myself, the safer I will be.”
Firas the Assassin, man of Alamut and master of the sword, inclined his head. “A worthy ambition,” he said, somewhat to Johanna’s surprise, because as a Persian Firas should have appalled at the very notion of teaching such a thing to a woman.
The lessons commenced the following morning. At first Alma and Hayat only watched. After a few days, Alma came to Johanna and said simply, “Hayat and I would like to learn to use a blade, too.”
Firas shook his head but he didn’t say no, and doubled the practice times to mornings and evenings. Johanna began to teach the other two women soft boxing. One evening, watching the sun sink down below the horizon as she stood post, Johanna became aware that Firas had joined them. Nothing was said, then or later, but from then on he joined them. He seemed to catch on quicker than either of the two women, but one day he heard Johanna say, “You don’t have to pretend to be less able at this than he is, Alma.”
“But he is a man,” Alma said. “And our protector.”
“The point is to be able to protect ourselves,” Johanna said.
“From someone like Ogodei, or Gokudo?” Hayat said, skeptical and rightfully so.
“No one can protect themselves from an all-out assault by a full army,” Johanna said grimly. “In that situation, the only recourse is to run, and we did. Or to
conspire, which we also did. But one on one, there should be no reason—there will be no reason for us not to be able to defend ourselves from the harm that men would do to women when they are alone.”
After that, Alma became much more difficult to confound at Four Ladies Work at Shuttles, of all the thirty movements of soft boxing the hardest to master. Hayat was left-handed—“Always an advantage in a right-handed world,” Firas said—and proved to be quick and sure with a knife. When they passed a small town, Firas went into the market with a heavily veiled Johanna and found a slender, double-edged knife in a small belted sheath which he showed Hayat how to fasten to her forearm. Thereafter, he made her practice continually, until she perfected a draw so swift it was almost as if the knife sprouted from her hand.
Johanna was no match for Firas in upper body strength, but he made her practice with a heavy wooden practice sword for a month before he found a small sword in another market which weighed half of what the practice sword did. She discarded the first rusty blade he had bought in Balkh and blocked his first parry at their next practice with skill and quickness and even some ability. Her surprise and pleasure was evident, as was a beginning sense of pride.
He dropped his sword and stepped back. She dropped her guard. He leapt forward and with one circular pass disarmed her. Her sword flew from her hand and landed several feet away and a moment later the point of his blade pressed into the vein pulsing in her throat.
“Unless you are facing another woman armed with a sword, a highly unlikely circumstance, you will be facing armed men. They will not be Jibran, who is a man not so bound by Islam that he cannot recognize strength when he sees it, no matter the vessel. Nature has made men stronger than women. We will always have the advantage in strength, and most of the time in training as well.” He dropped his blade and stood back.
She picked up the small sword and regarded it with a glum expression. “Then what is the point of all this practice?”
He could have pointed out that she had been the one to ask him to teach her. “Surprise will be your biggest advantage,” he said. “No man will expect to face a woman with a blade. Even when they do, they will very probably laugh.”
Her eyes flashed.
“Yes,” he said. “Use their ignorance. It will be infinitely more powerful than any other weapon you could possible possess.”
She looked from her small sword to his scimitar, which was twice as long and outweighed it by half.
“Don’t allow the size of a weapon to intimidate you,” he said. “The fact that you will be able to raise a weapon in your own defense will make them pause in sheer astonishment. Use that moment to your best advantage. Take time to think first, then act. Remember, your best weapon is up here.” He tapped his head.
He looked at the three of them, weapons in hand, intent looks on their faces. They were committing his words to memory, and for a moment his heart failed at the thought of these women in a fight with real weapons against real opponents. An experienced soldier, an Assassin like himself or one of Ogodei’s Mongols, one with years of training and the experience of many battles, could dispatch any or all of the three at one blow. Two, at the most. “Don’t fight if you can possibly avoid fighting,” he said. “But if you have to fight, win by whatever means necessary.”
They were keeping to the less-frequented routes across central Persia. Some were so seldom traveled that they had to find elaborately circuitous ways around rockslides and fallen trees that had come down since last it had been used. The terrain was a continuous expanse of desert interrupted intermittently by low mountain ranges that ran more or less north and south. The narrow passes that led through these ranges required careful negotiation, populated as they were by tribes who regarded them as natural traps set by a providential god. Any travelers who attempted to negotiate them were regarded as fair game and their persons and their belongings as rightful winnings.
The women got their first chance to practice their newly-learned art against a band of men who leapt out from behind a heap of boulders that crowded a steep, narrow path with few trees and no water. The fact that their party was in a hurry to find the next stream or village with a well, whichever came first may have accounted for them not paying as much attention as they should have, because their attackers were not particular stealthy. North Wind bellowed outrage and reared and plunged but the trail was so narrow that he was as much hindrance as help, and the men cascading down the rocks seemed like sixty instead of only six. Alma kept her composure, waited until one of the grinning men got close enough, and leapt from her saddle to land right on his chest, knocking him flat on his back. He let out a roar of triumph and started to tear at her clothes, but the roar ended in a surprised gurgle when her blade efficiently located the narrow space between his first and second ribs and slid easily straight on into his heart. He died staring into her eyes, a look of astonishment on his face.
Hayat let another of the raiders grab her leg and pull her from the saddle. She used his own strength to turn the motion into a somersault that vaulted her right over his head and came up standing with her knife in hand, which she sank in the back of a third man who was gaping at Johanna, fighting to stay on North Wind’s rearing back. Hayat spun back to face her first attacker, who stared at her with his eyes goggling, unable to recover from his astonishment fast enough to live much longer than that.
When North Wind reared again Johanna slid down his back and over his tail, landing neatly on both feet, her blade out and her cloak looped around her left arm to form a felted shield. One of the attackers recovered his senses enough to slice at her with his dagger and she ducked beneath his arm and thrust her sword up into his belly, dodging back out of the way so his blood and guts would spill onto the ground and not on her.
The surprise of facing four warriors instead of one man with one sword and three helpless women worked, as Firas had predicted to Johanna, very much in their favor. He put his foot on the belly of the last man who had been standing and pulled out his sword, wiping it free of blood on the downed man’s robes. When he turned, Hayat and Alma were rifling the dead men’s purses and collecting swords and knives. “What are you going to do with those?” he said, indicating the weapons.
Hayat spared him a brief glance. “Throw them over the first cliff we come to. Johanna says so their relatives will have to find new weapons with which to ambush the next travelers through this pass.”
North Wind, scenting blood he hadn’t himself shed and annoyed about it, stamped and snorted his disapproval until Hayat’s mount whinnied his own dismay and North Wind nipped him firmly on the haunch in reproof. The only one allowed to complain was him.
“You knew they were there,” Johanna said.
Hayat and Alma looked up. “What?”
“You knew they were there, Firas,” Johanna said. “You didn’t raise your blade until that last man was about to stab Alma in the back. You knew they were there.”
“You will never learn to defend yourselves if you never have a chance to, young miss,” Firas said, entirely without apology. “And if you had been paying better attention, you would have heard them from that stand of spruce trees a quarter of league back. They displayed all the subtlety of North Wind at a gallop.”
Johanna looked at Alma and Hayat. They looked back at her with sober expressions. She wanted to be angry at Firas, but he was right.
They remounted and went on their way, negotiating the rest of the pass with care and unmolested. Scouting ahead, Firas found a village among a few terraced fields, with a well, but Johanna said, “If it’s the nearest village to the pass, the men who attacked us probably came from there. Let’s go on.”
Firas, who had been about to say the same thing, repressed a smile. They did, and as their reward found a small stream trickling over a rock shelf as they reached the bottom of the pass. Their horses gathered around the tiny pool, heads down as they lapped at the water, and Johanna shared out trail rations for her companions and hard grain bis
cuits for the horses.
Over the next few weeks Firas let Johanna take the lead more and more, stepping in with a quietly suggestive comment now and then when it seemed merited. Hayat and Alma, with a lifetime’s training in deferring to the male, took longer to assert themselves, but soon began to contribute the occasional opinion as well. None of their comments were at first very useful, as their experience in both travel and survival was limited, but they were slowly progressing from merely doing what they were told. Firas revised his private estimate of their ability to survive on their own from zero to perhaps ten percent.
When a gang of thieves attacked on the other side of another pass, who were far more professional than the opportunistic villagers who had previously ambushed them, Firas fell back to monitor the fight, taking an active part only when one of his students became hopelessly outnumbered. The three women prevailed, although Alma received a wound in her knife arm and Johanna took an elbow to the face that left her with one eye swollen completely shut and both bruised in a steady progression of spectacular colors over the next week. Hayat was unscathed and smug about it, even as she tended to the other two women’s injuries.
As a graduation exercise, it was definitive. Firas revised his estimate sharply upward.
The next morning he woke before dawn to find Johanna’s bedroll empty. Their camp was in a rocky hollow beneath an encircling ridge, next to a clear mountain stream that gave off a peaceful chuckle that had lulled them all to sleep the night before. He found her on the ridge above, watching the lightening edge of the eastern sky, and took a seat beside her.
After a while she said, “I never killed anyone before.”
He watched the horizon in silence. She wasn’t speaking of the men she had killed in the two ambushes.
Presently, she said, “I wondered if I would be able to. I hated Gokudo for what he did, but this life, Firas, whatever Hari says, I believe this life is all we have. Even though I know, none better, what I would have suffered if I had fallen into his hands, his life was all Gokudo had. I took it from him.”
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