“I could use some puppy tongues,” Shasha said.
Firas looked at her. “What?”
“The tongues of dogs have special properties. They heal their own wounds by licking them. Often dried puppy tongues, ground to powder and sprinkled on the wound of a man or a woman, will heal it as well.”
“And am I supposed to find these puppies, kill them, and remove their tongues for you?”
“Yes,” she said. She stretched the kinks out of her back. Firas kneaded her shoulders and knuckled the muscles down either side of her spine, and she groaned her relief.
“Well, then,” Firas said. “Are we done raising the dead for today?”
“Mistress,” a voice said.
They turned to see the tall man with the boil. He’d propped himself up against the outside wall of the house because he was unable to sit, Shasha remembered. “Ah yes, the boil,” she said. Like most healers she had a tendency to call people by their afflictions. “Come inside.”
He followed them inside the stall with a halting gait.
“Drop your hose,” Shasha said, “and bend over.”
With the air of one inured to indignity, he did so. The boil was the size of a large grape. Shasha stood well back when she lanced it, and as a result got very little of the resulting expulsion of pus on her apron. She stepped forward again to press gentle fingers against the dark, angry skin around the boil until the flow of pus and serum was replaced with good red blood.
“That hurts,” the man said, more in resignation than in distress.
“I know,” Shasha said. “It can’t be helped.” The wound drained, she applied a paste made of turmeric and a square patch of clean cloth that stuck to the paste. “Try not to dislodge the dressing, and try to keep your weight off that cheek for the next few days.”
The man stood up and pulled his hose up over his buttocks in gingerly fashion. “I thank you for your care, mistress.” He indicated his worn appearance. “As you might expect, I cannot pay you.” He nodded at the taverna down the street. “I serve at that establishment. The owner is a woman of generous heart. May I offer you a mug?”
“Are we done?” Shasha asked Firas. He nodded.
Jaufre, home from work, met them at the door. “Where’s Johanna?” he said, his inevitable greeting.
“With North Wind,” was the invariable reply, and he accompanied them to the taverna. Hari, sighted on the street with his usual comet’s tail of children, was hailed and joined them. It was a bustling place, a low, dark, rectangular room with a fat woman sweating in front of a large fireplace as she wielded a wooden paddle to slide round loaves of bread from a cavernous brick oven, an even fatter man dispensed enormous tankards of ale from a succession of barrels, and what was obviously their daughter. She had neither the size of her father nor the heft of her mother but had ample charms for all that, well displayed in a red gown cut low over her breasts and of a length that flirted with her ankles. She served them ale and tiny cakes made of very thin pastry layered with honey and crushed almonds. Shasha took careful note of the construction and the ingredients.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” said the man, with as much dignity as he could perched half on and half off the bench. “I am Jean de Valmy, born in Provence of Alys d’Arly and Didier de Valmy. My parents died when I was very young, and I was apprenticed to the Knights Templar.”
They introduced themselves, and Jaufre was niggled by the certainty that he had seen Jean de Valmy before.
“Your eyes,” Jean de Valmy said hesitantly to Shasha.
“These are how eyes are made where I come from,” she said.
“And where would that be?”
“Cathay.”
“Cathay!” Jean de Valmy’s eyes lit up. “Is it true that jewels rain from the skies in Cathay?”
“Only when the moon is full for the second time in a month,” Shasha said gravely. “The next morning one must wade through emeralds ankle deep. It’s a nuisance to clean up and very hard on the street sweepers, who receive an extra ration of wine that day for their trouble.”
Jean de Valmy eyed her uncertainly, and she relented. “People in Cathay are born, and marry, and have children, and worship, and honor their ancestors, and visit tavernas very like this one, and eat cakes and drink wine with their friends, and grow wheat for bread, and pay taxes, and eventually die, just as the people do here.” She smiled. “Our eyes are differently made.” We certainly bathe more frequently, she thought but didn’t say.
Jean de Valmy considered her for a moment longer, and turned to Hari. “And yourself? I see your eyes are different even from your companion’s.”
“Ah,” Hari said, and Shasha settled back to enjoy herself as she always did when the subject of Hari’s background came up, as it was never told the same way twice.
He did not disappoint her this time, either. “I was born to my mother, whose name I do not know, to a father who never knew me, many thousands of leagues distant, on the banks of the Ganges, one of the four great rivers of the world, and the spiritual home of my people.”
“Who are your people?”
“We are chughi. We live long, doing little, seeing much, shunning possessions, increasing our knowledge of life so that one day we may ascend to the next level.”
“The next level of what?”
“Of consciousness.”
“You’re awake now,” Jean de Valmy pointed out.
Hari smiled again and finished his wine. “There is awake, and there is awake, my friend.”
Jean de Valmy looked confused, as well he might. Heredity and inheritance was everything in his culture, and he could only dimly conceive of another to which both were shrugged off as inconsequential. “How long have you been from home?”
“Nearly five years now. And yourself?”
Jean’s naturally dismal face fell into even more mournful lines. “Thirty years. My Templar master brought me on crusade.” He sighed. “It wasn’t as I had imagined it as a child. Few battles, little swordplay, even less opportunity to gather riches, as one is promised when one goes to war. But there were rewards. We were very busy. There was constant coming and going between the Holy Land and Paris. We sent home much gold and silver from Africa, cloth from the East, the swords and armor of Damascus, the horses of Arabia. It was a good life, certainly a profitable one, and as I can read and write, I was useful to my master, and he was pleased with me.”
“What happened?”
“We were proscribed, and it became dangerous even to be who we were.”
“Why?” said Shasha, exchanging looks with Jaufre. They had heard bits of the Templar story from Alaric, but another perspective on the same tale was always informative.
Jean de Valmy shrugged. “I was never told the full story. It was said that the Knights Templar were devil worshippers, that our kiss meant death, that we worshipped a black cat called Bahomet. We began to be imprisoned. Some of us were even burned at the stake. We no longer exist as a group. It is still death for a Templar to return to France.”
“Yet you survived.”
“Because I have not returned to France,” Jean said patiently. “Although I miss it, I do. I have a great desire to visit the home of my childhood. I was very happy then. My mother was as beautiful as Helen of Troy, and my father as strong and brave as Ajax himself, and the food—” He kissed his fingers. “But such is the lot of us all, to be separated from that which makes us happy, to live out our lives as best we can in the eternal hope that upon death we will be translated unto heaven and be reunited with those we love.”
“‘There is no certainty in worldly matters,’” Hari quoted, nodding his agreement, “‘and no perfect happiness; good is mixed with evil, and virtue with vice. One must endure, and endure with grace. That is the true test.’”
Jean’s brow furrowed as he attempted to translate this into his kind of sense. Jaufre wanted to tell him not to bother. Eyeing their badges, de Valmy inquired after their provenance. “Wu Compa
ny,” he said, when they had explained. “The young man, the goliard who sings. He wears such a badge, does he not?”
“Félicien?” Shasha said. “Yes. He is a member of our company.”
“Ah,” de Valmy said, stroking his chin. “You are a very diverse company. A goliard. A healer. A trader. A monk.” He looked at Firas, turban ever on his head and short sword ever at his side, and forbore to comment further.
And then Jaufre remembered where he had seen de Valmy before. The Templar had been the old roué who had compared Félicien to a songbird after de Valmy had heard Félicien in performance.
The group parted with expressions of mutual esteem later than evening and Jaufre would have had no cause to think further on the elderly Frank until the following week, when Shasha suffered a visit from the priest of the local parish. Father Amadeo was a lean, fidgety man who wore a perpetually startled expression and spoke with all the consciousness of a man who had God and, more importantly, the church on his side and whose authority was therefore indisputable. “I have received a complaint from a member of my congregation, mistress, regarding unChristian practices taking place in your shop.” Further speech revealed Father Amadeo to be a traditionalist who believed that pain and suffering were his congregation’s lot in life, and that anyone who eased the pain of broken limbs or boils was regarded as suspect and their work very probably inspired by the devil.
Shasha and Firas exchanged a glance and knew in an instant the instigator of this clerical visitation. Jean de Valmy must have made a complaint in hopes of some reward. From his emaciated appearance he would likely have done so for as little as a full meal. “A broken limb or a boil isn’t the work of the devil?” Shasha said. “And is it not a healer’s duty to alleviate suffering if God has given her the skill to do so?”
Father Amadeo went away unsatisfied. Jaufre could practically smell the wood burning at the stake. He sent immediately for Hari, who answered the call with alacrity and marshaled his unlikely forces from the monastery. San Giorgio’s infirmarian, a pleasant, rotund gentleman by the name of Brother Luca, paid Shasha a visit a week later, chaperoned of course by Hari. They enjoyed a comfortable conversation over tea that ranged from the relative efficacies of willow bark infusion taken orally over mustard seed plasters applied topically for joint pain, although Brother Luca held out for a large helping of olive oil taken internally on a daily basis and massaged into the skin weekly as the most sure relief. But then he was Italian, and in Venice olive oil was known as the mother’s helper and used for everything from keeping a woman’s skin young to oiling the hinges on a door. If he hadn’t held out for olive oil, it would have been garlic, which he did in fact recommend for the common cold. Ingest enough of it, he told Shasha, and the smell alone would keep off even the most determined of the ill humors that assailed mankind.
Leave was taken with compliments all around and Brother Luca extended an invitation to Shasha to visit the herbarium at the monastery and make herself free of its stocks, and another invitation to Alma to meet with Brother Uberto, the monastery’s precentor, who shared Alma’s interest in the movement of the heavens. Nothing further was heard from Father Amadeo, and Shasha was free to pestle her herbal concoctions, tuck them into squares of parchment tied with string, and send them off to Ca’ Polo or anywhere else she liked.
They congratulated themselves on their near escape from the flames of the Inquisition but Jaufre, ever cautious, made a point of attending mass at least once a week. The incense wasn’t any worse than your average temple function in Cambaluc and he already had the ability to look attentive while his mind was quite elsewhere. The when to sit, stand and kneel took longer to learn. Father Amadeo looked upon his presence in the congregation with a very sour expression, which was not alleviated by the generous donation Jaufre left in the collection plate at the end of every service.
Messages from Johanna frequently accompanied Shasha’s concoctions to Ca’ Polo. Moreta sent messages back will less frequency, and the year had turned before Johanna got the one she most wanted.
She and Tiphaine were sitting in their lodgings, not speaking, when Shasha, Jaufre and Firas returned home.
“What news?” Jaufre said, looking from one to the other.
“Tomorrow morning,” Johanna said, without meeting his eyes. “Moreta says morning is when he is at his most alert, and most himself.”
There was a brief silence. “Are you sure you want to do this, Johanna?” Shasha said.
Johanna gave a laugh that was half-sob. “Want to do it?” she said. “Rather, I must.”
She felt rather than saw Jaufre and Shasha exchange looks over her bent head. She held out her hands and felt each of them clasped, Jaufre’s hand warm and calloused, Shasha’s warm and soft from the cosmetic cream she made herself of oil and beeswax and dried lavender. “Must,” she said again. “I must do this.”
Peter met her at the servants’ entrance. Ser Polo’s house was dark and gloomy and like all Venetian palazzos belied its magnificent exterior by being disagreeably dank inside. The servants’ stairway was ill lit and narrow. Johanna followed Peter on tiptoe, one hand touching the damp stone wall for reassurance. Her heart seemed to be beating unnaturally loudly in her ears.
At the top of the stair he paused, one ear to a door. The door opened inward without a squeak—she wondered if he had been busy at the hinges with olive oil that morning—and they found themselves at the end of a broad hallway, the length of which ended in a much broader stair with elaborately carved marble bannisters. Up which the invited guests were escorted, no doubt.
The hallway was wainscotted to the ceiling in some dark wood hung with varnished portraits lit by candle sconces. Already difficult to make out, they were made more so by their subjects being painted in dark clothes against dark backgrounds. They all seemed to be wearing the same dour, disapproving expression, too, and Johanna felt a most inappropriate bubble of laughter rising to the back of her throat.
Peter gave out with a delicate clearing of throat and at once one of the doors opened a crack, throwing a bar of light across the tiled floor. Johanna felt herself being taken firmly in hand and steered down the hall and through the door, which closed behind her with a thud of finality that sounded to her admittedly feverish imagination like the closing of the door to a tomb.
Moreta was standing there and the three of them stood stock still for a moment. Johanna could tell that the other two were listening hard, so she listened, too. She heard nothing.
“Did anyone see you?” Moreta said.
Peter shook his head.
Moreta seemed to relax. “Good.” She looked at Johanna and attempted a smile. “I’m sorry, but if my mother sees you…”
When her voice trailed away without offering any horrible outcomes, Peter said diplomatically, “She will be displeased.”
Moreta huffed out something between a snort and a laugh. “Indeed she will.” She looked at Johanna. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell him. I just…I couldn’t.”
There was a stir across the room. “Moreta? Daughter?”
It was an old man’s voice, thready and dry. It came from a wooden bed shrouded in brocade curtains and canopy, dark blue in color. A clothes press stood in one corner, and one wall was completely covered with a set of shelves cluttered with pottery and porcelain. Johanna recognized a few blue and white bowls that had surely been made in Shinping. A small chest sat next to the bed. On it sat a candelabra, a pitcher, a squat, stemmed glass and various glass bottles. A bit of paper sat scrunched up on one corner. The container of Shasha’s last potion, possibly.
Moreta went to the bed and leaned over the man lying there. “Father?”
“Ah, daughter. Some water, of your goodness. My mouth feels most dry.”
Moreta poured from the pitcher and leaned over the bed with the stemmed glass in her hand. A moment of silence, and then an “ah” of satisfaction. “Thank you, daughter.”
She leaned down and Johanna could hear the pr
ess of lips against cheek. “Father,” Moreta said in a low voice, “there is someone here to see you.”
“Who is it?” the thready voice said. “Peter?”
“Yes, Peter,” Moreta said. “And someone else, too.” She stood back and beckoned to them.
Peter stepped forward, Johanna following in his wake on legs whose knees felt very peculiar. They stopped at the side of the bed.
“Peter.” The voice was stronger now, and Johanna looked at her grandfather’s face for the first time.
His features were sunken, his beard grizzled, but his dark eyes were fixed on Peter’s face with a look of pleasure. “Peter, my old friend. It is good to see you.”
Moreta made as if to say something. Johanna saw Peter touch her hand briefly, and she was still again.
“It is always good to see you, master.”
The old man shifted in his bed, lips tightening momentarily in what Johanna took to be discomfort. “I have been laying here thinking of the old days, Peter, in the court of the Great Khan, and on the steppes of the tribes, and in all the lands we traveled. Do you remember the unicorns, Peter? Not like horses at all, thick-snouted and short-legged and broad-bellied, with skin like leather, and two horns, Peter, two, not one as the old tales would have it.”
“I remember the unicorns, master. Ugly creatures, and dangerous.”
There was a snorting sound from the bed that took Johanna a moment to recognize as a laugh. “No maiden I ever met would have allowed such a creature anywhere near her lap.”
He gave that snorting laugh again and this time choked and coughed. Moreta poured him some water and held the glass once more to his lips. He gulped it down and the choking subsided, although he gasped for air afterward. “Thank you, daughter.”
Moreta murmured something in return, and Johanna thought she saw tears in his daughter’s eyes as she turned to replace the glass on the stand.
“I did not tell half of what I saw,” the old man said. “I could have written another book, and more.” His fingers plucked at the sheets. “I should have. Il Milione! I’ll ‘Il Milione’ them!” He subsided into mutterings.
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