“Are you sure you want to come with us?” Shasha said pointedly.
He smiled at her. “Of course. Let us follow the chariot of Arjuna, whose wheels are right effort and whose driver is truth. Thus shall we all come to the land which is free from fear.”
“Kerman, then,” Jaufre said, bringing them back to the point. “The carpets there are said to be very fine.”
“And Tabriz afterward,” Shasha said.
“And then Gaza,” Johanna said, and gave an impish smile. “And anything in between that looks interesting.”
Firas and Félicien were interested auditors but contributed no opinions.
“Johanna?”
Johanna looked up to see Fatima standing in the doorway, an even more joyous smile than usual on her face. “Azar is here.”
A slim young man in pants and tunic with a dark blue cheche wrapped about his head stood next to her, a shy smile on his face. He was older and taller than when they had seen him last, but then they all were, and they had no trouble recognizing her betrothed.
“Azar!” Jaufre leaped to his feet and they clasped hands warmly. Shasha pushed him to one side and took Azar by his shoulders. “You look well,” she said, and gave him a gentle shake. She was displaced in turn by Johanna, who gave him a hearty embrace. He colored slightly, but he was definitely pleased to see them.
“We are coming with you to Kerman!” Fatima said.
Johanna was startled. “We only just decided we were going there.”
Fatima gave that remark the back of her hand. “Father has heard of a new kind of grain available in the west, one that in the right climate can bear twice in the same season.”
“Has Ahmed the baker become a grain merchant, then?”
“Who cares, so long as our time together is not yet done? Although—” Fatima managed to assume a stern expression “—we are not pitching our yurt anywhere near yours again. I tremble to think what would happen the next time you called on the North Wind for aid.”
The four of them laughed.
Uncle Cheng had arranged for them to join a caravan headed for Kerman by way of Talikan, where they would trade for almonds and pistachios but mostly for salt. “It is said there are mountains of it,” Jaufre said.
“What’s so special about this particular salt?” Johanna said.
“It is said to be washed in the azure waves of the Gulf of Persia, and harvested by virgins at the dark of the moon.”
Johanna raised an eyebrow. “Hard on the feet, stumbling around all those rock pools at night.”
“Also said to be flavored with the blood of said virgins,” Jaufre said, inspired.
“Oh, well, we should definitely buy some, then.”
Besides the camels they had eight horses, one and a spare for each of them, and Félicien’s donkey. Hari, too, had insisted on a donkey, purchased in Kashgar.
Sheik Mohammed and his son were also traveling west. The sheik told Jaufre they were returning to their home near Talikan, and offered escort, for a price.
He also renewed his offer to buy North Wind. Eventually he and Jaufre concluded terms for their journey that did not include the stallion, and when they emerged from the tent the old sheik further irritated Johanna by patting her cheek and saying approvingly to Jaufre, “Skin as smooth as mare’s milk, my friend, and I have never seen such eyes, like the sky at sunrise. You should make your woman wear a veil, lest she tempt mens’ thoughts into covetousness.”
Jaufre smiled and bent his head without replying, and hoped he was going to survive the night, never mind the journey. Straightening, he saw the sheik’s son’s eyes drawn irresistibly to Johanna.
The old man was in love with the horse. The young man was in love with its rider. Jaufre squared his shoulders, feeling the reassuring weight of his father’s sword against his back. Neither man would achieve his heart’s desire on this trip.
They left Kashgar the next morning, since the heat of the day was easing as the year made its way toward fall. Uncle Cheng saw them off, tears unashamedly streaming down his cheeks. Johanna was the last of his family left to him. At the last moment, Johanna, similarly affected, said urgently, “Come with us, uncle!” She burrowed into his arms, her voice muffled against his tunic. “Who knows what wonders we shall find, far in the west! Come see them with us!”
He wiped his tears on his sleeve and patted her back before pushing her back. “I don’t deny that it is tempting, Johanna, but I have merchants expecting cargo in Chang’an. Still, who knows? One day, perhaps, I shall follow.”
With that Johanna had to be content. She mounted North Wind and kicked him into a gallop to catch up with her friends, where she reined in and stood in her stirrups to turn and look back for the last time. The large man in the sand-colored robes standing outside the great Kashgar gate raised his arms high above his head. She raised both of hers in return and cried out, something inarticulate, encompassing love, and loss, and farewell.
And then she faced west and nudged North Wind into motion again.
The white bulk of the Pamirs stood blunt and proud against the deep blue sky, on their left as they began to climb up. The way was all ridges and valleys and passes. The narrow trail was beaten down by hundreds of years of travelers’ feet but no smoother for that. Rocks rattled down from the hills above, evergreen branches scraped their heads, and in places the trail fell abruptly to the bottoms of distant canyons where the way narrowed to a strip of ground barely wide enough for a camel to pass. Jaufre hooked the lead camel to Hari’s donkey and let the sure-footed little beast lead the way. Hari walked behind, omming. He never seemed to be out of breath like the rest of them.
“Straight to heaven,” Johanna said, panting.
“How long before we get to the top?” Shasha said.
Johanna touched the purse at her waist. “Father says forty days to the plain.”
“Forty days!” It was only their third, and the path before them wound ever upward.
The people who lived between the ridges and in the valleys were few and secretive, and seen only in glimpses. They looked to be hunters, as they were dressed in skins. As the travelers soon found, if they did not mount a constant watch the mountain people were also expert thieves. Exhausted as they were at the end of each day, it was an additional hardship, to be always alert for theft.
When they met oncoming travelers, it was a mad, confused crush of swearing men and animals, jostling for place on the trail (no one wanted the outside edge if they were currently traversing a precipice, which they only too often were) and trying to avoid steaming piles of dung excreted by camels and horses and donkeys choosing to exercise their displeasure by the only means possible to them. There were no caravansaries along this stretch of the Road, and campsites were few, small and mean, lacking in fuel and often in water, which caused them to make camp earlier some evenings so that they could send out scouts to find the nearest stream. If another caravan was there before them, they slept between rocks and under trees at the nearly vertical sides of the trail, everyone out of sorts the next day from having spent the entire night trying not to slip down into whatever abyss they were camping next to. Arguments over who had laid claim to what campsite for the evening increased with altitude, and only Firas’ calm, authoritative manner averted some outright clashes.
“I’m glad we brought him,” Johanna said, when they were first into the next campsite that evening.
“Me, too,” Jaufre said.
Johanna looked at Shasha. “Are you glad we brought him, Shasha?”
Shasha said nothing, but the next time her camel was in reach he took a nip at Johanna’s knee.
There was none of the camaraderie that had existed on the crossing of the vast, flat plain they had left so far behind them. There was no singing around the campfire in the evening, as there wasn’t much of a campfire and no one had any breath to sing with anyway. There was not even the comfort of light, as the twisting trail, the overhanging bluffs and the narrow valleys cu
t off the most wayward rays of the sun during the day, and hid the stars at night.
“No wonder Yusuf the Levantine charged so much for his olive oil,” Johanna said one afternoon, toiling ever and ever upward. Like Jaufre and Shasha, she had donned her astrakhan coat very soon after they had begun to climb. She sweated beneath it as the trail rose, but if she took it off the sweat froze to her skin.
Félicien blew loudly into a large and filthy handkerchief. “I came by the northern way when I went first to Khuree. It was much easier.”
They all wished he hadn’t said that.
“We climb to the seat of heaven itself,” Hari said, face raised beatifically to the sky.
Firas, like Hari, seemed impervious to heat and cold alike.
Thirty days into their climb, water would not boil, and even if it would you could stick your finger in it and not be burned. Game thinned out and the birds vanished altogether. They subsisted on dried fruit and nuts, and unleavened bread made from grain they carried with them, when they could find enough water to spare from filling their water sacks. They went thirsty before the livestock did.
Johanna kept North Wind behind her on the trail and picketed near them every night. He was better than a muezzin at sounding the call if someone smelling unfamiliar approached their camp, but she noticed that he ate less than he was used to, and drank every bucket of water dry.
They were all drinking as much water as they could find. It never seemed enough. One morning Johanna noticed that the others’ voices were beginning to sound high and thin and somehow from a distance, even if they were standing right in front of her. Wu Li had written of this phenomenon in his book, but it was one thing to read of it happening to other people, and another and very disconcerting thing to experience in person.
Then, one day, she looked off the trail and beheld a sheep such as she had never seen before. He was very fat and bore a pair of enormous, curling horns that she recognized as the precursors of bowls she had seen in Kashgar. He baa’ed at her and bounded away, but they saw more and more of them as they climbed higher. That night they dined on fresh meat for the first time since they entered the mountains. Later that evening they also paid an extortionate amount to the herder to whom the sheep had belonged, who appeared, indignant and wrathful, at the very moment they were cracking the last of the bones for the marrow.
“Excellent timing,” Jaufre murmured, and Johanna noticed he added a little to the requested sum. He saw her looking and grinned. “I admire professionalism in any endeavor.”
And then the next morning Johanna woke to light, or at least more light than she had become accustomed to over the past month. The trail had begun to level out, and the tall evergreens gave reluctant way to dells of greensward, and then to pasture. They were able to ride again, and Jaufre unhitched Hari’s donkey from the lead camel and Hari rode once more with his face upturned to the sun.
“Is this heaven, old man?” Jaufre said.
He smiled without opening his eyes. “It is very nearly nirvana itself, young master.” proving that even holy men were subject to the ill humors of the trail.
Spirits rose up and down the line of camels, and soon Félicien had his lute out and was singing a bawdy song about a brute of a husband with a beautiful young wife and a handsome young lover, and the old hag down the village who spoiled everyone’s fun. He sang it a second time in Mongol and a third time in Persian, and again in Frankish. He was out of breath and his voice didn’t reach far but by the end they could hear snatches of chorus coming at them from up and down the line of camels.
Finally there came one evening when they camped at the edge of a fine, blessedly level pastureland that seemed to extend beyond the horizon, the rough trails and mountain ridges and the dark claustrophobia of the encroaching evergreens only a threatening green wall at their back. Tall mountains lined the horizon on every side with sharp, menacing peaks clad in white, but next to their campsite there was a clear lake fed by a bubbling stream, and even the fact that their fires burned small and sullen and threw off no heat whatsoever was not enough to stem the party’s returning vitality. They had fresh meat again that night, and were ready when the sheep’s owner materialized very nearly right out of the grass at their feet, rending his beard and crying out for redress. He got it, and a mug of lukewarm tea well sweetened with honey to send him on his way rejoicing.
Fatima and Azar joined them at their fire, Azar bringing his tambour and Fatima her finger cymbals. No one was in very good voice but they could gasp out the lyrics. It was sort of like poetry, Shasha said later, if poetry was chanted out to the rhythm of a drum and the clash of cymbals.
The sheik and his son joined them, too, solemn but attentive, light from the diminutive fire casting long shadows on their faces. A waxing moon rose above the horizon. Fatima and Azar disappeared arm in arm, whispering and giggling. Firas sat next to Shasha, dignified and silent, while she mended a large tear in one of Jaufre’s tunics by the dim light of the campfire.
The sheik stirred. “Jaufre of Cambaluc, I would renew my offer to buy your horse.”
“You do me too much honor, Sheik Mohammed,” Jaufre said. “I am desolated to have to repeat my refusal.”
From his picket nearby, North Wind whickered.
“Five thousand bezants,” the sheik said, which was quite an advance on his last offer, and had the added advantage of being currency they wouldn’t have to change when they arrived at last at the shores of the Middle Sea. They could tell by his expression he didn’t see how they could refuse it.
Firas bent forward to look around Shasha, courteous and perfectly polite. “I believe you heard the young sir’s answer, effendi.”
The sheik was silenced, and seemed to sigh. He said something to his son in a low voice none of them caught and rose to his feet. “Then I must bid you goodnight.” He sketched a small nod that was almost a bow in their general direction, and strode off. With his elaborate headdress and his sweeping skirts, he always looked like he was leading a parade.
His son paused for a moment, his eyes on Johanna, as happened far too often for Jaufre’s taste, and for Shasha’s too, for that matter. “You will not reconsider?”
“I cannot, even if I would, sir,” Johanna said, patiently for her. “If I sold him to your father I would be cheating him, because North Wind will not stay where I am not.”
His dark eyes held hers for a long moment. “It is as you wish,” he said, and turned to follow his father.
“It is as it is,” Johanna said. “They’ll have two foals out of the Wind, why do they keep asking for him as well?”
“Who wouldn’t?” Félicien said cheerfully, and got to his feet. “I’m for bed. How long to cross this plateau, Johanna?”
“Twelve days, my father said,” Johanna said.
“A quarter the distance, and it’s flat,” the goliard said with immense satisfaction.
Jaufre was still staring at the place where the sheik had sat. Johanna nudged him. “What is it?”
“I don’t like his insistence on buying North Wind,” he said, his mouth a hard line.
“He is very persistent,” Johanna said, stretching her arms and yawning.
“It’s more than that,” Jaufre said.
Unexpectedly, Firas said, “I agree with you, young sir. We should keep a close watch on the horse.”
Johanna laughed in mid-yawn. “I’d pay good money for a chance to watch someone try to steal North Wind.”
She got up. Shasha assembled her mending and rose to her feet. “I, too, am uneasy,” she said.
Firas looked at Jaufre. “You take the first watch, and then wake me.”
Jaufre nodded.
“Thank you both for taking such good care of my horse,” Johanna said with a mock bow. “Whether he needs it or not.”
Fifteen
The Pamir and Terak Pass
AFTER SO LONG TOILING up and up and farther up again, the rolling grassland was a positive luxury. The season was well int
o fall but the weather held and sunny day succeeded sunny day, although the sky seemed oddly leeched of color. There was fodder to spare for the pack and the riding animals, and plenty of water from snow trickling down from the high mountains, which reared up, jagged and forbidding, all around them.
“The roof of the world,” Johanna said.
Jaufre, a practical man, stretched his hand up as if to touch it. “It’s as if we are traveling beneath a clear dome.”
They moved quickly now, all alone on this vast expanse of tall grasses, for it was late for them to be making this journey. They knew they were one good storm away from wading through snow piled as high as a camel’s hump, and there was still a steep trail to descend on the other side of the high plain before they reached an altitude where the wind did not bite into one like a sharp knife.
By using every moment of daylight available to them, they made the top of the pass just after dark on the eleventh day, and everyone was too tired to do much more than wash down a handful of dried fruits and nuts and roll themselves into their blankets. They didn’t even bother pitching the yurts, sleeping instead beneath that pale, open sky.
Sometime before dawn something woke Jaufre. The camp was silent but for the occasional grunts and groans of the livestock. There was no smell of woodsmoke so he was awake even before the cooks. Wide awake, and fully alert. Tense, even, although he could not immediately identify any reason why.
He raised his head. Johanna, Shasha, Félicien and Hari were all sleeping quietly.
Firas was missing, his bedroll tossed to one side, barely visible in the bleached light only now beginning to illuminate the eastern horizon.
Moving quietly, Jaufre got to his feet. He felt for his father’s sword and strapped it to his back. He walked a short distance away to relieve himself, washed his face and hands in a pool of water just beginning to form a skin of ice, and went to check on North Wind. The great white beast was sleeping, strapped in a thick felt blanket. Jaufre felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. As tired as she must have been last night, Johanna had still first attended to North Wind. He ran his hand down North Wind’s neck, and noticed that the big horse had lost some weight during their journey up and over the Roof of the World. The sooner they got back to sea level and a more civilized speed of travel, the better for them all. Jaufre was looking forward to the baths in Kerman.
Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) Page 17