“Now, I am more skeptical of the Templars, next on our list. I might perhaps believe a centipede three feet long, with a sting fatal to humans—though all such wondrous beasts have a habit of shrinking, you know, the closer you get to their home territory. I find it harder to accept such a centipede as a Templar, a temple guardian intelligent enough to know the difference between worshipers and robbers. And when we are told that such creatures are themselves worshipers in the temple, we tread on strange ground indeed: the notion of a soul in the body of a beast. That is a clear heresy. But you, Johannes, will separate truth from falsehood.”
(I sat quiet at the feet of M. di Piacenza and hugged myself with excitement. Johannes of Magdeburg was heading off beyond the rising sun, to Cathay or farther, on a journey of magical discovery, and I would give my right hand to go with him. How could I persuade my master to give me permission?)
“I will group together and pass over the questions of birds as big as elephants, or of two-headed, fire-breathing lizards, or of peacocks that eat only rocks and shit pure opals,” went on my master. “You will surely ask about them. But whether they exist or whether they are no more than myth and legend will make little difference to the Holy Church. Neither property nor belief is at issue, merely human curiosity. However, this last item is another matter.” He tapped the yellow paper. “Ants, says Father Carpini. He heard of ants the size of men, Quarry Ants who operate the diamond mines of the Great Khan. Ants that speak in human tongues, ants who have learned the use of fire, ants who worship a divine creator. You know what that would do to the roots of our beliefs.”
Johannes nodded. He knew, but of course I did not—not then. Later, he explained to me that they were concerned because in his religion God made Man in his own image, and so creatures other than those in the shape of Man could not worship or have souls. They would have to be Satanic creations, inventions of the Devil.
“Now,” concluded my master. “Here is the letter from His Holiness, for delivery to the Great Khan, Kublai. According to Father Carpini, the Great Khan lives in such splendor that material gifts are useless, although almost everyone offers them. We hope that your own scientific and mathematical powers will interest the Khan more than anything else. Do you have any new suggestions for this?”
While my master was still speaking, Johannes reached into his battered brown bag of calf’s leather and pulled out a little book, bound in red. “This is not new, but I think it may be new to the court of the Great Khan. It is the Liber Abaci of Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci. I have studied it closely, and I believe it to be of overwhelming importance for science.”
“Indeed.” My master looked at the book, and to tell the truth there was a skepticism in his voice that only someone who knew him well would recognize. “This little volume here?”
“Yes. It introduces a quantity, the sifr, or cifra, and a new way of writing numbers based upon it. I agree with Fibonacci, this will transform every aspect of calculation, from astronomy to the sale of goods. With your permission, and the permission of His Holiness, I propose to instruct the philosophers at the court of the Great Khan in the mathematical techniques of the Liber Abaci.”
“Oh certainly, certainly, do that if you wish.”
But it was clear that my master thought this of little consequence compared with Auromancers and Templars and Quarry Ants.
By contrast, Nataree seemed indifferent when I spoke of animals with near-magical powers, and flamed with curiosity when I mentioned the little book that Johannes carried with him everywhere.
She had huddled inside her cloak as she listened to me talk of Johannes and our mission, with only her eyes showing. Now she suddenly stirred and said, “Tell me more about the book. Tell me what it allows you to do.”
I tried to explain; and of course, I could not. I had heard Johannes talk a hundred times of the new methods, and seen him do calculations so fast that some scholars swore he must be in league with the Devil; but nothing of Johannes’s techniques had ever made sense to me.
Nataree listened to me for a while, then pushed back her cowl and stood up. “Dari, you do not make sense. It is not your fault. I will talk about this to Johannes myself.”
And then she was moving, heading for the line of campfires. As she walked away, I was tempted to shout after her, “Talk all you want, you silly girl. Johannes does not speak your language, and you do not speak his.” Then I shivered, and remained silent. I realized that in the hour or less that we had been talking together, Nataree had somehow caught much of my vocabulary and accent, and was already speaking closer to my own choice of tongue. I am quick with languages; most people would say, incredibly quick. Could anyone, ever, learn another’s language in a few hours or a few days? Only, I would say it again, if she were a witch-woman.
I was cold, not fully recovered from our ordeal in the desert, and again feeling hungry; but I did not go back at once to the cooking pots and the warmth of the fires. I felt strangely disloyal and ashamed. In thinking to acquire information, I had learned nothing, and perhaps I had told too much.
It was good that Nataree had left when she did. Otherwise the force of those pale, piercing eyes might have sucked out of me the rest of the story of my first meeting with Johannes; and that was something that he surely wanted no one to know about—not even me.
My master, when the official business was over, had drawn a chair up close to Johannes, and his voice changed to a solemn tone I had never heard him use before. I froze at his feet.
“My son,” he said, and Johannes bowed his head. “Do not look on this journey as a punishment, or even as a penance.”
“Father di Piacenza, Your Holiness, I try not to not think of it that way. I try to see it as an opportunity.”
“It is, indeed. An opportunity to give service to God, and a chance to renew your faith. If you would like to tell me what happened to you…”
Johannes had sighed like an old, old man. “That is part of the problem. Nothing happened. There was no event, no moment of temptation, no sight of Satan high on a church spire trumpeting at me like a thousand elephants to bring me to sin. But the more I studied, the more I asked questions, the more I tried to understand—the less became my certainty. I waited and prayed and hoped. Six months ago I at last went to Monsignor Alienti and asked for advice. He suggested some kind of pilgrimage, and thought that with my interests and background in the sciences, one of unusual type might serve better both me and the Holy Church. And so here I am.”
There was a great simplicity and honesty to Johannes, no one could mistake that. And although what he said made no sense at all to me, apparently it did to my master. “If the result of this mission is that you are helped,” he said, “then even if nothing else is accomplished, it will not be a failure. A soul is quite beyond price. Nothing is more important than your return to full conviction.”
Johannes’s eyes were turned down, but I could see them from where I was sitting. Instead of the clear certainty they held when he spoke about mathematics and the Liber Abaci, now they were tormented and filled with misery.
“You have questions,” my master went on. “The Church has no objection to questions. It welcomes debate and logical thought, it even thrives on paradox. But logic must ultimately be subordinated to Faith. We begin with Faith, and end with Faith, and Faith conquers all. If in your studies there was a failure to understand God’s plans for the world down to the level of the smallest logical detail, that is proof only of human fallibility. It adds to the glory of God, if understanding Him is not simple. You are making a grave error if you say, ‘because I cannot understand everything, God is lacking’! Remember again, the soul of a human is priceless.”
I listened closely—and still I had little idea what he was talking about! It was more of the cold tangle of Christ that I heard so often in the palace. All words and no warmth. But this time I felt something new: the pain in Johannes. I was so drawn to him, so taken with him, I could not dismiss this dialogu
e as unimportant.
“Perhaps,” Johannes said after a few moments of silence, “I will convert the Great Khan himself, to make him become a follower of Christ.”
His voice was wistful. My master blew that sorrow away with a great gust of laughter.
“Ah, my Johannes, would that you could! But no, we are not so ambitious as that. Go east, and bring back a little new knowledge, and your faith made whole, and that will be all we can ask.” He finally noticed me, staring up at him, and switched at once to speak in Persian. “Now then, Dari, why are you still here? Off, and bring chai for our honored guest.”
I would never have a better chance.
“Master,” I said, and bowed low. “The honored guest has come a great distance, and I think he must travel farther. I heard you talk of the court of the Great Khan. That is far, far away. If the guest does not know the language you are using now, or those of the tribes still farther to the east, he will find travel very difficult. I have some gift for languages. I would be honored to serve him, and speak to others on his behalf.”
My master stared at me as though he had never seen me before in his whole life. I shivered, and waited. At last he smiled. “This desire to serve does you credit, Dari. But there is one problem. How can you help the holy Johannes, when you cannot even speak his language. What would you be able to say to him, or on his behalf, if you cannot understand him?”
“I would say”—and now I turned to face Johannes himself, and changed to Latin; not very good Latin, on purpose, since I did not want to upset my master with my earlier eavesdropping—“Domine, I want to serve you. My Lord, I will go with you wherever you go, and speak on your behalf, and make your goals my only goals.”
M. di Piacenza’s mouth hung open. “Such cheek! You’ll do no such thing. Be off with you, little Dari, get out of here and bring hot tea. Johannes and I have much to talk about.”
I went, and my feet bore me along the carpeted corridor like the wings of eagles. My master might fool Johannes with the severity of his manner, but he did not fool me. When he was angry he called me Daryush, when he was pleased with me, it was Dari; when he was really pleased, it was little Dari.
I was going, I was going, I was going, I was going.
Johannes of Magdeburg and I, we would travel east and east and farther east. We would walk the shining world, go together beyond the eye of the rising sun, to travel the Great Silk Road—the Dragon Road, the Smoke Road, the Snowy Road, the Golden Road, the magic road that would lead to the court of the Great Khan himself.
I hugged myself. I was going!
When I lived in Bactria, before I was sold to M. di Piacenza, I slept always with the horses and the camels. My master told me at once when I reached Acre that he did not want me stinking of animals in his house, and he made me bathe often and sleep in an inside chamber; but I have never lost my fondness for the warmth and comforting smell of the great beasts.
In desert country, now, where there is no hope of forage, all the animals of the caravan are herded together for the night in the middle of the circle of campfires. It is smelly and intimate there, and the finest place in the world in freezing weather. When I at last came in from the darkness, chilled to the bone, I headed inside the circle for old time’s sake, and also for a late-night look at Nataree’s beautiful dappled pony.
To my surprise, Johannes was at the first campfire I came to—and he was sitting with Ahmes and Nataree.
I watched for a few moments before I joined them. Johannes had his beloved Liber Abaci held out in front of him, and he was doing most of the talking. Nataree was listening very closely, and asking occasional questions in a slow and correct Persian. My teaching for the past year had been enough to allow Johannes to follow her, and to reply to her.
“So this mark,” she was saying. “The sifr. It does not mean that hichi—nothing—is there. It says that there is something specific there; that in this space there are no tens in this particular number. So it serves to mark the place where numbers of tens are written. This number, 308, has none of the tens. Three tens of tens in this place, here. No tens, in this place here. And eight units, here.”
“Exactly right!” Johannes leaned forward and gripped the hand that touched the book, something which he definitely should not have done. I looked around at once to see if her guards had seen, but they were arguing and dozing by the next fire. “And the sifr can mark the position of any sort of number—it could show, for instance, that there are no hundreds in a number which has some thousands and some tens. It makes calculation easy, almost trivial.”
Nataree was nodding, while Ahmes was yawning. I can’t say that I blame him. I’d heard Johannes and his “sifr position notation” far too often, myself. But Ahmes was by no means asleep. His eyes were on Nataree, and the expression they held was one that I had seen a hundred times. I am perhaps a little skinny, but I am fair-skinned and graceful in movement, and many men have found me attractive. I have never given myself to one, but I recognize that red-eyed glaze of blind lust easily enough; and Ahmes had it now. If he was not careful, he would get himself into worse trouble than any he had seen so far.
“Teach me more!” said Nataree suddenly. “Let us do another calculation!”
“Give me a problem!” Johannes was as excited as she, like a child showing off a toy. “Any numbers that you choose.”
“My age, added to your age, added to his age, added to his age.” She pointed at me and Ahmes.
“Too simple—once I know the ages.” Johannes made a column of numbers. “Twenty-eight, that is me. Thirteen, that is Dari. Ahmes, how old are you?”
“Twenty-three years.” The soldier shrugged. “And what good will your answer be when you get it?”
“And I am fifteen,” said Nataree. But as Johannes made his column of numbers, and did odd things with it, I saw through her game. She wanted to know how old Johannes was. And she had found out, without asking.
But why did she want to know? To cast horoscopes, perhaps? To set a spell on him? Nothing made sense. She was destined to be a bride of the Great Khan, that was her future, and the future of Johannes was irrelevant to her.
I was suspicious. I disliked Nataree anyway, without needing more reason. She was a witch-woman, and I had already given her too much information about me and about Johannes.
The whole desert was wider than Ahmes had said—far wider. If we had not met the caravan, the three of us would have ended as sun-dried corpses, days short of any supply of water; and we had been only in the Little Desert, the western end of the Great Desert.
Even with the experienced merchants of the caravan to guide us, the journey across that Great Desert was not easy. The most foolhardy traveler would not plunge on into the heart of the Takla Makan Shamo itself, the place that we had been heading for, in our sublime ignorance. The caravan turned north on the Great Desert’s western margin, to find and follow the southern edge of the Tien Shan, the Celestial Mountains, where we could take our water from their snowmelt.
It was four weeks before we reached the plain that we would follow north-east toward Karakorum itself. The weather turned colder and colder. We would find Karakorum, home of the Great Khan, a snow-girt city with (according to false legend) walls of gold and towers of diamond.
Not that at all, said the merchants, many of whom had made this journey before. But a place of incredible wealth, nonetheless. And what, pray, did we hope to trade there?
They were polite, but it was a politeness reserved for madmen. I could tell what they thought of us, but Johannes could not. He did not speak Turkic. He knew what he knew only through my translations, and I was not about to translate the “Ah!”’s and the “Oh, yes?” and “Indeed?”’s that greeted discussions of new science and strange mathematics.
After the first week with the caravan I began to be aware of other things. The caravan itself was by no means a single unit, as it had seemed when we first encountered it. It comprised three groups in addition to us: first,
the true merchants, devoted only to the acquisition and sale of trade goods. They were easy to understand, because the nature of a trader is the same in Samarkand or Karakorum as it is in Acre or Persepolis. Unless they were dead, they would haggle endlessly and price everything they saw. If they could have done it, they would have set a value for my master on Johannes’s immortal soul, something he had said was impossible!
Then there was the party from Kabul, including Nataree and her guardian soldiers. She would arrive at Karakorum a virgin, they told me, or they would all die. According to Khosro, my soldier friend in the leather leggings, a girl-gift for the Great Khan had once arrived in Karakorum from the local khan not only seduced, but visibly pregnant! The local khan’s ambassador in Karakorum had ordered that the whole group of guards be flayed alive. The Great Khan, in his compassion, had given instructions that the men be strangled first, before their skins were removed and sent back to Kabul. There was no love, according to my friend, between the Great Khan and the lesser khan of Kabul. The homage offered to Karakorum was a grudging and reluctant one, provided only because of fear of the Great Khan’s long arm of power.
With that threat of slow death hanging over them, it was amazing to me that the guards of Nataree took their duties so lightly. That they would allow me to talk to her freely and even wander outside the camp with her was not perhaps so surprising, since my voice was not yet a man’s voice. But she wandered the whole caravan, with apparently little control or even surveillance of her actions. I understood that better after a few days. The man who could seduce or rape Nataree would be an unusual one. The fire and ice in her eye frightened most people away (though not Ahmes—he still had that look). She spent her time as she chose, almost all of it talking endlessly to Johannes about things that no sensible person was interested in. He was delighted! For the first time, someone cared about science and mathematics and understood his precious Liber Abaci as fully as he did.
Georgia On My Mind and Other Places Page 15