The Crusading Wizard

by Christopher Stasheff

  Balkis still looked wary, but Matt was glad of a way out. He caught her hand and started to turn away—but a pang of sympathy kept him from turning his back on Fortune. “You could, you know … if you wanted … come with us …”

  Lakshmi looked alarmed, and Balkis shrank down into a ball, but Fortune backed away in sheer terror. “Go … out? Out of this cavern, you mean? Oh, no, I could not! I dare not, all manner of things might come at me out there, Heaven alone knows what monsters await! Go out? No, never, nay!”

  Her voice ended in a scream; she backed up against a wall of rough stone, arms spread wide, fingers clutching at its niches and crevices.

  “Okay, okay, it was just a suggestion! An invitation, I mean!” Matt knew a case of agoraphobia when he saw one, even if he’d never seen one before. “Don’t worry, nobody’s going to make you come with us. You’re safe, you can stay here.”

  “Can I?” Fortune thawed a bit, at least enough to bring her arms down. “I can remain in my cavern, then? But, oh, I miss the outdoors, the wide sky and the rolling plains!” Tears gathered in her eyes. “I so long to see them again—but I dare not.”

  “You used to live out in the open?” Matt asked, surprised.

  “Oh, aye! The herding folk, they thought me a goddess, and every tribe had a hearth for me in their camps. But they ceased, yes, gobbled up by those same barbarians who even now threaten the Caliph, or settled down by a river-fork and built themselves cities, then forgot me. There was no more hearth for Fortune, no more meal-cakes or puddings assured, so I hid myself away here, yes, and made myself wheels to spin, through which I could watch the endless pageant of humankind.” She stepped away from the wall, eyes damp with reminiscence. “You are a wonderful species, you know, combining wisdom and folly, courage and cowardice, nobility and vulgarity, and all steps in between.” She took a deep breath, let it out in a sigh as she shook herself—spilling her coiffure into frowzy curls and gaining a dozen pounds again—and said regretfully, “No thank you, my friends. I shall stay here.”

  “As you wish,” Lakshmi said, with a smile of sympathy. “We shall try our best to visit again, when we return.”

  “Yes, do!” Fortune nodded vigorously. “I shall look forward to it. But now, good-bye!” She stepped over to the wall of wheels, stopped one particular disk from its spinning, and stabbed a dart into it without even letting go. A huge blast of wind caught the companions, and Lakshmi barely had time to catch Matt and Balkis to her breast before she was whirling about and about in the wind, and the world turned into a kaleidoscope of churning colors again.

  When the Technicolor tornado stopped spinning, Matt looked up and saw down. He was rushing head first toward the sharpened peaks of the Hindu Kush Mountains again.

  “Yikes!” Matt shouted. “This is no improvement! At least when we left, we were flying level!”

  “Oh, be not such a babe!” Lakshmi snapped, disregarding how she was holding him. Her flight path began to curve and she called out to her husband, “Marudin! Fly due north!”

  The djinni only nodded, lifting his head and, thereby, his torso, then the rest of his body, swooping in a great curve and steadying on his new heading.

  The mountainside swung from in front of Matt’s forehead down to under his chest, and “before” suddenly became “below” again. His stomach tried to stick by its preconceptions and stay where it had been, but he choked down the nausea, accepting it gladly as the lesser of two evils.

  He gave the new heading ten minutes or so while he developed the shakes and let them run down, leaving his body limp as spaghetti. Then he called up to Lakshmi, “Any idea where we’re going?”

  “To find this Arjasp’s capital,” she told him, “or should I call it a mere headquarters?”

  Matt thought it over. “Considering most of his warriors are nomads, we’re probably looking for a collection of tents large enough to be a small city. The direct route seems a little hazardous to me, though.”

  “Filled with hazards? What do you mean?” Lakshmi demanded.

  “He knows we’re going to be looking for him,” Matt explained, “or at the very least, ought to be suspecting it and be on the watch for it. He’ll have spies on the lookout, maybe even wizards scrying.”

  “You think he will see us coming, and prepare to defend against our magic.” Lakshmi turned thoughtful. “Still, we must go where he is. How do you suggest we mislead him?”

  “Let him think we’re looking for another destination. Land at some city that’s on the way, if you can find one.”

  “Of course—there is Samarkand.” Lakshmi nodded, no longer uncertain. “We shall stop there and visit. Certainly some there will know where this Arjasp’s city can be found, and perhaps we can contrive some sort of disguise.”

  “Maybe we can.” But Matt wasn’t thinking about the disguise—he was fired with the wonder of it all. Samarkand! One of the fabled cities of the East, rich with the trade of the Silk Road, the caravan route across Central Asia, and he was actually going to see it!

  They landed on a hill overlooking the city. It glistened in the morning sun as though it were made all of ivory—cubes of ivory, boxes of ivory, domes of ivory decorated with gold.

  Some of those were the bulging and pointed domes of mosques, but others were the half-globe shapes of Christian churches. There were several minarets, but also several steeples, too, and Matt was sure he saw the tiers of a pagoda and the beehive shape of a Buddhist stupa.

  “Samarkand!” Matt breathed. “The crossroads of Asia, and it sure looks like it!” He turned to his companions. “Come on, let’s get down there and visit!”

  “There is a small matter of disguise,” Lakshmi pointed out.

  “What disguise?” Matt asked. “I’m still dressed as a Persian.”

  “Indeed!” Lakshmi said archly. “And are Marudin and I to go into that city dressed as we are?”

  “Why not?” Matt countered. “You can’t be the first Arabs they’ve seen. If you’re worried about the proprieties, don’t be—this is Samarkand, not Tehran. Even Muslim women don’t have to wear the complete veil here.”

  “Indeed,” Lakshmi said dryly. “What of these spies you spoke of?”

  That gave Matt pause.

  “She speaks truth,” Marudin said. “Surely Arjasp knows that djinn can shrink or grow to any size we wish. His spies will have been told to look for an Arab man and woman clad as a Mameluke and a dancing girl.”

  “As well as a Frank,” said Lakshmi, “but you are right in that you are well enough disguised, and Balkis has always her own guise with her.”

  Balkis meowed confirmation. Looking down, Matt saw she was pussyfooting around again. Absently, he reached down, holding his palm horizontal, and she flowed under it back and forth for automatic petting. “She’s got the best disguise of any of us,” he agreed. “Arjasp probably can’t keep up with her shifts in color and markings. But as to you two … Let’s see, I suppose I could pass for a merchant; we could claim I’m carrying semiprecious stones in my robe …” He patted the wand in his sash. “You could, too, Princess, and Marudin could be our bodyguard. Persian robes all around—okay?”

  “That ‘okay’ is certainly one of the strangest words in your language,” Lakshmi complained, “but I take its meaning in this case: ‘Is it acceptable?’ “

  “Close enough,” Matt said. “Is it?”

  For answer, Lakshmi made a gesture as though drawing a curtain over herself, and as her hand passed downward, her bolero jacket became a yellow robe, her harem pants turned into the ankle-length skirt of a light blue under-robe, her slippers became stout boots, and a turban sprouted from her long silky tresses. Marudin gave himself a similar gesture and stood forth in a costume matching hers, except that he wore a yellow shirt and trousers with a crimson sash instead of a dress and a sky-blue robe over them.

  Matt stood back and eyed them critically. “Okay, I guess we’ll pass. Let’s … uh, join the traffic into the city.” He had almost s
aid “Let’s hit the road,” but then remembered that Lakshmi might take him literally.

  They passed through the gate, and Matt inhaled the rich aromas of cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and others he couldn’t identify. “Certainly are spice traders here. Well, let’s have a look around, folks.”

  The “look around” lasted two hours. Even the djinn seemed amazed at the richness and variety of their surroundings. Far Eastern architecture stood side by side with Persian and Indian. The bazaar held booth after booth filled with silken cloth and Chinese carvings; Indian puppeteers acted out stories from the Mahabharata, and the turbans and caftans of Western Asia mingled freely with the trousers and tunics of the steppe barbarians, the pyjamas and saris of India, and the silken robes of China. Booths of lath and canvas stood in the shadows of buildings of alabaster trimmed with gilt and archways decorated with tiles in geometric designs.

  The djinn wandered through the town, amazed by its opulence and its poverty both. Matt had to explain who those yellow-skinned, slant-eyed people were, then guess at the differences between Mongols and Chinese. He was able to tell a Turk from a Russian and did, but had difficulty explaining the people of mixed strains, of whom there seemed to be many—people who’d had both Chinese and Turkish parents, like the great Chinese poet Li Po, or Turkish and Mongol forbearers, like Tamurlane, or any of the other rich varieties of people he saw. He was able to identify Hindu traders and distinguish them from Sikh guards, and his recent experiences in India made him able to tell the difference between a Parsi trader and his Guebre cousin, but there were others that put him completely at a loss.

  Finally Lakshmi said, “I am wearied, wizard, and dazed with so much looking. We must rest.”

  “Museum fatigue,” Matt identified. “Okay, let’s try to find some nice, quiet little residential square where somebody has a booth selling sherbets.”

  They took to the twisting alleyways, Balkis padding silently along, now in front, now behind, nose twitching at the wealth of scents and, no doubt, trying to find the track of a mouse that hadn’t been overlaid with curry. In a few minutes they came out into just such a small, quiet court as Matt had hoped for, one whose quiet was broken only by the merry calls of children at play and the more subdued cry of a sherbet vendor. It was surrounded by dwellings with large patches of stucco missing—and on the side across from the alleyway, a building whose cross over a double door proclaimed it to be a church.

  But what a church! Its architecture was definitely Asian, not European. Matt stared. “What kind of Christians worship in there?”

  “Go in and find out, Frank,” Marudin sighed as he sat down cross-legged in the shade. “But before you do, buy us sherbets, will you not?”

  “Me?” Matt fought righteous indignation. “What makes me the waiter here?”

  “Because you have coins,” Marudin explained, “whereas we should have to conjure some up, and by your leave, we are rather wearied.”

  “Wearied from having carried you across half a continent,” Lakshmi said pointedly.

  “Okay, you win.” Matt strolled over to the booth and bought three sherbets with his smallest silver coin, and by the grin on the vendor’s face, he had obviously overpaid again. He brought them back to the djinn couple, ate a few spoonfuls of his own, then set it down next to Balkis’ nose and turned away to go to church.

  The interior was dim and cool, the decorations unfamiliar and Asiatic, but there was a cross over a stone table that was recognizably an altar, and racks of votive candles that might as easily have come from a Chinese temple as from a Catholic church. There were no pews, but Matt knelt anyway and said a few silent prayers of thanks for their safety, and for success in rescuing the children. As he was climbing to his feet again, he saw a man with a gray beard come out by the altar. The man glanced at him, then turned and stared.

  So did Matt. The tall hat and dark robe looked suspiciously like those of a priest of Ahriman!

  Then Matt blinked, clearing away the illusion. There was a resemblance, yes, but that hat was a cylinder, not a cone with a rounded top, and the long beard looked very familiar. Matt had a sudden memory of a Coptic bishop he had seen on a television documentary. He relaxed—somewhat.

  The priest came toward him, puzzled and with an energy that belied his gray hairs. “Good day, Christian.”

  He spoke a dialect Matt had never heard before, but his translation spell was still working. He hoped it would still work in reverse, and said, “Good day, Reverend Sir. I am not familiar with your sect. Can you tell me what manner of Christian church this is?”

  “Ah.” The priest relaxed, smiling, as though Matt’s words had removed his own question. “Ours is the sect founded by Bishop Nestorius, young man.”

  “Nestorians!” That explained a lot. Matt had heard that the Nestorian brand of Christianity was widely spread through Asia, though scattered—that there had even been some churches in China, though most of them were in Central Asia.

  “And yourself?”

  Matt thought fast, not wanting to give any more clues to his identity than he had to. “I learned my religion from a Christian who came from the Far West, reverend.”

  “Ah! A Frank! Then your sect are those who follow the Bishop of Rome.” The priest nodded. “I have heard of them. Distant and fabled lands, they are. I have seen one or two Franks in the marketplace, but I have never met one before.” He frowned, looking more closely at Matt. “You have not the Frankish look, though.”

  “I have traveled widely,” Matt said vaguely. “Tell me, reverend—are there many of your churches in these lands?”

  “Some,” the priest said, “not many—at least, not this far south. Most of us dwell in the kingdom to the north, where a priest of our own faith rules the land.”

  “A Christian priest-king?” Matt stared, then caught himself. “Your pardon, reverend. The only Christian priest I’ve heard of who rules a land is the Pope, whose holdings are small and who never calls himself a king. Who is he who rules this northern land, then?”

  “He is called Prester John,” the priest said.

  CHAPTER 25

  Prester John! That explained a lot. He had heard the name, the Oriental Christian king who had been the hope of Europe during the Crusades. Someone had supposedly carried a letter from Prester John to the Emperor of Byzantium, but since he hadn’t been able to find Byzantium, he had thoughtfully copied the missive several times and sent on the copies—and other hands had copied the copy, then copied copies of the copy, all of which passed from hand to hand and pen to pen until the emperor finally got the message, along with most of the rest of Europe.

  Of course, whether the word the emperor read was the message Prester John had sent was a very open question, since with each copying, the letter had grown, and so had the glory of Prester John and the wonders of his kingdom, claiming that he ruled a land filled with marvels and led an invincible army that, being Christian, would surely attack the Turkish conquerors of the Holy Land from the East, catching them between Prester John’s forces and the Crusaders in the West, assuring a Christian victory. Never mind what kind of Christian—any kind was better than the Muslim Turks.

  “Prester” was another form of the word “presbyter,” the stewards of the early Church. Over the centuries, in the East, it had apparently come to mean “priest,” and John, in the finest Oriental tradition, was a priest-king.

  All of that was fable, of course, drawn from the deeds of a Mongol prince who had battled a Persian sultan and won. Word of his victory had spread to the West, but become somewhat distorted in the process, so that from having Nestorian Christians in his army—along with Buddhists, animists, and Muslims—he had become himself a Christian, a priest, and a king. When Europeans first heard of the conquests of Genghis Khan, they had been delighted, thinking that at last Prester John had come to rescue the Holy Land from the Muslims. They had been sadly disappointed.

  That, however, had been in Matt’s home universe, where Prester John w
as only a fable. Now Matt lived in a universe of fantasy in which trolls and manticores were real, and Prester John was apparently fact, not rumor.

  “What … what is Prester John’s kingdom like?” Matt asked.

  “A land of peace and plenty,” the priest told him, “where the rivers teem with fish and the crops never fail. The people are industrious and cheerful, living as the early Christians did, with love toward one another and living so closely by Christ’s precepts that there is little friction between them.”

  “But that’s not the case with their barbarian neighbors.”

  “Not at all,” the old priest said sadly, “and therefore does Prester John maintain an army that cannot be beaten—or could not, until this accursed Arjasp and his gur-khan began their apocalyptic ride.”

  “They conquered Prester John?” Matt asked in surprise.

  “We know not,” the old priest sighed. “No word has come from the North since first the gur-khan began his conquests, for the caravans had to find routes that kept them away from the fighting.”

  “Which means that even if Prester John is alive and well, his kingdom is suffering a major recession,” Matt said thoughtfully.

  “Perhaps, but they would scarcely be starving.” The old priest smiled. “His granaries are reputed to be as high as mountains, and his supplies enough to last for seven years.”

  “Are they really?” Matt recognized a literary convention when he heard one. “What about Prester John himself? Is he as splendid as his kingdom?”

  “He is said to be heir to the sanctity and wisdom of Saint John the Evangelist, he who wrote the fourth gospel and the Book of Revelations.”

  “Which is why he’s called John?”

  The old man smiled. “Perhaps. He is also heir to the crozier of St. Thomas, the evangelist to the Indies and, therefore, the first bishop of the East. Prester John is also said to be descended from the magi, those same wise men who came to kneel before Baby Jesus in His manger.”