Gwellyn laughed, thinking Ibrim had made a joke. “You’ll be taking a vow of silence?”
“No,” Ibrim said. “I’d prefer not to continue on our voyage—I’ll be the one to stay behind.”
“Impossible! You’re the navigator!” Now Gwellyn wasn’t laughing.
“Zana can be trained,” Ibrim said. “Just about any of these people can. They know a lot more about the sea and its ways than we think. They live here by choice—not obligation—and I cannot say that I blame them.”
Nor could any of the other three, as they pondered their futures.
“I was thinking of staying here somewhat longer myself,” Paschos said, “to make a more complete catalog of those bones. We only scratched the surface up there.”
“I’m an old man already,” Jakob said. “The winters here will be kind. And the women…”
Yes, the women, Gwellyn agreed. One woman in particular…
“You’re thinking about Lilee,” Jakob said.
“She’s like no woman I’ve ever had before,” Gwellyn replied.
“Forgive me,” Jakob said. “But you’ve only had a total of one woman before—Daralyn—am I right?”
Gwellyn’s cheeks flamed with embarrassment and anger.
Paschos mumbled a hasty leave-taking, and joined Ibrim, who had already gone to talk to some of the islanders by the shore. Paschos knew better than to intrude upon, even be witness to, the kind of discussion Jakob and Gwellyn were about to have.
“I’m only saying this because you’re young, you’ll find other women, and you of all people should continue on this voyage,” Jakob said.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t continue,” Gwellyn said. “Only you, Ibrim, and Paschos said that.”
“OK,” Jakob said. “But you were thinking about it. As we all are. And that’s understandable. But you must continue—without you, there would be no voyage. We’ll never find out more about the singers.”
“I never realized you were so interested,” Gwellyn said.
“Why do you think I’ve come along with you this far? My people are an ancient people—we go back more than four thousand years on our continuous calendar. We’ve been persecuted by Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and yet we have survived. I’ve travelled the world, spent my life, in pursuit of money, true, but that doesn’t mean I’m not also interested in knowledge. The two are not mutually exclusive.”
“You sound like Paschos,” Gwellyn said.
“He is a very wise man. As is Ibrim. As are you. And if we can find out what happened to the singers—were they persecuted, like my people, except they did not survive, or maybe they did—then we must continue our voyage.”
“Except… I love her,” Gwellyn said. “I feel like I want to stay with her, always—like I never want to leave here.”
“How long have you felt this way?” Jakob asked.
“I don’t know,” Gwellyn said. “Maybe not until just now.”
IN THE END, all four of them went on the ship anyway, in addition to Zana. There was no room on the original ship for five, but his people constructed a larger boat, with room enough for six. “My people travelled in boats like this on the open sea, for far greater distances than we will be travelling,” Ibrim translated for Zana. “That’s how we got to this island from the far far East in the first place.”
“Don’t accept the limits of a problem,” Paschos said, “redefine the limits, extend them through techne—technology. I like that.” He made a copy of his notes about the bones, and left them with the islanders for safekeeping. “Perhaps I’ll return to this island in the future,” he said. “In the meantime, I’ll bring my notes, what I know about the bones, to the rest of civilization.”
Ibrim nodded. “I’ve taught them the rudiments of Arabic writing. They learned quickly. They’ll be ready for Islam when it arrives. They’ll take good care of your notes—they know the value of writing. Zana told me it’s the only way of preserving the truth about where they came from, who they are. He said, stories told only in speech are like mist in the sun.”
Zana smiled. “Tsi-afa-javona.”
Gwellyn informed them he was taking Lilee on the ship.
Jakob took him aside.
“They built the ship for six,” Gwellyn said. “There’s room for her.”
“That’s not the point,” Jakob said. “You can’t take a woman along on a ship that small with five men for a voyage that might take five, ten months—who knows, maybe more than a year.”
“Paschos doesn’t seem to be very interested in women,” Gwellyn said, “at least, not human women.”
“OK,” Jakob replied. “You can’t take a woman like that, so young and so beautiful, on a ship that small with four men. You understood that with Daralyn.”
“Lilee’s not Daralyn.”
“In regard to this problem, they are one and the same,” Jakob said. “Your loving Lilee doesn’t change that.”
“I’m taking her,” Gwellyn said.
But he made love to her that night, his soul pouring into hers, her spirit into his, and he wondered if this love, strong as it was, was a match for Jakob’s logic. As he looked at Lilee, so warm in his arms, and thought of Zana, Ibrim, any other man with her, he could see that taking her on the boat with them was a path to madness. He tried to put it out of his mind, but it reappeared with increasing ferocity. He would kill them all with his bare hands if they touched her…
“I came here once by the sea, I can come here again,” he told her. “And I will. I promise you, my love.”
And though she understood no word other than love and I in the Tocharian that Gwellyn spoke, she understood the tears in his eyes, the timbre of his voice, all too plainly…
She held him close, sobbed softly, and promised him and herself that she would wait for him, forever…
So there was no joy in Gwellyn’s heart when their ship left the shore at last. Room on the ship for six, was all he could say to himself, yet we bring only five…
And yet, within a month of their new voyage, as they approached the southern tip of the continent, Gwellyn had reason to be glad he had not taken Lilee along.
Each of the four men said a prayer, in their own language, as they consigned Zana’s body to the sea.
Ibrim shook his head sadly. “His people sailed the seas at great lengths,” he said. “The stories of his people are filled with these events. That he should die of some illness from the sea, after so short a voyage, is very strange.”
“We don’t know the illness came from the sea,” Paschos said. “For all we know, it came from one of us, or some place he visited, maybe the pit of bones.”
“But none of us has illness,” Gwellyn said.
“Sometimes a person can have an illness inside, and not get sick, but give it to other people,” Jakob said.
Gwellyn sighed. “I wonder if it was the same illness as my father’s. I wonder if it has anything to do with the singers and their bones. I wonder if all of us—the whole world—is cursed with this!” And inside he thought: I could not bear to see Lilee die. I’m glad, at least for that reason, she did not come on the ship.
Later, Gwellyn asked Jakob a question.
“Do you think it at all strange that we came upon the island by accident—that we were pursuing the singers in a completely different direction—yet we found a flute of the singers on the island anyway?”
“What are you saying, that you think Ibrim may have steered us to the island deliberately?” Jakob replied. “Why? To lay the groundwork for another conquest for Islam? But that still would not explain why we found the flute.”
“No, it would not,” Gwellyn agreed. “Only Ibrim—and maybe Islam—having some connection to the singers, to the flute, could explain that.”
Jakob considered. “There’s a better explanation.”
Gwellyn looked out at the water. “Yes?”
“It’s that the singers were in many more places in the world than at first we real
ized.”
FIVE
CARTHAGE, CIRCA A.D. 753
The boat constructed by Zana’s people was not as seaworthy as they had claimed…or the seas on the far side of Ifrica were more obstinate than the islanders had realized or remembered…or perhaps Ibrim wasn’t as good a navigator of Zana’s boat as Zana would have been…
The boat foundered at last on the north shore of the continent, having been blown far off course to the east as they clutched the coastline for protection from the storms. Ibrim had urged that they travel yet further east, until they found a spot suitable for repair of their vessel and restocking of their energy. Now they needed to travel a sizeable distance back over the western Mediterranean, retracing the last stretch of their voyage, just to reclaim their position on the way to the place the islanders had marked on their map.
Except they had no boat—it turned out to be quite beyond repair.
“Can we know that their map is any more reliable than their boat?” Gwellyn asked.
“We cannot,” Jakob replied. “But it makes no sense to give up having come this far.” The fifteen months of their voyage, its innumerable stops and starts at ports friendly and otherwise, had taken more of a toll on him than the younger men. Jakob had nearly died at one point; only Paschos’ bizarre medicine—“you fight the living death of illness with other living things”—had saved him. But Gwellyn was pleased to see that Jakob’s spirit still burned strong—like the lamps of light of his people celebrating the victory of Judas Maccabaeus over the Greeks. “Those Greeks,” Jakob often joked, “you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.”
The boat’s final foundering was not far from Carthage, once seat of the great maritime empire founded by Phoenicia, of alphabetic and purple-dyed fame. Carthage had long ago been absorbed by Rome—“Carthago delenda est,” Jakob had muttered—and later was capital city of the Vandals. More recently, Belisarius had reclaimed Carthage for the Second Rome of Byzantium, but now Islam had leveled most of it and was firmly in charge. “Which is why I say it’s good fortune for us to have landed near here,” Jakob concluded his historical summary for Gwellyn. “Ibrim will find many friends to help us on the last leg of our voyage.”
“This voyage has had too many last legs already,” Gwellyn grumbled. “We’re like a millipede.”
“Don’t let discouragement crush us, then,” Jakob replied.
Paschos approached them on a hilltop the inhabitants called Byrsa. “Ibrim’s making arrangements,” he said, and joined the two in their viewing of the ruins and the harbor. “These people stood at the edge of another world, didn’t they,” Paschos said. “They had the sea in the palm of their hand.”
“What went wrong?” Gwellyn asked.
“Something. This thing, that thing, another thing. Something always goes wrong. We know that now. It’s the way of civilizations. Something always undoes them. It’s almost not important what that thing is. Alexander dies too young. Rome gets lazy. Byzantium and Islam are in the ascendancy now. But that will pass too. Only humanity endures.”
“Do we?” Gwellyn asked.
“Well, we’re here talking about that now, aren’t we?” Paschos replied. “Humanity is the one thing common to Carthage, Alexander, Rome, Byzantium, and Islam—no reason to suppose we won’t still be around when newer glories arise.”
“I wonder if the singers thought that too,” Gwellyn said.
“Perhaps you’ll have a chance to ask them,” Paschos said. “One of Ibrim’s friends says he knows the place where the brutes still live.”
“THIS IS GOOD news,” Ibrim said to Gwellyn, Jakob, and Paschos as the four sipped wine on a quiet stone embankment by the partially ruined artificial lagoon which had once served as the mighty harbor of Carthage. “It confirms what the islanders told us.”
“Would have been better news if the singers had been seen right here.” Gwellyn gestured to the ruins of the Temple of Saturn Balcaranesis, the crown of the mountain chain on the horizon. “I’m tired of travelling.”
“You expect too much of Carthage,” Jakob said. “Look around you—it’s amazing anyone lives here at all now.”
“Carthage may rise again someday,” Paschos said. “It has come back before. But you’d be unlikely to find the singers near a place like this in any case—relics of the past tend to persist best in places least trodden.”
“Carthage is irrelevant now,” Ibrim agreed. “And when it wasn’t so, the Romans were right to destroy it, as was Hasan ibn en-Noman. But let me show you what my friend told me.” He produced a palm leaf with a map upon it. “You see where we are now?”
Gwellyn nodded.
Ibrim traced a route back to the west, beyond the Mediterranean, and then northward and to the east. “Here.” He made his own mark over the one already on the map. “My friend says they speak a language there like no other. They mine iron and live off the sea. They’ve been isolated from the rest of world for aeons by these mountains.” He drew a long straggly line under the two marks. He jabbed them with his brush. “Here are your singers!”
“Ah, Strabo’s Vascones,” Paschos said.
“The Roman Cantabria?” Jakob asked.
“I think that’s a bit to the west,” Ibrim replied, “though they could be the same.”
“Either way, that’s a big leap from speaking an unknown language to being the singers,” Gwellyn said. “The singers are not supposed to speak any language.”
“Still,” Paschos persisted, “that spot coincides pretty well with the general area indicated by the islanders on their map—it would be odd if that was just coincidence. And the Cantabrian access to the sea could explain how that flute might have ended up on the other side of Ifrica.”
“Then it would have to be a lot easier to travel north to south than south to north,” Gwellyn said, “or the singers would have to have been much better at shipcraft than the islanders.”
Jakob stroked his beard. “Both could be true, for all we know. Same about the singers speaking a language as well as singing. The point is we don’t actually know enough about them to rule any of this out.”
Paschos nodded. “Aristotle wrote a treatise about the peoples and languages of the world, and I believe he told of a people who lived by the sea beyond the sea in the west, with the mountains to their back, and they spoke an unknown language which had no words for abstract concepts. They could be the Vascones described later by Strabo.”
“Really?” Gwellyn asked. “I never heard of such a treatise—and I was well educated by my father in the Philosopher’s writings.”
Paschos sighed. “Not surprising. The catalog of Alexandria 220 years before the birth of Jesus Christos listed 186 different treatises by Aristotle—fewer than eighty are known today.”
“I heard fewer than sixty,” Ibrim said. “But what do I know?”
Paschos smiled. “Byzantium yet has some secrets.”
“Here is something which is no secret,” Jakob said. “Our funds are very low. How much will it cost us to get to this place between the sea and the mountains?”
Ibrim quoted the figure he had negotiated for a ship and a proper crew to take them there. “Believe me, it’s the best we can do,” he said.
Gwellyn scowled. He fingered the purse with the jewels he had purchased in Barbaricon with most of the money his father had given Jakob and him, a purse he kept close to his body at almost all times. “That will leave us paupers—with no means of return.”
THEY MOVED PAST the Pillars of Hercules again some eight weeks later. The sky was crystal azure this time—the storms that had obscured their entrance now long gone—and they could see the massive square castle on the Rock as clear as Ibrim’s beaming face when their ship passed by. “Jebel Tarik,” Ibrim said with pride, and Gwellyn thought he saw Paschos flinch in the periphery of his vision. What really occupied Gwellyn’s sight, though, were the group of singers standing on the edge of the Rock… He saw their bones, charred and pulverized, rise from
the ground and regain first their form and then their flesh and composure. And now they softened the ship’s passage with their flutes…“Europa,” Jakob said. And the sound of his voice caused the concert of flutes to vanish…
The Islamic ship Ibrim had chartered with a crew of six—plus his friend Aziz, who seemed to know so much about the singers—was far more sturdy than the craft the islanders had given them. It made the short but difficult distance to Cantabria without incident.
It turned immediately around after the four of them and Aziz had disembarked—Gwellyn’s gems having been sufficient for purchase of just a one-way trip. Aziz assured them that means would be at hand in the coastal settlements for the makings of a return trip. “If you want to go back,” he said. “Among those few who come here, most want to stay.” Gwellyn wondered if that was due to the persuasion of Cantabria or the dissuasion of the sea.
They made shore on the inside of a rocky peninsula, nestled against two mountain ranges, near a village that Aziz called Portus Victoriae. “To commemorate the victory of Marcus Agrippa and the Romans over the native Cantabrians,” Aziz advised. “If Allah allows, perhaps we’ll live to see the village with an Islamic name.”
There were all kinds of people in the village—spearheads of Islam, Christians fleeing the Islamic conquests from the east, Visigoths, children with faces of Rome, even faces of the original Cantabrian inhabitants who had long ago held off the Romans with ten years of disorganized but effective warfare, as Aziz explained. But none were the people with the strange language.
“Truthfully, their strongholds are further west,” Aziz said.
“So why did we land here?” Gwellyn asked.
“Because this was the furthest west that we could be assured of a safe port,” Aziz said. “These Vascones, as Paschos calls them, are not always friendly to outsiders, especially followers of Islam who come in a ship.”
The Silk Code Page 9