by Noah Gordon
“Ah, it is not,” she admitted, and this time smiled.
“Mary Margaret!” her father called sharply. She moved to him at once, a daughter accustomed to obeying.
Mary Margaret?
She must be near the age Anne Mary would be now, he realized uneasily. His sister’s hair was brown when she was a little girl, but there had been reddish tints …
The girl was not Anne Mary, he reminded himself firmly. He knew he must stop seeing his sister in every woman who wasn’t elderly, for it was the sort of pastime that might become a form of madness.
There was no need to dwell on it, since he had no real interest in James Cullen’s daughter. There were more than enough soft things in the world, and he decided that he’d stay away from this one.
Her father evidently determined to give him a second chance at conversation, perhaps because he hadn’t seen him talking again to the Jews. On their fifth night on the road James Cullen came to visit, bearing a jug of barley liquor, and Rob said words of welcome and accepted a friendly pull from the bottle.
“You know sheep, Master Cole?”
Cullen beamed when he said he didn’t, ready to educate him.
“There are sheep and there are sheep. In Kilmarnock, site of the Cullen holding, ewes often run as small as twelve stone in weight. I’m told that in the East we’ll find ewes twice that size, with long hair instead of short—denser fleece than the beasts of Scotland, so full of richness that when the wool is spun and made up into goods, it will shed rain.”
Cullen said he planned to buy breeding stock when he found the best, and bring it back to Kilmarnock with him.
That would take ready capital, a goodly amount of trading money, Rob told himself, and realized why Cullen needed packhorses. It might be better if the Scot also had bodyguards, he reflected.
“It’s a far journey you’re on. You’ll be a long time away from your sheep holding.”
“I left it in the reliable care of trusted kinsmen. It was a hard decision, but … Six months before I left Scotland I buried my wife of twenty-two years.” Cullen grimaced and put the jug to his mouth for a long swallow.
That would explain their rue, Rob thought. The barber-surgeon in him made him ask what had caused her to die.
Cullen coughed. “There were growths in both her breasts, hard lumps. She just grew pale and weak, lost appetite and will. Finally there was terrible pain. She took a time to die but was gone before I believed it could be so. Her name was Jura. Well… I stayed drunk for six weeks but found it no escape. For years I’d engaged in idle talk about buying fine stock in Anatolia, never thinking it would come to pass. I just decided to go.”
He offered the jug and didn’t seem offended when Rob shook his head. “Piss time,” he said, and smiled gently. He had already finished a large amount of the jug’s contents and when he attempted to clamber to his feet and leave, Rob had to assist him.
“A good night, Master Cullen. Please come again.”
“A good night, Master Cole.”
Watching him walk away unsteadily, Rob reflected that he hadn’t once mentioned his daughter.
The following afternoon a French factor named Felix Roux, thirty-eighth in the line of march, was thrown when his horse shied at a badger. He struck the ground badly, with the full weight of his body on his left forearm, breaking the bone so the limb hung askew. Kerl Fritta sent for the barber-surgeon, who set the bone and immobilized the arm, a painful procedure. Rob struggled to inform Roux that although the arm would give him hell’s pain when he rode, he would still be able to travel with the caravan. Finally he had to send for Seredy to tell the patient how to handle the sling.
He was thoughtful on his way back to his own wagon. He had agreed to treat sick travelers several times a week. Although he tipped Seredy generously, he knew he couldn’t continue to use James Cullen’s manservant as interpreter.
Back at his wagon, he saw Simon ben ha-Levi sitting on the ground nearby, mending a saddle cinch, and he walked up to the thin young Jew.
“Do you have French and German?”
The youth nodded while holding a saddle strap close to his mouth and biting off the waxed thread.
Rob talked and ha-Levi listened. In the end, since the terms were generous and the time required wasn’t great, he agreed to interpret for the barber-surgeon.
Rob was pleased. “How do you have so many languages?”
“We’re merchants between nations. We travel constantly, with family connections in the markets of many countries. Languages are part of our business. For example, young Tuveh is studying the language of the Mandarins, for in three years he’ll travel the Silk Road and go to work with my uncle’s firm.” His uncle, Issachar ben Nachum, he said, headed a large branch of their family in Kai Feng Fu, from which every three years he sent a caravan of silks, pepper, and other Oriental exotics to Meshed, in Persia. And every three years since he was a small boy, Simon and other males of his family had traveled from their home in Angora to Meshed, from which they accompanied a caravan of the rich goods back to the East Frankish Kingdom.
Rob J. felt a quickening within him. “You know the Persian language?”
“Of course. Parsi.”
Rob looked at him blankly.
“It’s called Parsi.”
“Will you teach it to me?”
Simon ben ha-Levi hesitated, because this was a different matter. This could take a good deal of his time.
“I’ll pay well.”
“Why do you want Parsi?”
“I’ll need the language when I reach Persia.”
“You want to do business on a regular basis? Return to Persia again and again to buy herbs and pharmaceuticals, the way we do for silks and spices?”
“Perhaps.” Rob J. shrugged, a gesture worthy of Meir ben Asher. “A bit of this, a little of that.”
Simon grinned. He began to scratch out a first lesson in the dirt with a stick, but it was unsatisfactory and Rob went to the wagon and got his drawing things and a clean round of beechwood. Simon started him in the Parsi language exactly as Mam had taught him to read English many years earlier, by teaching him the alphabet. Parsi letters were composed of dots and squiggly lines. Christ’s blood! The written language resembled pigeon shit, bird tracks, curled wood shavings, worms trying to fuck each other.
“I’ll never learn this,” he said, his heart sinking.
“You shall,” Simon said placidly.
Rob J. took the piece of wood back to the wagon. He ate his supper slowly, buying time in which to control his excitement, then he sat on the wagon seat and at once began to apply himself.
27
THE QUIET SENTRY
They emerged from the mountains to flat land that the Roman road divided with absolute straightness as far as the eye could see. On both sides of the road were fields with black soil. People were beginning to harvest grain and late vegetables; summer was over. They came to an enormous lake and followed its shoreline for three days, stopping overnight to buy provision at a shoreside town called Siofok. Not much of a town, sagging buildings and a crafty, cheating peasantry, but the lake—it was named Balaton—was an unworldly dream, water dark and hard-looking as a gem, giving off white mist as he waited early in the morning for the Jews to say their prayers.
The Jews were funny to watch. Strange creatures, they bobbed while they prayed and it seemed that God was juggling their heads, which went up and down at different times but seemed to work with a mysterious rhythm. When they were finished and he suggested that they swim with him, they made faces because of the chill but suddenly they were babbling to each other in their language. Meir said something and Simon nodded and turned away; he was camp guard. The others and Rob ran to the shore and threw off their clothes, splashing into the shallows like screaming children. Tuveh wasn’t a good swimmer and wallowed. Judah haCohen paddled feebly and Gershom ben Shemuel, who had a shocking-white round belly despite his sun-darkened face, floated on his back and bell
owed incomprehensible songs. Meir was a surprise. “Better than the mikva!” he shouted, gasping.
“What’s the mikva?” Rob asked, but the stocky man plunged beneath the surface and then began to move out from shore with strong, even strokes. Rob swam after him, thinking he would rather be with a female. He tried to recall women with whom he had swum. There were perhaps half a dozen and he had made love to each, before or after the swimming. Several times it had been in the water with the wetness lapping all around them …
He hadn’t touched a woman for five months, his longest period of abstention since Editha Lipton had guided him into the sexual world. He kicked and flailed in the water, which was very cold, trying to rid himself of the ache to fuck.
When he overtook Meir, he sent a great splash into the other man’s face.
Meir sputtered and coughed. “Christian!” he shouted ominously.
Rob splashed him again and Meir closed with him. Rob was taller but Meir was strong! He pushed Rob under, but Rob locked his fingers in the full beard and pulled the Jew under with him, down and down. As they sank it seemed as though tiny flecks of rime left the brown water and clung to him, cold on cold, until he felt clothed in a skin of icy silver.
Down.
Until, at the same moment, each panicked and decided he would drown for playfulness. They pushed apart to rise, and broke the surface gasping for air. Neither vanquished, neither victor, they swam back to shore together. When they left the water they trembled with a foretaste of autumn chill as they struggled to force wet bodies into their clothes. Meir had noted his circumcised penis and looked at him.
“A horse bit the tip off,” Rob said.
“A mare, no doubt,” Meir said solemnly; he muttered something to the others in their language, causing them to grin at Rob. The Jews wore curiously fringed garments next to their flesh. Naked, they had been as other men; clad, they reassumed their foreignness and were exotic creatures again. They caught Rob studying them but he didn’t ask them to explain the strange undergarments, and no one volunteered.
After they left the lake behind, the scenery suffered. Traveling down a straight and unending road, passing mile after mile of unchanging forest or a field that looked like all the other fields, soon became almost unbearable in its monotony. Rob J. took refuge in his imagination, visualizing the road as it had been soon after it was built, one via in a vast network of thousands that had allowed Rome to conquer the world. First there would have come scouts, an advance cavalry. Then the general in his chariot driven by a slave, surrounded by trumpeters both for panoply and signaling. Then on horseback the tribuni and the legati, the staff officers. They were followed by the legion, a forest of bristling javelins—ten cohorts of the most efficient fighting killers in history, six hundred men to a cohort, each one hundred legionnaires led by a centurion. And finally thousands of slaves doing what other brutes of labor could not, hauling the tormenta, the giant machinery of war that was the real reason for building the roads: enormous battering rams for leveling walls and fortifications, wicked catapulta to make the sky rain darts on an enemy, giant ballista, the slings of the gods, to send boulders through the air or launch great beams as if they were arrows. Finally, the carts laden with impedimenta, the baggage, would be trailed by wives and children, whores, traders, couriers, and government officials, the ants of history, living off the spoils of the Roman feast.
Now that army was legend and dream, those camp followers ancient dust, that government long gone, but the roads remained, indestructible highways that were sometimes so straight as to lull the mind.
The Cullen girl was walking near his wagon again, her horse tied to one of the pack animals.
“Will you join me, mistress? The wagon will be a change for you.”
She hesitated, but when he extended his hand she took it and allowed him to pull her up.
“Your cheek has healed nicely,” she observed. She colored but seemed unable to keep from talking. “There’s only the slightest silver line from the last of the scratches. With luck it will fade so there will be no scar.”
He felt his own face go hot and wished she wouldn’t examine his features.
“How did you come by the injury?”
“An encounter with highwaymen.”
Mary Cullen drew a deep breath. “I pray God to preserve us from such.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “Some are saying that Kerl Fritta himself started the rumors of Magyar bandits, in order to put fear into travelers and bring them flocking to join his caravan.”
Rob shrugged. “It’s not beyond Master Fritta to have done so, I think. The Magyars don’t appear threatening.” On either side of the road, men and women were harvesting cabbages.
They fell into a silence. Each bump in the road jostled them so he was constantly aware of the possibility of a soft hip and a firm thigh, and the scent of the girl’s flesh was like a faint warm spice lured out of berry bushes by the sun.
He who had cozened females the length and breadth of England heard his voice thicken when he tried to talk. “Have you always had your middle name of Margaret, Mistress Cullen?”
She regarded him in astonishment. “Always.”
“Can’t ever remember another name?”
“When I was a child my father called me Turtle, because sometimes I did this.” She blinked both her eyes slowly.
He was unnerved from wanting to touch her hair. Under the broad cheekbone of the left side of her face was a tiny scar, unseen unless you studied her, and it didn’t mar her appearance. He looked quickly away.
Ahead, her father twisted in the saddle and saw his daughter riding in the wagon. Cullen had witnessed Rob several more times in the company of the Jews, and his displeasure was in his voice when he called Mary Margaret’s name.
She prepared to leave. “What is your middle name, Master Cole?”
“Jeremy.”
Her nod was serious but her eyes mocked him. “Has it always been Jeremy, then? You can’t remember any other name?”
She gathered her skirts in one hand and leaped to the ground lightly as an animal. He caught a glimpse of white legs and slapped the reins against Horse’s back, furious with the knowledge that he was an object of amusement to her.
That evening after supper he sought out Simon for his second lesson and discovered that the Jews owned books. St. Botolph’s school, which he had attended as a boy, had owned three books, a Canon of the Bible and a New Testament, both in Latin, and in English a menology, a list of holy feast days prescribed for general observance by the King of England. Every page was vellum, made by treating the skins of lambs, calves, or kids. Each letter had been transcribed by hand, a monumental task that caused books to be expensive and rare.
The Jews appeared to have a great number of books—later he found that there were seven—in a small chest of worked leather.
Simon selected one that was written in Parsi and they spent the lesson examining it, Rob searching out specific letters in the text as Simon called for them. He had learned the Parsi alphabet quickly and well. Simon praised him and read a passage of the book so Rob could hear the melodiousness of the language. He stopped after each word and had Rob repeat it.
“What is this book called?”
“It is the Qu’ran, their Bible,” Simon said, and he translated:
“Glory to God Most High, full of Grace and Mercy;
He created All, including Man.
To Man He gave a special place in His Creation.
He honored Man to be His Agent,
And to that end, imbued him with understanding,
Purified his affections, and gave him spiritual insight.
“I shall give you a list each day, ten Persian words and expressions,” Simon said. “You must commit them to your memory for the following day’s lesson.”
“Give me twenty-five words every day,” Rob said, for he knew he would have his teacher only as far as Constantinople.
Simon smiled. “Twenty-five, then.”
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Next day Rob learned the words easily, for the road was still straight and smooth and Horse was able to plod with loose reins while his master sat in the driver’s seat and studied. But Rob saw a wasted opportunity, and after that day’s lesson he asked Meir ben Asher’s permission to carry the Persian book to his own wagon, so he might study it all through the empty day of travel.
Meir refused firmly. “The book must never leave our sight. You may read it only in our close company.”
“May not Simon ride in the wagon with me?”
He felt certain Meir was about to say no again, but Simon spoke up. “I could use the time to prove the account books,” he said.
Meir considered.
“This one is going to be a fierce scholar,” Simon said quietly. “There’s already in him a ravenous appetite for study.”
The Jews regarded Rob in a way that was somehow different than heretofore. Finally Meir nodded. “You may take the book to your wagon,” he said.
That night he fell asleep wishing it were the next day, and in the morning he awoke early and eager, with a sense of anticipation that was almost painful. The waiting was more difficult because he could witness every one of the Jews’ slow preparations for the day: Simon going into the woods to empty bladder and bowels, yawning Meir and Tuveh ambling to the brook to wash, all of them bobbing and muttering at morning prayer, Gershom and Judah serving up their bread and gruel.
No lover ever awaited maiden with more yearning impatience. “Come, come, you slow-foot, you Hebrew dawdler,” he muttered, going over his day’s lesson of Persian vocabulary one final time.
When finally Simon came he was laden with the Persian book, a heavy account ledger, and a peculiar wooden frame containing columns of beads strung on narrow wooden rods.
“What’s that?”
“An abacus. A counting device, useful when doing sums,” Simon said.
After the caravan got under way it was apparent that the new arrangement was workable. Despite the relative smoothness of the road, the wagon wheels rolled over stones and writing was impractical; but it was easy to read, and each of them settled into his work as they moved through mile after mile of countryside.