The Journeyer

by Gary Jennings

  Never having been in a masjid, I did not know what to expect, but I was vaguely surprised to find it absolutely unlighted and empty of worshipers or anybody else. All I could see in the dim interior was a row of immense stoneware jars, nearly as tall as I was, standing against one wall. The boys led me to the jar at the end of the row and bade me get into it.

  I had been slightly apprehensive—being outnumbered and half nude and not in full command of myself—that the juvenile Sodomites perhaps had designs upon my body, and I was prepared to fight. But what they proposed struck me as more hilarious than outrageous. When I asked for an explanation, they simply continued to motion at the massive jar, and I was too fuddled to balk. Instead, even while laughing at the preposterousness of what I was doing, I let the boys boost me up to a sitting position on the lip of the jar, and swung my feet over and let myself down into it.

  Not until I was inside it did I perceive that the jar contained a fluid, because there was no splash or sudden feeling of coldness or wetness. But the jar was at least half filled with oil, so nearly at body warmth that I hardly felt it until my immersion raised its level to my throat. It really felt rather pleasant: emollient and enveloping and smooth and soothing, especially around my tired legs and my sensitively exposed private parts. That realization roused me a little. Was this a prelude peculiar to some strange and exotic sexual rite? Well, thus far at least, it felt good and I did not complain.

  Only my head protruded from the collar of the jar, and my fingers still rested on its rim. The boys laughingly pushed my hands inside with me, and then produced something they must have found nearby: a large disk of wood with hinges, rather like a portable pillory. Before I could protest or dodge, they fitted the thing around my neck and closed it shut. It made a lid for the jar I stood in, and, though it was not uncomfortably constrictive around my neck, it somehow had clamped onto the jar so securely that I could not dislodge or lift it.

  “What is this?” I demanded, as I sloshed my arms around inside the jar and vainly shoved upward against the wooden lid. I could slosh and shove only slowly, as sometimes one moves in a dream, because of the warm oil’s viscosity. My confused senses finally registered the sesame smell of that oil. Like the figs I had earlier been made to eat, I had apparently been put to steep in sesame oil. “What is this?” I shouted again.

  “Va istadan! Attendez!” commanded the boys, making gestures for me to stand patient in my jar and wait.

  “Wait?” I bellowed. “Wait for what?”

  “Attendez le sorcier,” said Naser with a giggle. Then he and Daud ran out through the gray oblong that was the door to the outside.

  “Wait for the wizard?” I repeated in mystification. “Wait for how long?”

  Ibrahim lingered long enough to hold up some fingers for me to count. I peered through the gloom and saw that he had splayed the fingers of both hands.

  “Ten?” I said. “Ten what?” He too edged backward toward the door, meanwhile closing his fingers and flicking them open again—four times. “Forty?” I said desperately. “Forty what? Quarante à propos de quoi?”

  “Chihil ruz,” he said. “Quarante jours.” And he disappeared out the door.

  “Wait for forty days?” I wailed, but got no answer.

  All three boys were gone and, it seemed evident, not just to hide from me for a while. I was left alone in my pickling jar in the dark room, with the smell of the sesame oil in my nose, and the loathsome taste of figs and sesame in my mouth, and still a whirl of confusion in my mind. I tried hard to think what all this meant. Wait for the wizard? No doubt it was a boyish prank, something to do with Arab custom. The khane landlord Ishaq would probably explain it to me, with many a laugh at my gullibility. But what kind of prank could keep me immured for forty days? I would miss tomorrow’s ship and be marooned in Acre, and Ishaq would have ample time to explain Arab customs to me at leisure. Or would I have vanished in the clutches of the wizard? Did the infidel Muslim religion, unlike the rectitudinous Christian, allow wizards to practice their evil arts unmolested? I tried to imagine what a Muslim wizard would want with a bottled Christian. I hoped I would not find out. Would my father and uncle come looking for me before they sailed? Would they find me before the wizard did? Would anybody?

  Just then somebody did. A shadowy shape, larger than any of the boys, loomed in the gray doorway. It paused there, as if waiting for its eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then moved slowly toward my jar. It was tall and bulky—and ominous. I felt as if I were contracting, or shriveling, inside the jar, and wished I could retract my head below the lid.

  When the man got close enough, I saw that he wore clothes of the Arab style, except that he had no cords binding his headcloth. He had a curly red-gray beard like a sort of fungus, and he stared at me with bright blackberry eyes. When he spoke the traditional greeting of peace-be-with-you, I noticed even in my befuddlement that he pronounced it slightly differently from the Arab manner: “Shalom aleichem.”

  “Are you the wizard?” I whispered, so frightened that I said it in Venetian. I cleared my throat and repeated it in French.

  “Do I look like a wizard?” he demanded in a rasping voice.

  “No,” I whispered, though I had no idea what a wizard ought to look like. I cleared my throat again and said, “You look more like someone I used to know.”

  “And you,” he said scornfully, “seem to seek out smaller and ever smaller prison cells.”

  “How did you know—?”

  “I saw those three little mamzarim manhandle you in here. This place is well and infamously known.”

  “I meant—”

  “And I saw them leave again without you, just the three of them. You would not be the first fair-haired and blue-eyed lad to come in here and never come out again.”

  “Surely there are not many hereabouts with eyes and hair not black.”

  “Precisely. You are a rarity in these parts, and the oracle must speak through a rarity.”

  I was already confused enough. I think I just blinked at him. He bent down out of my sight for a moment, and then reappeared, holding the leather bag that Naser must have dropped when he departed. The man reached into it and took out an oil-dripping fig. I nearly retched at sight of it.

  “They find such a boy,” he said. “They bring him here and soak him in sesame oil, and they feed him only these oil-soaked figs. At the end of forty days and nights, he has become macerated as soft as a fig. So soft that his head can be easily lifted off his body.” He demonstrated, twisting the fig in his fingers so that, with a squishy noise just barely audible, it came in two.

  “Whatever for?” I said breathlessly. I seemed to feel my body softening below the wooden lid, becoming waxy and malleable like the fig, already sagging, preparing to part from my neck stump with a squishy noise and sink slowly to rest on the bottom of the jar. “I mean, why kill a perfect stranger, and in such a way?”

  “It does not kill him, so they say. It is an affair of black sorcery.” He dropped the bag and the pieces of fig and wiped his fingers on the hem of his gown. “At any rate, the head part of him goes on living.”

  “What?”

  “The wizard props the severed head in that niche in the wall yonder, on a comfortable bed of olivewood ashes. He burns incense before it, and chants magic words, and after a while the head speaks. On command, it will foretell famines or bounteous harvests, forthcoming wars or times of peace, all manner of useful prophecies like that.”

  I began to laugh, at last realizing that he was merely joining in the prank that had been played on me, and prolonging it.

  “Very well,” I said between laughs. “You have paralyzed me with terror, old cellmate. I am uncontrollably pissing and adulterating this fine oil. But now, enough. When I last saw you, Mordecai, I did not know you would flee this far from Venice. But you are here, and I am glad to see you, and you have had your joke. Now release me, and we will go and drink a qahwah together and talk of our adventures since last we
met.” He did not move; he simply stood and looked sorrowfully at me. “Mordecai, enough!”

  “My name is Levi,” he said. “Poor lad, you are already ensorceled to the point of derangement.”

  “Mordecai, Levi, whoever you are!” I ranted, beginning to feel a touch of panic. “Lift this accursed lid and let me out!”

  “I? I will not touch that terephah uncleanness,” he said, fastidiously taking a step backward. “I am not a filthy Arab. I am a Jew.”

  My disquiet and anger and exasperation were beginning to clear my head, but they were not influencing me to be tactful. I said, “Did you come here, then, only to entertain me in my confinement? Are you going to leave me here for the idiot Arabs? Is a Jew as idiotically superstitious as they are?”

  He grunted, “Al tidàg,” and left me. He trudged across the chamber and out through the gray doorway opening. I looked after him, appalled. Did al tidàg mean something like be-damned-to-you? He was probably my only hope of rescue, and I had insulted him.

  But he came back almost immediately, and he was carrying a heavy bar of metal. “Al tidàg,” he said again, and then thought to translate: “Do not worry. I will get you out, as I am bidden, but I must do it without touching the uncleanness. Happily for you, I am a blacksmith, and my smithy is just across the way. This bar will do it. Stand firm, now, young Marco, so you do not fall when it breaks.”

  He swung the bar and, at the moment it crashed against the jar, he leapt well to one side, so that his garments would not be defiled by the resultant cascade of oil. The jar shattered with a great noise, and I swayed unsteadily, as the pieces and all the oil fell away from me. The wooden lid suddenly weighed heavily on my neck. But, since I could now reach my hands to the upper surface of it, I quickly found and undid the catches that held it closed, and I dropped the wooden disk in the spreading pool of oil at my feet.

  “Will you not get into trouble over this?” I asked, indicating the mess all about us. Very elaborately, Levi shrugged his shoulders, his hands and his fungoid eyebrows. I went on, “You called me by name, and you said something about having been bidden to rescue me from this danger.”

  “Not from this danger specifically,” he said. “The word was merely to try to keep Marco Polo out of trouble. There were also some words of description—that you could easily be recognized by your proximity to the nearest available trouble.”

  “That is interesting. The word from whom?”

  “I have no idea. I gather that you once helped some Jew get out of a bad spot. And the proverb says that the reward of a mitzva is another mitzva.”

  “Ah, as I suspected: old Mordecai Cartafilo.”

  Levi said, almost peevishly, “That could be no Jew. Mordecai is a name from ancient Babylon. And Cartafilo is a gentile name.”

  “He said he was a Jew, and so he seemed to be, and that was the name he used.”

  “Next you will say that he wandered, as well.”

  Puzzled, I said, “Well, he did tell me that he had traveled extensively.”

  “Khakma,” he said, which rasping noise I took to be a word of derision. “That is a fable concocted by fabulists of the goyim. There is not one immortal wandering Jew. The Lamed-vav are mortal, but there are always thirty-six of them going secretly and helpfully about the world.”

  I was disinclined to linger in that dark place while Levi argued about fables. I said, “You are a fine one to sneer at fabulists, after your ludicrous tale of wizards and talking heads.”

  He gave me a long look, and scratched thoughtfully in his curly beard. “Ludicrous?” He held out to me his metal bar. “Here. I do not wish to put my feet in the oil. You break the next jar in the row.”

  I hesitated for a moment. Even if this place was just an ordinary masjid house of worship, we had already considerably desecrated it. But then I thought: one jar, two jars, what matter? And I swung the bar as hard as I could, and the second jar broke with a brittle smash, and loosed its surge of sesame oil with a splash, and something else hit the ground with a thick, moist thud. I bent over to see it better, and then hastily recoiled, and said to Levi, “Come, let us go away.”

  On the threshold I found my hose where I had discarded them, and I gratefully put them on again. I did not mind that they got instantly soaked with the oil clinging to me; the rest of my garb already was sopping and clammy. I thanked Levi for his having rescued me, and for his explication of Arabian sorcery. He bade me “lechàim and bon voyage,” and cautioned me not to depend on the relayed word of a nonexistent Jew to keep me forever out of every trouble. Then he went off to his forge and I hastened back toward the inn, looking repeatedly over my shoulder in case I should be seen and pursued by the three Arab boys or the wizard for whom they had captured me. I no longer believed the adventure to have been a prank, and I no longer contemned the sorcery as a fable.

  When Levi watched me break that second jar, he did not ask me what it was I bent to peer at among its shards, and I did not try to tell him, and I cannot tell it clearly even yet. The place was very dark, as I have said. But the object that fell onto the ground with that sickening wet plop was a human body. What I saw and can tell about it is that the corpse was naked, and had been a male, not full grown to manhood. Also it lay oddly on the ground, like a sack made of skin, a sack that had been emptied of its contents. I mean it looked more than soft, it looked flaccid, as if somehow all its bones had been extracted, or dissolved. The only other thing I could see was that the body had no head. I have never since that time been able to eat figs or anything flavored with sesame.

  5

  THE next afternoon, my father paid our bill to landlord Ishaq, who accepted the money with the words, “May Allah smother you with gifts, Sheikh Folo, and repay every generous act of yours.” And my uncle distributed to the khane servants the gratuities of smaller money, which are in all the East called by the Farsi word bakhshish. He gave the largest amount to the hammam rubber who had introduced him to the mumum ointment, and that young man thanked him with the words, “May Allah conduct you through every hazard and keep you ever smiling.” And all the staff, Ishaq and the servants together, stood in the inn door to wave after us with many other cries:

  “May Allah flatten the road before you!”

  “May you travel as upon a silken carpet!” and the like.

  So our expedition proceeded northward up the Levantine coast, and I congratulated myself on having got out of Acre intact, and I trusted that I had had my one and last encounter with sorcery.

  That short sea voyage was unremarkable, as we stayed in sight of the shore the whole way, and that shore is everywhere much the same to look at: dun-colored dunes with dun-colored hills behind them, the occasional dun-colored mud hut or village of mud huts almost imperceptible against the landscape. The cities we sailed past were slightly more distinguishable, since each was marked by a Crusaders’ castle. The most noticeable from the sea was the city of Beirut, it being sizable and set upon an outjutting point of land, but I judged it to be inferior, as a city, even to Acre.

  My father and uncle occupied themselves on shipboard with making lists of the equipment and supplies they should have to procure in Suvediye. I occupied myself mainly in chatting with the crew; although most of them were Englishmen, they of course spoke the Sabir of travelers and traders. The Brothers Guglielmo and Nicolò occupied themselves in talking to each other, and talking endlessly, about the iniquities of Acre and how thankful they were to God for His having let them decamp from there. Of all the complaints they might have aired in regard to Acre, they seemed most exercised about the unchaste and licentious behavior of the resident Clarissas and Carmelitas. But, from what I overheard of their lamentations, they sounded more like hurt husbands or rejected suitors of those nuns than like their brothers in Christ. Lest I sound disrespectful of a noble calling, I will say no more about my impressions of the two friars. For they deserted our expedition before we got any farther than Suvediye.

  That city was a poor and s
mall place. To judge from the ruins and remains of a much larger city standing around it, Suvediye had gradually been reduced from what grandeur it may have had in Roman times, or perhaps earlier, when Alexander had come its way. The reason for its diminishment was not far to seek. Our own ship, not a large one, had to anchor well out in the little bay, and we passengers had to be brought ashore in a skiff, because the harbor was so badly silted and shallowed by the outflow of the Orontes River there. I do not know if Suvediye still is a functioning seaport, but at that time it clearly did not have very many more years in which to be so.

  For all the city’s puniness and poor prospects, Suvediye’s inhabitant Armeniyans seemed to regard it as the equal of a Venice or a Bruges. Though only one other ship was anchored there when ours arrived, the port officials behaved as if their harbor roads were thronged with vessels, and all requiring the most scrupulous attention. A fat and greasy Armeniyan inspector came bustling aboard, his arms laden with papers, while we five passengers were in the process of debarking. He insisted on counting us—five—and all our packs and bundles, and entered the numbers in a ledger. Then he let us go, and began to pester the English captain for the information with which to fill out innumerable other manifests of cargo, origin, destination and so forth.

  There was no Crusaders’ castle in Suvediye, so we five—pushing our way through the city’s throngs of beggars—went directly to the palace of the Ostikan, or governor, to present our letters from Prince Edward. I charitably call the Ostikan’s residence a palace; it was in fact a rather shabby building, but it was respectable in extent and two stories in height. After numerous entry guards and reception clerks and under-officials had severally demonstrated their importance, each of them delaying us with an officious show of fuss, we were finally conducted into the palace throne room. I charitably call it a throne room, for the Ostikan sat on no imposing throne, but lolled on what is called a daiwan, which is only a heap of cushions. In spite of the day’s warmth, he repeatedly rubbed his hands over a brazier of coals before him. In a corner, a young man sat on the floor, using a large knife to cut his toenails. Those nails must have been exceedingly horny; each gave a loud thwack as it was cut off, and then went whiz and fell elsewhere in the room with an audible click.