The Journeyer

by Gary Jennings

  “And here is a manservant for each of you,” said the Wazir Jamshid, producing three lissome, beardless young men. “They are all expert in the Indian art of champna, which they will perform for you after you have been to the hammam.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Uncle Mafìo, sounding pleased. “We have not enjoyed a shampoo, Nico, since we came through Tazhikistan.”

  So again we had the thorough cleansing and refreshment of a hammam, an elegantly appointed one this time, in which our three young men served as our rubbers. And afterward we lay nude on our separate beds in our separate rooms for what was called the champna—or shampoo, as my uncle had pronounced it. I had no idea what to expect; it had sounded like a dance performance. But it proved to be a vigorous rubbing and pummeling and kneading of my entire body, more energetically done than the hammam rubbing, and with the intent not of extruding dirt from the skin, but of exercising every part in a manner to make one feel even healthier and more invigorated than a hammam bath can do.

  My young servant, Karim, pounded and pinched and tweaked me, and at first it was painful. But after a while, my muscles and joints and sinews, stiffened by long riding, began to uncoil and unknot under that assault, and gradually I lay at ease and enjoyed it, and felt myself beginning to tingle with vitality. As a matter of fact, one impertinent part of me became obtrusively alive, and I was embarrassed. Then I was startled, for Karim with an evidently practiced hand started to exercise that also.

  “I can do that for myself,” I snapped, “if I deem it necessary.”

  He shrugged delicately and said, “As the Mirza commands. When the Mirza commands,” and concentrated on less intimate parts of me.

  He finished the mauling at last, and I lay half wanting to doze, half wanting to leap up and do athletic feats, and he asked to be excused.

  “To attend the Mirza your uncle,” he explained. “For such a massive man, it will require all three of us to give him an adequate champna.”

  I graciously gave him leave, and abandoned myself to my drowsiness. I think my father also slept the afternoon away, but Uncle Mafìo must have had a most thorough working-over, for the three young men were just leaving his room when Jamshid came to see us dressed for the evening meal. He brought for us new and myrrh-scented clothing of the Persian style: the lightweight pai-jamah, and loose shirts with tight cuffs, and, to wear over the shirts, beautifully embroidered short waistcoats, and kamarbands to go tightly about our waists, and silk shoes with upturned, curly, pointed toes, and tulbands instead of hanging kaffiyah headcloths. My father and uncle each proficiently and neatly wound his tulband around his head, but young Karim had to instruct me in the winding and tucking of mine. When we were dressed, we all looked exceptionally handsome and nobly Mirza and genuinely Persian.

  2

  WAZIR Jamshid led us to a large but not overpowering dining hall, lighted with torches and ringed about with servants and attendants. They were all males, and only the Shah Zaman joined us at the sumptuously laid dining cloth. I was rather relieved to see that the palace household was not so unorthodox that females were allowed to violate Muslim custom and routinely sit down to eat with men. We and the Shah had a meal uninterrupted by the facundities of the Shahryar, and he only once referred to her:

  “The First Wife, being of royal Sabaean blood, has never reconciled herself to the fact that this Shahnate was heretofore subordinate to the Qalif and now is subordinate to the Khanate. Like a fine-bred Arabian mare, the Shahryar Zahd bucks at being harnessed. But otherwise she is an excellent consort, and more tender than the tail of a fat-tailed sheep.”

  His barnyard similes perhaps explained, but to my mind did not excuse, her seeming to be the cock of that yard, and he the much-pecked hen. Nevertheless, the Shah was a congenial fellow, and he drank with us like a Christian, and he was a knowledgeable conversationalist when he was unencumbered of his wife. At my remark that I was thrilled to be following the trails which Alexander the Great had trodden, the Shah said:

  “Those trails of his ended not far from here, you know, after Alexander had returned from his conquest of India’s Kashmir and Sind and the Panjab. Only fourteen farsakhs south of here are the ruins of Babylon, where he died. Of a fever brought on, it is said, by his having drunk too much of our wine of Shiraz.”

  I thanked the Shah for the information, but I privately wondered how anyone could drink a killing amount of that sticky liquid. Even in Venice I had heard travelers extol their remembrance of the wine of Shiraz, and it is much praised in song and fable, but we were drinking it at that very meal, and I thought it fell far short of its reputation. That wine is an unappetizing orange in color, and cloyingly sweet, and thick as treacle. A man would have to be determined on drunkenness, I decided, to drink very much of it.

  The other elements of the meal, though, were unqualifiedly superb. There was chicken cooked in pomegranate juice, and lamb cubed and marinated and broiled in a manner called kabab, and a rose-flavored sharbat cold with snow, and a billowy, trembling confection like a fluffed-up nougat, made of fine white flour, cream, honey, daintily flavored with oil of pistachio, and called a balesh. After the meal, we lolled among our cushions and sipped an exquisite liqueur expressed from rose petals, while we watched two court wrestlers, naked and shiny and slippery with almond oil, try to bend each other double or break each other in half. Then, when they had escaped the performance unharmed, we listened to a court minstrel play on a stringed instrument called al-ud, very like a lute, while he recited Persian poems, of which I can recall only that their every line ended in a mouselike squeak or a mournful sob.

  When that torment was concluded, I was given leave by the elder men to go and amuse myself, if I wished. I did so, leaving my father and uncle discussing with the Shah the various land and water routes they might take after Baghdad. I left the room and walked down a long corridor, where were many closed doors guarded by giant men holding spears or shimshir sabers. They all wore the sort of helmet I had seen at the palace gates, but some of the guards had faces of African black or Arab brown, ill according with the helmets’ gold-sculptured tresses.

  At the end of the corridor was an unguarded archway giving onto the outdoor garden, and I went there. The smooth gravel pathways and lush flower beds were softly illuminated by a full moon that was like a great pearl displayed on the black velvet of the night. I wandered idly about, admiring the unfamiliar blooms made even more new to me by the pearl light shining on them. Then I came to something so novel as to be astonishing: a flower bed that was visibly and all on its own doing something. I stopped to watch and ponder what appeared to be an unvegetably deliberate behavior. The flower bed was a tremendous circular area, divided piewise into twelve slices, each segment planted densely with a different variety of flowers. All of them were at the blooming stage, but in ten of the slices the flowers had closed their blossoms, as many flowers do at night. However, in one segment, some pale pink flowers were just then folding their petals, and in the adjoining segment some large white flowers were at the same time just opening their blossoms and loosing on the night a heady perfume.

  “It is the gulsa’at,” said a voice that might also have been perfumed. I turned to see the young and comely Shahzrad and, standing some way behind her, the aged grandmother. Princess Moth went on, “Gulsa’at means the flower dial. In your country, you have sand glasses and water glasses to tell the hours, do you not?”

  “Yes, Shahzrad Magas Mirza,” I said, taking care to use her whole regalia of address.

  “You may call me Moth,” she said, with a sweet smile visible through her sheer chador. She indicated the gulsa’at. “This flower dial also tells the hours, but it never has to be turned or refilled. Each kind of flower in that round bed naturally opens at a certain hour of the day or night, and closes at another. They are selected for their regularity of habit, and planted here in proper sequence and—lo! They silently announce each of the twelve hours we count from sunset to sunset.”

  I said
daringly, “It is a thing as beautiful as you are, Princess Moth.”

  “My father the Shah takes a delight in measuring time,” she said. “Yonder is the palace masjid in which we worship, but it is also a calendar. In one wall it has openings so the sun in its rounds shines its light each dawn through one after another to tell the day and the month.”

  Somewhat similarly, I was sidling around the girl, to put her between me and the moon, so its light shone through her filmy garments and outlined her delectable body. The old grandmother evidently perceived my intention, for she grinned her gums evilly at me.

  “And yonder, beyond,” the Princess continued, “is the anderun where reside all my father’s other wives and concubines. He has more than three hundred, so he can have a different one almost every night of the year if he chooses. However, he prefers my mother, the First Wife, except that she talks all night. So he only takes one of the others to bed when he wishes to have a good night’s sleep.”

  Looking at the Shahzrad’s moon-revealed body, I felt my own body again stirring as vivaciously as it had done during the champna. I was glad I was not wearing tight Venetian hose, or I would have bulged them most disgracefully. Dressed as I was in ample pai-jamah, I did not think my arousal could have been visible. But the Princess Moth must have sensed it anyway, for to my shocked amazement she said:

  “You would like to take me to bed and make zina, would you not?”

  I stammered and stuttered, and managed to say, “Surely you should not speak so, Princess, in the presence of your royal grandmother! I assume she is your”—I did not know the Farsi word, so I said it in French—“your chaperon?”

  The Shahzrad made an airy gesture. “The old woman is as deaf as that gulsa’at. Be not concerned, but answer me. You would like to put your zab into my mihrab, no?”

  I swallowed and gulped. “I could hardly be so presumptuous … I mean, a Royal Highness …”

  She nodded and said briskly, “I believe we can arrange something of the sort. No, do not grab at me. The grandmother can see, if she cannot hear. We must be discreet. I will ask my father’s permission to be your guide while you are here, to show you the delights of Baghdad. I can be a very good guide to those delights. You will see.”

  And with that, she drifted away down the moonlit garden, leaving me shaken and shaking. I might say vibrant. When I tottered to my room, Karim was waiting to help me doff the unfamiliar Persian clothes, and he laughed and made noises of admiration and said:

  “Surely now the young Mirza will allow me to complete the relaxing champna!” and he poured almond oil into his hand, and he did so with expertness, and I fell languidly into sleep.

  The next day I slept late, and so did my father and uncle, for their consultation with Shah Zaman had lasted well into the night. As we ate our breakfast meal, brought by the servants to our suite, they told me that they were contemplating the Shah’s suggestion that we go by sea as far as the Indies. But they would first have to find out if it was practicable. They would each go to one of the Gulf ports—my father to Hormuz, my uncle to Basra—and see if, as the Shah believed, an Arab trader-captain could be persuaded to allow passage to us rival Venetian traders.

  “When we have investigated,” said my father, “we will regather here in Baghdad, because the Shah will be wanting us to carry many gifts from him to the Khakhan. So you, Marco, can come along with either one of us to the Gulf, or you can await our return here.”

  Thinking of the Shahzrad Magas, but having the good sense not to mention her, I said I thought I would stay. I would take the opportunity to get better acquainted with Baghdad.

  Uncle Mafìo snorted. “In the way that you got so well acquainted with Venice when we were last away? Truly, not so very many Venetians get to know the interior of the Vulcano.” To my father he said, “Is it prudent, Nico, to leave this malanòso alone in an alien city?”

  “Alone?” I protested. “I have the servant Karim and”—I again refrained from mentioning the Princess Moth—“and the whole palace guard.”

  “They are responsible to the Shah, not to you or us,” said my father. “If you should get into trouble again …”

  I indignantly reminded him that my most recent trouble had involved my saving them from being slaughtered in their sleep, and they had praised me for it, and that was why I was still in their company, and—

  My father sternly interrupted with a proverb, “One sees better backwards than forwards. We are not going to set a warden over you, my boy. But I think it would be a good idea to buy a slave to be your personal servant and see to your best interests. We will go to the bazàr.”

  The melancholy Wazir Jamshid walked with us, to interpret for us if our command of Farsi should prove inadequate. Along the way he explained several curious things I was seeing for the first time. For example, in eyeing the other men on the streets, I observed that they did not allow their blue-black beards to go gray or white as they aged. Every elderly man I saw had a beard of a violent pink-orange color, like Shiraz wine. Jamshid told me that it was done with a dye made from the leaves of a shrub called hinna, and he said the hinna was also much used by women as a cosmetic and by carters to adorn their horses. I should mention that the horses used in Baghdad for carriage and cartage are not the fine Arabians used for riding. They are tiny little ponies, not much bigger than mastiff dogs, and they do look very pretty with their flowing manes and tails dyed that brilliant pink-orange color.

  There were, on the Baghdad streets, men of many other nations than Persia. Some wore Western clothes and had faces, like ours, that would have been white had they not been sun-darkened. Some had black faces, some brown, some a sort of tan-yellow hue, and there were many whose faces were like weathered leather. Those were the Mongols of the occupying garrison, all dressed in armor of varnished hides or metal chain mail, and striding contemptuously through the street crowds, shoving aside anybody who stepped in their way. Also on the streets were many women, also of various complexions, the Persians only lightly veiled, and others not wearing chador at all, a strange thing to see in a Muslim city. But, even in liberal Baghdad, no woman walked alone; whatever her race or nationality, she was attended either by one or several other women or by a male attendant of considerable bulk and beardless face.

  I was so bedazzled by the Baghdad bazàr that I could hardly believe the city had been conquered and plundered and held to tribute by the Mongols. It must have recovered commendably from its recent impoverishment, for it was the richest and most thriving center of commerce I had yet seen, far surpassing every marketplace of Venice in the variety and abundance and value of the goods for sale.

  The cloth merchants stood proudly among bales and bolts of fabrics woven of silk and wool and Ankara-goat hair and cotton and linen and fine camel hair and sturdier camelot. There were more exotic Eastern fabrics like mussoline from Mosul and dungri from India and bokhram from Bukhara and demesq from Damascus. The book merchants displayed volumes of fine vellum and parchment and paper, gorgeously engrossed in many colors and gold leaf besides. Most of the books, being copies of the works of Persian authors like Sadi and Nimazi, and of course written in Farsi and rendered in the convulsed-worm Arabic lettering, were incomprehensible to me. But one of them, titled Iskandarnama, I could recognize from its illuminations as being a Persian version of my favorite reading, The Book of Alexander.

  The bazàr’s apothecaries stocked jars and phials of cosmetics for men and women: black al-kohl and green malachite and brown summaq and red hinna and eye-brightening collyrium washes, and perfumes of nard and myrrh and frankincense and rose attar. There were tiny bags of an almost impalpably fine grit which Jamshid said was fern seed, to be employed by those who knew the proper accompaniment of magical incantations, to make their corporeal persons invisible. There was an oil called teryak, expressed from the petals and pods of poppy flowers, which Jamshid said physicians prescribed for the relief of cramps and other pains, but which any person depressed by age or miser
y could buy and drink as an easy way out of an unbearable life.

  The bazàr was also shiny and glittering and coruscating with precious metals and gems and jewelry. But of all the treasures for sale there, I was most taken with a particular sort. There was a merchant who dealt exclusively in sets of a certain board game. In Venice it is unimaginatively called the Game of Squares, and it is played with cheap pieces carved of ordinary woods. In Persia that game is called the War of the Shahi, and the playing sets are works of art, priced beyond the reach of all but a real Shah or someone of equal wealth. A typical board offered for sale by that Baghdad merchant was of alternate ebony and ivory squares, expensive all by itself. The pieces on one side of it—the Shah and his General, the two elephants, the two horsemen, the two rukhi warriors and the eight peyadeh foot soldiers—were made of gem-encrusted gold, the sixteen facing pieces across the board being of gem-encrusted silver. The price asked for that set I cannot remember, but it was staggering. He had other Shahi sets variously fashioned of porcelain and jade and rare woods and pure crystal, and all of those pieces were sculptured as exquisitely as if they had been miniature statues of living monarchs and generals and their men at arms.

  There were merchants of livestock—of horses and ponies and asses and camels, of course, but also of other beasts. Some of them I had known only by repute and never seen before that day, such as a big and shaggy bear, which I thought resembled my Uncle Mafìo; a delicate kind of deer called a qazèl, which people bought to grace their gardens; and a yellow wild dog called a shaqàl, which a hunter could tame and train to stop and kill a charging boar. (A Persian hunter will go alone and with only a knife to challenge a savage lion, but he is timid of meeting a wild pig. Since a Muslim recoils even from speaking of pig meat, he would deem it a death horrific beyond imagination if he should die at the tusks of a boar.) Also in the livestock market was the shuturmurq, which means “camel-bird,” and it certainly did look like a mongrel offspring of those two different creatures. The camel-bird has the body and feathers and beak of a giant goose, but its neck is unfeathered and long, like a camel’s, and its two legs are ungainly long, like a camel’s four, and its splayed feet are as big as a camel’s pads, and it can no more fly than a camel can. Jamshid said the shuturmurq was caught and kept for the one pretty thing it can supply: the billowy plumes it grows on its rump. There were also apes for sale, of the sort which uncouth seamen sometimes bring to Venice, where they are called simiazze: those apes as big and ugly as Ethiope children. Jamshid called that animal nedjis, which means “unspeakably unclean,” but he did not tell me why it was so named or why anyone, even a seaman, would buy such a thing.