The Journeyer

by Gary Jennings

  “So we ask only,” said the girl, “that you take Aziz with you to Mashhad, and that in Mashhad you seek out a karwan merchant of wealth and kindly nature and other good qualities … .”

  “Someone like yourself, Mirza Marco,” suggested the boy.

  “ … And sell Aziz to him.”

  “Sell your brother?” I exclaimed.

  “You cannot just take him there and abandon him, a little boy in a strange city. We would wish you to place him in the keeping of the best possible master. And, as I said, you will realize a profit on the transaction. For your trouble of transporting him, and your taking pains to find the right sort of buyer for him, you may keep the entire amount you get for him. It ought to be a handsome price for such a fine boy. Is that not fair enough?”

  “More than fair,” I said. “It may sway my father and uncle, but I cannot promise. After all, I am just one of three in our party. I must put the proposition to them.”

  “That should suffice,” said Sitarè. “Our mistress has already spoken to them. The Mirza Esther also wishes to see young Aziz set upon a better road in life. I understand that your father and uncle are considering the matter. So, if you are agreeable to taking Aziz, yours should be the persuading voice.”

  I said truthfully, “The widow’s word probably carries more weight than mine does. That being so, Sitarè, why were you prepared to”—I gestured, indicating her state of undress—“to go to such lengths to cajole me?”

  “Well … ,” she said, smiling. She moved aside the clothes she held to give me another unimpeded look at her body. “I hoped you would be very agreeable …”

  Still being truthful, I said, “I would be, anyway. But there are some other aspects you ought to consider. For one thing, we must cross a perilous and uncomfortable desert. It is no fit place for any human being, not to mention a small boy. As is well known, the Devil Satan is most evident and most powerful in the desert wastes. It is into deserts that saintly Christians go, simply to test their strength of faith—and I mean the most sublimely devout Christians, like San Antonio. Unsaintly mortals go there only at great hazard.”

  “Perhaps so, but they do go,” said young Aziz, sounding unperturbed by the prospect. “And since I am not a Christian, I may be in less danger. I may even be some protection for the rest of you.”

  “We have another non-Christian in the party,” I said sourly. “And that is a thing I would have you also consider. Our camel-puller is a beast, who habitually consorts and couples with the vilest of other beasts. To tempt his bestial nature with a desirable and accessible little boy …”

  “Ah,” said Sitarè. “That must be the objection your father raised. I knew the mistress was concerned about something. Then Aziz must promise to avoid the beast, and you must promise to watch over Aziz.”

  “I will stay always by your side, Mirza Marco,” declared the boy. “By day and by night.”

  “Aziz may not be chaste, by your standards,” his sister went on. “But neither is he promiscuous. As long as he is with you, he will be yours only, not lifting his zab or his buttocks or even his eyes to any other man.”

  “I will be yours only, Mirza Marco,” he affirmed, with what might have been charming innocence, except that he held aside the garments in his hands, as Sitarè had done, to let me look my fill.

  “No, no, no,” I said, in some agitation. “Aziz, you are to promise not to tempt any of us. Our slave is only a beast, but we other three are Christians! You are to be totally chaste, from here to Mashhad.”

  “If that is what you wish,” he said, though he appeared crestfallen. “Then I swear it. On the beard of the Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him).”

  Skeptical, I asked Sitarè, “Is that oath binding on a beardless child?”

  “Indeed it is,” she said, regarding me askance. “Your dreary desert journey will not be at all enlivened. You Christians must take some morbid pleasure in the denial of pleasure. But so be it. Aziz, you may put on your clothes again.”

  “You too, Sitarè,” I said, and if Aziz had looked crestfallen, she looked thunderstruck. “I assure you, dear girl, I say that unwillingly, but with the best of will.”

  “I do not understand. When you take responsibility for my brother, my virginity is worth nothing toward his advancement. So I give it to you, and thankfully.”

  “And with all thanks I decline it. For a reason I am sure you are aware of, Sitarè. Because, when your brother departs, what becomes of you?”

  “What matter? I am only a female person.”

  “In a person most beautifully female. Therefore, once Aziz is provided for, you can offer yourself for your own advancement. A good marriage, or concubinage, or whatever you can attain to. But I know that a woman cannot attain to much unless she is virginally intact. So I will leave you that way.”

  She and Aziz both stared at me, and the boy murmured, “Verily, Christians are divanè.”

  “Some, no doubt. Some try to behave as Christians should.”

  Sitarè’s stare turned to a softer look, and she said in a soft voice, “Perhaps some few succeed.” But again, provocatively, she moved the screening clothes aside from her fair body. “You are sure you decline? You are steadfast in your kindly resolve?”

  I laughed shakily. “Not at all steadfast. For that reason, let me go quickly from here. I will consult with my father and uncle about taking Aziz with us.”

  The consultation did not take long, for they were in the stable talking it over at that very time.

  “So there,” said Uncle Mafìo to my father. “Marco is also in favor of letting the boy come along. That makes two of us voting yes, against one vote wavering.”

  My father frowned and tangled his fingers into his beard.

  “We will be doing a good deed,” I said.

  “How can we refuse to do a good deed?” demanded my uncle.

  My father growled an old saying, “Saint Charity is dead and her daughter Clemency is ailing.”

  My uncle retorted with another, “Cease believing in the saints and they will cease doing miracles.”

  They then looked at each other in a silence of impasse, until I ventured to break it.

  “I have already warned the lad about the likelihood of his being molested.” They both swiveled their gaze to me, looking astonished. “You know,” I mumbled uncomfortably, “Nostril’s propensities for, er, making mischief.”

  “Oh, that,” said my father. “Yes, there is that.”

  I was glad that he seemed not unduly concerned about it, for I did not wish to be the one to tell of Nostril’s most recent indecency, and probably earn the slave a belated beating.

  “I made Aziz promise,” I said, “to be wary of any suspicious advances. And I have promised to watch over him. As for his transportation, the pack camel is not at all heavily laden, and the boy weighs very little. His sister offered to let us pocket whatever money we can sell him for, which should be a substantial amount. But I rather think we ought merely to subtract from it the cost of his keep, and let the boy have the rest. As a sort of legacy, to start his new life with.”

  “So there!” said Uncle Mafìo again, scratching at his elbow. “The lad has a mount to ride and a guardian to protect him. He is paying his own way to Mashhad, and earning himself a dowry as well. There can be no further possible objection.”

  My father said solemnly, “If we take him, Marco, he will be your responsibility. You guarantee to keep the child from harm?”

  “Yes, Father,” I said, and put my hand significantly on my belt knife. “Any harm must take me before it takes him.”

  “You hear, Mafìo.”

  I perceived that I must be making a weighty vow indeed, since my father was commanding my uncle to bear witness.

  “I hear, Nico.”

  My father sighed, looked from one to the other of us, clawed in his beard some more, and finally said, “Then he comes with us. Go, Marco, and tell him so. Tell his sister and the Widow Esther to pack whatev
er belongings Aziz is to take.”

  So Sitarè and I took the opportunity for a flurry of kisses and caresses, and the last thing she said to me was, “I will not forget, Mirza Marco. I will not forget you, or your kindness to us both, or your consideration of my fortunes hereafter. I should very much like to reward you—and with that which you have so gallantly forgone. If ever you should journey this way again …”

  4

  WE had been told that we were crossing the Dasht-e-Kavir at the best time of the year. I should hate to have to cross it at the worst. We did it in the late autumn, when the sun was not infernally hot, but, even without incident, that would by no means have been a pleasant trip. I had hitherto supposed that a long sea voyage was the most unvarying and boring and interminable and monotonous sort of travel possible, at least when not made terrible by storm. But a desert crossing is all of that, and besides is thirsty, itchy, scratchy, rasping, scraping, parching—the list of hateful adjectives could go on and on. And the list does go on, like a chant of curses, through the morose mind of the desert journeyer, as he endlessly trudges from one featureless horizon across a featureless flat surface toward the featureless skyline ever receding ahead of him.

  When we left Kashan, we were again dressed for hard traveling. No longer did we wear the neat Persian tulbands on our heads and the gorgeously embroidered body garments. We were again loosely enwrapped in the Arabs’ hanging kaffiyah headcloths and ample aba cloaks, that less handsome but more practical attire which does not cling about a person but billows free, so it allows the dissipation of body heat and sweat, and affords no folds in which the drifting sand can accumulate. Our camels were hung all about with leather bags of good Kashan water and sacks of dried mutton and fruits and the brittle local bread. (It was to procure these foodstuffs that we had had to wait for the bazàr to restock after Ramazan.) We had also acquired in Kashan some new items to carry with us: smooth round sticks and lengths of light fabric with their hems sewn to form sheaths. By inserting the sticks into those sheaths, we could quickly shape the cloths into tents, each just of a size to shelter one man comfortably, or, if necessary, to accommodate two persons in rather less comfortable intimacy.

  Before we even got out of Kashan, I warned Aziz never to let our slave Nostril tempt him inside a tent or anywhere else out of sight of the rest of us, and to report to me any other sorts of advances the camel-puller might make to him. For Nostril, on first seeing the boy among us, had widened his piggy eyes almost to human size and dilated his single nostril as if he scented prey. That first day, also, Aziz had been briefly naked in our company—and Nostril had hung about, ogling—while I helped the boy doff the Persian garb his sister had dressed him in, and showed him how to put on the Arab kaffiyah and aba. So I gave Nostril some stern warnings, too, and toyed significantly with my belt knife while I was haranguing him, and he made insincere promises of obedience and good behavior.

  I would hardly have trusted Nostril’s promises, but, as things turned out, he never did molest the little boy, or even try to. We were not many days into the desert when Nostril began noticeably to suffer from some painful ailment in his under parts. If, as I suspected, the slave had deliberately made one of the camels lame to make us stop in Kashan, then another of the beasts was now exacting revenge. Every time Nostril’s camel made a misstep and jounced him, he would cry out sharply. Soon he had his saddle pillowed with everything soft he could find among our packs. But then, every time he went away from our camp fire to make water, we could hear him groaning and thrashing about and cursing vehemently.

  “One of the Kashan boys must have clapped him with the scola-mento,” said Uncle Mafio derisively. “Serves him right, for being unvirtuous—and indiscriminate.”

  I had not then and indeed never have been similarly afflicted myself, for which I give more thanks to my good fortune than to my virtue or my discrimination. Nevertheless, I might have shown more comradely sympathy to Nostril, and laughed less at his predicament, if I had not been thankful that his zab was giving him other concerns than trying to put it into my young ward. The slave’s ailment gradually abated and finally went away, leaving him apparently no worse for the experience, but by that time other events had occurred to put Aziz beyond threat of his lechery.

  A tent, or some shelter like a tent, is an absolute necessity in the Dasht-e-Kavir, for a man cannot just lie down in his blankets to sleep, or he would be covered by sand before he woke. Most of that desert can be likened to the giant tray of a giant fardarbab tomorrow-teller. It is a flat expanse of smooth, dun-colored sand, a sand so fine that it flows through one’s fingers like water. In the intervals between winds, that sand lies as virginally unmarked as the sand in the tomorrow-teller’s tray. So fine and so smooth is it that the least passing insect—a centipede, a grasshopper, a scorpion—leaves a trail visible from afar. A man could, if he got bored enough by the tedium of desert traveling, find distraction by following the meandering track of a single ant.

  However, in the daytime, it was seldom that a wind was not blowing, stirring that sand and picking it up and carrying it and throwing it. Since the winds of the Dasht-e-Kavir blow always from the same direction, from the southwest, it is easy to tell in which direction a stranger is traveling—even if you meet him camped and immobile—simply by seeing which flank of his mount is the most heavily coated with blown sand. In the nighttime, the desert wind drops, and lets drop from the air the heavier particles of sand. But the finer particles hang in the air like dust, and hang there so densely as to constitute a dry fog. It blots out whatever stars there may be in the sky, sometimes obscures even a full moon. In the combined darkness and fogginess, one’s vision may be limited to just a few arm-lengths. Nostril told us that there were creatures called Karauna which took advantage of that dark fog—according to Persian folk legend the Karauna create it, said Nostril, by some dark magic—in which to do dark deeds. More usually, the chief danger of that fog is that the suspended dust sifts imperceptibly down from the air during the stillness of night, and a traveler not sheltered under a tent could be quietly, stealthily buried and smothered to death in his sleep.

  We had still the greater part of Persia to cross, but it was the empty part—perhaps the emptiest part of the entire world—and we did not meet a single Persian along our way, or much of anything else, or see in the sand the tracks of anything larger than insects. In other regions of Persia, similarly unoccupied and uncultivated by man, we journeyers might have had to be on our guard against predatory prides of lions, or scavenging packs of shaqàl dogs, or even flocks of the big flightless shuturmurq camel-birds, which, we had been told, can disembowel a man with a kick. But none of those hazards had to be feared in the desert, for no wild thing lives in it. We saw an occasional vulture or kite, but they stayed high in the windy sky above and did not tarry in their passing. Even vegetable plants seem to shun that desert. The only green thing I saw growing there was a low shrub with thick and fleshy-looking leaves.

  “Euphorbia,” Nostril said it was. “And it grows here only because Allah put it here to be a help to the journeyer. In the hot season, the euphorbia’s seed pods grow ripe and burst and fling out their seeds. They begin to pop when the desert air gets exactly as hot as a human’s blood. Then the pods burst with increasing frequency as the air gets even hotter. So a desert wanderer can tell, by listening to the loudness of the popping of the euphorbia, when the air is getting so perilously hot that he must stop and put up a shelter for shade, or he will die.”

  That slave, for all his squalid person and sexual erethism and detestable character, was an experienced traveler, and told us or showed us many things of use or interest. For example, on our very first night in that wasteland, when we stopped to camp, he got down from his camel and stuck his prodding pole into the sand, pointed in the direction we were going.

  “It may be needful in the morning,” he explained. “We have determined to go always toward the spot where the sun rises. But if the sand is blowing
at that hour, we may not be able otherwise to fix on the spot.”

  The treacherous sands of the Dasht-e-Kavir are not its only menace to man. That name, as I have said, means the Great Salt Desert, and for a reason. Vast extents of it are not of sand at all; they are immense reaches of a salty paste, not quite wet enough to be called mud or marsh, and the wind and sun have dried the paste to a surface of caked solid salt. Often a traveler must cross one of those glittering, crunching, quivering, blindingly white salt crusts, and he must do it gingerly. The salt crystals are more abrasive than sand; even a camel’s callused pads can quickly be worn to bleeding rawness, and, if the rider has to dismount, his boots can be likewise shredded, and then his feet. Also, the salt surfaces are of uneven thickness, making of those areas what Nostril called “the trembling lands.” Sometimes the weight of a camel or a man will break through the crust. If that happens, the animal or the man falls into the pasty muck beneath. From that salt quicksand it is impossible to climb out unaided, or even to stay put and wait for help to come. It slowly but ineluctably draws down whatever falls into it, and sucks the fallen creature under the surface, and closes over it. Unless a rescuer is nearby, and on firmer ground, the unfortunate fallen one is doomed. According to Nostril, entire karwan trains of men and animals have thus disappeared and left no trace.

  So, when we came to the first of those salt flats, though it looked as innocuous as a layer of hoarfrost unseasonably on the ground, we halted and studied it with respect. The white crust gleamed out before us, clear to the skyline, and away as far as we could see to either side.