The Journeyer

by Gary Jennings

  However, long before I could make the least conversation with our three escorts, I had discerned from their behavior some of the Mongols’ curious ways and customs—or, I might better say, their barbaric superstitions. While we were still in the oasis, Nostril had suggested to them that they might like to wash the blood and sweat and long-accumulated dirt out of their clothes, and so have them fresh and clean for the next stage of traveling. The men declined, giving as a reason that it was unwise to launder any article of apparel when abroad from one’s home camp, because that would raise a thunderstorm. How it would do that, they could not say, and would not demonstrate. Now, any man of ordinary good sense, in the middle of a parched and bleached desert, would scarcely object to any kind of wet storm, however mysteriously produced. But the Mongols, who fear nothing else under Heaven, are as terrified of thunder and lightning as is the most timid child or woman.

  Also, while still in that abundantly watered oasis, the three Mongols never once treated themselves to a thorough and refreshing bath, though God knows they needed one. They were so crusty they almost creaked, and their aroma would have gagged a shaqàl. But they washed no more of themselves than their heads and hands, and did that little washing most miserly. One of them would dip a gourd in the spring, but use not even the dipper’s amount of water. He would slurp from the gourd only a single mouthful, and hold it in his mouth, then spit the water into his cupped hands, a little at a time, and with one spurt wet his hair, with the next his ears, and so on. Granted, that may not have been a matter of superstition, but of conservation, a custom decreed by a people who spend so much of their time in arid lands. But I did think they would have been a more socially acceptable people if they had relaxed that stringency when it was not needful.

  Another thing. Those three men had been traveling from out of the northeast when they first came upon us. Now that we were proceeding in that direction, and perforce so were they, the men insisted that we ride a farsakh or so to one side of their prior trail, because, they assured us, it was unlucky to return over the exact same route by which one has gone out.

  It was also extremely unlucky, they remarked, during the first night we all camped together on the trail, for any member of a party to sit with his head hanging as in sorrow, or to lean his cheek or chin on his hand as an aid to cogitation. That, they said, could bring sadness on the entire company. And they said it while glancing uneasily at Uncle Mafio, who was sitting just that way, and looking mournful indeed. My father or I might jolly him into sociability for a while, but he soon would lapse into gloom again.

  For a very long time after the death of Aziz, my uncle spoke seldom and sighed often and looked miserably bereft. Where earlier I had tried to take a tolerant attitude toward his unmanly nature, I was now more inclined to an amused and exasperated contempt. No doubt a man who can find sensual pleasure only with one of his own sex can also find a deep and lasting love for one of them, and such a true ardor—like the more conventional instances of true love—can be esteemed and admired and commended. However, Uncle Mafio had had only a single and insignificant sexual encounter with Aziz, and otherwise he had been no closer to the boy than any of the rest of us. We all grieved for Aziz, and felt sorrow at his loss. But for Uncle Mafio to carry on, in the way that another man might grieve for a wife lost after many years of happy marriage—that was lugubrious and farcical and unworthy. He was still my uncle, and I would continue to treat him with all due respect, but I had come privately to conclude that his big and burly and strong outer semblance had not much inside it.

  No one could have been sorrier for the death of Aziz than I was, but I realized that my reasons were mainly selfish, and gave me no right to make loud lamentation. One reason was that I had promised both Sitarè and my father that I would keep the boy from harm, and I had not. So I could not be sure whether I was feeling more sorry for his death or for my failure as a guardian. Another of my selfish reasons was that I was grieving because someone worth keeping had been snatched out of my world. Oh, I know that all people grieve so, on the occasion of a death, but that makes it no less a selfish reason. We survivors are deprived of that one person newly dead. But he or she is deprived of everything—of all other persons, of all things worth keeping, of the entire world and every least thing in it, all in an instant—and such a loss deserves a lamentation so loud and vast and lasting that we who stay are incapable of expressing it.

  I had yet another selfish reason for lamenting the death of Aziz. I could not help recalling the Widow Esther’s admonition: that a man should avail himself of everything life offers, lest he die repining for those opportunities he neglected to seize. It was perhaps virtuous of me, and laudable, that I had declined what Aziz offered me, and so left his chastity unsmirched. It would perhaps have been sinful of me, and reprehensible, if I had accepted, and so despoiled his chastity. But, I asked myself now, since Aziz would have gone so soon to his grave in either case, what difference could it have made? If we had embraced, it might have meant one last pleasure for him, and a unique one for me: what Nostril had called “a journey beyond the ordinary”—and whether it had been innocuous or iniquitous, it would have left no trace on the all-covering quicksand. But I had refused, and in all the rest of my life, if any such chance ever came again, it could not come from the beautiful Aziz. He was gone, and that opportunity was lost, and now—not on some putative future deathbed—now I was sorry.

  But I was alive. And I and my uncle and my father and our companions journeyed on, for that is all that the living can do to forget death, or defy it.

  We were not accosted by any more Karauna, or any other sorts of lurkers, and we did not even meet any other fellow travelers during the rest of our desert crossing. Either our Mongol escort had been unnecessary or its presence had discouraged any further molestation. We came finally out of the lowland sands at the Binalud Mountains, and up through that range to Mashhad. It was a fair and pleasant city, somewhat larger than Kashan, and its streets were lined with chinar and mulberry trees.

  Mashhad is one of the very holy cities of Persian Islam, because a highly revered martyr of olden time, the Imam Riza, is entombed in an ornate masjid there. A Muslim’s worshipful visit to Mashhad earns him the prefix of Meshadi to his name, as a pilgrimage to Mecca earns him the right to be addressed as Hajji. So the greater part of the city’s population consisted of transient pilgrims and, because of that, Mashhad had very good and clean and comfortable karwansarai inns. Our three Mongols led us to one of the best, and themselves spent a night there before turning back to resume their patrol of the Dasht-e-Kavir.

  There at the karwansarai, the Mongols demonstrated yet another of their customs. While my father, my uncle and I gratefully took lodging inside the inn, and our camel-puller Nostril gratefully took lodging in the stable with his animals, the Mongols insisted on laying their bedrolls outside in the center of the courtyard, and staked their horses to the ground about them. The Mashhad landlord indulged them in that eccentricity, but some landlords will not. As I later discovered, when a Mongol party is commanded by the innkeeper to lodge indoors like civilized folk, the Mongols will grudgingly comply, but they still will not depend on the karwansarai kitchen. They will lay a fire in the middle of their chamber floor, put a tripod over it and do their own cooking. Come night, they will not repose on the beds provided, but will unroll their own carpets and blankets and sleep on the floor.

  Well, I could now sympathize in some measure with the Mongols’ reluctance to reside under a fixed roof. Myself, my father and my uncle, after our long crossing of the Great Salt, had also developed a taste for unconfined spaces and unrestricted elbow room, and the limitless silence and clean air of the outdoors. Though at first we exulted in the refreshment of a hammam bath and rubbing, and were pleased to have our meals cooked and presented to us by servants, we soon found ourselves vexed by the noise and agitation and turmoil of indoor living. The air seemed close and the walls even closer and the other karwansarai guests
a terribly talkative crowd. The all-pervading smoke especially tormented Uncle Mafìo, who was troubled by intermittent coughing spells. So, for all that the inn was well appointed and Mashhad an estimable city, we stayed only long enough to exchange our camels again for horses, and to replenish our traveling gear and rations, and we moved on.

  BALKH

  1

  WE went now a little south of east, to skirt the Karakum, or Black Sands, which is another desert lying due eastward of Mashhad. We chose a route across the Karabil, or Cold Plateau, which is a long shelf of more solid and verdant land extending like a coastline between the bleak dry ocean of Black Sands to the north and the bleak escarpment of the treeless Paropamisus Mountains to the south.

  It would have made a shorter journey to go straight across the Karakum desert, but we were weary of desert. And it would have been a more easeful journey if we had gone farther to the southward, through the valleys of the Paropamisus, for there we would have found accommodation in a succession of villages and towns and even cities of respectable size, such as Herat and Maimana. But we preferred to take the middle course. We were well accustomed to camping out of doors, and that high Karabil plateau must have got its name only by comparison to lower and warmer lands, for it was not terribly cold even then in early wintertime. We simply added layers of shirts and pai-jamah and abas as we needed them, and found the weather tolerable enough.

  The Karabil consisted mostly of monotonous grassland, but there were also stands of trees—pistachio, zizafun, willow and conifers. We had seen many greener and more pleasant lands, and would see many others, but, after having endured the Great Salt, we found even the dull gray grass and scanty foliage of the Karabil a delight to our eyes, and our horses found it adequate for forage. After the lifeless desert, that plateau seemed to us to teem with wildlife. There were coveys of quail, and flocks of a red-legged partridge, and everywhere marmots peeking from their burrows and whistling peevishly at our passing. There were migrant geese and ducks wintering there, or at least passing through: a kind of goose with a barred head-feathering, and a duck of lovely russet and gold plumage. There were multitudes of brown lizards, some of them so immense—longer than my leg—that they frequently startled our horses.

  There were herds of several different sorts of delicate qazèl, and of a large and handsome wild ass, called in that region the kulan. When we first saw it, my father said that he almost wished we could stop and capture some, and tame them, and take them back to the West for sale, as they would fetch a far better price than the mules which noblemen and ladies buy for their mounts. The kulan is veritably as big as a mule, and has the same jug head and short tail, but it is of an extraordinarily rich dark-brown coat with a pale belly, and it is beautiful. A man can never tire of watching the herds of them swiftly running and frisking and wheeling in unison. But the Karabil natives told us the kulan cannot be tamed and ridden; they value it only for its edible flesh.

  We ourselves, and Uncle Mafio especially, did much hunting on that stage of our journey, to supplement our travel rations. In Mashhad we had each procured a compact Mongol-style bow and the short arrows for it, and my uncle had practiced until he was expert with that weapon. As a rule, we tried to shy clear of the herds of qazèl and kulan, for we feared they might be attended by other hunters: wolves or lions, which also abound in the Karabil. But we did occasionally risk stalking a herd, and several times brought down a qazèl, and once a kulan. Almost every day we could count on getting a goose or duck or quail or partridge. That fresh meat would have been eminently enjoyable, except for one thing.

  I forget what was the first creature we brought down with an arrow, or which of us it was who got it. But when we started to carve it for spitting over our fire, we discovered that it was riddled with some kind of small blind insects, dozens of them, alive and wriggling, snugged between the skin and flesh. Disgusted, we flung it aside and made do that night with a desert-type dried-food meal. But the very next day, we brought down some other sort of game, and found it identically infested. I do not know what demon afflicts every living wild creature of the Karabil. The natives we asked could not tell us, and seemed not to care, and even expressed disdain of our queasiness. So, since all our subsequently bagged game was similarly crawly, we forced ourselves to pick out the vermin and cook and eat the meat, and it did not make us ill, and eventually we came to regard the matter as commonplace.

  Another thing we might have thought bothersome—but which, after the desert, we found rather exhilarating—was that three times during our traverse of the Karabil we had to cross a river. As I recall, their names were the Tedzhen, the Kushka and the Takhta. They were not wide waters, but they were cold and deep and fast-running, tumbling down from the Paropamisus heights to the Karakum flats, where eventually they would seep into the Black Sands and disappear. At each riverside we found a karwansarai, and each provided a ferry service, of a sort I found amusing. Our horses we simply unsaddled and unloaded and let swim across the rivers, which they did with aplomb. But we travelers were taken across, one at time, with our packs, by a ferryman plying a peculiar kind of raft called a masak. Each of those craft was not much bigger than a tub and consisted of a light framework of wood, supported by a score or so of inflated goatskins.

  A masak was ludicrous looking, with all the tied-off stumps of goat legs poking up among its framing poles, but I learned that there was a reason for that. Those rivers ran briskly, and the men paddling had little control over something as awkward as a masak, so it yawed and rocked and revolved and pitched wildly as it went careening on a long diagonal from one shore to the other. Each crossing took quite a while, during which time the inflated goatskins leaked and bubbled and whistled. When the masak began to get alarmingly low in the water, the ferryman would stop paddling, untie the goat legs and vigorously blow into the hide bags, one after another, until they were buoyant again, and then deftly retie them. I should amend my earlier remark and say I found that an amusing mode of ferriage after I was on each occasion put safely aground on the other side. During the turbulent crossings, I had other feelings—compounded of giddiness, wetness, coldness, sea-sickness and expectation of imminent drowning.

  At the Kushka ferry, I remember, another karwan party was preparing to cross, and we watched and wondered how it would manage, for it was traveling in a number of horse-drawn carts. But that did not deter the ferrymen. They unhitched the horses and sent them swimming for the far bank, and made several raft trips to transport the occupants and contents of the wagons. Then, as each cart was emptied, they eased it down the riverbank until its four wheels rested one apiece in four of the tubby little masaks, and they rowed it across in quaternion. That made a sight to see: each wagon dipping and dancing and whirling down the river, and its raftmen at each of its corners alternately paddling like Charon to make headway and puffing like Aeolus to keep the goatskins inflated.

  I must remark that the riverside inns in the Karabil provided better ferriage than forage for their guests. At only one karwansarai did we have a decent meal, in fact something unique in our experience thus far: huge and tasty steaks carved from a fish caught in the river outside the door. The steaks were so tremendous that we marveled and asked permission to go into the kitchen for a look at the fish they had been cut from. It was called an ashyotr, and it was bigger than a big man, bigger than Uncle Mafio, and instead of scales it had a shell of bony plates, and beneath its long snout it had barbels like whiskers. In addition to giving edible flesh, the ashyotr yielded a black roe, each egg of seed-pearl size, and we ate some of that too, salted and pressed to make a relish called khavyah.

  But at the other inns the food was awful, and there was no reason for it to be, given the abundance of game in that country. Every landlord of a karwansarai seemed to think that he must serve his guests something they had not lately been eating. Since we had been dining on such delicacies as game birds and wild qazèl does, the innkeepers fed us the mutton of domestic sheep. The Karabil i
s not sheep country, meaning that the meat had probably traveled as far from its point of origin as we had, to get to the karwansarai. Mutton had long since ceased to delight me, and this was dried and salted and tough, and there was no oil or vinegar or anything else to season it with, only pungent red meleghèta pepper, and it was invariably accompanied by beans boiled in sugar water. After enough such gaseous meals, we could probably have served instead of the goatskins to support the masak rafts. But, to say one good thing about the inns in the Karabil, they charged only for their human patrons, not for the karwan animals. That was because wood was hard to come by, and the beasts paid their own way by leaving their dung to be dried for fuel.

  The next city of any consequence to which we came was Balkh, and in times past that had been a city of truly great consequence: the site of one of Alexander’s main encampments, a major station for karwan traders traveling the Silk Road, a city of crowded bazars and majestic temples and luxurious karwansarais. But it had stood in the path of the first waves of Mongols rampaging out of the fastnesses to the east—meaning that earliest Mongol Horde commanded by the invincible Chinghiz Khan—and in the year 1220 the Horde had stamped upon Balkh as a booted foot might stamp upon an ant nest.