The Journeyer

by Gary Jennings

  From the capital, we circled around the shores of a sea-sized lake named Urumia, which was also called the Sea of the Sunset. Then we climbed up and over the mountains which marked the northwestern frontier of Persia. One of the mountains in that range, said my father, was the biblical Mount Ararat, but it was too far off our route for me to go and climb it to see if any trace of the Ark was still there. Anyway, having recently scaled another mountain to see a footprint that might well have been Adam’s, I was now inclined to think of Noah as rather a latecomer in history. On the other side of the mountains, we descended into the Turki lands at another sea-sized lake, this one named Van, but called the Sea Beyond the Sunset.

  The country hereabout, and the nations composing it, and the borders thereof, were all in flux and had been for many years. What had formerly been part of the Byzantine Empire under Christian rulers was now the Seljuk Empire under rulers of the Turki race and Muslim religion. But these eastern parts of it were also known by older names, bestowed by peoples who had inhabited these lands since time before time, who had never conceded that they were not still the rightful owners of them, and who recognized none of the vagaries of modern claimants and modern boundary lines. Thus, at the point where we emerged from Persia, we came down from the mountains into a country which could equally well be named Turki, after the race of its rulers, or the Seljuk Empire, as those Turki called it, or Cappadocia, which was its name on older maps, or Kurdistan, for the Kurdi people who populated it.

  The land was a green and pleasant one, the wildest parts of it seeming hardly wild at all, but looking almost neatly cultivated, with rolling hills of meadow grass tidily separated by clumps of forest, so that the whole countryside was as trim as an artificial parkland. There was plenty of good water, in sparkling streams as well as immense blue lakes. The people here were all Kurdi, some of them farmers and villagers, but most of them nomad families following flocks of sheep or goats. They were as handsome a race as I have seen in any Islamic land. They had very black hair and eyes, but a complexion as fair as my own. The men were large and solidly built, and wore great black mustaches, and were famously fierce fighters. The Kurdi women were not particularly delicate, either, but withal were well formed and good-looking—and independent; they scorned to wear the veil or live hidden in the pardah imposed on most other women of Islam.

  The Kurdi received us journeyers cordially enough—nomads usually are hospitable to other seeming nomads—but they cast unloving looks at our Mongol escorts. There were reasons for that. Besides all the other complications of national names and dominions and boundary lines, this Seljuk Empire was also in enforced vassalage to the Ilkhanate of Persia. That situation dated from the time when a traitorous Turki minister had foully murdered the King Kilij—he who was the father of my onetime princess friend Mar-Janah—and usurped the throne by promising to lay it under subjection to the then Ilkhan Abagha. So this Seljuk Empire, though nominally ruled now by a King Masud in the capital city of Erzincan, was really subordinate to Abagha’s surviving son, the Regent Kaikhadu, whose Maragheh court we had just come from and whose palace guards were accompanying us. We journeyers were welcome here; the warriors with us were not.

  One might have supposed that the Kurdi—rebellious throughout history against every non-Kurdi ruler ever imposed upon them—would have cared little whether Erzincan or Maragheh was the real ruling capital, because out here, a hundred farsakhs or more from either city, they were pretty much left unruled by anybody. But they seemed to regard the Mongols as a tyranny inflicted on top of the Turki tyranny they already chafed under, and the one to be even more hotly resented and hated. We learned how well the Kurdi could hate when, one afternoon, we stopped at an isolated hut to buy a sheep for our evening meal.

  The evident proprietor of the hut was sitting in the doorway of it, holding his sheepskin robes around him as if he had a chill. My father and I and just one of our Mongols rode into the dooryard and politely dismounted, but the shepherd impolitely did not stand up. The Kurdi had a language of their own, but almost all of them spoke Turki as well, and so did our Mongol escorts, and in any case the Turki tongue was similar enough to the Mongol that I could usually understand any overheard conversation. Our Mongol asked the man if we might buy a sheep. The man, still seated, his eyes glumly on the ground, refused us.

  “I think I ought not to trade with our oppressors.”

  The Mongol said, “No one is oppressing you. These Ferenghi wayfarers ask a favor of you, and will pay for it, and your Allah enjoins hospitality toward wayfarers.”

  The shepherd said, not in an argumentative way, but in seeming melancholy, “But the rest of you are Mongols, and you will also eat on the sheep.”

  “What of that? Once you sell the animal to the Ferenghi, what matter to you what becomes of it?”

  The shepherd sniffled and said, almost tearfully, “I did a favor to a passing Turki not long since. Helped him change a broken shoe on his horse. And for that I have been chastised by the Chiti Ayakkabi. A small favor for a mere Turki. Estag farullah! What will the Chiti do to me if he hears I did a favor for a Mongol?”

  “Come!” snapped our escort. “Will you sell us a sheep?”

  “No, I cannot.”

  The Mongol sneered down at him. “You do not even stand like a man when you speak defiance. Very well, cowardly Kurdi, you refuse to sell. Then would you care to stand up and try to prevent my taking a sheep?”

  “No, I cannot. But I warn you. The Chiti Ayakkabi will make you regret the robbery.”

  The Mongol laughed harshly and spat in the dust in front of the seated man, then remounted and rode to cut a fat ewe out of the flock grazing in the meadow beyond the hut. I remained there, curious, staring down at the slumped and defeated-looking shepherd. I knew that Chiti meant a brigand and, as best I knew, Ayakkabi meant a shoe. I wondered what kind of bandit would style himself “the Shoe Brigand” and would occupy himself in punishing his own fellow Kurdi for giving aid and comfort to their presumed oppressors.

  I managed to inquire of the man, “What did this Chiti Ayakkabi do to chastise you?”

  He did not speak a reply, but showed me, lifting the skirts of his sheepskins to reveal his feet. It was evident why he had not stood to greet us, and I got some idea of why the Kurdi bandit had such a strange name. Both of the shepherd’s feet, otherwise bare, were clotted with dried blood and studded with nails—not nail heads but the upthrusting points of nails—where both his feet had been shod with iron horseshoes.

  Two or three nights later, near a village called Tunceli, the Chiti Ayakkabi made us regret our robbery of the sheep. Tunceli was a village of the Kurdi, and it had only one karwansarai, and that very small and dilapidated. Since our company of fifteen riders and thirty-odd horses would have crowded it intolerably, we rode on through the village and made camp in a grassy glade beyond, convenient to a clear-flowing brook. We had eaten and rolled ourselves in our blankets and gone to sleep, leaving just one Mongol on guard, when the night erupted with bandits.

  Our lone sentry had only time to bellow “Chiti!” before he was brained with a battle-ax. The rest of us thrashed free of our bedrolls, but the brigands were among us, with blades and cudgels, and all was a confused turbulence in the dim remaining firelight. My father and I had Uncle Mafìo to thank that we were not slain as abruptly as all our Mongol troop. Those warriors thought first to snatch for their weapons, so the bandits flew first at them. But my father and I both saw Mafìo standing by the fire, looking about him in numb bemusement, and we both at the same moment threw ourselves toward him, and seized him and dragged him to the ground, so he made not such a prominent target. The next moment, something clouted me above the ear and, for me, the night went totally dark.

  I woke, lying on the ground with my head cradled in a soft lap, and as my vision cleared I looked up into a female face illumined by the now built-up fire. It was not the square, strong face of a Kurdi woman, and it was framed by a tumble of hair that was n
ot black, but dark-red. I labored to collect my wits, and said in Farsi, in a voice that croaked:

  “Am I dead, and are you a peri now?”

  “You are not dead, Marco Efendi. I saw you just in time to cry to the men to desist.”

  “You used to call me Mirza Marco, Sitarè.”

  “Marco Efendi means the same. I am more of a Kurdi now than a Persian.”

  “What of my father? My uncle?”

  “They are not even bruised. I am sorry you had to take a blow. Can you sit up?”

  I did, though the movement threatened to make my head roll off my shoulders, and I saw my father sitting with a group of the black-mustached bandits. They had made qahwah, and he and they were drinking and chatting amiably together, with Uncle Mafìo sitting placidly by. It would have looked quite a civilized scene, except that others of the brigands were stacking the bodies of our dead Mongols like cordwood off to one side of the glade. The largest and most fiercely mustached of the newcomers, seeing me stir, came over to me and Sitare.

  She said, “This is my husband, Neb Efendi, known also as Chiti Ayakkabi.”

  He spoke Farsi as well as she did. “I apologize to you, Marco Efendi. I would not knowingly have attacked the man who made possible the treasure of my life.”

  I was still addled in my wits, and did not know what he was talking about. But as I drank bitter black qahwah and my head gradually cleared, he and Sitarè explained. He was the Kashan cobbler whom the Almauna Esther had introduced to her maidservant Sitarè. He had loved her at first sight, but their marriage would of course have been unthinkable had Sitarè not been a virgin, and Sitarè had told him frankly that her being still intact was thanks to a certain gentlemanly Mirza Marco’s having declined to take advantage of her. I felt more than a little uncomfortable, listening to a rough and murderous bandit expressing his indebtedness for my not having preceded him in making “sikis,” as he called it, with his bride. But also, if I was ever grateful for my onetime constraint, it was now.

  “Qismet, we call it,” he said. “Destiny, fate, chance. You were good to my Sitarè. Now I am being good to you.”

  It further transpired that Neb Efendi, having been balked of prospering as a cobbler in Kashan—where the people did not know the difference between a noble Kurdi and a vile Turki, but would have despised him in any event—had brought his wife back here to his native Kurdistan. But here he felt also estranged, a vassal to the Turki regime which was in turn vassal to the Mongol Ilkhanate. So he had given up his trade entirely, keeping only the name of it, and turned to insurrection as the Shoe Brigand.

  “I have seen some of your cobblery,” I told him. “It was—distinctive.”

  He said modestly, “Bosh,” which is a Turki word meaning “you flatter me overmuch.”

  But Sitarè nodded proudly. “You mean the shepherd. It was he who set us on your trail to Tunceli here. Yes, Marco Efendi, my dear and valorous Neb is determined to rouse up all Kurdi against the oppressors, and to discourage any weaklings who truckle to them.”

  “I had rather divined that.”

  “Do you know, Marco Efendi,” he said, thumping a fist loudly against his broad chest, “that we Kurdi are the oldest aristocracy in the world? Our tribal names go back to the days of Sumer. And all that time we have been fighting one tyranny after another. We battled the Hittites, the Assyrians, we helped Cyrus overthrow Babylon. We fought with Salah-ed-Din the Great against the first marauding Crusaders. Not forty years ago, unaided, we slaughtered twenty thousand Mongols at the battle of Arbil. But still we are not free and independent. So now it is my mission—first to throw off from Kurdistan the Mongol yoke and then the Turki.”

  “I wish you success, Chiti Ayakkabi.”

  “Well, my band and I are poor and ill-equipped. But your Mongols’ weapons and your good horses and the considerable treasure in their packs will help us immensely.”

  “You are going to rob us? You call that being good to us?”

  “I could have been less good.” He waved casually at the bloody heap of dead Mongols. “Be glad your qismet decreed otherwise.”

  “Speaking of qismet,” Sitarè said brightly, to distract me, “tell me, Marco Efendi. What of my darling brother Aziz?”

  We were in a precarious enough situation, I decided, that I would not hazard making it more so. Neither she nor her ferocious mate would be overjoyed to hear that her little brother had been dead for more than twenty years, that we had let him be slain by a robber band very like their own. Anyway, I was loath to sadden an old friend unnecessarily. So I lied, and lied loudly enough that my father could overhear, and not later contradict me.

  “We carried Aziz to Mashhad, as you desired, Sitarè, and we guarded his chastity the whole way. There, he was fortunate enough to catch the admiring eye of a fine and prosperously fat merchant prince. We left them together, and they seemed more than fond of each other. As far as I know, they are still trading together, up and down the Silk Road between Mashhad and Balkh. Aziz would by now be a well-grown man, but I have no doubt he is still as beautiful as he was then. And as you are, Sitarè.”

  “Al-hamdo-lillah, I hope so,” she sighed. “I saw much resemblance to Aziz in my own two sons, as they grew up. But my manly Neb, not being a Kashanite, would not let me insert the golulè in our boys, or show them how to use cosmetics, in preparation for their someday securing male lovers. So they have grown up to be most manly men themselves, and they sikismek only with women. Those are the boys, over yonder, Nami and Orhon, stripping the boots off those dead Mongols. Would you believe, Marco Efendi, that my sons are both older than you were when last I saw you? Ah, well, it is good to have news of dear Aziz after all these years, and to know that he made as glowing a success of his life as I have made of mine. We owe it all to you, Marco Efendi.”

  “Bosh,” I said modestly.

  I could have suggested that we might be owed our own possessions, but I did not. And my father, when he too realized that we were to be plundered, merely sighed in resignation and said, “Well, when there is no banquet, at least the candles are happy.”

  True, our lives had been spared. And of our portable valuables I had already dispensed with a third part before we left Khanbalik, and anyway they represented only a trifle compared to what our Compagnia had earlier sent home from Kithai. And the brigands took only the things they could easily spend, sell or trade, meaning that they left us our clothes and personal belongings. So, while we could hardly rejoice at being robbed at this late stage in our long journeying—we especially regretted the loss of the magnificent star sapphires acquired in Srihalam —we neither of us repined too much.

  Neb Efendi and his band did allow us to ride our own horses as far as the coast city of Trebizond, and even rode that far with us as a protection against any further Kurdi assault, and they courteously refrained from slaughtering or shoeing anyone else along the way. When we dismounted at the outskirts of Trebizond, the Chiti Ayakkabi gave us back a handful of our own coin, sufficient to pay for our transport and sustenance the rest of the way to Constantinople. So we and they parted in a friendly enough way, and the Shoe Brigand did not strike me dead when Sitarè, as she had done twenty-some years before, kissed me a voluptuous and lingering goodbye.

  At Trebizond, on the shore of the Euxine or Kara or Black Sea, we were still more than two hundred farsakhs east of Constantinople, but we were glad to be standing again on Christian ground for the first time since we had left Acre in the Levant. My father and I decided against the purchase of new horses, not out of dread of the overland journey, but out of concern that it might be too hard on Uncle Mafìo, with none but us now to take care of him. So, carrying what was left of our packs, we went to the Trebizond waterfront and, after some search, found a barge-like gektirme fishing boat whose Christian Greek captain—he was captain of a crew consisting of his four loutish sons—would, with Christian goodness, sail us to Constantinople, and would feed us on the way and, with Christian goodness, would charg
e us only all we had.

  It was a tediously slow and miserable voyage, for the gektirme was netting all the way, and netting only anchovies, so anchovies were what we were fed all the way, with pilaf of rice cooked in anchovy oil, and we lived in, slept in, breathed in the smell of anchovies all the way. Besides us and the Greeks, there was a mangy dog aboard, for no discernible reason, and I frequently wished we had not already paid over every coin we possessed, so that I could have bought the dog and offered him up to be cooked, just for a change from the anchovies. But just as well. The dog had been aboard for so long that I suppose he would have tasted no different.

  After nearly two dismal months aboard our floating anchovy-cask, we finally made our way into the strait called Bosphorus, and along it to where it met the estuary called the Golden Horn, and there we raised the great city of Constantinople—but on a day of such dense fog that I could not see and appreciate the city’s magnificence. The fog did permit me, however, to learn the reason for the gektirme’s resident dog. One of the sons beat it regularly with a stick as we crept cautiously through the fog, so that the dog barked and snarled and cursed continuously. I could hear other invisible dogs similarly yowling all about us, and our captain at the steering oar kept his ear cocked to the noises, so I perceived that dog-beating—instead of bell-ringing, as in Venice—was the locally accepted fog warning device.

  Our ungainly gektirme groped its way without collision across the Horn and under the walls of the city. Our captain told us he was heading for the Sirkeci dock allocated to fishing boats, but my father prevailed on him to take us instead to the Phanar quarter, which was the Venetian section of the city. And somehow, in that thick fog and after not having seen Constantinople for some thirty years, he managed to direct the captain there. Meanwhile, somewhere behind the fog, the sun was setting, and my father was in a fever of impatience, grumbling, “If we do not get there before dark, we must sleep another night on this wretched scow.” We and the nightfall, about simultaneously, touched a wooden dock, and he and I said hasty farewells to the Greeks, helped Uncle Mafio ashore, and my father led us at an old man’s trot through the fog, through a gate in the high wall and then through a labyrinth of sinuous, cramped streets.