It is always a mistake to underestimate your opposition, Jaufre heard Ram saying, and he smiled again, openly this time.
Johanna cleaned and sheathed her sword and smiled back at Jaufre with a fierceness he recognized, as it matched his own. “Whatever are we going to do with all these bodies?”
“She sent me after you,” Edyk said slowly, making a visible effort to understand. “And she sent them to find you, too.”
It was some time later. The room had been cleared and Firas and Alaric had disposed of the bodies under cover of darkness. No one asked where. The wounded bravo and his lone surviving companion had been dealt with, too, and again, no one cared enough to ask. The room had been scrubbed clean of spilled blood but the smell of it lingered in the air. They took rough seats placed around a splintery table beneath a cedar tree in the back yard, and Shasha had put together a scratch meal of fruit and bread and cheese. They were all downing copious amounts of hot, sweet tea, although Alaric was trading off with wine that he was drinking directly from a clay bottle.
“She sent me after you,” Edyk said dully. “I didn’t know she sent them, too.” He looked up. “I believed her when she said she only wanted you back to help her run your father’s business.”
“The last strike of the dying serpent,” Jaufre said, and laughed.
Edyk’s voice rose. “But you knew when I told you that she wanted to kill you. Didn’t you? Didn’t you!”
“Yes,” Johanna said in a level voice. “Yes, I knew. She killed Wu Li, Edyk. She and Gokudo.” She looked at Jaufre, and at Shasha. “Gokudo is dead.”
By her hand, it was understood, by them if not by Edyk. Jaufre watched her with an appreciative gaze. He wanted to the hear the story but it could wait, now that she was well and truly back. Or someone was. Johanna had been first his savior, then his sister, then an object of desire, but this was the first time that Jaufre had seen her as a companion in arms. He was a welter of emotions, beginning with incredulous delight, gratitude, lust, and, oddly, a kind of wariness. He had no idea what to expect next.
He found himself looking forward to it.
“Do you have my purse?” Johanna said, looking at Shasha.
Shasha unfastened it from her waist and handed it over. “I kept them safe for you.”
Johanna smiled. “I knew you would.”
She opened the little leather bag and brought out Wu Li’s bao, the jade cylinder inscribed on one end in raised characters, and the tiny jade pot filled with the red paste the seal was dipped it before impression. “This is why she wants me back, Edyk,” she said. She pulled out the small, leather-bound book. “And this. It’s not because she wants me to run Wu Li’s business with her. It’s because she can’t run it without these, and I took them from her when I left.”
Edyk looked from the bao to Johanna with a kind of horror. “You stole Wu Li’s bao?”
She tucked everything back into the purse without replying.
“She can’t run Wu Li’s business without it, Johanna.”
“I know,” Johanna said, and smiled. Jaufre warmed to that smile.
Edyk appeared less enchanted. “What have you become, Johanna?”
“She has become a warrior,” Alma said.
“Strong,” Hayat said.
“Able to defend herself when attacked,” Alma said.
“And capable of exacting revenge where it is merited,” Hayat said. Edyk looked at her, his eyes wide, and her lip curled. “You have no reason to fear, little man. You are no threat to her, and therefore stand in no danger from us.”
Alaric snorted, and drank more from his clay bottle.
“Hayat.” Johanna’s voice was warning. Hayat sniffed and subsided.
Johanna turned to Edyk. “Go home, Edyk,” she said, her voice much gentler now. “There is nothing for you here.”
His hands half rose in entreaty, and fell again. “What do I tell her?”
Johanna shrugged. “Whatever you wish. Tell you couldn’t find me. Tell her I’m dead. Chiang has always been discreet, you can rely on him to say nothing. Dai Fang will never know, and she has no reason to fear you. You’ll be safe from any further attention on her part.” She rose to her feet, and perforce, so did Edyk.
“But—” It was obvious that Edyk the Portuguese had followed more than Dai Fang’s instructions to Gaza. He had also followed his heart. That heart had loved a young girl once, high in the hills above Cambaluc, in a cabin next to a lake, in the springtime when the plum trees were in bloom. He looked for any trace of that girl in Johanna’s face, and could not find her.
“Go home to Jade and Blossom, Edyk,” she said, not unkindly. “They will be missing you.”
Edyk stumbled twice on his way out of the lodging. Firas put a helping hand beneath his elbow and saw him safely back to the caravansary.
Exhausted, the company made up their beds for the night and rolled into them. Introductions and plans could be made on the morrow. When Firas returned, the lamps had been doused and all were deeply asleep.
All but one. A hand met his in the darkness and drew him into the yard. “You returned,” Shasha said. “And you brought her back to me.”
“She is your family,” Firas said. “Which means she is now my family, too.” He traced her features with his fingertips. “You were ever in my thoughts during my absence, Shu Shao of Cambaluc.”
Her hands came up to his shoulders. “As you were in mine during yours, Firas the Assassin.”
He heard the smile in her voice, and laughed soundlessly.
She had spread their blankets in the farthest corner of the garden.
The others might have had more comfortable beds, but Firas and Shasha enjoyed theirs much more.
14
Gaza, November, 1324
THAT PILGRIM HERDER AND charming rogue, Giovanni Gradenigo, fell in love with Johanna at first sight. Of course North Wind succeeded her immediately in his affections, and he had nice things to say about the purebred Arabians, late of the Sheik of Talikan’s stables, too. Like everyone else who first made North Wind’s acquaintance, he offered Johanna a fortune for him. She let North Wind discourage him, too, which the stallion speedily did. Gradenigo took it well, partly because no bones had been broken.
The good captain had his mast re-stepped and re-rigged four days following the arrival of Johanna and company, after which they were forced to wait two interminable weeks for a favorable wind. His pilgrims, thoroughly bored with the delights of Gaza’s bazaars and women, were impatient to depart. They said so, in steadily increasing volume, and with mounting threats to inform the authorities of his malfeasance once they were back in Venice. There were some truly colorful phrases that polyglots Johanna and Jaufre were quick to commit to memory. English was a great language for oaths.
Johanna and Jaufre and Shasha used this period of waiting to catch up on the past year, whose events seemed so distant and yet so immediate in retrospect. Jaufre and Shasha listened to the tale of Talikan with sober faces. Shasha’s detailed account of the torturous journey from Terak to Kabul and Jaufre’s slow recovery leached the color from Johanna’s cheeks. The tale of Gokudo’s pursuit and his eventual death was met with a silence that was almost awed.
“Good,” Shasha said at last.
Jaufre raised Johanna’s hands to his lips and kissed them, one after the other. “For Wu Li, twice over,” he said.
Johanna colored and pulled her hands free, ostensibly to drink more tea.
Jaufre produced the book written by Marco Polo he had found in Kerman, and watched Johanna leaf through it, her forehead puckering. “Have you told anyone why we’re going to Venice?” she said.
He shook his head.
“Good,” she said. “Let’s keep it that way. At least for now.”
“Why?”
She was slow to answer. “I’m not sure,” she said finally. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us in Venice. If my grandfather lives there still. If he is even still alive. If he is in or
out of favor with the authorities.”
“Gradenigo might know all of those things.”
“Let’s not ask him.” Her smile was fleeting. “Something tells me the good captain likes gossip too well. Word would fly ahead of us the moment we docked.” She touched the leather purse at her waist and her smile faded. “Remember what it was like in Cambaluc. Remember what my father always said.”
“That it was always better to be unknown at court than known,” Jaufre said.
She nodded. “Let us go to Venice anonymous and unannounced.”
She looked at Shasha, who nodded agreement.
“Very well,” Jaufre said.
In the meantime Alaric became slowly accustomed to the idea of women warriors, especially after Hayat and Alma working together managed to dump him on his backside during a practice session. He looked on their joining morning practice with a less condemnatory eye after that, and he was certainly less smug when he faced them across a practice blade.
Not by so much as a quiver of a cheek muscle did Firas show how much he had enjoyed the scene. But then he was feeling very mellow these days.
Félicien took to the two women immediately, and they to him, Alma in particular because he was a student, Hayat because he was eager to learn all the songs she knew. Hari questioned them most stringently on the role of women in Islam. Alma struck up an instant friendship with Shasha, who, like Félicien she regarded as a fellow acolyte in scientific matters.
When the question was asked, it appeared that the entire company was traveling to Venice, each for their individual reasons. Johanna was going to Venice, and Shasha was going with Johanna, and that meant Firas was going, too. No further comment was made. None was needed. Everyone had seen the bed in the yard.
“I seem to have acquired a taste for travel,” Alma said, and Hayat shrugged. “Where Alma goes, I go.” She and Firas were very alike in that way.
Alaric had already declared his intention of returning to his homeland, ignoring Félicien when the goliard said beneath his breath, “To see if it has cooled down enough for him to go home, more like.”
Félicien, too, had declared a state of homesickness. He looked at Jaufre when he said it, although no one noticed but Shasha and Hari. “It’s been five years,” he said. “I can’t stay away forever.”
Hari said simply that he had no option but to move forward as his calling bade him. He was on a lifetime voyage of exploration, and a little thing like a vast sea would not stop him. Besides, he had been told of an enormous temple in Rome, dedicated to the Christian god…
“Wait until you see Chartres,” Félicien said.
“Eight then,” Giovanni Gradenigo said when he was informed, adding up figures. He looked up with a broad smile. “Seven ducats each. That includes bed and board, of course.”
This provoked the expected outrage, as forced intimacy with the pilgrims had taught them that seven and a half ducats was the going rate for the round trip from Venice to Jaffa and back again, weevily hardtack and sour water included. They beat him down to two ducats each, if they provided their own food. Shasha, who had volunteered to go among the pilgrims to treat their aches and pains, had had an earful of what kind of board Gradenigo provided and laid in stores accordingly. Further, she had prescribed a large dose of valerian tea every night for Mistress Joan, which seemed to promote a quieter attitude. Jaufre claimed, not without credence, that Gradenigo owed them all a reduction in fare for that alone.
Then there were the horses. Since four of Gradenigo’s pilgrims had died en route, three on board ship and one in Jerusalem of the bloody flux, he bundled extra pilgrims into the second ship to make room for North Wind and the three Arabians on the first, although he charged them a fortune for it. Johanna would entrust food and water for the horses to no one but themselves, so it wasn’t as expensive as it could have been.
Meanwhile, they waited for a favorable wind. “We could sacrifice a virgin,” Félicien said. When the wind finally came—with all the Gaza virgins still accounted for—Gradenigo bundled everyone on board post haste and set sail before it could change its fickle mind.
Of course their group found themselves on the same ship as Mistress Joan. Of course they did. Johanna only hoped she wouldn’t frighten the horses.
On the voyage she found herself most in company with Jaufre, who had a disturbing habit of watching her with a smile in his eyes. It had been a long year apart and they were both much changed, but now that she was back in his company, she remembered clearly the feelings for him that she had only just begun to discover before they were parted. The kind of feelings she had once had for Edyk.
And then he had been attacked, stabbed in the back and for all she knew killed, as she had been dragged off against her will. She knew an enormous relief that Jaufre had survived, and thrived, as well as an astonishment at the maturity—and the competent swordplay—of the man who had taken his place. But she felt as if she hardly knew him now. She felt, unbelievably, shy, a thing she had never felt before in her life, and something it had taken a while for her to identify.
And then there was Edyk. Seeing him had been a shock, if not for the reasons she might have expected. He was older than she was by several years, a more experienced merchant and traveler, and vastly more experienced as a lover. And yet in Gaza he seemed so young and comparatively innocent. It was as if their positions had been reversed, and she was now the elder and wiser and by far the more experienced of the two.
She had been happy to see him again, and she had gone to see him off when he left Gaza to return east because she could not bear to part with him on bad terms. But in the end, it was with a very faint fond remembrance that she watched him ride through Gaza’s north gate. It had not been nearly as easy for her to leave Edyk at the summerhouse the previous spring.
“Do you want to take North Wind with you?” she had said, dreading the answer.
Edyk smiled. It was only a slight smile, but still, he did smile. “He would not come. And even if I compelled him, he would not stay with me.” The smile grew wider. “I should never have let you help with his training.”
They both laughed a little. He had said much the same before she left Cambaluc. His hand caressed her cheek briefly, toyed with a bronze curl. Then his smile faded and he kicked his mount viciously in the sides and galloped away from her for the last time, followed by the ever-faithful Chiang, who had pretended not to have seen Johanna at all.
She should feel sad, she told herself. But mostly what she felt was relief.
It was a violent crossing, the previous lack of wind compensated for by one violent fall storm after another. The two ships were brutally pushed along a course that more resembled the trail of a snake that the wake of a boat. The storms had the virtue of making it a quick passage, at least, and of drowning out the shrieking and exhortations of Mistress Joan en route. Johanna and Jaufre, wise to the ways of sea travel since childhood, remained on deck for the entire five weeks, one standing watch while the other slept, fending off the attention of crewmen interested in what might be in their pockets.
They saw few other ships. “I thought anyone who sailed the Middle Sea was at grave risk from pirates,” Johanna said one day when the captain was passing.
A gust of wind tore at the sails and rattled the rigging so fiercely that for a moment she thought the whole mass would be torn loose and carried away, leaving the ship at the mercy of the storm with no means of propulsion or control. The ship listed sharply and a wave of water came over the gunnel to soak them both to the skin.
Gradenigo laughed and pushed his wet hair out of his eyes. He had to shout to be heard above the wind. “Signorina, no pirate in his right mind would be out in this weather!”
Except for the mandatory stops at Candia in Crete and Modon in Greece, when everyone staggered on shore for an hour of fresh air and a surface that didn’t move beneath their feet, the rest of their party stayed below in their single cramped cabin with their heads over the communal
commode. The resulting aroma only increased their nausea and multiplied the rats. Firas and Shasha were unaffected, and joined Johanna and Jaufre on deck, where they held hands longer and more tightly than strictly necessary to keep their balance against the heaving of the ship. Johanna reserved comment. She was, amazingly, learning discretion.
Several more of the pilgrims died mid voyage and their bodies were buried at sea in accordance with the rules as set out by the captain’s contract. There were moments when Alaric, Alma and even Hari wished most heartily to have been one of them.
They disembarked with relief for the last time, on the Grand Canal in Venice one cold, gray morning in early November. Stabling for the horses provided for and bags left at an inn Gradenigo recommended, the first gondolier they hailed said, “The Polo palazzo? Of course.”
They climbed gingerly into the long, narrow boat and penetrated the heart of the one of the stranger cities they had ever visited. Most of the streets were canals connected by bridges, and Johanna wondered if this was what Baghdad had looked like before its canals had been destroyed by Hulegu. There were few signposts and many people, all talking and gesticulating at a great rate. There were shops filled with every kind of merchandise and they caught quick glimpses into open doors of dazzling arrays of silk and gemstones and spices.
Their gondolier pushed them along with a long pole he went up and down hand over hand, more often than not ducking when they passed beneath the bridges, which did not seem to have been built with gondoliers in mind. After thirty minutes’ worth of twists and turns down waterways that all looked—and smelled—the same to them once they got off the Grand Canal, he decanted them at the foot of a bridge on one of the smaller canals. He pointed at a massive double door made of wood set in the front of a grand stone house, accepted payment and a tip that Shasha thought was extortionate, and shoved off in search of his next fare.
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