Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  Johanna filled their mugs. “My name is Johanna,” she said. She held one of the mugs out to him.

  He hesitated before accepting it. “Peter,” he said eventually.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Peter?”

  “In Venice,” he said, “I am Peter.”

  She wondered how old he was. In the best Mongol tradition, his face was ageless, the skin smooth, the fold of his eyelids confounding the lines at the corners that might have given her some indication. The countenance he presented was bland, but his eyes, alert and interested, gave him away.

  “You recognized the name of Shu Lin,” Johanna said. “Perhaps you knew her.”

  He said nothing.

  She fortified herself with a drink. “As I said, I am her granddaughter. She was wife to Ser Polo, who served the Great Khan for twenty years. The gift of her person was a mark of the Khan’s favor, or so it is told in my family.”

  “Is it?”

  She felt a spark of anger at his evasion. “It is,” she said with emphasis. “From this union came my mother, Shu Ming. She married Wu Li, a merchant of Cambaluc and a friend to Ser Polo. I am their only child.”

  “Wu Li,” he said. “What is any respectable father about, to let you travel unescorted so far from home?”

  She smiled a little. “You should talk.”

  “I am a man,” he said, but mildly.

  Her smiled widened. “You are a Mongol,” she said. “You don’t make the mistake of underestimating women.”

  He was surprised into a laugh, turned into a cough.

  She let her smile fade. “My father is dead,” she said. “As is my mother. I left Cambaluc to travel to the West.”

  “To find what family remained to you?”

  It was at least in part the truth. “Yes,” she said.

  “Wu Li,” he said, musingly. “The son of Wu Hai, perhaps?”

  “Yes.”

  His gaze was straight and piercing. “The Honorable Wu Hai was a great friend of my master.”

  She felt the knot in her belly begin to ease. “Yes. He married my mother to his son, after my grandmother died.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Shu Lin…”

  “…was dead by that time. The circumstances of her death were not…pleasant.”

  Now she had his full attention.

  “Explain,” he said.

  For a servant he possessed a great deal of innate authority. She told the tale without emotion, distant enough from her now that it caused her no pain.

  “And Wu Hai turned his wife out of doors for the betrayal of Shu Lin and my master’s daughter?”

  “His entire household, except his son, my father, whom he married to Shu Ming.”

  There was silence as Peter the Mongol absorbed this information. “And you wish to see your grandfather.”

  Her heart seemed to leap into her mouth. She took a deep breath. “I do.”

  “What do you want from him?” he said. “He lies on his deathbed.”

  “So I have been told,” she said. She sat back in her chair. What did she want from her grandfather? She had traveled almost two thousand leagues to find him. What now did she want to say to this storied man, this legend whose blood she carried in her veins?

  “Perhaps,” she said slowly, “it is what he might want from me.” She met Peter’s eyes. “News of his wife and daughter. The knowledge that he has a grandchild.”

  “He has other grandchildren,” Peter said. “And if he would have wanted news of Shu Lin and Shu Ming, he could have sent for it.”

  She swallowed. He was brutal but he wasn’t wrong. “You think he won’t want to see me, then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, surprising her with his frankness. “He is not…” He lingered over his next words. “…himself much of the time now.”

  Her turn to say nothing.

  “But it is possible that his daughter might wish to meet you,” he said.

  She looked up. “Which one?”

  “Moreta,” he said, and again his eyes dwelt on her face with something she recognized as fascination. “The youngest daughter, who is still at home.” He smiled. “You may find you have something in common.”

  2

  Venice, December, 1323

  Shasha had found them a suite of rooms on the first floor of a house on the Rio del Pontego del Tedeschi, midway between the Polo mansion and the Ponte di Rialto, the bridge that crossed the Grand Canal. Jaufre was fairly certain that Shasha’s major incentive for hiring these particular rooms was that each one had its own hearth. By far and away their biggest expense so far was fuel, but no one complained. They were all afflicted by the cold.

  Shasha had set up a stillroom on the ground floor and was combing the various fairs and markets for herbs new and old. Soon the first floor was perfumed with the aroma of simmering herbs and spices. One thing—possibly the only thing—Venice had for sale at a reasonable price was glass vials and bottles. Shasha bought them in bulk empty and sold them full of lotions, potions and tinctures of her own devising, effective if the traffic through her stillroom was any indication. Hers was a going concern before Christmas.

  She and Firas were sharing a room, which surprised no one, not after their reunion in Gaza. “Almost a honeymoon,” Jaufre told Johanna, who either ignored or was oblivious to any hidden meaning in the remark. But then Johanna was gone so much of the time those first days in Venice.

  Alma and Hayat shared another room, also to no one’s surprise. Alma appeared determined to seek out and interrogate every human being with a claim to scholarship, however tenuous, within the authority of the Doge. Her only complaint was the lack of clear skies at night, the worse for astronomical observations. She ran into less opposition because of her sex than Jaufre would have expected. Possibly her harem-cultivated beauty was responsible but he thought that the curiosity that burned with such a genuine fire effectively negated her gender. Certainly she was unstoppable as a seeker after truth, as the philosophers of Venice deemed it to be, and she was rarely turned from their doors.

  “She is determined to make up for all the time she lost in the harem,” Hayat told him. Hayat’s free time was spent in practice with Firas, who had commandeered the attic of their rental for his own private salle and filled it with mats and practice swords and staffs. He was insistent that the group maintain their fighting edge, honed by two years on the Road. They all had bruises, excepting only Alaric, whose Templar training was too well-learned and too long ingrained to allow for dropping his guard now.

  Alaric had attached himself and his sword to the salon of an expatriate from Paris, a Messire Roland, who made a good living spanking the young Venetian whelps of wealth and privilege who harbored the laughable illusion that they could wield a sword in workmanlike fashion or, they were soon given to understand, in any fashion at all. Alaric gave lessons in the broadsword and drank his pay in a series of local tavernas, seemingly determined to betray the vows of his former order insofar as temperance and sobriety were concerned. But then the Knights Templar had been disgraced and disbanded and their leaders burned at the stake in Paris almost a decade before, so it wasn’t as if he would be damned for it.

  Now and then he invited Firas to join him in an exhibition and charged admission. “He is much too fond of his wine,” Firas told Jaufre privately.

  “I am not his mother,” Jaufre said with an edge to his voice.

  Firas gave him a keen look from beneath suddenly frowning brows and said no more, leaving Jaufre a little ashamed of his curt reaction.

  Hari had gathered up his yellow robe and vanished behind the walls of the San Giorgio Monastery, where he had by means best known to himself become the bosom friend of the abbott. He surfaced occasionally to take tea with his companions, or to stand in rapt witness to one of the many gorgeously-costumed processions to St. Mark’s Basilica. He was an object of great curiosity to the children of the city, who would trail in his saffron-clad wake and gather round in an intent and strangely
ridicule-free attitude whenever Hari stopped to take speech with anyone he thought looked interesting.

  “Which is almost everyone,” Félicien said. “No citizen of Venice is safe from our monk.” The goliard had taken himself and his lute to the largest of the local inns and was there to be heard singing songs of the Princess Padmini and the night it rained emeralds, and telling floridly embellished tales of the hedonistic life lived in Cambaluc and Kinsai. Very little exaggeration was necessary to enthrall his audience, which swelled as his fame spread. Before long he began to receive invitations for private concerts in canal-side palazzos. “Not since l’Alouette du Sud have I heard such a voice,” Jaufre heard one grizzled old Frankish roué claim.

  “One would think Venetians would be a little more sophisticated,” Félicien told Jaufre when this was reported back to him, “but every fish bites at some bait, I suppose.” And spoiled his supercilious tone with a jingling shake of his full purse and a wide grin.

  “Who is l’Alouette du Sud?”

  Félicien gave an airy wave. “A singer not quite as talented as myself, it would seem.”

  Jaufre, for his part, had watched the rest of them pursue their various interests only briefly before seeking after his own. He had thought he would do this in company with Johanna, but when he approached her she said, her mouth in a grim line, “I am going to see my grandfather.” She was facing him but her gaze was fixed somewhere beyond him. “Although right now I’m going to visit North Wind.”

  “I could go with you,” he said, but she was already out the door, her footsteps moving firmly and briskly away. It took everything in him not to pursue her, but then what would he do if he caught her? She was not someone moved easily from her purpose.

  He had loved her for most of his life, this tall, slim, vibrant girl with the long bronze braid and the gray eyes that sparkled with life and the full lips so quick to smile. First their youth and then Edyk the Portuguese had kept her from seeing him as more than a friend and foster brother. But then came that moment in the yurt on the Road when he had watched her finally become aware of him as a man.

  And then Gokudo and Ogodei and Sheik Mohammed had conspired to separate them for a year, and Edyk, damn his eyes, had reappeared in Gaza as they were about to take ship for Venice, and yes, he understood that there was unfinished business between them but by all the demons dwelling in the Christian hell, how long was he supposed to wait? There were other women in the world, after all.

  But none like Johanna, a voice inside him said.

  A voice next to him said, “Patience.”

  He looked around to see Shasha standing next to him. “Patience,” she said again.

  “I’ve been patient,” Jaufre said through his teeth. “No one has ever been as patient as I have been.” He looked away, the words wrenched out of him. “It’s just that…she seems so indifferent, Shasha.”

  “Not indifferent, Jaufre,” his foster sister said. “Just preoccupied. Until this business with her grandfather is settled, she won’t have any attention to spare for anything else.” She touched his arm. “It’s what brought us here, after all. And we did follow her, willingly.”

  He took in a breath, held it, and then expended it again on a long sigh. “Patience,” he said.

  “Patience,” she said. “For just a little longer.”

  After all, they both thought, by all reports the old man was dying. How long could he be about it?

  “I suppose I could use the time to find us a place to sell our goods,” he said. “A storefront on a short lease.” He had thought that he would be about that task in company with Johanna, but he was entirely capable of doing so on his own. Entirely.

  She smiled, understanding very well his unspoken words. “You could do that. You might want to get to know Venice a little better first. And the Venetians.”

  He began his research on the docks, watching ships arrive and load and unload. It was one thing to peruse the posted bills of lading. It was another thing to talk to the sailors and the dockhands who actually laded the cargoes. There was always some master who thought he was smarter than the merchant officers posted the length of the Grand Canal. He was almost invariably wrong, which made for amusing entertainment, but that was another story, too, one fit for one of Félicien’s more picaresque stories. Jaufre wanted information, good, solid numbers and facts, and the best facts were those he could observe for himself.

  Venice was a city of merchants. Everyone who lived there was a member of or made their living by association to the merchant class. If they weren’t shipping, they were buying. If they weren’t buying, they were selling. If they weren’t selling, they were building ships to transport more goods. Even the omnipresent priests were in business for themselves, selling indulgences or pieces of the True Cross.

  Venice sold lumber—what they didn’t use themselves at the Arsenal building their own ships—and metal ore, and cured skins. They bought gold and silver from the mines of Germania, or did during the brief lulls between the dynastic skirmishes of the Wittelsbachs and the Hapsburgs, when the trade routes to the mines were safe to travel. They bought as much wool from England as they could and were always clamoring for more, as England, Jaufre soon learned, grew the best quality fleeces. The Venetians bought enormous quantities of fabric from Flanders in multiple weights and degree of fineness that Venetian weavers would have loved to have woven and sold themselves without recourse to a middleman, but for the scarcity of raw wool. They bought and sold at immense profit luxury items from Constantinople, the storied capital of Byzantium, everything from magnificent pieces of gold jewelry inlaid with enamel and set with gemstones to massive classical statuary that was allegedly antique. “Everything in Byzantium is for sale,” one Venetian merchant told Jaufre in a rare moment of expansiveness. “For a price.”

  There was also, inevitably, a brisk market in slaves, brought to Venice from Gaul and Britannia to be sold to Muslim traders. Most slave auctions were held indoors, due to the inclement winter weather, with only known traders admitted. He had bribed his way into three of these and had bolted from the third auction before it was a quarter over to be sick against the wall of the auction building. He straightened, trembling, gulping in fresh air, or air as fresh as Venice could provide.

  He thought he had made his peace with never seeing his mother again. His mother, captured by slavers when their caravan had been attacked on the Road between Kashgar and Yarkent when he was just ten years old. His father had been killed protecting Jaufre, and his mother, along with all the other women of the caravan had been kidnapped and sold in Kashgar. Jaufre had spent a lifetime looking for her. She would be in her forties now, if she were even still alive. She had been beautiful, he thought, although he knew a child’s memories of a beloved parent were always suspect. He hoped, fervently, that they did not lie in this instance, because beauty invariably fetched a higher price in the slave market, and a higher price meant better treatment.

  He suddenly wanted Johanna beside him with a ferocity that eclipsed all else. She alone understood. She alone could offer him comfort. She alone would have flayed him living for attending the slave auction in the first place.

  “Are you all right, young sir?”

  He turned to see an attractive young woman wearing a servant’s coif and carrying a basket over her arm. Her eyes were kindly and concerned. And appreciative in spite of his condition.

  Wrong woman, wrong time, wrong place. “Thank you, mistress,” he said, trying to look as if he were. “Something I ate.”

  “Or drank?” she said, and shook her head with a smile. “There is a well around the corner, open to all. Rinse out your mouth and wash your face.” She rummaged in her basket and present him with a handful of leaves. “And chew these afterward.”

  She went off, and he became aware of the smell of mint rising up from his hand.

  He did as he was bid and then forced himself to concentrate on the rest of what was on offer on the Rialto. Venice had no land
to cultivate, and so imported everything it ate and drank and wore. Vegetables, meat and grain came from Tuscany, brought daily by boat from the port of Mira. Venetians made the best bread he’d ever eaten, as evidenced by the multiple bakers’ carts clustered together in St. Mark’s Square, but they grew none of their own grain. A glass industry thrived on Murano, one of the other islands in the lagoon, but they exported the best of what was produced there and drank Nebbiolo imported from Valtellina in thick, heavy-bottomed mugs made of a glass so impure it was barely translucent. Shasha’s vials and bottles, he remembered, were serviceable, not exemplars of the glassblowers’ craft. The cloth that came in bolts from Flanders, the tailors and sempstresses of Venice labored long into the night making into richly embroidered robes for Venetian patrons. Very little of the finer cloth imported to the island city made it off the wharf again.

  There appeared to be a street market somewhere in the city every day of the week, not to mention a fair celebrating either a saint’s day, some of the more obscure events from the 1204 Venetian sack of Byzantium that resulted in the four bronze horses on top of St. Mark’s, or the arrival of just about any ship bearing goods for sale. Jaufre thought of the Kashgar market, held at the eastern edge of the Pamir Mountains every Sunday since the birth of Mohammed, but only every Sunday. Venice was one entire city-sized market, a trading fair open every day of the week, dawn to well past dusk, including saint’s days as celebrated by the local church. Indeed, the church was one of the merchants of Venice’s best customers, an inexhaustible purchaser of silken vestments, gold plate, incense, and the knucklebones of saints. If Christ had had as many fingers as Jaufre had seen for sale between the Holy Land and the Grand Canal, He would have had more arms than the Hindi goddess Durga.

  He kept that last observation strictly to himself. Venice was also a city of churches, sporting on average one per canal, and everyone went to church at least on Sundays and many of them attended services once a day. Jaufre, accustomed to Persian cities dotted with mosque towers issuing forth the call to prayer five times a day, still had never encountered such a priest-ridden society. He minded his manners, and enjoined his companions to do the same. Félicien emphatically endorsed this warning, and even Alaric bestirred himself enough to say, “Best to draw no attention our way, of any kind, religious or not.”