Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  There was a brief silence. “Father, there is someone else here to see you this morning.”

  “Oh?” The old man half-raised his head, peering through the gloom. “Make them come closer. It is so dark at this time of year.”

  “Here is Johanna, father,” Moreta said, motioning at Johanna to come forward. She hesitated before adding, “Johanna of Cambaluc.”

  “What? Cambaluc?”

  Johanna found she could hardly speak around the heart in her mouth. “It is true, Ser Polo.”

  The raspy voice strengthened. “Nonsense!”

  “Indeed, I was born in Cambaluc, Ser Polo.” She swallowed. I am—I have traveled many leagues to come to Venice, over roads with which you and Peter would be very familiar.”

  A withered hand gestured. “Come closer.”

  She leaned in between the bed curtains to meet the faded, watery eyes of the old man. To her surprise he seemed alert, his gaze sharp and penetrating, at least in that moment.

  For a few moments neither said anything, while behind her Moreta and Peter seemed to hold their breath. After a long moment, he spoke. “Shu Lin?”

  There was dead silence in the room, until Johanna managed to say, “I am her granddaughter.”

  The hand fell back. “Tell me.” His voice was stronger and very harsh.

  “Do you remember Wu Hai?”

  “Of course I remember Wu Hai,” the old man said testily. “The best friend a man could have. I committed Shu Lin and Shu Ming into his care when I left Cambaluc.” A brief silence, into which the dying man seemed to read reproach. “The Khan would not let me take them with me when I left,” he said, a little querulous, perhaps even a little pleading. “What happened, after I was gone?” When Johanna didn’t answer immediately he raised his voice. “What happened?”

  “Shhhh, father, shhh,” Moreta whispered, glancing at the door. “Mother will hear.”

  The remonstration quieted him immediately, which told its own tale. “What happened to Shu Lin, Johanna of Cambaluc?”

  Johanna swallowed. “She died not long after you left, Ser Polo,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how. Wu Hai married Shu Ming to his son, Wu Li. I am their daughter.”

  “But if you are Shu Ming’s daughter—”

  “Yes, Ser Polo. I am your granddaughter.”

  There was a charged silence. “Shu Lin’s granddaughter,” he said at last. After a moment, he said in a stronger voice, “My grand-daughter.”

  “Yes, Ser Polo.”

  The ghost of a smile flitted across his face. “I believe the proper way to address me is ‘Grandfather,’ young lady.”

  Johanna felt an answering smile, a little trembly at the corners, spread across her own face. She had not expected such instant acceptance. “Very well. Grandfather.”

  “Tell me of your life,” the old man said.

  And for the next hour Johanna did just that. She told him of her birth in Wu Li’s house and of her childhood on the Road. “He took you with him?”

  “He did, grandfather, myself and my mother, both of us.” Before that silence became too uncomfortable she said, “We traveled to many of the places you wrote of in your book. To Kinsai, the city of many canals—”

  “Canals!” the old man cried. “Hah! More canals than Venice itself! I was governor of Kinsai for three years, you know.”

  Johanna didn’t remember that in any of the stories told to her by her paternal grandfather, but then Wu Hai had died when she was still very young. She spoke instead of the journeys south into the Indus and Mien and from there the quick trips across the water to the islands where the spices grew. He questioned her closely about the kind and quality of nutmeg, clove and cinnamon, and then, exhausting that topic, he said, on an interrogatory note, “In Mien the finest rubies are found.”

  Johanna smiled, and told him the story of Lundi, the man with the dhow they had met in Kinsai on her last trip with her father. She glanced at Peter and Moreta, and leaned forward to whisper in the old man’s ear about the rubies that had fallen out of Lundi’s turban.

  He laughed again, and choked again, and was again revived with water, mixed with a little wine. Peter gave him a lemon drop and he sucked in it ruminatively. “Did you only go south, then?”

  “No, grandfather, we went east, too, as far as the islands of Cipangu, the land of the Nihon. I dove with the pearl fishers there.” She smiled. In this company, only he would know the pearl fishers were always women, who dove dressed only in a cloth wrapped about their loins. She thought it impolitic to say that she herself had donned this attire.

  “Hah,” he said, an answering smile on his face. “And the islands to the north? The ones where those large salt water weasels are so plentiful?”

  “No, we did not go so far. There was no need, as the Nihon traded in them.”

  “Ah,” he said reflectively. “Their fur makes the best coats and hats. If you could have cut out the middleman…”

  “The honorable Wu Li was of much the same mind, grandfather, but we didn’t have long enough in Cipangu for investigation. The Nihon’s pelts were of the finest quality, and expertly cured.”

  “How much profit in Cambaluc?”

  “Before transportation costs, almost fifty percent. The Mongols love good furs.”

  He grunted. “So you traveled with your father, your mother and you.”

  “Until he died, yes.” She willed her voice not to tremble. Old griefs should never be visited upon new friends, or old friends for that matter. “My mother predeceased him by a year.” She did not go into details and he did not ask. Old people were uninterested in any suffering but their own. “When he died, I left Cambaluc.”

  “On your own?”

  “Even I am not so foolhardy, grandfather,” she said. “No, I travel with friends.”

  “And you all came to Venice together?”

  “Yes.”

  “To what end?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He raised up shakily on one elbow. “What do you want, granddaughter? What do you want from me? A letter of recommendation to the merchants guild? An introduction to the Doge?” A rumble of a laugh. “I’m afraid my credit is such that neither would do you any good.” A tinge of bitterness crept into his voice. “Not from Il Milione. The man of a thousand lies.”

  “Father—”

  “Did you think I didn’t know what they called me behind my back, daughter?” The old man sank back to move restlessly beneath the covers. “I did not tell half of what I saw,” he said again, “for fear that I would not be believed. No, granddaughter, I see no use in my bringing you to anyone’s notice in Venice.” He paused and added, “Your Italian is appalling. Practice until you are fluent before you try to do business in this city.” He shifted again. “I have no coin about me, but—”

  “I have sufficient unto my needs, grandfather. I need nothing from you except—” here she hesitated “—except perhaps your—your regard.”

  “My regard, is it?” His voice was beginning to slur. “You have that, then, for what it’s worth. Lean down so that I may see you once more.”

  She did so, tears she had not expected pricking at the back of her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I never tried to find out what happened. I was—I think I was afraid.” He swallowed and fell back on his pillow. “And ashamed.”

  Well he should have been, came the unbidden thought, but again, she forbore from speaking it out loud. He was dying. What good would it do?

  She felt a light touch on her elbow, and turned to see Moreta nodding toward the door, an anxious expression on her face.

  Johanna straightened and took a long and what would probably be her last look at the old man, who had fallen fast asleep with the suddenness of the very ill and the very old. She had a feeling they would not meet again. “Goodbye, grandfather,” she said, and followed Moreta out of the room.

  In the hallway Moreta said, still in a whisper, “It’s been a long time since
I have seen him so alert and animated and—” she hesitated “—alive.”

  “And I,” Peter said, his shuttered Mongol features as close as Johanna thought they might ever get to an expression of approval.

  “May I come again, do you think?” Johanna said.

  “Who is that!” A voice, harsh and demanding, called from the head of the stairs.

  The three of them turned to behold an older woman at the head of the grand staircase, staring at them from a swarthy face which might have been attractive but for the perpetual scowl that had left deep creases between her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. “Moreta! Who is that woman?”

  As if they had rehearsed it, Peter took Johanna by one arm and hustled her toward the servants’ stairs. Moreta walked toward the woman, her hands held out in calming fashion.

  “It’s no one, mother, a—”

  “Who is she? I won’t ask again!” The sound of a ringing slap.

  “Merely another healer, mother, who thought she might have something to ease father’s joint pains—”

  The sound of another slap, and as Johanna was shoved through the stair door she caught a glimpse of Moreta half-turned from her mother, one arm raised in her own defense. “I told you, we’ve done all we can! The Lord God visits only so much pain on us as we can endure, and endure he must, like—”

  The door shut on the rant and Peter galloped Johanna down to the bottom of the stairs and shoved her out into the street. “I’ll send word when there is news,” he said and closed the door. Johanna walked away as fast as she could without running, the hood of her cloak drawn closely about her face in case anyone was looking out the windows of Ca’ Polo.

  “As well as can be expected,” was Shasha’s verdict.

  “You’re sure no one followed you when you left?” Jaufre said.

  Johanna nodded. “I took care not to come directly home,” she said. “I stopped for a meal on the way, and went to the market. I saw no one twice.”

  “Good.” Jaufre sat back and crossed his arms. “Donata Polo doesn’t sound like a pleasant person.”

  “No,” Johanna said definitely. “She isn’t.” She remembered the black-visaged presence at the head of the grand staircase, whose rage and jealous resentment could be felt all the way down the hall as something nearly palpable. “From what Moreta has said, and what my grandfather said this morning, I think she’s something of a despot, too.”

  “Abusive?”

  She nodded.

  “Murderous?” This from Jaufre.

  In fact Donata Polo reminded her somewhat of Dai Fang. Selfish and vicious. “I don’t know,” Johanna said. “Possibly. Dangerous, certainly.”

  Jaufre gave Johanna a considering look. “All right,” he said. “You’ve done what you came to do. Now what?”

  She sighed. “I’ll see him again, if it is possible. His wife will only be more suspicious from now forward, and he is very ill.” And his wife is determined he shall stay that way, she thought.

  “So, we’re in Venice,” Jaufre said. “You’ve met your grandfather.”

  “So now what?” Shasha said.

  “Good question,” Johanna said, making a face. She fiddled with a string unraveling from the hem of her tunic. “I know, this was all my idea,” she said without looking up. “And you two have never tried to—to—”

  “Talk you out of anything?” Shasha said, and exchanged a look with Jaufre, who laughed.

  “What would be the point?” Jaufre said. “This was the destination you chose for us. We could come with you, or you would go alone.”

  “You make me sound like—like—”

  “Foolish?”

  “Stubborn?”

  “Spoiled rotten?”

  Johanna flapped a hand. “All that and more,” she said. Her smile was crooked. “You still came with me.”

  “Yes, well.” Jaufre looked at Shasha. “It wasn’t as if we had someplace better to go.”

  “We don’t now, either,” Shasha said. “But I don’t much care for the idea of staying here past the winter.”

  “Well,” Johanna said, and cocked a brow. “We are still traders.”

  Jaufre shrugged. It didn’t need answering, if it was even a question.

  “And we haven’t seen all there is to see here,” she said. She felt for the square, leather-bound book in the purse at her waist. “And my father’s book is not yet complete. There are new roads to see and to write down in it.”

  Jaufre and Shasha exchanged looks. “Obviously,” Jaufre said.

  “Without question,” Shasha said, smiling.

  Johanna felt a matching smile spread across her face. “Then I say we gather up a pack train of—asses, I suppose, as camels don’t seem to have successfully crossed the Middle Sea, more’s the pity, and horses are too expensive to feed to be used for pack animals. We gather as much information as possible as to the kind of goods that are most in demand to the north of Venice—”

  “Spices,” Shasha said.

  “Small items, to pack as much as possible into as small a space as possible,” Jaufre said. “Jewelry, gemstones, small antiquities.”

  “Seeds,” Shasha said.

  “Sugar?” Jaufre said.

  Shasha shook her head. “Too bulky, and they cultivate honey here. Venetian glass?”

  “Big pieces will be too heavy, and too breakable,” Jaufre said. “Vials for potions and tinctures, perhaps.” Shasha nodded. “Coral, amber, ivory, worked or unfinished. Small pieces, nothing larger than would be suitable for a belt buckle.”

  “And spices,” Shasha said again, in case either of them hadn’t heard her the first time.

  Johanna looked at the two of them for a long moment. “And we leave when—”

  “Spring,” they said together.

  Johanna nodded. “After the snow melts and the ground dries out.”

  “I’m told there are high mountains to the north,” Jaufre said, “but also that there are hard but negotiable passes through them.”

  Johanna laughed, as anyone who had been through the Tien Shan would do at the mention of other, de facto inferior mountains. “No plans to stay put, then?” she said.

  “No!” they said in unison, and this time all three of them laughed.

  “We should acquire an agent here, though,” Jaufre said thoughtfully. “If we are to continue trading, we will need a source of goods from the East, and Venice appears to be the acknowledged source of foreign goods for trade in these parts.”

  “May, then,” Johanna said.

  They looked at each other. “May,” they agreed.

  Later that evening Jaufre came to Johanna’s room. She looked at him, and, unbidden, the tears began to gather and fall. He gathered her up in his arms and lay down with her on her bed, and held her all night. Once she said, “It’s not as if I really knew him.”

  His heart beat strongly and steadily beneath her cheek. He stirred, and said, “It’s not Ser Polo you weep for, Johanna.”

  “Who, then?”

  His smile was barely visible in the dim glow of the embers of what was left of the fire in the little fireplace that graced her room. “You weep for Wu Li, and Shu Ming, and the life you’ve left behind. Ser Polo was the last link left to that old life.”

  She listened to the beat of his heart beneath her ear. “Do you still think of your mother, Jaufre?”

  He remembered the women being stripped naked at the slave auctions down on the Grand Canal. “Always.”

  “I wish we could have found her for you.”

  “So do I.”

  They fell asleep then, holding each other until morning, when the watery daylight leaked through the small window high up on the wall stirred Johanna to consciousness. She stretched luxuriously, feeling a sense of well being at odds with the emotionally taxing experience of the previous day.

  Jaufre stretched in turn and blinked up at her. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning,” she said. “And thank you.” Impulsively
she leaned down to give him a quick kiss.

  He was instantly awake, one hand behind her head and another around her waist. He rolled them over so that he was lying on top of her, one leg sliding between hers, as he deepened the kiss.

  Shock kept her frozen in place for one moment, and then another, and then another, until she realized that her shock had passed and that her hands were moving up his back, kneading the warm, firm flesh beneath the rough nap of his tunic. His lips moved across her cheek and down her throat and she gasped when he pulled her nightshirt down her shoulder, exposing her breast. Her nipple hardened instantly and his lips were there, suckling, rubbing with his tongue.

  She heard breathless, whimpering, mewling sounds and realized that came from her. Her body was arched from head to toe, she had one leg wrapped around him and she was rubbing up against the hard ridge of flesh between his legs with a need she only dimly remembered from the time by the lake with Edyk. This need seemed far more urgent, more—more necessary.

  He raised his head. His blue eyes were narrowed, his golden hair tumbled. “Johanna,” he said, his voice rougher than she’d ever heard it.

  “Jaufre,” she said, in—disbelief? Wonder?

  “Johanna,” he said, this time in unmistakable satisfaction, and felt for the drawstring at her waist.

  The door to the room opened. “Johanna, you must come—oh.”

  The door closed again. After a moment came a knock, and Shasha’s subdued voice from behind it. “Johanna, Peter is here and asking for you. You’d better come.” A brief pause. “I’m sorry.” Footsteps moving away.

  Johanna stared up at Jaufre. “I’m sorry,” she whispered in her turn.

  Jaufre was the son of one ex-soldier and the friend of two others, and he had lived his entire life within earshot of muleteers, camel handlers, grooms and ostlers. These were not people known for moderation in language, and every curse he had learned was on display and at full volume as he extricated himself from Johanna’s bed and fumbled his clothing into place.

  Her face heated when she saw that his trousers were halfway down his legs and that it was she who must have made that happen.