by Noah Gordon
“I’ll never learn this,” he said, his heart sinking.
“You shall,” Simon said placidly.
Rob J. took the piece of wood back to the wagon. He ate his supper slowly, buying time in which to control his excitement, then he sat on the wagon seat and at once began to apply himself.
27
THE QUIET SENTRY
They emerged from the mountains to flat land that the Roman road divided with absolute straightness as far as the eye could see. On both sides of the road were fields with black soil. People were beginning to harvest grain and late vegetables; summer was over. They came to an enormous lake and followed its shoreline for three days, stopping overnight to buy provision at a shoreside town called Siofok. Not much of a town, sagging buildings and a crafty, cheating peasantry, but the lake—it was named Balaton—was an unworldly dream, water dark and hard-looking as a gem, giving off white mist as he waited early in the morning for the Jews to say their prayers.
The Jews were funny to watch. Strange creatures, they bobbed while they prayed and it seemed that God was juggling their heads, which went up and down at different times but seemed to work with a mysterious rhythm. When they were finished and he suggested that they swim with him, they made faces because of the chill but suddenly they were babbling to each other in their language. Meir said something and Simon nodded and turned away; he was camp guard. The others and Rob ran to the shore and threw off their clothes, splashing into the shallows like screaming children. Tuveh wasn’t a good swimmer and wallowed. Judah haCohen paddled feebly and Gershom ben Shemuel, who had a shocking-white round belly despite his sun-darkened face, floated on his back and bellowed incomprehensible songs. Meir was a surprise. “Better than the mikva!” he shouted, gasping.
“What’s the mikva?” Rob asked, but the stocky man plunged beneath the surface and then began to move out from shore with strong, even strokes. Rob swam after him, thinking he would rather be with a female. He tried to recall women with whom he had swum. There were perhaps half a dozen and he had made love to each, before or after the swimming. Several times it had been in the water with the wetness lapping all around them …
He hadn’t touched a woman for five months, his longest period of abstention since Editha Lipton had guided him into the sexual world. He kicked and flailed in the water, which was very cold, trying to rid himself of the ache to fuck.
When he overtook Meir, he sent a great splash into the other man’s face.
Meir sputtered and coughed. “Christian!” he shouted ominously.
Rob splashed him again and Meir closed with him. Rob was taller but Meir was strong! He pushed Rob under, but Rob locked his fingers in the full beard and pulled the Jew under with him, down and down. As they sank it seemed as though tiny flecks of rime left the brown water and clung to him, cold on cold, until he felt clothed in a skin of icy silver.
Down.
Until, at the same moment, each panicked and decided he would drown for playfulness. They pushed apart to rise, and broke the surface gasping for air. Neither vanquished, neither victor, they swam back to shore together. When they left the water they trembled with a foretaste of autumn chill as they struggled to force wet bodies into their clothes. Meir had noted his circumcised penis and looked at him.
“A horse bit the tip off,” Rob said.
“A mare, no doubt,” Meir said solemnly; he muttered something to the others in their language, causing them to grin at Rob. The Jews wore curiously fringed garments next to their flesh. Naked, they had been as other men; clad, they reassumed their foreignness and were exotic creatures again. They caught Rob studying them but he didn’t ask them to explain the strange undergarments, and no one volunteered.
After they left the lake behind, the scenery suffered. Traveling down a straight and unending road, passing mile after mile of unchanging forest or a field that looked like all the other fields, soon became almost unbearable in its monotony. Rob J. took refuge in his imagination, visualizing the road as it had been soon after it was built, one via in a vast network of thousands that had allowed Rome to conquer the world. First there would have come scouts, an advance cavalry. Then the general in his chariot driven by a slave, surrounded by trumpeters both for panoply and signaling. Then on horseback the tribuni and the legati, the staff officers. They were followed by the legion, a forest of bristling javelins—ten cohorts of the most efficient fighting killers in history, six hundred men to a cohort, each one hundred legionnaires led by a centurion. And finally thousands of slaves doing what other brutes of labor could not, hauling the tormenta, the giant machinery of war that was the real reason for building the roads: enormous battering rams for leveling walls and fortifications, wicked catapulta to make the sky rain darts on an enemy, giant ballista, the slings of the gods, to send boulders through the air or launch great beams as if they were arrows. Finally, the carts laden with impedimenta, the baggage, would be trailed by wives and children, whores, traders, couriers, and government officials, the ants of history, living off the spoils of the Roman feast.
Now that army was legend and dream, those camp followers ancient dust, that government long gone, but the roads remained, indestructible highways that were sometimes so straight as to lull the mind.
The Cullen girl was walking near his wagon again, her horse tied to one of the pack animals.
“Will you join me, mistress? The wagon will be a change for you.”
She hesitated, but when he extended his hand she took it and allowed him to pull her up.
“Your cheek has healed nicely,” she observed. She colored but seemed unable to keep from talking. “There’s only the slightest silver line from the last of the scratches. With luck it will fade so there will be no scar.”
He felt his own face go hot and wished she wouldn’t examine his features.
“How did you come by the injury?”
“An encounter with highwaymen.”
Mary Cullen drew a deep breath. “I pray God to preserve us from such.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “Some are saying that Kerl Fritta himself started the rumors of Magyar bandits, in order to put fear into travelers and bring them flocking to join his caravan.”
Rob shrugged. “It’s not beyond Master Fritta to have done so, I think. The Magyars don’t appear threatening.” On either side of the road, men and women were harvesting cabbages.
They fell into a silence. Each bump in the road jostled them so he was constantly aware of the possibility of a soft hip and a firm thigh, and the scent of the girl’s flesh was like a faint warm spice lured out of berry bushes by the sun.
He who had cozened females the length and breadth of England heard his voice thicken when he tried to talk. “Have you always had your middle name of Margaret, Mistress Cullen?”
She regarded him in astonishment. “Always.”
“Can’t ever remember another name?”
“When I was a child my father called me Turtle, because sometimes I did this.” She blinked both her eyes slowly.
He was unnerved from wanting to touch her hair. Under the broad cheekbone of the left side of her face was a tiny scar, unseen unless you studied her, and it didn’t mar her appearance. He looked quickly away.
Ahead, her father twisted in the saddle and saw his daughter riding in the wagon. Cullen had witnessed Rob several more times in the company of the Jews, and his displeasure was in his voice when he called Mary Margaret’s name.
She prepared to leave. “What is your middle name, Master Cole?”
“Jeremy.”
Her nod was serious but her eyes mocked him. “Has it always been Jeremy, then? You can’t remember any other name?”
She gathered her skirts in one hand and leaped to the ground lightly as an animal. He caught a glimpse of white legs and slapped the reins against Horse’s back, furious with the knowledge that he was an object of amusement to her.
That evening after supper he sought out Simon for his second lesson and discovered that the Jew
s owned books. St. Botolph’s school, which he had attended as a boy, had owned three books, a Canon of the Bible and a New Testament, both in Latin, and in English a menology, a list of holy feast days prescribed for general observance by the King of England. Every page was vellum, made by treating the skins of lambs, calves, or kids. Each letter had been transcribed by hand, a monumental task that caused books to be expensive and rare.
The Jews appeared to have a great number of books—later he found that there were seven—in a small chest of worked leather.
Simon selected one that was written in Parsi and they spent the lesson examining it, Rob searching out specific letters in the text as Simon called for them. He had learned the Parsi alphabet quickly and well. Simon praised him and read a passage of the book so Rob could hear the melodiousness of the language. He stopped after each word and had Rob repeat it.
“What is this book called?”
“It is the Qu’ran, their Bible,” Simon said, and he translated:
“Glory to God Most High, full of Grace and Mercy;
He created All, including Man.
To Man He gave a special place in His Creation.
He honored Man to be His Agent,
And to that end, imbued him with understanding,
Purified his affections, and gave him spiritual insight.
“I shall give you a list each day, ten Persian words and expressions,” Simon said. “You must commit them to your memory for the following day’s lesson.”
“Give me twenty-five words every day,” Rob said, for he knew he would have his teacher only as far as Constantinople.
Simon smiled. “Twenty-five, then.”
Next day Rob learned the words easily, for the road was still straight and smooth and Horse was able to plod with loose reins while his master sat in the driver’s seat and studied. But Rob saw a wasted opportunity, and after that day’s lesson he asked Meir ben Asher’s permission to carry the Persian book to his own wagon, so he might study it all through the empty day of travel.
Meir refused firmly. “The book must never leave our sight. You may read it only in our close company.”
“May not Simon ride in the wagon with me?”
He felt certain Meir was about to say no again, but Simon spoke up. “I could use the time to prove the account books,” he said.
Meir considered.
“This one is going to be a fierce scholar,” Simon said quietly. “There’s already in him a ravenous appetite for study.”
The Jews regarded Rob in a way that was somehow different than heretofore. Finally Meir nodded. “You may take the book to your wagon,” he said.
That night he fell asleep wishing it were the next day, and in the morning he awoke early and eager, with a sense of anticipation that was almost painful. The waiting was more difficult because he could witness every one of the Jews’ slow preparations for the day: Simon going into the woods to empty bladder and bowels, yawning Meir and Tuveh ambling to the brook to wash, all of them bobbing and muttering at morning prayer, Gershom and Judah serving up their bread and gruel.
No lover ever awaited maiden with more yearning impatience. “Come, come, you slow-foot, you Hebrew dawdler,” he muttered, going over his day’s lesson of Persian vocabulary one final time.
When finally Simon came he was laden with the Persian book, a heavy account ledger, and a peculiar wooden frame containing columns of beads strung on narrow wooden rods.
“What’s that?”
“An abacus. A counting device, useful when doing sums,” Simon said.
After the caravan got under way it was apparent that the new arrangement was workable. Despite the relative smoothness of the road, the wagon wheels rolled over stones and writing was impractical; but it was easy to read, and each of them settled into his work as they moved through mile after mile of countryside.
The Persian book made no sense at all to him, but Simon had told him to read the Parsi letters and words until he felt at ease with the pronunciations. Once he came upon a phrase Simon had given him on the list, Koc-homedy, “You come with good intent,” and he felt triumphant, as if he had scored a minor victory.
Sometimes he looked up and watched Mary Margaret Cullen’s back. Now she rode close to her father’s side, no doubt at his insistence, for Rob had noted Cullen glowering at Simon when he climbed onto the wagon. She rode with a very straight back and her head erect, as if she had balanced on a saddle all her life.
He learned his list of words and phrases by noon. “Twenty-five isn’t enough. You must give me more.”
Simon smiled and gave him another fifteen words to learn. The Jew spoke little, and Rob became accustomed to the click-click-click of the abacus beads flying under Simon’s fingers.
In the middle of the afternoon, Simon grunted and Rob knew he had discovered an error in one of the accounts. The ledger obviously contained the record of a great many transactions; it dawned on Rob that these men were bringing home to their family the profits of the mercantile caravan they had taken from Persia to Germany, which explained why they never left their campsite unguarded. In the line of march in front of him was Cullen, taking a considerable amount of cash to Anatolia in order to buy sheep. Behind him were these Jews, almost certainly carrying a greater sum. If bandits knew about rich plums such as these, he thought uneasily, they would raise an army of outlaws and even so large a caravan wouldn’t be safe from attack. But he wasn’t tempted to leave the caravan, for to travel alone was to ask for death. So he put all such fears from his mind and day after day sat on the wagon seat with the reins loose and his eyes fixed, as if eternally, on the Sacred Book of Islam.
There followed a special time. The weather held, with skies so autumnal that their blue depth minded him of Mary Cullen’s eyes, of which he saw little because she kept her distance. Doubtless she was so ordered by her father.
Simon finished checking the account book and had no excuse for coming to sit on his wagon seat each day, but their routine had been established and Meir had become relaxed about parting with the Persian book.
Simon trained him assiduously to become a merchant prince.
“What is the basic Persian unit of weight?”
“It is the man, Simon, about one-half of a European stone.”
“Tell me the other weights.”
“There is the ratel, the sixth part of a man. The dirham, the fiftieth part of a ratel. The mescal, half a dirham. The dung, the sixth part of a mescal. And the barleycorn, which is one-fourth of a dung.”
“Very good. Good, indeed!”
When he wasn’t being quizzed, Rob couldn’t refrain from eternal questions.
“Simon, please. What is the word for money?”
“Ras.”
“Simon, if you would be so kind … what is this term in the book, Sonab a caret?”
“Merit for the next life, that is to say, in Paradise.”
“Simon—”
Simon groaned and Rob knew he was becoming a nuisance, whereupon he held back the questions until the need to ask another popped into his head.
Twice a week they saw patients, Simon interpreting for him and watching and listening. When Rob examined and treated he was the expert and Simon became the one who asked questions.
A foolishly grinning Frankish drover came to see the barber-surgeon and complained about tenderness and pain behind his knees, where there were hard lumps. Rob gave him a salve of soothing herbs in sheep’s fat and told him to come back again in a fortnight, but within a week the drover was back in line. This time he reported the same kind of lumps in both armpits. Rob gave him two bottles of the Universal Specific and sent him away.
When everyone else had gone, Simon turned to him. “What is the matter with the big Frank?”
“Perhaps the lumps will go away. But I think they won’t, I think he’ll get more lumps because he has the bubo. If that is so, soon he’s going to die.”
Simon blinked. “Is there nothing you can do?”
/> He shook his head. “I’m an ignorant barber-surgeon. Perhaps somewhere there is a great physician who could help him.”
“I wouldn’t do what you do,” Simon said slowly, “unless I could learn everything there is to know.”
Rob looked at him but said nothing. It shocked him that the Jew could see at once and so clearly what it had taken him such a long time to realize.
That night he was awakened roughly by Cullen. “Hurry, man, for Christ’s sake,” the Scot said. A woman was screaming.
“Mary?”
“No, no. Come with me.”
It was a black night, no moon. Just past the Jews’ camp somebody had lighted pitch torches and in the flickering illumination Rob saw that a man lay dying.
He was Raybeau, the cadaverous Frenchman who occupied the position three places behind Rob in the line of march. In his throat was an open, grinning rictus and next to him on the ground was a dark and glistening puddle, his escaped life.
“He was our sentry tonight,” Simon said.
Mary Cullen was with the shrieking female, Raybeau’s ponderous wife with whom he had constantly quarreled. Her husband’s slit throat was slippery under Rob’s wet fingers. There was a liquid rattling and Raybeau strained for a moment toward the sound of her anguished calling before he twisted and died.
In a moment they started at the sound of galloping. “It’s only mounted pickets sent out by Fritta,” Meir said quietly from the shadows.
The entire caravan was aroused and armed, but soon Fritta’s riders returned with word that there had been no large raiding party. Perhaps the murderer had been a lone thief, or a scout for the bandits; in either case, the cutthroat was gone.
For the remainder of the night they slept little. In the morning Gaspar Raybeau was buried hard by the Roman road. Kerl Fritta intoned the Service of Interment in hurried German, and then people left the grave and nervously prepared to resume their journey. The Jews loaded their pack mules so their burdens wouldn’t tear loose if the animals had to be galloped. Rob saw that among the things packed on each mule was a narrow leather bag that appeared to be heavy; he thought he could guess the contents of the bags. Simon didn’t come to the wagon but rode his horse next to Meir, ready to fight or flee if either was necessary.
