by Noah Gordon
Rob estimated this Ghazna army to be four times as large as the one Masūd had led through Ispahan on his way west.
“Why haven’t they entered the city?” he asked a member of the kelonter’s police force.
“They have pursued Alā here and he is within the city walls.”
“Why should that hold them outside?”
“Masūd says Alā must be betrayed by his own people. He says if we deliver the Shah, they will spare our lives. If we do not, he promises a mountain of our bones in the central maidan.”
“Will Alā be delivered?”
The man glared and spat. “We are Persians. And he is the Shah.”
Rob nodded. But he did not believe.
He descended the wall and rode the horse back to the house in Yehuddiyyeh. The English sword had been stored away, wrapped in oily rags. He strapped it to his side and bade Mary to take out her father’s sword and barricade the door behind him.
Then he remounted the horse and rode to the House of Paradise.
On the Avenue of Ali and Fatima, people stood in worried groups. There were fewer persons in the four-laned Avenue of the Thousand Gardens and no one in the Gates of Paradise. That usually immaculate royal boulevard showed signs of neglect; caretakers had not groomed or pruned the landscaping of late. At the far end of the road was a solitary sentry.
The guard stepped out to challenge as Rob approached.
“I am Jesse, hakim at the maristan. Summoned by the Shah.”
The guard was little more than a boy and looked uncertain, even frightened. Finally he nodded and stepped aside so the horse might pass.
Rob rode through the artificial woods created for kings, past the green field for ball-and-stick, past the two racing tracks and the pavilions.
He stopped behind the stables, at the living quarters that had been given to Dhan Vangalil. The Indian weapons-maker and his elder son had been taken to Hamadhān with the army. Rob didn’t know if the two men had survived, but their family was gone. Their little house was deserted and someone had kicked in the clay walls of the smelting furnace Dhan had built with such care.
He rode down the long graceful approach road to the House of Paradise. The battlements were empty of sentries. His mount’s hooves clattered hollowly across the drawbridge, and he tethered the horse outside the great doors.
Inside the House of Paradise his footsteps echoed through the empty corridors. Finally he came to the audience chamber in which he had always come before the king, and he saw that Alā sat in a corner alone on the floor, his legs crossed. Before him was a ewer half-filled with wine, and a board set up with a problem in the Shah’s Game.
He looked as rank and untended as some of the gardens outside. His beard was untrimmed. There were purple smudges under his eyes and he was thinner, making his nose more of a harsh beak than ever. He stared up at Rob standing before him with his hand on the hilt of his sword.
“Well, Dhimmi? Have you come to avenge yourself?”
It was a moment before Rob realized Alā was talking of the Shah’s Game and already rearranging the pieces on the game board.
He shrugged and took his hand from the hilt, arranging the sword so he could be comfortable as he sat on the floor opposite the king.
“Fresh armies,” Alā said without humor, and opened by moving an ivory foot soldier.
Rob moved a black soldier. “Where is Farhad? Was he slain in the fighting?” He had not expected to find Alā alone. He had thought he would have to kill the Captain of the Gates first.
“Farhad was not slain. He has fled.” Alā took a black soldier with his white horseman, and at once Rob used one of his ebony horsemen to capture a white foot soldier.
“Khuff would not have deserted you.”
“No, Khuff would not have run away,” Alā agreed absently. He studied the board. Finally, at the end of the battle line he picked up and moved the rukh warrior carved in ivory with killer’s hands cupped to his lips, drinking his enemy’s blood.
Rob baited a trap and sucked Alā in, giving up an ebony horseman in exchange for the white rukh.
Alā stared.
After that the king’s moves were more deliberate and he spent more time in contemplation. His eyes gleamed as he gained the other white horseman but cooled when he lost his elephant.
“What of the elephant Zi?”
“Ah, that was a good elephant. I lost him too at the Gate of al-Karaj.”
“And the mahout Harsha?”
“Killed before the elephant died. A lance through the chest.” He drank wine without offering any to Rob, directly from the pitcher and spilling some on his already filthy tunic. He wiped his mouth and beard with the back of his hand. “Sufficient talk,” he said, and settled into play, for the slight advantage was with the ebony pieces.
Alā turned grim attacker and tried all the ruses that once had worked so well, but Rob had spent the last years pitted against finer minds; Mirdin had shown him when to be daring and when to be cautious and Ibn Sina had taught him to anticipate, to think so far ahead that now it was as though he led Alā down the very paths in which annihilation of the ivory pieces was a certainty.
Time passed, and a sheen of sweat appeared on Alā’s face, though the stone walls and stone floor kept the room cool.
It seemed to Rob that Mirdin and Ibn Sina played as part of his mind.
Of the ivory pieces there came to be on the board only the king, the general, and a camel; and soon, his eyes holding the Shah’s, Rob took the camel with his own general.
Alā placed his general before the king piece, blocking the line of attack. But Rob had five pieces left: the king, the general, a rukh, a camel, and a foot soldier, and he quickly moved the unthreatened foot soldier to the opposite side of the board, where the rules allowed him to exchange it for his other rukh, no longer lost.
In three moves he had sacrificed the newly reclaimed rukh in order to capture the ivory general.
And in two more moves his own ebony general periled the ivory king. “Remove, O Shah,” he said softly.
He repeated the words three times, while he positioned his pieces so there was no place for Alā’s beleaguered king to turn.
“Shahtreng,” he said finally.
“Yes. The agony of the king.” Alā swept the remaining pieces from the board.
Now they examined one another and Rob’s hand was back on the hilt of his sword.
“Masūd has said if the people don’t deliver you up, the Afghans will murder and pillage in this city.”
“The Afghans will murder and pillage in this city whether they give me up or don’t give me up. There is only one chance for Ispahan.” He clambered to his feet, and Rob rose so a commoner would not be seated while the ruler stood.
“I will challenge Masūd to combat, king against king.”
Rob desired to kill him, not to admire or like him, and he frowned.
Alā bent the heavy bow few men could have bent, and strung it. He pointed to the sword of patterned steel Dhan Vangalil had made, where it hung on the far wall. “Fetch my weapon, Dhimmi.”
Rob brought it and watched him strap it on. “You go against Masūd now?”
“Now appears a good time.”
“You wish me to attend you?”
“No!”
Rob saw shocked disdain at the suggestion that the King of Persia would be squired by a Jew. Instead of being angry, he felt relief; for it had been said impulsively and regretted as soon as uttered, since he could see no sense or glory in dying alongside Alā Shah.
Yet the hawk’s face softened and Alā Shah paused before leaving. “It was a manly offer,” he said. “Consider what you would like as reward. When I return, I shall issue you a calaat.”
Rob climbed a narrow stone stairway to the highest battlements of the House of Paradise, and from this aerie he could see the houses of the wealthiest part of Ispahan, Persians standing atop the wall of the city, the plain beyond, and the Ghazna encampment that stret
ched into the hills.
He waited for a long time with the wind whipping his hair and beard, and Alā did not appear.
As more time elapsed he began to blame himself for not having killed the Shah, certain Alā had gulled him and then made good an escape.
But presently he saw.
The western gate was hidden from his sight but there on the flat plain beyond the wall the Shah emerged from the city, astride a familiar mount, the savagely beautiful white Arabian stallion, which was tossing its head and prancing smartly.
Rob watched Alā ride straight for the enemy camp. When he was close, he reined up the horse and stood in the stirrups as he shouted his challenge. Rob couldn’t hear the words, only a thin, unintelligible shouting. But some of the king’s people could hear. They had been raised on the legend of Ardewan and Ardeshir and the first duel to choose a Shahanshah, and from the top of the wall rose the sound of cheering. In the Ghazna camp, a small group of horsemen rode down from the area of officers’ tents. The man in the lead wore a white turban but Rob couldn’t tell if it was Masūd. Wherever Masūd was, if he had heard of Ardewan and Ardeshir and the ancient battle for the right to be King of Kings, he cared nothing for legends.
A troop of archers on fast horses burst from the Afghan ranks.
The white stallion was the fastest horse Rob had ever seen, but Alā didn’t try to outrun them. He stood in the stirrups again. This time, Rob was certain, he shouted taunts and insults at the young Sultan who would not fight.
When the soldiers were almost on him, Alā readied his bow and began to flee on the white horse, but there was no place to run. Riding hard, he turned in the saddle and loosed a bolt that felled the leading Afghan, a perfect Parthian shot that drew cheers from those watching on the wall. But an answering hail of arrows found him.
Four arrows found his horse as well. A red gush appeared at the stallion’s mouth. The white beast slowed and then stopped and stood, swaying, before it crashed to the ground with its dead rider.
Rob was taken unawares by his sadness.
He watched them tie a rope to Alā’s ankles and then pull him to the Ghazna camp, raising a trail of gray dust. For a reason Rob didn’t understand, he was especially bothered by the fact that they dragged the king over the ground face down.
He took the brown horse to the paddock behind the royal stables and removed the saddle. It was a task to open the massive gate alone but the place was as unattended as the rest of the House of Paradise, and he manhandled it himself.
“Goodbye, friend,” he said.
He slapped the horse on the rump and when it joined the herd he shut the gate carefully. Only God knew who would own the brown horse by morning.
At the camel paddock he collected a pair of halters from the impedimenta hanging in an open shed and chose the two young, strong females he wanted. They knelt in the dust chewing their cuds, watching his approach.
The first tried to bite off his arm when he drew near with the bridle; but Mirdin, that most gentle of men, had shown him how to reason with camels, and he punched the animal so hard in the ribs that the breath whistled from between the square yellow teeth. After that the camel was tractable and the other animal gave no trouble, as though it learned by observation. He rode the larger and led the second beast on a rope.
At the Gates of Paradise the young sentry was gone, and as Rob traveled into the city it appeared Ispahan had gone mad. People were rushing everywhere, bearing bundles and leading animals laden with their belongings. The Avenue of Ali and Fatima was in an uproar; a runaway horse careered past Rob, causing the camels to shy. In the marketplaces, some of the merchants had abandoned their goods. He saw covetous glances directed at the camels, and he took his sword from its sheath and held it across his lap as he rode. He had to make a wide berth around the eastern part of the city in order to reach Yehuddiyyeh; people and animals already were backed up for a quarter of a mile as they tried to flee Ispahan through the eastern gate to evade the enemy camped beyond the western wall.
When he reached the house, Mary opened the door at his call, her face ashen and her father’s sword still in her hand.
“We are going home.”
She was terrified but he saw her lips moving in thanksgiving.
He took off the turban and Persian clothing and put on his black caftan and the leather Jew’s hat.
They assembled his copy of Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine, the anatomical drawings rolled and inserted into a length of bamboo, his casebook, his kit of medical tools, Mirdin’s game, foodstuffs and a few drugs, her father’s sword and a small box containing their money. All this was packed on the smaller camel.
From one side of the larger camel he hung a reed basket and from the other, a loosely woven sack. He had a tiny amount of buing in a small vial, just enough to allow him to wet the end of his little finger and let Rob J. suckle the fingertip, and then do the same for Tam. When they were sleeping he placed the older boy in the basket and the baby in the sack, and their mother mounted the camel to ride between them.
It wasn’t quite dark when they left the little house in Yehuddiyyeh for the last time, but they didn’t dare delay, since the Afghans could fall upon the city at any moment.
Darkness was complete by the time he led the two camels through the deserted western gate. The hunting trail they followed through the hills passed so close to the Ghazna campfires that they could hear singing and shouting, and the shrill cries of the Afghans working themselves into a frenzy for the pillaging.
Once a horseman seemed to be galloping straight at them, yipping as he rode, but the hoofbeats veered away.
The buing began to wear off and Rob J. started to whimper and then to cry. Rob thought the sound doomingly loud, but Mary took the boy from the basket and silenced him with her teat.
There was no pursuit. Soon they left the campfires behind, but when Rob looked back whence they had come a roseate nimbus had appeared low in the sky and he knew Ispahan was burning.
They traveled all night and when the first thin light of morning came, he saw he had led them out of the hills and no soldiers were in sight. His body was numb, and his feet … he knew that when he stopped walking pain would be another enemy. By this time both children were wailing and his gray-faced wife rode with closed eyes, but Rob didn’t stop. He forced his tired legs to continue to plod, leading the camels west, toward the first of the Jewish villages.
PART SEVEN
The Returned
75
LONDON
They crossed the great channel on March 24, Anno Domini 1043, and touched land late in the afternoon at Queen’s Hythe. Perhaps if they had come to the city of London on a warm summer’s day the rest of their lives might have been different, but Mary landed in a sleety spring rain carrying her younger son, who, like his father, had retched and vomited from France till journey’s end, and she disliked and mistrusted London from the damp bleakness of the first moment.
There was scarcely room to disembark; of fearsome black naval ships alone, Rob counted more than a score riding the swells at anchor, and merchant craft were everywhere. They were, all four, exhausted by travel. They made their way to one of the market inns Rob remembered at Southwark but it proved a sorry haven, crawling with vermin that added to their misery.
At earliest light next morning he set out alone to find them a better place, walking down the causeway and over London Bridge, which was in good repair, the least changed detail of the city. London had grown; where there had been meadows and orchards he saw unfamiliar structures and streets that meandered as crazily as those in Yehuddiyyeh. The northern quarter of the town made a complete stranger of him, for when he was a boy it had been a neighborhood of manor houses set off by fields and gardens, the properties of old families. Now some of these had been sold and the land converted to use by the dirtier trades. There was an iron works, and the goldsmiths had their own cluster of houses and shops, as did the silversmiths and the copper workers. It was not a place
he chose to live, with its pall of misty wood smoke, the stink of the tanneries, the constant clang of hammers on anvils, the roaring of the furnaces, and the tapping, beating, and banging of work and industry.
Every neighborhood came up lacking something in his eyes. Cripple gate was hard by the undrained moor, Halborn and Fleet Street remote from the center of London, Cheapside too crowded with retail business. The lower part of the city was even more congested but it had been a heroic part of his childhood and he found himself drawn back to the waterfront.
Thames Street was the most important street in London. In the squalor of the narrow lanes that ran from Puddle Dock on one end of it and Tower Hill on the other lived porters, stevedores, servants, and other unprivileged folk, but the long stretch of Thames Street itself and its wharves were the prosperous center of the export, import, and wholesale trades. On the south side of the street, the river wall and the quays compelled a certain amount of alignment, but the north side ran crazily, sometimes narrow, sometimes broad. In places, great houses pushed gabled fronts out as pregnant overhangs. Sometimes a small fenced garden poked out or a warehouse stood back, and most of the time the street was filled with humanity and animals whose vital effluvia and sounds he remembered well.
In a tavern he inquired about empty housing and was told of a place not far from the Walbrook. It proved to be next to the small Church of St. Asaph, and he told himself Mary would like that. On the ground floor lived the landlord, Peter Lound. The second floor was to let, being one small room and one large room for general living, connected to the busy street below by the steep stairway.
There was no sign of bugs and the price seemed fair. And it was a good location, for along the better side streets on the rising land to the north, wealthy merchants lived and kept their shops.
Rob lost no time in going to Southwark to fetch his family.
“Not yet a fine home. But it will do, will it not?” he asked his wife.
