Jakob ran his fingers over the instrument. “It appears to be some mixture of stone and bone. Perhaps these ancient people knew some secret of how to mix the two substances—this is not the first time I have seen such mixtures, sometimes in the human remains themselves.”
Gwellyn recalled the bones of the singer he and his brother had pulverized. They were just bone, no stone.
“A kind of embalming perhaps?” the Nestorian asked.
“Perhaps,” Jakob replied. “Or maybe, God forbid, some illness that half turns bones into stone. Health—if you have it, you have wealth!”
“Ask him if he knows where these people are now,” Gwellyn said, “the ancient people who made this stone-bone flute.”
The Nestorian conveyed the question in the language of clicks and grunts he was speaking to the flautist. He listened for the answer.
“He says almost all are bones themselves now, but some still live.”
“Yes, but where?” Gwellyn pressed.
“He says: ‘Everywhere. In all of us.’”
“That’s no answer,” Gwellyn said. “Ask him, where most on this Earth? In what land?”
“He says: ‘They live most in a land beyond the land.’”
“Riddles,” Gwellyn said. “I don’t want riddles. Ask him the name of the closer land.”
“He says: ‘The Land of Silk. The Land of the T’angs,’” the Nestorian translated.
“And where is this farther land in relation to the Land of Silk,” Gwellyn asked. “Up in the clouds, beyond some desert?”
“He’ll tell you it’s beyond a vast sea,” Jakob interjected.
“I know,” Gwellyn said. “I want to hear it from him.”
“He says: ‘The farther land is beyond a vast sea,’” the Nestorian supplied.
“See? I told you so!” Jakob reinforced his point with a bony finger.
Gwellyn nodded.
“These stone-bone flute players always give the same answer,” Jakob said.
“Precisely your Socratic complaint about the written word,” Gwellyn said. “It gives but one unvarying answer, as if written in stone…”
The two proceeded with yet another rendition of their debate about writing and its benefits and drawbacks, and then progressed to seas, and how to get to them, and where they might lead…
The Nestorian stood quietly, taking it all in. Eventually he returned the flute to its owner, who resumed his diatonic melodies.
Still later, the three left the dwelling.
The music was still in Gwellyn’s ears as he left the alleyway, as he left the precincts of Barbaricon completely for the small camp he and Jakob and others from their party kept on its outskirts.
The music stayed in his ears that evening, and the next morning and evening too, a living embodiment of Xeno’s paradox of a half of a half never diminishing to zero, a thread of asymptotically thinning honey that connected him to the man with the flute and the sallow skin and the sad bright sweet music…
He came to realize it would never leave him.
“ALEXANDER CONQUERED HALF the world already when he was my age! What are you so worried about?”
“Not quite,” Daralyn said. “Alexander was twenty when he succeeded his father, and twenty-two when he started his campaign east. And Aristotle was his teacher. And that was a thousand years ago anyway—times have changed.”
Gwellyn slapped her backside, and kept his hand there. “Yes, they have at that. And we know much more now than they did in Alexander’s day—much more about traveling long distances by land and sea.”
“Do we?” Daralyn removed the hand, but gave it an affectionate squeeze.
“Of course! Merchants like Jakob travel everywhere now—from Rome to Antioch to the Land of Silk. In Alexander’s day, it was considered a miracle that he even got as far as the Indus.”
“Yes, but even that is a far cry from setting out in a ship to who knows where. At least Alexander always had his feet on the ground. Every people he encountered would tell him something about the people who lived a little farther east. In many cases, they had actually seen that land with their own eyes. You would be sailing on nothing but wild rumors,” Daralyn said.
Gwellyn said nothing.
“Your father doesn’t want this,” Daralyn said quietly.
“Ah, somehow I knew it would come to that,” Gwellyn replied.
“He loves you.”
“He knew when I left that I would travel as far as need be to find the singers. My continuing the search should come as no surprise to him.”
“I think he was hoping you would get it out of your system in Barbaricon,” Daralyn said.
“I’ll get it out of my system when I find the singers.”
“I don’t know how much farther I can accompany you,” Daralyn said.
“Then I’ll miss you,” Gwellyn replied.
“DARALYN’S NOT WRONG about our sailing on rumors,” Gwellyn said.
“If we knew more about the singers, then I suspect you would not find their pursuit so tantalizing,” Jakob said. “Still, there’s the singing pottery…”
Gwellyn sighed. “The Nestorian’s going to bankrupt us before our voyage even begins.” He frowned. “OK, I’ll have a look—a listen—at it.”
They found the potter outside a series of lean-to’s, near the river.
“He speaks no Tocharian,” the Nestorian advised.
“No, of course not,” Gwellyn said.
“Do you understand what you’ll be hearing, how it came to be?”
Gwellyn nodded.
“Let me make sure I understand,” Jakob said. This encounter had cost them twenty coins, and he wanted to make sure they were getting their money’s worth. “There is a kind of pottery that captures the sounds that are made all around it, as it is being created. Like a painting of sound.”
“Yes,” the Nestorian said.
“And the sounds make lines upon the pottery, such that when you run a comb or stylus of the right composition over the lines, the sounds come back to life.”
“Yes,” the Nestorian said. “This potter has a collection of them, thousands, from all over the world, and through the ages.”
The potter looked up and smiled at them.
“Perhaps he understands Tocharian after all,” Gwellyn observed.
“He is just a happy man,” the Nestorian said, and went on to explain to the potter, in the clicking and grunting language he had used with the stone-bone flautist, what kinds of selections his clients were most interested in hearing.
Gwellyn and Jakob listened to many selections that day. The process of listening was very personal—only one person could listen at a time, because the point of the pottery from which the sounds emerged could accommodate only one ear. The sounds, at first, seemed very faint, and indistinct. But by the third or fourth listening, Gwellyn’s ear had adjusted, and each time the potter ran his comb across a different piece of pottery, Gwellyn found himself transported to a new world. He heard women having orgasms that made Daralyn’s sound like whimpers…old men groaning and dying…children laughing…birds singing, snakes hissing…winds rustling, things fluttering, through trees…and music, all kinds of music…
“Those potters knew how to live,” Jakob said.
They continued to listen, taking turns.
“Extraordinary,” Gwellyn said, at last. “I think we’re ready to hear what we came for.”
The Nestorian conveyed that in clicks and grunts to the potter.
“He says rub your hands on this, for good luck.” The Nestorian took a bolt of silk from the potter, who had taken it from a large oval vase he had retrieved from a lean-to nearly hidden by the others. The vase was a fleshy ochre, with lines so deep in some places that Gwellyn was surprised they didn’t crack the vase.
He lent his ear to the ochre, as the potter caressed it with the comb.
He heard a sad bright sweet music again, the music that had never left him, though this time it was outsid
e as well as inside his ears, in his face as well as his memory.
He heard a murmuring, a dog barking, and then the most compelling voice he had ever known. It was something between a plea and a prayer, a song of incredible gentleness, comprised of pieces less than words but more than sounds, a wispiness, a sigh, more vibrant than a scream…
And he knew at once and forever more why these brutish people from the dawn of humanity were called singers.
“SO YOU HEARD their voices, so you know they existed,” Daralyn said. “You already knew that.”
“Yes, I knew that when my brother and I burned the singer’s body, and ground his bones into dust.”
“But you still don’t know they exist today—and if so, where.”
“True,” Gwellyn replied.
“But you’re determined to sail out onto the sea to try to find them, anyway.”
“True.”
Daralyn turned away, in exasperation.
“The boat will be small,” Gwellyn offered, “the crew will be few. I’m entitled to risk my own life for what I believe in. So are the others.”
“Small? You intend to sail out in the vast sea with a small boat?”
“Jakob knows someone who comes from a distant island, where they make small boats, very sea-worthy, called curraghs. The name itself appeals to me—it sounds like it has some connection to my people. One is under construction right now.”
Daralyn started to speak, but was interrupted by a rustle in front of the tent.
“Come in,” Gwellyn said.
It was Li-Hsien, the Buddhist who served as his father’s liaison to the people of the Jade Gate, at Yumen.
“Forgive my intrusion…” Li-Hsien began.
Gwellyn waved off the apology, and offered Li a pouch of fermented mare’s milk, which he accepted and guzzled down.
“More?” Gwellyn asked.
Li hesitated, then nodded yes.
“So you have news from my father,” Gwellyn said, as Li drank down the second pouch. “Let me guess—he sends his commandment that I not proceed on this voyage of discovery.”
Gwellyn turned to Daralyn. “What did you do? Send him a message of warning by moonlight? Even a bird could not get from here to there so fast!”
Li started to speak, stammered, cleared his throat, said nothing.
“It’s OK,” Gwellyn said. “You can give me the message from my father. I don’t believe in killing the messenger.”
“The message is not from your father,” Li finally said.
Gwellyn looked confused.
“The message is about your father,” Li said. “His spirit has moved on to another plane. And Allyn is nowhere to be found.”
“What?”
“Your father is no longer on this Earth,” Li said.
“Who did it?” Gwellyn demanded. “The followers of Mohammet?”
“No, it was an illness. Some are saying they should burn your father’s corpse, and pulverize his bones.”
Daralyn took his hand. Her warm fingers felt comforting against the ice that had settled into the center of his palm. But he was still shivering.
She looked into his eyes, with an expression that said, surely you will return now, to be Shaman for your people. I will accompany you. I will support you.
But if there had been even the slightest doubt in Gwellyn’s mind that he should undertake this insane journey, that doubt vanished now, more quickly than ice in the sun.
FOUR
MALAGASY ISLAND, CIRCA A.D. 752
Unreliable winds had blown their small ship far off course. They made landfall on a large island that their guide said was about 250 miles off the mainland, the Southern continent, which he called Ifrica. Their guide was a Mohammetan, Ibrim al-Hibris. Gwellyn wasn’t completely sure at first that he could trust him. But Ibrim had been willing to guide them, at no cost other than his share of the treasures they might find. And as Jakob had said, “We’re all beggars when it comes to the sea and its ways, so we can’t be choosers.” Gwellyn also felt that, considering the huge unknowns that awaited them, the differences based on their pasts were meaningless…
“Some people call this place Monkey’s Island,” Ibrim mentioned, as he sat with Gwellyn and Jakob around their first fire on the shore. Paschos, an Aristotelian zoologist from Constantinople with a bounty on his head for some misconduct with animals, was the fourth member of their expedition, and he was asleep. Jakob had vouched for him.
“It looked big enough to be a continent,” Gwellyn said.
“Take my word for it,” Ibrim said. “If the winds had pushed our ship much farther west, we would have found ourselves between Ifrica, a true continent, and this little paradise for monkeys, which some of its inhabitants believe is itself a ship upon the sea.”
“I’ve also heard this island referred to as the Malagasy,” Jakob said, “assuming it’s the same place. Lots of different kinds of monkeys are supposed to live here—they say as many as there are different kinds of people in the world. That should make you happy.” He looked in Gwellyn’s direction.
“Why would that be?” Gwellyn responded. “Why should I care a fig about monkeys?”
“Because monkeys are related to people,” Jacob replied. “They bear more than a passing resemblance to us. Haven’t you noticed?”
“Who could deny it?” Ibrim said.
“And perhaps they will provide some insights into the singers,” Jakob said.
“That I couldn’t say,” Ibrim said.
“Enough about monkeys,” Gwellyn said. “What kind of people live here?” He warmed his hands over the fire. Maybe it was the warmth, or being on land for the first time in months and months, that made him especially miss Daralyn this evening. Not a night went by that he hadn’t regretted leaving her in Barbaricon—and it was almost a year already—but there was no way he could take a woman like her, any woman, on a voyage like this. If she hadn’t refused to come along, he would have been obliged to leave her anyway.
“Islam has yet to reach here in any force,” Ibrim was saying, “but it will come. In the meantime, from what I’ve heard from fellow travellers who have come this far, there seem to be two kinds of people on this island—black Ifricans from just across the channel, and people from the ocean worlds, from far off in the East.”
“Ocean worlds?” Gwellyn asked.
“Oh yes,” Ibrim said. “There are many islands to the south and east of the Land of Silk. Some even farther than that.”
“That was where we were supposed to be going,” Jakob said, ruefully, “to a huge land, separated from the Land of Silk by a huge water, in the far distant East.”
“I know,” Ibrim commiserated. “But we have no control over the winds—we are completely at their mercy in a boat such as ours. That is why the Silk Road is preferable to the Spice Route, except when the Road is closed.”
“Perhaps we can talk to some of these ocean people,” Gwellyn said. “Perhaps they know about singers on those far islands.”
Ibrim smiled. “We’ll have to find them first. And then hope we understand their language. But Paschos is a man of many talents.”
AS IT TURNED out when they finally made contact nearly five weeks later, everyone except Gwellyn understood something of their language, and even Gwellyn understood a little, for the ocean people on this island spoke a language that seemed cousin to more than one of the languages spoken in Barbaricon.
“They have the aspect of those who inhabit some of the archipelagos in the northeast section of the Spice Route, near where our voyage originated,” Paschos said to Gwellyn, as the two surveyed the small group of ocean people engaged in conversation with Jakob and Ibrim. The discussion had to do with how to get fresh food, and whom to pay for it—their most pressing need, after security had been established. And that had been established easily. These islanders seemed innocent of weaponry.
“I’ve never been to those islands, so I don’t know what those people look like,” Gwellyn said.
“But I have seen some people like these in Barbaricon. Not dressed like these, though—those vegetable fibers are quite appealing.” He was thinking especially of the two women, both about his age, he guessed, and both wearing skirts, parched grass in color, from waist to ankle. One also wore a large square garment draped over the upper part of her body, like a Roman toga. The other had nothing on at all above her skirt. Gwellyn couldn’t take his eyes off her breasts, beautiful, like suns peeking up just above an horizon.
“They wear no animal skin for clothing,” Paschos said. “They say skin should be connected to a beating heart.”
“I can see the logic in that,” Gwellyn said, his gaze on the woman, and where he envisioned her beating heart, below, to be.
“And once the heart stops, the skin should be shown the respect the spirit within deserves, and not flaunted as clothing,” Paschos continued.
Gwellyn saw skin as it rose and it fell in a tender rhythm of breath. “I hope her heart beats a very long time,” he said, quietly.
Jakob and Ibrim concluded their business.
“They say we are welcome to their food,” Jakob explained to Gwellyn and Paschos in Greek, the only language that the four sea-farers could easily understand. One of the islanders, a man about twenty with a loin-cloth and a toga and presumably no understanding of Greek, stood beside Jakob. Ibrim was walking in the other direction with the islanders.
“He’s going off with them to dig up some roots for us,” Jakob said. “The inhabitants say these roots are sweet and nourishing, and last a long time out of the ground.”
Gwellyn nodded, still focusing on the woman with just the skirt.
“They say they’re also willing to be our guides to anywhere on this island,” Jakob said.
“And what is their price for this?” Paschos asked.
“That we take one of them along with us on our ship when we leave the island. They say as an ocean people, their heritage requires it.”
“Is there room on our boat?” Gwellyn asked, now paying more attention.
“Only if one of us stays behind,” Paschos said.
Jakob nodded. “That’s right.”
The Silk Code Page 7
