“And what response did you give to that?” Gwellyn asked.
“The standard one, in these circumstances,” Jakob replied. “I told them we could not guarantee that. I told them one of us would stay behind only if we made that choice of our own free will.”
“And their response?”
Jakob smiled. “They said that would be fine—that they were sure there would be no shortage of volunteers to stay on this island.”
Gwellyn looked at the islander, who smiled now too.
“And there’s something else,” Jakob reverted to his loud whisper, even though he was still talking in Greek. “He’s willing to guide us right now to a pit of bones in the forest, which he says may have something to do with the singers.”
“You told him about the singers?”
“Yes,” Jakob replied. “They asked why we had come here, and I told them. I described for them the singers and their bones.”
Gwellyn looked back in the direction of Ibrim and the departing islanders. “Does Ibrim know where we’re going?”
“He was part of the conversation, yes,” Jakob said.
“How long will it take us to get to the pit of bones?” Gwellyn asked.
“The whole trip forth and back should take no more than a week,” Jakob said. “Ibrim should have a good store of supplies by then.”
Gwellyn could barely see the individuals in the receding group. For a moment he imagined that the woman in just the skirt turned around and rewarded him with the sweetest fleeting smile he had ever seen. Or maybe it wasn’t his imagination…
“Let’s go to the forest, then,” Gwellyn said.
ZANA, THEIR GUIDE, motioned for silence and pointed to a clearing beyond the ferns.
Gwellyn dropped to his hands and knees as quietly as he could, and extended his head toward the clearing. A ribbon of deep mauve moths left a shrub in a hurry, and ascended to the dusky sky—like a sash of Phoenician silk, Gwellyn thought. A small animal with a long, bushy tail nosed its way out of the shrub.
“Aye-aye,” Zana said, in a low, mellifluous voice.
Paschos chuckled softly. “Means ‘always’ in Greek—purely coincidental, I’m sure. It’s the islanders’ name for that little monkey.”
“Monkey? It looks more like a cat,” Gwellyn whispered.
“Look again then,” Paschos said. “Look at its face.”
Gwellyn looked, and caught his breath. There was real intelligence in those eyes, closer to human intelligence in some ways than a cat’s.
“So you still think that monkeys have no connection to people?” Jakob whispered, more sonorously than anyone had spoken.
Zana made a face.
“But how can it be that a creature as small as a cat can have more in common with people than cats?” Gwellyn asked.
They made camp for the evening in the clearing.
It was warm enough that they didn’t need a fire for heat.
It was light enough in the fullness of the moon that they didn’t need a fire for vision.
The aye-aye, after first retreating when the people entered the clearing, returned with its mate a few minutes later, and eagerly accepted the pieces of bamboo with caterpillars that first Zana and then the others extended, in between the human consumption of the succulent roots that Zana had unearthed near a riverbed that afternoon. Eventually the moon went behind the trees, and the starlight reflected in the four huge eyes of the aye-ayes were the brightest spots in the clearing.
“You see,” Paschos said, “we look at life in this world and most of the time contemplate the differences. Aristotle teaches that the good naturalist must also pay attention to the similarities—to the formal causes, as he put it.”
“Ah yes,” Jakob said, recalling a philosophy he too had once studied intensely, in his youth. “The Philosopher says that four kinds of causes move the world. Efficient causes are the immediate things that make other things happen—like my biting into this root gives me the taste of sweetness, or water makes me wet. Material causes are the composition of things—that’s the cause that makes things look different, sand from water from roots. Final causes are where things are going—the goal that every being, living and non-living, has. The root grows into a tree. And formal causes—those are the underlying patterns that shape things, that give things their forms. Some say a root looks like a penis, a melon like a breast. Like Plato’s ideal forms, except with Aristotle, the forms are somehow inside us, inside the beings already. Am I right?”
Paschos nodded in appreciation. “Should I ever get my name cleared and return to Constantinople, I’ll make it a point of inviting you to the academy!”
Jakob laughed. “A merchant picks up a thing or two in the way of knowledge as he travels the world.”
“So you’re saying that those little monkeys and we have similar causes—similar forms, on the inside—even though we don’t look exactly alike on the outside?” Gwellyn asked. He took one last root from Zana, and smiled his thanks. “But we can recognize that inner form, when we look into the face of these monkeys?”
“Yes, and more than that,” Paschos said. “If we follow Aristotle to his logical conclusion—a conclusion that the Philosopher himself may not have reached, though that is very hotly debated—then we see a deep kinship in all living things, an underlying similarity of form not only in monkeys and people, but in those caterpillars Zana is feeding to the monkeys as well. In fact, in the bamboo too.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying,” Gwellyn said.
“I’m saying that on the form level—the shapes on the inside that shape us on the outside, that make our material not so much look but act a certain way—I’m saying that if we could capture the forms of us, and of those monkeys, and of the caterpillars, and the bamboo, that there might be more similarities than differences among them—that on the deepest level, those forms might be interchangeable.”
“But Aristotle knew that different kinds of animals could not interbreed,” Jakob said.
“Yes,” Paschos said, “but that’s because our material differences get in the way.” He lowered his voice, smiled at Zana, and asked if he minded the rest of the group conversing in a language Zana could not understand. Zana said he did not mind, but would appreciate a summary from time to time. Paschos responded with as accurate a summary as he could manage in the islander’s language, and the less than complete command he had of it.
Paschos then turned to Gwellyn and Jakob, and spoke in Greek. “Consider this,” he said. “I cannot have sexual relations with the female of that monkey because, well, she is too small for my flesh to fit. That’s material causes getting in the way. But let’s say there was some way I could get my seed into her nonetheless—let’s say there was a way that our forms could meet. Do you see where this hypothetical reasoning leads?”
Gwellyn thought he did—and also that perhaps the reasoning had not always been completely hypothetical for Paschos, and perhaps that’s what had gotten him in trouble for the animal misconduct in Constantinople…
THEY REACHED THE pit of bones late the next day. It was located on the edge of a barren plateau that rose above the forest.
Looking up, they could see a jagged mountain peak rising in the southwest.
“Tsi-afa-javona,” Zana said.
“That which the mists cannot climb,” Paschos translated.
Looking down, they saw a depression in the plateau, as deep as it was wide, as if rained on by torrents for a thousand years. Bones of all sorts and sizes glinted whitely in the sunlight.
They worked over the bones for two full days. Paschos made careful notes with a reed on the several rolls of papyrus he had brought along. The others called out discoveries, in some cases bringing over bones and bits of bones they had found. Except for Zana, who seemed more interested in the writing process than what it was Paschos was writing about.
They sat around the fire in the evening and discussed what had been found. “Most of these bones l
ook like they could have come from those little monkeys,” Paschos said, “though they all have stone in them. The biggest bones seem to be of a tremendous tortoise—the skeleton is almost complete.”
“What about the bones of that impossibly big bird?” Jakob asked.
“Yes,” Paschos said. “I suppose that bird could have been bigger than the tortoise.”
“But the point he’s making,” Gwellyn said to Jakob, “is that however big those bones may be, none seem to be anything like those of a man.” He knew they had certainly found nothing in the pit that looked like the bones of a singer—he knew what those bones looked like from personal, pulverizing experience. He could still smell their charred dust in his brain.
All three looked at Zana. “So let me ask him,” Jakob said. “And see why he thinks this Noah’s Ark graveyard has something to do with the singers.”
Zana listened to the question, smiled, then hummed a melody.
“It’s hard to tell the difference between his speech and his music,” Gwellyn said.
“That was just music,” Paschos said.
Gwellyn sighed.
They resumed their poking and prying—and Paschos his cataloging—the next day.
“Ibrim will be worried that we haven’t returned,” Jakob said, as they pulled loose a large jaw.
“He’ll understand,” Gwellyn said. He helped Jakob clean some of the dirt from the jaw. “Paschos says we should be careful not to break any of these bones as we free them from the earth—the less broken they are, the easier to identify.”
“Makes sense.” Jakob stepped back, and examined the jaw in its entirety. “Looks like a crocodile—I’m glad we were not here when this jaw was alive!”
“A crocodile couldn’t live here now—it’s too dry up here,” Gwellyn said. He had seen crocodiles in Barbaricon, and shared Jakob’s gladness about not seeing them again in motion.
Paschos joined them. “There must have been a river up here at some point in history,” he said. “Once you find the premise of a bone, you can proceed to a conclusion about what kind of world its owner lived in.”
Gwellyn nodded.
“Come,” Paschos said. “I have something to show you.”
They walked about two hundred feet to the spot where Paschos had been working—digging and cleaning and writing. “What do you think of that?” He pointed to a bone, about as wide as a human hip, and perhaps half as long. But it wasn’t human—even Gwellyn knew that.
“An ox of some sort?” Jakob asked. “Perhaps a piece from a more slender part of its leg?”
“Yes, that seems like a good guess,” Paschos said. “And what do you think those holes are?”
Gwellyn looked more closely at the bone, and ran his hand over it. There were indeed a series of holes in it, obscured at first by the light color of the sediment immediately beneath the bone, but clear as day now…
No, clear as a whistle would be a better way of putting it, Gwellyn realized, if there was such an expression.
Zana was smiling, humming his melody again.
And Gwellyn knew what he was looking at.
“It’s a piece of a flute,” he said. “Like the flute-player’s in Barbaricon!”
THEY RETURNED TO their base camp on the northeast shore five days later. This was a full week beyond their expected return date, and in the interim Ibrim had departed for a two-day journey southward down the shore “to teach the people writing,” one of Zana’s friends told them.
“Good to see Ibrim was so concerned about us,” Jakob observed, sourly.
Paschos translated to Zana and his friend.
“No need to do that—” Jakob began.
Paschos interrupted, pointing toward Zana’s friend, who was half speaking, half gesturing some kind of story.
“What is he saying?” Gwellyn asked.
“He’s saying Ibrim was not concerned about our absence,” Paschos translated, “because Zana had communicated our situation, our safety, to a flock of birds, who brought the message back here to Zana’s friend.”
Gwellyn looked at Zana. “I don’t recall his doing that. Can birds be trained to do that?”
“Actually, the word he used means ‘moths,’ not ‘birds,’” Paschos said, “but even I thought that too preposterous to translate.”
Jakob rolled his eyes. “Let’s eat—I’m starving.”
Some of the islanders joined them for dinner around the fire. Gwellyn was disappointed that the woman with the sweetest smile he had ever seen was not among them, but he controlled himself from asking where she was, and consoled himself by focusing on the piece of flute.
“Would be nice to hear the music this made,” he finally said.
“With half a flute, you can’t make music,” Jakob said.
“Depends what kind of half you have, doesn’t it?” Paschos said, and bit into a very colorful, fragrant fruit. “A flute cut off horizontally, in the middle, might still make you music. But, yes, a flute cracked down its vertical pole like this can only be looked at.”
“You know not only your Aristotle, but your Pythagoras and your Euclid,” Jakob said.
Paschos smiled. “Byzantium’s a very rich culture, a marriage of many ancient parts.”
“The two of you with your talk of half-flutes and marriage remind me of Jakob’s famous saying, ‘With one behind, you can’t dance at two weddings,’” Gwellyn said.
“Are you implying we’re all asses?” Jakob said, and the three burst out laughing.
Zana asked for a translation.
“His humming recalls the music of the flute we heard in Barbaricon, would you agree?” Gwellyn asked Jakob.
“Difficult to say,” Jakob considered. “I can hear a similarity, yes. But for me, all music which is not civilized sounds much the same.”
“Maybe this music is more civilized,” Gwellyn said.
“What makes you say that?” Jakob asked.
“I don’t know,” Gwellyn said, “it’s soothing in a way that no other music is.”
They had asked Zana, right after they had discovered the piece of flute, and many times on the trip back, what had made him bring them to that pit of bones. Did he know the flute was there? Did he know of some connection between it and the singers? It seemed too much to be coincidence, but Gwellyn could not get a clear answer from Zana. All the islander did when questioned about the flute was hum his inchoate but haunting melody.
Gwellyn asked Paschos to ask Zana again.
They were treated to the same reply.
“Perhaps he’s not unwilling but unable to tell us,” Jakob said. “Perhaps he’s just a guide—and a hummer—and someone else among these islanders can provide the explanations…”
Gwellyn had already turned his attention to another islander, but not for the explanations to which Jakob was referring…
The woman with the sweet attributes had entered the camp. She sat down on the far side of the fire, and made eye contact for a shy split second with Gwellyn.
She was fully, opaquely clothed now, but Gwellyn could see right through her garment.
There would be no further discussion of flutes and singers by Gwellyn this night. Jakob could see that, and smiled with a surrogate fatherly satisfaction.
IBRIM RETURNED THE day after next.
“I’ve been told where to find the other half of the flute,” he said.
Paschos looked up from his writing. “Let’s tell the others.”
Jakob was summoned from his work on the ship, Gwellyn from a dip in a nearby lagoon with Lilee.
“I still can’t conceive how a flock of moths could have given you such detailed information,” Gwellyn said. The hot sun felt especially good upon his wet skin.
“I can’t explain it either,” Ibrim said, “but obviously I received the information.”
“I can see how it could be possible,” Paschos said. “I write squiggles on a piece of parchment, and they speak words from voices not here, describe events that happened y
esterday, may happen tomorrow, may not happen at all. That a group of moths could also signify such meanings—each two or ten or twenty of them arranged in such a way to represent a spoken utterance, like our letters of the alphabet—is not so strange to consider. All you would need are moths of two different colors. A moth of one color is Alpha, a moth the other color is Beta, two Alpha moths are Gamma, two Beta moths are Delta, an Alpha moth and a Beta moth are Epsilon, three Alpha moths are Zeta, three Beta moths are Eta…”
“Like an abacus with beads of two colors from the Land of Silk,” Jakob said.
Paschos nodded.
“Fascinating,” Gwellyn said. “Tell us more about the other half of the flute,” he said to Ibrim. “How many days from here?”
Ibrim smiled, shook his head. “Not days. Months. Perhaps years.”
Jakob raised his eyebrows.
“Here, let me show you.” Ibrim took a stick to the dirt. “They drew a map for me, and I have a good memory for those things.” He sketched a small oval. “This is the island we are upon.” He sketched a much larger landmass to its left, much wider at the top than the bottom. “This is the continent across the channel—Ifrica.”
The three other men nodded.
“Now,” Ibrim continued, “we are at this place, right here.” He pointed to the upper right-hand side of the oval. “To find the other half of the flute, we must take our ship, and travel like this.” He drew a line down the right-hand side of the small oval, then over to the right-hand side of Ifrica, then south for a small distance, then around the tip of Ifrica, then up its left-hand coast, up, up, all the way…
“That’s where the flutes come from!” Ibrim jabbed the dirt, at an unsketched place somewhere above the continent. “The islanders say the flute people once visited this place, in the early morning of their history—”
“How long ago was that?” Gwellyn asked.
“I don’t know,” Ibrim replied. “I still don’t understand completely the way they keep track of time here.”
Gwellyn looked at the mark in the dirt above the continent. “Where exactly is that? Does it have a name?”
“Near Rome, Gaul?” Jakob asked.
Ibrim nodded. “Yes, that’s the general area. Islam has already gone further west than that, on the northern edge of Ifrica, across the narrow straits, to a land by an ocean where the Romans once were but they are no more. I will give you a letter—informing my brothers of your good intentions. So when you arrive there, you’ll be treated well.”
The Silk Code Page 8
