You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

  They’d become an obsession during Vera’s first convalescence. In the dead of winter she had slipped out of the house and wandered off into the hills, where a search party found her lying in the snow. She’d been distraught since having learned, four years after our arrival at the Count’s house, of his plan to become her suitor. It was as if we’d both been struck with a lash. Our mother when asked had replied that she knew nothing of his intentions, and that what Vera did was her own affair; but when Vera in response had begged to be sent abroad to study sculpture, she’d been sharply reminded that neither her family nor the Count possessed the funds for that sort of adventure.

  The pneumonia had almost destroyed her, and as she convalesced I read to her at her bedside. We’d worked through the Greek myths and Siegfried sagas of our childhood and our mother had begun ferrying in volumes from the Count’s library as well. At first Vera forbade their use but after a week or so seemed too despairing even for that, and late one night after a particularly dispiriting relapse we both found ourselves horribly engrossed by William of Tyre’s chronicle, in which Henry II, Count of Champagne, considering an alliance against the Abbasid, visited the Assassin stronghold of Al-Kahf, where in order to demonstrate his authority their Grand Master beckoned to two of his adherents, who immediately flung themselves over the ramparts to their deaths.

  The map was from the Survey of India series, four miles to the inch, and manifested its inaccuracy even in the few features it cited. It offered no hint of the mountains squarely before us. Polo’s account, however, had thus far been borne out, its verification expedited by our use of the same method of transport. I resolved to create my own map as I went along, calling a halt three times a day to mark salient features while Ismail dipped into his cheese with an expression that suggested he was still awaiting a lull in the general perversity of my behavior.

  It was gratifying to register that we were not marked on any map. For another week we negotiated naked rock rounded by the weather and without vegetation. To the southeast began some desolate and impressively dismaying salt marshes along a bitter stream that spooked the mules. For one stretch we had to unload their saddlebags and drag them by the halter ropes while Aziz shouted into their ears distressing facts about their parentage. We came upon great concentrations of Aghul and camelthorn, as well as bitter colocynth low to the ground. We saw a strange large hole whose bottom was lost to shadow. We rode in a dust storm lasting so long that after we stopped the next morning I discovered beside me two low mounds of reddish sand that revealed themselves in the gathering light to be the sleeping forms of my retainers.

  We rode into the evenings, Ismail singing more Kurdish songs while we plodded along in the moonlight. I was stunned each daybreak by how the excess of light seemed to smooth away all before it.

  Finally we began the ascent of a steep ravine whose shale slopes offered every few miles a smallish larkspur or some white Aethionema. What looked like yellow heather in the washes of dry gullies were disclosed to be great carpetings of thorns. Rows of flustered little birds took flight as we rode past, and circled back round and resettled once we were gone. With each day my companions’ unease increased. And in the evenings they grouped themselves ever more tightly around me on the ground to guard my rest.

  When I was a child, there were nights I would startle out of sleep and, in the stillness that followed, would listen to the entire house and become convinced that a flood was slowly filling the room. I heard wavelets beneath my sister’s breathing. The only remedy for it was to climb into her bed and fall asleep in her arms, and our mother would scold us when she found us the next morning in our hopeless tangle with cold feet protruding from the bedcovers.

  Vera and I were both outsiders who never overcame our odd and lonely upbringing or foreign accent and manner in that remote Italian hill town, and for many years we were each other’s solitary playmates. Vera tied her lavish long hair back with a velvet ribbon so she could take part in my projects of rooting through brambles and bracken, and accompanied me wherever I roamed. She reassured herself with the knowledge that I had to look after her and she had to look after me. Remaining in a room once I had left it seemed to her meaningless. Once the Count took to dropping by our bedroom to chat we used for our secret conferences the kitchen’s larder cupboard, which afforded space for two people if they stood without lifting their elbows. She sympathized with my desire to leave but said it was only permissible if I took her with me. While I studied and waited she chided me for brooding too much and being ungrateful for those blessings we enjoyed. One rainy March afternoon she noted I’d been peering out our window for an hour, and wanted to know at what I’d been gazing. It then occurred to me that I’d been looking at a hedge, and that a hedge was not enough at which to have been staring for so long.

  We agreed on the necessity of understanding others’ affections not as fixed commitments but rather as ever-changing seas, with their tides coming and going. This was of considerable service after the Count’s proposal and our mother’s response. He repeated his proposal some months later on the occasion of Vera’s seventeenth birthday, and the previous week news had arrived that I’d be matriculating at Bedford College, London, a real school at last after all of my scuttering. Our father had agreed to pay the tuition. He himself had resolved to move to England.

  Vera had been without words in my presence for a day and a half following this development, and then had slipped into my bed in the wee hours of the morning.

  “See?” I whispered to her. “You do love your sister.”

  “Put your arms around me,” she whispered back. Her nightgown’s periwinkle was indigo in the darkness.

  “Not without a declaration of love,” I told her, and when she started to weep I gently teased, “Well, why else are you here?”

  She turned so that her back was to my front and my arms could more easily encircle her. “Because I’ve got nowhere else to go,” she finally whispered.

  We awoke to a predawn aurora in the east and the cheerless and clanking procession of a small tribe descending to its winter valley. Ismail offered our greetings and informed me in a low voice that these were people of the Qazvin. The men must have gone ahead previous. There were at most fifty or sixty elders, women, and children, and even so they occupied over an hour in moving past. I went unnoticed in the low light due to the plainness of my chador and the extent of their fatigue. Mules and the occasional small ox were overhung with any number of carpets, cooking pots, poultry baskets, and tent cloths, all crisscrossed with ropes as if lashed to the frames in a windstorm. Mothers carried children on their backs. Stragglers fell out of the column and regained their feet and wavered back into it. Watching the pace they set, I began to understand why two years earlier the Lurs, when fleeing a forced resettlement, had massacred their own families to unburden themselves for the march.

  After nine days’ advance we were still continuing to climb, the track at times becoming so steep it was impracticable for our heavy-laden mules. We were being taken up into the joyful loneliness of the summits. Ismail’s mood continued to deteriorate, and at day’s end he would squat, lost in a meadow of resignation, while Aziz and I erected our poor camp. He might answer an inquiry about dinner with the comment that we still possessed some flour, and he responded to complaints by invoking the majesty of God and wondering how he was expected to produce sustenance in an uninhabited land. One evening apropos of nothing he remarked that it was no wonder England was a mighty nation, since its women did what Persian men feared to attempt.

  We entered a great canyon and persisted in our ascent while crossing and recrossing a stream tumbling down past us. Maidenhair ferns provided a welcome green. Fish in pools at intervals swirled their wide, transparent tails. The water was altogether sweet but Ismail insisted it was known as the Eye of Bitterness. We rode until trees appeared on the high skylines of the ridges and began to spread down the slopes. We passed broom and tamarisk and terebinth, the last bearing blue ber
ries that proved delicious.

  We rode until we topped a windswept ridge of sufficient elevation that we could see for twenty miles, and there we made camp. There in that buffeting cold we looked out on Alamut country below and experienced the satisfaction of being able to glimpse, after all we had traversed, proof that the Grail of our imaginations now belonged to the tangible world.

  Even as a child I had realized that in the realm of one’s family, there was a weight and a drag to all things, but that even so I could walk from morning until nightfall and feel only a pleasant faint trembling in my legs at day’s end. Upon receipt of one of my mother’s or Vera’s letters I might walk from Hyde Park to Deptford Wharf and, while walking, compose my responses. I told them about my revered new professor, William Paton Ker, who was already opening innumerable doors to me, and I conveyed my elation with the country’s appetite for discoveries of every stripe: Gertrude Bell had ventured among the Jebel Druze and had reported seeing them devour their sheep raw. When Vera asked if I found Bell’s success disheartening, I wrote back that the woman traveled with enough companionship and equipment for a supper club, with her dining tables and mosquito nets, and that she visited only well-charted areas, which differences would clearly distinguish my achievement from hers.

  My sister asked if she might come visit, and I told her that she would always be welcome, though I had neither funds with which to entertain her nor place in which to put her. She pointed out that in roughing it she was at least my equal and offered to sleep on the floor beneath my bed. My housemistress, I observed, would be implacably unhappy with an arrangement such as this.

  In subsequent letters she asked if I’d been so very discontented in Italy and if living alone had brought me any more fulfillment. I answered that the discontented were the least capable of living with only themselves, since the same goad that drove them to isolation would spoil their solitude as well. The true traveler left not to renounce but to seek. And while to be given a cold bath was not a merit in itself, to take one voluntarily might be.

  A month later my mother wrote that my sister had accepted the Count’s proposal, and that Vera was sorrowful she would not be able to realize her dream of a wedding in England. My mother’s tone was brisk. For the first time she referred to the Count as Mario. My sister herself wrote that she hoped to become a good friend to him, but also that she felt she’d wasted years in just learning how to live, knowledge that now was going to be locked away. She noted, apropos of another breakdown, that she was so wretched it pleased her to make everyone else wretched as well. And that what attractiveness she ever possessed had deserted her, and that I was now the beautiful one. And I’m disconcerted still by the potency of the thrill I experienced at my escape, amid all of my misery on her behalf. She wrote that our mother had taken her to Venice on holiday, and I read and reread the letter and castigated myself during my circumnavigations of the city, because this was how competitive I could be: once, at the age of eight, when my father had beaten me at chess, I became so enraged that I buried his white queen in the garden.

  The descent to the valley was hair-raising. It was as if the entire range on which we’d been perched was a giant breaking wave, and having ascended the gentle backslope, we next had to negotiate down the much steeper face. We made camp that night at its base and then for five days traversed untracked and seared reaches of red, hardened earth. This country Ismail believed to be inhabited by heretics capable of eating, or at least sitting in, fire. He mentioned with some concern that he didn’t think they were Moslem at all.

  On the sixth day we encountered, just as Polo’s account recorded, a stepped and crooked valley rising to our left. The path of its dried riverbed the Italian called the Track of Thieves. As it narrowed, its walls radiated heat. We could feel our elevation. In the winter, Ismail speculated, a bitter wind must scour out this funnel. Aziz responded from ahead that winters in his village were so cold that even the wolves stayed home.

  Eventually we reached the willows and sanjid trees of the Badasht oasis, smaller than Polo described it, and had our bread and raisins by a stream while white-and-black magpies stalked to and fro before us. On either side the cliffs were so high we were untouched by the sun. When Ismail smeared his cheese on his lips as a kind of balm, I found myself longing for the minor relief of some mealtime companionship that didn’t involve spitting or mashing food with one’s fingers.

  We were joined in the late afternoon by a shepherd with crossed eyes and his two sons. They afforded us the standard greeting, polite without effusion, and for a time we sat in a circle in silence that in the East is good manners. Upon seeing the whiteness of my arms they pulled up their own sleeves in order to demonstrate the contrast. Finally the shepherd informed Ismail that they had never seen a European woman. Or man. They seemed pleased with us for having been brave enough to come among them.

  They laid out their meal before them and shared what they had with great hospitality. This meant less for them, and when I partook at their insistence, the father looked off downstream with a comfortable kind of sadness and the smaller boy’s eyes followed every mouthful I took.

  While the boys filled the family goatskin with water and Aziz gathered straw for the mules, the shepherd asked Ismail to explain my presence, glancing over every so often to see if my appearance corroborated the outlandish story he was receiving. He told us that Alamut was the name not of the fortress but of the valley itself. He said that people often came in search of the fortress but when pressed on that point clarified that to his knowledge only two men had done so in the last seven years. Later, as we made our arrangements for sleep, the boys exclaimed over a wandering tortoise. And then we retired to the tremolo of water running nearby, the sweetest of sounds in the night.

  A priest counseling Philip VI of France against the hazards of an exploratory campaign in the East wrote of the Assassins that they were thirsty for human blood, contemptuous of life and salvation, and could, like the devil, encloak themselves in radiance. If encountered they were to be cursed, then fled. They had turned taqiyya, the Shia tradition of concealment in the face of persecution, back against the Sunni in the most lethal of configurations. When not disguised they were said to have worn white gowns with red headcloths, the colors of innocence and blood. This and more came from Von Hammer-Purgstall’s history of the sect in the London School of Oriental Studies, and when I wrote Vera excitedly of my find, she wrote back, “Wolves in sheep’s clothing: of course it would excite you.”

  Ismail warned that we should travel as much by night in this region as we could manage, for safety’s sake, and the shepherd when taking his leave of us seemed to agree. The path above the oasis after a short stretch led us through a long defile of dark stone the shepherd had called the Black Narrows and in which he had warned us not to linger. When that ended we found our track clinging to a cliff that fell away below us a thousand feet. Each slip by our mules occasioned a curse from Ismail, tired and furious at being forced to navigate such a passage. So narrow that our outside feet hung out over the abyss, it continued for miles with no widening that might allow us to take our ease, and after nightfall the darkness grew so total that even my mule’s ears were lost to sight. I entrusted the edge, step by step, wholly to him.

  Mid-morning the next day, round a particularly terrifying corner, the track finally opened out onto an ancient road and the ruins of an old bridge over a cataract plunging away into the valley below: the Alamut stream, I was certain, whose spring provided water for the fortress. From anywhere but this spot, the great ridge and headland of rock seemed to close off with a wall any upward access. We still had a thousand feet to climb, along that thin thread of water which near the top dispersed its spray to the wind, but even so we knew how close we were. After an uncomfortable cliff-side night’s rest, a morning’s ascent brought us in searing sunlight onto the knife-edge of a ridge. And before us, like the prow of a great ship, was what had to be the western redoubt of the Rock of the Assassin
s.

  Around its northern flank appeared a path tilted on a frighteningly steep gradient through white limestone that powdered like salt beneath the mules’ hooves. The scree was sufficiently treacherous that Ismail and I ascended as much with our hands as our feet, Aziz behind us leading the mules. At the summit we scrambled over a low outer wall made of a few loose stones and into a cold wind, sweat-soaked as we were. The height was such that we could plainly see the roundness of the Earth. On the northwestern side a granite pillar adjoining an even higher cliff face formed a natural citadel and revealed itself as the site of the spring, the conduits of which were still visible as grooves running south to rectangular cisterns dug into the solid rock.

  The site had long since been pumiced clean by the wind, although traces of the outer walls emerged here and there, as well as half the central keep, still upright and brandishing an iron loophole at its highest point. On all sides the natural walls fell away sheer. From the southern end we looked down two thousand feet of stone. To the east, in huge stone slabs, were round holes four inches deep and eight in diameter that may have held the doorposts for giant gates. Out of one hole I fished a piece of blue-glaze pottery pictured in von Hammer-Purgstall’s history, and sank to my knees with a cry. “It is Polo’s fortress!” I shrieked to Aziz, who smiled back in terror at my agitation.