by Noah Gordon
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.
The following day they came to Novi Sad, a bustling Danube River town where they learned that a group of seven Frankish monks traveling to the Holy Land had been set upon by bandits three days before and robbed, sodomized, and killed.
For the next three days they traveled as if attack were imminent, but they followed the wide, sparkling river to Belgrade without incident and took on provision in the farmers’ market there, including small sour red plums of exceptional flavor and little green olives that Rob ate with relish. He had his supper at a tavern but found it not to his liking, being a mixture of many greasy meats chopped together and tasting of rancid fats.
A number of persons had left the caravan at Novi Sad and more at Belgrade, and others joined it, so that the Cullens, Rob, and the party of Jews moved forward in the line of march and no longer were part of the vulnerable rear.
Soon after they left Belgrade they entered foothills that quickly became meaner mountains than any they hitherto had crossed, the steep slopes studded with boulders like bared teeth. In the higher elevations, sharper air brought winter suddenly into their minds. These mountains would be hell in the snow.
Now he couldn’t drive with slack reins. Going up inclines he had to urge Horse with gentle little flicks of the leather and going downhill he helped by holding her back. When his arms ached and his spirits were raw he reminded himself that the Romans had moved their tormenta over this range of brooding peaks, but the Romans had had hordes of expendable slaves and Rob J. had one tired mare who required the most skillful driving. At night, dull with weariness, he dragged himself t
o the Jews’ camp and sometimes there was a lesson of sorts. But Simon didn’t ride in the wagon again and some days Rob did not succeed in learning ten Persian words.
28
THE BALKANS
Now Kerl Fritta came into his own and for the first time Rob looked at him with admiration, for the caravan leader seemed to be everywhere, helping with wagon breakdowns, urging and exhorting people the way a good drover encourages dumb beasts. The way was stony. On October first they lost half a day while men of the caravan were impressed to remove rocks that had fallen across the trail. Accidents happened frequently now and Rob set two broken arms in the space of a week. A Norman merchant’s horse bolted and his wagon overturned on him, smashing his leg. He had to be carried on a litter slung between two horses until they came to a farmhouse whose occupants agreed to nurse him. They left the injured man there, Rob devoutly hoping that the farmer didn’t murder him for his belongings as soon as the caravan was out of sight.
“We’ve passed beyond the land of the Magyar and are now in Bulgaria,” Meir told him one morning.
It mattered little, since the hostile nature of the rocks was unchanged and the wind continued to batter them on the high places. As the weather grew raw the people of the caravan began to wear a variety of outer garments, most of them warmer than they were fashionable, until they were a strange-looking collection of ragged and padded creatures.
On a sunless morning, the pack mule Gershom ben Shemuel was leading behind his horse stumbled and fell, front limbs splayed painfully until the left one snapped audibly under the considerable weight of the pack on the animal’s back. The doomed mule screamed in agony like a human being.
“Help him!” Rob called, and Meir ben Asher drew a long knife and helped him in the only way possible, by slitting the quivering throat.
They began at once to unpack the bundle that was on the dead mule. When they came to the narrow leather bag Gershom and Judah had to lift it off together, and an argument ensued in their own language. The remaining pack mule already bore one of the heavy leather bags and Rob was able to see that Gershom was protesting, with justification, that the second bag would quickly overtax the animal.
In the stalled caravan to their rear there were outraged shouts from those who didn’t countenance falling behind the main body.
Rob ran back to the Jews. “Throw the bag into my wagon.”
Meir hesitated, then he shook his head. “No.”
“Then go to hell,” Rob said roughly, enraged at the implied lack of trust.
Meir said something and Simon ran after him. “They’ll lash the pack onto my horse. May I ride in the wagon? Only until we’re able to buy another mule.”
Rob motioned him onto the seat and climbed up himself. He drove for a long time in silence, for he wasn’t in a mood for Persian lessons.
“You don’t understand,” Simon said. “Meir must keep the bags with him. It isn’t his money. Some belongs to the family and most is owed to investors. The money is his responsibility.”
The words made him feel better. But it continued to be a bad day. The way was hard and the presence of a second person in the wagon increased Horse’s labor so that she was visibly fatigued when dusk caught them on a mountaintop and they were required to make camp.
Before he or Simon could eat their supper they had to go to see patients. The wind was so strong it forced them behind Kerl Fritta’s wagon. Only a handful of people were there to see him, and to his surprise, and Simon’s, among them was Gershom ben Shemuel. The tough, chunky Jew lifted his caftan and dropped his trousers and Rob saw an ugly purple boil on the right cheek of his arse.
“Tell him to bend over.”
Gershom grunted as the point of Rob’s scalpel bit, making yellow pus spurt, and he groaned and cursed in his own language as Rob squeezed the boil until all the putrescence was gone and only bright blood appeared.
“He won’t be able to sit a saddle. Not for several days.”
“He must,” Simon said. “We can’t leave Gershom.”
Rob sighed. The Jews were proving to be a trial today. “You can take his horse and he’ll ride in the back of my wagon.”
Simon nodded.
The smiling Frankish drover was next. This time new tiny buboes covered his groin. The lumps in his armpits and behind his knees were larger and more tender than they had been, and when Rob asked, the big Frank said they had begun to pain him.
He took the drover’s hand into his own. “Tell him he’s going to die.”
Simon glared. “Be damned,” he said.
“Tell him I say he’s going to die.”
Simon swallowed and began to speak softly in German. Rob watched the smile dwindle from the big, stupid face, then the Frank pulled his hands from Rob’s grasp and raised the right one, turning it into a fist the size of a small ham. He spoke in a growl.
“Says you’re a fucking liar,” Simon said.
Rob stood and waited, his eyes meeting the drover’s, and finally the man spat at his feet and shambled away.
Rob sold spirits to two men with ragged coughs and then treated a whimpering Magyar with a disjointed thumb—he had caught it in the saddle girth and his horse had moved.
Then he left Simon, wanting to escape this place and these people. The caravan was spread out; everyone had sought a large boulder to camp behind, as protection from the wind. He walked beyond the final wagon and saw Mary Cullen standing on a rock above the trail.
She was unearthly. She stood holding open her heavy sheepskin coat with both arms spread wide, her head back and her eyes closed as if she were being purified by the full wash of the wind that swept against her with all the strength of water in full flow. The coat billowed and flapped. Her black gown was plastered against her long body, outlining heavy breasts and rich nipples, a soft roundness of belly and a wide navel, a sweet cleft joining strong thighs. He felt a strange warm tenderness that surely was part of a spell, for she looked like a witch. Her long hair streamed behind her, playing like writhing red fire.
He couldn’t tolerate the thought of her opening her eyes and seeing him watching her, and he turned and walked away.
At his own wagon he gloomily contemplated the fact that its interior was too fully packed to carry Gershom lying on his stomach. The only way to supply the needed space was to abandon the bank. He carried out the three sections and stared at them, remembering the countless times he and Barber had stood on the little stage and entertained their audience. Then he shrugged and, picking up a large rock, smashed the bank into firewood. There were coals in the firepot and he coaxed a fire to life in the lee of the wagon. In the growing darkness he sat and fed the pieces of the bank to the flames.
It was unlikely that the name Anne Mary would have been changed to Mary Margaret. And a baby’s brown hair, even though it had reddish tints, wouldn’t have grown into such an auburn magnificence, he told himself as Mistress Buffington came and mewed and lay next to him close to the fire and out of the wind.
* * *
Midmorning on October twenty-second, hard white grains filled the air, flying before the wind and stinging when they struck bare skin.
“Early for this shit,” Rob said morosely to Simon, who was back in the wagon seat, Gershom having toughened his cheek and returned to his horse.
“Not for the Balkans,” Simon said.
They were into loftier and more rugged steeps, mostly forested with beech, oak, and pine, but with entire slopes as bare and rocky as though an angry deity had wiped away part of the mountain. There were tiny lakes made by high waterfalls that plummeted into deep gorges.
Ahead of him, Cullen father and Cullen daughter were twin figures in their long sheepskin coats and hats, indistinguishable save that he was able to watch the bulky figure on the black horse and know it was Mary.
The snow didn’t accumulate and the travelers struggled against it and made headway, but not fast enough for Kerl Fritta, who raged up and down the line of march, urging greater s
peed.
“Something has put fear of Christ in Fritta,” Rob said.
Simon gave him the quick, guarded glance Rob had noted among the Jews whenever he mentioned Jesus. “He must get us to the town of Gabrovo before the heavy snows. The way through these mountains is the great pass called the Balkan Gate, but it’s already closed. The caravan will winter in Gabrovo, close to the entrance to the gate. In that town there are inns and houses which take in travelers. No other town near the pass is large enough to harbor a caravan as large as this one.”
Rob nodded, able to see advantages. “I can study my Persian all winter.”
“You won’t have the book,” Simon said. “We shan’t stay in Gabrovo with the caravan. We go to the town of Tryavna, a short distance away, where there are Jews.”
“But I must have the book. And I need your lessons!”
Simon shrugged.
That evening, after he had tended to Horse, Rob went to the Jews’ camp and found them examining some special cleated horseshoes. Meir handed one to Rob. “You should have a set made for your mare. They keep the animal from slipping on snow and ice.”
“Can I not come to Tryavna?”
Meir and Simon exchanged a glance; it was apparent they had discussed him. “It’s not in my power to grant you the hospitality of Tryavna.”
“Who has such power?”
“The Jews there are led by a great sage, the rabbenu Shlomo ben Eliahu.”
“What is a rabbenu?”
“A scholar. In our language rabbenu means ‘our teacher’ and is a term of the highest honor.”
“This Shlomo, this sage. Is he a haughty man, cold to strangers? Stiff and unapproachable?”
Meir smiled and shook his head.
“Then may I not go to him and ask to be allowed to stay near your book and Simon’s lessons?”
Meir looked at Rob and didn’t pretend to be happy with the question. He was silent for a long moment, but when it was clear that Rob was prepared to wait stubbornly for a reply, he sighed and shook his head. “We will take you to the rabbenu,” he said.
