by Noah Gordon
“I’ve given you truth. I could neither cause your death nor betray you, and I’m certain you must treat me the same way.”
“I’ll not be waiting for any physician,” she said.
He nodded, loathing himself for the bitter veil over her eyes as she turned away.
All day he watched her riding very erect in the saddle. She didn’t turn around to look at him. That evening he observed Mary and Master Cullen talking seriously and at length. Evidently she told her father only that she had decided not to marry, for a while later Cullen shot a grin at Rob that was both relieved and triumphant. Cullen conferred with Seredy, and just before dark the servant brought two men into the camp, whom Rob took to be Turks from their clothing and appearance.
Later he guessed they had been guides, for when he awoke the next morning, the Cullens were gone.
As was customary in the caravan, everyone who had traveled behind them moved up one place. That day, instead of following her black gelding, he now drove behind the two fat French brothers.
He felt guilt and sorrow but also experienced a sense of relief, for he had never considered marriage and had been ill prepared. He pondered whether his decision had been made out of true commitment to medicine or if he had merely fled matrimony in weak panic, as Barber would have done.
Perhaps it was both, he decided. Poor stupid dreamer, he told himself in disgust. You’ll grow tired one day, older and needier of love, and doubtless you will settle for some slovenly sow with a terrible tongue.
Conscious of a great loneliness, he yearned for Mistress Buffington to be alive again. He tried not to think of what he had destroyed, hunching over the reins and staring in distaste at the obscene arses of the French brothers.
Thus for a week he felt as he had after a death had occurred. When the caravan reached Babaeski he experienced a deepening of guilty grief, realizing that here they would have turned off together to accompany her father and start a new life. But when he thought of James Cullen he felt better about being alone, for he knew the Scot would have been a troublesome father-in-law.
Still, he didn’t stop thinking of Mary.
He began to come out of his moodiness two days later. Traveling through a countryside of grassy hills, he heard a distinctive noise coming toward the caravan from far away. It was a sound such as angels might make and eventually it drew near and he saw his first camel train.
Each camel was hung with bells that chimed with every strange, lurching step the beasts took.
Camels were larger than he had expected, taller than a man and longer than a horse. Their comic faces seemed both serene and sinister, with great open nostrils, floppy lips, and heavily lidded liquid eyes half hidden behind long lashes that gave them an oddly feminine appearance. They were tied to one another and laden with enormous bundles of barley straw piled between their twin humps.
Perched atop the straw bundle of every seventh or eighth camel was a skinny, dark-skinned drover wearing only a turban and a ragged breech-cloth. Occasionally one of these men urged the beasts forward with a “Hut! Hut! Hut!” that his ambling charges seemed to ignore.
The camels took possession of the rolling landscape. Rob counted almost three hundred animals before the last of them diminished into specks in the distance and the wonderful tinkling whisper of their bells faded away.
The undeniable sign of the East hurried the travelers along their way as they began to follow a narrow isthmus. Although Rob couldn’t see water, Simon told him that to their south lay the Sea of Marmara and to their north the great Black Sea, and the air had taken on an invigorating salt tang that reminded him of home and filled him with a new sense of urgency.
The following afternoon, the caravan crested a rise and Constantinople lay before him like a city of his dreams.
33
THE LAST CHRISTIAN CITY
The moat was wide and as they clattered across the drawbridge Rob could see carp large as pigs in the green depths. On the inside bank was an earthen breastwork and twenty-five feet beyond, a massive wall of dark stone, perhaps a hundred feet high. Sentries walked the top from battlement to battlement.
Fifty feet farther and there was a second wall, identical to the first! This Constantinople was a fortress with four lines of defense.
They passed through two sets of great portals. The huge gate of the inside wall was triple-arched and adorned with the noble statue of a man, doubtless an early ruler, and some strange animals in bronze. The beasts were massive and bulky, with big floppy ears raised in anger, short tails to the rear, and what appeared to be longer tails growing rampantly out of their faces.
Rob pulled at Horse’s reins so he could study them, and behind him Gershom hooted and Tuveh groaned. “You must move your arse, Inghiliz,” Meir shouted.
“What are these?”
“Elephants. You have never seen elephants, you poor foreigner?”
He shook his head, twisting on the wagon seat as he drove away so he could study the creatures. So it was that the first elephants he saw were the size of dogs and frozen in metal that bore the patina of five centuries.
Kerl Fritta led them to the caravanserai, an enormous transportation yard through which travelers and freight entered and left the city. It was a vast level space containing warehouses for the storage of the varied goods, and pens for animals and rest houses for humans. Fritta was a veteran guide and, bypassing the noisy horde in the caravanserai yard, he directed his charges into a series of khans, man-made caverns dug into adjoining hillsides to provide coolness and shelter for caravans. Most of the travelers would spend only a day or two at the caravanserai, recuperating, making wagon repairs or swapping horses for camels, then they would follow a Roman road south to Jerusalem.
“We’ll be gone from here within hours,” Meir told Rob, “for we are within ten days’ travel of our home in Angora and eager to be freed of our responsibility.”
“I’ll stay a while, I think.”
“When you decide to leave, go to see the kervanbashi, the Chief of Caravans here. His name is Zevi. When he was a young man he was a drover and then a caravan master who took camel trains over all the routes. He knows the travelers and,” Simon said proudly, “he is a Jew and a good man. He’ll see that you journey in safety.”
Rob grasped wrists with each of them in turn.
Farewell, chunky Gershom, whose tough arse I lanced.
Farewell, sharp-nosed, black-bearded Judah.
Goodbye, friendly young Tuveh.
Thank you, Meir.
Thank you, thank you, Simon!
He said goodbye to them with regret, for they had shown him kindness. The parting was more difficult because it took him from the book that had led him into the Persian language.
Presently he drove alone through Constantinople, an enormous city, perhaps larger than London. When seen from afar it had appeared to float in the warm clear air, framed between the dark blue stone of the walls and the different blues of the sky above and the Sea of Marmara to the south. Seen from within, Constantinople was a city full of stone churches that loomed over narrow streets crowded with riders on donkeys, horses, and camels, as well as sedan chairs and carts and wagons of every description. Burly porters dressed in a loose uniform of rough brown stuff carried incredible burdens on their backs or on platforms that they wore on their heads like hats.
In a public square Rob paused to study a lone figure that stood atop a tall column of porphyry, overlooking the city. From the Latin inscription he was able to learn that this was Constantine the Great. The teaching brothers and priests of St. Botolph’s school in London had given him a thorough grounding in the subject of this statue; priests were greatly taken with Constantine, for he was the first Roman emperor to become a Christian. Indeed, his conversion had been the making of the Christian Church, and when he had captured the metropolis called Byzantium from the Greeks by force of arms and made it his own—Constantinople, city of Constantine—it became the jewel of Christianity in the E
ast, a place of cathedrals.
Rob left the area of commerce and churches and entered the neighborhoods of narrow wooden houses built cheek by jowl, with overhanging second stories that might have been transported from any number of English towns. It was a city rich in nationalities, as befit a place that marked the end of one continent and the beginning of another. He drove through a Greek quarter, an Armenian market, a Jewish sector, and suddenly, instead of listening to one impenetrable babble after another, he heard words in Parsi.
Straightaway he asked for and found a stable, run by a man named Ghiz. It was a good stable and Rob saw to Horse’s comfort before leaving her, for she had served him well and deserved a lazy rest and lots of grain. Ghiz pointed Rob toward his own home at the top of the Path of the Three Hundred and Twenty-nine Steps, where a room was for rent.
The room proved worth the climb, for it was light and clean and a salt breeze blew through the window.
From it he looked down over the hyacinth Bosporus, on which sails were like moving blossoms. Past the far shore, perhaps half a mile away, he could see looming domes and minarets keen as lances and realized they were the reason for the earthworks, the moat, and the two walls surrounding Constantinople. A few feet from his window the influence of the Cross ended and the lines were manned to defend Christendom from Islam. Across the strait, the influence of the Crescent began.
He stayed at the window and stared over at Asia, into which he would delve deep and soon.
That night Rob dreamed of Mary. He awoke to melancholy and fled the room. Off a square called August’s Forum he found public baths, where he took the chill waters briefly and then sat lolling in the tepidarium’s hot water like Caesar, soaping himself and breathing steam.
When he emerged, toweled dry and glowing from the last cold plunge, he was enormously hungry and more optimistic. In the Jewish market he bought little fishes fried brown and a bunch of black grapes that he ate while he searched for what he needed.
In many of the booths he saw the short linen undergarments every Jew had worn at Tryavna. The little vests bore the braided embellishments called tsitsith which, Simon had explained, allowed Jews to carry out the biblical admonition that all their lives they must wear fringes on the corners of garments.
He found a Jewish merchant who spoke Persian. He was a doddering man with a down-turned mouth and there were food stains on his caftan, but in Rob’s eyes he was the first threat of exposure.
“It’s a gift for a friend, he is my size,” Rob muttered. The old man paid him small attention, intent on the sale. Finally he came up with a fringed undergarment that was large enough.
Rob didn’t dare buy everything at once. Instead, he went to the stables and saw that Horse was fine.
“Yours is a decent wagon,” Ghiz said.
“Yes.”
“I might be willing to buy.” “Not for sale.”
Ghiz shrugged. “An adequate wagon, though I would have to paint it. But a poor beast, alas. Without spirit. Without the proud look in her eyes. You would be fortunate to have that animal off your hands.”
He saw at once that Ghiz’s interest in the wagon was a diversion to direct attention from the fact that he had taken a fancy to Horse.
“Neither is for sale.”
Still, he had to fight a smile at the idea that so clumsy a diversion had been attempted on one for whom diversion had been a stock in trade. The wagon was close at hand and it amused him, while the stableman was busy in a stall, to make certain unobtrusive preparations.
Presently he drew a silver coin from Ghiz’s left eye.
“O Allah!”
He convinced a wooden ball to vanish when covered by a kerchief, then he caused the kerchief to change color, and change color again, green to blue to brown.
“In the Prophet’s name …”
Rob drew a red ribbon from between his teeth and presented it with as pretty a flourish as if the stableman were a blushing girl. Caught between wonderment and fear of this infidel djinni, Ghiz gave in to delight. And thus part of the day was spent pleasantly in magic and juggling, and before he was through, he could have sold Ghiz anything.
With his evening meal he was served a flask of fiery brown drink, too thick and cloying and too plentiful. At the next table was a priest, and Rob offered him some of the drink.
Priests here wore long flowing black robes and tall, cylindrical cloth hats with stiff little brims. This one’s robe was fairly clean but his hat bore the greasy story of a long career. He was a red-faced, pop-eyed man of middle age, eager to converse with a European and improve his facility with Western languages. He knew no English but tried Rob in the Norman and Frankish tongues and finally settled for speaking Persian, a trifle sulkily.
His name was Father Tamas and he was a Greek priest.
His mood sweetened over the liquor, which he drank in large draughts.
“Are you to settle in Constantinople, Master Cole?”
“No, in a few days I’ll travel East in hopes of acquiring medicinal herbs to take back to England.”
The priest nodded. It would be best to venture East without delay, he said, for the Lord had ordained that one day there would be a righteous war between the One True Church and the Islamic savage. “Have you visited our Cathedral of St. Sofia?” he demanded, and was aghast when Rob smiled and shook his head. “But, my new friend, you must, before you leave! You must! For it is the churchly marvel of the world. It was raised at the order of Constantine himself, and when that worthy emperor first entered the cathedral he fell upon his knees and exclaimed, ‘I have built better than Solomon.’
“It is not without reason that the head of the Church makes his quarters within the magnificence of the Cathedral of St. Sofia,” Father Tamas said.
Rob looked at him in surprise. “Has Pope John moved to Constantinople from Rome, then?”
Father Tamas contemplated him. When he seemed satisfied that Rob was not laughing at his expense, the Greek priest smiled frostily. “John XIX remains Patriarch of the Christian Church in Rome. But Alexius IV is Patriarch of the Christian Church in Constantinople, and here he is our only shepherd,” he said.
The liquor and the ocean air combined to give him a deep and dreamless sleep. Next morning he allowed himself to repeat the luxury of the Augustine Baths, and in the street bought a breakfast of bread and fresh plums as he walked to the Jews’ bazaar. At the market he selected carefully, for he had given thought to each item. He had observed a few linen prayer shawls in Tryavna but the men he had respected most there had worn wool; now he bought wool for himself, a four-cornered shawl adorned with fringes similar to those on the undergarment he had found the day before.
Feeling passing strange, he bought a set of phylacteries, the leather straps they placed on their forehead and wound around an arm during the morning prayers.
He had made each of the purchases from a different merchant. One of them, a sallow young man with gaps in his mouth from missing teeth, had a particularly large display of caftans. The man didn’t know Parsi but gestures served them well. None of the caftans was large enough, but the merchant motioned that Rob must wait, and then he hurried to the booth of the old man who had sold Rob the tsitsith. Here there were larger caftans, and within a few moments Rob had purchased two of them.
Leaving the bazaar with his possessions in a cloth bag, he took a street on which he hadn’t walked and soon saw a church so magnificent it could only be the Cathedral of St. Sofia. He entered enormous brazen doors and found himself in a huge openness of lovely proportion, with a reaching of pillar into arch, of arch into vault, of vault into a dome so high it made him smaller than life. The vast space of the nave was illuminated by thousands of wicks whose soft clear burning in cups of oil was reflected by more glitter than he was accustomed to in a church, icons framed in gold, walls of precious marbles, too much gilt and blaze for an English taste. There was no sign of the Patriarch but, looking down the nave, he saw priests at the altar in richly bro
caded chasubles. One of the figures was swinging a censer and they were singing a Mass but were so far away that Rob couldn’t smell the incense or make out the Latin.
The greater part of the nave was deserted and he sat in the rear surrounded by empty carven benches, beneath the contorted figure hanging from a cross that loomed in the lamp-lit gloom. He felt that the staring eyes penetrated his depths and knew the contents of the cloth bag. He hadn’t been raised in piety, yet in this calculated rebellion he was strangely moved to religious feeling. He knew he had entered the cathedral precisely for this moment, and he rose to his feet and for a time stood in silence and met the challenge of those eyes.
Finally he spoke aloud. “It needs be done. But I am not forsaking you,” he said.
He was less certain a short time later, after he had climbed the hill of stone steps and was again in his room.
On the table he propped the small square of steel in whose polished surface he had been accustomed to shaving, and he took his knife to the hair that now fell long and tangled over his ears, trimming until what was left were the ceremonial earlocks they called peoth.
He disrobed and put on the tsitsith fearfully, half expecting to be stricken. It seemed to him that the fringes crawled over his flesh.
The long black caftan was less intimidating. It was only an outer garment, with no connection to their God.
The beard was still undeniably sparse. He arranged his earlocks so they hung loosely beneath the bell-shaped Jew’s hat. The leather cap was a fortunate touch because it was so obviously old and used.
Still, when he had left the room again and entered the street he knew it was madness and it wouldn’t work; he expected anyone who looked at him to howl with laughter.
I shall need a name, he thought.
It wouldn’t do to be called Reuven the Barber-Surgeon as he had been known in Tryavna; to succeed in the transformation he required more than a piss-weak Hebrew version of his goy identity.
