Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) (16 page)

She hugged him, too, for what seemed like a much longer time than she had Johanna or Shasha.

Jaufre grinned down at her. “Why, thank you, Fatima. And how is Azar these days?”

Fatima released him, laughing. “Azar is just fine, Jaufre the Frank, and thank you for asking.”

“Are you married yet?”

Fatima looked at Jaufre with a speculative eye. “Not yet. I’m waiting to see if I get a better offer.”

Jaufre laughed at this. Johanna frowned. Shasha noticed.

“We are joining your caravan, did you know?” Fatima said. “We let our last leave without us because Father said the caravan master didn’t know where he was going.”

There was general rejoicing, and plans were made immediately to pitch their camps together. Shasha didn’t think that either Johanna or Jaufre noticed how ably Johanna was able to keep herself between Jaufre and Fatima at all times.

They made new friends, too, as the journey continued. One of the most interesting was Félicien the Frank, a thin young man with curious eyes in a sun-burned face and dark, untidy curls confined by a floppy cap. His bare cheek proclaimed his youth and his worn but sturdy clothes a purse only irregularly full. His only possessions were a lute and an aged donkey whose complaints in transit could be heard from one end of the caravan to the other. Félicien was not a trader, but a traveler, he told them one evening around the communal campfire. “A goliard, they call us sometimes where I come from,” he said.

“Where do you come from?” Johanna said.

“What’s a goliard?” Jaufre said.

“A goliard is a student,” Félicien said.

“A student,” Jaufre said. “Of what?”

Félicien waved an airy hand. “Oh, of the world, my dear Jaufre. Of the world and all its manifest glories.”

“How long have you been, ah, studying the world?”

“This will be my third summer on the Road.”

“So long,” Johanna said, who had noticed that Félicien had not answered her question about where he was from. “How do you pay your way? If you don’t trade…” The goliard was lean but not thin, so he wasn’t starving.

Félicien quirked an eyebrow, but it appeared he recognized the genuine curiosity behind a question posed by a life made possible and prosperous by trade. “I tell stories,” he said. “I sing. I write cansos, and, if I’m paid well enough to hire a fast horse afterward, I write sirventes.”

“You sing?” Johanna said.

“What’s a canso?” Jaufre said.

“What stories?” Shasha said.

Félicien laughed, displaying a set of very fine teeth, even and white and well cared-for, an unusual sight in a Frank. “Yes, I sing. A canso is a love song. What stories—oh, all stories, any story that will find a few coins in my pocket afterward. But King Arthur and the Round Table a speciality.” He gave a slight bow.

“What’s a sirvente?” Jaufre said, stumbling a little over the word.

Félicien grimaced. “A hate song,” he said, and would be drawn no farther into the subject. Instead he sang them a lilting ditty in the Frankish tongue that he translated into Persian on the fly, about an unlovely swineherd and a passing poet that had everyone around the fire rocking with laughter. Johanna understood much more than she would have before Edyk and the three days at the summerhouse, and laughed along with the rest.

Félicien’s voice was high and clear and pure and he could put a soulful quaver into the most mundane verse, causing gentlemen to clear their throats and ladies to wipe surreptitiously at the corners of their eyes. He ended his impromptu concert with a short song called “A Monk’s View.”

O wandering clerks
You go to Chartres
To learn the arts
O wandering clerks
By the Tyrrhenian
You study Aesclepion
O wandering clerks
Toledo teaches
Alchemy and sleight-of-hand

O wandering clerks
You learn the arts
Medicine and magic
O wandering clerks
Nowhere learn
Manners or morals
O wandering clerks

It scanned and rhymed in French, and by then everyone was shouting along whenever the line “O wandering clerks!” made an appearance. At the finish Félicien leapt to his feet and flourished his cap in an elaborate bow. Quite a few coins were tossed into it. Laughter in this case was demonstrably more than its own reward. Johanna took thoughtful note.

From that evening forward Félicien found himself at their campfire more often than not. His stories were in high demand and his voice a welcome addition to their own. He was also a font of information on places beyond the Middle Sea, and Jaufre drank all these in thirstily, especially any scrap concerning Britannia.

Their course took them not directly west; rather, they moved from city to city as trading opportunities and market values offered opportunity. The topography was initially mostly flat, dry plain, sandy dunes interspersed with expanses of loose black pebbles and hard-packed dirt. The Tian Shan Mountains, snow-capped peaks keeping august distance from the riffraff, were succeeded by the Flaming Mountains, which formed a bare rock wall against the northwestern horizon. “They aren’t flaming,” Johanna said, disappointed that they didn’t live up to their name.

“They aren’t really of a height to deserve the term ‘mountains,’ either,” Jaufre said critically.

The barely undulating plain was interrupted just often enough for comfortable travel by oasis towns, built on rivers that snaked back and forth for a few leagues before vanishing into the ground, only to reappear again leagues away. The ruins of ancient villages perched on yellow sandstone wedges, marooned high in the air by the erosion of the water’s flow. Tiny farms were tucked in along the riverbanks, fields of cotton beginning to bud between straight rows of slender poplars radiant in silvery green. Grape vines sent investigatory tendrils across wooden frames and fruit trees were small white clouds of blooms. Everywhere the bees were happily drunk on nectar, buzzing dizzyingly from blossom to blossom.

In Lanchow they traded not at all, the city being too near Chang’an and Cambaluc for profit such as Wu Li had taught them to expect. If they did not trade, however, they could look to see what luxuries were going for the highest prices that year, and store that information away for future profit. Midway between the spice market and a row of apothecaries shops Johanna, Jaufre and Félicien were offered a full saddlebag of grayish grainy matter that the seller, hand on his heart, earnestly swore upon the bones of his ancestors was dried ground testicle of Jacob’s sheep, a proven aphrodisiac—“Guaranteed to warm the coldest woman on the darkest winter night, sahib!” The seller, a wizened little man in a filthy jellaba and an even filthier turban fastened with a chipped red brooch that couldn’t even pretend to be a ruby, clutched at Jaufre’s sleeve. “Yes, yes, and a known curative for shingles, croup, headache, stomach ache and toothache besides!” When Jaufre smiled and shook his head the old man said, “Where else will you find such rare and wonderful goods, young sir? Where?”

“Where, indeed,” Johanna said, but Jaufre was made of kinder stuff and pressed a small coin into the old man’s hand. It disappeared, but they left the old man pulling his wispy beard and calling out after them, “Is it Wuwei that you journey to next? No, no, not Wuwei, young sir, young miss, as your life depends upon it! Those fellows on the other side of the river are robbers and murderers, they are deviants and pederasts, they rape their mothers, they slay their fathers! Stay safe here where you deal always with honest men! I spit, I spit—” suiting his word to the deed so that Jaufre had to step quickly out of range “—all good people spit on the monsters there!”

“Well, we can’t say we haven’t been warned,” Félicien said, and Johanna could tell by the faraway look in his eyes that he was already composing his next song, something scurrilous to do with the perverse occupations of the dread Wuwei-ers, no doubt.

They met Shasha coming out of the spice market. “Anything worth buying?” Jaufre said.

“I will wait for Yarkent,” Shasha said, and Jaufre and Johanna laughed. Félicien looked between them, quizzical, and Johanna said, “Just wait. When we get to Yarkent, you’ll see.”

In Wuwei, the Lanchow marketplace prophet’s dire prophecies notwithstanding, Johanna found a Khuree merchant with two bales of sable pelts, so expertly cured they rivaled silk for suppleness and sheen. The Khuree knew what he had and the bargaining was fierce, but in the end Johanna bore the sables off in triumph, secure in the knowledge that the return on investment to be had farther down the Road would be well worth her while.

Jaufre found a smith who made belt knives of simple yet elegant design, with edges honed to a sharpness that, the smith said with pride, “cut your eye just to look at it.” Jaufre tested a few of the edges and the smith wasn’t far wrong. They were beautiful and useful and small in bulk and weight, a hundred of them tucked easily into a single pack.

Shasha visited the spice bazaar and said, “I will wait for Yarkent.”

“What’s in Yarkent?” Félicien said again, and again Jaufre and Johanna would only shake their heads.

In Kuche the donkey carts were tethered in the dry riverbed as the muezzin’s call to prayer summoned their drivers to the mosque. On Saturday the sun rose on a bustling market. Jaufre found a vendor with two camel load’s worth of fragrant sandalwood that he knew would do well in Kashgar. Johanna sought out a wool merchant with whom Wu Li had a long and profitable relationship, who could be relied upon not to leave his bales open in transit so as to gather desert sand on the road and so increase their weight, although she kneaded a handful before making an offer because it was expected of her father’s daughter. The wool merchant offered her hot, sweet mint tea and commiseration upon the loss of such a noble father, and she bought ten bales of his finest wool for a weaver in Kashgar who would know how to value it.

Shasha, upon inquiry, said with a certain self-conscious dignity that she had seen nothing of interest beyond an inferior frankincense priced so high as to be amusing to any experienced trader.

“And you’ll wait for Yarkent,” Jaufre said.

Johanna laughed, and Shasha glared, and the three of them returned to camp in high spirits.

“Honorable niece,” Uncle Cheng said, intercepting them before their yurt.

“Honorable uncle,” Johanna said, wondering at the twinkle in his eye. “Have you prospered in Kuche?”

“I have,” he said, the twinkle more pronounced. “I believe I may prosper even more tomorrow.”

“We remain another night then, uncle?” Jaufre said.

“We do,” Uncle Cheng said with a slight bow and a beaming smile that made all three of them instantly suspicious. “We do indeed.”

“Is the market extended for another day?”

“It is not,” Uncle Cheng said. “But there are to be races.”

Jaufre and Shasha both watched with foreboding as Johanna’s expression changed to resemble Uncle Cheng’s in a way no two persons who looked so infinitely dissimilar should do.

Race day dawned in Kuche clear and cool, the aromas of baking bread and animal manure jostling for place. Jaufre woke to find Johanna already gone, and looked across the yurt to see Shasha staring back at him. “This is not wise,” she said. “It will draw attention.”

“What,” he said, grumbling his way into his clothes, “you think Edyk the Portuguese hasn’t noticed yet that his horse is missing?”

The dry riverbed had been transformed, all the donkey carts moved to the sides and tethered to roots beneath the overhang. The center of the riverbed was taken up with a group of child acrobats who tumbled down gracefully from quickly-formed human pyramids to somersault between running camels. A strongman, an ex-soldier by the contemptuous curl of his lip, bent a sword in half, then straightened it out again. A magician made a little girl’s doll disappear, made it reappear when the little girl opened her mouth to cry, and then produced a silver drachma from her brother’s ear. Lines formed before letter writers, spare quills tucked behind their ears, their assistants scraping industriously at previous letters written on already venerable pieces of vellum. An astrologer was doing a rousing business in horoscopes, musicians piped their pipes and strummed their sitars and beat their drums with greater and lesser skill, and the inevitable Kuchean dancing girls entranced wide-eyed country boys with hips that seemed to move independently of the rest of their bodies. Or they did before the boys’ mothers came up to smack their ears and chase them back to their families, there to fall victim to the prostitutes beckoning seductively from the trees growing along the top of the riverbank.