Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) (28 page)

Google “weights in the Middle Ages” and you get over 8 million hits. Here, I use drams, gills, cups, pints, quarts and gallons in ascending order of liquid measurement. Pounds then ranged from 300 grams to 508 grams, so the hell with it, here it’s sixteen ounces (about 453 grams). A hundredweight is a hundred pounds.

Calicut
Now Kozhikode, India.

Cambaluc
Built by Kublai Khan. What became the basis for what is now the Forbidden City in Beijing, China.

Chang’an
Now Xi’an, China.

Cheche
Pronounced “shesh.” A long scarf, usually indigo-dyed blue, worn by Tuaregs. It can be knotted many different ways to keep the sun out of the eyes and protect the neck and face from sunburn. The indigo leeched onto the face and hands of the wearer. Or, alternatively, depending on which story you believe, Tuaregs deliberately dyed their face and hands blue to protect themselves from the sun. I heard both in Morocco.

Cipangu
Now Japan.

Currency
Tael: China. Bezants: Byzantium. Drachma: Arabic. Florence: Florins. Venice: Accommodate all currencies but rely on gemstones.

Ell
The distance from a man’s elbow to the tip of his middle finger, or about 18 inches. A standard unit of measurement for textiles in the Middle Ages, and never mind the differences between Scots, English, Flemish, Polish, German and French ells.

Gujarat
Now a province in northwest India.

Ibn Battuta
Berber slave trader, 1304–1369, known for writing
The Rihla
(“The Journey,”) an account of his extensive travels throughout the medieval world. Purely for the convenience of my plot, I have advanced his first visit to Kabul by five years.

Kabul
Now the capital of Afghanistan.

Khuree
The summer capital of the Mongols. Now Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Kinsai
Now Hangzhou, or Hangchow, China.

Lanchow
Now Lanzhou, China.

League
The distance one person could walk in an hour. Also defined as about three miles. I have rounded up and down. The Khan’s yambs were built every 25 miles, therefore in
Silk and Song
every eight leagues. The Khan’s imperial mailmen rode 200 miles daily, hence sixty leagues. Close enough for government work and fiction.

The Levant
From Wikipedia: “A geographic and cultural region consisting of the eastern Mediterranean between Anatolia and Egypt…The Levant consists today of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Cyprus and parts of southern Turkey. Iraq and the Sinai Peninsula are also sometimes included.”

Middle Sea
The Mediterranean, also known as the Western Sea.

Mien
Now Myanmar, or Burma.

Mintan
A short-waisted, long-sleeved coat. Ottoman.

Mongols and torture
. Yes, they did those things. Those exact things. And more.

Mysore
Then as now, a city in northwest India.

Paiza
The royal Mongol passport. The Mongols called it a gerrega.

Sarik
A headscarf. Ottoman.

Shang-tu
The summer capital of the Mongols. Now Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Also called
Khuree
.

Shensi
Now Shaanxi, China.

Silk Road
A term that did not come into common usage until the twentieth century. Here I use the more generic Road.

Time
See
Bureau of Weights and Measures
above
. In Europe: divided into times for prayer. Matins: midnight. Lauds: 3am. Prime: Sunrise. Terce: Midmorning. Sext: Noon. None: Midafternoon. Vespers: Sunset. Compline: Bedtime.

Turgesh
Turkey, or Turkish.

Zeilan
On what is now the Somali-Ethiopian border.

MY INTENT AS A STORYTELLER
is always to entertain, but this book also required a great deal of research over many years, and was influenced by the work of many scholars, without whose heavy lifting this by comparison light-hearted romp would not have been possible. Here’s a list of just a few of the books that helped Johanna and Jaufre on their way.

Bergreen, Laurence.
Marco Polo, From Venice to Xanadu.

Bonavia, Judy.
The Silk Road.

Boorstin, Daniel J.
The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself.

Burman, Edward.
The Assassins.

Burman, Edward.
The World before Columbus, 1100–1492.

Cahill, Thomas.
Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe.

Collis, Louise.
Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: the Life and Times of Margery Kempe.

Croutier, Alev Lytle.
Harem, The World Behind the Veil.

Dalrymple, William.
In Xanadu.

Dougherty, Martin.
Weapons & Fighting Techniques of the Medieval Warrior.

Foltz, Richard C.
Religions of the Silk Road.

Freeman, Margaret B.
Herbs for the Medieval Household for Cooking, Healing and Divers Uses.

Garfield, Simon.
On the Map, A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks.

Gillman, Ian, and Hans-Joachim Klimkett.
Christians in Asia before 1500.

Grotenhuis, Elizabeth Ten, editor.
Along the Silk Road.

Hansen, Valerie.
Silk Road, A New History.

Herrin, Judith.
Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire.

Johnson, Steven.
The Ghost Map.

Lacey, Robert & Danny Danzier.
The Year 1000, What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium.

Manchester, William.
A World Lit Only by Fire.

Newman, Sharan.
The Real History Behind the Templars.

Ohler, Norbert.
The Medieval Traveller.

Polo, Marco.
The Adventures of Marco Polo.
Many editions.

Rowling, Marjorie.
Everyday Life of Medieval Travellers.

Tooley, Ronald Vere.
Maps and Map-Makers.

Tuchman, Barbara.
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.

Turner, Jack.
Spice: The History of a Temptation.

Weatherford, Jack.
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

Whitfield, Susan.
Life Along the Silk Road.

Wood, Frances.
The Silk Road, Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia.

Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage and raised on 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and after having a grand old time working in the Prudhoe Bay oilfields on the North Slope of Alaska, making an obscene amount of money and going to Hawaii a lot, found it in writing.

Her first crime fiction novel,
A Cold Day for Murder
, won an Edgar award, her first thriller,
Blindfold Game
, hit the
New York Times
bestseller list, and her twenty-ninth novel and twentieth entry in the Kate Shugak series,
Bad Blood
, was released in February 2013.

Find her on the web at
stabenow.com
.

A Cold Day for Murder
A Fatal Thaw
Dead in the Water
A Cold-Blooded Business
Play with Fire
Blood Will Tell
Breakup
Killing Grounds
Hunter’s Moon
Midnight Come Again
The Singing of the Dead
A Fine and Bitter Snow
A Grave Denied
A Taint in the Blood
A Deeper Sleep
Whisper to the Blood
A Night Too Dark
Though Not Dead
Restless in the Grave
Bad Blood

Fire and Ice
So Sure of Death
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Better to Rest

Second Star
A Handful of Stars
Red Planet Run

Blindfold Game
Prepared for Rage

This digital edition of
Everything Under the Heavens
(1.0) was published in 2014 by
Gere Donovan Press
.

If you downloaded this book from a filesharing network, either individually or as part of a larger torrent, the author has received no compensation. Please consider purchasing a legitimate copy—they are reasonably priced and available from all major outlets.

If you enjoyed it, a positive review is the best way to show your appreciation.
Your author thanks you.

© 2014, Dana Stabenow.

If you enjoyed
Everything Under the Heavens
, y
ou might also enjoy Jane Johnson's
The Sultan's Wife,
another ripping work of historical fiction, coming soon from Gere Donovan Press. Here's an excerpt:

‘My name is Alys Swann
and I am twenty-nine years of age.’

‘No, I have no children: I have never married.’

‘Yes, I am still a maid.’

I answer their questions with my head held high. I am not ashamed of my estate. So I look the foreign picaroon in the eye with all the courage I can muster and speak out clearly. Had our circumstances been different, some of those present would probably have sniggered, but since we are all in fear for our lives they have other more pressing matters to concern them than my spinsterhood and long-preserved virginity.

My captors’ scribe takes down these details for his record in a script that reads from right to left. That, in conjunction with his dark skin and cloth-wrapped head, suggests to me that we have been boarded by Turks. Behind me, I can hear Anouk and Marika, my maids, sisters hired to accompany me on the voyage from Scheveningen to England, snuffling and gulping, and feel a brief moment’s pity. They are barely more than children, and, although sullen and unbiddable, they do not deserve to meet an early death. Poor dears, they are just starting out, full of the dreams I had at their age—of young men and marriage, of babies and laughter. They have spent most of the voyage giggling and making sheep’s eyes at the crew; but now many of those handsome lads he dead on the deck of our ship, or in chains aboard this one.

‘Do you think they will rape us?’ Anouk asks me, her eyes huge.

‘I hope not,’ is all I can honestly say.

And yet a man grasped my breast as they took us off the other vessel. I was so surprised I did not even think to scream, but simply took hold of his hand and pushed it away. An unmistakable expression of shame crossed his face: he bobbed his head and muttered something in his strange language that I believed to be an apology, which did not correspond with the ruthless fashion in which our ship had been taken.

But it does not take us long to realize that we are merchandise, worth far more than the bolts of cloth in the hold of the ship. The two mulatto women who served the dead captain as cooks (and I am sorry to say also more than likely mistresses) roll their eyes. ‘Slaves,’ one says; and the other replies: ‘Again.’

Slavery has always seemed to me a deplorable practice. The idea of owning a person like a stick of furniture seems to me morally wrong and I have refused to buy anyone. Mother berated me for my lack of economic management: Amsterdam is the slave capital of Europe and we could buy slaves for a bargain price. But after Father’s death I kept the books and I dug my heels in, though she complained bitterly not to have a parcel of little black boys she could dress up in fancy clothes as an enhancement to her person when her frightful friends visited with their own sorry retinues. But, to my shame, I have never even considered the possibility of a white person being sold as a slave—least of all myself.

I have heard about slave-vessels, of men chained in their own filth and disease below-decks, of more corpses being thrown overboard than arrive alive at the destination; but it seems that is not to be my lot. I am taken to a small cabin, which, although cramped and dirty, affords me some degree of privacy and dignity, and I lie there in the dark contemplating what might have been had our ship reached England. Once married, I would have lived with my husband, Mr Burke, in his newly built house in London’s Golden Square - a place that sounds magical, but that I have never seen, and now probably never will see.

I have not met Mr Burke: the union was arranged between our families, though it was not, I fear, the alliance for which my mother hoped. She cherished grand dreams, told me I would marry into the nobility and thus remake the fortune my father lost when he fled from the Parliament men to Holland at the outset of the English War. Why she married him, I do not know, for it was clear to me even as a child that she did not greatly care for him. She too was an émigré, daughter of a family living on the edge of court life, mixing with the rich and famous, without the wherewithal to do so. There was some scandal, I believe; she married Father as a result.

Throughout my youth I was thrown with ever greater urgency at a succession of visiting gentry, but with King Charles restored there were sufficient girls of greater beauty, substantially larger fortunes and better family at home in England to supply the marriage market, and so my mother became an increasingly disappointed woman. Disappointment turned to bitterness; bitterness to a sickness of the spirit that soon became a sickness of the body; and I have been her attendant ever since. It was only because our debts had mounted and she had a ‘hankering to see my beloved England before I expire’ that she had accepted on my behalf the hand of Mr Andrew Burke.

The closest I had ever come to my fiancé was a small portrait that he sent, but, since I had seen the one made of me for the purpose of the betrothal, I rather doubted its honesty. In my own portrait I was petite and fair, my eyes larger and bluer than they are in life, my skin porcelain white, with no trace of freckle, and a good ten years erased by the lack of detail, as if someone had shone a bright light upon me that washed age and care away. Seeing it made me laugh out loud. ‘He’ll send me back when he sees what he’s actually bought!’ Mother was not amused.