Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (18 page)

One other small point for anyone curious about the name of the game:
Adestis
is simply Latin for
You are present.

Beyond the Golden Road

The wise men in the court of the Great Khan say that Life and Death are the two great arcs of the world. Close to each other at birth, they move apart in middle life, and in old age they converge again and finally meet.

I am too young to be a sage, and I do not question the words of wise men and great philosophers. But when we finally stumbled across the merchant caravan in the wastes of the Tarim Desert, I knew that the arcs of Life and Death for me, a young man, stood no more than a fingernail apart.

We had been walking for six days, the last two without water. According to the soldier Ahmes, the desert should have been no more than four days travel wide. Long since we ought to have emerged from its eastern margin and found the Ghadi oasis. Instead we were dying under a late-October sun.

Ahmes was not a man to understand guilt. He strode on, still strong and erect, still carrying his curved Damascene sword and leather shield. A gray-black layer of dust covered his cheeks and caked around his lips, but his face was as cheerful as ever. He was sucking on a smooth pebble, and now and again he would turn to us and smile his mysterious crinkle-eyed grin of white teeth.

I had carried most of our baggage, and all of the water for as long as we had water. Now I was staggering, close to collapse. Johannes, who
does
feel guilt—much too acutely—knew how near I was to giving up. He had an arm around me, half-carrying me forward, while he whispered encouraging words. “A little farther, Dari,” he said, “it cannot be more than another hour or two. We have come too far, you and I, to be stopped now.” And then, when I was near weeping with pain and thirst and weariness, “I am sorry I brought you here. But courage, little Dari. This too shall pass.”

He liked Ahmes. He had trusted him since we first met in the freezing heights of the Hindu Kush, winding our way east through the high snowy passes and glittering glaciers. Ahmes had led us then on a supposed shortcut, one that left us lost and shivering on a mountainside, in air so thin and clear and cold that the midday sky looked purple-black, and the leaves of the flowering plants were as brittle as dried tea. We had been lucky to survive that day, and had done it only by taking a hair-raising slide down three thousand feet of a blind snow-slope. It could have ended in a precipice. The luck of Ahmes, it ended in soft snow and, just below, a pleasant valley.

Johannes believed him even now, when we had been led so far astray that our lives were again in terrible danger. He could not see past that bluff, cheerful exterior to the bloody, reckless warrior inside. But I knew Ahmes. I had seen men like him all my life, ever since I was a mewling baby.

And now Ahmes was going to be the death of us all.

I leaned my head against Johannes’s shoulder. He would always be kind to me, but he would not listen, would not think of me as a man. I was still “little Dari,” even though I had grown half a head since we set out from Acre more than a year ago. He had never taken me seriously, and now there could never be a chance for such a thing.

“Eh-hey!” The shout broke into my thoughts. Ahmes had been walking twenty paces ahead, and now he turned to grin at us in triumph. “There we are. Straight ahead.”

And there it was. The luck of Ahmes. A rising streak of dust on the next sandy ridge. Within that dust as we topped our own dune I could see the line of camels and ponies, walking nose to tail along the high line of the hard sand. Five minutes later I had my face buried in a juicy section of
hendevane
—watermelon. Nothing had ever tasted so good.

I swallowed cool red pulp, ran the cold, sticky rind across my forehead, and looked up. Ahmes was chattering with half a dozen of the merchants while Johannes, less fluent, did his best to follow the babble. I had been coaching him for a year, but his ear was blind and he did not have my gift for languages. As Ahmes talked now of the desert crossing, just as though we had planned everything this way, Johannes was nodding. Was it worth pointing out to him, one more time, that the advice of Ahmes had been hopelessly wrong, that we had found no oasis where he promised, and that the encounter with this caravan was nothing but the act of a kind Fate?

Useless. Johannes thought and spoke nothing but good of anyone. Except himself.

I did not want to hear the lies and boasting of Ahmes. I finished the slice of melon and began to wander back along the broken line of the halted caravan. And there, in the middle of a group of soldiers who each looked even bigger and stronger than Ahmes, I had my first sight of her.

The witch-woman.

At the time she seemed no more than a girl, sitting on the most beautiful little pony that I had ever seen. Can I confess it, that my interest was drawn first to that darling horse, dappled dark-brown and black, with a flowing white mane? I coveted that pony.

She sat upright on its back, muffled in a dark blue cloak from feet to eyes. Those eyes were wide, with irises the color of honey, and eyebrows thick and black above them. From her bearing I took her for a fully mature woman, perhaps the senior wife of one of the merchants. Only when I looked closer could I see that she was not so old. Fifteen or so, and my senior by only two years.

She urged her pony forward along the line toward the head of the caravan. When she arrived there she stood staring at Johannes, and ignoring Ahmes. That was unusual. Ahmes was tall and broad and loud, the dominant figure in most groups.

“Who is that?” I spoke to one of the foot soldiers, a man wearing fronded leather leggings, and pointed to the woman. I had spoken in Turkic, but I was ready to try with Pushtu and Persian and Arabic if that did not work.

He understood me all right, and so did his companions. They all roared with laughter.

“Eyes off her, little warrior,” the man said. “She is forbidden fruit. Kings-meat, reserved for the Emperor himself. Anyone who touches her will find he’s two balls short. You don’t want to lose ’em, do you, before you’ve had a chance to use ’em?”

He was burly and bearded, but his eyes were good-humored and they took the roughness from his words. And he had told me something of supreme importance. If the woman were intended as a bride or concubine of the Emperor, then the caravan must be bound for Karakorum itself and the court of the Great Khan. That was many days travel away, but by staying with them, we would reach our own destination. We were luckier than we had realized.

It was late afternoon, and our arrival had provided a sufficient reason for the traveling merchants to stop for the day. The girl came riding slowly back along the line, and the soldier next to me saw my look.

“All right, little warrior, go and talk to her if you want to. Talk is certainly permitted.” He laughed, but he was not laughing at me. “We are here to protect her, but not from talk. And we will protect you, too, if you need it. Go.”

I did not need to approach her. She was heading straight for me. When the pony and I were nose to nose she stopped and pulled the veil of the
chador
from the lower half of her face. I saw a straight nose with flared nostrils, a lower lip full enough to be new-stung by a honeybee from the thyme fields of the Elburz Mountains, and a skin as pale and clear as their first-fallen snow. Kings-meat, indeed.

“Dar-i,” she said, and it was the first sign that she was a witch-woman. How did she know my name? “Dari, the caravan is stopping now. When we eat the evening meal, I want to talk to you.”

Her accent was strange, her voice deep, and I could only just understand her. She was not from this part of the world, but we had enough common language to talk freely. Before I did more than nod she had swung around and was heading down the line. I was left looking at the pony’s swaying haunches. And then Johannes was calling me from the head of the line, needing help to converse with the merchants.

I sighed. How would he have managed without me, if I had died out there in the desert? How
had
he managed, in his many years before we ever met?

* * *

Nataree, her name was. She came from the mountains north of Kabul, far to the west of this eastern desert, and because of her great beauty she had been picked out by the local khan from all the girls of his region, and sent to be a bride for the Great Khan; or to be whatever the Great Khan, in his wisdom, wanted her to be.

She smiled when she said that last piece, as though it was a joke. I nodded, just as though I understood, and wondered why we were talking at all. I wanted to get back to Johannes, he was not safe without me.

“Your own journey,” she said at last. “It is also to visit the court of the Great Khan?”

“That is correct.”

She was silent for a long time, those honey eyes staring into the distant firelight. We were sitting apart from the other groups, off in the cold and dark that fills the world twenty paces or more from the fires. She ate daintily and little, as though food was nothing to her. At last: “But you have no gifts for the Khan, no wives, no jewels, no new inventions?”

And now it was my turn to be silent. Our mission was certainly no secret, but it was perhaps better explained to people by Johannes, not by me. But he could not explain to her!—not until he learned to speak her language. And even then, there were things that he might not want said, about his own reasons for being here. On the other hand, what harm could there be in my telling Nataree of the questions we sought to answer? We would look for information from anyone.

“We are here to learn certain things of the court of the Great Khan,” I said at last. “And we do bring gifts. Gifts of learning.”

Her eyes glowed with interest. I began to speak, and as I did so I reflected that this at least was not misleading. We brought learning, and no one could doubt Johannes’s fittingness as an ambassador of knowledge and wisdom. I had known it the first time we met, at the house of my master, di Piacenza, the papal legate in Acre.

I had been there for two years as a house servant, sold from Bactria via Bokhara. When Johannes appeared at the house he was ushered in at once to see the legate. I was there, as usual, to run errands or to bring tea and sweetmeats. I sat at my master’s feet. As Johannes came in I saw this ancient, bent-shouldered man. Then he lifted his head, and something strange and wonderful was revealed. A young man and an old man were living together in one face, with wisdom, knowledge, and love shining from pale blue eyes. I had never seen such abstract intelligence in a human countenance, coupled with such naivety for worldly affairs.

“Welcome, Johannes of Magdeburg,” said my master. He spoke of course in Latin, and I had reached the point in my knowledge of that language where I could understand everything that was said. But I had not revealed my progress to M. di Piacenza, not mainly in truth because I sought to deceive him, but because I was thus allowed to be present in many cases where I would otherwise have been excluded. “A good journey from Venice, I trust?” added my master.

Johannes nodded. So far as he and my master the papal legate were concerned, the proprieties had now been observed and they could get down to business. I never ceased to marvel at the abruptness—the crudity—of the leaders of the Church of Jesus. In my homeland, even relative strangers would chat for a few minutes and drink tea or wine together before they began any work of negotiation. Here, it was hello, hello, now let’s talk business.

“We have made a list,” said my master, “in cooperation with His Holiness and the advisers in Rome. We have seven reports—rumors, let us call them, pending some confirmation—of strange inventions and discoveries in the regions ruled by the Great Khan, Kublai. We would like to know more about them.” He held out a roll of paper, tied with a bright blue ribbon. “Study these at your leisure as you travel, but let me offer you my own opinions in a few words. First, the Philosophers’ Stone, which can transmute base metals to noble metals.”

Johannes smiled at once and shook his head.

My master nodded. “I know. We have seen it on a hundred lists, and it never reveals anything but fraud and deceit. But it was reported by Father de Plano Carpini, the Franciscan, on his travels for His Holiness among the Mongols, and he is an honest man. It should be checked. Let us move on to others of more interest. The Auromancers, the little worms that spin golden thread, they sound at first impossible. Except that silk cloth is surely no myth, and there is good evidence that it is made by a little worm or caterpillar, far off in Cathay. You must check the Auromancers. Myself, I believe they exist. Possession of that secret would be a path to great wealth, but we do not ask that you seek to buy or steal an Auromancer. Only seek the knowledge of truth or falsehood of the story.

“Now, I am more skeptical of the Templars, next on our list. I might perhaps believe a centipede three feet long, with a sting fatal to humans—though all such wondrous beasts have a habit of shrinking, you know, the closer you get to their home territory. I find it harder to accept such a centipede as a Templar, a temple guardian intelligent enough to know the difference between worshipers and robbers. And when we are told that such creatures are
themselves
worshipers in the temple, we tread on strange ground indeed: the notion of a soul in the body of a beast. That is a clear heresy. But you, Johannes, will separate truth from falsehood.”

(I sat quiet at the feet of M. di Piacenza and hugged myself with excitement. Johannes of Magdeburg was heading off beyond the rising sun, to Cathay or farther, on a journey of magical discovery, and I would give my right hand to go with him. How could I persuade my master to give me permission?)

“I will group together and pass over the questions of birds as big as elephants, or of two-headed, fire-breathing lizards, or of peacocks that eat only rocks and shit pure opals,” went on my master. “You will surely ask about them. But whether they exist or whether they are no more than myth and legend will make little difference to the Holy Church. Neither property nor belief is at issue, merely human curiosity. However, this last item is another matter.” He tapped the yellow paper. “Ants, says Father Carpini. He heard of ants the size of men, Quarry Ants who operate the diamond mines of the Great Khan. Ants that speak in human tongues, ants who have learned the use of fire, ants who worship a divine creator. You know what that would do to the roots of our beliefs.”