“Gèsu,” my uncle said wearily. “You will be beaten not on your buttocks but on your clattering tongue. Your Majesty, we will depart at dawn tomorrow, and take this stench speedily out of your vicinity.”
Early the next morning, Karim and our other two servants dressed us in good sturdy traveling garb in the Persian style, and helped us pack our personal belongings, and presented us with a large hamper of fine foods and wines and other delicacies, prepared by the palace cooks so that the viands would keep well and sustain us for a good part of our way. Then all three servants indulged in a performance of wild grief, as if we had been their lifelong beloved masters and were leaving them forever. They prostrated themselves in salaams and tore off their tulbands and beat their bare heads on the floor, and did not desist until my father distributed bakhshish among them, at which they saw us off with broad smiles and commendations to the protection of Allah.
At the palace stable, we found that Nostril had, without command or beating or supervision, got our riding camels saddled and the pack camel loaded. He had even carefully wrapped and arranged all the gifts being sent by the Shah, so they would not fall or jar against each other or be dirtied by the dust of the road, and, so far as we could determine, he had not stolen a single item from among them.
Instead of complimenting him, my uncle said sternly, “You scoundrel, you think to please us now and cozen us into leniency, so that we will be easygoing when you regress into your natural sloth. But I warn you, Nostril, we will
expect
this sort of efficiency, and—”
The slave interrupted, but obsequiously. “A good master makes a good servant, and gets from him service and obedience in direct proportion to the respect and trust accorded him.”
“From all report,” said my father, “you have not very well served your recent owners—the Shah, the slave dealer …”
“Ah, good Master Mirza Polo, I have been too long pent in cities and households, and my spirit gets crabbed by confinement. I was made by Allah to be a wanderer. Once I learned that you gentlemen are journeyers, I bent every effort to get myself expelled from this palace and attached to your karwan.”
“Hm,” said my father and uncle, skeptically.
“In so doing, I knew I risked an even more immediate release—like a dunking in the oil vat. But this young Mirza Marco saved me from that, and he will never regret it. To you elder masters, I will be the obedient servant, but to him I will be the devoted mentor. I will stand between him and harm, as he did for me, and I will sedulously instruct him in the wisdoms of the road.”
So here was the second of the uncommon teachers I acquired in Baghdad. I heartily wished that it could have been another as comely and companionable and desirable as the Princess Moth. I was not much pleased at the prospect of being the ward of this scruffy slave, and possibly having some of his nasty attributes rub off on me. But I was disinclined to wound him by saying those things aloud, and I responded merely by making a face of tolerant acceptance.
“Mind, I do not claim to be a good man,” said Nostril, as if he had overheard my thoughts. “I am a man of the world, and not all my tastes and habits are acceptable in polite society. Doubtless you will have frequent occasion to chide me or beat me. But a good traveler, that I am. And now that I shall be again upon the open road, you will appreciate my usefulness. You will see!”
So we three went to make our final and formal leavetakings of the Shah and the Shahryar and her old mother and the Shahzrad Magas. They had all risen early on purpose, and they said their farewells as feelingly as if we had been real guests instead of merely bearers of the Khakhan’s ferman who had to be accommodated.
“These are the papers of ownership of that slave,” said the Shah Zaman, giving them to my father. “You will cross many borders from here eastward, and the border guards may require to know the identities of all in your karwan. Now goodbye, good friends, and may you walk always in the shadow of Allah.”
Princess Moth said to us all, but with a special smile for me, “May you never meet an afriti or an evil jinni on the way, but only the sweet and perfect peri.”
The grandmother nodded a mute goodbye, but the Shahryar Zahd said a leavetaking almost as long as one of her stories, concluding fulsomely, “Your departure leaves all of us here bereft.”
At that, I made bold to say to her, “There is one here in the palace to whom I would like my personal regards conveyed.” I confess, I was still slightly bemazed by my own made-up story about the Princess Sunlight, and by my delusion that I had almost uncovered some long-kept secret regarding her. Anyway, whether or not she was as sublimely beautiful as I had made her in my mind, she
had
been my unflagging lover, and it was only politeness to make especial farewell to her. “Would you give her my fond goodbye, Your Lady Majesty? I do not think the Princess Shams is your own daughter, but—”
“Really,” said the Shahryar, with a giggle. “My daughter, indeed. You jest, young Mirza Marco, to leave us all laughing in good humor. I am sure you must be aware that the Shahrpiryar is the only Persian Princess named Shams.”
I said uncertainly, “I have never heard that title before.” I was puzzled, having noticed that the Princess Moth had retreated to a corner of the room and muffled her face in the qali draperies, only her green eyes visible and sparkling naughtily, as she tried to contain the laughter that was nearly doubling her over.
“The title Shahrpiryar,” said her mother, “means the Dowager Princess Shams, the Venerable Royal Matriarch.” She gestured. “My mother here.”
Speechless with astonishment and horror and revulsion, I stared at the Shahrpiryar Shams, the wrinkled, balding, mottled, shrunken, moldy, decrepit, unspeakably old grandmother. She responded to my eye-extruding stare with a lascivious and gloating smile that bared her withered gray gums. Then, as if to make sure I did not fail of realization, she slowly ran the tip of her mossy tongue across her granulated upper lip.
I think I may have reeled where I stood, but somehow I followed my father and uncle out of the room without falling unconscious or vomiting on the alabaster floor. I only vaguely heard the cheery, laughing, mocking goodbyes Moth called after me, for I was hearing inside my head other mocking noises—my own fatuous query, “Is your sister much younger than you are?” and my imagined Allah’s decree about “the divine beauty of the Princess Shams” and the fardarbab’s sand reading, “Beware the bloodthirstiness of the beautiful …”
Well, this latest encounter with beauty had cost me no blood, and I daresay no one ever died of disgust or humiliation. If anything, the experience served to keep my blood long astir and red and vigorous afterward, for my every recollection of those nights in the anderun of the palace of Baghdad made my blood suffuse me with a blazing red blush.
THE wazir, riding a horse, accompanied our little camel train for the isteqbal—the half a day’s journey—which the Persians traditionally perform as a courteous escort for departing guests. During that morning’s ride, Jamshid several times solicitously remarked on my mien of glazed eyes and slack jaw. My father and uncle and the slave Nostril also several times inquired if I was being made ill by the rolling gait of my camel. To each I made some evasive reply; I could not admit that I was simply stunned by the knowledge that for the past three weeks or so I had been blissfully coupling with a drooling hag some sixty years older than myself.
However, because I
was
young, I was resilient. After a while, I convinced myself that no real harm had been done—except perhaps to my self-esteem—and that neither of the Princesses was likely to gossip and make me a universal laughingstock. By the time Jamshid gave us his final “salaam aleikum” and turned his horse back for Baghdad, I was able again to look about me and see the country through which we were riding. We were then, and would be for some time, in a land of pleasantly green valleys winding among cool blue hills. That was good, for it enabled us to get used to our camels before we should reach the harder going in the desert.
I will mention that riding a camel is no more difficult than riding a horse, once one has acquired a head for the much higher altitude where one is perched. A camel walks with a mincing gait and wears a supercilious sneer, exactly like certain men of a certain sort. That gait is easy for even a new rider to adjust to, and the riding is easiest done with both legs on the same side, in the way a woman rides a horse sidesaddle, one’s forward leg crooked around the saddle bow. The camel is reined, not with a bridle, but with a line tied to a wooden peg permanently fixed in its snout. The camel’s sneer gives it a look of haughty intelligence, but that is entirely spurious. One must constantly be aware that a camel is among the most stupid of beasts. An intelligent horse may take a notion to play pranks, to vex or unseat its rider. A camel would never be capable of such an idea, but neither does it have a horse’s good sense to watch its way and sidestep avoidable hazards. A camel’s rider must stay alert and guide it even around obvious rocks and holes, lest it fall or snap a leg.
As we had been doing ever since Acre, we were still traveling through country that was as new to my father and uncle as it was to me, because they had earlier crossed Asia, both going eastward and returning home, by a much more northerly route. Therefore, with whatever misgivings, they left our direction to the slave Nostril, who claimed to have traversed this country many times in his life of wandering. And so he must have done, for he confidently led us along, and did not pause at the frequent branchings of the trail, but always seemed to know which fork to take. Precisely at that first day’s sundown, he brought us to a comfortably appointed karwansarai. By way of rewarding Nostril’s good conduct, we did not make him put up in the stable with the camels, but paid for him to eat and sleep in the main building of the establishment.
As we sat about the dining cloth that night, my father studied the papers the Shah had given us, and said:
“I remember your telling us, Nostril, that you have borne other names. It appears from these documents that you have served each of your previous masters under a different one. Sindbad. Ali Babar. Ali-ad-Din. They are all nicer sounding names than Nostril. By which would you prefer that we call you?”
“By none of them, if you please, Master Nicolò. They all belong to past and forgotten phases of my life. Sindbad, for example, refers only to the land of Sind where I was born. I long ago left that name behind.”
I said, “The Shahryan Zahd told us some stories about the adventures of another habitual journeyer who called himself Sindbad the Sailor. Could that possibly have been you?”
“Someone very like me, perhaps, for the man was clearly a liar.” He chuckled at his own self-deprecation. “You gentlemen are from the marine republic of Venice, so you must know that no seaman ever calls himself a sailor. Always seaman or mariner, sailor being a landsman’s ignorant word. If that Sindbad could not get his own by-name correct, then his stories must be suspect.”
My father persisted, “I must inscribe on this paper some name for you under our ownership … .”
“Put down Nostril, good master,” he said airily. “That has been my name ever since the contretemps which earned it for me. You gentlemen might not believe it, but I was a surpassingly handsome man before that mutilation of my nose ruined my looks.”
He went on at great length about how handsome he had been when he still had two nostrils, and how sought after by women enamored of his manly beauty. In his early days, as Sindbad, he said, he had so entranced a lovely girl that she had risked her life to save him from an island peopled by winged and wicked men. Later, as Ali Babar, he had been captured by a band of thieves and thrust into a jar of sesame oil, and would have had his talking head pulled off his softened neck but that another lovely girl, beguiled by his charm, had rescued him from the jar and the thieves. As Ali-ad-Din, he with his handsome looks had emboldened yet another comely girl to save him from the clutches of an afriti commanded by an evil sorcerer … .
Well, the tales were as implausible as any told by the Shahryar Zahd, but no more implausible than his assertion that he had once been a good-looking man. No one could have believed that. Had he had the normal two nostrils, or three, or none, it would not have improved his resemblance to a large-beaked, chinless, pot-bellied shuturmurq camelbird, made even more comical by a stubble of beard under its beak. He went on even more incredibly, embellishing his claim of physical appeal by claiming to have done exploits of bravery and ingenuity and fortitude. We listened politely, but we knew all his rodomontata to be—as my father said later—“All vine and no grapes.”
Some days afterward, when my uncle compared our eastward progress against the maps in the Kitab of al-Idrisi, he announced that we had arrived at a historic place. According to his calculations, we were somewhere very near the spot, recorded in
The Book of Alexander,
where, during the conqueror’s march across Persia, the Amazon Queen Thalestris had come with her host of warrior women to greet and pay homage to him. We could only take Uncle Mafìo’s word, for there was in that place no monument to commemorate the occasion.
In after years, I have often been asked whether I in my journeyings ever found the nation of Amazonia, or, as some call it, the Land of Femynye. Not there in Persia, I did not. Later, in the Mongol domains, I met many warrior women, but they were all subservient to their menfolk. I have also been often asked whether, out yonder in those far lands, I ever met the Prete Zuàne, called in other languages Presbyter Johannes and Prester John, that reverend and mighty man so shrouded in myth and fable and legend and enigma.
For more than a hundred years, the Western world has been hearing rumor and report of him: a direct descendant of the royal Magi who first worshiped the Christ child, hence himself royal and devoutly Christian, and furthermore wealthy and powerful and wise. As the Christian monarch of a reputedly immense Christian realm, he has been a figure to tantalize Western imagination. Given our fragmented West, of many and little nations, ruled by comparatively petty kings and dukes and such, forever warring against each other—and a Christianity continually sprouting new and schismatic and antagonistic sects—we needs must look with wistful admiration on a vast congeries of peoples all peaceably united under one ruler and one supreme pontiff, and both of those embodied in one majestic man.
Also, whenever our West has been beleaguered by heathen savages swarming out of the East—Huns, Tàtars, Mongols, the Muslim Saracens —we have fervently hoped and prayed that the Prete Zuàne would emerge from his still farther East and come up
behind
the invaders with his legions of Christian warriors, so that those heathens would be caught and crushed between his armies and ours. But the Prete Zuàne never
has
ventured out of his mysterious fastnesses, neither to help the Christian
West
in its recurrent times of need nor even to make demonstration of his existence in reality. Does he then exist, and if so, who is he? Does he really hold sway over a far-off Christian empire, and if so, where is it?
I have already speculated, in my earlier published chronicle of my travels, that the Prete Zuàne did exist,
in a sense,
and in that sense may still exist, but he is not and never was a Christian potentate.
Back when the Mongols were only separate and disorganized tribes, they called each tribal chief a Khan. When the many tribes united under the fearsome Chinghiz, he became the only Eastern monarch ruling over an empire resembling the one rumored to belong to the Prete Zuàne. Since the time of Chinghiz, that Mongol Khanate was ruled in part or in whole by various of his descendants, before his grandson Kubilai became Khakhan and enlarged it even further and consolidated it more firmly. All of those Mongol rulers down the years had different names, but all were titled Khan or Khakhan.
Now, I invite you to notice how easily the spoken or written word Khan or Khakhan could be misread or misheard as Zuàne or John or Johannes. Suppose a long-ago Christian traveler in the East misheard it so. He naturally would be reminded of the sainted Apostle of that name. It would be no small wonder if he thereafter believed he had heard mention of a priest or bishop named for the Apostle. He had only to mingle the misapprehension with the reality—the extent and power and wealth of the Mongol Khanate—and by the time he went home to the West he would have been eager to tell of an imaginary Prete Zuàne ruling an imaginary Christian empire.
Well, if I am right, the Khans probably did inspire the legend, through no doing of their own, but they are not Christians. And they never have owned any of the fabulous possessions ascribed to that Prete Zuàne—the enchanted mirror in which he spies on the distant doings of his enemies, the magic medicaments with which he can cure any mortal ill, his man-eating warriors who are invincible because they can subsist only on the enemies they vanquish—all those other fanciful marvels so reminiscent of the Shahryar Zahd’s stories.
This is not to say that there are no Christians in the East. There are, and many of them, individuals and groups and entire communities of Christians, to be found everywhere from the Mediterranean Levant to the farther shores of Kithai, and they are of all colors, from white to dun and brown and black. Unfortunately, they are all communicants of the Eastern Church, which is to say followers of the doctrines of the fifth-century schismatic Abbot Nestorius, which is to say heretics in the eyes of us Christians of the Roman Church. For the Nestorians deny the Virgin Mary the title of Mother of God, they do not allow a crucifix in their churches, and they revere the despised Nestorius as a saint. They practice many other heresies besides. Their priests are not celibate, many of them are married, and all are simoniacs, for they will not administer any of the sacraments except for a fee of money paid. The Nestorians’ only tie with us real Christians is that they worship the same Lord God, and recognize Christ as His Son.
That at least made them seem more kin to me and my father and uncle than did the far more numerous surrounding worshipers of Allah or Buddha or even more alien divinities. So we tried not to abhor the Nestorians too much—even while we disputed their doctrines—and they were usually hospitable and helpful to us.
If indeed the Prete Zuàne existed in actuality, not just in the Western imagination—and if, as rumored, he were a descendant of one of the Magi kings—then we ought to have found him during our traverse of Persia, for that is where the Magi lived, and it was from Persia that they followed the Nativity star to Bethlehem. However, that would have made the Prete Zuàne a Nestorian, since those are the only sorts of Christians existing in those parts. And in fact we did find among the Persians a Christian elder of that name, but he could hardly have been the Prete Zuàne of the legend.
His name was Vizan, which is the Persian rendition of the name rendered elsewhere Zuàne or Giovanni or Johannes or John. He had been born into the royalty of Persia—had indeed been born a Shahzadè, or Prince—but in his youth he had embraced the Eastern Church, which meant renouncing not only Islam, but also his title and heritage and wealth and privilege and right to succession in the Shahnate. All of that he had forsworn, to join a roving tribe of Nestorian bedawin. Now a very old man, he was that tribe’s elder and leader and acknowledged Presbyter. We found him to be a good man and a wise man, and altogether an admirable man. In those particulars he well fit the character of the fabled Prete Zuàne. But he reigned over no broad and rich and populous domain, only a ragtag tribe of some twenty impoverished and landless shepherd families.
We encountered that bunch of sheep herders on a night when there was no karwansarai nearby, and they invited us to share their camping ground in the middle of their herd, and so we spent that evening in the company of their Presbyter Vizan.
While he and we made our simple meal around a small fire, my father and uncle engaged him in a theological discussion, and they ably discredited and demolished many of the old bedawi’s most cherished heresies. But he seemed not in the least dismayed or ready to discard the shreds they left of his beliefs. Instead, he cheerfully turned the conversation to the Baghdad court we had recently inhabited, and asked after all there, who were of course his royal relatives. We told him that they were well and thriving and happy, although understandably chafing under the overlordship of the Khanate. Old Vizan seemed pleased with the news, though no whit nostalgic for that life of courtly ease he had long ago given up. Only when Uncle Mafìo chanced to mention the Shahrpiryar Shams—making me inwardly flinch—did the ancient shepherd-bishop heave a sigh that might have denoted regret.