WHEN I came back to myself, I was myself. I was still naked and supine on the hindora bed, but I was a male again, and the body appeared to be my own. I was scummed with dried sweat and my mouth was terribly dry and thirsty and I had a pounding headache, but I felt no pains anywhere else. There was not any mess of my body wastes on the pallet; it looked as clean as it ever looked. The room was very nearly clear of the smoke, and I saw my discarded clothes on the floor. Chiv was also there, and fully dressed. She was hunkered down, wrapping a small something, pale blue and purple, in the paper I had brought the hashish in.
“Was it all a dream, Chiv?” I asked. She did not speak or look up, but went on with what she was doing. “What happened to you in the meantime, Chiv?” She did not reply. “I thought I had a baby,” I said, with a dismissive laugh. No response. I added, “You were there. You were it.”
At that, she raised her head, and her face wore much the same expression it had worn in the dream or whatever that had been. She asked, “I was dark brown?”
“Why, er, yes.”
She shook her head. “Babies of the Romm do not get dark brown until later. They are the same color as white women’s babies when they are born.”
She stood up and carried her little package out of the room. When the door opened, I was surprised to see the brightness of daylight. Had I been here all through the night and into the next day? My companions would be much annoyed at my leaving them all the work to do. I began hurriedly putting on my clothes. When Chiv came back to the room, without her bundle, I said conversationally:
“For the life of me, I cannot believe that any sane woman would ever
want
to go through that horror. Would you, Chiv?”
“No.”
“Then I was right? You were only pretending before? You are really not with child?”
“I am not.” For a normally talkative person, she was being very brusque.
“Have no fear. I am not angry with you. I am glad, for your sake. Now I must get back to the karwansarai. I am going.”
“Yes. Go.”
She said it in a way that implied “do not come back.” I could not see any reason for her surliness. It was I who had done all the suffering, and I strongly suspected that she had contributed in some cunning way to the philter’s miscarriage of purpose.
“She is in a vile humor, as you said, Shimon,” I told the Jew, on my way out. “But I suppose I owe you more money, anyway, for all the time I spent.”
“Why, no,” he said. “You were not long. In conscience—here—I give you a dirham back. Here also is your squeeze knife. Shalom.”
So it was still the same day, then, and not really far into the afternoon, at that, and my travail had only seemed much, much longer. I got back to the inn to find my father and uncle and Nostril still collecting and packing our possessions, but having no immediate need of my assistance. I went down to the lakeside, where the washerwomen of Buzai Gumbad kept always a patch of water cleared of ice. The water was so blue-cold that it seemed to bite, so my bath was perfunctory—my hands and face, and then I briefly took off my upper garments to dash some few drops at my chest and armpits. That wetting was the first I had had all winter; I would probably have been revolted by my own smell, except that everyone else smelled the same or worse. At least it made me feel a trifle cleaner of the sweat that had dried on me in Chiv’s room. And, as the sweat got diluted, so did my worst recollections of my experience. Pain is like that; it is excruciating to endure, but easy to forget. I daresay that is the only reason why any woman, after having been agonized and riven by the extrusion of one child, can even contemplate chancing the ordeal of another.
On the eve of our departure from the Roof of the World, the Hakim Mimdad, whose own karwan train would also be leaving, but in a different direction, came to the karwansarai to say his goodbyes to us all, and to give Uncle Mafio a traveling supply of his medicine. Then, while my father and uncle looked rather agog, I told the Hakim how his philter had failed—or else had succeeded wildly far beyond his intent. I told him graphically what had happened, and I told it not at all enthusiastically, and not a little accusingly.
“The girl must have meddled,” he said. “I was afraid of that. But no experiment is a total failure if something can be learned from it. Did you learn anything?”
“Only that human life begins and ends in merda, or kut. No, one other thing: to be careful when I love in future. I will never condemn any woman I love to such a hideous fate as motherhood.”
“Well, there you are, then. You learned something. Perhaps you would like to try again? I have here another phial, another slight variant on the recipe. Take it along with you, and try it with some female who is not a Romni sorceress.”
My uncle grumbled ruefully, “There is a Dotòr Balanzòn for you. Gives me a stunting potion and, to level the scales, gives an enhancer to one too young and brisk to need it.”
I said, “I will take it, Mimdad, as a keepsake curiosity. The notion is appealing—to sample lovemaking in a multitude of shapes. But I have a long way to go before I exhaust all the possibilities of this body, and I will remain in it for now. Doubtless, when you have finally refined your philter to perfection, the word of it will be noised all about the world, and by then I may be jaded with my own possibilities, and I will seek you out and ask then to try your perfected potion. For now, I wish you success and salaam and farewell.”
I did not get to say even that much to Chiv, when that same evening I went to Shimon’s place.
“Earlier this afternoon,” he told me indifferently, “the Domm girl asked for her share of her income to date, and resigned from this establishment, and joined an Uzbek karwan train departing for Balkh. The Domm do things like that. When they are not being shiftless, they are being shifty. Ah, well. You still have the squeeze knife to remember her by.”
“Yes. And to remind me of her name. Chiv means blade.”
“Does it now. And she never stuck one into you.”
“I am not so sure of that.”
“There are still the other females. Will you have one, this last night?”
“I think not, Shimon. From the glances I have had of them, they are exceedingly unbeautiful.”
“By your reckoning as once expressed, then, they are nicely un-dangerous.”
“You know something? Old Mordecai never said so, but that may be a count
against
unbeautiful people, not in their favor. I think I will always prefer the beautiful, and take my chances. Now I thank you for your good offices, Tzaddik Shimon, and I bid you farewell.”
“Sakanà aleichem, nosèyah.”
“That sounded different from the usual peace-go-with-you.”
“I thought you would appreciate it.” He repeated the Ivrit words, then translated them into Farsi: “Danger go with you, journeyer.”
Although there was still plenty of snow about Buzai Gumbad, the whole of Lake Chaqmaqtin had gradually exchanged its cover of blue-white ice for a multicolored cover of waterfowl—numberless flocks of ducks and geese and swans that had flown in from the south, and continued to come. The noise of their contented honks and quacks was a continuous clamor, and they would make a rustling rumble like a windstorm in a forest whenever a thousand of them suddenly vaulted from the water all at once for a joyous flight around the lake. They provided a welcome addition to our diet, and their arrival had been the signal for the karwan trains to begin packing their gear, harnessing and herding their animals, forming up their wagons in line, and one after another plodding off for the horizon.
The first trains to leave had been those headed westward, to Balkh or farther, because the long decline of the Wakhan Corridor was the easiest route down from the Roof of the World, and the earliest to become negotiable in the spring. The journeyers bound for the north or east or south prudently waited a while longer, because to go in any of those directions meant first climbing the mountains surrounding this place on those three sides, and descending through their high passes only to climb the next mountains beyond, and the ones beyond them. To the north, east and south of here, we were informed, the high passes never completely shed their snow and ice even in midsummer.
So we Polos, having to go north and having no experience of travel in such terrain and conditions, had waited for the prudent others. We might really have hesitated longer than we needed to, but one day there had come to us a delegation of the little dark Tamil Chola men at whom I had once laughed and to whom I had later apologized. They told us, speaking the Trade Farsi very badly, that they had decided not to carry their cargo of sea salt to Balkh, for they had heard reliable report that it would fetch a much better price in a place called Murghab, which was a trading town in Tazhikistan, on the east—west route between Kithai and Samarkand.
“Samarkand is far to the northwest of here,” Uncle Mafio remarked.
“But Murghab is directly to the north,” said one of the Cholas, a spindly little man named Talvar. “It is on your way, 0 twice-born, and you will have crossed the worst of the mountains when you get there, and the mountain journey from here to Murghab will be easier for you if you travel in karwan with us, and we wish only to say that you would be welcome to join us, for we have been much impressed by the good manners of this twice-born Saudara Marco, and we believe you will be congenial companions for the trail.”
My father and uncle, and even Nostril, looked slightly bemazed at being called twice-born, and at my being praised by strangers for my good manners. But we all concurred in accepting the Cholas’ invitation, expressing gratitude and thanks, and it was in their train that we rode our horses out of Buzai Gumbad and up into the forbidding mountains to the northward.
This was a small train compared to some we had seen in the encampment, trains comprising scores of people and hundreds of animals. The Cholas numbered only a dozen, all men, no women or children, with only half a dozen small and scrawny saddle horses, so they took turns riding and walking. For vehicles they had only three rickety, two-wheeled carts, each drawn by a small harness horse, in which carts they hauled their bedding, provender, animal feed, smithy and other traveling necessities. They had brought their sea salt as far as Buzai Gumbad on twenty or thirty pack asses, but had there effected a trade for a dozen yaks, which could carry the same load but were better suited to the more northerly terrain.
The yaks were good trailbreakers. They were uncaring of snow and cold and discomfort, and they were sure of foot, even when heavy laden. So, as they trudged at the head of our train, they not only picked the best trail, but also plowed it clean of snow and tramped it firm for us who followed. In the evenings, when we made camp and staked the animals roundabout, the yaks showed the horses how to paw down through the snow to find the dingy and shriveled but edible burtsa shrubs left from the last growing season.
I imagine the Cholas had invited us to accompany them only because we were big men—at least in comparison to them—and they must have supposed that we would be good fighters if the train should encounter bandits on the way to Murghab. We did not meet any, so our muscularity was not required for that contingency, but it did come in useful on the frequent occasions when a cart overturned on the rugged trail, or a horse fell into a crevice, or a yak scraped off one of its pack sacks when squeezing past a boulder. We also helped in preparing the meals at evening, but that we did more out of self-interest than affability.
The Cholas’ way of preparing every meat dish was to drench it with a sauce of gray color and mucoid consistency, compounded of numerous different and pungent spices, a sauce called by them kàri. The effect was that, whatever one ate, one could taste only kàri. This was admittedly a blessing when the dish was a tasteless knob of dried or salted meat, or was high on its way toward green putrefaction. But we non-Cholas soon got tired of tasting only kàri and never knowing whether the substance underneath was mutton or fowl or, as it could have been, hay. We first asked permission to improve the sauce, and added to it some of our zafràn, a condiment hitherto unknown to the Cholas. They were much pleased by the new flavor and the new golden color it added to the kàri, and my father gave them a few culms of the zafràn to take back to India with them. When even the improved sauce began to weary us, I and Nostril and my father volunteered to alternate with the Cholas as cooks of the camp-time meals, and Uncle Mafio got from our packs his bow and arrows and began to supply us with fresh-killed game. It was usually small things like snow hares and red-legged partridges, but once in a while something larger, like a goral or an urial, and we cooked plain and simple meals of boiled or broiled meat, served blessedly sauce-less.
The Cholas’ addiction to kàri excepted, those men were good traveling companions. In fact, they were so retiring, and so shy of speaking until they were spoken to, and so reticent of seeming obtrusive, that we others could have journeyed all the way to Murghab without much awareness of their presence. Their timidity was understandable. Although the Cholas spoke Tamil, not Hindi, they were of the Hindu religion and they came from India, so they had to endure the contempt and derision with which all other nations rightly regard the Hindus. Our slave Nostril was the only non-Hindu person I knew who had bothered to learn the lowly Hindi language, and not even he had ever learned the Tamil. So none of us could converse with these Cholas in their own tongue, and they were very imperfect in the Trade Farsi. However, when we made it clear to them that we were not going to shun and scorn them overtly, or laugh at their halting speech, they became almost fawningly friendly to us and exerted themselves to tell us things of interest about this part of the world and things of usefulness on our way through it.