Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (20 page)

Not that at all, said the merchants, many of whom had made this journey before. But a place of incredible wealth, nonetheless. And what, pray, did we hope to trade there?

They were polite, but it was a politeness reserved for madmen. I could tell what they thought of us, but Johannes could not. He did not speak Turkic. He knew what he knew only through my translations, and I was not about to translate the “Ah!”s and the “Oh, yes?” and “Indeed?”s that greeted discussions of new science and strange mathematics.

After the first week with the caravan I began to be aware of other things. The caravan itself was by no means a single unit, as it had seemed when we first encountered it. It comprised three groups in addition to us: first, the true merchants, devoted only to the acquisition and sale of trade goods. They were easy to understand, because the nature of a trader is the same in Samarkand or Karakorum as it is in Acre or Persepolis. Unless they were dead, they would haggle endlessly and price everything they saw. If they could have done it, they would have set a value for my master on Johannes’s immortal soul, something he had said was impossible!

Then there was the party from Kabul, including Nataree and her guardian soldiers. She would arrive at Karakorum a virgin, they told me, or they would all die. According to Khosro, my soldier friend in the leather leggings, a girl-gift for the Great Khan had once arrived in Karakorum from the local khan not only seduced, but visibly pregnant! The local khan’s ambassador in Karakorum had ordered that the whole group of guards be flayed alive. The Great Khan, in his compassion, had given instructions that the men be strangled first, before their skins were removed and sent back to Kabul. There was no love, according to my friend, between the Great Khan and the lesser khan of Kabul. The homage offered to Karakorum was a grudging and reluctant one, provided only because of fear of the Great Khan’s long arm of power.

With that threat of slow death hanging over them, it was amazing to me that the guards of Nataree took their duties so lightly. That they would allow me to talk to her freely and even wander outside the camp with her was not perhaps so surprising, since my voice was not yet a man’s voice. But she wandered the whole caravan, with apparently little control or even surveillance of her actions. I understood that better after a few days. The man who could seduce or rape Nataree would be an unusual one. The fire and ice in her eye frightened most people away (though not Ahmes—he still had that look). She spent her time as she chose, almost all of it talking endlessly to Johannes about things that no sensible person was interested in. He was delighted! For the first time, someone cared about science and mathematics and understood his precious
Liber Abaci
as fully as he did.

And beyond that, Nataree learned Persian—and Latin from long sessions with Johannes—so fast it surprised even me. However, not even the guards were worried about Johannes. They saw him as a holy man, a man whose life was consumed with learning, one whose pure soul shone from his clear eyes.

What fools we were, all of us! We could not see Johannes as she saw him.

Well, with Johannes talking and talking to Nataree and not wanting an interpreter at the moment, I had plenty of time on my own hands. The third group in the caravan was that of the drovers, the men who looked after the horses and the camels. Since I had been raised among drovers, it was natural for me to seek them out. Within a few days I was a dung-boy, an honorary member of the group. We trailed last in the caravan, and carefully collected all the dung and dried it. Each morning we did the same thing within the camp. In the desert it was our main fuel, the difference between raw, unpleasant food and delicious cooked food.

A dung-boy is like a fly, present everywhere and totally invisible. No one noticed me with my flat pan and shovel. And as we were emerging from the foothills of the Celestial Mountains I saw something I was not supposed to see.

One of the soldiers sent to guard Nataree was an odd man out. His name was Maseed, and he was a skeletal, long-limbed man with a huge nose and a walleye. But it was his actions, not his appearance, that made him noteworthy. While the others sat around the fires, drinking or dozing, he would be off by himself, wandering the perimeter. He would set a cup on top of a rock, move three or four paces away, and then throw a small round pellet toward it. I say he threw, but actually the pellet was propelled with an almost imperceptible flick of the middle fingertip from the thumb, and flew so fast and so invisibly that I knew of its motion only by the rattle of its arrival in the cup. His accuracy was astonishing. I counted, and he missed only one or two times in a hundred. Even when I looked for it, I could not follow the pellet’s flight.

He did the same thing over and over, day after day; flicked and flicked, while I watched and wondered. (Pointlessly? Perhaps. M. di Piacenza back in Acre always told me that my nosiness would be the death of me.)

What was he doing? I was tempted to ask Nataree about it, to see if it was a game or custom of her country, but I never did. I would not accept the idea of her doing me any favors.

No less odd, late one night I went to watch Maseed . . . and found Ahmes with him. They were away from the others by their own little campfire, heads close together.

“One simple act,” Maseed was saying, “and that one with no risk. A moment’s diversion. After that, wealth will be yours.”

“And the other?” asked Ahmes. “The fair one was promised.”

“The promise will be kept. Her body will be yours, to do as you like with. But you must make the move exactly when I tell you, precisely as I direct. Then there will be no danger at all.”

I had often wondered what Ahmes was doing on this journey. I had suspected the oldest motives in the world: blood and gold. Now I had proof of that, and I was ready to add lust to the list. Ahmes was a mercenary, pure and simple, and he could be bought by anyone who could afford him. But as to
what
he and Maseed were doing . . .

I waited and watched, a lesson I had learned almost before I could walk.

Meanwhile, we steadily drew nearer to the city of Karakorum, the home of the Great Khan. From twenty miles away it was finally visible across the snowy plain, a great rising tower of blue smoke above the horizon. When we camped for the last night, we sent our runners on ahead to make sure that the Great Khan knew we were arriving. An unnecessary gesture, the merchants said, since Kublai Khan’s own intelligence service had made him aware of our approach for at least the past five days; however, notification of arrival was diplomatically necessary.

On that final cold evening, I sat close to the campfire and listened while Johannes and Nataree talked together. Not on the speculation of any sane person, as to the sights and sounds to be found in the court of the Great Khan. By no means. It was as bad as being back in Acre, listening to Johannes and my master.

“You do not understand,” he was saying. “Faith is the most important thing in the whole world, since it leads not only to happiness on earth but to life eternal. And faith is what I lost. I have lost it still.”

“No,” she said. “It is you, Johannes, who understands nothing.” She was speaking Latin, and it jolted me to realize that her knowledge of that language now seemed to match my own. “You say you have lost faith. All that you lost is simpleminded certainty. There are many faiths in this world, dozens of them, hundreds of them. Who is to say that your church’s Trinity is truer than this man’s demons, or that man’s different beliefs? Your prophet, Christ, you say he is the son of God, and he was taken to the top of a high mountain and tempted with all the treasures of the world. Very well. I am the daughter of God, or at least one of God’s daughters. If you would allow me, I could take you to another peak, just as real, and tempt you with a whole other world, just as sacred.”

It sounded as though she was offering her body—and yet just as clearly that was not what she meant at all, for she went on, “You tell me yourself, your geometry and your calculations are eternal, pure logic that will exist forever. The proof of the parabola theorem that you showed me today, what could ever be more beautiful than that? Surely
these
, and not some fixed group of wordy ideas, are your
veritates aeternae
, your eternal verities.”

“You don’t understand me,” said Johannes. He sounded anguished, and yet at the same time enthralled. He loved this sort of pointless talk. “What I mean is this . . .”

And off he went, on another camel ride across a desert of theories and proofs. He was the most handsome and wonderful man I had ever known, and he was never anything but patient and thoughtful. But he was also the world’s most obstinate and persistent man when it came to his ideas, and the hardest man to understand when he talked about them. But perhaps she did understand him, very well. For although they had talked like this many times, endlessly, hour after hour, neither ever seemed to tire of it.

I left, and became a dung-boy again. No one saw me, wandering along with my flat pan and shovel. And near the end of the camp, where few people went because the food and water was far off at the front, I again saw Ahmes and Maseed. They were saying little, but Ahmes was holding a beautiful little shield of polished brass. Maseed had placed a metal cup on a rock, and was standing four paces from it. In the twilight, I saw him lift his left hand to touch his ear, and at that moment Ahmes dropped the shield. It fell clanging to the ground, and a second later Maseed flicked his finger. There was a rattle of a round pellet into the cup.

“Very good,” he said, and he laughed, but there was no humor in his voice. “One more time, and that will be the last time.”

It was something bad. Maseed was a bad man. I knew that, as surely as I knew that Johannes of Magdeburg was a good man. But what were they doing? I sought Johannes, to ask his advice, but he was no longer by the fire, nor was he with Nataree. She was with her guards, settled in for the night.

I wandered around the whole camp, and finally went into the beasts’ circle and lay down for comfort next to the dappled pony. Tomorrow that pony would carry Nataree into Karakorum itself. And then perhaps Johannes would stop talking and begin his search for the knowledge that we came for. It would be nice to know we had succeeded, and could begin to think whenever we chose about the journey home.

* * *

Karakorum certainly had walls, but they were not of gold, nor were its towers of diamond. According to Johannes, it was less of a city than other places he had been, Paris and Rome and Athens. However, it was a wonderland by my standards, and it was undeniably the home of the Great Khan, ruler over an empire that stretched across more than half the world.

We came to it across a long, cleared plain, and from miles away we could see the great palace within the walls. It was huge, a hundred paces long and seventy wide, towering up on its sixty-four wooden columns on their granite bases. Inside the city itself most of the buildings were of brick, including Shamanist shrines, mosques, and temples to Buddha.

“And perhaps one day,” said Johannes, “a Church of Christ.” But he did not sound very confident.

I had finally found out where he went the previous evening. He had wandered off by himself, alone into the night, something he was apt to do when he wanted to work hard on his beloved calculations. No one else in the world had his power of concentration on a single problem. I had known him stay in one place for twenty-four hours, totally lost in thought.

Today he was pale and moody, rubbing the palm of his hand along his forehead and his unshaven chin. I told him what had happened last night with Ahmes and Maseed, and asked him what he thought was going on. He heard me all right, I know he did, but instead of replying he stared at me as though I were a passing cloud. Then he reached out, and touched me gently on the shoulder.

I said he was never anything but loving and patient, and that is true. But when the philosophical fit was on him, he could be unreachable.

We were entering Karakorum, the whole unwieldy procession of us, and soon we learned that our audience with Kublai Khan would not happen for another day. Fortunately, most people in the caravan were not seeking to pay their respects to the Great Khan. The merchants went their way, the drovers another, and a group of about a dozen of us, including Nataree and her guards, were left to hang around near the entrance to the palace, and haggle with the local merchants for an evening meal at inflated prices. I did our haggling. Johannes was not good at that sort of thing, he would believe whatever the storekeepers told him.

After dinner I once more sought him out. As always, he was talking to Nataree, their incomprehensible babble of circles and lines and squares. I interrupted them. I told Johannes again what I had seen with Maseed, and at last I asked Nataree if she, as Maseed’s countrywoman, knew the meaning of his ritual. She listened closely, and so did Johannes, but then they both shook their heads. They did not disbelieve me, but the mystery remained.

Our audience with the Great Khan had been set for early the next day. Soon after dawn Nataree’s soldiers were up and busy polishing their brass. They all wore new tunics and their best headgear.

I wished I could have done the same. I was supposed to be the interpreter for Johannes, and although in the desert a little dirt didn’t show, now I was aware of the whiff of horse and camel dung that came from my clothes. Brushing at the dirt just made it worse.

All the groups who would be presented to the Khan entered the palace at the same time. Naturally, all weapons, and anything that might conceivably be used as a weapon, were left outside with the palace guards. It would hardly be a necessary precaution, since the person of the Great Khan was always surrounded by his trained guards.

First into the palace was a group of rich merchant princes from India. They were seeking trade agreements, and to increase their chances they brought lavish gifts of ivory, jade, and sapphires. Next was the Nataree party, with smarmy Maseed in front and Ahmes, bearing the little ornamental shield on a velvet cushion, just behind. It was clear that it was to be a gift for Kublai Khan. Nataree, beautifully dressed in a long gown of purple and white, walked demurely after them. She looked no more impressed by the court of the Great Khan than she did by anything else.