“Oh, Doris, are you starting that again?”
“I do not know why you should refuse. I am accustomed now to keeping myself clean, as you told me a lady ought to do. I keep myself clean all over. Look.”
Before I could protest, she stripped off her one garment in one lithe movement. She was certainly clean, even to being totally hairless of body. The Lady Ilaria had not been quite so smooth and glossy all over. Of course, Doris was also lacking in feminine curves and rotundities. Her breasts were only just beginning to be distinct from her chest, and their nipples were only a faintly darker pink than her skin, and her flanks and buttocks were but lightly padded with womanly flesh.
“You are still a zuzzurullona,” I said, trying to sound bored and uninterested. “You have a long way to go to become a woman.”
That was true, but her very youth and smallness and immaturity had their own sort of appeal. Though all boys are lecherous, they usually lust for real women. Any girl of their own age, they tend to regard as only another playmate, a tomboy among the boys, a zuzzurullona. However, I was somewhat more advanced in that respect than most boys; I had already had the experience of a real woman. It had given me a taste for musical duets—and I had for some time been without that music—and here was a pretty novice pleading to be introduced to it.
“It would be dishonorable of me,” I said, “even to pretend a wedding night.” I was arguing with myself more than with her. “I have told you that I am going far away to Rome in a few days.”
“So is your father. But it has not prevented his getting really married.”
“True, and we quarreled about that. I did not think it right. But his new wife seems perfectly content.”
“And so would I be. For now, let us pretend, Marco, and afterward I will wait, and you will come back. You said so—when there is another change of Doge.”
“You look ridiculous, little Doris. Sitting here naked and talking of Doges and such.” But she did not look ridiculous; she looked like one of the pert nymphs of old legend. I truly tried to argue. “Your brother always talks of what a good girl his sister—”
“Boldo will not be back until tonight, and he will know nothing of what happens between now and then.”
“He would be furious,” I went on, as if she had not interrupted. “We should have to fight again, the way we fought after he threw that fish so long ago.”
Doris pouted. “You do not appreciate my generosity. It is a pleasure I offer you at the cost of pain to myself.”
“Pain? How so?”
“The first time is always painful for a virgin. And unsatisfying. Every girl knows that. Every woman tells us so.”
I said reflectively, “I do not know why it should be painful. Not if it is done the way my—” I decided it would be maladroit of me to mention my Lady Ilaria at this moment. “I mean, the way I have learned to do it.”
“If that is true,” said Doris, “you could earn the adoration of many virgins in your lifetime. Do show me this way you have learned.”
“One begins by doing—certain preliminary things. Like this.” I touched one of her diminutive nipples.
“The zizza? That only tickles.”
“I believe the tickling changes to another sensation very soon.”
Very soon she said, “Yes. You are right.”
“The zizza likes it, too. See, it lifts to ask for more.”
“Yes. Yes, it does.” She slowly lay back, supine on the deck, and I followed her down.
I said, “A zizza likes even more to be kissed.”
“Yes.” Like a lazing cat, she stretched her whole little body, voluptuously.
“Then there is this,” I said.
“That tickles, too.”
“It also gets better than tickling.”
“Yes. Truly it does. I feel …”
“Not pained, surely.”
She shook her head, her eyes now closed.
“These things do not even require the presence of a man. It is called the hymn of the convent, because girls can do this for themselves.” I was being scrupulously fair, giving her the opportunity to send me away.
But she said only, and breathlessly, “I had no idea … I do not even know what I look like down there.”
“You could easily see your mona with a looking glass.”
She said faintly, “I do not know anyone who owns a looking glass.”
“Then look at—no, she is all hairy down there. Yours is still bare and visible and soft. And pretty. It looks like …” I reached for a poetic comparison. “You know that kind of pasta shaped like a folded little shell? The kind called ladylips?”
“You make it feel like lips being kissed,” she said, as if talking in her sleep. Her eyes were closed again and her small body was moving in a slow squirm.
“Kissed, yes,” I said.
From the slow squirm, her body seemed to clench briefly, then to relax, and she made a whimpering noise of delight. As I continued to play musically upon her, she made that slight convulsion again and again, each time lasting longer, as if she was learning through practice to prolong the enjoyment. Not ceasing my attentions to her, but using only my mouth, I had my hands free to strip off my own clothes. When I was naked against her, she appeared to enjoy her gentle spasms all the more, and her hands fluttered eagerly over my body. So I went on for quite a while, making the music of the convent, as Ilaria had taught me. When finally Doris was shiny with perspiration, I stopped and let her rest.
Her breathing slowed from its rapid pace, and she opened her eyes, looking dazed. Then she frowned, because she felt me hard against her, and she shamelessly moved a hand to take hold of me, and she said with surprise, “You did all that … or you made me do all that … and you never …”
“No, not yet.”
“I did not know.” She laughed in great good humor. “I could not have known. I was far away. In the clouds somewhere.” Still holding me in one hand, she felt herself with the other. “All that … and I am still a virgin. It is miraculous. Do you suppose, Marco, that is how Our Blessed Virgin Lady—?”
“We are already sinning, Doris,” I said quickly. “Let us not add blasphemy.”
“No. Let us sin some more.”
And we did, and I soon had Doris cooing and quivering again—in the clouds somewhere, as she had said—enjoying the hymn of the nuns. And finally I did what no nun can do, and that happened not roughly or forcibly, but easily and naturally. Doris, sleek with perspiration, moved without friction in my arms, and that part of her was even more moist. So she felt no violation, but only a more intense sensation among the many new ones she had been experiencing. She opened her eyes when that happened, and her eyes were brimming with pleasure, and the whimper she gave was merely in a different musical register from the previous ones.
It was a new sensation for me, too. Inside Doris, I was held as tightly as in a tender fist, far more tightly than I had been in either of the other two females with whom I had lain. Even in that moment of high excitement, I realized that I was disproving my onetime ignorant assertion that all women are alike in their private parts.
For the next while, both Doris and I made many different noises. And the final sound, when we stopped moving to rest, was her sigh of commingled wonder and satisfaction: “Oh, my!”
“I think it was not painful,” I said, and smiled at her.
She shook her head vehemently, and returned the smile. “I have dreamt of it many times. But I never dreamed it would be so … And I never heard any woman recall her first time as so … Thank you, Marco.”
“I thank you, Doris,” I said politely. “And now that you know how—”
“Hush. I do not wish to do anything like that with anyone but you.”
“I will soon be gone.”
“I know. But I know you will be back. And I will not do that again until you come back from Rome.”
However, I did not get to Rome. I have never been there yet. Doris and I went on dispo
rting ourselves until nightfall, and we were dressed again and behaving most properly when Ubaldo and Daniele and Malgarita and the others returned from their day’s excursion. When we retired into the barge to sleep, I slept alone, on the same pallet of rags I had used once before. And we were all awakened in the morning by the bawling of a banditore, making unusually early rounds because he had unusual news to cry. Pope Clement IV had died in Viterbo. The Doge of Venice was proclaiming a period of mourning and of prayer for the Holy Father’s soul.
“Damnation!” bellowed my uncle, slapping the table and making the books on it jump. “Did we bring bad luck home with us, Nico?”
“First a Doge dies, and now the Pope,” my father said sadly. “Ah, well, all psalms end in glory.”
“And the word from Viterbo,” said the clerk Isidoro, in whose counting room we were gathered, “is that there may be a long deadlock in the Conclave. It seems there are many feet twitching with eagerness to step into the Fisherman’s shoes.”
“We cannot wait for the election, soon or late,” my uncle muttered, and he glowered at me. “We must get this galeotto out of Venice, or we may all go to prison.”
“We need not wait,” my father said, unperturbed. “Doro has most capably purchased and collected all the travel gear we will need. We only lack the hundred priests, and Kubilai will not care if they are not chosen by a Pope. Any high prelate can provide them.”
“To what prelate do we apply?” demanded Mafìo. “If we asked the Patriarch of Venice, he would tell us—and with reason—that to lend us one hundred priests would empty every church in the city.”
“And we would have to take them the extra distance,” my father mused. “Better we seek them closer to our destination.”
“Forgive my ignorance,” said my new marègna, Fiordelisa. “But why on earth are you recruiting priests—and so many priests—for a savage Mongol warlord? Surely he cannot be a Christian.”
My father said, “He is of no discernible religion, Lisa.”
“I would have thought not.”
“But he has that virtue peculiar to the ungodly: he is tolerant of what other people choose to believe. Indeed, he wishes his subjects to have an ample array of beliefs from which to choose. There are in his lands many preachers of many pagan religions, but of the Christian faith there are only the deluded and debased Nestorian priests. Kubilai desires that we provide adequate representation for the true Christian Church of Rome. Naturally, Mafìo and I are eager to comply—and not alone for the propagation of the Holy Faith. If we can accomplish this mission, we can ask the Khan’s permission to engage in missions more profitable.”
“Nico means to say,” my uncle said, “that we hope to arrange to trade between Venice and the Eastern lands—to start again the flow of commerce along the Silk Road.”
Lisa said wonderingly, “There is a road laid of silk?”
“Would that it were!” said my uncle, rolling his eyes. “It is more tortuous and terrible and punishing than any pathway to Heaven. Even to call it a road is an extravagance.”
Isidoro begged leave to explain to the lady: “The route from the Levantine shores across the interior of Asia has been called the Silk Road since ancient times, because the silk of Cathay was the most costly merchandise carried along it. In those days, silk was worth its weight in gold. And perhaps the road itself, being so precious, was better maintained and easier to travel. But in more recent times it fell into disuse—partly because the secret of silkmaking was stolen from Cathay, and today silk is cultivated even in Sicily. But also those Eastern lands became impossible to traverse, what with the depredations of Huns, Tartars, Mongols, marauding back and forth across Asia. So our Western traders abandoned the overland route in favor of the sea routes known to the Arab seafarers.”
“If you can get there by sea,” Lisa said to my father, “why suffer all the rigors and dangers of going by land?”
He said, “Those sea routes are forbidden to our ships. The once pacific Arabs, long content to live meekly in the peace of their Prophet, rose up to become the warrior Saracens, who now seek to impose that religion of Islam on the entire world. And they are as jealous of their sea lanes as they are of their current possession of the Holy Land.”
Mafìo said, “The Saracens are willing to trade with us Venetians, and with any other Christians from whom they can make a profit. But we would deprive them of that profit if we sent fleets of our own ships to trade in the East. So the Saracen corsairs are on constant patrol in the seas between, to make sure we do not.”
Lisa looked primly shocked, and said, “They are our enemies, but we trade with them?”
Isidoro shrugged. “Business is business.”
“Even the Popes,” said Uncle Mafìo, “have never been unwilling to deal with the heathen, when it has been profitable. And a Pope or any other pragmatist ought to be eager to institute trade with the even farther East. There are fortunes to be made. We know; we have seen the richness of those lands. Our former journey was mere exploration, but this time we will take along something to trade. The Silk Road is awful, but it is not impossible. We have now traversed those lands twice, going and coming. We can do it again.”
“Whoever is the new Pope,” said my father, “he should give his blessing to this venture. Rome was much affrighted when it looked as if the Mongols would overrun Europe. But the several Mongol Khans seem to have extended their Khanates as far westward as they intend to encroach. That means the Saracens are the chief threat to Christianity. So Rome ought to welcome this chance for an alliance with the Mongols against Islam. Our mission on behalf of the Khan of All Khans could be of supreme importance—to the aims of Mother Church as well as the prosperity of Venice.”
“And the house of Polo,” said Fiordelisa, who was now of our house.
“That above all,” said Mafìo. “So let us stop beating our beaks, Nico, and get on with it. Shall we go again by way of Constantinople and collect our priests there?”
My father thought it over and said, “No. The priests there are too comfortable—all gone soft as eunuchs. The gloved cat catches no mice. However, in the ranks of the Crusaders are many chaplain priests, and they will be hard men accustomed to hard living. Let us go to the Holy Land, to San Zuàne de Acre, where the Crusaders are presently encamped. Doro, is there a ship sailing eastward that can put us in Acre?”
The clerk turned to consult his registers, and I left the warehouse to go and tell Doris of my new destination and to say, to her and to Venice, goodbye.
It was to be a quarter of a century before I saw either of them again. Much would have changed and aged in that time, not least myself. But Venice would still be Venice, and—strangely—so would Doris somehow still be the Doris I had left. What she had said: that she would not love again until I came back-those words could have been a magic charm that preserved her unchanged by the years. For she would still, that long time later, be so young and so pretty and so vibrantly still Doris that I would recognize her on sight and fall instantly enamored of her. Or so it would seem to me.
But that story I will tell in its place.
THE LEVANT
1
AT the hour of vespro on a day of blue and gold, we departed from the basin of Malamoco on the Lido, the only paying passengers in a great freight galeazza, the Doge Anafesto. She was carrying arms and supplies to the Crusaders; after unloading those things and us in Acre, she would go on to Alexandria for a cargo of grain to bring back to Venice. When the ship was outside the basin, on the open Adriatic, the rowers shipped their oars while the seamen stepped the two masts and unfurled their graceful lateen sails. The spreads of canvas fluttered and snapped and then bellied full in the afternoon breeze, as white and billowy as the clouds above.
“A sublime day!” I exclaimed. “A superb ship!”
My father, never inclined to rhapsodize, replied with one of his ever ready adages: “Praise not the day until night has brought its close; praise not the inn until the
next day’s awakening.”
But even on the next day, and on succeeding days, he could not deny that the ship was as decent in its accommodations as any inn on the land. In earlier years, a vessel that touched at the Holy Land would have been crowded with Christian pilgrims from every country of Europe, sleeping in rows and layers on the deck and in the hold, like sardines in a butt. However, by that time of which I am telling, the port of San Zuàne de Acre was the last and only spot in the Holy Land not yet overwhelmed by the Saracens, so all Christians except Crusaders were staying at home.
We three Polos had a cabin all to ourselves, right under the captain’s quarters in the sterncastle. The ship’s galley was provided with a livestock pen, so we and the seamen had meals of fresh meat and fowl, not salted. There was pasta of all varieties, and olive oil and onions, and good Corsican wine kept cool in the damp sand the ship carried for ballast at the bottom of the hold. All we missed was fresh-baked bread; in its place we were served hard agiàda biscuits, which cannot be bitten or chewed but have to be sucked, and that was the only fare of which we might have complained. There was a medegòto on board, to treat any ailments or injuries, and a chaplain, to hear confessions and hold masses. On the first Sunday, he preached on a text from Ecclesiasticus: “The wise man shall pass into strange countries, and good and evil shall he try in all things.”
“Tell me, please, about the strange countries yonder,” I said to my father after that mass, for he and I had really not had much time in Venice to talk just between ourselves. His reply told me more about him, however, than about any lands beyond the horizon.
“Ah, they brim with opportunities for an ambitious merchant!” he said exultantly, rubbing his hands. “Silks, jewels, spices—even the dullest tradesman dreams of those obvious things—but there are many more possibilities for a clever man. Yes, Marco. Even in coming with us only as far as the Levant, you can, if you keep your eyes open and your wits about you, perhaps begin the making of a fortune of your very own. Yes, indeed, all the lands yonder are lands of opportunity.”