7
ON two nights in that country, we deliberately skirted the nearest karwansarai and camped outdoors on our own. It was something we would later have to do, when we got into even less populous regions, so my father and uncle thought I should start having the experience in an easy terrain and clement weather. Also, all three of us were by then getting extremely tired of filth and mutton. So, on each of those nights, we made pallets of our blankets, with our saddles for pillows, and laid a fire for cooking, and turned our horses free to graze, hobbling their front legs together so they could not wander far.
I had already learned from my much-traveled father and uncle some of the tricks of traveling. For example, they had taught me always to carry my bedding in one saddle pannier and my clothing in another, and always to keep the two apart. Since a traveler has to use his own blankets at every karwansarai, they inevitably get full of fleas and lice and bedbugs. Those vermin are a torment even when one sleeps the usual deep sleep of exhaustion, but they would be intolerable when one is dressed and awake and about. So, getting naked out of bed each morning, I would pick myself clean of the accumulated bugs, and then, having carefully kept my clothing apart from the bedding, I could put on either used or clean garments without their having been contaminated. When we did not stay at a karwansarai, but made our own camp, I learned other things. I remember, the first night we camped, I started to tilt one of the water bags for a good long drink, but my father stopped me.
“Why?” I said. “We have one of the blessed rivers of Eden with which to refill it.”
“Better get used to thirst when it is not necessary,” he said, “for you will have to when it is. Just wait and I will show you something.”
He built a fire of branches hacked with his belt knife from a convenient zizafun tree, the thorny wood of which burns hot and quickly, and he let it burn until the wood was all charcoal but not yet ashes. Then he scraped most of the charcoal to one side, and laid new branches on what was left, to make up the fire again. He let the removed charcoal cool, then crushed it to powder and heaped that onto a cloth and put the cloth like a sieve over the mouth of one of the pottery bowls we had brought. He handed me another bowl and bade me go and fill it from the river.
“Taste that Eden water,” he said, when I fetched it.
I did and said. “Muddy. Some insects. But not bad water.”
“Watch. I will make it better.” He poured it slowly through the charcoal and cloth into the other bowl.
When it had finished its slow trickling, I tasted it again from that bowl. “Yes. Clear and good. It even tastes cooler.”
“Remember that trick,” he said. “Many times your only source of water will be putrid or vile with salts or even suspect of poison. That trick will render it potable at least, and harmless, if not delicious. However, in the deserts where the water is worst, there is usually no wood to burn. Therefore, try always to carry a supply of charcoal with you. It can be used over and over again before it gets saturated and ineffectual.”
The reason we made our outdoor camp only twice during the journey down the Furat was that, while my father could strain insects and impurities out of the water, he could not remove the birds from the air, and I have mentioned that that country abounds in golden eagles.
On that day of which I speak, my uncle had, by good luck, come upon a large hare in the grass, and it stood immobile and trembling in that moment of surprise, and he whipped out and threw his belt knife, and killed the creature. It was on that account—having our own provender for a non-mutton meal—that we decided to make the first camp. But when Uncle Mafìo skewered the skinned hare on a zizafun stick and hung it over the fire, and it began to sizzle and its aroma rose with the smoke into the air, we got as much of a surprise as the hare had got.
There came a loud, rustling, swooshing noise from out of the night sky above us. Before we could even look up, a blur of brown flashed in an arc down between us, through the firelight and upward into the darkness again. At the same instant, there was a sound like plop! and the fire flew all apart in a spray of sparks and ashes, and the hare was gone, complete with its stick, and we heard a triumphant barking yell, “Kya!”
“Malevolenza!” exclaimed my uncle, picking up a large feather from the remains of the fire. “A damned thieving eagle! Acrimonia!” And that night we had to make our meal on some hard salt pork from our packs.
The same thing, or very near it, happened the second time we stayed outdoors. That camping was occasioned by our having bought, from a passing family of bedawin Arabs, a haunch of fresh-killed camel calf. When we put that on the fire, and the eagles espied it, another of them came in a rush. The moment my uncle heard the first rustle of its pinions in the air, he made a dive to throw himself protectively over the cooking meat. That saved our meal for us, but nearly lost us Uncle Mafìo.
A golden eagle has wings that spread wider than a man’s outstretched arms, and it weighs about as much as a fair-sized dog, so when it comes plummeting down—when it stoops, as the hawkers say—it is a formidable projectile. That one hit the back of my uncle’s head, fortunately only with its wing and not with its talons, but that was a blow heavy enough to knock him sprawling across the fire. My father and I dragged him out, and beat the sparks out of his smoldering aba, and he had to shake his head for a time to get his senses back, and then he cursed magnificently, until he went into a fit of coughing. Meanwhile, I stood over the spitted meat, ostentatiously swinging a heavy branch, and the eagles stayed away, so we did manage to cook and eat the meal. But we decided that, as long as we were in eagle country, we would stifle our revulsions and spend each night in a karwansarai from then on.
“You are wise to do so,” said the next night’s landlord to us, as we ate yet another nasty meal of mutton and rice. We were the only guests that night, so he conversed while he swept the day’s collected dust out the door. His name was Hasan Badr-al-Din, which did not suit him at all, for it means Beauty of Faith’s Moon. He was wizened and gnarled, like an old olive tree. He had a face as leathery and wrinkled as a cobbler’s apron, and a wispy beard like a nimbus of wrinkles that could not find room on his face. He went on, “It is not good to be out of doors and unprotected at night in the lands of the Mulahidat, the Misguided Ones.”
“What are the Misguided Ones?” I asked, sipping a sharbat so bitter that it must have been made of green fruit.
Beauty of Faith’s Moon was now going about the room, sprinkling water to lay the remaining dust. “You perhaps have heard them called hashishiyin. The killers who kill for the Old Man of the Mountain.”
“What mountain?” growled my uncle. “This land is flatter than a halycon sea.”
“He has always been called that—the Sheikh ul-Jibal—though no one knows really where he lives. Whether his castle is really on a mountain or not.”
“He does not live,” said my father. “That old nuisance was slain by the Ilkhan Hulagu when the Mongols came this way fifteen years ago.”
“True,” said the aged Beauty. “Yet not true. That was the Old Man Rokn-ed-Din Kurshah. But there is always another Old Man, you know.”
“I did not know.”
“Oh, yes, indeed. And an Old Man still commands the Mulahidat, though some of the Misguided must be old men themselves by now. He hires them out to the faithful who have need of their services. I hear that the Mamluks of Egypt paid high to have a hashishi slay that English Prince who leads the Christian Crusaders.”
“Then they wasted their money,” said Uncle Mafìo. “The Englishman slew the sassìn.”
Beauty shrugged and said, “Another will try, and another, until it is done. The Old Man will command, and they will obey.”
“Why?” I asked, and swallowed a wad of rice that tasted of taint. “Why should any man risk his own life to kill at the behest of another man?”
“Ah. To understand that, young Sheikh, you must know something of the Holy Quran.” He came and sat down at our cloth, as if pleased to
explain. “In that Book, the Prophet (blessing and peace be upon him) makes a promise to the men of the Faith. He promises to every man that, if he is unswervingly devout, then once in his life he will enjoy one miraculous night, the Night of the Possible, in which he will be granted his every desire.” The old man arranged his wrinkles in a smile, a smile that was half happy and half melancholy. “A night replete with ease and luxury, with marvelous food and drink and banj, with beautiful and compliant haura women and boys, with renewed youth and virility for the zina enjoyment of them. Thus, every man who believes will live his life in fierce devoutness, and hope for that Night of the Possible.”
He stopped, and seemed to lose himself in contemplation. After a moment, Uncle Mafìo said, “It is an appealing dream.”
Beauty said distantly, “Dreams are the painted pictures in the book of sleep.”
Again we waited, then I said, “But I do not see what that has to do with—”
“The Old Man of the Mountain,” he said, as if coming abruptly awake. “The Old Man gives that Night of the Possible. Then he holds out promise of still other such nights.”
My father, my uncle and I exchanged glances of amusement.
“Do not doubt it!” the landlord said testily. “The Old Man, or one of his Mulahidat recruiters, will find a qualified man—a strong and bold man—and will slip a potent bit of banj into his food or drink. When the man swoons to sleep, he is spirited away to the Castle ul-Jibal. He wakes to find himself in the most lovely garden imaginable, surrounded by comely lads and ladies. Those haura feed him rich viands and more of the hashish and even forbidden wines. They sing and dance enchantingly, and reveal their nippled breasts, their smooth bellies, their inviting bottoms. They seduce him to such raptures of lovemaking that at last he swoons again. And again he is spirited away—back to his former place and life, which is humdrum at best, and more probably dismal. Like the life of a karwansarai keeper.”
My father yawned and said, “I begin to comprehend. As the saying goes, he has been given cake and a kick.”
“Yes. He has now partaken of the Night of the Possible, and he yearns to do so again. He wishes and begs and prays for that, and the recruiters come and tantalize him until he promises to do anything. He is set a task—to slay some enemy of the Faith, to steal or rob for the enrichment of the Old Man’s coffers, to waylay infidels intruding on the lands of the Mulahidat. If he successfully performs that task, he is rewarded with another Night of the Possible. And after each subsequent deed of devotion, another night and another.”
“Each of which,” said my skeptical uncle, “is really nothing but a hashish dream. Misguided, indeed.”
“Oh, unbeliever!” Beauty chided him. “Tell me, by your beard, can you distinguish between the memory of a delightful dream and the memory of a delightful occurrence? Each exists only in your memory. Telling of them to another, how could you prove which happened when you were awake and which when you were asleep?”
Uncle Mafìo said affably, “I will let you know tomorrow, for I am sleepy now.” He stood up, with a massive stretch and a gaping yawn.
It was rather earlier in the night than we were accustomed to go to bed, but I and my father also were yawning, so we all followed Beauty of Faith’s Moon as he led us down a long hall and—because we were the only guests—allotted us each a separate room, and quite clean, with clean straw on the floor. “Rooms deliberately well apart from each other,” he said, “so that your snores will not disturb each other, and your dreams will not get intertangled.”
Nevertheless, my own dream was tangled enough. I slept and dreamed that I awoke from my sleep, to find myself, like a recruit of the Misguided Ones, in a dreamlike garden, for it was full of flowers I had never seen when awake. Among the sunlit flower beds danced dancers so dreamily beautiful that one could not say, or care, whether they were girls or boys. In a dreamy languor, I joined the dance and found, as often happens in dreams, that my every step and prance and movement was dreamily slow, as if the air were sesame oil.
That thought was so repugnant—even in my dream I remembered my experience with sesame oil—that the sunlit garden instantly became a bosky palace corridor, down which I was dancing in pursuit of a dancing girl whose face was the face of the Lady Ilaria. But when she pirouetted into a room and I followed through the only door and caught her there, her face got old and warty and sprouted a red-gray beard like a fungus. She said, “Salamelèch” in a man’s deep voice, and I was not in a palace chamber, or even a bedroom of a karwansarai, but in the dark, cramped cell of the Venice Vulcano. Old Mordecai Cartafilo said, “Misguided One, will you never learn the bloodthirstiness of beauty?” and gave me a square white cracker to eat.
Its dryness was choking and its taste was nauseous. I retched so convulsively that I woke myself up—really awoke this time, in the karwansarai room, to find that I was not dreaming the nausea. Evidently our meal’s mutton or something had been tainted, for I was about to be violently sick. I scrambled out of my blankets and ran naked and barefoot down the midnight hall to the little back room with the hole in the ground. I hung my head over it, too wretched to recoil from the stink or to fear that a demon jinni might reach up out of the depths and snatch at me. As quietly as I could, I vomited up a vile green mess and, after wiping the tears from my eyes and getting my breath back, I padded quietly toward my room again. The hall took me past the door of the chamber my uncle had been given, and I heard a muttering behind it.
Giddy anyway, I leaned against the wall there and gave ear to the noise. It was partly my uncle’s snoring and partly a sibilant low speaking of words. I wondered how he could snore and talk at the same time, so I listened more intently. The words were Farsi, so I could not make out all of them. But when the voice, sounding astonished, spoke louder, I clearly heard:
“Garlic? The infidels pretend to be merchants, but they carry only worthless garlic?”
I touched the door of the room, and it was unlatched. It swung easily and silently open. Inside, there was a small light moving, and when I peered I could see that it was a wick lamp in the hand of Beauty of Faith’s Moon, and he was bending over my uncle’s saddle panniers, piled in a corner of the room. The landlord was obviously seeking to steal from us, and he had opened the packs and found the precious culms of zafràn and had mistaken them for garlic.
I was more amused than angry, and I held my tongue, so as to see what he would do next. Still muttering, telling himself that the unbeliever probably had taken his purse and true valuables to bed with him, the old man sidled over beside the bed and, with his free hand, began cautiously groping about beneath Uncle Mafìo’s blankets. He encountered something, for he gave a start, and again spoke aloud in astonishment:
“By the ninety-nine attributes of Allah, but this infidel is hung like a horse!”
Sick though I still felt, I very nearly giggled at that, and my uncle smiled in his sleep as if he enjoyed the fondling.
“Not only an untrimmed long zab,” the thief continued to marvel, “but also—praise Allah in His munificence even to the unworthy—two sacks of balls!”
I might really have giggled then, but in the next moment the situation ceased to be amusing. I saw in the lamplight the glint of metal, as old Beauty drew a knife from his robes and lifted it. I did not know whether he intended to trim my uncle’s zab or to amputate his supernumerary scrotum or to cut his throat, and I did not wait to find out. I stepped forward and swung my fist and hit the thief hard in the back of his neck. I might have expected the blow to incapacitate such a fragile old specimen, but he was not so delicate as he looked. He fell sideways, but rolled like an acrobat and came up from the floor slashing the blade at me. It was more by happenstance than by deftness that I caught his wrist. I twisted it, and wrenched at his hand, and found the knife in my own hand, and used it. At that, he did fall down and stay down, groaning and burbling.
The scuffle had been brief, but not silent, yet my uncle had slept through it, and he stil
l slept, still smiling in his sleep. Appalled by what I had just done, as well as by what had almost been done, I felt very alone in the room and badly needed a supporting ally. Though my hands were trembling, I shook Uncle Mafìo, and had to shake him violently to bring him to consciousness. I realized now that the more than ordinarily nasty evening meal had been heavily laced with banj. We would all three have been dead but for the dream that had wakened me to the danger and made me disgorge the drug.
My uncle finally, unwillingly, began to come awake, smiling and murmuring, “The flowers … the dancers … the fingers and lips playing on my flute …” Then he blinked and exclaimed, “Dio me varda! Marco, that was not you?”
“No, Zio Mafìo,” I said, in my agitation speaking Venetian. “You were in peril. We are still in peril. Please wake up!”
“Adrìo de vu!” he said crossly. “Why have you snatched me from that wondrous garden?”
“I believe it was the garden of the hashishiyin. And I have just stabbed a Misguided One.”
“Our host!” cried my uncle, sitting up and seeing the crumpled form on the floor. “Oh, scagaròn, what have you done? Are you playing bravo again?”
“No, Zio, look. That is his own knife sticking in him. He was about to kill you for your cod of musk.” As I related the circumstances, I began to weep.
Uncle Mafìo bent over the old man and examined him, growling, “Right in the belly. Not dead, but dying.” Then he turned to me and said kindly, “There, there, boy. Stop slobbering. Go and wake your father.”
Beauty of Faith’s Moon was nothing to weep over, alive or dead or dying. But he was the first man I ever slew with my own hand, and the killing of another human being is no trivial milestone in a man’s career. As I went to fetch my father out of the hashish garden, I was thinking how more than ever I was glad that, back in Venice, another hand had thrust the sword into my guiltless earlier prey. For I had just learned one thing about killing a man, or at least about killing him with a blade. It slides into the victim’s belly easily enough, almost eagerly, almost of its own accord. But there it is instantly seized by the violated muscles, held as tightly as another tool of mine had once been clasped in the virgin flesh of the girl Doris. I had pushed the knife into old Beauty with no effort whatever, but I could not withdraw it again when I had done so. And in that instant I had known a sickening realization: that a deed so ugly and so easily done cannot thereafter be undone. It made killing seem rather less gallant and dashing and bravìsimo than I had imagined it to be.