I was dragged to where the camp fire was being rekindled, but not by any of us. The intruders were men to make the earlier visiting Mongols look like elegant and polished court gentlemen by comparison. There were seven of these, and they were filthy and ragged and ugly and somehow, though they never smiled, they kept their snaggle teeth always bared. They each had a horse, a small one like a Mongol horse, but bony and ribby and pustular with sores. One other thing I noticed about those horses, even in my dazed condition: they had no ears.
One of the marauders was making up the fire, the others were dragging my companions to it, and all of them were babbling in a high voice another language new to me. Nostril alone seemed to understand it, and he, though also having been knocked about and yanked from his bed and consumed with terror, took the pains to translate and shout to us all:
“These are the Karauna! They are mortally hungry! They say they will not kill us if we feed them! Please, my masters, in the name of Allah, get busy and show them food!”
The Karauna dumped us all beside the fire and then began frantically scooping up water from the spring with their hands and dashing it down their throats. My father and uncle obediently hurried to get out the food stores. I still lay on the ground, shaking my head, striving to get the pain and darkness and buzzing out of it. Nostril, trying to look properly and obsequiously busy, and doubtless half scared to death, nevertheless kept shouting:
“They say they will not rob or kill the four of us! Of course they are lying, and they will, but not until after the four of us have fed them. So, please Allah, let us keep on feeding them as long as there is food to feed! All four of us!”
Mainly concerned with the havoc inside my head, I dimly supposed that he was urging me, too, to show some life and activity. So I struggled upright and bestirred myself to pour some dried apricots into a pot of water to soften. I heard Uncle Mafio also shouting:
“We must comply, the four of us! But then, while they are gorging themselves, the four of us may see a chance to retrieve our swords and to fight.”
I finally caught the message he and Nostril were trying to impart. Aziz was not among us. When the Karauna swooped down, they had seen four tents, had dragged four men out of them, and now had four captives dutifully scurrying at their command. It was because I had taken down Aziz’s tent. When they plucked me from mine, Aziz might have come along, attached, but he had not. And he must have realized what was happening, so he would stay hidden, unless … . The boy was brave. He might try some desperate expedient … .
One of the Karauna roared at us. His thirst quenched, he seemed delighted to see us slaving for him. Like a victorious conqueror, he thumped his chest with his fists, and bellowed quite a long narrative, which Nostril translated in a quaver:
“They have been so hotly pursued that they were near dead of thirst and starvation. They several times opened the veins of their horses to drink their blood for sustenance. But the horses got so weak that they desisted from that, but at last cut off and ate the horses’ ears. Ayee, mashallah, che arz konam? …” and he tailed off into another spate of praying.
The confusion also diminished, as the seven Karauna ceased to mill about the spring, and let their mistreated horses get to it, and came to where we had laid all our food around the fire. With bared teeth and guttural growls, they indicated that we should all stand aside, well out of range to interfere. The four of us backed away, and the Karauna fell slavering upon the provender, and in the next moment there was confusion confounded. Three more horses came plunging suddenly out of the darkness, bearing three howling riders swinging swords.
The Mongol patrol had returned! I might better say, the Mongols had all the while been lurking somewhere nearby, and not even I, the camp guard, had suspected it. They had known that we would be an irresistible bait to the Karauna, and simply had waited for the bandits to walk into the trap.
But the Karauna, although taken unawares and unmounted and with their attention fixed upon the food before them, neither surrendered on the instant nor fell before the flashing swords. Two or three of the dirty brown men magically turned bright red before our eyes, as blood spurted from the cuts given them by the Mongols. But they, like the not immediately wounded others, whipped out swords of their own.
The Mongols, having leapt in on horseback, could make only that one flailing slash before their mounts carried them a little way past the fray. Not turning their horses, they slid from their saddles to continue the fight on foot. But the Karauna, in their avidness to feed, had not tethered or hobbled or unsaddled their own mounts. They must have been mightily tempted to stand and fight, with the food all laid out for them, and they being seven against three. Probably only because they were weak with hunger—and knowing that three well-fed Mongols were their fighting equal—they bounded astride their pitiful horses and, beating their blades down on the swords of the Mongols now afoot, put spurs to their horses and surged out of the firelight in the direction from which they had dragged me.
The Mongols considerately hesitated long enough to glance around at us, and ascertain that we were not visibly injured, before they caught their own horses, vaulted to their saddles, and were off in hot pursuit. Everything had happened in such a furious tumult—from the moment I had been clouted to this sudden quiet fallen on the oasis—that it might have been a simùm desert storm that had swept down and embroiled us and swept on past.
“Gèsu … ,” my father breathed.
“Al-hamdo-lillah … ,” prayed Nostril.
“Where is the boy Aziz?” Uncle Mafio asked me.
“He is safe,” I said loudly, to be heard above the ringing still going on in my head. “He is in my tent.” And I gestured toward where the dust of the horses’ departure was hanging in the air.
As soon as he could get some clothes on, my uncle went running off in that direction. My father saw me rubbing my head, and came and felt of it. He remarked that I had a palpable knot there, and told Nostril to put a cup of water to heat.
Then my uncle came running back, out of the darkness, shouting, “Aziz is not there! His clothes are, but he is not!”
Leaving Nostril to bathe my head and bind a poultice of salve about it, my father and uncle went to beat the bushes for the boy. They did not find him. Nor did any of us, when Nostril and I joined them, and we did a methodical back-and-forth pacing of the entire oasis. Consulting together, we tried to reconstruct what must have happened.
“He would have left the tent. Even undressed and in this cold.”
“Yes, he would have known they would loot it soon or later.”
“So he sought a safer place to hide.”
“More likely he was creeping close, to see if he could aid us.”
“Anyway, he was in the open when the Karauna suddenly fled.”
“And they saw him and snatched him up and took him with them.”
“At the first opportunity, they will kill him.” It was Uncle Mafio who said that, and he said it in the voice of one bereaved. “They will kill him in some bestial manner, for they must be furious, thinking we arranged that ambuscade.”
“They may have no opportunity. The Mongols are close behind.”
“The Karauna will not kill the boy, but hold him hostage. A shield to ward off the Mongols.”
“And if the Mongols hold off, which they may not,” said my uncle, “think what the Karauna will be doing to that little boy.”
“Let us not weep until someone is hurt,” said my father. “But whatever the outcome, we must be there. Nostril, you stay. Mafio, Marco, mount up!”
We laid the sticks to our camels. Since we had never pressed them before, the beasts were so startled that they did not think to complain or balk, but went at a stretch-out gallop, and maintained it. The movement made my head seem to pound upon the neck-top of my spine with an excruciating beat, but I said nothing.
On sand, camels run faster than horses can, so we caught up to the Mongols well before dawn. We would eventually
have met them in any case, as they were leisurely returning toward the oasis. The dry fog having settled to the ground by then, we saw them at some distance in the starlight. Two of them were walking and leading the horses, and supporting the third in his saddle, where he sagged and wobbled, being evidently badly hurt. The two called something to us as we approached, and waved their hands to indicate where they had come from.
“A miracle! The boy lives!” said my father, and lashed his camel harder.
We did not pause to speak to the Mongols, but kept on going, until we saw far off a scattering of dark, motionless shapes on the sand. They were the seven Karauna and their horses, all dead and much hacked and arrow-punctured, and some of the men lay separate from their severed sword hands. But we paid them no mind. Aziz was sitting on the sand, in a large puddle of blood from one of the fallen horses, his back propped against its saddle. He had covered his bare body with a blanket he must have pulled from the saddle pannier, and it was drenched with gore. We jumped off our camels before they had entirely knelt, and ran to him. Uncle Mafio, with tears pouring down his face, fondly rumpled the child’s hair, and my father patted him on the shoulder, and we all exclaimed in wonder and relief:
“You are all right!”
“Praise the good San Zudo of the Impossible!”
“What happened, dear Aziz?”
He said, his little bird voice even quieter than usual, “They passed me from one to another as we rode, so each could take a turn, and so they did not have to slow their pace.”
“And you are unhurt?” my uncle asked.
“I am cold,” Aziz said listlessly. Indeed, he was shivering violently under the threadbare old blanket.
Uncle Mafio persisted anxiously, “They did not—abuse you? Here?” He laid a hand on the blanket between the boy’s thighs.
“No, they did nothing like that. There was no time. And I think they were too hungry. And then the Mongols caught us up.” He puckered his pale face as if to cry. “I am so cold …”
“Yes, yes, lad,” said my father. “We will set you soon to rights. Marco, you stay by him and comfort him. Mafio, help me look about for dung to make a fire.”
I took off my aba and spread it over the boy for an extra cover, uncaring about the blood that soaked into it. But he did not hug the covers about him. He only sat where he was, against the sideways saddle, his little legs stuck out in front of him and his hands lying limp alongside. Hoping to cheer and enliven him, I said:
“All this time, Aziz, I have been wondering about the curious animal you challenged me to guess.”
A faint smile came briefly to his lips. “I did riddle you to puzzlement, Marco, did I not?”
“Yes, you did. How does it go again?”
“A desert creature … that unites in itself … the natures of seven different beasts.” His voice was fading again to listlessness. “Can you still not divine it?”
“No,” I said, frowning as before, and pretending to delve deep in my mind. “No, I confess I cannot.”
“It has the head of a horse …” he said slowly, as if he were having trouble remembering, or having trouble speaking. “And the neck of a bull … the wings of a rukh … belly of a scorpion … feet of a camel … horns of a qazèl … and the … and the hindquarters … of a serpent …”
I was worried by his uncharacteristic lack of vivacity, but I could discern no cause for it. As his voice dwindled, his eyelids drooped. I squeezed his shoulder encouragingly, and said:
“That must be a most marvelous beast. But what is it? Aziz, unriddle the riddle. What is it?”
He opened his beautiful eyes and gazed at me, and he smiled and he said, “It is only a common grasshopper.” Then he fell abruptly forward, his face hitting the sand between his knees, as if he had been loosely hinged at the waist. There was a sudden, noticeable increase in the prevailing stench of blood and body odors and horse manure and human excrement. Aghast, I leaped up and called for my father and uncle. They came running, and stared down at the boy, unbelieving.
“No living human being ever bent over flat like that!” my uncle exclaimed in horror.
My father knelt and took one of the boy’s wrists and held it for a moment, then looked up at us and somberly shook his head.
“The child has died! But of what? Did he not say he was unhurt? That they only handed him back and forth as they rode?”
I helplessly raised my hands. “We spoke for a little. Then he fell over like that. Like a sawdust doll from which all the sawdust is gone.”
My uncle turned away, sobbing and coughing. My father gently took the boy’s shoulders and lifted him, and laid the lolling head back against the saddle, and with one hand held him sitting up while with the other he pulled down the gory covers. Then my father made a retching noise and, repeating what the boy had told us, he muttered, “The Karauna were hungry,” and he backed away in sick revulsion, letting the body topple forward flat again, but not before I also saw. What had happened to Aziz—I could liken it to nothing except an ancient Greek tale I had once been told in school, about a stalwart boy of Sparta and a voracious fox cub he hid beneath his tunic.
6
WE left the dead Karauna where they lay, carrion for the beaks of any scavenger vultures that might find them. But we took with us the already bitten and gouged and partially devoured little corpse of Aziz, as we headed back for the oasis. We would not leave him on the surface of the sand, or even bury him under it, for nothing can be so deeply buried in the sand but the wind will continually cover and uncover it again, as indifferently as it does the karwan leavings of camel dung.
On our way forth from the oasis, we had passed the white fringe of a minor salt flat, so we stopped there on our return. We carried Aziz out upon the trembling land, wrapped in my aba for a shroud, and we found a place where we could break through the glittering crust, and we laid Aziz on the quaggy quicksand under it. We said our farewells and some prayers during the time it took the small bundle to sink from our sight.
“The salt slab will soon re-form over him,” mused my father. “He will rest under it undisturbed, even by corruption, for the salts will permeate his body and preserve him.”
My uncle, scratching absentmindedly at his elbow, said with resignation, “It may even be that this land, like others I have seen, will in time heave and break and rearrange its topography. Some future journeyer may find him, centuries hence, and gaze upon his sweet face, and wonder how it came to pass that an angel fell from Heaven to be interred here.”
That was as fine a valedictory as could be pronounced over any departed one, so we left Aziz then and remounted and rode on. When we arrived again at the oasis, Nostril came running, all worry and concern, and then all lamentation when he saw there were still only the three of us. We told him, in as few words as possible, how we had been deprived of the smallest member of our party. Looking properly grieved and woebegone, he muttered some Muslim prayers, and then he spoke to us a typically fatalistic Muslim condolence:
“May your own spans be lengthened, good masters, by the days which the boy has lost. Inshallah.”
The day was at its noon by then, and anyway we were weary and my head was near to splitting with pain and we had no heart for hastening to resume our journey, so we prepared to spend another night in the oasis, even though it was no longer any happy place for us. The three Mongols had preceded us there, and Nostril went on with what he had been doing when we came: helping those men clean and anoint and bind up their wounds.
Those wounds were many, but none very serious. The man we had thought worst hurt had only had his brains temporarily scrambled when he was kicked in the head by a horse during the final affray with the Karauna; he had considerably recovered. Even so, all three of the men bore numerous sword cuts and had lost much blood and must have been much weakened, and we would have expected them to remain in the oasis for some days while they recuperated. But no, they said, they were Mongols, indestructible, unstoppable, and they w
ould ride on.
My father asked where they would go. They said they had no assigned destination, only a mandate to go and seek and chase and destroy the Karauna of the Dasht-e-Kavir, and they wanted to get on with that job. So my father showed them our passepartout signed by the Khakhan Kubilai. For certain, none of those men could read, but they easily recognized the distinctive seal of the Khan of All Khans. They were agog at our possession of it, as they had earlier been impressed to hear my father and uncle speaking their tongue, and they inquired if we wished to give them any orders in the name of the Khakhan. My father suggested that, since we were carrying rich gifts for their great lord, the men might help ensure the delivery of them by riding as our escort as far as Mashhad, and they readily agreed to do so.
The next day, we were seven when we moved on northeastward. Since the Mongols disdained conversing with a lowly camel-puller, and since Uncle Mafio seemed indisposed to speak to anybody, and since my head still hurt whenever I jarred it by talking, only my father and our three new companions talked as we rode, and I was satisfied to ride close to them and listen, and thereby begin learning yet another new language.
The first thing I learned was that the name Mongol does not connote a race or a nation of people—the name derives from the word mong, meaning brave—and similar though our three escorting Mongols appeared to my unaccustomed eye, they were in fact as disparate as if they had been Venetian, Genoan and Pisan. One was of the Khalkas tribe, one was of the Merkit and one was of the Buriat—which tribes, I gathered, originally hailed from widely separated parts of those lands that the mighty Chinghiz (himself a Khalkas) long ago first united and so began building the Mongol Khanate. Also, one of the men was of the Buddhist faith, another of the Taoist—religions of which I then knew nothing—and the third was, of all things, a Nestorian Christian. But I learned at the same time that, whatever a Mongol’s tribal origin or his religious affiliation or his soldierly occupation, he is never to be referred to as a Khalkas or a Christian or even as a bowman or an armorer or any other such applicable appellation. He calls himself only a Mongol—and proudly, thus: “Mongol!”—and he must be spoken of only as a Mongol, for his being a Mongol supersedes anything else he may be, and that name of Mongol takes precedence over all other names.