Читать книгу Caravan to Xanadu, A Novel of Marco Polo - Эдисон Маршалл - Страница 5

Returning to the zebec with the medicine in my pocket, I had no lack of stout henchmen. They rowed our four-oared argosy under the very sail of the Infidel and watched with round eyes what seemed the adventure’s end. Eager hands reached down. To the hand I took for the captain’s I entrusted the potion; when I showed him six silver grossi I had received in change, his jubilant cry of “Backsheesh!” told me I could keep them. This was a word known to every lad frequenting the quays, an importation from Egypt and the Levantine coast meaning “commission” or “gift.”

My companions were thrilled enough by the rich gift, but I had them tarry awhile in the hope of some greater happening. My reward was the return of the swarthy captain to the deck and a glorious halloo across the water. At my answering shout, he pointed to the sun. Three times he swept his arm westward to indicate the passage of three days—common sign language among the polyglot people of the port—then beckoned from me to the ship. My comrades looked at me as though I had come in to a fortune.

At dawn of the fourth day a bumboat captain who claimed to know Arabic brought me alongside the zebec. After a little wait, the ship’s longboat bore Mustapha Sheik to Spinalunga Island across the bay, where I witnessed a strange scene of farewell. While he stood tall in a white robe of mourning, flanked on each side by a servant, one after another of his followers bowed down before him, weeping. It was not hard to guess that he was going into exile for the remainder of his days. No doubt he had been banished from Islam, and the zebec had ventured our waters solely to transport him here. If Spinalunga were his chosen instead of enforced abode, I thought it a good choice: the Venetian Jews dwelt here by law, among them many patriarchs whose noble faces resembled his, and who could be his friends.

Truly I should have wondered at his journeying westward instead of eastward from his native deserts. The answer lay, as time revealed, in his curiosity regarding Western Europe and what he called its waking from a long sleep. He thought that the last years of his life could be spent more interestingly in Venice than in any other city available to him.

I helped his servants install him and his goods in a small but worthy house facing the lagoon, and ran some of his errands. He gave me golden Torpini dates, rarely seen in Venice, pomegranates, and melons, and told me I could come another day. On that day I was allowed to look at some of his treasures—books with bejeweled covers, illuminated scrolls, and instruments that I thought must be for alchemy but instead were for studying the stars. These things fascinated me, suggesting distant lands and mysterious lore, but no more than the old man himself with his wonderful lean face and living eyes. I kept coming back. I was always sure of his welcome and the visits were exciting in ways I could not name.

He was never loath to put down his manuscripts or lay aside his calculations to answer my questions, and the day came soon that he questioned me carefully as to my history. I told him that my father, Nicolo Polo, had departed for Constantinople with his elder brother Maffeo about six months before my birth. According to their letters to their half-sister Flora, they had lived in the Venetian quarter there for six years, buying and selling goods. Then they had gone to Sudak in the Crimea, and on eastward to a city called Bolgary, where they were living the last my aunt had heard.

“Bolgary?” Mustapha Sheik echoed in a wondering tone.

“It’s on a river called the Volga.”

“Well I know. Marco, that’s a very long way. Have you any notion how long?”

“Not a very clear notion.”

“By crow flight I would guess it as close to two thousand miles. But men may not follow the flight of the crows, and by caravan road the distance is nearer three thousand miles. Do your father and uncle have to go that far—amid such ready dangers—to make their fortunes?”

“According to the last letter, they found their way homeward blocked by warring tribesmen and were making for another city named Bukhara.”

Mustapha looked more thoughtful than before. “Has your father sent abundant moneys for your support?” he asked.

“He hasn’t sent any. We supposed he wasn’t able to do so with safety. My aunt Flora’s husband, Uncle Zane, looks out for me some. He expects to be repaid with interest when my father comes home rich.”

“Your father could have sent money, if he knew the means. There are Jews in every city as far as Bukhara who’ll warrant the payment of moneys by fellow Jews in any other city, and their only fee is its use in the periods between. But I suppose your father wouldn’t trust them. Has he promised to recompense your uncle?”

“No, your Honor, he’s never mentioned it.”

“What has he written you on the subject?”

“I’ve never heard from him.”

“Never? Then surely he has sent you greetings in his letters to your uncle and aunt.”

“He has sent greetings to their son Leo, but has never mentioned me.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t know that his wife bore him a son.”

“Uncle Zane has referred to me in several letters—asking what to do for me. My father never replies.”

“Your uncle Zane must love you, to continue with your care——”

“He doesn’t love me and Aunt Flora cares very little about me. They give all their love to Leo. Uncle Zane has no money except what came with Aunt Flora, and the Polo name still carries too much weight with him for him to turn me out. But I cost him almost nothing and I’m away all day.”

“That affords you time to come here, for which I’m glad.” Mustapha Sheik had me bring him a cup containing a liquor of bhang, sipped from it, and set it aside. In reply to his further questions I told him that my mother had been above my father in name and had brought him a fair dower, most of which he had taken with him to Constantinople. She had died of fever when I was not quite four years old. Her maiden name was Lucia Carpini and she had come from Perugia, between Florence and Rome.

Something I had said had aroused the old Arab’s intense interest. I could not see it in his face but felt it in his silence and stillness.

“Marco, do you remember her fairly well?” he asked.

“I remember loving her beyond all the world, and thinking that the world had ended when she died.”

“Did she ever speak—or did you ever hear—of Friar Johannes Carpini? He too came from near Perugia.”

“I think—I’m almost sure—that he was my mother’s uncle.” Then there came a mild aching above my eyebrows that I had felt a hundred times before. Trying to bring some vague, very early memories into focus always brought the pain, and often the mere thinking of my mother.

“That valiant old man went farther than Bukhara. It’s to him that we owe final proof of the most important political fact of our century.”

“Political” was a big word for a boy of twelve, but I would not let him know it. “What is it, Mustapha Sheik?”

“Of course you’ve heard of Prester John, whom folk believe to be the greatest of Christian kings, ruling half the world.”^[1]

“I’ve heard that he’s king of seventy-two kings, and is waited on by seven of them at a time. When he goes to war, thirteen crosses twenty feet high, made of solid gold and jewels, are carried before him, each guarded by ten thousand horsemen and a hundred thousand footmen. In front of his palace is a mirror two hundred feet tall——”

“The more learned in Europe know now that he doesn’t exist. If he’s not made up out of whole cloth, he was a minor king in Africa, and a Coptic Christian. But the most learned—a handful of geographers at the universities of Islam and Christendom—know of a real wonder hardly less than this imaginary one. They found it out from the journal of old Johannes Carpini.”

“Is it a secret?” I asked. “If it’s not, I entreat you to tell me.”

“The greatest secrets in the world are open to those who’ll listen and believe. I think your own mother could have told you this one, if Friar Johannes was indeed her uncle. There was a real king, Kuyuk Khan, greater and richer than legend makes Prester John. He was followed by Mangu Khan, and now by Kublai Khan. Kublai has no magic mirror and no giant crosses precede him into battle, but fully a thousand kings, great and small, pay tribute to his throne. His treasures are beyond counting. His empire is many times larger than that of Rome in all her glory. His subjects number Allah alone knows how many hundred million. He’s greater than all the kings in Europe rolled together—and yet no European has ever seen his face.”

“It may be my father will see him.” And my neck prickled fiercely.

“It could well be. And for that glory, he may be blinded, or be killed, or bring home such riches that the very Doge would seem a beggar in comparison.”

“How far is Bukhara from the kingdom of Kublai Khan?”

“It’s within his kingdom, yet perhaps three thousand miles from his capital.”

“If my father doesn’t go there in five years, I’ll get there first.”

Mustapha Sheik beckoned me to him, put his hand on my forehead, and looked deeply into my eyes.

“Do you love your father?” he asked quietly.

“No, I hate him.”

“Because he abandoned you?”

“I don’t care about that. But it is well to know how he made my mother cry.”

“If his goal is the Court of Kublai Khan—and it may be, if he talked to the old friar—you can never catch up with him now. It would be five years or so before you could even start.”

“I’ll catch up with him, before I’m through, and go beyond him.”

“For the reason you just gave?”

“There’s another reason, if I could just remember what it was. It was something Mama told me the night before she died.” Suddenly the ache over my eyes almost burst my forehead. “It had something to do with two fires——”

The pain dimmed and the intense strain in Mustapha’s face slowly faded away.

“Five years,” he said quietly. “They are very few compared with mine, and you mustn’t grow impatient. If Nicolo Polo becomes the first Venetian to prostrate himself before Kublai Khan, his son Marco may be the first to stand at Kublai’s side.”