The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 22

Rob was delighted with the answer. He had spent hours thinking of spurious details to tell about himself, and now he saw it was unnecessary; businessmen didn't reveal too much.

"Where do you travel?" the young man named Simon said, startling Rob, who had decided only Meir knew English.

"Persia."

"Persia. Excellent! You have family there?"

"No, I go there to buy. One or two herbs, perhaps a few medicinals."

"Ah," Meir said. The Jews looked at one another, accepting it instantly.

It was the moment to leave, and he bade them good night.

Cullen had been staring over at them while he talked to the Jews, and when Rob approached his camp the Scot seemed to have lost most of his initial warmth.

He introduced his daughter Margaret without enthusiasm, although the girl greeted Rob politely enough.

Up close, her red hair was something that would be pleasant to touch. Her eyes were cool and sad. Her high round cheekbones seemed large as a man's fist and her nose and jaw were comely but not delicate. Her face and arms were unfashionably freckled and he wasn't accustomed to a woman being so tall.

While he was trying to decide whether she was beautiful, Fritta came along and spoke briefly to Seredy.

"He wishes Master Cole to be a sentry this night," the interpreter said.

So as dusk fell Rob began to walk his post, which started with the Cullens' site and extended through eight camps beyond his own.

As he walked, he saw what a strange mixture the caravan had brought together. Next to a covered cart an olive-skinned woman with yellow hair nursed a baby while her husband squatted near the fire and greased his harnesses. Two men sat and cleaned weapons. A boy fed grain to three fat hens in a crude wooden cage. A cadaverous man and his fat woman glared at one another and quarreled in what Rob believed to be French.

On his third circuit of the area, as he pa.s.sed the Jews' camp he saw that they stood together and swayed, chanting what he realized was their evening prayer.

A large white moon began to ride up from the forest beyond the village and he felt tireless and confident, for suddenly he was part of an army of more than one hundred and twenty men, and that wasn't the same as traveling through a strange and hostile land by yourself.

Four times during the night he challenged somebody and found it was one of the men going beyond the camp to answer a call of nature.

Toward morning, when he was becoming unbearably sleepy, the Cullen girl came out of her father's tent. She pa.s.sed close by him without acknowledging his presence. He saw her clearly in the washed light of the moon. Her dress looked very black and her long feet, which must have been wet with dew, looked very white.

He made as much noise as possible while walking in the opposite direction from the one she had taken, but he watched from afar until he saw her safely back, and then he began to walk again.

At first light he quit his post and made a hurried breakfast of bread and cheese. While he ate, the Jews a.s.sembled outside their tent for sunrise devotions. Perhaps they would be an annoyance, for they seemed an exceedingly worshipful people. They strapped little black boxes on their foreheads and wound thin leather strips around their forearms until their limbs resembled the barber poles on Rob's wagon, then they lost themselves alarmingly in reverie, covering their heads with prayer shawls. He was relieved when they were done.

He had Horse harnessed too early, and had to wait. Although those at the head of the caravan set out shortly after daybreak, the sun was well up before it was his turn. Cullen led on a rawboned white horse, followed by his servant Seredy riding a scruffy gray mare and leading three packhorses. Why did two people need three pack animals? The daughter sat a proud black. Rob thought the haunches of both the horse and the woman were admirable, and he followed them gladly.

26.

PARSI.

They settled at once into the routine of the journey. For the first three days both the Scots and the Jews regarded him politely and left him alone, perhaps made uneasy by his battered face and the bizarre markings on the wagon. Privacy had never displeased him, and he was content to be left to his thoughts.

The girl rode in front of him constantly, and inevitably he watched her even after they made camp. She appeared to have two black dresses, one of which she washed whenever there was opportunity. She was obviously a sufficiently seasoned traveler not to fret over discomforts but there was about her, and about Cullen, an air of barely concealed melancholy; he a.s.sumed from their clothing that they were in mourning.

Sometimes she sang softly.

On the fourth morning, when the caravan was slow to move, she dismounted and led her horse, stretching her legs. He looked down at her walking close by his wagon and smiled at her. Her eyes were enormous, as deep a blue as irises can be. Her high-boned face had long, sensitive planes. Her mouth was large and ripe like everything about her, yet curiously quick and expressive.

"What's the language of your songs?"

"Gaelic. What we call the Erse."

"I thought so."

"Och. How is a Sa.s.senach to recognize the Erse?"

"What is a Sa.s.senach?"

"It's our name for those who live south of Scotland."

"I sense the word isn't a compliment."

"Ah, it is not," she admitted, and this time smiled.

"Mary Margaret!" her father called sharply. She moved to him at once, a daughter accustomed to obeying.

Mary Margaret?

She must be near the age Anne Mary would be now, he realized uneasily. His sister's hair was brown when she was a little girl, but there had been reddish tints ...

The girl was not Anne Mary, he reminded himself firmly. He knew he must stop seeing his sister in every woman who wasn't elderly, for it was the sort of pastime that might become a form of madness.

There was no need to dwell on it, since he had no real interest in James Cullen's daughter. There were more than enough soft things in the world, and he decided that he'd stay away from this one.

Her father evidently determined to give him a second chance at conversation, perhaps because he hadn't seen him talking again to the Jews. On their fifth night on the road James Cullen came to visit, bearing a jug of barley liquor, and Rob said words of welcome and accepted a friendly pull from the bottle.

"You know sheep, Master Cole?"

Cullen beamed when he said he didn't, ready to educate him.

"There are sheep and there are sheep. In Kilmarnock, site of the Cullen holding, ewes often run as small as twelve stone in weight. I'm told that in the East we'll find ewes twice that size, with long hair instead of short-denser fleece than the beasts of Scotland, so full of richness that when the wool is spun and made up into goods, it will shed rain."

Cullen said he planned to buy breeding stock when he found the best, and bring it back to Kilmarnock with him.

That would take ready capital, a goodly amount of trading money, Rob told himself, and realized why Cullen needed packhorses. It might be better if the Scot also had bodyguards, he reflected.

"It's a far journey you're on. You'll be a long time away from your sheep holding."

"I left it in the reliable care of trusted kinsmen. It was a hard decision, but ... Six months before I left Scotland I buried my wife of twenty-two years." Cullen grimaced and put the jug to his mouth for a long swallow.

That would explain their rue, Rob thought. The barber-surgeon in him made him ask what had caused her to die.

Cullen coughed. "There were growths in both her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, hard lumps. She just grew pale and weak, lost appet.i.te and will. Finally there was terrible pain. She took a time to die but was gone before I believed it could be so. Her name was Jura. Well... I stayed drunk for six weeks but found it no escape. For years I'd engaged in idle talk about buying fine stock in Anatolia, never thinking it would come to pa.s.s. I just decided to go."

He offered the jug and didn't seem offended when Rob shook his head. "p.i.s.s time," he said, and smiled gently. He had already finished a large amount of the jug's contents and when he attempted to clamber to his feet and leave, Rob had to a.s.sist him.

"A good night, Master Cullen. Please come again."

"A good night, Master Cole."

Watching him walk away unsteadily, Rob reflected that he hadn't once mentioned his daughter.

The following afternoon a French factor named Felix Roux, thirty-eighth in the line of march, was thrown when his horse shied at a badger. He struck the ground badly, with the full weight of his body on his left forearm, breaking the bone so the limb hung askew. Kerl Fritta sent for the barber-surgeon, who set the bone and immobilized the arm, a painful procedure. Rob struggled to inform Roux that although the arm would give him h.e.l.l's pain when he rode, he would still be able to travel with the caravan. Finally he had to send for Seredy to tell the patient how to handle the sling.

He was thoughtful on his way back to his own wagon. He had agreed to treat sick travelers several times a week. Although he tipped Seredy generously, he knew he couldn't continue to use James Cullen's manservant as interpreter.

Back at his wagon, he saw Simon ben ha-Levi sitting on the ground nearby, mending a saddle cinch, and he walked up to the thin young Jew.

"Do you have French and German?"

The youth nodded while holding a saddle strap close to his mouth and biting off the waxed thread.

Rob talked and ha-Levi listened. In the end, since the terms were generous and the time required wasn't great, he agreed to interpret for the barber-surgeon.

Rob was pleased. "How do you have so many languages?"

"We're merchants between nations. We travel constantly, with family connections in the markets of many countries. Languages are part of our business. For example, young Tuveh is studying the language of the Mandarins, for in three years he'll travel the Silk Road and go to work with my uncle's firm." His uncle, Issachar ben Nachum, he said, headed a large branch of their family in Kai Feng Fu, from which every three years he sent a caravan of silks, pepper, and other Oriental exotics to Meshed, in Persia. And every three years since he was a small boy, Simon and other males of his family had traveled from their home in Angora to Meshed, from which they accompanied a caravan of the rich goods back to the East Frankish Kingdom.

Rob J. felt a quickening within him. "You know the Persian language?"

"Of course. Parsi."

Rob looked at him blankly.

"It's called Parsi."

"Will you teach it to me?"

Simon ben ha-Levi hesitated, because this was a different matter. This could take a good deal of his time.

"I'll pay well."

"Why do you want Parsi?"

"I'll need the language when I reach Persia."

"You want to do business on a regular basis? Return to Persia again and again to buy herbs and pharmaceuticals, the way we do for silks and spices?"

"Perhaps." Rob J. shrugged, a gesture worthy of Meir ben Asher. "A bit of this, a little of that."

Simon grinned. He began to scratch out a first lesson in the dirt with a stick, but it was unsatisfactory and Rob went to the wagon and got his drawing things and a clean round of beechwood. Simon started him in the Parsi language exactly as Mam had taught him to read English many years earlier, by teaching him the alphabet. Parsi letters were composed of dots and squiggly lines. Christ's blood! The written language resembled pigeon s.h.i.t, bird tracks, curled wood shavings, worms trying to f.u.c.k each other.

"I'll never learn this," he said, his heart sinking.

"You shall," Simon said placidly.

Rob J. took the piece of wood back to the wagon. He ate his supper slowly, buying time in which to control his excitement, then he sat on the wagon seat and at once began to apply himself.

27.

THE QUIET SENTRY.

They emerged from the mountains to flat land that the Roman road divided with absolute straightness as far as the eye could see. On both sides of the road were fields with black soil. People were beginning to harvest grain and late vegetables; summer was over. They came to an enormous lake and followed its sh.o.r.eline for three days, stopping overnight to buy provision at a sh.o.r.eside town called Siofok. Not much of a town, sagging buildings and a crafty, cheating peasantry, but the lake-it was named Balaton-was an unworldly dream, water dark and hard-looking as a gem, giving off white mist as he waited early in the morning for the Jews to say their prayers.

The Jews were funny to watch. Strange creatures, they bobbed while they prayed and it seemed that G.o.d was juggling their heads, which went up and down at different times but seemed to work with a mysterious rhythm. When they were finished and he suggested that they swim with him, they made faces because of the chill but suddenly they were babbling to each other in their language. Meir said something and Simon nodded and turned away; he was camp guard. The others and Rob ran to the sh.o.r.e and threw off their clothes, splashing into the shallows like screaming children. Tuveh wasn't a good swimmer and wallowed. Judah haCohen paddled feebly and Gershom ben Shemuel, who had a shocking-white round belly despite his sun-darkened face, floated on his back and bellowed incomprehensible songs. Meir was a surprise. "Better than the mikva!" he shouted, gasping.

"What's the mikva?" Rob asked, but the stocky man plunged beneath the surface and then began to move out from sh.o.r.e with strong, even strokes. Rob swam after him, thinking he would rather be with a female. He tried to recall women with whom he had swum. There were perhaps half a dozen and he had made love to each, before or after the swimming. Several times it had been in the water with the wetness lapping all around them ...

He hadn't touched a woman for five months, his longest period of abstention since Editha Lipton had guided him into the s.e.xual world. He kicked and flailed in the water, which was very cold, trying to rid himself of the ache to f.u.c.k.

When he overtook Meir, he sent a great splash into the other man's face.

Meir sputtered and coughed. "Christian!" he shouted ominously.

Rob splashed him again and Meir closed with him. Rob was taller but Meir was strong! He pushed Rob under, but Rob locked his fingers in the full beard and pulled the Jew under with him, down and down. As they sank it seemed as though tiny flecks of rime left the brown water and clung to him, cold on cold, until he felt clothed in a skin of icy silver.

Down.

Until, at the same moment, each panicked and decided he would drown for playfulness. They pushed apart to rise, and broke the surface gasping for air. Neither vanquished, neither victor, they swam back to sh.o.r.e together. When they left the water they trembled with a foretaste of autumn chill as they struggled to force wet bodies into their clothes. Meir had noted his circ.u.mcised p.e.n.i.s and looked at him.

"A horse bit the tip off," Rob said.

"A mare, no doubt," Meir said solemnly; he muttered something to the others in their language, causing them to grin at Rob. The Jews wore curiously fringed garments next to their flesh. Naked, they had been as other men; clad, they rea.s.sumed their foreignness and were exotic creatures again. They caught Rob studying them but he didn't ask them to explain the strange undergarments, and no one volunteered.

After they left the lake behind, the scenery suffered. Traveling down a straight and unending road, pa.s.sing mile after mile of unchanging forest or a field that looked like all the other fields, soon became almost unbearable in its monotony. Rob J. took refuge in his imagination, visualizing the road as it had been soon after it was built, one via in a vast network of thousands that had allowed Rome to conquer the world. First there would have come scouts, an advance cavalry. Then the general in his chariot driven by a slave, surrounded by trumpeters both for panoply and signaling. Then on horseback the tribuni and the legati, the staff officers. They were followed by the legion, a forest of bristling javelins-ten cohorts of the most efficient fighting killers in history, six hundred men to a cohort, each one hundred legionnaires led by a centurion. And finally thousands of slaves doing what other brutes of labor could not, hauling the tormenta, the giant machinery of war that was the real reason for building the roads: enormous battering rams for leveling walls and fortifications, wicked catapulta to make the sky rain darts on an enemy, giant ballista, the slings of the G.o.ds, to send boulders through the air or launch great beams as if they were arrows. Finally, the carts laden with impedimenta, the baggage, would be trailed by wives and children, wh.o.r.es, traders, couriers, and government officials, the ants of history, living off the spoils of the Roman feast.

Now that army was legend and dream, those camp followers ancient dust, that government long gone, but the roads remained, indestructible highways that were sometimes so straight as to lull the mind.

The Cullen girl was walking near his wagon again, her horse tied to one of the pack animals.

"Will you join me, mistress? The wagon will be a change for you."