“No, I cannot.”
The Mongol sneered down at him. “You do not even stand like a man when you speak defiance. Very well, cowardly Kurdi, you refuse to sell. Then would you care to stand up and try to prevent my taking a sheep?”
“No, I cannot. But I warn you. The Chiti Ayakkabi will make you regret the robbery.”
The Mongol laughed harshly and spat in the dust in front of the seated man, then remounted and rode to cut a fat ewe out of the flock grazing in the meadow beyond the hut. I remained there, curious, staring down at the slumped and defeated-looking shepherd. I knew that Chiti meant a brigand and, as best I knew, Ayakkabi meant a shoe. I wondered what kind of bandit would style himself “the Shoe Brigand” and would occupy himself in punishing his own fellow Kurdi for giving aid and comfort to their presumed oppressors.
I managed to inquire of the man, “What did this Chiti Ayakkabi do to chastise you?”
He did not speak a reply, but showed me, lifting the skirts of his sheepskins to reveal his feet. It was evident why he had not stood to greet us, and I got some idea of why the Kurdi bandit had such a strange name. Both of the shepherd’s feet, otherwise bare, were clotted with dried blood and studded with nails—not nail heads but the upthrusting points of nails—where both his feet had been shod with iron horseshoes.
Two or three nights later, near a village called Tunceli, the Chiti Ayakkabi made us regret our robbery of the sheep. Tunceli was a village of the Kurdi, and it had only one karwansarai, and that very small and dilapidated. Since our company of fifteen riders and thirty-odd horses would have crowded it intolerably, we rode on through the village and made camp in a grassy glade beyond, convenient to a clear-flowing brook. We had eaten and rolled ourselves in our blankets and gone to sleep, leaving just one Mongol on guard, when the night erupted with bandits.
Our lone sentry had only time to bellow “Chiti!” before he was brained with a battle-ax. The rest of us thrashed free of our bedrolls, but the brigands were among us, with blades and cudgels, and all was a confused turbulence in the dim remaining firelight. My father and I had Uncle Mafìo to thank that we were not slain as abruptly as all our Mongol troop. Those warriors thought first to snatch for their weapons, so the bandits flew first at them. But my father and I both saw Mafìo standing by the fire, looking about him in numb bemusement, and we both at the same moment threw ourselves toward him, and seized him and dragged him to the ground, so he made not such a prominent target. The next moment, something clouted me above the ear and, for me, the night went totally dark.
I woke, lying on the ground with my head cradled in a soft lap, and as my vision cleared I looked up into a female face illumined by the now built-up fire. It was not the square, strong face of a Kurdi woman, and it was framed by a tumble of hair that was not black, but dark-red. I labored to collect my wits, and said in Farsi, in a voice that croaked:
“Am I dead, and are you a peri now?”
“You are not dead, Marco Efendi. I saw you just in time to cry to the men to desist.”
“You used to call me Mirza Marco, Sitarè.”
“Marco Efendi means the same. I am more of a Kurdi now than a Persian.”
“What of my father? My uncle?”
“They are not even bruised. I am sorry you had to take a blow. Can you sit up?”
I did, though the movement threatened to make my head roll off my shoulders, and I saw my father sitting with a group of the black-mustached bandits. They had made qahwah, and he and they were drinking and chatting amiably together, with Uncle Mafìo sitting placidly by. It would have looked quite a civilized scene, except that others of the brigands were stacking the bodies of our dead Mongols like cordwood off to one side of the glade. The largest and most fiercely mustached of the newcomers, seeing me stir, came over to me and Sitare.
She said, “This is my husband, Neb Efendi, known also as Chiti Ayakkabi.”
He spoke Farsi as well as she did. “I apologize to you, Marco Efendi. I would not knowingly have attacked the man who made possible the treasure of my life.”
I was still addled in my wits, and did not know what he was talking about. But as I drank bitter black qahwah and my head gradually cleared, he and Sitarè explained. He was the Kashan cobbler whom the Almauna Esther had introduced to her maidservant Sitarè. He had loved her at first sight, but their marriage would of course have been unthinkable had Sitarè not been a virgin, and Sitarè had told him frankly that her being still intact was thanks to a certain gentlemanly Mirza Marco’s having declined to take advantage of her. I felt more than a little uncomfortable, listening to a rough and murderous bandit expressing his indebtedness for my not having preceded him in making “sikis,” as he called it, with his bride. But also, if I was ever grateful for my onetime constraint, it was now.
“Qismet, we call it,” he said. “Destiny, fate, chance. You were good to my Sitarè. Now I am being good to you.”
It further transpired that Neb Efendi, having been balked of prospering as a cobbler in Kashan—where the people did not know the difference between a noble Kurdi and a vile Turki, but would have despised him in any event—had brought his wife back here to his native Kurdistan. But here he felt also estranged, a vassal to the Turki regime which was in turn vassal to the Mongol Ilkhanate. So he had given up his trade entirely, keeping only the name of it, and turned to insurrection as the Shoe Brigand.
“I have seen some of your cobblery,” I told him. “It was—distinctive.”
He said modestly, “Bosh,” which is a Turki word meaning “you flatter me overmuch.”
But Sitarè nodded proudly. “You mean the shepherd. It was he who set us on your trail to Tunceli here. Yes, Marco Efendi, my dear and valorous Neb is determined to rouse up all Kurdi against the oppressors, and to discourage any weaklings who truckle to them.”
“I had rather divined that.”
“Do you know, Marco Efendi,” he said, thumping a fist loudly against his broad chest, “that we Kurdi are the oldest aristocracy in the world? Our tribal names go back to the days of Sumer. And all that time we have been fighting one tyranny after another. We battled the Hittites, the Assyrians, we helped Cyrus overthrow Babylon. We fought with Salah-ed-Din the Great against the first marauding Crusaders. Not forty years ago, unaided, we slaughtered twenty thousand Mongols at the battle of Arbil. But still we are not free and independent. So now it is my mission—first to throw off from Kurdistan the Mongol yoke and then the Turki.”
“I wish you success, Chiti Ayakkabi.”
“Well, my band and I are poor and ill-equipped. But your Mongols’ weapons and your good horses and the considerable treasure in their packs will help us immensely.”
“You are going to rob us? You call that being good to us?”
“I could have been less good.” He waved casually at the bloody heap of dead Mongols. “Be glad your qismet decreed otherwise.”
“Speaking of qismet,” Sitarè said brightly, to distract me, “tell me, Marco Efendi. What of my darling brother Aziz?”
We were in a precarious enough situation, I decided, that I would not hazard making it more so. Neither she nor her ferocious mate would be overjoyed to hear that her little brother had been dead for more than twenty years, that we had let him be slain by a robber band very like their own. Anyway, I was loath to sadden an old friend unnecessarily. So I lied, and lied loudly enough that my father could overhear, and not later contradict me.
“We carried Aziz to Mashhad, as you desired, Sitarè, and we guarded his chastity the whole way. There, he was fortunate enough to catch the admiring eye of a fine and prosperously fat merchant prince. We left them together, and they seemed more than fond of each other. As far as I know, they are still trading together, up and down the Silk Road between Mashhad and Balkh. Aziz would by now be a well-grown man, but I have no doubt he is still as beautiful as he was then. And as you are, Sitarè.”