A black Kashan scorpion came scrabbling along the garden path, and I stepped on it for her. Then I turned to the nephew and said, “Your aunt once had a house maid named Sitarè …”
“Another of her deathbed dispositions. Every old woman is a matchmaker at heart. She found for Sitarè a husband, and had them married in this house before she died. Neb Efendi was a cobbler, a good craftsman and a good man, though a Muslim. He was also an immigrant Turki, which made him not very popular hereabout. But it also made him not a pursuer of boys, and I trust he was a good husband to Sitarè.”
“Was?”
“They moved away from here shortly afterward. He was a foreigner, and evidently folk prefer to have their shoes made and mended by their home folk, even if they are inept in their work. So Neb Efendi picked up his awls and his lasts and his new wife and departed—to his native Cappadocia, I believe. I hope they are happy there. It was a long time ago.”
Well, I was a little disappointed not to get to see Sitarè again, but only a little. She would be a matron now, of about my own middle age, and to see her might be even more of a disappointment.
So we pushed on, and eventually arrived at Maragheh. The Regent Kaikhadu did receive us, not grudgingly but not with wild enthusiasm either. He was a typical, shaggy Mongol man at arms, who clearly would have been more comfortable astride a horse, hacking with a blade at some battlefield opponent, than he was on the throne to which his brother’s death had shoved him.
“I truly did not know of Arghun’s embassy to the Khakhan,” he told us, “or you may be sure I would have had you escorted hither in great pomp and ceremony, for I am a devoted subject of the Khakhan. Indeed, it is because I have spent all my time afield, fighting the Khanate’s campaigns, that I was unaware of Arghun’s canvass for a new wife. Right this minute, I should properly be putting down a band of brigands that are rampaging over in Kurdistan. Anyway, I do not know quite what to do with this woman you have brought.”
“She is a handsome one, Lord Kaikhadu,” said the envoy Uladai. “And a good-natured one.”
“Yes, yes. But I already have wives—Mongol, Persian, Circassian, even one frightful Armeniyan—in yurtus scattered from Hormuz to Azerbaizhan.” He threw up his hands distractedly. “Well, I suppose I can inquire among my nobles … .”
“We will stay,” my father said firmly, “until we see the Lady Kukachin settled according to her station.”
But the lady took care of that herself, before we had been many days in residence at the Maragheh palace. My father and I were airing Uncle Mafìo in a rose garden one afternoon when she came running up to us, smiling for the first time since our arrival at Hormuz. She also had someone in tow: a boy, very short and ugly and pimply, but in courtier’s rich attire.
“Elder Brothers Polo,” she said breathlessly. “You need fret over me no longer. By good fortune, I have met a most wonderful man, and we plan shortly to announce our betrothal.”
“Why, that is stupendous news,” said my father, but cautiously. “I do hope, my dear, that he is of suitably high birth and position and prospects … .”
“The highest!” she said happily. “Ghazan is the son of the man I came here to wed. He will be Ilkhan himself in two years.”
“Mefe, you could not have done better! Lassar la strada vechia per la nova. Is this his page? Can he fetch the good fellow for us to meet?”
“But this is he. This is the Crown Prince Ghazan.”
My father had to swallow before he could say, “Sain bina, Your Royal Highness,” and I bowed deeply to give myself time to compose my face to sobriety.
“He is two years younger than myself,” Kukachin chattered on, not giving the boy much chance to speak for himself. “But what is two years in a lifetime of happy marriage? We will be wed as soon as he ascends to the Ilkhanate. In the meantime, you dear devoted Elder Brothers can leave me in good conscience, knowing I am in good hands, and go on about your own affairs. I shall miss you, but I shall not be lonely or despondent any more.”
We made the proper congratulations and good wishes, and the boy grinned like an ape and mumbled acknowledgment, and Kukachin beamed as if she had just won an unimaginably great trophy, and the two of them went off hand in hand.
“Well,” said my father with a shrug, “better the head of a cat than the tail of a lion.”
But Kukachin must have seen in the boy what we could not. God knows he could never have been better than a goblin for looks and physical stature—he was afterward styled in all the Mongol chronicles “Ghazan the Ugly”—but the fact that he did make history is proof that he was more than he appeared to be. He and the lady were wed when he replaced Kaikhadu as Ilkhan of Persia, and then he went on to become the ablest Ilkhan and warrior of his generation, making many wars and winning many new lands for the Khanate. Unhappily, his loving Ilkhatun Kukachin did not live to share all his triumphs and celebrity, for she died in childbirth two years or so after their marriage.
4
SO, having completed our last mission for the Khan Kubilai, my father and uncle and I pressed onward. We left at Maragheh the populous company we had so far been traveling with, but Kaikhadu generously gave us good horses and remounts and packhorses and ample provisions and an escort of a dozen mounted men of his own palace guard, to see us safely through all the Turki lands. However, as things turned out, we would have traveled more safely without that Mongol troop.
From the capital, we circled around the shores of a sea-sized lake named Urumia, which was also called the Sea of the Sunset. Then we climbed up and over the mountains which marked the northwestern frontier of Persia. One of the mountains in that range, said my father, was the biblical Mount Ararat, but it was too far off our route for me to go and climb it to see if any trace of the Ark was still there. Anyway, having recently scaled another mountain to see a footprint that might well have been Adam’s, I was now inclined to think of Noah as rather a latecomer in history. On the other side of the mountains, we descended into the Turki lands at another sea-sized lake, this one named Van, but called the Sea Beyond the Sunset.
The country hereabout, and the nations composing it, and the borders thereof, were all in flux and had been for many years. What had formerly been part of the Byzantine Empire under Christian rulers was now the Seljuk Empire under rulers of the Turki race and Muslim religion. But these eastern parts of it were also known by older names, bestowed by peoples who had inhabited these lands since time before time, who had never conceded that they were not still the rightful owners of them, and who recognized none of the vagaries of modern claimants and modern boundary lines. Thus, at the point where we emerged from Persia, we came down from the mountains into a country which could equally well be named Turki, after the race of its rulers, or the Seljuk Empire, as those Turki called it, or Cappadocia, which was its name on older maps, or Kurdistan, for the Kurdi people who populated it.
The land was a green and pleasant one, the wildest parts of it seeming hardly wild at all, but looking almost neatly cultivated, with rolling hills of meadow grass tidily separated by clumps of forest, so that the whole countryside was as trim as an artificial parkland. There was plenty of good water, in sparkling streams as well as immense blue lakes. The people here were all Kurdi, some of them farmers and villagers, but most of them nomad families following flocks of sheep or goats. They were as handsome a race as I have seen in any Islamic land. They had very black hair and eyes, but a complexion as fair as my own. The men were large and solidly built, and wore great black mustaches, and were famously fierce fighters. The Kurdi women were not particularly delicate, either, but withal were well formed and good-looking—and independent; they scorned to wear the veil or live hidden in the pardah imposed on most other women of Islam.