“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.”
“Al-hamdo-lillah, I hope so,” she sighed. “I saw much resemblance to Aziz in my own two sons, as they grew up. But my manly Neb, not being a Kashanite, would not let me insert the golulè in our boys, or show them how to use cosmetics, in preparation for their someday securing male lovers. So they have grown up to be most manly men themselves, and they sikismek only with women. Those are the boys, over yonder, Nami and Orhon, stripping the boots off those dead Mongols. Would you believe, Marco Efendi, that my sons are both older than youwere when last I saw you? Ah, well, it is good to have news of dear Aziz after all these years, and to know that he made as glowing a success of his life as I have made of mine. We owe it all to you, Marco Efendi.”
“Bosh,” I said modestly.
I could have suggested that we might be owed our own possessions, but I did not. And my father, when he too realized that we were to be plundered, merely sighed in resignation and said, “Well, when there is no banquet, at least the candles are happy.”
True, our lives had been spared. And of our portable valuables I had already dispensed with a third part before we left Khanbalik, and anyway they represented only a trifle compared to what our Compagnia had earlier sent home from Kithai. And the brigands took only the things they could easily spend, sell or trade, meaning that they left us our clothes and personal belongings. So, while we could hardly rejoice at being robbed at this late stage in our long journeying—we especially regretted the loss of the magnificent star sapphires acquired in Srihalam —we neither of us repined too much.
Neb Efendi and his band did allow us to ride our own horses as far as the coast city of Trebizond, and even rode that far with us as a protection against any further Kurdi assault, and they courteously refrained from slaughtering or shoeing anyone else along the way. When we dismounted at the outskirts of Trebizond, the Chiti Ayakkabi gave us back a handful of our own coin, sufficient to pay for our transport and sustenance the rest of the way to Constantinople. So we and they parted in a friendly enough way, and the Shoe Brigand did not strike me dead when Sitarè, as she had done twenty-some years before, kissed me a voluptuous and lingering goodbye.
At Trebizond, on the shore of the Euxine or Kara or Black Sea, we were still more than two hundred farsakhs east of Constantinople, but we were glad to be standing again on Christian ground for the first time since we had left Acre in the Levant. My father and I decided against the purchase of new horses, not out of dread of the overland journey, but out of concern that it might be too hard on Uncle Mafìo, with none but us now to take care of him. So, carrying what was left of our packs, we went to the Trebizond waterfront and, after some search, found a barge-like gektirme fishing boat whose Christian Greek captain—he was captain of a crew consisting of his four loutish sons—would, with Christian goodness, sail us to Constantinople, and would feed us on the way and, with Christian goodness, would charge us only all we had.
It was a tediously slow and miserable voyage, for the gektirme was netting all the way, and netting only anchovies, so anchovies were what we were fed all the way, with pilaf of rice cooked in anchovy oil, and we lived in, slept in, breathed in the smell of anchovies all the way. Besides us and the Greeks, there was a mangy dog aboard, for no discernible reason, and I frequently wished we had not already paid over every coin we possessed, so that I could have bought the dog and offered him up to be cooked, just for a change from the anchovies. But just as well. The dog had been aboard for so long that I suppose he would have tasted no different.
After nearly two dismal months aboard our floating anchovy-cask, we finally made our way into the strait called Bosphorus, and along it to where it met the estuary called the Golden Horn, and there we raised the great city of Constantinople—but on a day of such dense fog that I could not see and appreciate the city’s magnificence. The fog did permit me, however, to learn the reason for the gektirme’s resident dog. One of the sons beat it regularly with a stick as we crept cautiously through the fog, so that the dog barked and snarled and cursed continuously. I could hear other invisible dogs similarly yowling all about us, and our captain at the steering oar kept his ear cocked to the noises, so I perceived that dog-beating—instead of bell-ringing, as in Venice—was the locally accepted fog warning device.