The moon did not cease her waxing and waning, the whole host of stars moved a little with the seasons, and the planets seemed to wander where they listed, although their courses were as inexorably fixed as the very sun’s. I could hardly believe that half a year had passed since my father’s return—and afterwhile, a full year. On the day of his return, I had known myself for a man. After sixteen, I walked and talked so that no one doubted it. Another summer’s end found me seventeen and no nearer Cathay than the last summer; but neither, thank God, was my sire.
The Legates were uncommonly slow at electing a new Pope. The Polo brothers worried over their repute with Kublai Khan; he might easily be led to think them scoundrelly adventurers who had had no intention of obeying his sublime commands. This anxiety preyed upon them all the more in the gathering quiet of the Casa Polo. The portico no longer swarmed with would-be wanderers to the world’s end. Captains of galleys had stopped vying with one another in offering their services, and the Doge had graver business on his mind. The return of the two travelers from very Cathay had begun to look like a nine-day wonder. When they passed a knot of merchants on the Rialto, sometimes there was elbowing, and even winks, behind their backs. But if sometimes Maffeo turned and looked, Nicolo never did.
Fall winds blew and bit, and the wild geese returned. The brothers determined to set forth in mid-April, new Pope or no. Meanwhile my doors of hope were closing one by one. Only one, always the widest and the brightest, still stood wide.
“Marco my son, how much would you risk for a thousand pieces of gold?” asked Mustapha Sheik when the mid-March morning sun burst through the casement glass and ensilvered his long beard.
“I’d lay my life on the toss of a coin and grievous sin on my soul,” I answered.
“The risk to your skin is not that heavy in the venture I’m thinking of, but it’s far from light and my belly faints at the thought. There are those who’d say your soul’s risk would be even greater, but with all due respect to Christian dogma, I think it will come through unscathed. And for the love of Allah, don’t hang on my words as though they were a life line thrown to you in a sinking ship. If you don’t get to go with the Polo brothers, what will you do?”
“I’ll take service with a merchant, the best I can get, and wait till my ship comes in.”
“Will your heart be broken?”
“No, only cracked a little.” But my errant Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
“Do you know that if I had the gold, I’d put it in your hands, not to spare you a cracked heart, but as an offering to Allah—God, you say—for my sins?”
“I don’t ken you, master.”
“Why should you? It’s a matter between Him and me. It’s the light I see, which may be a will-o’-the-wisp, yet I must believe it for my soul’s sake. I want you to go, Marco Polo. To that end, I’ll lend you a hundred bezants, which will pay what you owe to your uncle Zane and furnish you for the thing I have in mind. You can repay the sum, if the chance comes, to the School of Averroës in Morocco.”
“If I live long enough, I will.”
“I’ve been pondering the matter since leaf fall. A month ago, you could as well pine for a roc’s egg, as did Aladdin’s bride, as for help from me. A fortnight past, I saw hope glimmering dimly at the bottom of the well, but I had no bucket to go down. As late as a week ago, the difficulties of the venture loomed so great, and the danger so deadly, that I couldn’t bring myself to broach the matter to you. Now one of the dragons guarding the treasure has been given a bone to gnaw. Even so, many dragons remain, and perhaps the treasure itself is as visionary as the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end.”
Mustapha Sheik spoke calmly, as was his wont. But his eyes, so black in contrast with his beard, glimmered like jet.
“Bismillah!” I cried, like a good Moslem.
“In the city of Medina I knew slightly a merchant of the common name of Haran-din. He had become rich by buying and selling slaves. On one of his voyages he was captured by a Venetian and himself sold as a galley slave. Being much too old for the labor, he expected to be thrown to the sharks within a twelve month, but no such mercy was vouchsafed him. Within two moons a patch of skin on his hand showed silvery as the moon. So he was delivered from his bench and put in the lazar house of Chioggia. In a few weeks more, perhaps in a few days, he will be freed from there also, by a more kind delivery, but one he won’t welcome in that place.”
“Death?” I asked.
“Truly. But he doesn’t want to meet him there. He wants the appointment to be in Zara, on the shores of Hungary, across the Adriatic from Rimini.”
“Why there, Mustapha Sheik?”
He was always patient with my questions. “Because in Zara there is a Mohammedan mosque containing a relic from Mecca. You may ask how it comes there, in a Christian state. Because Stephen, the king, wedded a Cuman woman, whose people swore to become Christians, but who are half Mohammedans, half pagans. When those leaning toward Allah desired to raise a temple, he gave them leave. Haran-din prays that he may kiss this relic, a stone fixed in the walls, which once lay upon the Hill of Mercy, and which touched the Prophet’s foot when he shouted ‘Labbeyka!’ unto God. And he sent me word that whoever brings him forth into the light and bears him to Zara and enables him to kiss the stone before he dies, him he will make his heir.”
“I wish you’d told me sooner, Mustapha Sheik. Now the time grows short.”
“It would have grown long if you had undertaken the venture even a week ago. A warden, Captain Vico, knew that Haran-din had secret wealth, but it was useless to torture him because the malady was so far advanced that he could no longer feel pain, and that is the nature of this most strange and awful affliction. He knew too that Haran-din had conspired to escape, whereby to dispose of his treasure, so he laid a cunning trap to kill anyone who stole his way to the prison bars. But Haran-din gave him a jewel that a certain Jew had kept for him, wherefor this Vico promised, on the forfeit of his soul to be burned by demons through eternity if he breaks faith, to leave open an outer gate at such a time as to circumvent the outer guard. Thus only the inner guard will remain to be eluded, which Haran-din declares would not be difficult for a resolute, resourceful, and cunning man.”
“If so, why doesn’t the warden arrange for a confederate to deliver Haran-din and so share in the reward?”
“Because Haran-din will trust only another Mohammedan or a Jew, with whom Captain Vico has no dealings and whom he himself would not trust.”
“Why won’t Haran-din trust a Christian?”
“Because he believes that a good Christian would free him from the lazar house only to let him die in some odor of sanctity, in a last attempt to save his soul, and the common run of Christians would not dare touch his leprous hand.”
“Am I neither one?” I asked with a grin.
“You’re a most mongrel mixture of good and bad, to my soul’s joy.”