I continued the effort in some strange and tragic defiance of known and unknown foes. My soul gave the command as though it were a haughty thing instead of the poor thing it often showed itself to be, and I obeyed.
If Fate struck, it would be by the hand of Nicolo. He had been riding fast when I first saw him; when he saw the lion he had spurred the tall dappled Arab into its utmost run. The course he had taken was intended to intercept the lion’s course at almost his last stride. Long and lean though the chance was, there was no other.
I did not believe it. Instead I actively disbelieved it without any recognizable process of thought. Nicolo might pretend to try to save me, more for my eyes than for those of onlookers, and at the last instant let me fall. This was my preconceived conviction. He had not unslung his bow—no doubt he knew as well as I did that he was not equal to the shot—and his apparent purpose was to catch the beast on his lance point. Beliefs stored in my brain denied that he could force the Arab that near his ancestral enemy.
In this last supposition, I was wrong. The stallion never faltered from the course his master had set and ran as fiercely as a troopers steed in the full charge. It had slipped my mind that many of the finest horses in Central Asia were trained to intercept running game. His neck was stretched, his ears laid back, his snowy mane rose and fell, while Nicolo rode like a dervish. The dun killer’s big black mane set off his pearl-bright fangs and he gave forth a deep-toned coughing roar. Their nearing courses gave the effect of the two lords of the desert being drawn together by some elemental force.
For any of us four who survived, the scene among the multicolored stones, under the steel-blue sky in the white sunlight of midmorning, would be one to remember always. It might return and return to the dreams of the drowsing beasts, or suddenly cast Nicolo or me into deepest reverie.
Nicolo leaned forward and half out of the saddle, thrusting the long lance. The point missed the tawny side and only gashed the beast’s shoulder with a glancing blow, but it arrested his terrible charge. As he turned to fight, the rumbling thunder in his throat changed to a short growl of surpassing violence. Then the gods must have looked down in wonder and admiration, for the stallion reared up on his hind legs, tall and taller till he loomed giantlike in form as well as in valor, and tried to strike with his forefeet.
These great events had dwarfed my own struggle to survive, but I was no bystander. Drawing my bow with my full strength, I drove an arrow as with a sledge hammer into the lion’s flank. As he whipped his maned head to bite at the shaft, Nicolo’s spear leaped forward again. Its lightning played against the tawny hide while its steel plunged deep. The beast’s great start as it pierced his vitals wrenched the weapon from Nicolo’s hand, and his throes broke the shaft.
Once more he reared up to attack, in an awful silence now, but his strength was waning fast, and a terrific blow from the screaming stallion knocked him on his back. He rolled over—tried to get up—fell back with a groan. For a moment more he lay sobbing in the dust, then he stretched his legs and his neck and tail, shuddered, and died.
“You came at a very lucky time for me,” I told Nicolo as the dust began to settle. I could not keep my voice from trembling.
“It wasn’t altogether luck,” he answered gravely and with deep calm. “I suspected that the caravan beasts smelled something more frightening than a leper. And there was talk at the caravanserai of lions hereabouts.”
My head swam and my knees almost buckled under me. To cover this, I walked over to look at Fatima, vultures’ meat now.
“You’ll need another horse,” Nicolo remarked thoughtfully.
“I wouldn’t’ve if you hadn’t arrived when you did.”
“Probably you’ll have to make out with a scrub until we get to the great horse market in Badakhshan.”
“Both the mare and I would be in the same boat,” I persisted.
“It’s said that the breed of Bucephalus was obtainable there until very recently, but the widow of the breeder killed all the pure stock in some act of revenge.” Nicolo swung down for a better view of the lion.
“I’m under great obligation to you, signor, for coming to my help,” I said, the cords of my neck taut.
“Not at all.”
“Will you accept my thanks?”
“Certainly not, when you don’t owe them.”
“Will you enlighten me as to why I don’t owe them?”
“I owed you a debt. Your quick work saved Maffeo and me as well as several others from the Karaunas. I don’t like owing debts to anyone, much less to an upstart bastard out of my wife. Now the score is paid.”
He rubbed his hands as though washing them, sprang lightly on his horse, and cantered away.
CHAPTER 4
KING OF THE SNOWS
In twelve days’ march from Balkh, we came to the fortified town of Talikun, in a fertile land close by a mountain of solid salt. Here the Mohammedan population is almost as wayward from the tenets of the Prophet as Nestorians from the teachings of the true Church. But they are great hunters as well as heavy topers of their thick, sweet wine; thievish but hospitable; half-civilized but good to look upon, with tall, well-molded bodies, ruddy skins, yellow to brown hair, and hazel eyes. I enjoyed meeting them on the roads and the close company of one of their prettiest daughters at the caravanserai at Qishm. Near the town stands the Mount of the Zend-Avestam, sacred to the Parsis, where burned the holiest fire in all the world, brought there by the hero Jamshid. Myself and Roxana—to my delight, the maid was named after very Alexander’s bride—lighted a fire of our own. It was not holy that I knew of, but most certainly beautiful, and it would glow in my memory for many a moon.
Beyond Qishm lay desolation as complete as it seemed without end, but we crossed it in three days. Then we came upon wonderful highlands, part of the great kingdom of Badakhshan under the Hindu Kush, and here I bought a marvelous red-bay mare with a white star on her forehead. It was the mark of Bucephalus, the seller told me, but I cared naught for that, when I had taken her down a rocky defile at full tilt. She was as sure-footed as a goat, swift as a mountain sheep, and I believed brave as a lion. I named her Roxana in remembrance of my good companion.
We moved among high mountains now, in the coolest and most bracing of air. We ate wild-sheep meat, the best in the world for flavor and strength-giving according to the people, wheat bread, and brook trout fried in walnut oil; we drank the cold, crystal-clear water in place of barley beer; and generally we thanked God for the life within our bosoms. Still we were not quite content with the common blessings of the days. On this cold, magnificent plateau, with manifold green parks that God laid out, there were mines of silver, mines of azure, and the richest mine in the world, for all we knew, producing the balas rubies of which very Venice had heard, red as pigeon blood, fiery as a hill girl’s heart, and almost as unobtainable as a roc’s egg.
If we could get hold of some of them, we could trade them for the favor of kings or the favors of their daughters. But the Emir owned the mines, amassing almost the whole output in his treasury, and selling only a few at extravagant prices. Only a very few went down the rathole, as the saying was. The Emir’s guards searched the mineworkers to their bungs; a guard caught with one was chained in the mine until he died, a poetic punishment that the Emir learned from the Tatar. If a slave girl was seen to wear one at the Court, the courtiers began bowing and kowtowing as though she would soon be queen.
You could wonder that no Tatar army had ridden hence, to loot the treasury and work the mine. The answer lay in the high, narrow passes, colder than Iceland, which alone gave entrance to the kingdom, and where a company of lean, wine-bibbling catapultists could hold off a button-nosed horde. Indeed the Emir remained one of the few independent monarchs in all Asia.