My bow rounded. Iskander gained speed. A slight action of my fingers freed the string and the long arrow with its broad head of whetted steel sped smoothly on its way. I was not fixed to shoot again, lest the sudden movements make me lose my balance, so I held my stand, trusting all to the well-loosed shaft. As it struck and plunged deep, the great ram rose on his hind legs, his horns in a magnificent last flourish against the sky.
Giantlike he toppled, but with a final wrench of his body, he fell with his head toward me. Kingly still, he raised his head to look at me. Slowly it lowered, not as though cast down by the hand of Death, but from the weight of a crown he could no longer bear.
CHAPTER 5
VOICES ON THE DESERT
Dropping down and down from the Pamir, we watched the snow fields and naked rock and windy grass slopes give way to parklands and forests and mountain meadows, while the weather slowly warmed.
It would cool eftsoon. The fourth summer since our spring departure from Venice was waning as inconspicuously as a common moon. But in spite of necessary rests and much unavoidable waiting, these more than three years had gained us about two-thirds the distance to Peking. Nicolo and Maffeo Polo had journeyed by another route and so had traveled no part of this road, this long road from the Levant outward, and they knew no better than I what to expect, and rarely better how to cope with it. I had become so great a strength to the company that Nicolo might save my life in some deadly pass from sheer practicality, and I was almost sure that he would not try to take it until we had crossed the last river.
A curious change had come over my mind, although so gradually I could not remember when it began. From the first I had refrained from looking back to Venice, refusing to dwell on people and events I had known there, and of late this disregard had changed to a kind of forgetfulness. At first they had come to visit my dreams, but I paid them little heed, never went back to visit them, and in time they had ceased to trouble me. It had been my desire, and it represented a victory of my will, although sometimes I felt it might prove a costly one. Lately I had found myself no longer looking forward to the Court of Kublai Khan; indeed I did not worry with matters beyond the immediate reach of road. I had no occupation, no identity, but that of a traveler. I was in no haste, neither did I want to tarry. I cared not for the next year or the next moon, but lived for the day, the hour, sometimes it seemed for no longer than the present moment.
Far and away from the far-flung Arabic civilization and its remote outposts, I heard and spoke no more its rich and beautiful tongue except as it larded Turki-Persian, the lingua franca of Central Asia, now merging into Turki-Tatar. Thus I had less cause to remember Mustapha Sheik. And if I had lost beautiful Venice, the Bride, the very Saki of the Sea, behind a lost horizon, why should I try to keep one small, yellow-haired maiden I had met there? So it was neither in her memory nor to obtain forgetfulness that at Kashgar, whose name Venice had never heard, I took a Bride of the Oasis; it was merely the custom of the road. I kept her for ten days in the caravanserai, ten more among my baggage eastward, then sent her back, weeping, with a westbound caravan.
Also in Kashgar I traded for half a gallon of jade, black, white, yellow, vermilion, and a piece or two of dark green with golden veins. It had been fished by jade divers from the Kysyk So, and it would pour through my hands and shine before my eyes long after I had forgotten my bride’s name.
At summer’s end we went to Yarkand, where almost every person has a great swelling on the side of his throat and very large, bright eyes. In the early fall, we gained the great and wonderful oasis of Khotan. The best of the fruit was already harvested; what remained was grateful to my eyes—so strangely clinging to the boughs, or heaped in baskets, red or purple or golden, as though we were back in Italy instead of down from the Pamirs—and sweet to my lips. The yellow stalks of ripe grain bent down from the weight of their bearded heads.
Beyond the oasis lies the approach to the terrible Takla Makan that sweeps east and north to join with the Gobi in what the people call the Kingdom of Evil. I thought at first this was a figure of speech, but was soon to learn it was a literal expression of their belief. They thought that in some old conflict between God and the Devil, the Prince of Darkness had seized upon this vast domain, a year’s journey long from Khotan northeast to the Manchu rivers and generally half as broad, perhaps greater than all Europe west of Constantinople.
The Devil had turned back the rain-bearing clouds, so except for some mountaintops reaching close to heaven, and still disputed ground, there was no rain, no snow, no dew for a thousand leagues. The land was turned into one vast melancholy waste with a few seepage-fed wells along its fringes, a suitable place for his legions of demons, imps, monsters, and all sorts of evil spirits.
It was said that only his worshipers could pass freely and safely, after performing flagitious rites. All other human beings, and Christians especially, entered the kingdom at great hazard to their lives and souls.
From Khotan to far Cherchen, the caravan road crosses a high plateau at the feet of the Kunlun Mountains. To the southward we caught glimpses of peaks rearing up and piercing the ethereal cirrus clouds, and one, called Muztagh Ata, the name meaning White Mountain, was sublimely beautiful. A few cattle drivers have cots along the road, and secret water holes away on the desert to which they fly when the Devil-worshipers come riding. Now the autumn winds shrilled across its sands and hard-baked clay.
This was an outer borderland of the dread Takla Makan. At Cherchen we loaded food and water for a three-day forced march, and God knew you would think that desolate stretch lay out of the world. Instead it was a corridor between the two realms, a kind of Land of Nod. At its end lay the thriving city of Lob, where there were wells and even baths, shops and caravanserais, and temples to Buddha, Allah, and the Christian God. Luxuries of most sorts could be had at exorbitant prices; only the favors of the beautiful fair-haired Turkman damsels were dirt-cheap.
Yet we knew well, by means of inklings beyond our common sense, that Lob was no common city, part of man’s world. No one dwelt here; the people came, hung for a while on the brink of Gehenna, went away, went mad, or died. Many became mystics and dreamers; others fashioned new gods and strange cults; a great number practiced sorcery and divination. A good part of the folk within the walls belonged to caravans resting here after the terrible crossing, but they had seen and heard what is not good for the souls of men, and it was a common thing for them to linger on through weeks and months and years, wasting their substance, and never return to their homes. An equal number, eastward bound, reveled in the fleshpots ere they set forth; but it came to pass that some never found the strength and the will power, each day finding a good reason to wait another day, till their bales too were empty; then they borrowed or stole for a season, and disappeared. Perhaps the Devil met them in the dead of night and persuaded them to join his legions. There were strange things. . . .
“Heed me well,” spake a Nestorian priest to Nicolo, Maffeo, and me on the eve of our setting-forth. “Not tomorrow night, or the next, or perhaps for seven nights, will you hear from the demons dwelling in the Kingdom of Evil; but they will be about you ever, and no later than the tenth night they will move against you. You will hear what seems a great company of people out in the dark. The jingle of harness, the creak of ropes, the shouts of the cameleers, even the shuffle of sand—all this will come clearly to your ears. But leave not the road or the rest ground to search for them. They will lead you to your death. And on no account shall any man straggle from the company. If his body is ever found, it will be beheaded or dismembered or deboweled by a clawlike hand.”