“I would like to see the wares,” I said.
“You may within the hour. We should be on our way soon after midnight—Baram will wait for morning to get what water seeps into the well during the night and then make a forced march to our last night’s rest. I’ve given him hashish to stimulate him for the effort, and enough to keep his men going eight or ten hours. Traveling light, they should make it without trouble. Now come with me.”
Nicolo walked beside me, talking spiritedly, to Baram’s pavilion. “This young man is very pleased with the sapphire,” Nicolo told him. “Now I’m taking him to see the gift that you gave to me.”
“It will look better when it’s polished, and it will improve in a warmer climate.”
Nicolo led me to a pavilion that I thought must be occupied by some merchant in his company. When he called for admittance in the Turki-Persian dialect, the door curtain was drawn aside by a dark, pink-palmed hand. The light showed first a young, shapely Nubian girl in the dress of an ayah. A small charcoal blazer took the chill from the felt-lined and carpeted chamber; plainly, Nicolo and Baram had had dealings here. But there was another girl lying on a heap of raspberry-colored rugs, wearing a padded coat over a shift of transparent Samarkand silk. Either the soft, yellow radiance seemed slow in falling upon her or else my eyes were briefly and strangely darkened.
As the maiden sat up, her hair fell about her shoulders. It was of much paler color than my sapphire, still the excuse for Nicolo’s jest. But at first blush it seemed strange that he would regard her of greater worth, she being so inordinately pale and gaunt from famine.
She was older, too, than the prime offerings in the slave markets. She was a young woman, not a child in her first flower—perhaps eighteen. Her eyes were pale brown and oddly set. I could hardly see her lips, they were so pallid. Her throat was slender and her breasts were small. Surely, surely I was lucky to be given a yellow emerald worth a thousand gold dinars instead of this wasted desert waif with yellow hair.
The maiden bowed her head and touched her hands to her brow in obeisance to her new master, then drew her coat closer in modesty before a visitor. When again she raised her eyes, she gazed straight forward without a trace of expression on her face. And now I could see the delicate carving of its bones.
The light fell full upon it and my eyes opened wide. Then I too was blinded by a sudden hope—almost a belief—bound round with terror. It had moved upon me under burning tears that Nicolo must not discern.
CHAPTER 6
THE STRANGERS
Little slave girl met midway on the ocean sea of sands, are you Miranda of England? Unless you give me a sign, I cannot know.
Not that my common sense rebels. It hammers within my head that although she and I have been parted for four summers, and that parting came to pass halfway across the world, all that time and all that way she too could have been bound for the Court of Kublai Khan. Does he not collect the rarest and most beautiful things on earth?
Thousands of his agents comb all Asia for the most beautiful virgins, slave or free. Could I wonder that Paulos Angelos or that some later buyer, discovering he had obtained a pearl perhaps beyond price, aspired to set her among her peers to his great gain? She and I started for the Levant within a few days of each other. Would it be a miracle that on the only eastward highway between the Tien Shan and the Kunlun Shan, we twain should meet again?
If this slave girl is Miranda, I went searching for her in the moonlit waste when she thought that her rendezvous was with Death. But was this strange encounter out of keeping with the pattern of my life and fate? Still, I cannot believe unless I am given a sign. For I kissed her good-by forever, put her out of my life, buried her among my lost memories and effaced her grave.
“Why man, your eyes are full of tears!”
This was Nicolo’s voice, breaking into my reverie, its tone mainly curious but holding the merest trace of suspicion.
“They’re full of dust from my ride and the lamplight burns it in.” I wiped them on my kerchief.
“Now take a good look at my new jewel, and tell me who got the best of it, you or me?”
Nicolo’s eyes were bright with happiness. I believed he had an inkling that his triumph was even greater than he knew. They were also extremely alert, but I did not fear self-betrayal as I made my search. I was used to guarding my countenance in his sight.
But Miranda was not so practiced. If this was she, she had known me at first glance; she had been expecting all these months and years to meet me again; if she had been in hearing of my voice when I came up to her caravan, she had recognized me then. The fact that she sat so still, with only a slight rise of color easily caused by the visit of strangers, argued that she was not Miranda. My dry eyes caught differences more marked than I had at first thought. Miranda could look like this after such a journey in space, time, and event, but so could many other maidens of her coloring, features, and form of equal beauty. Miranda was nearly twenty now, while this girl looked about eighteen. I had long ago put Miranda away because she had become the concubine of some prince, nobleman, or goldsealed merchant; I had divorced her phantom from my bed and her wraith from my board. Yet Nicolo had spoken of his new prize as a maiden. . . .
My heart cried that this was Miranda, but it had lied to me before. I asked a bold question in the Venetian tongue.
“What is her nationality, Signor Nicolo?”
“I haven’t inquired into that, as yet. She’s not a blonde Hun, as they are called—Kaffirs and the like from the Hindu Kush—and I doubt greatly if she’s any sort of Circassian. My best guess would be she’s a White Russian or even an Eastern German. But I’ve got the strangest sort of feeling, which my common sense denies, that she’s English.”
“What language does she speak?”
“She knows a few words in Turki-Persian. She didn’t respond to any other that I tried.”
“And you say Baram bought her to sell to Kublai Khan?”
“You seem greatly astonished by it, Marco. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you so taken aback.”
“She’s rather old to be a virgin, is she not?”
“She told Baram that she was, and he believed her. He’s no fool, and I believe him.”
“What is her name, signor?” And my heart stood still.
“He calls her Linda.”
Miranda . . . Linda. One might have derived from the other, but actually they were no more closely related by sound or letter than Maffeo and Marco.
“Signor, I don’t deny that the girl has beauty of an odd, wistful sort,” I said, my heart drumming my side. “No doubt it will be more marked when she puts on weight——”
“And when she has bathed,” Nicolo broke in, sniffing as he smiled. “So far she’s had only a little oil to remove the dust from her face and breast. They were covered with it when Baram showed me her—yet I was overjoyed by the gift. I believe I would have given my second-best balas ruby for her as she stood.”
“The ruby would bring about two thousand dinars, I believe.”
“Perhaps I’m bewitched, yet I’d lay you a hundred bezants that my eyes are as open and my business judgment as sound as ever in my life.”
“I would have chosen her myself, had I been given the choice of gifts. I see in her a pearl of first water, worth more as she stands than the sapphire. What do you see in her?”
“One of the most beautiful girls on earth.”
Little slave girl that I found on the mountain, must I deny you still? Yes, if only in self-protection. For if you are Miranda, what then? I have found you only to lose you again. And this time I have lost you not to some unknown whose face I cannot see; this face resembling mine, except it is aglow with triumph over your possession, is one I know full well. And it must be that I loved you more than I knew, for it is not true—my heart denies the evil prompting—that I would rather see you dead.