“Will you play it for me, Linda?” came Nicolo’s quiet voice, speaking in Turki-Persian.
“Yes, my lord.”
Nicolo put it into her hands. Her attendant had not cleaned them in the fragmentary toilet making and their dirt touched me almost as much of their gauntness and seeming frailness. But with movements bold and strong she plucked the strings.
I heard the opening chords of an almost forgotten melody. Then the maiden Linda began to sing in a language I could neither speak nor understand, although I knew it was her native tongue. It was a ballad of her own country that Miranda had translated into my native tongue and sung to me long ago. Her voice was low and glimmering with beauty and the words came soaring out of the past, across the mountains and deserts, back into my heart.
Pikeman O pikeman, red from the fray,
Did you pass a bold knight in battle to-day?
He promised to wed, I gave him a flower,
O fetch him to me, my Young Rob o’ the Tower.
I fear he’ll not wed you, fair maiden of Devon,
He died in the battle and rode on to Heaven;
And gifts that you gave him in sweet unbless’d hour
Will fetch you to Fire, not to Rob o’ the Tower.
2
In the business that followed, Nicolo represented both Maffeo and me while we stayed in the background. He had met several of Baram’s kinsmen during a stay in Bukhara on the earlier passage; over cups of long-stored sherbet, he got us better bargains than we had hoped. In addition to the Nubian girl, Nicolo bought for me silk stuffs, mainly gold and silver brocades, to the amount of a thousand dinars. The quantity was as much or more than I could have got in Bukhara for the same sum; in effect it had been transported free across fifteen hundred miles of mountain and desert. If I did not make a thousand dinars’ profit, I would miss my guess.
Nicolo and Maffeo bought all the remainder of Baram’s offerings for five thousand dinars.
With some bought camels and hired tenders transporting our new goods, we set forth in the biting cold of midnight. I did not seem to look twice at the curtained fitter, heaped with felts, atop an old, shaggy, perfectly trained riding camel belonging to Nicolo. I was deep in wonder, which is a deeper thing than amazement or astonishment.
We had traveled about two hours when the shape of a horseman showed on the moonlit road behind us. To behold such a figure, silent and solitary in this empty waste, flung our hearts into our mouths; he was very Death coming to summon us, for all we knew. But before long he had turned into a common-looking fellow named Zurficar we had seen at the rest ground. Some fashion of Tatar calling himself a Turk, and bound for Inner Mongolia, he had taken a puny captain’s position in Baram’s caravan. It developed that he had been torn between his desire to continue his journey and his desire to turn back with his chief. The former urge prevailed upon him shortly after our departure, whereupon he set out to overtake us. So however ordinary he might look, he was of extraordinary courage, or he would not have journeyed that road of bones alone in the dead of night.
Nicolo’s face lay in shadow as he spoke to him, and from his voice alone I got the impression that he took no pleasure in the addition to our company, and even lacked a little of his usual self-mastery. However, when Zurficar explained that he had served the Great Khan in Mongolia and knew the country fairly well, the cold shoulder warmed.
The night waned, the cold dawn cracked, the pale sun rose, the genial warmth turned to heat. Just before noon we came to a good well, one of the best on the road, the waters cool from underground seepage from distant mountains, and abundant not only to slake the thirst of man and beast, but to wash hands and faces and a few clothes, and even the bodies of us three merchants and the slave girls. The camp stilled in the early afternoon and remained hushed until early night. When I had wakened and eaten, I sent word by Nicolo’s servant for Sheba to come to my tent.
I had had it pitched well away from any other, which had caused the cameleers to exchange nods and winks. To reply to their jests I got out my ram’s horns and posted them beside the entrance, and since these were the largest they had ever seen, the men roared with mirth; perhaps it was a good healthful human sound that I thought God liked to hear, and perhaps the desert demons stopped their evil occupations to listen and snarl with hate and perchance tremble with fear.
I lighted a small palm-oil lamp. The flap of my doorway jerked, and I drew it aside. Sheba, wearing a barracan of gaily striped cloth, threw back her facecloth and raised her hands to her bowed head.
“You may take your ease,” I told her in the Arabic of Oman.
She understood me and squatted on the felt floorcloth. I paid her no more attention for a matter of ten minutes, partly so she could familiarize herself with my appearance and the surroundings, partly to provide the silence that any lecherous cameleer, eavesdropping in the dusty dark, might well expect. Then I blew out the lamp and coming close to her, spoke in hushed tones.
“Sheba, do you know why I bought you?” I asked.
“Effendi?”
I reworded the question, employing the simplest forms and words. She tossed her chin in a sign of understanding and pleasure.
“I do not know, but I guess.”
This meaning I derived from the girl’s bewildering mixture of base Arabic with some Nubian language. Still I did not switch to Turki-Persian, in which she had appeared fluent: I wanted her to make a habit of mind of addressing me in this dialect, so if ever she spoke unwisely in others’ hearing no harm would be done. By patience on both our parts and Sheba’s quick ear and tongue, we were soon getting along without much trouble.
“What was your guess?” I managed to ask.
“You want me to carry secrets between you and the Lady Linda.”
“Did she tell you so?”
“When I asked her, she said it might be so, but it would bring no good to anyone, and likely harm.”
“What made you suspect it?”
“She told me of a lover she had had in—in some city in Frankistan—and that we might meet him on our journey. When I saw your face, I believed you were the one. When I could look into Lady Linda’s face, I was almost sure.”
“What did she say when I sent for you tonight?”
“I beg not to answer.”
“You must answer. You are bound to me, now.”
“I remain bound to her as well. Lord, she told me if you desire me for your concubine, to give and take every pleasure that I could, for the road was long and lonely, and we might soon all be dead, and she was sorry that I had been made to attend her all the way from Samarkand.”
“Do you think she spoke from her heart?”
“How could I doubt it, effendi? She told me that she had begged you to take her virginity, and instead you took a thousand pieces of gold; but since I was not a virgin, and you had no sum to lose, you might be more yielding.”
“Did she speak in bitter jest?”
“No, effendi. She spoke quietly, with her small, beautiful smile.”
“Do you love her, Sheba?”
“She’s the beat of my heart.”
“Do you think she has the wasting sickness?”
“Has the slender-legged gazelle of the Libian Desert? She has made herself thin by much walking and little eating, so she can better endure thirst and hunger and great heat.”
“It is cold now, and she should fatten. Why did she tell the signor she had the wasting sickness?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was not that the signor might sell her to me?”
“I think not, effendi.”
“Why not? Has her love for me turned to hate? Speak truly, or I’ll lay on the kurbash.”
“She told me only that you did not call her, effendi, as you promised, and so I think her love for you died on the desert.”
“How could I call her——?”
Then my throat cords twisted, and I stopped. Miranda’s own words in farewell rang out of the past: “When you lie cold and lonely, call me, and I’ll come.”