I opened the tent flap and looked up at the dust-dimmed moon. It seemed that I said something to her without words—made some sort of promise without thought. Then I tied the strings and returned to my place.
“Did Miranda—the Lady Linda—tell you any of her history after the Greek Angelos bought her and before you knew her?”
“She spoke of it to pass the time. Angelos tried to sell her to a perfume buyer of Byzantium, but without success. Then he sold her to a Syrian slave dealer named Abu Kyr.”
“Did she tell you the price?”
“When I asked, she told me. Fifteen hundred bezants.”
“Angelos could have done better, if he had faith. What happened to her then?”
“Abu Kyr brought her to Isfahan, intending to sell her to the great Emir there. Instead he sought Baram of Bukhara, buying treasures to sell to the Great Khan and his couriers, and Baram bought her.”
“At what price?”
“When I asked, she told me. Two thousand bezants.”
“Then her boast was true.”
“Effendi?”
“At what price did Baram hold her?”
“I heard him say he would get three thousand bezants—or dinars—from a buyer for the Great Khan. This was before she got so thin.”
“Three thousand! One who owned her sold her for a thousand and thought he’d done well.”
“He was a blind fool, effendi.”
“Sheba, your mistress—but she’s not so any more except by my sufferance—bade you take pleasure in me and give me pleasure. If it is my desire, it is your duty as a slave. But if I do not command it, and leave it to your preference, will you do so or not?”
“I cannot, lord.”
“Why not?”
“Even though you have bought me, the Lilla Keiberia is still my mistress.”
“You said her love for me died on the desert.”
“But the dead walk sometimes. I have seen and heard them.”
“Without your meaning to, you’ve given me hope. No, I seized upon it and made it my captive, but you’ve fed it when it wouldn’t eat from my hands.”
“Is it like a lion cub, or a fledgling sand dove from a nest?” Sheba broke into a shout of laughter.
“The listeners about our tent will think I’ve done well. What will your mistress think?”
“Do you think she would deign to listen, effendi? Your hope is dove-frail if you know her no better than that.”
“You speak too boldly, but I’ll not reprove you, only give you an order. Arrange for her to meet me alone, as safely as possible, at tomorrow’s rest.”
“She won’t do it, effendi. She made a promise to her gods to be a dutiful slave.”
“In that case, arrange for my coming to her, taking her by surprise. Leave the tent flap untied and do all else for my ease and safety. Take pains, and let me know when all is ready. If you do your part well, I’ll give you Persian sweetmeats. If you fail, you may have only a half-measure of water on the next day’s march. If she cries an alarm, I will shield you if I can. Now you have my leave to go.”
Sheba rose and touched her forehead with both hands.
“Effendi, if I were not bound to her, I would ask for sweetmeats of another sort.”
With a deep-throated bubbling laugh, she vanished in the darkness.
3
The office I had given Sheba was no sinecure. We camped on a clay flat, shadowless except for heaps and crude windbreaks of sun-baked bricks, probably the rubble of some long-ago military post. Happily the well was deep, clean, and abundant, but its only help was to give her an excuse to stay up late, washing her own, her mistress’s, and her master’s clothes. It was by no means certain that Nicolo would stay in bed through any term of hours. To transport our new inlay of goods, we had bought some of Baram’s camels and hired their tenders; the newcomers had not yet settled down and required frequent surveillance. Also, Baram kept spies among the drovers.
Nicolo ordered his new slave’s tent erected within thirty paces of his own. But because both were near the well, the seeming blow to my hopes might prove a boon. Sheba would go to her clothes-washing soon after nightfall. Nicolo should be sound asleep by then; and if he rose in the next hour, she was sure to see him in the light of her dung fire, in which case she was going to run to him with a loud cry of Shair Allah (The Justice of God)! By pleading for holy water to protect her and her mistress from night demons—we were never without a ewer blessed by Nestorian priests—she hoped to arrest him while I beat a quick, furtive retreat.
I had enjoyed the hatching of the crude but sound plan—actually, any working or mere plotting against Nicolo was joy to me—and I did not dwell on its quite possible if not probable uselessness. For instance, Sheba had told Miranda not to fasten the door ropes, since she would be close by and going back and forth. But if Miranda did fasten them, from nervousness, I could not expect to get in. If I succeeded in entering, I could not even guess how soon I must come forth.
The last dusk died in the seventh hour; the decaying, jaundiced moon would not rise until the tenth. When the coast appeared clear, I moved too swiftly to be oppressed by my thudding heart. The strings of the close-drawn curtain had not been fastened, but the thick dark I had counted on within held a pale, bluish-yellow globe around the jewellike flame of a taper. Miranda lay in its umbrage. I made out her shape and guessed at her white face and a ghost of highlight on her hair.
“Who’s there?” she asked in Turki-Persian. Her voice was low, not it seemed from stealth but by nature.
“Marco Polo.”
“If you are looking for Sheba, she’s at the well.”
“I know it—keeping watch.”
“What do you want?”
I started to say humbly, “Only to talk to you.” But that was a mere fraction of my wants and maybe the time was short, and maybe Fate would give me no more or less than that, so I spoke the one Venetian word that came upon my lips, springing there from my heart.
“You.”
She did not seem arrested or amazed.
“You can’t have me now, Marco,” she answered in the Venetian tongue. “It’s too late.”
“It’s not too late as long as we both live.”
She gave a muted laugh. I knew her by it as well as by her song.
“That might not be very long, if you’re caught here,” she said.
“If it comes to killing, Nicolo will die, not me.”
“You were always a great boaster.”
I knew her by her truthtelling, too.
“I have to be to win.” It was true, but I did not know why.
“It may come to that. You hate each other far more than I ever realized. I smelled it on both of you when he brought you into my tent to show me to you. That was an act of hatred on his part. This may be one on your part.”
“What may be?”
“Your coming here. You don’t want me any more. You wanted me only when you were young and innocent, and even then you wanted something more. You said you did, just now; but what you meant was, you want Nicolo’s slave girl. I don’t care about that, but is it fairly safe for you to come here? Don’t lie to yourself or to me.”
“Fairly safe, yes.”
“Are you taking into consideration that he’s even more cunning than you are—at least he’s far more experienced in cunning—and may have seen through our pretending the other night and may be sneaking up on us this instant?”
“If he had suspected we had been lovers, he would have tried to keep me from buying Sheba.”
Miranda laughed again, then her eyes grew big. “You still have a grain of innocence,” she told me in a different voice, utterly lovely in my ears. Then she paused, fought and won a little battle of some kind, and went on in the almost sprightly tone of a moment ago. “It’s just what he would do, Marco, to encourage you. And you know, if he wanted an excuse to kill you, catching you with me would afford him the best he could ever find.”
Deep inside my brain I felt a slight shock, as from the impact of an idea.