Early in the 1300s, attending the fair at Beaucaire in the south of France, they encountered a group of people whose proclivity for travel made Kudra and Alobar seem as though they were chained to a stump. These nomads rumbled from town to town, fair to fair, in brightly colored wagons. Variously called Logipciens, Bohemians, or Gypsies, they were ostensibly itinerant metalworkers, but music and magic were their true vocations. Although the Gypsies were new to Europe, Kudra had known them in India and could converse in their dialect. Moreover, her pigmentation was the same shade as theirs. Their chief invited her to join them. Reluctantly, he agreed to include Alobar.
For the next half-century (time flies when you're having fun), they lived as Gypsies, bumping over the quasi-roads of the continent in a red and orange donkey cart, sleeping in a tent of woven fabrics kept precariously in place by stones, warming themselves with tezek, that charming fuel made of cow dung and straw. They indulged in some serious horseshoeing and harness making, but more frequently their band earned its living amusing, and sometimes fleecing, visitors to holy sites, festivals, and fairs. The Gypsies danced, they sang and strummed, they navigated a pea beneath a walnut shell so slickly you'd wager your last sou that it was beneath the one next door. When they shook their tambourines and sistrums, in voluptuous poses, feudal barons found them irresistible, but that made them all the more hateful in the eyes of the pious and grave, a reaction that was for Alobar a source of endless delight. Kudra chided him for it mildly, but he was rarely happier than when savoring the fear and disgust that welled up in proper Christians at the sight of their rattling, tinkling troupe.
The opinion that “all good things must come to an end” is a confession of fatalism that the immortalist hand of Alobar would never sign. Nonetheless, he realized his days as a Gypsy were numbered when he surprised several of the chief's sons ransacking his and Kudra's belongings, searching for their presumed “elixir of youth.” As a matter of fact, their tent and wagon had been broken into thrice before, but Alobar had written it off to routine Gypsy thievery and to the Gypsies' insistence on treating them as second-class citizens. Claiming to be the direct descendants of the biblical Cain, the Gypsies considered themselves a race elite. It was obvious that their ethnocentricity would never allow complete acceptance of outsiders, no matter how compatible. They not only stole from Kudra and Alobar, but they also served them last at communal meals and required them to perform occasional menial chores. For example, on Saturdays Kudra was expected to clean the chief's wagon and launder his many brilliant scarves.
It was while she was sweeping out the executive cart one day that she noticed that the chief's wife's famous crystal ball had been left uncovered. For a while Kudra managed to ignore the naked sphere, but at last curiosity got the best of her and she peered into it, shyly at first, then so piercingly that the chief's laundry could have been hung out to dry on her gaze. She saw nothing in the ball. There was nothing to see. It was, after all, a mere lump of polished glass. As a point of departure for the psyche, however, a crystal ball has merit, although a mandala, a seashell, or a cigarette pack can be as effectively employed. There are apparently few limitations either of time or space on where the psyche might journey, and only the customs inspector employed by our own inhibitions restricts what it might bring back when it reenters the home country of everyday consciousness. When Kudra shut her eyes to rest them after their intense probing of the crystal innards, a vivid scene unfolded in her mind. She saw Alobar and herself, bound with rope, in the process of being tortured by the Gypsies, who were demanding a map to the fountain of youth.
When she returned to their tent, Kudra told Alobar of her vision. “That settles it,” he said. That night, when the moon had set, they stole away. As they disappeared into the woods, they glanced back to see shadowy figures advancing on their tent.
In the excitement of their escape, Kudra had neglected to inform Alobar that she had consulted the crystal ball a second time ere she left the chief's wagon that Saturday. A finely detailed scene had again flashed before her mind's eye as she rested after examining the crystal. This second vision seemed far less urgent, which is why she put it aside, but it was stranger, more difficult to interpret. In it, a tall black man, blacker by several shades than she, was beckoning to her, laughing all the while. The black man wore the oddest clothes she had ever seen, and the oddest item in his wardrobe was his cap. It turned out to be not a cap at all, but a swarm of bees.
Although finished with Gypsies, per se, Alobar and Kudra retained their vagabond life-style, working the European fair circuit on their own. Alongside booths overflowing with cotton, furs, metals, wine, tea, Venetian glass, meat, produce, and livestock, they sold or traded aromatics to a populace that was beginning to appreciate pretty fragrances, despite — or because of — the fact that it had yet to accept the concept of the bath. When business was poor, Kudra slipped into her Gypsy skirt and danced the dodole, Alobar accompanying her on tambourine. Less than approving of the leers his wife's dancing elicited from fairgoers of masculine gender, it nonetheless amused Alobar to meditate upon her real birthdate as she undulated those secretly ancient hips and loins; and, of course, it invariably elevated his mood when the priests came by to consign them to hell for their detestable display.
Actually, the priests proved to be good customers after Kudra decided to start manufacturing combustible cones from the raw aromatics in which she customarily dealt. Influenced by the Byzantines, the Western Church had become increasingly fond of the ritualistic burning of incense, ostensibly as an evocation of the sweet oxygens of heaven, but more likely a way of combating the concentrated funk of sweaty congregations. It appeared as if incense might become a rage in the cathedrals of Paris, so Alobar was not overly surprised when Kudra announced one morning that she wished to settle in the French capital and open a permanent shop.
“A shop might be a smart idea,” agreed Alobar, “but when you say 'permanent,' you mean, of course, permanent compared to our usual knocking about.” They had been on the road for several centuries.
“No,” said Kudra. “I mean permanent.”
“I needn't remind you of the troubles in store should we hang around long enough to flaunt our perpetual freshness before the envious eyes of our steadily decaying fellow citizens. Ahem. We can realistically expect fifteen, maybe twenty years as Parisian incense merchants. But that will be a welcome change, a nice recess, and when the time comes, we shall move on.”
“I am not moving on. I am finished with moving on. I want a shop, I want a home, and I want to stay there.”
“Stay,” repeated Alobar. “How long, exactly, do you intend to stay?”
“As long as. . I don't know. As long as it damn well pleases me.”
“Well, it better not please you beyond fifteen years or so, because when it dawns on the neighbors that we aren't aging—”
“But maybe I will age.”
"What?"
Kudra gave him a look that you could spread on a bun. Her words, however, pricked him like the knife that does the spreading. “We are capable of aging, if we want to. We stopped the aging process and we can start it again. Haven't we fallen into a rut, being the same age for over five — or is it six — hundred years? I don't know about you, but I am a little fed up with it. I really wouldn't mind aging again.”