“Do you think I could not tell?” Kagig raged, as I was later told. “She wept all during the ceremony, behind her veil, for she knew what I was soon to discover! She wept when we went together to our chamber, for the moment of revelation was at hand! She wept as she and I undressed, for she was at the brink of her perfidy’s disclosure! She wept even more loudly when I embraced her. And at the crucial moment, she did not give the cry that must be cried!So I investigated, and I could feel no maidenhead in her, and I saw no spot of blood upon the bed, and—”
One of Seosseres’ male relatives interrupted him, shouting, “Oh, mongrel dog of an Armeniyan, do you not remember?”
“I remember that I was promised a virgin! Not your shouting nor her weeping can change the fact that she had been had by some man before me!”
“You accursed defamer! You nothing!” shouted the Circassians, frothing from the lips. “Our sister Seosseres has never been near a man before!” They were all trying to get at Kagig, but other guests were holding them back.
“Then she has made love to a phallocrypt!” Kagig shouted wildly. “A tent peg or a cucumber or one of those haramlik carvings! But that is the only kind of thing that will ever love her again!”
“Oh, putridity! Oh, spew!” the Circassians bellowed, struggling against the holders-back. “Have you harmed our sister?”
“I should have!” he grumbled. “I should have cut out her duplicious tongue and thrust it up between her legs. I should have boiled oil and poured it into the defiled hole. I should have nailed her alive to the palace gate.”
At that, several of his own relatives seized him and shook him roughly, demanding, “Never mind that! What did you do?”
He fought loose of them, and petulantly shrugged his clothes back into an approximation of place. “I did only what a cuckolded husband is entitled to do, and I shall sue for annulment of this mock marriage!”
Not just the Circassians, but also the Arabs and Armeniyans shouted at him every kind of filthy name and revilement. There was so much commotion and tearing of hair and beards and rending of garments that it was several minutes before anyone could collect himself to speak coherently and tell the detestable husband what, in his drunkenness, he had done and then forgotten. It was his father, the Ostikan Hampig, who, weeping, told him :
“Oh, unfortunate Kagig, it was youwho deflowered the maiden! Last night, on your wedding eve. You thought it would be clever and amusing to anticipate your husbandly rights. You went upstairs and forced her to bed, and you boasted of it afterward in this very room. It cost me dearly to persuade these her people not to slay you and anticipate her widowhood. The Princess is guiltless of any sin. It was you! You yourself!”
The cries in the hall redoubled:
“Pig!”
“Carrion!”
“Putrescence!”
And Kagig turned pale and his thick lips twitched, and for the first time in my knowledge of him he acted like a man. He showed genuine chagrin and he called for retribution as if he meant it, crying, “May the coals of Hell lie hot upon my head! I truly loved the beautiful Seosseres, and I have cut off her nose and her lips!”
6
MY father plucked at my sleeve, and he and I and my uncle slipped discreetly through the roiling crowd and out of the dining hall.
“This is not bread to my teeth,” said my father, frowning. “The Ostikan is in bad trouble, and any sovereign in trouble can make things trebly troublous for everyone around him.”
I said, “Surely he cannot blame us for anything.”
“When the head hurts, the whole body may suffer. I think it best that we get our horses loaded for a departure at first light. Let us go to our chamber and start packing.”
There we were joined by the two Dominicans, who spoke loudly of their nausea and disgust at what Kagig had done, as if only they of us all had sensibilities to be offended.
“Ho ho,” said Uncle Mafìo without humor. “These are fellow Christians. You have yet to meet some real barbarians.”
“That is what most disturbs us,” said Brother Guglielmo. “We understand that such horrendous cruelties are common practices in farther Tartary.”
My father remarked placidly that he had known of atrocities having been committed in the West, as well.
“Nevertheless,” said Brother Nicolò, “we fear that we could not competently minister to such monsters as you would have us go among. We wish to be excused from our preaching mission.”
“Would you now?” My uncle coughed and hawked and spat. “You wish to desert before we are even underway? Well, wish all you like. We have committed ourselves, and so have you.”
Brother Guglielmo said frostily, “Perhaps Fra Nico did not put it strongly enough. We are not asking your permission, Messeri, we are telling you our decision. The conversion of such raw savages would require more—more authority than we possess. And the Scriptures say: Turn away thy foot from evil. He that touches pitch shall be defiled with it. We decline to accompany you any farther.”
“You could not have supposed that this would be an easy or enjoyable mission,” said my father. “As the old saying has it, nobody goes to Heaven on a cushion.”
“A cushion? Fichèvelo!” boomed my uncle, thereby suggesting a unique use for a cushion. “We have paid good money to buy horses for these two manfroditi!”
“Calling us filthy names is not likely to persuade us,” said Brother Nicolò with hauteur. “In the manner of the Apostle Paolo, we do shun profane and vain babblings. The ship which brought us here is now preparing to sail on to Cyprus, and we will be aboard.”
My uncle would have blustered on, probably using still more words that sacerdoti seldom get to hear, but my father gestured him to silence, saying:
“We wanted emissaries of the Church to prove to Kubilai Khan the worth and superiority of Christianity over other religions. These sheep in priestly clothing would hardly be the best examples to show him. Go to your ship, Brothers, and God go with you.”
“And God and you go quickly!”snarled my uncle. When they had gathered up their belongings and left the chambers, he grumbled, “Those two merely seized upon our venture as an excuse to get away from the wicked women of Acre. Now they welcome this ugly incident here as an excuse to get away from us. We were bidden to bring a hundred priests, and we got two spineless old zitelle. Now we do not even have them.”
“Well, it is less hurtful losing the two than a hundred,” said my father. “The proverb says it is better to fall from a window than from the roof.”
“I can bear losing those two,” said Uncle Mafìo. “But now what? Do we go on? Without any clerics for the Khan?”
“We promised him we would return,” said my father. “And we have already been long away. If we do not go back, the Khan will lose faith in any Westerner’s word. He may bar the gates against all traveling merchants, including us, and we are merchants before anything else. We have no priests to take, but we do have enough capital—our zafràn and Hampig’s musk—that we can multiply it yonder into an estimable fortune. I say yes, let us go on. We shall simply tell Kubilai that our Church was in disarray during this papal interregnum. It is true enough.”
“I concur,” said Uncle Mafìo. “We go on. But what about this sprout?”
They both looked at me.
“He cannot return yet to Venice,” my father mused. “And the English ship is sailing on to England. But he could change at Cyprus to some vessel headed for Constantinople … .”
I said quickly, “I will not sail even to Cyprus with those two poltroon Dominicans. I might be tempted to do them some injury, and that would be a sacrilege, and that would imperil my hope of Heaven.”