Aziz asked if there were any police in the area and Ismail told him that a year or so ago there had been two, and that they had been shot. He related the way robbery would work once we were in the mountains: we’d be approached and asked to allow ourselves to be looted. If we refused our interrogators would withdraw, and we would proceed until an ambush put an end to our obstinacy and to us. This region’s local name, he added, translated as “the most advanced point from which one is captured.” He claimed to be looking forward to reaching that part of the country in which one was less frequently murdered. During a rest break, while I stretched, he peered over at me with a mild, untrustworthy expression. And Aziz, when helping me up onto my mount, informed me in a low voice that while our guide was a bad man he would see to it that I came to no harm. Yet as I rode I understood how exhilarating it could be to climb into a country which was not considered safe.
At the gathering for my sixteenth birthday, my mother began her toast by noting that it seemed to take acquaintances about a month in my presence to overcome their first impression of my plainness. She said that she thought that it was perhaps because my face was more intelligent than pretty, though she had always held that my complexion was milky smooth. That night Vera reminded me that the only thing to do when something unpleasant happened was to pretend it hadn’t, and in turn I reminded her of the fact that she was the beautiful daughter, a point to which, as always, she offered no rebuttal.
Our mother’s parents had settled in Italy at the time of the Risorgimento, when Tuscany was attracting all varieties of expatriates. She liked to explain that they’d enjoyed such a thriving salon that as a little girl she had found herself at one affair accompanied on the piano by Franz Liszt. She’d had her portrait painted by Edwin Bale, and was widely admired for her winsomeness and flair. As opposed to our father, who was so reticent we might forget he was present. She described herself as more of an enthusiast for projects than for children, and would regale the room with the story of how, having brought me home from the hospital, she’d been dismayed to discover she’d made no provision for my food, my clothes, or my sleeping. By the time Vera was born, a year later, our parents had moved to the pretty hill town of Asolo, and my sister later remarked from her sickbed how much of our childhood had been spent watching adults pack or unpack great trunks. It had been only a small surprise, then, when our mother left us to join the Count di Roascio, in order, she said, to partner in his philanthropic enterprise of providing employment for the area encompassing his family’s provincial seat. Later she’d had us join them in their home and, filled with happiness herself, had never noticed that our lives were heaped about in miniature ruins.
There followed a succession of Italian governesses, all erratically trained when it came to schooling, so much so that we quickly learned how to teach ourselves. We’d seen our father only when circumstances allowed. Alone in his emptied house, he gave the impression of being perpetually surrounded by seed catalogs, and as a means of conversing with him we turned ourselves into expert horticulturalists. On walks he taught us topography and geology. With animals he showed us how all of the feelings we couldn’t put into words might be expressed through our hands, so that any dog or horse or child could understand, whatever our seeming reticence, how fiercely we cherished their affection. So that even today I’m still happiest just sitting and smoothing a donkey’s ears in the sun.
The Assassins were a Persian sect, a branch of the Shia, and they seem to have entered history in 1071 when their founder and first Grand Master, Hassan-i Sabbah, experimented with systematic murder as a political tool, his innovation proving so successful that his ascendancy quickly spread from northern Persia all the way to the Mediterranean. Legends grew of a secret garden where he drugged and seduced his followers, and held forth on the uses of both assassination and the liberal arts, and it was the stumbling attempts of the Crusaders’ chronicles to render the word for hashish users — the Hashishin — that gave the sect its name. They were the terror of their neighbors and at once inspired and intimidated the great Christian fighting orders, including the Templars, through the diabolical patience and subterfuge with which they operated. To their enemies they were ubiquitous; to their victims, invisible. Inexorably they extended their domain eastward to the Caspian, where they raised their central stronghold of Alamut, the fortress that symbolized their power until it fell to the Mongol armies some two hundred years later.
They’d become an obsession during Vera’s first convalescence. In the dead of winter she had slipped out of the house and wandered off into the hills, where a search party found her lying in the snow. She’d been distraught since having learned, four years after our arrival at the Count’s house, of his plan to become her suitor. It was as if we’d both been struck with a lash. Our mother when asked had replied that she knew nothing of his intentions, and that what Vera did was her own affair; but when Vera in response had begged to be sent abroad to study sculpture, she’d been sharply reminded that neither her family nor the Count possessed the funds for that sort of adventure.
The pneumonia had almost destroyed her, and as she convalesced I read to her at her bedside. We’d worked through the Greek myths and Siegfried sagas of our childhood and our mother had begun ferrying in volumes from the Count’s library as well. At first Vera forbade their use but after a week or so seemed too despairing even for that, and late one night after a particularly dispiriting relapse we both found ourselves horribly engrossed by William of Tyre’s chronicle, in which Henry II, Count of Champagne, considering an alliance against the Abbasid, visited the Assassin stronghold of Al-Kahf, where in order to demonstrate his authority their Grand Master beckoned to two of his adherents, who immediately flung themselves over the ramparts to their deaths.
The map was from the Survey of India series, four miles to the inch, and manifested its inaccuracy even in the few features it cited. It offered no hint of the mountains squarely before us. Polo’s account, however, had thus far been borne out, its verification expedited by our use of the same method of transport. I resolved to create my own map as I went along, calling a halt three times a day to mark salient features while Ismail dipped into his cheese with an expression that suggested he was still awaiting a lull in the general perversity of my behavior.
It was gratifying to register that we were not marked on any map. For another week we negotiated naked rock rounded by the weather and without vegetation. To the southeast began some desolate and impressively dismaying salt marshes along a bitter stream that spooked the mules. For one stretch we had to unload their saddlebags and drag them by the halter ropes while Aziz shouted into their ears distressing facts about their parentage. We came upon great concentrations of Aghul and camelthorn, as well as bitter colocynth low to the ground. We saw a strange large hole whose bottom was lost to shadow. We rode in a dust storm lasting so long that after we stopped the next morning I discovered beside me two low mounds of reddish sand that revealed themselves in the gathering light to be the sleeping forms of my retainers.
We rode into the evenings, Ismail singing more Kurdish songs while we plodded along in the moonlight. I was stunned each daybreak by how the excess of light seemed to smooth away all before it.
Finally we began the ascent of a steep ravine whose shale slopes offered every few miles a smallish larkspur or some white Aethionema. What looked like yellow heather in the washes of dry gullies were disclosed to be great carpetings of thorns. Rows of flustered little birds took flight as we rode past, and circled back round and resettled once we were gone. With each day my companions’ unease increased. And in the evenings they grouped themselves ever more tightly around me on the ground to guard my rest.