The Journeyer - Jennings Gary - Страница 47
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7
ON two nights in that country, we deliberately skirted the nearest karwansarai and camped outdoors on our own. It was something we would later have to do, when we got into even less populous regions, so my father and uncle thought I should start having the experience in an easy terrain and clement weather. Also, all three of us were by then getting extremely tired of filth and mutton. So, on each of those nights, we made pallets of our blankets, with our saddles for pillows, and laid a fire for cooking, and turned our horses free to graze, hobbling their front legs together so they could not wander far.
I had already learned from my much-traveled father and uncle some of the tricks of traveling. For example, they had taught me always to carry my bedding in one saddle pannier and my clothing in another, and always to keep the two apart. Since a traveler has to use his own blankets at every karwansarai, they inevitably get full of fleas and lice and bedbugs. Those vermin are a torment even when one sleeps the usual deep sleep of exhaustion, but they would be intolerable when one is dressed and awake and about. So, getting naked out of bed each morning, I would pick myself clean of the accumulated bugs, and then, having carefully kept my clothing apart from the bedding, I could put on either used or clean garments without their having been contaminated. When we did not stay at a karwansarai, but made our own camp, I learned other things. I remember, the first night we camped, I started to tilt one of the water bags for a good long drink, but my father stopped me.
“Why?” I said. “We have one of the blessed rivers of Eden with which to refill it.”
“Better get used to thirst when it is not necessary,” he said, “for you will have to when it is. Just wait and I will show you something.”
He built a fire of branches hacked with his belt knife from a convenient zizafun tree, the thorny wood of which burns hot and quickly, and he let it burn until the wood was all charcoal but not yet ashes. Then he scraped most of the charcoal to one side, and laid new branches on what was left, to make up the fire again. He let the removed charcoal cool, then crushed it to powder and heaped that onto a cloth and put the cloth like a sieve over the mouth of one of the pottery bowls we had brought. He handed me another bowl and bade me go and fill it from the river.
“Taste that Eden water,” he said, when I fetched it.
I did and said. “Muddy. Some insects. But not bad water.”
“Watch. I will make it better.” He poured it slowly through the charcoal and cloth into the other bowl.
When it had finished its slow trickling, I tasted it again from that bowl. “Yes. Clear and good. It even tastes cooler.”
“Remember that trick,” he said. “Many times your only source of water will be putrid or vile with salts or even suspect of poison. That trick will render it potable at least, and harmless, if not delicious. However, in the deserts where the water is worst, there is usually no wood to burn. Therefore, try always to carry a supply of charcoal with you. It can be used over and over again before it gets saturated and ineffectual.”
The reason we made our outdoor camp only twice during the journey down the Furat was that, while my father could strain insects and impurities out of the water, he could not remove the birds from the air, and I have mentioned that that country abounds in golden eagles.
On that day of which I speak, my uncle had, by good luck, come upon a large hare in the grass, and it stood immobile and trembling in that moment of surprise, and he whipped out and threw his belt knife, and killed the creature. It was on that account—having our own provender for a non-mutton meal—that we decided to make the first camp. But when Uncle Mafio skewered the skinned hare on a zizafun stick and hung it over the fire, and it began to sizzle and its aroma rose with the smoke into the air, we got as much of a surprise as the hare had got.
There came a loud, rustling, swooshing noise from out of the night sky above us. Before we could even look up, a blur of brown flashed in an arc down between us, through the firelight and upward into the darkness again. At the same instant, there was a sound like plop! and the fire flew all apart in a spray of sparks and ashes, and the hare was gone, complete with its stick, and we heard a triumphant barking yell, “Kya!”
“Malevolenza!” exclaimed my uncle, picking up a large feather from the remains of the fire. “A damned thieving eagle! Acrimonia!” And that night we had to make our meal on some hard salt pork from our packs.
The same thing, or very near it, happened the second time we stayed outdoors. That camping was occasioned by our having bought, from a passing family of bedawin Arabs, a haunch of fresh-killed camel calf. When we put that on the fire, and the eagles espied it, another of them came in a rush. The moment my uncle heard the first rustle of its pinions in the air, he made a dive to throw himself protectively over the cooking meat. That saved our meal for us, but nearly lost us Uncle Mafio.
A golden eagle has wings that spread wider than a man’s outstretched arms, and it weighs about as much as a fair-sized dog, so when it comes plummeting down—when it stoops, as the hawkers say—it is a formidable projectile. That one hit the back of my uncle’s head, fortunately only with its wing and not with its talons, but that was a blow heavy enough to knock him sprawling across the fire. My father and I dragged him out, and beat the sparks out of his smoldering aba, and he had to shake his head for a time to get his senses back, and then he cursed magnificently, until he went into a fit of coughing. Meanwhile, I stood over the spitted meat, ostentatiously swinging a heavy branch, and the eagles stayed away, so we did manage to cook and eat the meal. But we decided that, as long as we were in eagle country, we would stifle our revulsions and spend each night in a karwansarai from then on.
“You are wise to do so,” said the next night’s landlord to us, as we ate yet another nasty meal of mutton and rice. We were the only guests that night, so he conversed while he swept the day’s collected dust out the door. His name was Hasan Badr-al-Din, which did not suit him at all, for it means Beauty of Faith’s Moon. He was wizened and gnarled, like an old olive tree. He had a face as leathery and wrinkled as a cobbler’s apron, and a wispy beard like a nimbus of wrinkles that could not find room on his face. He went on, “It is not good to be out of doors and unprotected at night in the lands of the Mulahidat, the Misguided Ones.”
“What are the Misguided Ones?” I asked, sipping a sharbat so bitter that it must have been made of green fruit.
Beauty of Faith’s Moon was now going about the room, sprinkling water to lay the remaining dust. “You perhaps have heard them called hashishiyin. The killers who kill for the Old Man of the Mountain.”
“What mountain?” growled my uncle. “This land is flatter than a halycon sea.”
“He has always been called that—the Sheikh ul-Jibal—though no one knows really where he lives. Whether his castle is really on a mountain or not.”
“He does not live,” said my father. “That old nuisance was slain by the Ilkhan Hulagu when the Mongols came this way fifteen years ago.”
“True,” said the aged Beauty. “Yet not true. That was the Old Man Rokn-ed-Din Kurshah. But there is always another Old Man, you know.”
“I did not know.”
“Oh, yes, indeed. And an Old Man still commands the Mulahidat, though some of the Misguided must be old men themselves by now. He hires them out to the faithful who have need of their services. I hear that the Mamluks of Egypt paid high to have a hashishi slay that English Prince who leads the Christian Crusaders.”
“Then they wasted their money,” said Uncle Mafio. “The Englishman slew the sassin.”
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