But happily, most such occasions were not spoiled for me by any such incident. Sometimes, when I heeded the call of music, it led me not to a dance but to a game. There were two kinds of outdoor sport popular at Buzai Gumbad, and neither could have been played in a much smaller area, for both involved a considerable number of men on horseback, riding hard.
One game was played only by the Hunzukut men, because it had been originally invented in their home valley of Hunza, somewhere to the south of these mountains. In that game, the men swung heavy sticks, like mallets, batting at an object they called the pulu, a rounded-off knot of willow wood which rolled on the ground like a ball. Each team comprised six mounted Hunzukut, who tried to strike that pulu with their sticks—meanwhile often and enthusiastically striking their opponents, their horses and their own teammates—in order to drive the pulu past the six opponents’ flailing defense until it rolled or flew beyond a winning line at the far end of the field.
I often lost track of a game’s progress because I had a hard time telling the members of the two teams apart. They all wore heavy garments of fur and hide, plus the typical Hunzuk hat, which makes a man look as if he is balancing two thick pies atop his head. The hat actually consists of a long tube of coarse cloth rolled from both ends until the two rolls meet, and the whole then plopped onto the head. For a contest of the pulu, the six men on one team would don red pie-hats and the other six put on blue ones. But, after a very short time of play, the colors would be almost indistinguishable.
I also often lost sight of the wooden pulu itself, among the horses’ forty-eight pounding hoofs and the thrown-about snow and mud and sweat, and the intermixed clashing mallets and, not infrequently, some unhorsed players being whacked and kicked about as well. But the more experienced game-watchers, meaning almost everybody else in Buzai Gumbad, were keener of eye. Every time they saw the pulu bounce past the winning line at one or the other end of the field, the whole crowd would shout, “Gol! Go-o-o-ol!”—a Hunzuk word signifying that one team had tallied a point toward winning the game—and simultaneously a band of musicians would pound drums and blow flutes in a cacophony of celebration.
A game did not end until one team had nine times put the pulu past the opposing gol line. So that herd of twelve horses might spend a whole day thundering up and down the increasingly sloppy and treacherous field, with the players bellowing and cursing and the spectators roaring encouragement, and the sticks waving and crashing and often splintering, and the churned-up terrain plastering the players and horses and watchers and musicians, and the riders falling from their saddles and trying to scurry to safety and being cheerfully ridden down by their fellows, and, toward the end of the day, when the field was a mere swamp of mud and slime, the horses also slipping and slewing and falling down. It was a splendid kind of sport, and I never missed a chance to watch it.
The other game was similar, in that it was played by many men on horseback. But in that sport it did not matter how many, for there were no teams; each rider played for himself, against all the others. It was called bous-kashia, and I think that is a Tazhik term, but the game was not the specialty of any one people or tribe, and all the men joined in it on one occasion or another. Instead of a pulu, the central object in bous-kashia was the cadaver of a goat from which the head had just been severed.
The newly dead thing was simply tossed onto the ground among the horses’ legs, and the many riders all spurred close around it and wrestled and shoved and pummeled one another, each striving to reach down and snatch up the goat from the ground. He who finally succeeded in that, next had to gallop and carry it across a line at the end of the field. But of course he was pursued by all the others, snatching at his trophy and trying to trip or swerve his horse or knock him out of the saddle. And whoever did seize the contested cadaver himself became the prey of all the other riders. So the game really amounted to not much more than a wrestling and grabbing match on horseback and at the gallop. It was furious and exciting, and few players emerged from it in good health, and many a spectator got trodden on by the herd of horses, or got knocked insensible by a flying goat, or a ripped-loose bloody haunch of it.
During those long winter months on the Roof of the World, besides the time I spent watching games and dances, and in the hindora bed with Chiv, and in other diversions, I also spent some less frivolous whiles in conversation with the Hakim Mimdad.
Uncle Mafìo invited no comment on his ailment or the other troubles it had brought upon him. He was taking the powdered stibium as prescribed, and we could see that he was putting on the weight he had lost, and getting stronger day by day, but we restrained any curiosity we might have had as to exactly when the medicine turned him into a eunuch, and he did not volunteer the information. Since I never encountered him in company with a boy or any other sort of partner while we stayed in Buzai Gumbad, I could not say when he may finally have desisted from such partnerships. Anyway, the hakim still called on us at regular intervals, to make a routine examination of Uncle Mafio’s progress and to increase or decrease by minute amounts the stibium he was taking. After the physician’s sessions with the patient, he and I would often sit and talk together, for I found him to be a most interesting old fellow.
Like every other mèdego I have ever known, Mimdad regarded his everyday medical practice only as a necessary drudgery by which he had to earn his living, and preferred to concentrate most of his energies and devotions on his private studies. Like every other mèdego, he dreamed of discovering something new and medically miraculous, to astound the world and to enshrine his name forever alongside those of physician deities like Asklepios and Hippocrates and ibn Sina. However, most doctors of my acquaintance—in Venice, anyway—pursue studies sanctioned or at least tolerated by Mother Church, such as the seeking of new ways to expel or expunge the demons of disease. Mimdad’s studies and experiments, I learned, were less in the realm of the healing arts than in the realm of Hermes Trismegistus, which arts verge on sorcery.
Because the Hermetic arts were originally and for so long practiced by pagans like Greeks and Arabs and Alexandrians, Christians are naturally forbidden to delve into them. But every Christian has heard of them. I, for one, knew that the Hermetics ancient and modern—the adepts, as they like to be called—have almost always and to a man been seeking to discover one of two arcane secrets: the Elixir of Life or the Universal Touchstone that will change base metals into gold. So I was surprised when the Hakim Mimdad scoffed at both of those aims as “unrealistic prospects.”
He admitted that yes, he too was an adept of the age-old and occult art. He called it al-kimia, and claimed that Allah had first taught it to the prophets Musa and Haroun, meaning Moses and Aaron, whence it had been passed down through the years to such other famous experimenters as the great Arab sage Jabir. And Mimdad admitted that yes, like every other adept, he was chasing an elusive quarry, but one less grandiose than immortality or untold wealth. All he hoped to discover—or rediscover, rather—was what he called “the philter of Majnun and Laila.” One day when the upland winter had begun to ease its clamp, and the karwan leaders were studying the sky to decide when they would start downhill from the Roof of the World, Mimdad told me the history of that remarkable philter.
“Majnun was a poet and Laila a poetess, and they lived long ago and far away. No one knows where or when. Except for the poems that have survived them, all that is known about Majnun and Laila is this: they had the power of changing their forms at will. They could become younger or older, more handsome or more ugly, and of whichever sex they chose. Or they could change their persons entirely, becoming giant rukh birds or mighty lions or terrible mardkhora. Or, in a lighter mood, they could become gentle deer or beautiful horses or pretty butterflies … .”