We made the proper congratulations and good wishes, and the boy grinned like an ape and mumbled acknowledgment, and Kukachin beamed as if she had just won an unimaginably great trophy, and the two of them went off hand in hand.
“Well,” said my father with a shrug, “better the head of a cat than the tail of a lion.”
But Kukachin must have seen in the boy what we could not. God knows he could never have been better than a goblin for looks and physical stature—he was afterward styled in all the Mongol chronicles “Ghazan the Ugly”—but the fact that he did make history is proof that he was more than he appeared to be. He and the lady were wed when he replaced Kaikhadu as Ilkhan of Persia, and then he went on to become the ablest Ilkhan and warrior of his generation, making many wars and winning many new lands for the Khanate. Unhappily, his loving Ilkhatun Kukachin did not live to share all his triumphs and celebrity, for she died in childbirth two years or so after their marriage.
4
SO, having completed our last mission for the Khan Kubilai, my father and uncle and I pressed onward. We left at Maragheh the populous company we had so far been traveling with, but Kaikhadu generously gave us good horses and remounts and packhorses and ample provisions and an escort of a dozen mounted men of his own palace guard, to see us safely through all the Turki lands. However, as things turned out, we would have traveled more safely without that Mongol troop.
From the capital, we circled around the shores of a sea-sized lake named Urumia, which was also called the Sea of the Sunset. Then we climbed up and over the mountains which marked the northwestern frontier of Persia. One of the mountains in that range, said my father, was the biblical Mount Ararat, but it was too far off our route for me to go and climb it to see if any trace of the Ark was still there. Anyway, having recently scaled another mountain to see a footprint that might well have been Adam’s, I was now inclined to think of Noah as rather a latecomer in history. On the other side of the mountains, we descended into the Turki lands at another sea-sized lake, this one named Van, but called the Sea Beyond the Sunset.
The country hereabout, and the nations composing it, and the borders thereof, were all in flux and had been for many years. What had formerly been part of the Byzantine Empire under Christian rulers was now the Seljuk Empire under rulers of the Turki race and Muslim religion. But these eastern parts of it were also known by older names, bestowed by peoples who had inhabited these lands since time before time, who had never conceded that they were not still the rightful owners of them, and who recognized none of the vagaries of modern claimants and modern boundary lines. Thus, at the point where we emerged from Persia, we came down from the mountains into a country which could equally well be named Turki, after the race of its rulers, or the Seljuk Empire, as those Turki called it, or Cappadocia, which was its name on older maps, or Kurdistan, for the Kurdi people who populated it.
The land was a green and pleasant one, the wildest parts of it seeming hardly wild at all, but looking almost neatly cultivated, with rolling hills of meadow grass tidily separated by clumps of forest, so that the whole countryside was as trim as an artificial parkland. There was plenty of good water, in sparkling streams as well as immense blue lakes. The people here were all Kurdi, some of them farmers and villagers, but most of them nomad families following flocks of sheep or goats. They were as handsome a race as I have seen in any Islamic land. They had very black hair and eyes, but a complexion as fair as my own. The men were large and solidly built, and wore great black mustaches, and were famously fierce fighters. The Kurdi women were not particularly delicate, either, but withal were well formed and good-looking—and independent; they scorned to wear the veil or live hidden in the pardah imposed on most other women of Islam.
The Kurdi received us journeyers cordially enough—nomads usually are hospitable to other seeming nomads—but they cast unloving looks at our Mongol escorts. There were reasons for that. Besides all the other complications of national names and dominions and boundary lines, this Seljuk Empire was also in enforced vassalage to the Ilkhanate of Persia. That situation dated from the time when a traitorous Turki minister had foully murdered the King Kilij—he who was the father of my onetime princess friend Mar-Janah—and usurped the throne by promising to lay it under subjection to the then Ilkhan Abagha. So this Seljuk Empire, though nominally ruled now by a King Masud in the capital city of Erzincan, was really subordinate to Abagha’s surviving son, the Regent Kaikhadu, whose Maragheh court we had just come from and whose palace guards were accompanying us. We journeyers were welcome here; the warriors with us were not.
One might have supposed that the Kurdi—rebellious throughout history against every non-Kurdi ruler ever imposed upon them—would have cared little whether Erzincan or Maragheh was the real ruling capital, because out here, a hundred farsakhs or more from either city, they were pretty much left unruled by anybody. But they seemed to regard the Mongols as a tyranny inflicted on top of the Turki tyranny they already chafed under, and the one to be even more hotly resented and hated. We learned how well the Kurdi could hate when, one afternoon, we stopped at an isolated hut to buy a sheep for our evening meal.
The evident proprietor of the hut was sitting in the doorway of it, holding his sheepskin robes around him as if he had a chill. My father and I and just one of our Mongols rode into the dooryard and politely dismounted, but the shepherd impolitely did not stand up. The Kurdi had a language of their own, but almost all of them spoke Turki as well, and so did our Mongol escorts, and in any case the Turki tongue was similar enough to the Mongol that I could usually understand any overheard conversation. Our Mongol asked the man if we might buy a sheep. The man, still seated, his eyes glumly on the ground, refused us.
“I think I ought not to trade with our oppressors.”
The Mongol said, “No one is oppressing you. These Ferenghi wayfarers ask a favor of you, and will pay for it, and your Allah enjoins hospitality toward wayfarers.”
The shepherd said, not in an argumentative way, but in seeming melancholy, “But the rest of you are Mongols, and you will also eat on the sheep.”
“What of that? Once you sell the animal to the Ferenghi, what matter to you what becomes of it?”
The shepherd sniffled and said, almost tearfully, “I did a favor to a passing Turki not long since. Helped him change a broken shoe on his horse. And for that I have been chastised by the Chiti Ayakkabi. A small favor for a mere Turki. Estag farullah! What will the Chiti do to me if he hears I did a favor for a Mongol?”
“Come!” snapped our escort. “Will you sell us a sheep?”
“No, I cannot.”
The Mongol sneered down at him. “You do not even stand like a man when you speak defiance. Very well, cowardly Kurdi, you refuse to sell. Then would you care to stand up and try to prevent my taking a sheep?”
“No, I cannot. But I warn you. The Chiti Ayakkabi will make you regret the robbery.”
The Mongol laughed harshly and spat in the dust in front of the seated man, then remounted and rode to cut a fat ewe out of the flock grazing in the meadow beyond the hut. I remained there, curious, staring down at the slumped and defeated-looking shepherd. I knew that Chiti meant a brigand and, as best I knew, Ayakkabi meant a shoe. I wondered what kind of bandit would style himself “the Shoe Brigand” and would occupy himself in punishing his own fellow Kurdi for giving aid and comfort to their presumed oppressors.