“All this time, Aziz, I have been wondering about the curious animal you challenged me to guess.”

A faint smile came briefly to his lips. “I did riddle you to puzzlement, Marco, did I not?”

“Yes, you did. How does it go again?”

“A desert creature … that unites in itself … the natures of seven different beasts.” His voice was fading again to listlessness. “Can you still not divine it?”

“No,” I said, frowning as before, and pretending to delve deep in my mind. “No, I confess I cannot.”

“It has the head of a horse …” he said slowly, as if he were having trouble remembering, or having trouble speaking. “And the neck of a bull … the wings of a rukh … belly of a scorpion … feet of a camel … horns of a qazèl … and the … and the hindquarters … of a serpent …”

I was worried by his uncharacteristic lack of vivacity, but I could discern no cause for it. As his voice dwindled, his eyelids drooped. I squeezed his shoulder encouragingly, and said:

“That must be a most marvelous beast. But what is it? Aziz, unriddle the riddle. What is it?”

He opened his beautiful eyes and gazed at me, and he smiled and he said, “It is only a common grasshopper.” Then he fell abruptly forward, his face hitting the sand between his knees, as if he had been loosely hinged at the waist. There was a sudden, noticeable increase in the prevailing stench of blood and body odors and horse manure and human excrement. Aghast, I leaped up and called for my father and uncle. They came running, and stared down at the boy, unbelieving.

“No living human being ever bent over flat like that!” my uncle exclaimed in horror.

My father knelt and took one of the boy’s wrists and held it for a moment, then looked up at us and somberly shook his head.

“The child has died! But of what? Did he not say he was unhurt? That they only handed him back and forth as they rode?”

I helplessly raised my hands. “We spoke for a little. Then he fell over like that. Like a sawdust doll from which all the sawdust is gone.”

My uncle turned away, sobbing and coughing. My father gently took the boy’s shoulders and lifted him, and laid the lolling head back against the saddle, and with one hand held him sitting up while with the other he pulled down the gory covers. Then my father made a retching noise and, repeating what the boy had told us, he muttered, “The Karauna were hungry,” and he backed away in sick revulsion, letting the body topple forward flat again, but not before I also saw. What had happened to Aziz—I could liken it to nothing except an ancient Greek tale I had once been told in school, about a stalwart boy of Sparta and a voracious fox cub he hid beneath his tunic.

6

WE left the dead Karauna where they lay, carrion for the beaks of any scavenger vultures that might find them. But we took with us the already bitten and gouged and partially devoured little corpse of Aziz, as we headed back for the oasis. We would not leave him on the surface of the sand, or even bury him under it, for nothing can be so deeply buried in the sand but the wind will continually cover and uncover it again, as indifferently as it does the karwan leavings of camel dung.

On our way forth from the oasis, we had passed the white fringe of a minor salt flat, so we stopped there on our return. We carried Aziz out upon the trembling land, wrapped in my aba for a shroud, and we found a place where we could break through the glittering crust, and we laid Aziz on the quaggy quicksand under it. We said our farewells and some prayers during the time it took the small bundle to sink from our sight.

“The salt slab will soon re-form over him,” mused my father. “He will rest under it undisturbed, even by corruption, for the salts will permeate his body and preserve him.”

My uncle, scratching absentmindedly at his elbow, said with resignation, “It may even be that this land, like others I have seen, will in time heave and break and rearrange its topography. Some future journeyer may find him, centuries hence, and gaze upon his sweet face, and wonder how it came to pass that an angel fell from Heaven to be interred here.”

That was as fine a valedictory as could be pronounced over any departed one, so we left Aziz then and remounted and rode on. When we arrived again at the oasis, Nostril came running, all worry and concern, and then all lamentation when he saw there were still only the three of us. We told him, in as few words as possible, how we had been deprived of the smallest member of our party. Looking properly grieved and woebegone, he muttered some Muslim prayers, and then he spoke to us a typically fatalistic Muslim condolence:

“May your own spans be lengthened, good masters, by the days which the boy has lost. Inshallah.”

The day was at its noon by then, and anyway we were weary and my head was near to splitting with pain and we had no heart for hastening to resume our journey, so we prepared to spend another night in the oasis, even though it was no longer any happy place for us. The three Mongols had preceded us there, and Nostril went on with what he had been doing when we came: helping those men clean and anoint and bind up their wounds.

Those wounds were many, but none very serious. The man we had thought worst hurt had only had his brains temporarily scrambled when he was kicked in the head by a horse during the final affray with the Karauna; he had considerably recovered. Even so, all three of the men bore numerous sword cuts and had lost much blood and must have been much weakened, and we would have expected them to remain in the oasis for some days while they recuperated. But no, they said, they were Mongols, indestructible, unstoppable, and they would ride on.

My father asked where they would go. They said they had no assigned destination, only a mandate to go and seek and chase and destroy the Karauna of the Dasht-e-Kavir, and they wanted to get on with that job. So my father showed them our passepartout signed by the Khakhan Kubilai. For certain, none of those men could read, but they easily recognized the distinctive seal of the Khan of All Khans. They were agog at our possession of it, as they had earlier been impressed to hear my father and uncle speaking their tongue, and they inquired if we wished to give them any orders in the name of the Khakhan. My father suggested that, since we were carrying rich gifts for their great lord, the men might help ensure the delivery of them by riding as our escort as far as Mashhad, and they readily agreed to do so.

The next day, we were seven when we moved on northeastward. Since the Mongols disdained conversing with a lowly camel-puller, and since Uncle Mafio seemed indisposed to speak to anybody, and since my head still hurt whenever I jarred it by talking, only my father and our three new companions talked as we rode, and I was satisfied to ride close to them and listen, and thereby begin learning yet another new language.

The first thing I learned was that the name Mongol does not connote a race or a nation of people—the name derives from the word mong, meaning brave—and similar though our three escorting Mongols appeared to my unaccustomed eye, they were in fact as disparate as if they had been Venetian, Genoan and Pisan. One was of the Khalkas tribe, one was of the Merkit and one was of the Buriat—which tribes, I gathered, originally hailed from widely separated parts of those lands that the mighty Chinghiz (himself a Khalkas) long ago first united and so began building the Mongol Khanate. Also, one of the men was of the Buddhist faith, another of the Taoist—religions of which I then knew nothing—and the third was, of all things, a Nestorian Christian. But I learned at the same time that, whatever a Mongol’s tribal origin or his religious affiliation or his soldierly occupation, he is never to be referred to as a Khalkas or a Christian or even as a bowman or an armorer or any other such applicable appellation. He calls himself only a Mongol—and proudly, thus: “Mongol!”—and he must be spoken of only as a Mongol, for his being a Mongol supersedes anything else he may be, and that name of Mongol takes precedence over all other names.