“I did,” he said. “I gave one to a train going west from Kashan.”

I also remarked, without rancor, that he might have apprised my mother in the same way.

“I did,” he said again. “I wrote a letter every year, to her or to Isidoro. I had no way of knowing that they never arrived. But in those days the Mongols were still actively conquering new territories, not just occupying them, and the Silk Road was an even less reliable post route than it is now.”

In the evenings, he and my uncle put much devoted labor, as I have said, into bringing our maps up to date and place, and I did the same with my log papers of notes taken so far.

While doing that, I came upon the names of the Princesses Moth and Sunlight, away back in Baghdad, and I was made acutely aware that I had not lain with a woman since that long ago. Not that I really needed reminding; I had got quite tired of the only substitute: waging a war of the priests in the middle of every other night or so. But I have mentioned that the Mongols, having no perceptible organized religion of their own, do not interfere with the religions practiced by their tributary peoples; neither do they interfere with the laws observed by those peoples. So Balkh was still of Islam, and still abided by the sharaiyah, the law of Islam, and all of Balkh’s resident females either stayed at home in close pardah or walked abroad only in chador-muffled invisibility. For me to have brashly approached one would have meant, first, chancing the possibility that she was an aged crone like Sunlight, and worse, chancing the likely wrath of her menfolk or the imams and muftis of Islamic law.

Nostril, of course, had found one of his usual perverse (but lawful) outlets for his animal urges. In every karwan train that stopped at Balkh, each Muslim man who did not have an accompanying wife or concubine, or two or three of each, had his kuch-i-safari. That term also signifies “traveling wives,” but those really were boys, carried along to be used for wifely purposes, and there was no sharaiyah prohibition against strangers paying for a share of their favors. I knew that Nostril had hastened to do just that, for he had wheedled from me the money for it. But I was not tempted to emulate him. I had seen the kuch-i-safari, and had seen none among them to compare even remotely with the late Aziz.

So I went on wanting and wishing and lusting, and finding nothing to lust for. I could only stare hard at every walking heap I passed on the streets, and try in vain to descry what sort of female was inside that bale of clothing. Even doing no more than that, I was risking the outrage of the Balkhites. They call that idle ogling “Eve-baiting,” and condemn it as vicious.

Meanwhile, Uncle Mafìo was also being celibate, almost ostentatiously so. For a while, I assumed it was because he was still grieving for Aziz. But it was soon evident that he was simply becoming too physically weak to engage in any dalliance. His persistent cough had been for some time past getting insistent. Now it would come upon him in such racking spells as to leave him feeble afterwards, and compel him to take bed rest. He looked hale enough, and he seemed still as robust as ever, and his color was good. But now, when he began to find it intolerably tiring just to walk from our karwansarai to the bazàr and back, my father and I overrode his protestations and called in a hakim.

Now, that word hakim merely means “wise,” not necessarily educated in medicine or professionally qualified or experienced, and it may be given as a title to one who deserves it—say, the trusted physician to a palace court—or to one who may not, like a bazàr tomorrow-teller or an old beggar who gathers and sells herbs. So we were a trifle apprehensive about finding in these parts a person of real mèdego skill. We had seen many Balkhites with all too obvious afflictions—the most numerous being men with dangling goiters, like scrotums or melons, under their jawhne—and that did not much inspire us with confidence in the local medicinal arts. But our karwansarai keeper fetched for us a certain Hakim Khosro, and we put Uncle Mafìo in his hands.

He seemed to know what he was doing. He had to make only a brief examination diagnostic to tell my father, “Your brother is suffering from the hasht nafri. That means one-of-eight, and we call it that because one of eight will die of it. But even those mortally stricken do not often die until after a long time. The jinni of that disease is in no hurry. Your brother tells me he has had this condition for some while, and it has worsened only gradually.”

“The tisichezza it is, then,” said my father, nodding solemnly. “Where we come from, it is sometimes also called the subtle sickness. Can it be cured?”

“Seven times out of eight, yes,” said Hakim Khosro cheerfully enough. “To begin, I will need certain things from the kitchen.”

He called on the landlord to bring him eggs and millet seed and barley flour. Then he wrote some words on a number of bits of paper—“powerful verses from the Quran,” he said—and stuck those papers onto Uncle Mafio’s bare chest with dabs of egg yolk into which he had mixed the millet seed—“the jinni of this ailment seems to have some affinity to millet seeds.” Then he had the innkeeper help him sprinkle and rub flour all over my uncle’s torso, and rolled a number of goatskins tightly around him, explaining that this was “to promote the active sweating-out of the jinni’s poisons.”

“Malevolenza,” growled my uncle. “I cannot even scratch my itching elbow.”

Then he began coughing. Either the flour dust or the excessive heat inside the goatskins sent him into a fit of coughing that was worse than ever. His arms being pinioned by the wrapping, he could not pummel his chest for relief, or even cover his mouth, so the coughing went on until it seemed he would strangle, and his ruddy face got more red, and he sprayed little flecks of blood onto the hakim’s white aba. After some time of that agony, he turned pale and swooned dead away, and I thought he had strangled.

“No, be not alarmed, young man,” said Hakim Khosro. “This is nature’s means of cure. The jinni of this disease will not trouble a victim when he is not conscious of being troubled. You notice, when your uncle is in the faint, he does not cough.”

“He has only to die, then,” I said skeptically, “and he is permanently cured of coughing.”

The hakim laughed, unoffended, and said, “Be not suspicious either. The hasht nafri can only be arrested in nature’s good time, and I can but lend assistance to nature. See, he wakes now, and the fit has passed.”

“Gèsu,” Uncle Mafio muttered weakly.

“For now,” the hakim went on, “the best prescriptive is rest and perspiration. He is to stay in bed except when he must go to the mustarah, and that he will do frequently, for I am also giving him a strong purgative. There are always jinn hiding in the bowels, and it does no harm to get rid of them. So, each time the patient returns from the mustarah to bed, one of you—since I will not always be here—must dust him with a new coating of barley flour and rewrap the skins about him. I will look in from time to time, to write new verses to be pasted on his chest.”

So my father and I and the slave Nostril took turns tending Uncle Mafio. But that was no onerous duty—except for having to listen to his continuous grumbling about his enforced prostration—and after a while my father decided he might as well make another use of our stay in Balkh. He would leave Mafio in my keeping, and he and Nostril would travel to the capital city of these regions, to pay our respects to the local ruler (whose title was Sultan) and make us known to him as emissaries of the Khakhan Kubilai. Of course, that city was only nominally a capital, and its sovereign Sultan was, like the Shah Zaman of Persia, only a token ruler, subordinate to the Mongol Khanate. But the journey would also enable my father to embellish our maps with further details and modern designations. For example, our Kitab gave the name of that city as Kophes, and it was Nikaia in Alexander’s time, but nowadays and hereabout we heard it always called Kabul. So my father and Nostril saddled two of our horses and prepared to ride there.