Immortal at the Edge of the World (21 page)

“Will you kill me now?” he asked. “As that man said?”

“It would be no less an honorable death than the one you expected to face in the court of Fa Xi Han,” I said.

“Less honorable for knowing now what a fool I have been.”

“A shame that would not go any further than this valley.”

“As you say.” He remained on his knees and lowered his head for my sword.

“Hand me your letters,” I said.

Without speaking he reached inside his coat and held them out for me. I in turn handed them to Hsu. “I’m not going to kill you. But you are no longer Xuangang of the Malays.
He
is.”

Chapter Thirteen

It took us a few years to turn Xuangang’s silks, letters, name, and connection to a cardamom exporter into a profitable enterprise for all concerned. It was fortunate that Hsu and I had spent all those months beforehand talking to people in monasteries along the Road and trying to understand how to get close to Abraham bin Yasser, because we ended up absorbing a great deal about how trade went through the Indies. It wasn’t at all long before we had managed to connect a stable distribution of black cardamom from Javaland and Malay to India by sea, and then overland to the markets of Constantinople, Tbilisi, and especially Baghdad and Samarra.

The real Xuangang proved worthy of being kept alive, because even though it was Hsu pretending to be him whenever it came time to discuss business with regional merchants or ship captains, we needed the real person when dealing with Fa Xi Han. This was especially true one or two times a year when we had to travel to Han’s court to run through the numbers. Fa Xi Han was a big fan of numbers. To make it easier on Xuangang we let him do the books.

Hsu and I were traveling more or less constantly those years, trying to keep the modest one-product shipping business afloat. It was actually an enormous pain, and since neither of us were necessarily out for the money—I was more interested in it than he was, which was an interesting reversal—we found it difficult at times to pass on the most convenient deal in favor of the one that made the most business sense. We both recognized that looking like anything less than shrewd businessmen would not be in our interests, either in the eyes of our supplier or our competition.

To that end we kept small residences throughout India, as well as in Baghdad and a couple of other places. These residences were for our use or for the use of anyone remaining from our original band of trusted associates, depending on where the business winds took them. That list of associates did not include the vampire, who eventually got bored again and went to the beach one morning, and that was the last we heard of him. Indira the succubus likewise found work as a spice merchant not to her liking. She took her cut and set up a bordello in Chennai with it. I stopped by on her whenever I was in town, which was often since our ships usually landed on the same coast.

Everyone else stuck around. I didn’t have the heart to tell any of them we were only doing this to attract the attention of another merchant, but then we were pretty sure if we got his attention it would end up being profitable enough for people to start thinking about retiring.

As to
why
we were trying to get the attention of Abraham bin Yasser, I had nothing more to go on than what I had originally heard from Hsu years earlier under the hanging tree. He managed to describe the sought-after object obliquely at best, saying if I used it properly I would be able to “step off the edge of the world”. I took this to mean by doing so I would visit his faery kingdom.

I didn’t want to visit the faery kingdom, but I knew he did, and while I was entirely unconvinced that anything he told me about the place was more than legend, exaggerations, and outright lies—either told to him or by him—I was interested in seeing if he could prove me wrong.

I had heard of the faery folk before. Versions of them came out of a lot of different traditions stretching from the Britons to the Hindus. But I had never seen one, much as I had never seen an angel or a devil. I know it seems like history is rife with creatures most people would stack in the same pile—goblins, elves, satyrs, dragons, demons, pixies, vampires, and on and on—but there were real versions of these things in the world at one time or another, and in just about every case the real version was not at all as fearsome as the legendary kind. (Nymphs would be the exception. They are much worse in real life, and I don’t want to talk about it.) My point is faeries were always mythological. I based that on my having never seen one, which is usually all the proof I need. And the one or two times someone told me about one, it turned out to be an ordinary person with a few magic tricks and better-than-average PR.

Despite all that, Hsu persisted in claiming he had lived in the actual faery kingdom, and that it was a real place that was possible to visit. He had no proof of this, other than the fact that he was apparently much older than he looked. Admittedly, that was the kind of evidence I took to heart, since I was also much older than I looked. But I needed more. Clean living and a decent moisturizer seemed like a more plausible explanation than an entire secret world.

Hsu’s age was actually starting to show. His hair was graying, and the laugh lines around his mouth were starting to become wrinkles. I am routinely startled by the changes made by time on the people around me, because from my perspective it’s extraordinarily sudden. Hsu was only exhibiting tiny differences so far, but I was studying him more closely to see if he aged. So I noticed.

Other than describing a kingdom that couldn’t possibly be real in florid language that sounded straight out of every other faery myth, Hsu spent a lot of time describing the faery who took him there. His name was Byha, a literally radiant figure my friend was clearly in love with. They were only together a short while before Hsu realized that time was passing differently where they were, and he had missed almost the entire lifespan of his family. So he asked to be returned home. Byha agreed, and gave him the object now in Abraham’s possession. He told Hsu if he wished to return he needed only to hold it up to the sky and walk in the direction of the star that wasn’t there, and when he arrived to speak the word
Byrgddun
. It was no word in any language I knew, and Hsu couldn’t tell me what it meant, but insisted he was speaking it correctly. And it was impossible for me to forget because I heard him recite it to himself every evening, just in case saying so evoked a visit from his faery.

Upon being returned to the world, Hsu went back to his village to find his family was all dead, and in his mourning he ended up getting very drunk. Then came a drunken wager and the loss of the one thing he needed to return to Byha. It took him months to track down the man who’d won it from him, only to learn that he had used it to pay off a debt to one Abraham bin Yasser.

And that was when Hsu sought me out.

*
 
*
 
*

It was during our fourth year in the spice trade business that a correspondence reached us from an associate representing the interests of one Abraham bin Yasser. I say it
reached us
because that’s the way letters had to work back then. They were sent out into the world with the hope that one of them would reach its destination. This was a likely prospect when the recipient was not mobile, as for instance the letters Abraham sent home to his father-in-law. Those were sent in sealed envelopes with ship captains along with goods being sent to the same area. The letters were passed from person to person until they got to the right person, or until they didn’t.

In our case the one that reached us had been dated six months earlier and was noted as being one of three identical such letters, each sent along different routes. It stated an interest in a joint business venture and asked us to meet with the sender, giving a date that was, to the time and place we received it, three months and two mountain ranges away.
 

Hsu was ready to pack up and go immediately.

“It’s not Abraham,” I said. “It’s a guy speaking for Abraham.”

“But he can get us to him.”

“No, I don’t think so. I think if we agree to meet with him he’s the only one we’ll ever meet with.”

“How about if we
force
him to get us to Abraham?” Hsu was, shall we say, growing impatient.

“You have to trust me on this.”

Hsu stormed off muttering some swear words in Chinese he never bothered to translate for me, but which I believe defamed my parentage in some way.

My response to the letter was to tell this representative—his name was Moshe—that Xuangang had no interest in sitting down with any man who was not Abraham bin Yasser. I then notified him of ways in which the great Xuangang might be reached in the future.

I only sent one letter, because I knew where Moshe was going to be in three months.

*
 
*
 
*

As I’d hoped, a second letter arrived from Moshe six months after I’d sent my reply. In it, Moshe described at enormous lengths the incredible importance of Abraham bin Yasser as a person, how very impressively busy he was at all times, and how it was hardly necessary to bother the great man since Moshe’s word was as good as his boss’s.

And also, if we could be in Mangalore in six months, it
might
be possible for us to say hello to Abraham as he would be in town at that time.

Hsu had been impossible for the entire six months, which I guess was not unexpected. I think of this whenever someone complains to me about having to wait a while for an e-mail or a phone call, incidentally. You have no idea.

“
Now
can we go?” he asked after I showed him the letter.

“Yes, now we can go. Let me draft a reply first and send it ahead of us so we don’t appear too eager.”

“Perhaps we can appear too eager by showing up at all.”

“Go pack before someone asks why the great Xuangang is acting like an infant.”

*
 
*
 
*

Mangalore was a port town in southwestern India, and it wasn’t a huge surprise that Abraham was going to be there at some point during the year since all of the spices he shipped from overland through India left that port. He practically owned it, which was why I never even tried to negotiate the departure of a spice ship from there, even though it would have been a more efficient route—across the Indian Ocean to North Africa and north from there—than the perilous trip we made down the Silk Road every year. We were three months away if we took our time, which was difficult to do as Hsu seemed to think the faster he got there the sooner six months would pass.

“You appreciate, don’t you, that we have no reason to hurry?” I asked him after he spent yet another day pushing our group too hard through some particularly unpleasant mountains.

We had a large contingent with us consisting of the real Xuangang—now older and somewhat wiser, and no longer convinced we intended to eventually murder him—a few goblin associates of Hsu’s, two cooks, three local terrain guides, two of the merchants who would be in charge of shipments later in the year, and fifteen men with real soldiering experience to guard all of us. That wasn’t counting the wagons, carts, and horses.

“This plan of ours, it’s taken too long. I expected to be facing this man before now.”

“My concern is that he long ago parted with your bauble.”

He grumbled and picked at the food we’d had prepared. We were now doing well enough to expect a decent meal every night, which was nice. It mostly consisted of whatever animals our party managed to kill over the course of the day or, failing that, whatever stored salted meats we had, plus any vegetables and so on we came across. We had hired cooks out of two of the poorest areas in a hundred miles, because even though they had next to nothing to work with, they made very edible food. This is how I’d run a restaurant if I ever owned one, by the way. I’d give them some junk that was nearly spoiled and ask them to do something with it. If they made an edible meal, I’d hire them.

Hsu spoke again after a time. “If Abraham no longer has it I’ll find out who does and formulate a new plan.”

“You know, if this goes well you’ll end up modestly wealthy. Maybe your friend Byha will want to relocate here with you instead.”

“Yes, but I can’t really ask him that, can I?”

“He wasn’t called the first time you met him either.”

“No. But last time we had no arrangement. He parted the curtain from his world and stepped into ours because he thought I was beautiful. Now I am older and no longer beautiful and he is probably as young as when I left him. And he will not return to me because he is waiting for
me
to return to
him
. And I can’t.”

“You’re still a beautiful man, Hsu. I’m sure he will greet you happily.”

“And you speak with the tongue of an imp. But thank you anyway. Would that I aged as slowly as you.”

*
 
*
 
*

We reached Mangalore in plenty of time to arrange for quarters for our contingent, and to get a feel for the city and how things worked there.

The basic homogeneity of the modern city is a new thing. If you’re in America it’s very easy to stand on a street in a downtown area and have no idea which city you’re standing in. European cities have a little more character because they’re older, but there are still a lot of similarities between them. But the cities of the Early Middle Ages were miniature fiefdoms. It wasn’t just that you had to know what language was spoken and where the bad neighborhoods were, you needed to know how politically strong the ruling class was, what religion people adhered to and exactly how crazy they were about it, what behaviors were taboo, who was the law on the streets, and on and on. This is another reason I tried to stay away from large cities when I could. Plus, they always smelled.