While the Domari waited outside Samosata—just past the refuse mounds and grave stones in order to keep from attracting attention—the travelers from the caravanserai entered the city. Using the slave traders’ money, they purchased supplies, including roast chicken wrapped in pita bread, and brought them to the Domari. Upon receiving these wraps, the Domari scattered a spice they called kari inside. For dessert, everyone had something called lauzinaj, a kind of long narrow baklava roll made from almonds drizzled with honey.
Having eaten their fill, the group crossed the Euphrates over the ancient bridge, which was unusually large and sturdy. Two columns flanked the bridge’s entrance, and a Latin inscription on one stated that the Legio XVI Gallica had constructed it in the reign of Severus.
“Severus,” El-Hadi said. “Never heard of that one. Does anyone know when he was emperor?”
“No idea,” Alexios said. “Probably a thousand years ago.”
El-Hadi raised his eyebrows. “The bridge is still well put together. Was he a good or bad emperor?”
“He was severe,” Alexios said.
El-Hadi frowned.
On the bridge’s far side lay Mesopotamia, the Jazira or island between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, a wide broad flat land cool and gray in the winter sunshine. Merchants on camelback and mules laden with merchandise hurried back and forth along the eastern road, just like back in Pirin. Plenty of towns and caravanserais and wells lay along either side, but none were open to the Domari, forcing them to camp behind another hill which would conceal their cooking fires. These they lit using sticks, grass, and dried manure they had picked up along the way, cooking unleavened flat bread—which they called mana—on griddles. A goat the travelers had purchased in town was slaughtered, butchered, and cooked inside an earth oven. Everyone shared the cooked meat, washing it down with date wine.
Soon the music and dancing began. Aside from a pair of hand cymbals, the Domari had lost their instruments to thieves—along with almost everything else—so they could do little more than clap their hands and sing, although they managed to produce catchy music.
Spending your lives as wandering troubadours will do that, Alexios thought.
That they still possessed the energy to sing and dance after such a long day—which had begun with fighting for their freedom at dawn, only to spend many more hours afterward walking along a dusty road—was doubly impressive to Alexios. The Domari children danced with the adults; Kassia and Basil joined them. Their maturity had shocked Alexios earlier, and now to see them acting like kids again was equally shocking. He also missed them, but they were still ignoring him. Amina and El-Hadi were lying on a cloak with their big baby, who was named Ibrahim, while Miriai—drunk on date wine—had fallen asleep on her back, her mouth yawning to the stars, though she was such a talker that she talked even in her sleep. Za-Ilmaknun was keeping watch for everyone, and Isato had begun to leap around the flames.
Ah, this is the life. Alexios leaned back on his cloak before the fire under the stars, watching the beautiful Isato while telling himself to stop.
That night Alexios dreamed of Herakleia again. This time she was shackled to Gontran and Diaresso, and the Latins were whipping red welts into their backs as they marched them into the mines with all the other Trapezuntines. Their bodies entered the darkness, and metal tubs full of shining ore came out.
When Alexios woke in the dawn to the embers of the desert campfire, all he could think was that he had abandoned his friends and gotten too comfortable here. The idea made his stomach turn.
What if these are more than just dreams? Alexios thought. What if I can actually see what’s happening in Trebizond? I can’t stay here. I have to go back, even if I end up going alone. If it turns out that these Sabians aren’t at Sumatar, or if they can’t help me, then I have to go back to Trebizond. It’s been almost a month since I left. It’ll take me at least another two weeks to get there…
Baby Ibrahim was awake, and Amina was feeding him. Alexios glanced at them for a moment—turning away out of respect—but he likewise thought that there was something beautiful about a mother with her child.
Isis and Horace, Mary and the Baby Jesus, he thought. My inner patriarch rearing his ugly head.
Still, comparing the Amina of yesterday—the dangerous woman sprayed with her master’s blood—to the gentle mother of today—the contrast was striking. She still wore the slave trader’s scimitar at her side.
Don’t get between mama bear and her cubs, Alexios thought.
Soon enough, almost everyone was up. The camels were groaning, the donkeys were baying, and the children were whining for food. Bags of barley went to the animals, while the humans drank water and ate leftover mana from the night before. Alexios was mildly hungover from the date wine. He recalled that Isato had seized his hands and danced around the fire with him—that she had sung about a place called Mount Abora and somehow played a dulcimer—or was that a dream? She was now sleeping nearby.
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A few swigs of water from his goatskin cleared up his hangover and granted a few points of health, restoring it to 62/100.
Basil and Kassia, he noticed, were teaching the other children about the farr. These, in turn, showed their parents how they could move rocks without touching them, and then granted them the same power, explaining that Alexios from far away had used these techniques to fight the slave owners like a demon. For a moment, Alexios thought that this was dangerous and that he should stop it. Then he realized that even without the farr, people—including young children—had all kinds of power that they were rarely if ever permitted to exercise.
Now that knowledge of the farr was spreading, he could only think that it was a good thing. He checked to make sure Dionysios’s old manual was still in his pocket.
Pretty obvious now why the emperor wanted to stop us from showing this to everyone. Maybe the Domari can do some classes with me once they’re ready for more advanced concepts.
Soon they were on the move. They only stopped at the occasional well to water their animals and replenish their goatskins, watching out for the different tribes of badawi desert dwellers who would charge in out of nowhere on their camels to spear or scimitar any Domari who drank from their wells.
Tired from keeping watch the night before, Za-Ilmaknun spent the day sleeping on a camel. Isato led his beast and righted Za-Ilmaknun whenever he came close to falling off, swearing at him in Axumite and sometimes even exclaiming: “old fool!”
Kassia and Basil still refused to even look at Alexios, but he wasn’t the only one who missed them. Rakhsh, after he had finished devouring his usual enormous breakfast, nudged them both until they climbed onto his saddle. There they spent the day.
The evening sky was deep blue, and the rock and dirt a deeper orange when they began to approach Sumatar. Miriai said that in Arabic this region was known as the Diyar Mudar. It consisted of hills and canyons where the occasional tell rising from the wide flat land signified the remains of ancient cities piled atop each other, now all ground down to dust save for the occasional sarcophagus or bathtub poking from the ruins. Bits of painted rock which had once belonged to mosaics were scattered on the ground along with striped pottery shards. Sometimes the burned foundations of houses were visible. Signs of destruction lay everywhere.
Memento mori, Alexios thought.
Here and there were also little towns surrounded by farmland. Most were occupied these days by Kurds on one side and Armenians on the other, the men of the former group wearing turbans and baggy pants and attending a small mosque with a minaret where the muezzin shouted “Allahu Akbar!” on Fridays, the people of the latter group wearing crosses around their necks and attending a small church with a steeple where the semantron clattered on Sundays.
Memento…vita? Alexios thought. Is that how you would say it?
Since Kurdish women were rarely veiled, they could be distinguished from their Armenian counterparts via the patterns tattooed into their chins, cheeks, and foreheads. Assyrian Christian women wore conical hats with veils attached; but the men of this faith—aside from their black felt caps—were hard to tell apart from the men from any other group, at least for Alexios. Some men and most women from all these different cultures dressed in a flashy, colorful, patterned style. Alexios still remembered the dull fashions of the old world, so it was shocking to find these peasants halfway between the wilds and civilization doing difficult farm work and uttering folksy aphorisms to each other while dressing like they were ready to prance down a Milanese catwalk. Sometimes their clothes were dusty or worn, but they were often so flashy they could be seen glimmering on the horizon like flames.
Miriai explained that because the land was fertile and rivers and streams and wells were close, relations were good enough for the different groups that lived here to intermarry. Many were multilingual, speaking their native language at home and changing to Arabic in order to communicate outside.
Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, Romans, and others had been here centuries, but the Turks were the newcomers. They grazed their flocks in the countryside when grass sprung from the dust following the spring rains—which made the dry rocky wadis gush with whitewater—but also sometimes descended upon the towns to trade, exchanging milk, cheese, and yogurt for goods manufactured in town workshops like shoes, saddles, or steel weapons. These pastoralists dressed in a Biblical style. When they were angrier or more desperate—often because other tribes were fighting them elsewhere due to changes in the weather or revolutions in lands so distant no one knew their names—they settled permanently, and fought anyone who complained.
White-robed bedouin belonging to the Banu Numayr were also active. These emerged from mountain hideouts and hotter regions in the deep desert where the climate made only a nomadic lifestyle possible. On the way to Sumatar the travelers passed a bedouin encampment where women were cooking outside their black tents. Alexios saw one woman carrying an enormous jar on her head; in her arms she was also carrying a baby who was half her size. The woman wore a niqab made of shiny coins, leaving only a horizontal gap for her eyes to flash through; the abaya that covered the rest of her body was black and red.
None of these people knew anything about the Sabians when Alexios asked. They did say, however, that the nearby hills were full of caves, tombs, and ruined shrines which nomads sometimes occupied. When these people asked Alexios, in turn, for news from the Ajam—foreign lands—he quoted something his mom used to say:
“The world’s going to hell in a hand basket, and no one’s doing anything about it!”
This made them laugh, nod, and exclaim that—Wallah!—truer words had never been spoken. Most of these people knew only a little Greek at best, which meant that Alexios relied on Arabic speakers like Amina, Jafer El-Hadi, and Miriai to translate.
Soon the travelers came to ancient ruins of broken stone, fallen pillars, and smashed statues and carvings which were difficult to identify. These seemed older than anything built by the Romans. For those artworks hewn into the cliffs, centuries of sun, rain, wind, and sand had smoothed them down so much that they had almost returned to their primordial forms. The rocky hills were pockmarked with caves and topped with round structures of brick which might have been observatories or temples. Most caves were abandoned, but some were inhabited by nomadic families so poor they possessed only the clothes on their backs and a donkey, a camel, or sometimes just a goat. It was amazing to Alexios that a single animal was capable of sustaining a family consisting of several people, albeit precariously.
Miriai dismounted. She put her hands on her hips and squinted as she shaded her eyes from the sun. Despite the winter cold, sweat filled the creases in her face, which was lined with age. These lines deepened as she smiled.
“Sumatar,” she said.