Pet Monkey of the House of Tang (Любимая мартышка дома Тан)
by Master Chen (Dmitry Kosyrev)
Click here to read the author's biography
Click here to read a synopsis
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Sample translation by Nick Ostler
The Book of Necromancers
The hero is caught in a fog, in the midst of a dreadful and a wondrous story, groping to find his way. He is surrounded by enigmas at every turn and can’t begin to fathom the direction from which deadly arrows are flying. Lo! He hears the heavy, cruel word war, which cuts through the fog like an icy wind and begins to disperse it.
Chapter One
The Witch on the Roof
The dwarf advanced along the even white sand of my garden path making surprisingly rapid leaps, resembling the big red ape in the Imperial Zoo. The distorted shape of his body, wrapped tightly in dark rags and illuminated by the garden lights in the dusk, seemed to spread over the earth. From the rags protruded bare legs, set unnaturally far apart, with muscles like twisting vines or ropes. His feet kicked up small clouds of sand. The dwarf’s left hand was thrust forward; in his right hand he clutched a very strange weapon that looked like a long knife, or a short spear the length of a forearm.
A thousand deaths and cities ablaze; the thunder of the cavalry sweeping through deserted streets; love, bitter and beautiful; rivers and cities beheld for the first time; faces of military leaders, courtiers and conquerors – all these events, the stormiest of my heretofore none-too-calm existence, originated in this horrific figure on the sandy path.
Two dark silhouettes emerged out of the fog on the path behind the dwarf: imperial soldiers. Soldiers of the most ordinary kind – not horse guards with peacock feathers on their scale-encrusted helmets, but foot solders in thick dark robes down to their ankles (in the dark it was impossible to tell whether or not they wore armour underneath); in black cloth hats, lined with iron and tilted slightly forward and holding short spears in their hands. They stamped their feet, encased in thick felted boots, boldly. If it hadn’t been for the dwarf, I would most likely have lost a few precious seconds and I wouldn’t have understood that they were murderers who had stolen into the garden in the dead of night.
Unbelievable! My house in the quiet, lush green quarter of the Imperial Capital was guarded far more vigilantly than many other houses. Two sentries always guarded the gate that led out into the street and behind the second garden was a guardroom, where there was always someone listening for untoward sounds in the night. Guardsmen were permanently stationed at the rear perimeter of the house, by the stables, as well, observing the outer walls.
But now, strange as it may seem, sitting among cushions on a silken carpet in the front garden, surrounded by burning oil lamps and smoking coils to ward off mosquitoes, I found myself to be completely vulnerable. In my left hand I clenched some thick, rough paper – a scroll with vertical rows of sharp black marks that somehow evoked the spring night, filled with the sounds of cicadas and the pungent scent of fresh vegetation.
There wasn’t much time to think about what to do next – time, at most, to snap your fingers a couple of times.
Loud hollering was useless – if the intruders hadn’t been stopped on their way in, that meant that there was no one there to stop them. It would take much frantic snapping of the fingers for the servants to have time to reach the front garden – and by that time, it would be all over. The hollering itself would take up precious moments I didn’t have.
To stand up, turn and run away from the intruders toward the blind wall of the garden was foolish, not only because after that there would be nowhere else to go, but also because the dwarf, like a giant spider, was speeding up to strike a blow.
The only thing left for me to do was to use my opponent’s lethal speed against him. That is, I had to draw my feet in their soft leather boots under me and make a leap out of the circle of trembling yellow light and into the saving darkness. Not away, however, but headlong towards the attackers, though slightly to their right, avoiding the iron rod gripped in the Dwarf’s right hand. I dashed past his left shoulder and ended up near the left arm of one of the soldiers. The second soldier, though armed with his spear, was momentarily thrown for a loop.
Three jumps and my opponents were already behind me on my left. Not stellar, but pretty good for a start.
The scroll had remained behind on the carpet, but the burning oil lantern was still in my hand. This I flung at the soldier closest to me, hardly daring to hope that it would catch fire. He tried to dodge it, but got drenched in oil all the same. At that moment, I employed one of the oldest tricks in the book, a move right out of a street brawl. I dug my foot into the sand, mid-flight and kicked it into the face of the soldier.
In an instant, all three of my enemies were behind me and I, dazed by the stench of their unwashed bodies, was flying in the direction from which they had just arrived, the direction of the exit from the garden into the courtyard, behind which were the gates to the street, or, rather, to the stone wall that separated the outer courtyard from the garden, toward the old spreading pear tree that grew by the wall and supported its masonry with its branches.
What awaited me in the courtyard – more soldiers and dwarves – I didn’t know; but as for the street, now, after the second watch, with the gates of all the quarters of the city long since closed, there wouldn’t be a soul in sight. It would have been quite rash on my part to try to escape by relying solely on running, at my relatively advanced age, along deserted streets. The only alternative was to put myself above my adversaries, if not beyond them and then act as the situation demanded.
I grabbed the lowest branch of the pear tree and allowed myself to glance back, risking to lose another second or two.
Pretty bad – the soldiers had already managed to turn their faces toward me, grimacing in the moonlight. The dwarf, his about-face leaving a crescent-like furrow in the sandy garden path, caught up with them and catapulted himself forward.
Masters of martial arts tumble upwards into trees like squirrels. I tried scrambling up through the lower branches, braving thorns, slipping, gritting my teeth and forcing my legs to bend at unprecedented angles under their unexpected burden. My right hand, sticky with oil, almost let me down, losing its grip. But my foot was already touching the reassuring rough surface of the tiles of the wall; I pulled myself up and turned around.
The dwarf, crouched right under me at the base of the wall, stretched his mouth which was buried in his ropes of beard, into a smirking grin. He gave me no time to consider how to go about kicking him in the head. With his teeth, he seized his sharp iron bar (now I noticed it had a convenient handle) and leapt into the tree.
Next, he flew along the branches like a misshapen black shadow, swinging from one branch to another, propelling himself upward. In a moment he deprived me of my advantage, at the same time taking up a position on the far side of the tree, so that it was between us.
I didn’t doubt that he would have the advantage over me, even on the tiles of the wall. I had only one choice – to take him on while he was scrabbling over to me, before he had time to snatch his weapon from his teeth. I would have to try to push him to the ground into the clutches of the soldiers, who even armed with spears didn’t pose much of a threat to me as long as I held my position above them.
Slipping down, I began to skirt the tree from behind, stepping on the tiles. The dwarf was already slightly above me among the branches. I had to tilt my head back in order to make out his wrinkled face, which he had painstakingly darkened with soot. Just then he jerked in a strange manner and heaved towards me, twisting his head left and right in irritation. He slithered down through the branches and fell in a shapeless heap right at the feet of the approaching soldiers.
A short arrow with dark plumage protruded from the rags on his back. The soldiers stared dully at him, transfixed.
I had a few seconds to size up the situation and make a move – now I could probably snap my fingers, say, three times.
I stood on the tiled slope of the overhang atop the wall (these tiles covered not only houses, here, but walls alike; walls that divided the city into rectangles like a board game, separating houses and courtyards and the quarters of the city).
While I was here, I was granted a few moments of respite from fear of the soldiers, who were armed with spears, but not with crossbows. But I had no notion of how many enemies were rampaging through my house, how they were armed and what had become of my guards. I knew only that an unknown enemy had materialised in my life and that he had been taken down by an unknown friend. The latter, however, had also forced his way into my house, or its grounds, without invitation.
I peered into the darkness, with its massive outlines of trees and the convex ribs of the tiled roofs and walls between them. In the light of the moon, I descried something that astonished me.
A tall, lanky silhouette draped in dark rags stood motionless on the slope of a high roof. A wild mass of tangled grey hair glinted in the moonlight. The figure froze beneath my gaze in a pose that recalled a cat arching its back. It then made a curious, graceful leap sideways along the roof, landing without a sound behind the corner and disappeared from sight.
Was I sleeping, or had I glimpsed the heroine of a hundred urban tales of horror – the grey witch Xiao, who sprang from the rooftops at night and drank the blood of people and horses?
And then it struck me that in the hand of the witch who had just vanished from view was a weapon, one no larger than the sharpened iron bar of the Dwarf. It somewhat resembled a stick, a bit longer than the forearm, the end of which was adorned with a small bow-shaped cross-piece. In short, a crossbow; from the looks of it, one for hunting. A weapon from which you could use effectively with only one hand, albeit from a short distance.
This fleeting glimpse was enough for me. Returning to a house with guards who were nowhere in sight, a courtyard overrun with tramping soldiers armed with spears and grey-haired archers leaping nimbly about on the roof, was not a wise thing to do. As a matter of fact, there was no guarantee that the arrow that had felled the dwarf had not been meant for me, but had strayed a bit too far to the right.
I had to flee.
It takes only a few moments to reload a crossbow. I quickly propped myself up on my elbow on the wall, throwing a quick glance over the tiled overhang at the front courtyard and the gates. As I might have expected, a motionless body lay crumpled in the sand and by the gates, where my oil lamp still glowed, I could make out a second. My guards’ lives had been snuffed out without a sound while I sat close by, in a circle of light – and literally at the feet of the grey-haired archer on the roof, who could have read the bold marks of the manuscript over my shoulder, had he wished.
I turned around and moved quickly, then ran along the tiled overhang. I ran, falling repeatedly, banging up my knees, performing awkward little capers – and consoling myself with the fact that the sorry spectacle I made would wreak havoc with the aim of the unknown archer, if, indeed, he had such an intention.
I clambered along the tiles of the wall that separated the outer courtyard from the front garden and sprang onto an adjacent wall that divided my house from the deserted dwelling next-door. I advanced eastward along the wall, in the direction of the Eastern Market of the Imperial Capital.
Running along a tiled overhang, particularly a decrepit, pockmarked overhang, overgrown with grass and occasionally even small trees, wouldn’t have been so difficult had it not been for one problem: running along a sloping surface, one leg is always bent at a sharp angle, the body lists to the side and one tends to drop on one’s belly every so often, like a load of bricks.
I’m not fat, like most of the Imperial inhabitants, who take pride in a stomach the size of a mountain. But I have lived in this world a surprisingly long time: more than four decades. Most of my peers have already departed from this life or reconciled themselves to the loss of teeth, hair, the flexibility of their extremities, or even their extremities themselves. The God of the Blue Sky was good to me for many years; he had clearly not prepared me for frenzied leaps along the slope of a tiled overhang on legs buckling underneath me.
And still I made my way eastward. Little orange lights flickered between the branches at my feet. Down below, tender strumming on an instrument could be heard; spicy aromas of cooking meat wafted from kitchens nestling in the depths of gardens. Here was a girl, kneeling before a young man at table, pouring him wine from a teapot amidst the blinking lights of the fireflies. Now her young man raised his eyes and was astonished to see there in the dusk a clumsy fellow balancing in the branches, his beard sticking out in all directions, in a soiled dressing gown, western-style trousers and tattered boots. The thick scent of sandalwood from the silent Temple of Teacher Kung. Silk flags fluttering around the oddly angular sides of the mortar of the Temple of Teacher Fo. The columns of the Temple of Fire. Priests shuffle around in their sandals and peer up in alarm at me, rustling in the branches of the trees like a nocturnal bird. Branches and little lights, the pinkish trajectories of bats, the quiet snorting of horses in the darkness. A spring night serenaded by cicadas in a city that no longer exists.
A leap from the wall onto the white sand of a deserted avenue, 130 steps wide. Should I not simply give myself up to the guards, recounting the story of the invasion of my home by robbers? But besides the attacker dwarf, there were two Imperial soldiers who had forced their way into my home. This led me to suspect that an order for my arrest had been issued and, consequently, the circumstances warranted my urgent escape from the capital. If that was the case, I had to report in at our town residence, which was not far (about four quarters away) from my home.
And so – onward.
The shouts of the city guards who seem to have picked up my trail were still faint. I could even reflect a bit on what had happened. The events were similar to those that had led to the death of my predecessor Melek, who had run the purchasing operations of our trading house in the glorious Empire. His guards had survived, however. But they had not the faintest idea how that poor chap, resting like I had been in the garden retreat, had been found the next morning, pierced through the eye with some sort of unknown razor-sharp weapon.
At least now I knew what had transpired. But at the time, my brother and I had no inkling about why it had happened and at whose behest. Melek wrote letters to my brother and me, but there was not so much as a hint about threats to his life, with the exception of the following enigmatic lines: “...strange and alarming news has arrived, which I will occupy myself with in the near future, giving the matter all my attention.”
This letter, rolled up, sealed with wax and concealed in a vessel filled with sesame oil, was swaying on the back of a camel, moving at a measured pace along the Great Road to the headquarters of the trading house, when the author of the epistle was already lying motionless, crumpled up on his side in the garden just coming to life, the garden that had now ejected me in such a strange manner.
“Well, who should we send to replace Melek?” my brother asked me soon afterward, sitting next to me under branches hung with ripening golden peaches. “Maybe you’d agree to go yourself? You love the capital. You speak the language of the Empire and even read and write. You’re bored here, I know. And when words about ‘strange and alarming news’ arrive from the Empire, after which the author of those words is killed...well, it’s just what you need to spice things up a bit.”
That conversation had taken place two and a half years since, but I knew little more today than I knew then.
One last unpleasant surprise awaited me when I was already crawling down from the wall that surrounded the enormous quarter of the Eastern Market, where all the most expensive pleasures of the Imperial Capital were to be found in their most concentrated form. There were few guards here. This quarter (which was, in fact, a city within a city) was guarded by its own inhabitants more vigilantly than any sentry could even dream about. And as I myself was one of the inhabitants, I knew a dark, obscure part of the wall, unknown even to the sentries, where the foundation was old and dilapidated, the tiles were overgrown with grass and weren’t as slippery and where the wall was also shaded by an old gingko tree, with its fan-shaped leaves, silver on their undersides and bark like congealed mud. Down the tree I slid, counting on being able to creep from the near side of the wall onto the deserted back-street, where my storehouses of plain white silk were waiting for shipment to enormous, insatiable Byzantium. But just at that spot under the wall where I had planned on beginning my foray into the city, a character well known to the whole Eastern Market and bearing the undisputedly false name of Udai-Baba (accent on the last syllable) had settled down for the night. A professional holy man – in other words, a preacher of a religion of his own creation – he was perpetually grimy, with tangled hair and beard. True, unlike other prophets of Ind and Baktria, he was absolutely sane and reasonable – one only had to look closely at his crafty eyes, bulging out of his reddened eyelids and turning them almost inside out. Actually, after two or three conversations with Udai-Baba on the theme of eternity, retribution and carnal love as a religious rite, I had a sneaking suspicion that in addition to preaching he was involved in the same, let us say, silk trade that I was. It is, of course, very convenient to be a person who is never required to answer questions about where he is going, where he has been and whom he has been talking to.
This very person was leaning against the base of the wall just now, when I had crawled down and landed almost literally on his stomach. I bore a closer resemblance to a holy man than did Udai-Baba at that moment – I was impossibly filthy, my face scratched and glistening with sweat, hatless, my hair strewn with twigs and bits of dirt. Udai-Baba stared with his bulging eyes as I landed on the soft earth and subsequently attempted to stand up on my legs, which buckled clumsily under me.
Now everything became much easier. It would no longer be necessary to keep glancing backward and upward to make sure I wasn’t being pursued by a grey-haired archer. I had no doubt that she could easily have caught up with me with her flying leaps. And since she hadn’t tried to, it meant she was in fact my saviour and not my enemy.
Here, at the market, it smelled like smoldering coals and the coagulated juices of smoked meat. Garbage collectors moved here and there, weaving in and out like shadows. Here, a rag-tag Sogdian hobbling on stiffened legs and covered with dirt would raise no eyebrows – anyone would suppose he was a caravan trader who had already had one too many teapots of wine before dark and had just woken up in a ditch.
And so, with my last drop of strength I reached our town residence, where, as always, the oil lampions burned and visitors who had decided to while away the night here reclined on carpets.
At the gates, hefty fellows with faces normally devoid of expression, but now full of alarm, intercepted me. It seemed that everyone knew all the details of what had happened to me even before I had arrived. The strongmen led me out underneath a sheltering tree hung with illuminated lanterns. My dear Sangak hastened toward me, beaming with a smile boasting a paucity of teeth, which somewhat unnerved people who didn’t know him. He watched as I was settled on carefully prepared rugs and pillows, then snapped the fingers on his only hand, his armed raised above his head.
The yeasty smell of a jug of warm beer wafted up under my nose. As soon as I had drunk to the bottom in one long draft, the jug seemed to melt away and soft feminine hands (at least two pairs) began to stroke my neck, my face and even the crown of my head with towels of the softest muslin soaked in warm ginger water. The drops meandered in little rivulets under my collar, which was ticklish and devilishly pleasant“Soon there will be enough warm water for a tub, my lord,” Sangak said quietly, without a trace of emotion, his immobile inky blackness obscuring the moon above me. He now looked like a rhino from the Imperial Zoo that had been captured in the shallows of the Great River – with his thick column-like arms, bald head between two mobile ears and tiny eyes. Sangak lacked only a horn above his nose for the resemblance to be complete.
The situation was a delicate one, for Sangak’s responsibility at the trading house was to ensure that I was not visited at night by dwarves bearing sharpened iron rods, accompanied by two soldiers from heretofore unknown regiments. Recent events should have leveled a terrible blow at his professional pride, to say nothing of the fact that his fate and his possible demotion to lowly caravan trader, now hung on my words.
And that was the mildest possible outcome. But my massive friend knew well that I wouldn’t make such a decision without long deliberation and therefore he conducted himself with dignity, though not without compunction.
“I’m sorry I woke you, dear friend,” I said humbly. “You’ve probably had a hard day.”
“I wasn’t sleeping, my lord,” Sangak answered. “I was thinking.”
“About the imperfection of this world?” I asked, settling myself more comfortably against the warm trunk of the tree.
“I was thinking about the sheep,” sighed Sangak, continuing to stand, waiting for the gesture from me that would allow him to sit down. Receiving it, he perched on the edge of my rug at an angle that revealed his face, tenderly clasped the stump of his left arm with his right hand and continued:
“I was thinking about why, of all the beasts in our world, the sheep is so wonderful, why mutton is prized more highly than any other meat. It doesn’t turn into mush between your teeth like the meat of some small-sized bird and it doesn’t break into thick sinews like beef. It’s just right for the teeth and tongue. And the aroma! But where can I find the aroma of real mutton, the kind we’re used to at home, the kind I constantly dream about here? What’s wrong with the mutton in this accursed city? Why is it that the best that they can do with mutton here is to treat it like the Inda people do?
“To steep it in sour milk with ginger and garlic overnight? And then cook it in clay for hours?”
“Exactly right, my lord,” Sangak confirmed, still speaking with the same cautious restraint. “And, by the way, although I know your habit – not to eat much at night, still, if you want anything, anything at all, including pilaf, the whole kitchen is awake and awaits your orders...but I suspect, I’m even completely certain, that you will wish to have...
“Fruit,” I requested. Sangak at once snapped his fingers again, his armed raised over his head like a dancer from Damascus and a moment later my nose basked in the scent of a real Iranian melon that had managed to survive the winter. It would literally have swum in its own juices if it had not been packed in pieces of ice. Sangak had yet again salvaged his reputation.
“You can imagine, Sangak my friend, that things other than mutton have occupied my thoughts on this night,” I began, signalling the transition to serious matters. “But I see that you were forewarned about my arrival, since you had time to see to the cutting of a melon...”
“Bukar raised the alarm when he saw the murdered guards – two at the gates and one in the sentry box near the kitchen,” Sangak reported dispassionately.
“He couldn’t find you anywhere at home. He sent someone on horseback to me here. I immediately sent the ‘wisemen’ to your house. They have already arrived there, I think and are hard at work. In the meantime, I thought about it a bit and decided that if you were forced to stay away from home for some reason or other, you would either take cover somewhere until morning or show up here before then. And if something worse had happened, it would be necessary to go to the city guards in the morning. But I gave orders based on the most auspicious scenario. And I reinforced the watch here at the inner and outer perimeters. The sentries advised me soon that you were coming on foot through the ceremonial square...Bukar is also here.”
“Well, let’s talk to Bukar then.”
Sangak again snapped his fingers over his head with a dancer’s flourish and the figure of my temporarily vanished guard materialized out of the shadows and came over to our tree by the wall. His grey hair glinted metallically. Like Sangak, he knew me well and didn’t waste time trying to justify himself, but waited silently for my questions.
“Forgive me for causing you so much trouble tonight,” I said. The derision in my voice made Bukar’s face, greyish in the moonlight, go white. “Let’s begin from the beginning. What exactly did you hear? What made you come out to look?…”
“A rustling, master. From somewhere up above,” the warrior answered after a short pause. “It seemed that someone was on the roof enclosing the front garden. And then something louder, footsteps and stamping – also up above. I first ran out to the sentry box, where I saw Aspanak lying face down and he was bleeding.
Then I ran to your bedroom, where I didn’t find you and then people approached along the road and ran to the gates...”
“Through the front garden?” I questioned, interrupting him.
“Yes, master.”
“And what was in the garden?”
“Nothing,” Bukar replied, pausing again. “Though it clear you had just been there. Your manuscript was lying there, the lamps were burning, it was smoky...and there were tracks on the path. Many. I avoided them.”
“Go on.”
“Then I went up to the gates and saw two dead men. Vgashfarn and Devgon.”
“How had they been killed?”
“Vgashfarn by a long, sharp lance through the eye,” Bukar said, trembling almost imperceptibly. “Like Aspanak in the sentry box. But Devgon – his neck was broken. That’s all.”
“What do you mean ‘that’s all’? You didn’t see any more dead men? Or anyone at all?”
“No. No one.”
“No one at all? Strange...so, that’s all you have to report?”
“Almost, master....We began searching for you all over the house. And when we didn’t find you, I jumped on a horse and rode here, through the city, as fast as the wind. The guards didn’t even try to catch up with me. They don’t have horses like that.”
But I read some sort of doubt in Bukar’s eyes.
“What else did you see, friend?” I prompted him encouragingly.
“You won’t believe me, master...but this rustling on the roof...naturally, I turned my attention to the roof after this and I saw...I glimpsed it above the tiles on the edge of the roof, the one that faces to the east...”
“It...what was it?”
“It wasn’t a person,” Bukar murmured quietly.
“What was it then? Did the tigers escape from the Imperial Zoo?”
Bukar sighed heavily and remembering that I like facts and not premature conclusions, he answered:
“A shape. Not a man, not a woman. It jumped along the rooftop. Long grey hair.A black face. It didn’t move like people move. I saw it only for an instant. It was going towards the east, along the roof-tiles.
Sangak exhaled noisily and became perfectly still, waiting for my reaction. He was well aware of what I thought about the demons, spirits and devis my people were given to seeing. Or the witch, Xiao, known to all the city.
“How did she move?”
Bukar, after thinking a bit, dropped down on all fours and tried to execute a strange sideways leap.
There could be no doubt: he and I had seen the same thing.
“Thank you, my dear Bukar,” I said presently. “You have acted altogether honourably. We will talk again. And I am very sorry that your friends and mine have lost their lives.”
Bukar hesitated a bit, as though he couldn’t believe his luck, then let out a deep sigh and deftly made his exit. Sangak, painfully aware that no one had told him “you have acted altogether honorably,” kept silent.
“Well now,” I said, ready to draw some conclusions. “Bukar heard me running on the roof-tiles. Everything that happened before that occurred in virtual silence. This is very curious. To destroy three warriors without a sound – this is beyond... First, of course, they killed Aspanak in the sentry box. The dwarf did this singlehandedly. He crept over the roof, fell onto his neck from above and went right for his eye.”
“The dwarf!?” Sangak exclaimed, his eyes widening.
“It would be very unpleasant for you if you were to meet up with him, I assure you...Then he crept up to the gates and gave a signal to the soldiers. When armed soldiers knock on the door, it doesn’t arouse suspicion, but it provides a serious distraction. The guard strikes up a conversation and at that moment the dwarf sneaks to the back...Vgashfarn and Devgonare killed at the same time, so they don’t manage to utter a sound. The dwarf kills one of them with his strange weapon; one of the soldiers kills the other. That means that he knows how to break someone’s neck in the wink of an eye...also curious. In fact, this is why the soldiers were necessary. The dwarf couldn’t have done it on his own. And, by the way, they weren’t soldiers at all. And all the time I calmly sat in the front garden; maybe I heard a slight commotion at the entrance, but... that’s what gates are for – for people to knock on, asking for directions, or asking for food. Completely ordinary events and sounds... To continue, Sangak. The dwarf’s body disappeared. And the “soldiers” disappeared. That means they removed it. Moreover, in record time. And they vanished without a trace. After my escape, there was nothing more for them to do in the house, where a hue and cry was already starting up.
“Ah, you killed the dwarf!” Sangak exclaimed, with obvious relief.
I didn’t want to disappoint him; I didn’t tell him about another strange fact – that the grey-haired creature on the roof had set out, judging by Bukar’s story, toward the east. But I had fled in the same direction. Then followed the logical question: why had this creature not caught up with me? Especially since my progress during the flight eastward along the walls was not aided by youthful vigou,r.
“And so, Bukar ran out into the garden when I had already left and the dwarf had already been removed,” I continued.
“But how can that be, if the blockhead saw you all the same and mistook you for the witch Xiao on the roof?” Sangak protested.
“I truly hope that he wouldn’t make the observation “neither a man, nor a woman; not a person at all...” in regard to me,“ I remarked, shaking my head. “No, up there on the roof was someone else I saw with my own eyes; otherwise I wouldn’t have fled, Sangak. And he or she had a crossbow....In short: at daybreak, let the ‘wisemen’ explore all the roofs; what’s more, let the guards from this day on learn to keep watch over what transpires there, above their heads. And – thank you, Sangak. The melon was delicious.
My friend, understanding well that the final judgment on his blunders and his accomplishments was still to come, relaxed a bit.
“Your room is ready,” he said in a low voice, treading beside me. “The tub with hot water should be ready by now. The bench is spread with fine imperial linen, just as you like it. You will need a massage now and one in the morning; all the same, after such an adventure, your whole body will ache, believe me... it’s too bad that you cannot give a massage to yourself – all of us who have had occasion to experience your hands on us are luckier than you are...”
Afterwards, having almost fallen asleep in the tub, they literally had to carry me into the room where I had spent numerous happy nights during my former visits to the capital, before I began to manage all our trade activities here. I started to recall stories about the dreadful old hag Xiao, springing over the roofs on moonlit nights. And at the next moment the sun was shining – not early morning, but bright midday sun; and meek Sangak personally handed me something soft and warm, a slightly sagging parcel wrapped in a fine cotton tea-towel, from under which escaped the most wonderful smell in the world – freshly baked bread from the tandoor oven. By my bed stood a bowl full of large ripe translucent mulberries.