“It is my intention to become a soldier as soon as I am old enough. Sons of your men are admitted when they are fourteen; the rule is that a Jexalian born must be sixteen.”
“And how old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Well,” Caspar said, with sudden geniality, ‘we’ll make an exception in your case. I’ll give the word and if you present yourself tomorrow you will be accepted. Soldiers earn more than smiths—so you’ll be able to look after your sister.”
Why had he added that?
“I am indeed most grateful,” the boy said, without looking grateful at all; and Caspar knew that nothing he did, nothing would inspire true gratitude in this cub; “if he fetched out the crown and set it on his head, and bowed his own head and kissed his hand, he’d take it as no more than his just due. Such a boy could be dangerous; he must be watched!
“We don’t play at soldiers, now.” he said.
“You must work hard. I shall keep my eye on you. You may go.”
“I thank you. I shall work hard,” the boy said. He turned and walked away, unhurriedly and with a lithe grace. Somewhere in the corridor he called, “Ilya, where are you?” and it struck Gas-par that the words were an echo of words spoken only four years ago, but in fact unimaginably far away, the words of two children, silk-clad and carefree, playing in the long corridor of the Palace that was their home. Getting fanciful, he told himself scornfully.
It was a relief at the end of the day to sit down to supper with
Benjamin, the old Jew who bought and sold carpets.In the old days, if the Vizier was to be believed, supper in the Palace had occupied the whole evening and lasted far into the night. It had been a social occasion, a nightly feast, with many guests and three or four times as much food cooked as could possibly be eaten. Caspar and his Five Hundred had come straight from a life where they thought themselves lucky if in the morning they could place slices of tough raw meat under their saddles and at the day’s end remove it, flattened and softened in fibre, and find fuel enough to char it black on the outside. Often enough they had eaten it raw, tasting of leather and horses’ sweat. Bread had been a luxury, so had any vegetable or fruit.
From such a life they had plunged, in a single day, to life in this city, which straddling the trade routes from East to West, offered every delicacy known to man. A wide belt about the city itself was devoted to market gardens, to farms where pigs grew fat and calves were bred to be eaten young. There were imports, too; fruits from plants too delicate to flourish even in this sheltered valley, and fish, not the well-nigh indestructible salted and smoked fish which was a rare luxury in the desert, but fresh fish, reared in great pools on the fish farms, and other fish, cunningly preserved in oil and spices, brought from far places. There was even one delicacy, fish eggs in oil, sealed into jars, that came, by painful stages, from some unknown place in the north.
For a time they had all eaten gluttonously: and if they had simply been sacking the city and intending to move on, gluttony would have been in order, even a duty, since a man should build up reserves when he could, against the hungry days, as a camel did, or a fat-tailed sheep. But they were not passing through; they were here to establish themselves, and very soon Caspar, in whom the desert-bred respect for food was lively, had issued orders. Nowadays, even in the Palace, one main dish was served, fish or flesh or fowl, with all the bread, cheese or fruit that a man needed to attain the full-fed feeling. The horde of master cooks in the kitchens, mourning the waste of their acquired skills in rearing airy towers of spun sugar, the moulding of marzipan into flowers and animals, the making of small many-coloured cakes that melted on the tongue, had been set to useful tasks, often menial. And in the Great Hall where parasitic officials had feasted Caspar sat down to eat with those of the Five Hundred who had no homes of their own, or preferred the company of their fellows, and any chance-comer upon whose right to be there Caspar and the Vizier were agreed.
There had been a time when visitors showed obvious signs of nervousness. Jexal had been taken by barbarians and in many people’s minds barbarianism and cannibalism and reasonless killing were closely associated. But gradually the word had spread, the new regime was different, definitely uncouth, but it was disciplined; and Caspar was not a bad fellow; difficult to talk to, being ignorant of Greek which Alexander’s shortlived Empire had made almost a universal language.
On this evening, because, despite his embargo on the many public holidays, people were still celebrating, in a muted way, the Festival of the Horse, none of the Five Hundred was present and Caspar and his guest sat down alone; not in the Balcony Room which would ordinarily.. have been Caspar’s choice were the company to number less than ten, but in a small room, on the ground floor, handy for the kitchens. The Balcony Room, his chosen refuge in this place, had been spoiled for him by the morning’s experience. ;
The old Jew, who had washed his’ hands and his feet in an ante-room, gave his ritual greeting, “Peace be on this house.”
“Peace be upon you and yours.” Caspar responded. It was curious, he thought, how, from the very first, he had felt an affinity with this old man who came from the West, who was a trader. It had been partly explained when, during their first meeting, the old man had said that his people had once, long ago, been a desert people; and they had taken a city called Jericho in very much the same Way as Caspar had taken Jexal. Another partial explanation lay in the fact that Benjamin reminded Caspar of his grandfather, though there was no physical resemblance between that fierce old warrior, lean and leathery, all scarred from his many battles, and the plump, peaceable Jew. Yet there was a likeness; perhaps it lay in the fact that both men gave the
impression that they had lived long, seen manythings and been little impressed. And there was the similarity of greeting and leave-taking. True, Benjamin said, “Peace be upon this house,” and Caspar’s grandfather said ‘upon this tent’, never having seen a house; but the intent was the same. And the ritual reply was identical.
“And now,” Caspar said when the mutton and rice had been served.
“What is the news in the world?”
Benjamin had learned, on his previous visit, how limited Caspar’s knowledge was. Tell him now, for instance, about the increasing size and importance of the port of Caesarea—a thing of great importance to one who regularly shipped cargoes of carpets and rugs to Rome and a dozen other places, and what would it mean to Caspar who had never seen the sea or a ship? He considered and discarded several things and then said:
“The news that most closely concerns me is a plague that has broken out amongst the slaves in Tyre. They are the ones who fish out the murex, from which the purple dye is made; and they have died more quickly than they can be replaced. So for a year or two there will be a great shortage of the true purple colour.”
“Our carpets then, already dyed, should increase in value,” Caspar said, and was instantly ashamed. City talk. Tradesmen’s talk!
“That is so,” the Jew agreed placidly, ‘and today, in my buying, I took that into account. I paid more for any carpet with purple in it; and I warned your people of the shortage.”
Caspar narrowed his eyes.
“Now why should you do that? They couldn’t know. They’d have sold at the old price.”
“God would know,” the old man said, simply.
“And the man who profits by another’s ignorance can not lie down at peace with his God.”
Possibly in its far distant and now-no-more-than-legendary homeland Caspar’s peoples had had gods, religious beliefs and ceremonies, but if so they had been left there, with everything else that could not be carried on horseback or travel on its own legs. All that remained to them as drought after drought had forced them to move farther and farther to the south-west, was a primitive kind of sun worship, strictly practical in its purposes. It was convenient to have some form of ritual to mark a permanent marriage from a passing association; it was convenient to know that when a man said, “I swear by the sun .. .” what he said thereafter was likely to be the truth. There was no mysticism about it; nobody imagined that the sun had any interest in him or demanded anything from him. They kept one festival, on the day when the sun stood highest in the sky and meat was plentiful, since that was the time when young bull calves and rams were ready to be eaten, must indeed be weeded out to prevent over-grazing. Caspar was about as far from understanding what Benjamin meant when he said “God’ as any man could be. He remembered that on his former visit, telling stirring tales about famous men of his race, the old Jew had several times mentioned God and some completely unbelievable things that he was supposed to have done.