He went into the house where in a public room Caspar and a few other travellers who could afford the luxury were consuming the mutton and the onions and small crusty loaves of fresh-baked bread. He intended, as he took his place, to appeal to Caspar in much the same way as he had dope in the Palace at Jexal, but looking sideways at the hard young face, he had a better idea.
“There is a man who could be of inestimable use to us,” he remarked in an almost offhand way.
“That black beggar I’ “He is not a beggar by trade. He is a man of education. He speaks the tongue that has served me fairly well, so far, but has become less and less useful lately; and he also speaks the
languageof the country. It has worried me, to think that we might reach our destination and not be able to make ourselves understood.”
“That is a thing to consider,” Caspar admitted. It was not a situation which his own mind would ever have presented to him, but now that it was put to him by someone else he was able to visualise it quite clearly.
“Are you suggesting that we take him with us?”
“It would be a convenient arrangement.”
“But he stinks! Washed and re-clad he might be tolerable. And he would need a camel.”
“He would need a camel,” Melchior agreed, picking at his food and looking at Caspar from the corner of his eye.
“Could he fit himself to travel with us, very early in the morning?” Remembering the almost wild urgency in Balthazar’s voice and eyes, Melchior said with assurance: “Oh yes; he would be ready.”
“Then he’ll need some money,” Caspar said, feeling for his pouch. How many? Unconcerned as he had seemed about the cost of things he had realised that his money had lost value as he moved westwards. But even here, surely, ten would be enough. He passed the coins, unostentatiously, into Melchior’s hand.
“And tell him, from me, to do something about that running sore on his arm,” he said.
Melchior took the money with a feeling of relief and of triumph, and of gratitude.
“I hope,” he said, ‘that you will have reason to regard this as money well spent.” He picked up his plate and went back to the yard where Balthazar waited, patiently, sitting against a wall.
“It is arranged,” Melchior said.
“You are to come with us, if you can obtain a camel, and fresh clothes and be ready to set out before sunrise. Also you must wash and find some remedy for the sores on your arm and your feet. Here is money.”
He held it out and Balthazar’s eyes bulged. He’d seen such coins—but only on three widely separated occasions—in the counting house. The most valuable coin in the world, not only because it was so heavy, of such pure gold, but because of its beauty. It was greatly in demand, not as currency, but as a decoration. Men who could afford it hung their women with gold coins both as a means of advertising their wealth and as a form of investment; and a rose jekkal was of all coins the rarest and most sought after. Any woman lucky enough to own one wore it in the very centre of her forehead, exposing the side which showed the full-blown rose which gave the coin half its name.
“Ten! I don’t need ten,” Balthazar said when he had caught his breath again.
“Two will buy all I need and leave a great deal over.”
“It must be a good camel,” Melchior reminded him.
“We must travel fast. And in this country everything is very expensive. When last we filled our camels’ food-bags the man who supplied us took one of these.”
“Then he was a thief and you were cheated. Grossly cheated. There, also, I can be of service to you. I am an accountant, of great experience. I recognise even a rose jekkal, and know its worth.”
“Take two then,” Melchior said.
“And look, I have brought you some food.” He held out his hardly touched supper.
“That was a kindly thought; but thank you, I have eaten. Not long ago. And even had I not, I could not waste time on food just now. I have a lot to do.”
“You,” Melchior said, ‘are a man after my own heart.”
“And you are one of those of whom-I dreamed. I knew that once I could find you, all would be well.”
Melchior carried his plate back into the house. The fat had congealed as the food cooled and it was no longer the appetising dish that it had been; he ate it without noticing, absent-mindedly and in haste. He still had his charts to consult, his reckonings to do.
“You still here?” asked the innkeeper who had been called out of the house to settle a dispute between the two men who each ‘claimed that the other’s donkey had eaten his donkey’s food.
“I
don’t like beggars hanging about my yard. But you did a good service,
speaking for those strangers, so take this. And be off.“He pushed a penny towards Balthazar who pushed it away and said:
“I wish to buy a camel, a good camel. Perhaps you can tell me where to go.”
Innkeepers always knew what was for sale and where; they advised travellers, and if a sale resulted they were given their percentage.
“I myself have a camel to sell. A prime camel, young and , swift. A merchant came here and fell sick; we nursed him tenderly, my wife and I, but he died.” Balthazar gave a little inward shudder at the thought of what that tender nursing had been.
“He owed us a great deal,” the innkeeper went on, ‘and we shall never be fully paid. There is the camel and some clothes of the kind that there is no demand for in this place!”
“Show me the camel, and also the clothes.”
“Show me your money ‘ Balthazar held out the two rose jekkals, gleaming against his pinkish palm. Two of them, the innkeeper thought: one for his pretty wife to flaunt, one to sell!
“Come with me,” he said.
Balthazar knew, even before he saw it, that the camel would be a good one; and he knew with absolute certainty that among the dead man’s clothes would be a dark red robe, and a headscarf of the same colour, striped with blue and woven with a silver thread. And they were there, together with everything else, down to the very shoes which he had seen himself wearing in his dream. Exultant, bemused, one half of him gloated and rejoiced, the other half, the accountant half, stayed unmoved and bargained shrewdly. The innkeeper craved the two rose jekkals and they were too high a price to pay for an untried camel, however good-looking, and a dead man’s clothes. A full bath of hot water must be included.
“Oh yes, yes,” the innkeeper said, ‘the maid shall prepare it.”
“Also,” Balthazar said, “I need ointment for my blisters and the place where the dog bit me on the arm.”
“We have, in this town, a woman most skilled in the making of ointments and potions. She keeps her own bees, and grows the pink Cistus that yield myrrh,” the innkeeper said, thinking of his percentage.
“She lives a little way along this street, in a house with a broken fence. It is late,” he said, ‘and when you are bathed and reclothed it will be later still. But if you tell her that I sent you she will open her door.”
“Very good,” Balthazar said, spreading his open palm to which the two rose jekkals were now stuck.
“The camel, these clothes, enough change to buy the ointment. And,” he added in a fierce tone, alien to his own, ‘the freedom of the little lame girl-‘ “But consider,” the innkeeper protested.
“Even for two rose jekkals that is much to ask. Also the crooked one does not belong to me. She is my wife’s slave.”
“Then you must ask your wife; does she wish for two rose jekkals to hang on her forehead or not.”
For the first, for the only time in his life, Balthazar felt omnipotent; on this side the fulfilment of his dream, on this the possession of two rose jekkals.. .. And yet, thinking of the little lame girl, he was sad. Tomorrow the pretty, hard-hearted wife of the innkeeper would buy just such another and treat her just as badly. And then he remembered what he had seen when the star splintered and revealed the new world that was about to come. Save the little girl now, he thought, because it was obvious that unless something was done she would not live to see that new world; the next poor creature to fall into the hands of the innkeeper’s wife might be stronger, more resistant. We must play for time, Balthazar thought. He said: