Adventure Magazine Cover — page 142: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

VAM » wm. ee eee toe The Grand Cham “A ship, Bembo,” murmured the Breton, his eyes closed, ‘‘a harmless pilgrim galliot, beats off an attack by well-armed raiders because—a soldier calls secretly to the foe from below decks. One of Rudolfo’s men. A dagger is thrown from behind the mast. Feed your curiosity with that and let me sleep.” IT WAS a leaner and dirtier throng that lined the rail of the Nauplia when that good galliot entered the dark waters of the Golden Horn and an- chored off the crowded shore of Constanti- nople after the storms of the Aégean that followed the attack by the pirates. And when Clavijo and his party reem- barked for Pera and the Black Sea in a*« small Venetian trading-galley, Mocenigo - was no longer with them. The young count, Clavijo explained to Bearn, had found para- dise enough in the Hippodrome and palaces of the emperor, and women to his liking. The departure of the others had been hur- ried by the insults of Moslem warriors who thronged the water-front. Michael said nothing but sought out Bembo, who was sitting on a chest on the ietty, eying the preparations for departure. “The first of us has fallen by the wayside, Bembo,” he* observed gravely. He had been apprehensive about the jester since Bembo bobbed up as a stowaway, but had not reproved him. ‘Will you not follow his example and remain here?” “T would see the Grand Cham.” Michael looked at him and laughed. “You will never see the Grand Cham.”’ “Well—” Bembo was surprized— “you must know, master, for you have traveled near Cathay. I would see the city and the gold palaces “There is no city.” “Master? You have heard Clav “Clavijo—”’ Michael’s smile broadened into a wide grin— ‘‘Messer Ruy de Gonzales Clavijo is the greatest liar in Christendom.” Bembo gaped and glanced from the ship to the stores on the jetty and at the Breton as if doubting his senses. “Clavijo, my good Bembo, is a man with one talent. Aye—a tongue. The sun never shone upon a greater liar. What he did not pick up at the water-front of Genoa and Venice he heard related of the traveling monks. When that failed him he had his ___ tongue, and wit to match. It made his for- 141 tune in Venice. Until the council took him at his own value, forsooth, and sent him to find the city that is a lie.” Michael chuckled at the memory. “When Clavijo. by his own testimony was in Ca- thay I saw him among a throng of _camp- followers, fleeing along the Danube.” At this Bembo scratched his head vigor- ously. Then his eyes lighted and he leaped from the chest. “Aye, master. Well, then, since this is a quest of folly, who should be the leader but a fool?” When the galley cleared the Horn Bembo stood beside the helmsman, a wooden sword stuck in his ragged girdle, his twisted legs planted wide, and his bearing as important as that of an admiral of the Venetian fleet. And when, a month later, the party of explorers rode inland from Trebizond, Bem- bo took his place at the head of the column, mounted on a caparisoned mule. “On, into terra incognital’’ he cried, wav- ing his wooden sword valiantly. In fact Trebixond was the boundary of what we now call Europe. It was the eastern door of the fading Byzantine Empire, the last trade port of the Serene Republic of Venice, which had its bailio stationed in an arsenal on shore. The walled city, rising on rocks from this shore, was the home of Manuel the Second, almost the last of the Comneni line—emperors of Trebizond for generations. Now they were bound, as Bembo had stated, into unknown territory—into blank spaces on Venetian maps. No one in Trebi- zond had been anxious to accompany them for it was known that the mountains to the - south and east as far as the Salt Sea were occupied by tribes who paid tribute to a monarch of Tatary. Soranzi and others of the party had taken this information as a good augury and were in high spirits. So also was Bembo. “Come, my flock!” He jangled the bells on his hood. ‘Follow your bell-wether. Ply your spurs, sound the timbrels! A fool is your leader, and folly your guide. Ride, my cousins in ‘folly, and —— take him who | first draws rein!” Journeying to the southeast, they en- tered bare brown plains and passes that wound among stunted, rocky hills where the valleys were yet snow-coated and the air was chill. For the first time the voyag- ers were alone in a strange land. And Eomichbooks-:co