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was a vigorous and capable captain and Wu Li had no doubt his progress up the ranks would be steady and possibly even legendary, but even he could not guarantee the safety of one small boy in a city the size and duplicity of Kashgar. Anonymity was a much more sensible solution.
    Wu Li bought a cap for the boy to cover hair that, when washed, proved to be the color of gold, a distinctive, memorable and in these parts unusual shade, and told him to wear it every moment he was outside their rooms in the caravansary.
    Over the next week as Wu Li met with his agent in Kashgar, his fellow merchants and prospective buyers, he let fall the judicious word here and there that he was looking for a Greek woman answering to the name of Agalia. A free woman, recently widowed, who might through a series of unfortunate circumstances have had the additional misfortune of falling prey to slavers. He wasn’t asking for himself, but family in Antioch had contacted Basil the Frank, his agent in Baghdad, and as a favor to Basil…Yes, yes, of course, the utmost discretion…
    The Honorable Wu Li of Cambaluc, following in the footsteps of his father, the Honorable Wu Hai, had taken great care over many visits to maintain good relations with the city of Kashgar, paying into the city’s treasury with every appearance of good will his tithe of monies earned through sales of his goods. He had even taken on a local orphanage as a personal concern, in donations of cash, food and goods. Neither was he a stranger to the local mosque, Buddhist monastery, or Nestorian church. He had no intention of embarrassing any good citizen of Kashgar for legally acquiring property in the form of a slave. But if such a slave had been purchased, it was just possible that she could be sold again, immediately, and at a modest profit. The Honorable Wu Li would be very grateful, and as every citizen of Kashgar knew, such gratitude had a way of manifesting itself in very real terms, if not immediately then at some time in the future. The citizens of Kashgar, traders to the bone, took always the long view.
    In the meantime, Jaufre and Johanna, shadowed at a discreet distance by Deshi the Scout, sallied forth into the great bazaar, where a surgeon pulled a rotten molar from the mouth of a groaning patient with his wailing wife at his side. Next to the surgeon’s shop a blacksmith replaced a cast shoe on a braying donkey. Another stall featured an endless array of brilliant silks, presided over by a black-veiled woman who, when the imam issued the call to prayer, excused herself from her customers, produced a small rug, and knelt to prostrate herself toward the east.
    There were tents filled with nothing but soaps, powders to clean one’s hair, picks to clean one’s fingernails, pumice to smooth one’s callouses, creams and lotions to soften one’s skin, perfumes to make one irresistible to the opposite sex. There was cotton by the bale and by the ell, and tailors to make it up into any garment one wished. Carpenters made chair legs and rolling pins and carts. Herbalists made up mixtures of spices to season lamb, ease a head cold, hasten a birth. A tinsmith cut rolled sheets of tin into pieces for buckets, tubs, pots and pans. An ironworker fashioned chisels and hammers. Potters sat behind rows of bowls, pitchers and urns glazed in golden brown and cool green.
    One huge tent was filled with coarse sacks with the tops open and the sides partly rolled down to display a vast selection of dried fruits and nuts, apricots from Armenia, olives from Iberia, almonds and dates from Jordan, pistachios from Balkh. There were carts piled high with sheep’s lungs dyed pink and green and yellow and stuffed with spiced meats and cooked grains. One sweating man rendered a pile of pomegranates as tall as he was into cups of cool, tart, ruby-red juice, unperturbed by the dozens of wasps and flies buzzing around him. “Hah, daughter of the honorable Wu Li! You have returned to