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why art thou here?"
    "I heard that in the lands of the great khan a man may find service for his sword."
    "Ohai!" Mardi Dobro grinned like a cat. "Thou-a Christian without even a horse, without gold or servants-seeketh service with the Lord of the World! Thou art a prince of fools. Go back to thy people. Find a ship sailing into the west and go!"
    Again Nial smiled.
    "My people are dead. I have set my foot upon this road. I will go on."
    "The child rides a calf and cries for a horse." Mardi Dobro snapped lean fingers contemptuously. This boy had stood up to the Tatars foolishly, yet his sword was a good one. Perhaps it might please Barka Khan. And then there was the lion on the shield, the same rearing lion of the seal of Barka Khan. This might be an omen. "Thou canst not abide in Tana and live," he muttered. "There is a way for thee to go to Sarai, the city of Barka Khan. I will set thy foot on the way, if thou wilt."
    "Aye," said Nial.
    Shaking his head, and motioning Nial to follow, the shaman made off through the crowded alleys, dodging horses and mules, until he came to the face of a stone building into which a string of laden camels was passing. He led Nial through the gate into a courtyard open to the sky. Here he pointed to the open gallery of the floor above them.
    "At the head of the stair, in the fourth sleeping chamber, thou wilt find a Christian merchant who is as wise as thou art foolish. He goes to Sarai. Look to thyself!"
    When Nial turned to thank the shaman, he had disappeared among the kneeling camels. Climbing the stairs, the young swordsman counted the open compartments along the gallery and stopped. In these stalls slept the travelers who owned the beasts in the yard below. But at the fourth place loitered two bearded and shaggy men who glanced at him furtively and waited for him to pass. He had seen their like before, even to the long, curved knives they fingered restlessly.
    "Go," he said to them quietly. "Go and rob in the alleys below."
    They looked at his sword and the spread of his shoulders, then slipped away. Nial glanced into the compartment.
    "Ha! What art thou?" a sharp voice challenged him.
    Messer Paolo Tron sat at a small table before a steaming dish of rice and mutton, apparently heedless of the knifemen who had slunk off. A good carpet was spread on the floor, and the merchant's bed of quilts had been laid over several chests and bags at the rear.
    "Nial O'Gordon am I," responded the wanderer, "without gear or gold in this land of paynims. Faith, it was a magician who got me through the port and told me I would find a Christian merchant here."
    "What seek ye, Messer Nial?"
    Tron spoke in the Norman French that was common to most of Europe. Secretly-although he carried a short falchion under his mantle and wore a shirt of linked mail under his jerkin-he was glad to have the loiterers driven away, but he did not show it. Instead his lips tightened at mention of gold.
    "A bite to eat, a place to sleep, and a way to Sarai, which is the city of the great khan."
    Tron clapped his hands. A frightened Greek servant came to fetch another plate and glass for Nial. The two men helped themselves with their fingers and washed the food down with wine, in silence. The merchant was not given to idle talk, and Nial was hungry after weeks of being pent up in the galley.
    "Now," Tron asked suddenly, "how is it that you speak like an Arab?"
    "Easy to say." The boy smiled. "I was born among them. Aye, in a castle over the Jordan. My father and his father lived there, in the wars, but now they are dead."
    A crusader's son, Tron thought. A luckless lad, raised in Palestine and driven out into the sea by victorious Moslems. He had met crusaders returning through all the ports of the Mediterranean in the ships of the Templars. They were all poor, seeking hire for their swords in a Christendom that cared not at all for them. Strange that this one should come to the road to the Far East.
    "Better for you to abide in