Chapter 1.4

Chapter 5

Andrea Bembo stormed into the room and, seeing the spectacle, wondered whether he should burst with fury or a laugh. Cosimo was completely naked chasing the Persian dancer barely covered by a veil while another Chinese prostitute tugged at his leg trying to drag him to the bed. The boy was alarmed as he saw his uncle and was perplexed for some moments not knowing what to do. The older man regretted having introduced the young man to the brothels of Bukara at his previous stage a month earlier, but he had done so by feeling responsible for his sex education in the absence of the father and friends. The problem was that since then Cosimo had not been able to get rid of those experiences with the sensual Oriental women and when they arrived in Samarkanda his uncle had had to agree to allow them to repeat them in danger of his nephew escaping. All precautions and advice to take precautions against venereal diseases had been useless and the merchant could only hope for the best. Two days after they had to continue on their way to Kokand and needed the young man in one piece.

Up to that moment the Venetians had found excellent business opportunities and had been able to place most of their goods among their customers- many of them old acquaintances of Andrea of other trips- all the porcelain and glass products manufactured in Venice and its zone of influence, which was suitable since they were the most fragile pieces and that they could suffer the avatars of ruder stages of the trip ahead. In exchange for them they had obtained pearls from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, rubies and coral. Now they had only the delicate textile products in wool and linen of Italian manufacture with the expectation of exchanging them for silk fabrics, spices, jade and ivory manufactures from the Celestial Empire.

The Italians were traveling on the so-called Silk Road, a network of commercial roads that started at the latitude of Damascus to the east of Syria, and passing through Persia, Aria, Bactriana, contoured the Pamir massif and the Taklamakan desert moving into northern China. Innumerable secondary routes started in Italy and Constantinople, Africa, Arabia, India, Korea and Japan, so that the Silk Road connected Europe with the Far East, providing to the worldwide wealthy classes of the time all the best products that their world and their time could offer them, and creating opportunities of making fortune for the merchants of all the zones involved and of Venice in particular.

Andrea did not deceive him. He knew that from Kokand and especially from Kaschgar they would enter the most turbulent area of their journey since instead of tribes more or less controlled by the local chiefs they would be crossing the confines of the Celestial Empire, populated with bandits of all kinds in permanent conflict with the Chinese with whom the Venetians wanted to trade.

Resignedly Andrea returned to the room where Cosimo was. He would have to literally tear him out from between the legs of the prostitutes, so much was the taste the boy had taken for the exotic women.

Ivo woke with the first rays of the sun filtering through the curtains of the window. He realized that Lian slept beside him, and that it was not just a dream prompted by the long-held sexual abstinence since he had left Venice.

He slid his hand down the sheets, following the outline of the woman's hips-curved enough to be a Chinese female-taking particular care not to wake her as they had had a busy night. His hand returned gently to her shoulders, and as he reached the edge of the sheet, he folded it down leaving her neck exposed. Ivo looked closely at the features of the sleeping girl, the beautiful shape of her face, her chin, her long thin neck, the birth of her shoulders. Suddenly something caught his attention, causing him to jump on the bed. The woman, even without waking up, moved beneath the sheets as a smile of satisfaction surfaced on her lips. Ivo tried to sharpen his eyesight but found that the light in the room was too scarce. He got up from the bed and moved silently to the window, then slightly slid one of the curtains letting in a little more light, particularly in the area that interested him, but without full illuminating Lian´s face to allow her continue sleeping. He returned to the bed and lay down next to the woman as before. Then, in a tension he could not explain, the man proceeded to lower the sheet until the whole curve of her shoulder was exposed. A shiver ran through his body as he realized that what he had thought he had seen in the half-light before was indeed real. Lian had a dark spot on her right shoulder and the location was exactly the same as Federica's mark, which he knew so well, except that the contrast was less because Lian did not have the very white skin of the Venetian lady. Ivo paid particular attention to the shape of the stain, and the start was transformed into restlessness when he realized that it had indeed a symmetrical shape resembling that of a diamond or rhombus, in a whole similar to that of Federica. Gently he ran a finger over the stain, causing Lian to smile again, now exhaling catlike sounds.

Perplexed, the young man lay on his back and raised his arms to the height of his head, while his brain worked fast. What was a possible explanation for the fact that the two women who mattered in his live, born thousands of miles away, of completely different ethnic origins and with an age difference of almost two decades, had the same birthmark? A mark of otherwise very rare and improbable appearance due to its symmetry and straight contours. In the case of Federica, the young man already knew that it was a hereditary trait that ran in her family, from who knows how many generations. But in Lian?

Pleased for some inexplicable reason, the man decided that when they were both awake, he would interrogate the young woman over the diamond on her shoulder. With a smile on his mouth, Ivo was asleep too.