Three Arched Bridge Read Online Free

these drops of pitch always sow disaster. Now it has become a main raw material for war, and this great wizard is selling it everywhere, to the Turks and Byzantium on one hand, and to all the counts and dukes of Arberia on the other, fomenting quarrels on both sides.
    â€œThat’s what that tar does, and you are prepared to let it pass right through your lands. It brings death. Grief.”
    But in one of the crocodile’s furious thrashes, the tiger, it seems, discerned his soft, exposed belly. He attacked his enemy again with a terrifying roar. The crocodile lunged to bite him, exposing his belly again. The tiger needed only an instant to tear it open with his claws. Burying his head in his enemy’s body and crazed by his blood, he tore through the bowels with amazing speed, until he reached the heart.
    The three talked on, but I, who knew our liege lord, realized that he was not listening anymore. Perhaps because they had talked more than they should, they had lost. Although the count seemed to be in doubt for a moment, it was never easy to make him change his mind. The sum of money promised by the road company was greater than the entire profits of the water people. Besides, his daughter had shown signs of improvement since his decision to build the bridge.
    â€œNo,” he said at last, “We will talk no more about the bridge. It will be built,”
    They were struck dumb. Two or three times they moved their hands and were about to speak, but they did nothing but close their bags.
    The beast of the water was defeated.

8
    A WEEK LATER the master of roads and bridges bought the stretch of highway that belonged to our lord, Two other emissaries had been journeying without rest for three months and more through the domains of princes, counts, and pashas, buying up the great western highway that had once been called the Via Egnatia and was now called the Road of the Balkans, after the name the Turks have recently given to the entire peninsula, which comes from the word
mountain
. More than by the desire of the Ottomans to cover under one name the countries and peoples of the peninsula, as if subsequently to devour them more easily, I was amazed by our readiness to accept the new name. 1 always thought that this was a bad sign, and now 1 am convinced that it is worse than that,
    Now down this road came its purchasers, their clothes and hair whitened by its dust. They had so far purchased more than half of it, piece by piece, and perhaps they would travel all summer to buy it all They paid for it in fourteen kinds of coinage — Venetian ducats, dinars, drachmas, lire, groschen, and so forth —- making their calculations in eleven languages, not counting dialects, This was because the road passed through some forty principalities, great and small, and so far they had visited twenty-six of them, More than buying it, they seemed to be winding the old roadway, so gouged and pitted by winters, summers, and neglect, onto a reel
    The highway was older than anyone could remember. In the past three hundred years or so, almost all the holy crusades had passed along it. They said that two of the leaders of the First Crusade, Robert Giscard, Count of Normandy, and Robert, Count of Flanders, had spent a night at the inn a thousand paces down the road from us, which since then had been called the Inn of the Two Roberts,
    Tens of thousands of knights of the Second Crusade had also passed this way, and then the Third Crusade, headed by Frederick Barbarossa, or Barbullushi as our yokels called him. Then came the interminable hordes of the Children’s Crusade, the Fifth Crusade, the Seventh and Eighth, the knights of the Order of the Templars, the Order of St. John the Hospitalier, and the Teutonic Order. Very old men remembered these last, not from the time when they were traveling to Jerusalem, but from about forty years ago, when they passed this way on their return to Europe.
    A sorrier array of men had never