A Deadly Injustice

ONE

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one.

I needed to get away fast. I was being pursued by a mad dog in the shape of a Keshikten Guard. And as you know, the Keshikten are not to be messed with. I mean, anyone whose job it is to be bodyguard to the Great Khan of All the Mongols in the Year of Our Lord 1268 is a fearsome opponent. There are twelve thousand of them reputedly, under the control of four captains, each with three thousand men. Their duty roster lasts for three days and three nights and it keeps them in the Khan’s palace alert, sleepless and on duty all that time. So when they are finally off duty, they are inclined to indulge their personal fancies to an extreme degree. Mongotai’s predilections were drinking and gambling. I came across him in one of the low taverns that thronged the streets of Old Khan-balik.

The avenues were narrow, and filled with the babble of a mixture of races from all over the world. They were all out to find some brief pleasure in their hard lives. Work hard, play hard was an appropriate creed for those who struggled to survive at the margins of the Great Khan’s empire. Not that anyone in Khan-balik was at the geographical edge of the Mongol Empire, you understand. Far from it. A site to the north of the teeming old city that some Chinee called Yenking and others Tatu had been partially cleared by the Khan. His new winter capital and palace was being built there. So the rest of Old Yenking to the south of the new ramparts now found itself on the doorstep of the hub of the Mongol Empire. But many of those who lived and worked there fed off the scraps of the Khan’s opulence. That’s what I mean by living in the margins. And I should know. I am one of the scavengers.

My name is Niccolò Zuliani – plain Nick to my friends – once of Venice and more lately Shang-tu, the summer home of Kubilai Khan, the Great Khan of All the Mongols. Shang-tu is better known in the West as the fabled city of wealth and opulence, the mystical Xanadu. What drew me there was what would draw any Venetian worth his salt. Wealth, trade, and a chance to con some fool out of his hard-earned cash. But as soon as I had arrived in Xanadu, I had been sidetracked into solving a gruesome murder that had taken place there. A death that tarnished its reputation somewhat, and had brought me to within a whisker of being killed myself. But I survived, and earned the gratitude of Kubilai Khan himself. Now the same enticing possibilities that had taken me to Xanadu caused me to follow the Great Khan to his new winter palace at Tatu, or Khan-balik, or old Yenking. Its name depended on whether you were a Mongol, a Turk or a lowly Chinee. I used them all depending on whose company I was in. Most recently, it had been Tatu, as I foxed Mongotai with the old pot game swindle.

The backstreet tavern where I was drinking didn’t have a name. It didn’t need one, because the brew it served up was so rough that even if a name existed, you wouldn’t recall it after a few bowls of the harsh rice wine. I had been drinking for some time, hunched in the corner of the low-ceilinged hut well away from the other sullen habitues of the place. The other drinkers didn’t like me because I was a barbarian, and therefore, in their eyes, capable of a lack of good manners, or even a mindless act of madness. I was an unknown quantity to them. But at first they tolerated my presence, only occasionally casting worried glances my way. Then gradually, as the night wore on, the room began to clear. Whether it was my foreign presence, or the call of more important pursuits, such as servicing a mistress before returning home to the wife, or cutting open a full purse and robbing someone better off, I know not. Suffice it to say that eventually the only customers of the drinking den were Nick Zuliani and a big bear of a Mongol dressed in the dark red silk shirt and fur-trimmed jacket of a Keshikten guard. Where he had been sitting had made his presence invisible to me when the tavern was full. But as the other drinkers left, I could see him, and he could see me. I should have been warned off as soon as I saw what he was, but the fact he was well in his cups, and therefore incapable of making sense of what was about to happen, drove me on.

I pushed myself up from the low stool I had inhabited for the last hour or so and, swaying a little unsteadily on my feet to pretend a greater drunkenness than was true, made my way over to where the Mongol had planted himself. He was on a similar stool to mine, and stuck behind a small table. In the way of all inveterate drinkers embarking on a long session, he had managed to wedge himself in place with the furniture. He would not fall over, even when totally incapable of rational thought. Being well down the road to that state, I thought he was ripe for the picking. Bleary-eyed, he looked up as I approached.

What he saw was a tall, red-haired man, thickly bearded in that manly way that the Chinee consider shockingly animalistic and foreign. He would have guessed I was in my thirties, despite the fine tracery of lines at the corners of my eyes and mouth that made me look older. My cheekbones are high and deeply tanned in the way of seafarers. My green eyes, too, had the faraway look of a sailor. Though some said they could also see in them the distant stare of a man with deep pains buried in his soul. The truth of that I will tell you about later. At this very moment I smiled the smile of a fellow drinker, and flopped down next to him. He seemed to tolerate my barbarian presence, not even suggesting by a wrinkling of the nose that he had smelled something off. The less polite Chinee were prone to do that to foreigners, the Mongols less so. I called for some more rotgut and gestured to my new friend that he could take his share. In the way of a Westerner I stuck out my hand, and offered him my name.

‘Tomasso.’

I wasn’t about to give him my real name, now, was I? The beefy Mongol grunted, took my hand and squeezed hard.

‘Mongotai.’

I gasped and retrieved my mangled fingers from his grasp. He grinned, exposing broken and blackened teeth. I decided to keep well away from his exhalations as even the rotgut wouldn’t be enough to mask the stink from a mouthful of teeth that bad. I poured him a drink from the white porcelain jug, and began my spiel. I had been in this part of the world long enough to have a good grasp of the Mongol tongue, you see. Now was my chance to test it to the limit.

‘I’ve had some luck today. I sold a blade that I bought for next to nothing, and made a tidy profit. I’m flush with money, and willing to test my luck further. How about you? Do you feel lucky?’

Mongotai grunted and threw the brew in his bowl down his throat.

‘You speak funny.’

I thought, well, that’s OK, your breath smells funny. But he was a mark, so I kept my thoughts about his oral hygiene to myself. Besides, I had washed as recently as three weeks ago, and smelled as sweet as a khan’s concubine. In fact, I had been scrubbed by a woman who had almost become one of the Great Khan’s concubines. Her name is Gurbesu, and she had been part of an annual batch of Kungurat girls sent to Kubilai Khan as tribute. And that would have been her fate, except for a chance encounter en-route with an adventurer called Nick Zuliani. I stole her virginity before she got to Kubilai’s summer palace at Xanadu, rendering her useless for his purposes. Once her state was known, she had been smuggled out of the Inner Palace by her chaperone before she embarrassed everyone in front of the Khan. But that’s another story, which you may have heard me tell before. Gurbesu was dark-skinned and with a thick mane of hair so black that when it was oiled it was darker than the darkest night in the Desert of Lop. But I digress. I will return to my complicated love life later, if you like. It makes for exciting reading. For now, I must content you with explaining how I fleeced the smelly Mongol. And ended up with him hounding me out of Khan-balik.

He had said I spoke funny. I suppose I did to his ears. I poured more rice wine into his bowl.

‘Maybe this will help you understand me.’

He grunted, and swilled it down in one gulp. I leaned closer, as though I had a great secret to impart to my new-found friend.

‘Have you heard of the pot game?’

He looked puzzled, and my hopes were raised. If he had heard of it, I would not be able to play the con on him. I drank down my rice wine, and wiped the bowl clean with my sleeve. I then placed the bowl on the table between us.

‘This is the pot. We each put an equal amount of money in it, say fifty yuan, and then bid on the pot.’

The Mongol’s beady eyes gleamed at the idea of gaming with a red-haired foreigner. Mongols love gambling, and can’t resist an opportunity to indulge. Their innate sense of superiority makes them overconfident, particularly with foreigners. He was cocksure he could take me, drunk or not. He pulled out a pouch from his fur-trimmed coat and threw the requisite coins in the bowl. I did the same, matching his money with my own.

‘Now, there is a hundred yuan in the bowl. We each bid in turn, and whoever bids the highest gets the pot.’

Mongotai could not take his eyes off the pile of shiny coins in the bowl, so I offered to start the bidding.

‘With a hundred in there, I reckon it must be worth offering forty as my starting bid.’

Mongotai snorted in derision.

‘I bid fifty.’

I grimaced, as though going any higher would cause me a pain in my purse.

‘OK. I’m going to bid really high to get this hundred. I bid seventy.’

I fiddled nervously with the little pile of coins in my fist, as if I was short of funds. I could see the rice wine befuddled brain working hard behind the screwed-up buttons of eyes in the centre of Mongotai’s face. He grinned, reckoning he had me on the run. He laughed a short barking laugh.

‘Eighty!’

I threw up my hands in defeat.

‘That’s too rich! You are too good for me. You win. Give me eighty yuan and you can have the pot.’

Eagerly, the poor fool paid over his eighty, and gathered in the hundred in the stained rice wine bowl. I got up, shook his hand and left the gloomy tavern.

The first rule of the quick con is to get away as soon as you have fleeced the mark in case he spots how it was done. Did you see how it worked? Half of the pot was his money already, so he gave me eighty to buy back his fifty along with my fifty. That left me thirty up on the deal. Unfortunately, it was in the street that I made my big mistake. I stopped to count my coins before I was well clear of the tavern. Suddenly I heard a roar like the sound of a gale ripping at the sturdy sails of a trading vessel bound for Venice, tearing them to shreds. And bringing down the mast in the process.

Mongotai must have been brighter than I thought. He had just worked out the scam. He came out of the tavern so fast that the flimsy walls trembled as though an earthquake was ravaging the city. I took to my heels and ran before he could catch me.

‘Where’ve you been, Nick? Chu-Tsai is looking for you. He says it’s urgent. And why are you out of breath?’

Gurbesu’s shapely figure was a pleasant sight after the hairy demon that was Mongotai. But her face was distorted into a mask of disapproval. She must have smelled the stink of cheap rice wine on me when I tried to plant a kiss on her full, red lips. She pushed me away, and not for the first time I thought of my lost love in Venice. Caterina Dolfin was fair where Gurbesu was dark, and slim and boyish compared to the Kungurat girl’s rounded voluptuousness. But I had not seen fair Cat in a number of years, and she was a thousand miles and a lifetime away. So I put Cat out of my mind, and grabbed at Gurbesu’s accommodating hips, pulling her to me. This time she didn’t protest so much. That was the attractive thing about her – she could not resist my charms for long.

‘So many questions. I am out of breath because I thought of you and ran all the way home. As for Chu-Tsai, he can wait. I have some business far more urgent with you, my dear.’

The silken surfaces of our Chinee clothes slid enticingly over one another as we embraced. Gurbesu sighed deeply, and gave in to my blandishments.

Lin Chu-Tsai was becoming impatient. He had asked Gurbesu to find Zhong Kui and bring him to the palace. Zhong Kui was his pet name for the foreigner Nick Zuliani. Nick had won it both by being as tenacious as the legendary demon of that name, and by the bushy beard he wore which resembled the demon’s own. The original Zhong Kui was said to have been a man who committed suicide after failing his palace examinations. Reborn as a demon, he had vowed to rid the world of other mischievous lesser demons. And whereas Lin Chu-Tsai could not conceive of the self-confident Zuliani killing himself over a failed test, he nevertheless thought of him as someone who had become a harrier of bad men. Nick had proved his worth as a hunter of murderers to the Great Khan – Kubilai – and thereby won a place as official Investigator of Crimes. But now Lin Chu-Tsai, Clerk to the Minister of Justice of the Mongol Empire, had need of him himself.

‘Where are you, Zhong Kui? We must be on our way today, or suffer the consequences.’

He looked again at the document he had been handed by Ko’s servant that very morning. It purported to be a command from Kubilai himself to look into a criminal matter in the town of Pianfu. A murder, indeed. But the fact that it came through Ko Su-Tsung – Lin’s arch-enemy in the Khan’s palace – made him deeply suspicious. What was Ko doing referring a case of murder to him? The cadaverous, cold-hearted man was now effectively the head of the Censorate, a terrifying government department that kept an eye on all other government departments and officials. Ostensibly, its role was to eradicate all forms of corruption. But that very grave duty afforded the Censorate, and Ko Su-Tsung, the ultimate corrupting evil. He wielded power over the fate of every single person working for the Great Khan with no one in a position to challenge him. There was no one to watch the watcher, meaning that proof of misdeeds were hardly ever required by Ko – mere suspicion was enough to ruin a man for ever. Lin Chu-Tsai lived by an opposite code that demanded evidence of wrongdoing. Ko needed none.

Lin put the paper down on his desk, and pushed it away from him. It was as if he were trying to deny its existence. He was sure it was a trap to ensnare him and Zhong Kui both. But he knew he would have to comply with its demands, or fall into the other trap of dereliction of duty. Sighing, he picked up the offending document again, and perused its contents carefully. If he was to avoid the trap, he needed another brain urgently.

‘Where are you, Nick Zuliani?’