Caravan To Xanadu

CHAPTER 2

THE YOUNG FATHER

Meanwhile I passed my fifteenth birthday and my sixty-eighth inch. I weighed one and a half quintal, as we weigh fish, and was shooting up and filling out to the dismay of my mother’s tirewoman, who let out my clothes, and to the consternation of my cousin Leo, who feared I would outspan him at this rate. Going on sixteen, I must soon present new evidence of my father’s prosperity, my uncle making many countings of the moneys he had spent on me. By now it would be an easy thing to go to sea. Any galley captain who saw me shoot a bow would gladly hire me as a castle guard, not so much for my hits as for the doleful misses of most archers, and because I was quick. But in all likelihood this would still be a fatal thing as far as my ambitions were concerned.

Late in the month of May, I was watching the unloading of a wondrous cargo from Alexandria. Besides the more common riches of the Orient—bales of carpet, bolts of cloth, chests of spices, and stacks of sandalwood—there were live peacocks for the gardens of great villas on the mainland, pet monkeys for children and harlots, snakes for apothecaries, and talking and singing birds. I hardly noticed a dirty bireme docking an arrow cast distant. A ship’s clerk told me it hailed from Acre with a cargo of dressed leather. When two gentlemen disembarked and walked by, I gave them my second-best attention, and intended to make it short.

Instead I began to regard them with growing curiosity. They boasted very little gold and no jewels at all and were dressed very plainly compared to the dizened roosters I most admired, although the cloth was black velvet of no mean price. Their faces were more tanned and weathered than those of most rich merchants, who lie in their cabins in rough weather and sit under pavilions in good. But these were faces to mark and remember long.

The older had a long nose, a square jaw, and wide, thin, straight lips, all suggesting severity. His hair and beard were a sandy red, and his eyes blue. The younger face was as handsome, in a manly way, as any I had ever seen. The eyes were large and brilliant, of hazel color I thought, the nose high-bridged as a Spanish duke’s and finely chiseled, the mouth at once strong and voluptuous. He wore no beard, only a fine brown mustache. With this quite noble countenance and high-held head went a large, fine body of impressive stature and native grace. It did not surprise me that the handful of ladies accompanying their lords or fathers in visiting the ships put on their prettiest airs, while the bawds and serving wenches gazed wistfully.

Behind the younger man walked a youth of about fourteen and a younger boy, both handsome and elegantly dressed. Since he looked far too young to be their father, I took it that they were sons of the older gentleman.

Although their differences were more conspicuous than their similarities, I could not doubt that the two men were brothers. Their eyes, though different in size and brilliance, were set exactly alike, and there was no gaiety in either pair. Instead there was a firmness or an imperiousness such as I had rarely seen.

Intent on their business, they did not return my glance, and soon disappeared in the crowd. I tried to pay them no more mind, only to yield at last to overweening curiosity. When a Dalmatian pikeman disembarked from the same ship and swaggered off toward a wine shop, I accosted him.

“Friend, will you tell me who were the two gentlemen in black velvet?” I asked. “I think I’ve seen them somewhere before.”

“Why, they’re Venetian merchants, brothers to each other, returning home after a long journey.”

“How long a journey? I’ve heard of some that lasted five years.” And I had not given my heart leave to beat so fast.

“I didn’t hear ’em say, but they’ve been to countries so far away you’ve never heard their names.”

Not long ago I would not have missed this chance to boast.

“I’ve heard of Armenia and Persia—and a city named Bukhara.”

“Why, they’re just a stone’s throw compared to where those gentlemen came from, and it’s called the Celestial Kingdom of Cathay. Their name is Crispi—Giovanni and Roderico Crispi—and if you ask ’em, they’ll give you a monkey without any tail.”

With a droll look and a rolling walk, the Dalmatian went on his way.

I went home and began to wait. A good part of the waiting I spent in my chamber, shaping and fledging arrows, and in this I could take pride; but no small part of it I stood at a casement watching the entrance ways. I was fifteen and a half. Youths of like tender age had commanded galleys in bloody strife at sea. They had no fathers or mothers when the great catapults began to hurl quarter-ton stones. They stood or fell by their own manhood.

Several festooned gondolas passed our door. There was many a flurry of people on the bridge, but not two tall travelers, in black velvet, with their attendants. The long day died; twilight gave way to night; I supped, lay down, listened, and at last slept. My reason told me that the travelers’ names were Giovanni and Roderico Crispi. But in my dreams I wept. . . .

“Master Marco, you’re white in the face,” said an old charwench who had served my mother. “I fear that one of those tall ships you love has brought you the plague.”

“I’m plagued if I know,” I answered, laughing like a loon.

But the sand ran on in the glass. A servant maid had turned it twice, thrice, four times, since the Angelus. She was very Cronus, I thought, he who had castrated his father and eaten his sons so he could never be overthrown. The shadow of the style moved across the sundial, and beneath it, deep-carven in the stone, was this terrible legend:

Every hour wounds. The last hour kills.

We sat down to our big, rich midday meal. I could not eat, but I showed a bright face when the porter blew his horn. There were visitors at the door. I felt nothing more in my heart and instead was rallying all my physical and mental forces, exactly, it seemed, as I did when I drew my longbow for a difficult shot. I was almost pleasantly conscious of coolness and steadiness.

“They are Venetian merchants, newly returned from the East, with their attendants, and they seek admittance to your Honor’s presence,” the servant said.

“Why, you may show them in, and welcome,” replied my uncle Zane. For the merchants of Venice were her true lords.

They came in, the older leading the way, and as he passed the threshold I saw that he did not fill the doorway as did the younger. Their eyes were set alike and both had an imperious look, but the older man’s, although less bright, were not as cold. He was the more rugged-looking, but not the strongest. Their surcoats and leg gear were dark-blue velvet; and in addition they wore mantles of ceremony, lined with red silk and fastened at the throat with gold chains. Most of their train remained in the anteroom, but the two handsome youths, richly and elegantly dressed, followed them still.

“Welcome, my lords, to my humble abode, and will you honor me by sitting at my board?” quoth my uncle Zane.

“Why now, we’ll not sit yet,” answered the younger brother with great courtesy, “but we may beg to do so, when we’re sure of our welcome. Zane—and I address you so by right—do you know me?”

I did not know him. He had addressed my uncle by right, he said, but there seemed to be something wrong. I had thought about it a hundred times since yesterday. I had always understood that Nicolo Polo, my father, was the younger brother of Maffeo Polo. Actually I could not remember being told so and very easily could have got the wrong impression when a little child and carried it all these years. That was the way of it, surely—because the younger of these two brothers was not old enough to have a son fifteen and a half, and hardly sons fourteen and twelve. In that case, it stood to reason that the older, plainer, less arresting man was Nicolo Polo.

He was the better man in the way of goodness than the younger man. He could have darkened my mother’s ways but not cracked her heart. He could have neglected me from sheer unwillingness to bear responsibility for me, not ignored me on purpose. If he were my father, not the other, I would be happier . . . and safer. . . .

“Why, there’s something familiar in your face——” So spoke Zane, my uncle, and now there was a pallor in his own face and a tremor in his voice.

The taller, youthful brother turned to my Aunt Flora.

“Lady, have I no resemblance to someone you knew?”

“Oh, you have,” she answered, so white and faint that I thought she might swoon, “but I dare not speak——”

“Be bold. If you miscall me, I’ll not be offended.”

“If you are who I think you are, you were barely eighteen when you left here, sixteen years ago. It would be no wonder that you’ve changed greatly. But you”—and my aunt turned to the older brother—“you will I address with a bold heart. Of you, I’m almost sure.”

“Who am I, Flora?”

“By blessed Jesus, who died for me, I believe you’re my brother Maffeo, as though risen from the grave.”

“And who stands beside me?”

“It must be Nicolo—and it is!”

2

I had been going on fifteen, but suddenly I had become a full man.

I looked upon my father. The air in the room seemed to have become crystalline as after a rain. At the moment he was being greeted by the embracings and tears of his long-lost sister, while his long-lost son looked on. It was like him to return the greetings with great warmth, for no fish was he, instead a full-blooded, passionate, and strong man. More than that, he was a magnificent man.

“And this fine youth is our nephew and your dear son,” my uncle Maffeo exclaimed as he greeted Leo.

“He’s asked about you almost daily, it seemed to me, and longed for your return,” Uncle Zane replied. But he looked at Nicolo, not Maffeo. He was not one to mistake the buttered side of his bread.

“Why, Nicolo, he was only a toddler when we left here, but now he’s of an age to return with us,” Maffeo went on when both had greeted my smirking cousin.

“It’s a pity we can’t take him,” Nicolo replied, settling that matter once and for all. “Now I have a surprise for you, my dear kinsmen!”

With a proud expression, my father turned to the two splendid youths behind him. “Maffeo!” he called. “Andrea! Come forth and embrace your aunt whom you’ve never seen.”

I had been waiting, with a queer, cold patience, for the pair to be presented. Until the last second I had maintained the possibility that my uncle Maffeo might do the presenting. The handsome boys resembled him at least as much as I resembled my sire.

“Nicolo, you don’t mean——” my aunt gasped.

“I do, and they’re my legitimate sons. When news came of poor Lucia’s death, I took another wife, the daughter of a noble Venetian, Angelo Trevisen, dwelling in Constantinople.”

You took her in a hurry, Papa, by the look of things.

“Oh, I can hardly believe it,” my aunt cried, when she had kissed them both. “They’re so tall and fine.”

“About eleven and ten, but well grown for their years, I grant you.” My father beamed on them.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You’ve been gone over sixteen years.”

So he had—leaving Venice six months before I was born. And time dries all wounds, my aunt should have added to smooth everything over. And we all knew that my mother had been dead nearly twelve years, so who could find fault with the widower’s having a son of eleven? Actually the fine fellow was at least thirteen, but what did it matter? Perhaps he had divorced my mother in absentia and had had plenty of time.

“Now I’ve lost Felicia as well,” my father went on. “It was well that I had my boys—and my great ventures with Maffeo—to help heal the wound.”

My father’s voice became resonant and he was deeply moved.

“And you’ve traveled to the ends of the earth!” my uncle Zane exclaimed.

“To the very kingdom of Cathay on the shores of the Ocean Sea! Zane—Flora—neither of you can dream what we’ve seen! And I must tell you now—in our first hour together—that in just a little while we must go again. Such we have promised the King—Kublai Khan we call him—the greatest king on the earth.”

“He’s made us the bearer of great tidings to his Holiness the Pope,” Maffeo explained when my father paused. “He entreats him to send one hundred priests, learned men and pious, to his Court, there to instruct and baptize the heathen hosts—and we, Nicolo and I, are to lead them there.^[3] I want you to be the first to know of the great honor paid us, and anyway, it can’t be kept secret any longer.”

“Not only honor,” my father added. “The one of us whom he favors most will be made his viceroy—virtually the king—of a realm as great as France, to have and hold its revenues for five years. The other will sit on his Council for the same period. Then we’ll both return to Venice, rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

This was the news I was waiting for. It was natural enough for my father to reveal it in the first half-hour of his own and Maffeo’s return. It was the meat of the coconut, as Mustapha used to say.

The news itself was of such prodigious moment in my fate that I did not instantly perceive a strange fact of its transmission. I had not merely overheard it, as seemed the case with the previous announcements; I had been included in the audience. Perhaps he had become conscious of my presence without realizing or even suspecting who I was. It might be so, but I did not believe it. Instead I believed that the news was for my ears more than any, and in this degree he had acknowledged me at last.

At that instant, Aunt Flora took notice of me too. Perhaps she had never forgotten I was here, but one shock after another had caused her to neglect me until now. The immediate stimulus was some echo of the silent communication between my father and me. She stiffened and changed color.

“I’ll leave my boys here, with allowances for their care and schooling,” my father was saying. “Then when the new Pope is elected——”

Aunt Flora gave forth a gasp so deep it sounded like a sob. “Nicolo!”

“What is it, Flora?”

“You haven’t spoken to Marco!”

She spoke rapidly in an excited tone. That caused the slow voicing and quiet of his reply to be all the more marked.

“No doubt you mean this young man.” And very slowly he turned and looked me in the face.

“Don’t you know who he is? Blessed Jesus, forgive my sin!”

“If he’s the one of whom you have written me—you call him Marco Polo—I know only too well who he is.”

“Oh God, there’s some awful mistake. He’s your son. Nicolo, he’s your firstborn, by your wife Lucia. Your own begotten——”

“I regret to tell you, Flora, that Lucia bore me no son. De mortuis nil nisi bonum—yet I must speak.”

“Jesus, mercy!”

“If this is Lucia’s son, which I have no doubt, he’s the son of her lover, one Antonello, a wandering jongleur from Perugia. Only for the sake of her fame have I suffered him to bear my name.”^[4]

3

The great consternation created in our company by my father’s words caused a long, heavy, almost breathless silence. I was deeply grateful for it, because it gave me time to rally my faculties and act. The action was in my head, but it was no less positive than many by my hands, and hardly less violent. I forced my thoughts through a welter of hopes and fears, weaknesses and strengths, to a sure conclusion. I was quite certain that I need never question it in the future.

Certainly to us, and perhaps to himself as well, my father, Nicolo Polo, had told a black lie.

My father’s gaze was fixed on my face. I did not return it—my instinct was to refrain from any act of defiance. He was red in the face, his stunned hearers white. The silence stretched for second after second and I wondered if I would be the one to break it. I did not wish to and looked to my aunt Flora.

She remained aghast, but out of the corner of my eye I saw a sudden darkening of the dull-white face of my uncle Zane.

“God’s wounds!” he burst forth like a thunderclap.

“Oh, my lord!” cried his wife.

“What’s this you’re saying?” Zane persisted, turning with great energy to my father. “That Marco’s your wife’s bastard? Then what of the message you sent him in the secret writing?”

A perverse impulse to laugh aloud swept me from head to heel, but I contained it, and only a gasp came out.

“What secret writing?” my father demanded in a loud voice.

“In your last letter to Flora. You spoke of your dear son Marco—how you’d make him your heir——”

“By my saints, we’ve all been bitten by tarantulas! I sent no secret writing. Would I endow the living monument, the very witness, to Lucia’s infidelity and my own pain?”

“Then it was the Devil’s work. It was a wicked enchantment, to ruin me, worked with the Devil’s fire. Flora swore to the handwriting. On the strength of it I’ve spent God knows how many lire on Marco’s care.”

“Was it signed and sealed before an officer of the Court?”

“No it wasn’t, and why should I expect it to be, when ’twas sent from some heathen land? You’d never told us of his bastardy. You let us go on thinking he was your own——”

“When I left here—and it was the cause of my leaving—I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone of the disgrace. I was not even sure that Lucia was with child—she swore she wasn’t. After I had gone, I dared not write the truth, for only a fraction of my letters reached you—most of them were rifled and no doubt read by rogues and rival merchants.”

“That may be, but I’ll have my money back, fair weather or foul.”

“Uncle Zane, I’ll pay you every dinero,” I said.

My voice was more firm than I dared hope. To my surprise, it worked another silence, not as explosive as the other, but more strained. Aunt Flora looked deeply distressed and my father tense. There was malice in Leo’s eyes. He was not sure that the secret writing was the Devil’s work.

“I’ll fetch the letter, Papa, if you’ll give me leave,” he said.

“I think that would be best,” my father said gravely.

In a moment it was in his hands. He looked at it with knitted brows, then called for a lighted candle. After he had toasted it a moment, he examined it carefully, reread the doctored writing, and put it down.

“It’s not the Devil’s work,” he told Zane. “Only a clever trick.”

“Who’s the trickster? By heaven, he should hang!”

“It’s someone who’s acquainted with alchemy—Arabian, most likely—or who knows someone of that ilk.”

“Uncle Nicolo, Marco has been seen hundreds of times at the house of an old Arab in Spinalunga,” spoke up my cousin Leo.

“Then I don’t think we need search much further for the forger. However, I am seeing the offense in a little different light than at first. The truth is—and I admit it freely—I’ve not dealt altogether fairly with Lucia’s son Marco. The sin was wholly on her head, not in the least on his, yet it has been visited upon him in no small measure.”

“I’m not sure that I follow you, Brother Nicolo,” said my uncle Zane. His polite tone did not mean that he had forgotten the small sum I had bilked him of, rather that he remembered the vast sum to accrue to my father from his coming venture.

“Pardon me a moment. Marco, did your mother confess to you, before she died, that you weren’t my son? Did she boast of it, I’d better say? ’Tis true you were hardly four years old, still it’s possible that you’d remember.”

“No, your Honor, she didn’t.”

“And the notion never entered your head?”

“No, sir. How could it?”

“Then of course you were puzzled and hurt that I made no mention of you in my letters. Finally you succumbed to temptation to forge a mention, for your pride’s sake——”

“Not only for pride’s sake,” my uncle Zane broke in, “but for silver grossi spent on his back and belly.”

“I’m myself partly at fault for not making the situation clear both to him and to you,” my father admitted handsomely. “I’ll demand no punishment for the forgery, and I’ll go further than that. We’re taught to return good for evil. Before I leave, I’ll try to find a place for Marco in the establishment of some merchant. I think it won’t be difficult, if I throw business his way.”

My father had spoken firmly and with quite a manner. Even when quoting the great Christian maxim, not a trace of butter greased his tongue. He was so great an adversary that I marveled he should be one at all—what was there about me, a youth not yet sixteen, to attract his zealous attention? Since eagles do not hawk at flies, obviously it was the fruit of some old passion, and hence, of course, a weakness. But he would need a hundred weaknesses to reduce him to my fair match—or I must gain a hundred strengths.

“I’ll let it go at that, on the condition Marco pays me back out of his wages,” Uncle Zane replied. “Half of ’em to hand till the debt’s paid! Otherwise I’ll cry the cheat myself.”

“There’s still another condition.” My father turned to me. “You may no longer call yourself Marco Polo. You may take the name Marco Antonello——”

“I’ll not do that until the bastardy’s proved,” I broke in, greatly flurried within to be contesting him this soon, but surprisingly steady without.

This shot told far beyond my excited expectations. For an instant I thought I saw real hate gleaming in his eyes. It was not easy for him to control his countenance and then his voice.

“You’d best not doubt my word, young man,” he said.

“Either my doubting it or my believing it won’t change the law. The law is that if I was born while you and my mother were still married—and had opportunities to cohabit—I’m to be considered legitimate until proven otherwise. Any lawyer in Venice will tell you that.”

He had not expected me to know that point of law. Actually I took no great pride in it, since copulation is such a fascinating subject to youths of my age that we become remarkably well informed as to all its ramifications. What should make me justly proud was remembering it in this tight moment and making good use of it.

“I don’t believe I’ll have any trouble with the law. And if you’re thinking that you may come into a large sum of money by denying the truth, you’re fated for a disappointment. This letter states that Maffeo and I had lost a great part of our capital. A good portion of the rest was stolen from us by fire-worshipers who attacked us on the homeward journey and who would have killed us except for the golden tablet given us as safe-conduct by Kublai Khan. This the villains dared not touch, but they took the jewels he had given us, and all the money except what we had hidden in a bucket of camel’s milk. The remainder we have paid to moneylenders to take up the bond on my father’s house in San Felice.”

He was interrupted by an anguished grunt from my uncle Zane. Then he went on with lordly calm.

“It’s true that our prospects are bright for a great coup, but it won’t be realized for many years. So, to make it short, Marco—for I’ve already wasted too much time—I advise you to accept what I’m willing to do for you, and be grateful.”

“You said a post of profit with a favored merchant if I’ll forswear you as my father.”

“It amounts to that.”

“I’ll not give up my honored name unless you prove me a bastard. But I’ll address you as Signor Polo and renounce all claim on you for support or patrimony if you’ll grant one plea.”

“I’ll hear it, for what it’s worth.”

“You said that you and your brother Maffeo are returning to the Court of Kublai Khan with one hundred learned priests. Give me a place in the company.”

The proposal amazed him. The slight widening of his eyes indicated it had affected his superstitions in a way to dismay him too. But as his intelligence took hold, I thought he was glad I had made it. He was going to enjoy its rebuffing.

“You’re about sixteen, aren’t you?” Signor Polo said thoughtfully. “In my youth, that counted as a full man. But have you served an apprenticeship with any merchant?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been out of sight of the towers of Venice?”

“No, Signor.”

“Even if I would permit an unlearned and unexperienced young man to burden the company, where would you find the money to pay your way?”

“I’d go as an attendant on one of the holy fathers.”

“The journey of the fathers will of course be financed by Holy Church. Perhaps a few curates will accompany them, if the wherewithal can be found for ship and caravan transport, but what menial service they require will be furnished by the masters from stage to stage of the journey; and the luxury of attendants is not in keeping with their calling, as well you know. Anyway, I wouldn’t let any person claiming relationship to me or to my late wife work his way with us—a matter of what the Orient knows as izzat. In plain words, if you went with us, someone would have to pay your way.”

“If I can pay my own way, and I agree to renounce all claim on your estate, will you let me go?”

Signor Nicolo Polo could hardly hide his smile. “Traveling in good array, so as not to lose face for the company before the heathen?”

“Yes, Signor.”

“Let us all understand your proposal, Marco, to avoid future argument. By Venetian law, you reached the age of discretion when you were fifteen, and we are dealing before witnesses. Your agreement to renounce claim to my estate is given for my consent to join our party at your own expense. If you’re not able to find the necessary funds, it is not my lookout, and your renunciation still stands.”

I felt a dull pain across my forehead just above my eyebrows. If I could only remember a scene of just before dawn, as I stood by my mother’s bedside, and her frail hand enfolded mine and the lamplight guttered . . .

“You’re asking a good deal, Nicolo, of Lucia’s son,” Aunt Flora broke in.

“He’s no kin of yours, my sister, or of mine. And he aspires to go to Cathay.”

“Will you give me till vespers tomorrow, that I may pray to my saints for guidance?” I asked.

“I’ll not refuse you that.”

“And I think you should tell how great a sum he would have to raise,” Aunt Flora prompted.

“He hasn’t asked me. I dare say he trusts that the pot at rainbow’s end will hold enough.”

“I do ask you, Signor Polo,” rose a taut, nerve-rasped, stubborn voice I hardly knew for my own.

“Then I’ll answer, although I fear it may shake your ambition. In round figures, say three thousand lire—a thousand pieces of gold.”

4

Signor Polo began to tell the others of his and Maffeo’s journey to the Court of Kublai Khan. I listened long enough to gather one fact of great bearing on my own problem. The two travelers could not have gained that star-far place except for the lucky chance of falling in with one of the Khan’s ambassadors, returning to his master after carrying out a mission to Kublai’s brother, a subject king in Tatary. Nor could they have made the return journey except with the safe-conduct of the golden tablet bearing Kublai’s seal. They were not protected from savage tribes outside of the Khan’s law; yet without the talisman their hope of retracing their steps would be an empty dream.

I went to my room and called Rosa, once my mother’s tirewoman. She gazed at me with frightened eyes.

“What do ye want, Master Marco?” she asked in a quavering tone.

“Only to talk to you a while.”

“I thought ye might, after you’d seen the master, tall and alive. But I daren’t stay but a minute or two. Let me be changing your sheets, for Jesu knows they need it.”

“You never told me there was trouble between Signor Nicolo and my mother.”

“That I didn’t. I thought both of ’em were gone——”

“Do you know that he’s accused her of wantonness with a lowborn lover, and me the fruit of it?”

“Too well I know it. I heard him make the same charge when you were in the womb.”

“How much of the charge was true? And I charge you to speak truth.”

“You are Nicolo’s son. My lady vowed it, her hand in mine, before Our Lady. Antonello the jongleur had gone to Florence a good year before your birth. What had been between them before then, no soul on earth may say. Antonello was the son of my lady’s nurse, and they played together as children, and mayhap they discovered each other, with no harm done, as children will. He came to Venice with his troop, and sought out my lady, and she admitted him to her bower now and again, while her lord was trading in Trieste. Her lord, I said. So she confessed him, here below. But she would not confess him her Lord above. And that was what he craved, in his blasphemous, miscreant heart. For a while he was master of her body, but by blessed Jesu, he never won her soul.”

“You said that no one living could declare her innocence or guilt. Is Antonello dead?”

“Sixteen years ago.”

“Was he older than Signor Nicolo?”

“At least a year younger. My lady was fourteen when she wedded, and her lord seventeen. But God did not let her conceive till she was full fifteen.”

“Then Antonello died young!”

I was watching Rosa’s eyes. They wavered, then returned to mine.

“It’s hard to live on with your guts pulled out, and cut in four.”

“Who did it, I wonder?”

“Save your wonder for a two-headed calf! A young merchant, trading in Rimini, cried him for a thief. When the watch searched him, they found the merchant’s purse. Antonello swore that he had borrowed it for legerdemain from a merrymaker the night past and that the gentleman had disappeared before he returned it. But who would believe such a fantastic story?”

“Was the crier Nicolo Polo?”

“No, it was Maffeo Polo. And if the merrymaker were Nicolo, he had made full merry. He’d proved the gentleman from first to last. He hadn’t sullied his hands or steel in base blood. One must cross swords with an equal invading his bed, but a rat’s death isn’t good enough for one who brings lice. If the court knew naught of this, they knew that jongleurs were lewd, lawless fellows who needed lessons. Antonello was hanged, cut down while still alive, and quartered.”

“Signor Polo must have loved my mother with great passion.”

“He hated her with the black hate of Hell.”

“Why?”

“Because she was above him when she became his bride, and he couldn’t bring her down. It was no good to whip her, because she wouldn’t weep. It was no balm to sport with trulls or even highborn ladies, for he knew not one could hold a rushlight to her, and worse than that, she rejoiced at their serving in her stead.”

“She did weep. I heard her.”

“Sometimes tears ran down her long cheeks, but I was within sound of her voice day and night, and only once did I hear her weep aloud. That was when she had news of Antonello’s death. His slayer didn’t hear her, for he stayed in Rimini for her lover’s drawing and quartering, then took ship for Constantinople. The master would have given his soul to have heard her, but, glory to sweet Jesu! he never did, and I would die in slow fire before I told him of it, and if you should tell him, may your soul be saved for my lady’s sake but your living body crisp and blacken in slow fire!”

“Be still! As I hope to see salvation, I never will!”

Only my own vehemence caused me to realize hers. As she had talked, she had shaken and smoothed my bolster, spread sheets, and emptied pots; and because my pitch of feeling had mounted beside hers—like a flute in tune with a lyre—I had remained unaware of the steep climb. I had thought Rosa had much phlegm and little bile, but now I had never seen such eyes in a human head.

Suddenly she sighed. “I would you could have heard her, Marco, for your soul’s sake. But you couldn’t have, because you were not yet born.”

“I was in the womb, and I heard her through its walls.”

“Mayhap you did! Mayhap you are only mad!”

“But I can’t remember what she told me the night before she died. For good or evil, I charge you to tell me.”

“I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”

“Then you lied when you said you were always within sound of her voice, and for that you need a flogging.”

“I didn’t lie. My lady made no sound at all for three days before she died. But I wasn’t always in sight of her hands, and perhaps they gave you some signal.”

The pressure of pain grew across my forehead until it seemed my eyes would burst out.

“There were two candles burning. . .”

“That is so.”

“She had me put them both on her bedstand.”

“Yes, yes, I found them there.”

“She took a piece of white leather—perhaps it was a parchment—from a hiding place and held it in the flame, but it did not burn.”

“Jesu, have mercy!”

“Was it a letter that the Devil wouldn’t let her destroy? Did he draw the yellow teeth of his very element, so she might die with sin upon her soul? Or did her saints make cold the flame, to save her from doing evil?”

“Don’t think about that now. Leave that for the priests to settle, when you’ve recalled it all. What happened next? You’ll foul the chain of memory if you don’t haul——”

“I don’t know what happened next. It’s faded out.” The pain too had dimmed away.

Rosa wiped her face. “Someday it will come,” she prophesied.

“It might have come just now, if you’d told me the truth from first to last.”

“May my soul perish——”

“You said you didn’t know if Antonello was my mother’s lover, but later on, when your caution was lost in heat, you called him just that.”

“The wish was father to the thought, Marco my child. It may be that my lady never lay in the embrace of love, only of hate. When death called her to his cold bed ere she was twenty, she might never have known a bed warmed by a sweetheart’s passion. So I wish she’d broken her vow to rejoice her soul in Heaven and to torment Nicolo’s dreams. Would not her saints save her from the wrath? Aye, if they too had dwelt in mortal flesh and knew its yearnings. If atonement must still be made, I take it on my soul.”

Her weak voice rang. I looked to her scrawny form, her breasts that were ever dry and now were wasted too, her anxious old-maid countenance, and these were all transfigured by her one great love. Perhaps it was the love of a grown-up child for a doll that broke, with no warmer, better doll to come and comfort her, the story ended as complete as though the child herself had died.

I will live on in your stead, Rosa. I’ll be your lover, yourself, and your child. Doubt not I will be your avenger.

“You’d be better off if Antonello, not Nicolo, had been your father,” Rosa went on. “Poor as he was, lowborn, not even handsome, his seed would have been blessed.”

“I don’t doubt it, but I thank God for my evil begetting.”

I did not finish, just then, what I was about to say. It came to me it would have no validity until I had said something else in another place. Until then, I would have nothing to lose but wind. I had posted no bond to forfeit if I broke faith. A gauge had been thrown, which I had neither yielded nor picked up. I could not run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.

So I left her and went back to the dining hall. The strong, pure, marine light burst through the casements facing the lagoon and shone on Signor Nicolo Polo and my kinsmen seated at the board. Nicolo’s face was flushed with wine and glory; he was a full-blooded man. The others were hanging on his words.

“May I speak, your Honor?” I asked, when my entrance caused him to fall silent.

“You have my leave,” he answered like a king. Before many years, he meant to be a very king in Cathay.

“I’ve been thinking over the proposal that you made me.” And I could not keep my voice from shaking.

“Thinking over it? You said you’d pray over it.”

“I have, your Honor.” For my last words, Rosa bearing witness, were in thanks to God.

“Let’s see if I remember it exactly,” Nicolo continued. “If I don’t, one of these witnesses will correct me. I promised you a place in our company adventuring to the Court of Kublai Khan provided you journey in honorable array at your expense, and here and now renounce all claims to my estate.”

“Those were the very terms, or I’ll eat my shoon,” said Uncle Zane.

“And now you’ve come to tell me that since the world knows you as the son of Nicolo Polo, and the burden of proof of your bastardy is upon me, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and you’ll stay in Venice.”

Many men, waiting for an outcome, will betray what they hope for by prophesying just the opposite. Perhaps it is by way of placating the gods of evil fortune. Only very clever or bold ones will give voice to their desire, in the way of either suggestion or intimidation. Nicolo Polo was both clever and bold. I was quite sure that during my absence he had thought over his proposal to me and every dictate of his reason had made him hope that I would accept it. It was a thousand-to-one wager that I could not raise three thousand lire, and my renunciation of claim upon him would be a happy riddance.

He had spoken in a rich voice, almost jokingly, as though to save my face in defeat, smiling the while, causing the others to appreciate his charm. Only I saw him suck a quick mouthful of air when he had finished. All I knew was that whatever he wanted in the way of my answer he wanted very much.

“I’m going to continue to believe I’m your son,” I said, frightened half out of my wits lest I play mouse to his cat.

“I don’t blame you. Besides that, one thousand pieces of gold don’t grow on every bush. But I’ll trim that figure a little, Marco, if your heart’s set on it. Show me eight hundred pieces of the yellow stuff, and I’ll make you welcome.”

His tone was good-humored. His eyes were intensely bright, perhaps with excitement but more likely with mirth. My heart faltered and my bones unbraced. Yet I heard myself speaking.

“I’m grateful for your generosity, and I accept your offer.”

My uncle’s warm and almost jolly look remained unchanged, but if my saints stood by me, it was frozen on his face.

“You fool!” broke in my cousin Leo.

“Shut your mouth!” came Uncle Zane’s vehement cry.

Signor Nicolo Polo turned his usual calm countenance toward his sister Flora.

“I can’t say that I’m surprised, but you must be.”

“What do you mean, Nicolo?” she gasped.

“I think you’ve remained doubtful of my charge that Marco was Lucia’s son by a lowborn lover. I had remained doubtful that he himself didn’t know it, though I’d been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Now it’s proved that he does know it. That was my purpose in making the proposal, although I regret the trickery. Would he renounce a heritage as my son unless he knew well he was not my son, and that I could prove it? He saw he had nothing to lose, and if some merchant would lend him one thousand pieces of gold, everything to gain.”

“I follow your reasoning closely, Nicolo, yet I don’t want to believe that Lucia——”

“Don’t believe it, Aunt Flora,” I cried, the outburst saving me from crying in another fashion. “It’s because I’m his son that I can go to the Court of Kublai Khan.”

And this was what I had been about to tell Rosa. Next to Nicolo, she was the one most entitled to hear it. But I had only an inkling of its meaning.