Caravan To Xanadu

CHAPTER 1

TOWARD THE RISING SUN

Nicolo Polo, Maffeo Polo, and I, Marco Polo, traveled eastward.

We rode a well-armed merchantman down the Adriatic Sea, across the Ionian Sea, out along the Mediterranean Sea past Crete, past Cypress, at last to Acre, the great Christian stronghold that Richard the Lion-Hearted had conquered from the Infidel on the Lebanon coast. Other merchants took passage on the same ship, some servants followed Nicolo until he should replace them and send them back, yet the stars looking down knew we were alone. Our navigator estimated the distance at two thousand miles, which might be thrice the wild-goose flight from Venice to London.

From in and about Acre to the great port of Aegae two hundred and fifty miles up the Syrian coast, we three had company. The new Pope had not been able or else had not seen fit to appoint one hundred wise churchmen to carry Christian beatitudes to the Cathayan multitudes, but he had sent two, Nicolo and Guglielmo, worthy friars both. But at Aegae, at the mouth of the caravan road whose gut led to India, there came word of Tatar raids athwart our path. His Holiness had chosen the two friars on account of their wisdom. This wisdom caused them to turn back. Nicolo, Maffeo, and I went on alone.

To my sorrow, we did not pass the great Capital of Trebizond, on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea. Its royal family were esteemed the most beautiful human beings in the world. All the kings of Christendom and the Sultans of Islam vied for their tall, fair-haired, black-eyed daughters. But the fly in the ointment was—or so we were assured—that the sons were born with short tails that their robes of sable and ermine could hardly conceal. Mustapha Sheik would have doubted the tale of tails, although he would not have denied it without proof. I needed no proof to know that if it were true, the regal tailbearers made no real effort to hide their odd distinction, and indeed took pride in it as Satan does in his cloven hoofs. Only common men fear departure from commonality. The uncommon spend their whole lives, by and large, proving their condition.

The caravan road eastward fetched us to the south of Trebizond, through Sivas and Erzinjan. The great lords of these noble cities paid tribute into the hands of short, swart, button-nosed collectors, and some of it at long last poured into the coffers of Kublai Khan, halfway across the world. Our caravan moved on, a little southward now, losing track of the marches we had made since our friars turned back—thirty or suchlike—and did not trouble to dream of the count ahead. We passed some thousands of loaded camels every day, their backs piled high with silks, satins, brocades, rugs, musk and spikenard and spices, swords and armor for everlasting wars, ebony and ivory, gold and silver, amethysts and amber and jade. Wild-eyed captives of all colors and tongues walked in chains, while slave girls rode in curtained litters. These last were mainly veiled, but sometimes the veils were lifted by quick sly hands or perhaps wind played the wanton, revealing the arresting beauty of fair-haired Circassians or the beautifully molded brunette faces of the daughters of Persia, or sometimes ivory-skinned, slant-eyed maidens whose nation I could not name.

Swinging a little southward, we crossed a mighty range of mountains, cold as the moon on a winter night, absolute cold, it seemed, where the last warmth in the last tree heart had died away, and the green waters of the rock-bound lakes looked frozen to their depths.^[12] Here the snow drifted before the moaning wind, or was blown in eerie clouds, and except for that moaning and the hiss of the frozen snowflakes there was no sound. But we could bless the bitter weather, for only we and silent, lean gray wolves dared venture forth, while the wild Kurds, whose very name was Wolf in the Tatar tongue, almost as hairy and more cruel, must hang by their hidden fires instead of raiding our caravan. And out of those white passes we came down onto a wide brown plain, where the wind was bleak and biting but the winter sun gave forth a perceptible glow, and where grapes grew in summertime, and sweat ran off men’s faces as it did in the vineyards of Lucania.

Days passed, nights sped, and we came to the Kingdom of Mosul. This was the homeland of the great merchants who we called Musolini, sellers of the cloth called muslin (musolino). Here dwelt many Nestorian Christians, living at peace with the Saracens who worshiped Allah, but both paid taxes to the king of the Tatars, who bowed only to a distant emperor and a rag doll over his bed. And just across the river lay some ruins strangely differing from most we had seen along the route, in not being the handiwork of the Tatars, who had passed here less than twenty years ago. The new desolation had looked almost as old as this, but men said it was as the age of a kitten compared to that of a sea turtle. Men said that the rubble of the immense double walls marked the battlements in Nineveh, the capital of Assyria two thousand years ago, and that the great pile atop the hill was once the palace of Sennacherib, and a blackened spot amid the waste was the temple of the goddess Ishtar, on which God poured His wrath.

Now we followed the River Tigris as it wound through a wide, rich plain shut in by impenetrable mountains and pathless deserts. The land widened and warmed with the slow weeks; great reaches of it were garden-green, crowded with towns and villages; the spires of the Nestorian churches stood as thick as the minarets of the Infidel; and except for an occasional scar on the face of the land, or suddenly met stretches of desert in the midst of plenty, you would never know that the Tatar had passed this way.

He had come in the person of Hulaqu the Mongol, brother and viceroy of the Emperor Mangu Khan, who preceded Kublai Khan. He had brought a host of mounted archers and spearmen, and his destination was Baghdad. We too came to Baghdad, in due course, and at first glance you would wonder at his charity and restraint. He had not lost his temper once, so the whole vast wondrous city, the capital of Harun al-Rashid, was not razed and laid utter waste. True, he had shut the Calif in his own treasure tower with only gold to eat, but the Calif was known to love gold above all things, and he handled full much of it, piling it about, before he died of belly hunger and thirst. Hulaqu had marched only a hundred thousand of the people, on the pretense of counting them, to a nearby plain, but their bones lay out of sight beyond the city walls and half-a-hundred thousand children and babes nearly filled the gap. The huge caravanserai were a good half-full. The merchants offered great stores of silk stuffs and gold brocades, some of this so lavish with figures of birds and animals that the material for one robe cost two hundred bezants, or the same number of Persian dinars. And a Tatar governor still held court in the great palace of the Emir, made of sandalwood, ebony, ivory, jasper, lapis-lazuli, and black-and-white jade, and whose meanest stone was alabaster white as snow.

Yet it was whispered that a little way back from the caravan roads where his envoys rode amid pleasant sights, the mark of the Tatar was plain. There, half the water reservoirs and their aqueducts and wheels had been destroyed as if by playful giants, whereby whole countrysides were turned to desert, and this ever marched against the fertile farms; and in time all Mesopotamia, once the Garden of the World, the pride of kings, would become the sun-baked abode of a few shepherds, the lair of the lion, the pasture of the wild ass, and the haunt of the desert asp.

What did I care? Five years ago I had scarcely heard of Mesopotamia.

2

When we had reached the city of Hormuz, atop the straits of the same name, midway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, and so far from Venice that I could hardly believe in the same sun, it mattered greatly to me whether we continued our journey by land or by sea.

Nicolo wanted to go by sea. The voyage would be star-far, all around India and God knew what other vast lands outthrusting into the Indian Ocean, and then northward up the illimitable shores of China—but he reckoned it as shorter in the count of days, weeks, months, and years than the journey overland through the body of Asia. True, it would be a longer sail than any European had made since the world began. But men with dark or yellow skins sailed between port and port, goods were carried and traded, king’s horses were transported, and every pilot’s knowledge of reef and shoal overlapped his neighbor’s. The danger should be no greater, Nicolo said, and the hardships somewhat less.

Maffeo believed what Nicolo said and did what he told him, but he was badly frightened of the Persian dhows on which we must seek passage—wooden craft innocent of an iron nail, their planks held together by ropes of coconut fiber.

Nicolo was a little less afraid only because he had other matters—mainly, to reach our destination as quickly as possible—on his mind. I was the like for a different reason. A good half of the people in and about the docks were either Arabs or spoke Arabic as well as Persian. Knowing a nation’s language is a shibboleth whereby its queerest customs and strangest ways begin to show merit. These rope-stitched boats, anointed with whale oil, rode the choppy coastal water as limply as a Tatar did his rough-gaited pony. However, the great billows hurled by the tempest in the high ocean might tear one of them into scraps and tatters in one swoop.

Had the ships been as sturdy as a Venetian bireme, I would still have striven to go by land. In the first place, I was in no great haste to reach the Court of Kublai Khan—the longer in journey, in reason, the better schooled and muscled I would be for the tasks ahead. In the second place, riding the road across Asia was a harder and hence a far better school for a man of my abilities and ambitions than being batted about a hired cabin over the albatross path; before its end I would come closer to Nicolo in the lore of travel and the science of success.

In the third and fourth places, it was somewhat less expensive, and far more exciting. In the fifth place, if we went by sea, I could not get my hands on a helmet and a cloak and boots fashioned in a city called Fuchow, so far from us that you would think that ministering angels would lose their way.

“We’ll go by sea,” declared Nicolo to his brother Maffeo in the hearing of his unacknowledged son.

“If you say so,” answered Maffeo, “but I shall leave moneys with the Nestorian priests to say Mass for my soul.”

Still Nicolo would have held to it if a Tatar-speaking Persian had not come along selling opium pellets to ward off seasickness, and engaged him and Maffeo in a conversation of which I could not translate one word. However, this proved to be its general drift.

“Effendi, is the ship you are to take a new one or an old one?” the Persian asked, when they had made friends over the fact of knowing the same tongue.

“The latest from the yards, of course,” Nicolo answered. “I don’t trust those fiber fastenings not to weaken with use.”

“Malik, if I tell you a secret known to the shipbuilders, but closely guarded from the merchants, will you give me backsheesh?”

“If I count it of profit to know.”

“It’s true that the fiber ropes binding the planks grow weaker with age and use. The sailors care not for that, for if the ship falls apart in a gale they will speed straight to Paradise, to drink nectar and break maidenheads throughout eternity, but sober men think twice before entrusting their goods to these bottoms, let alone their lives. But if your Kismet ordains that you go to sea, in Allah’s name—and there is no God but Allah—go forth in vessels five or more years old, and eschew the new.”

“What’s the sense of that?”

“The sixth year past was the Year of the Locust. They came in black swarms and stripped and killed the palm trees of Oman, whence came the strong fiber most prized by shipbuilders. In its place they bought fiber of Yemen, greatly inferior to the other. If you do not believe me, count the score of lost ships in these waters since that dread year.”

“Could it be that you are in the pay of the owner of a fleet of old ships falling apart at the seams?”

“It must be that you’ve found me out, for now I’d accept no backsheesh even if you’d give it, and I beg that my saying go in one of effendi’s ears and out the other.”

“We must be on guard against tricksters, but it comes to me that you are honest, and I’ll give you a silver dinar.”

“I can’t go back on my word, effendi, but I’ll implore you Allah’s blessing, and if it comes to you in the form of good offices from humble men like me, and thereby you live to pass this way again, you may give me a feast.”

The opium seller salaamed deeply and went his way. When Nicolo investigated the report, he discovered that a new variety of fiber had been used in shipbuilding for about five years, although the builders maintained that it was fully as strong as the old. The more they thumped their palms with their fists, the greater the doubt raised in Nicolo’s mind. Also the single-sailed craft, undecked except for hides, were small, foul, and crawling with rats and roaches.

So it came to pass that on Maffeo’s next protest at the sea journey, Nicolo yielded, with fine handsomeness, to his wishes.^[13]

As we set forth up the caravan road to Shamil and Nevergun Pass I pondered with my usual anxiety the words and deeds of Nicolo. His guess that the Tatar-speaking opium seller had been employed by owners of antiquated ships was on the right street but the wrong corner. The real truth was, the man also spoke Arabic, and had been employed by me.

The trick was of the caliber of the first I had played in my lifelong war with Nicolo—falsifying his letter for the eyes of my uncle Zane. The cunning was of the same low sort and the immediate success of its operation as notable. Both had been hazardous, and in the first instance I had ultimately paid the piper. The piper’s fee would be a great deal higher for the present dancing, and I could only pray to my saints and trust to my luck for deliverance therefrom.

But the saints are not supposed to support artifice and deceit, and Luck is a famous whore.

3

It is hard to believe that Hell itself is hotter than Hormuz. Sometimes a wind blows across the plain that must be the breath of Hell, for men breathe it and fall dead and their bodies give the appearance of being baked in a long, slow fire. During our stay there, it smote an army of nearly seven thousand marching to collect the king’s tax from a recalcitrant prince, and since there was no water in which they could lie till the pall passed, not one life was spared.

Throughout the hot season no eyes in the city can shut with sleep, the rich seeking the coolness of their well-watered country villas and the lowest beggars fleeing the walls to be beside the roads. With this, and the death wind striking without warning, you would think that folk would abandon the country to beasts, birds, snakes, and evil spirits. Instead it throngs with dark-skinned Mohammedans who appear to enjoy life almost as well as Venetians. They eat vast quantities of dates and fish. They drink a date wine, marvelously spiced, and a cordial more fragrant than musk and spikenard, known as Mohammed’s Bouquet. They keep orchards of peaches, apricots, pomegranates, and oranges. They are born and die, hope, despair, fear, challenge, love. You would think them children of God, the same as ourselves.

Only two days north of Hormuz, we came on rough, rocky, gullied ground climbing steeply for a distance of twenty miles. Here we overtook some merchants waiting with their caravans for reinforcements ere they ventured on, and we were glad of their company in the journey forward. This wilderness, and that which lay beyond the great rich plains, were the abode of beasts more savage and terrible than the black-maned lions of the desert. They were some breed of Mongols, calling themselves Karaunas, and their business was raiding caravans. Our band being strong, we saw no hair or hide of the murderous rogues clean on to the Plain of Rúdbár.

This too had been fertile land until its towns and cities were laid waste. Still my eyes found much to brighten and delight them. On the sun-baked pastures ranged the fat-tailed sheep, almost as big as the little donkeys of Hormuz. The carts and plows were often drawn by immense oxen, snow-white, with a great hump on their shoulders—some of them kneeling like camels to receive their riders, and all of them beautiful in the noble way of beasts. Turtledoves winged from thorn grove to palm clump in multitudinous darting flocks, their pace ever seeming to quicken until it suddenly stopped short at the place of lighting. And among them ranged and slew the swiftest falcons I had ever seen—some sort of peregrines, I thought—their business in life declared by their blood-red breasts.

We ate of citronlike fruits with what appeared to be tooth marks in their skins, known as the apples of Paradise. It was said that they had grown from seed in the core that Adam dropped when he and his mate had shared a forbidden feast. And in the thickets dwelt a large black-and-white grouse, like to a francolin except for his flame-bright beak and feet; our Arab cameleers told us they had brought corn to Mohammed starving in the desert. Truly their evening cry sounded like Arabic words, saying,

“Sweet are the corn ears! Praised be Allah!”

The great plain was slightly tilted toward the distant mountains. Every day was cooler than the last, the landscape more wild and desolate. On an afternoon that we saw a lion asleep on a rock and met a gray wolf trotting down the road as though going to market, we were glad to find a mud-walled village in which we could seek shelter from the Karaunas. And since the settlement seemed indistinguishable from a hundred others scattered over the plain—a stretch of white road, a cluster of houses of sun-baked brick under date palms, a well, sheep and dogs and donkeys, and some score dark-skinned Infidels—how could we expect such a heart-warming scene as this we came upon at the village gate?

Two people were standing there, as though waiting for us, both of them a sight for homesick eyes. Not I, but most of our number, had some venerable kinsmen beyond the deserts whom one of the two recalled—this an aged man with snowy beard and hair whose proud bearing set at naught his shabby dress. That we could see his hair, instead of its being hidden under a turban, lifted the heart of every Christian in our company. It was almost certain proof that he was a Nestorian, cut off from all his kind except for one companion.

That companion was a damsel of not more than eighteen, unveiled, modestly but poorly dressed, and with a bright piece of embroidered cloth in her hand. One glance told me that she was among the few most beautiful, perhaps the very most, of all the damsels I had seen since leaving Venice long ago when I was young. Nor had the sum been small or its quality scurvy. My eyes had brushed a thousand agreeable faces since that departure to find out if even one could be as lovely as the one I had lost. A good many had been virgin slaves being transported to distant bazaars—and merchants who must count centesimi did not waste costly transport on homely faces. The girls I had seen in windows and on roof tops had wanted to be seen; since God made Eve, the plainest women have behaved the most properly. Moreover, God had scattered female beauty or its semblance from Ethiopia to Ultima Thule. It had been as rife in Baghdad as in Bologna.

Since leaving Venice, I had been true to the one I had lost. That was neither good sense nor sound philosophy—how can truth be kept with the nonexistent? Better say I had been continent out of respect to a memory. Even this was not the truth—continence does not count on Saint Peter’s book unless it tugs against temptation. Suddenly it came to me, with a rush of joy, that I was cured of the distemper. Time is a gentleman, say the Chinese. He is a good physician, too, and while he had not healed my strange raw wound, I thought that he had reconciled me to inevitable loss. But perhaps I would be sorry that this particular damsel had been the one to waken these yearnings from their long, cold sleep. The captain of our company had seen her too.

There was no doubt of that captaincy. We were three caravans, traveling together for mutual protection, embracing about a dozen merchants rich enough to ride horses instead of Bactrian camels, but by the end of our first day together, Nicolo had become its acknowledged chief. Nor could I doubt the discernment of his eyes as he gazed upon the darkly glowing face and small, voluptuous form.

He drew up beside the gaffer and swept off his hat.

“I salute your years and honors, and hope that I may serve you and your charge,” he said handsomely in his rich voice. This was duly translated into Persian by our Armenian interpreter.

“May Saint Thomas and Saint Theodore behold your charity to the aged and the weak and bring you benisons from the throne of God!” the old man answered in a firm and somehow thrilling voice.

“I rejoice to find a Christian in this unregenerate wilderness.” Nicolo’s large gray eyes glistened with emotion.

“Verily my granddaughter and I are of the True Faith, although poorly instructed in it. We’re followers of Nestorius like our fathers before us, but I fear we are touched by heresy and tainted with heathenism. Think you the Holy Father would have mercy on us for the sake of our striving?”

“I’ve no doubt of it.” And Nicolo too would forgive the taint, I thought. The heathen customs of some Central Asian folk often prove most convenient to Christian travelers.

There was something strange and no doubt heathenish in the maid’s appearance and manner, but as I rode up with the other merchants to view her at close range, I found that bewitching. Perhaps she was a witch. Her mouth was redder by nature than any I had ever seen, and her oddly set black eyes more bright. They shone out of the dense forest of black lashes. She looked more like a picture of Pharaoh’s daughter that I had seen in Alexandria than anyone I could recall. Her skin was a rich olive and her hair was dense, long and raven-black. She was wide between the temples, as are the Tatars, and perhaps there was a trace of Tatar in her sparkling blood. In spite of our gazing at her, she did not pretend to be shy, looking us over with a like lively interest. Her little unconscious movements appeared so graceful that I thought them lovely.

Above and beyond all this, there was something about her to excite the passions of every man, from youth to dotage, who looked at her. What that something was, all seven wise men of Ancient Greece could not have told.

“May we help you in some way?” Nicolo asked.

“Effendi, we’re in great need of help. Know that my granddaughter, Araxie, has lately lost her husband. Hearing of it, I went from my village in the north to fetch her home. What gold and silver he owned was seized by his mother, and the little I have saved we spent on the road, but Araxie has left one piece of silk of her own needlework. If you will give us a place in your caravan, to ride upon the poorest of your beasts or to walk behind you in the dust until you gain Kerman, we will beg to give you the unworthy gift as a token of gratitude.”

“Why, this is as fine embroidery as I’ve ever seen. It’s fit to cover a pillow to rest a prince’s head. So I take it you fear greatly the two-legged wolves, or you’d not pay such fare.”

“I myself, effendi, have nothing to fear. I have no red money, let alone white or yellow, and I am too old to be worth my ironing as a slave. But when I travel with my grandchild, it’s as though I go heavy with treasure. Forgive me, lord, my boastful words.”

“They were not boastful, father, only a statement of fact I myself invited. Truly you may come with us, and without fee. But the sun is low and we’ll not press on till tomorrow if the sheik will give us shelter behind his wall.”

That worthy stood forth from the small crowd of turbanned onlookers. In the salaaming and other ceremonies going on between him and Nicolo, attention was drawn from the vivid dark face among the bearded ones. As far as I could tell, no eyes but mine were on it. She must have felt them, for her eyes wheeled to meet mine.

A slight lift of my brows asked a question. She raised her chin a little—perhaps it was a half-nod—and her lips curled a little on one side in a witchy smile.