The Journeyer

KHANBALIK

1

TO my surprise, when we entered Khanbalik—that is to say, when we came in the twilight of a fading day to the place where the dusty road became a broad, paved, clean avenue leading into the city—our little train was met by a considerable reception party.

First there was waiting a band of Mongol foot soldiers wearing dress armor of highly polished metal and gleaming oiled leathers. They did not step out to impede our way, as Kaidu’s road guards at Kashgar had done. With unanimous precision, they presented their glittering lances at a slant of salute, then formed a hollow square about our train and marched with us along the avenue, between crowds of the city’s everyday inhabitants, who paused in their occupations to ogle us curiously.

The next waiting greeters were a number of distinguished-looking, elderly gentlemen—some Mongols, some Han, some evidently Arab and Persian—wearing long silk robes of various vivid colors, each man attended by a servant holding over him a fringed canopy on a tall pole. The elders strode out to march on our either flank, their servants scurrying to keep the canopies in place over them, and all smiled at us and made sedate gestures of welcome and called in their several languages: “Mendu! Ying-jie! Salaam!”—though those words were quickly drowned out by a troop of musicians joining the procession with an unearthly screech and clangor of horns and cymbals. My father and uncle smiled and nodded and bowed from their saddles, appearing to have expected this extravagant reception, but Nostril and Ussu and Donduk looked as astonished as I was.

Ussu said to me, over the noise, “Of course, your party has been watched all along the road, as is every traveler, and post riders will have kept the Khanbalik authorities informed of your approach. No one arrives at the City of the Khan unobserved.”

“But,” said Donduk, in a newly respectful voice, “usually it is only the city’s Wang who keeps account of visitors’ comings and goings. You Ferenghi”—he pronounced the word benignly for a change—“seem to be known to the very palace, and warmly awaited, and exceptionally welcome. Those elders marching alongside, I believe they are courtiers of the Khakhan himself.”

I was looking from side to side of the avenue, eager to get some idea of the city’s appearance, but suddenly the view was obscured and my attention diverted elsewhere. There came a noise like a crack of thunder and a light like a lightning flash, not high in the sky but frighteningly close overhead. It made me start and made my horse shy, so violently that I lost my stirrups. I curbed the animal before he could bolt, and held him to a skittish dance, while the terrific noise banged again and again, each time with a flare of light. I saw that all our other horses had also shied, and all our party were occupied in keeping them under control. I would have expected every one of the city folk in the avenue to be running for cover, but all seemed not only composed but actually to be enjoying the tumult and the brightening of the dusk. My father and uncle and the two Mongols were equally tranquil; they even grinned broadly as they sawed on the reins of the plunging horses. It seemed that the flicker and the racket were a bewilderment only to me and to Nostril —I could see his eyeballs protruding whitely from his head as he looked wildly about for the source of the commotion.

It came from the curly-eaved rooftops along both sides of the avenue. Blobs of bright light, like great sparks—or more like the desert’s mysterious “beads of Heaven”—went lofting upward from those roofs and arcing into the air overhead. Directly above us, they burst asunder, making that ear-clapping thump of sound, and became whole constellations of different-colored sprinkles and streaks and splinters of light that drifted down and dwindled and died before they reached the street pavement, leaving a trail of sharp-smelling blue smoke. So many were going up from the roofs and bursting at such close intervals that their flares made an almost constant glow, abolishing the natural twilight, and their bangs concerted in such a roar that our accompanying band was inaudible. The musicians, trudging unconcerned through the clouds of blue smoke, appeared to be only pantomiming the play of their instruments. Though also inaudible, the crowds of city folk along each side of our line of march seemed, from their jumpings and arm wavings and wagging mouths, to be cheering exuberantly at every new burst and blast.

It may be that my own eyes were bulging at sight of that strange and unaccountable flying fire. For, when we had proceeded farther along the avenue, and the smoke and the artificial lightning storm were behind us, Ussu again brought his horse close beside mine and spoke loudly to be heard above the again rambunctious band music:

“You never saw such a show before, Ferenghi? It is a toy devised by the childish Han people. They call it huo-shu yin-hua—fiery trees and sparkling flowers.”

I shook my head and said, “Toy, indeed!” but managed to smile as if I too had enjoyed it. Then I resumed my glancing about to see what the fabled city of Khanbalik looked like.

I will speak later of that. For now, let me just say that the city, which I suppose had suffered much ruination in the Mongols’ taking of it, sometime before I was born, had ever since been in the process of rebuilding from the ground up. These many years later, it was still being added to and refined and embellished and made as grand as the capital of the world’s greatest empire rightly ought to be. The broad avenue led us and our procession of troops and elders and musicians straight on for quite a long way, between the fronts of handsome buildings, until it ended at a towering, south-facing gateway in a wall that was almost as high and thick and impressive as the best-built stretches of the Great Wall out in the countryside.

We went through that gateway and we were in one of the courtyards of the Khakhan’s palace. But palace is a word not comprehensive enough. That was more than a palace; it was a fair-sized city within the city; and it also was still a-building. The courtyard was full of the wagons and carts and draft animals of stonemasons and carpenters and plasterers and gilders and such, and the conveyances of farmers and tradesmen purveying provender and necessities to the inhabitants of the palace city, and the mounts and carriages and porter-borne palanquins of other visitors come on other business from near and far.

From the group of courtiers who had accompanied us through the city, one stepped forward, a quite old and fragile-appearing Han, saying in Farsi, “I shall summon servants, my lords.” He only gently clapped his pallid, papery hands, but somehow that imperceptible command carried through the confusion of the courtyard and he was instantly obeyed. Out of somewhere came half a dozen stable grooms, and he instructed them to take charge of our mounts and packhorses, also to lead Ussu and Donduk and Nostril to quarters in the palace guard barracks. He clapped his hands almost soundlessly again, and three female servants just as magically appeared.

“These maids will attend you, my lords,” he said to my father and uncle and me. “You will lodge temporarily in the pavilion of honored guests. I will come on the morrow and conduct you to the Khakhan, who is most eager to greet you, and at that time doubtless he will appoint more permanent quarters for you.”

The three women bowed four times before us in the abjectly humble Han salute called the ko-tou, which is a prostration so low that the bowing forehead actually is supposed to knock the ground. Then the women smilingly beckoned and, with curiously birdlike, tripping little steps, led us across the courtyard, and the crowd made way before us. We went another considerable distance through the twilit palace city—along galleries and through cloisters and across other open courtyards and down corridors and over terraces—until the women again did the ko-tou at the guest pavilion. It had a seemingly blank wall of translucent oiled paper in frames of wood filigree, but the women easily opened it by sliding two panels apart and aside, and bowed us in. Our chambers were three bedrooms and a sitting room, en suite, lavishly decorated and ornamented, with an ornate brazier already alight—burning clean charcoal, not animal dung or the smoky kara coals. One of the women began turning down our beds—real beds, high standing and piled higher with downy quilts and pillows—while another set water to heat on the brazier for our baths and the third began bringing in trays of already hot food from some kitchen somewhere.

We fell first on the food, almost snatching and stabbing with our nimble-tong sticks, for we were hungry and it was fine fare: bits of steamed shoat in a garlic sauce, pickled mustard greens cooked with broad beans, the familiar miàn pasta, a porridge very like our Venetian chestnut-meal polenta, a cha flavored with almonds and, for the sweet, red-candied little crabapples impaled on twigs for ease of eating. Then, in our separate rooms, we bathed all over—or got bathed, I should say. My father and uncle seemed to accept those ministrations as indifferently as if the young women had been male rubbers in a hammam. But it was the first time I had been so served by a female since the long-ago days of Zia Zulià, and I felt both embarrassment and titillation.

To distract myself, I watched the maid instead of what she was doing to me. She was a young woman of the Han, perhaps a little older than I, but at that time I knew not how to gauge the age of such alien beings. She was far better dressed than any Western servant would have been, but also was much more meek and docile and solicitous than any Western servant.

She had face and hands of ivory tint, an upswept mass of blue-black hair, barely perceptible eyebrows, no apparent eyelashes, and eyes also invisible because their opening was so narrow and she kept them always downcast. She had rosebud lips, red and dewy-looking, but a nose almost nonexistent. (I was beginning to resign myself to never seeing a shapely Verona-style nose in these lands.) Her ivory face was at the moment marred by a smudge on her forehead, from her ko-tou in the courtyard. However, a small imperfection in a woman can sometimes be a most appealing feature. I began to wish very much that I could see what the rest of the young woman looked like, under her many layers of brocade —stole and robe and gown and sashes and ties and other furbelows.

I was tempted to suggest that, as soon as she had me clean all over, she might serve me in other ways. But I did not. I could not speak her language, and the necessary gestures of suggestion might have been taken as more offensive than inviting. Also, I did not know how liberal or how strict the local conventions might be in regard to such things. So I decided prudence was called for, and, when she finished my bath and made the ko-tou, I let her depart. The hour was still early, but the day had been a tiring one. My combined fatigue of traveling, excitement at having finally arrived, and languor induced by the bath put me immediately to sleep. I dreamed that I was undressing the Han maidservant like a toy doll, layer by layer, and when the last garment was peeled away she suddenly became that other toy: that bursting, blazing display called fiery trees and sparkling flowers.

In the morning, the same three women brought trays of food which they served upon our laps while we still lay in bed, and, while we broke our fast, prepared hot water to give us each another bath. I endured it without complaint, though I did think that two all-over bathings in the course of a single day was rather excessive. Then Nostril came, leading some of the stable hands carrying our travel packs. So, after the baths, we donned the finest and least worn clothes we owned. Those were our dashing Persian costumes—tulbands on our heads, embroidered waistcoats over loose shirts with tight cuffs, kamarbands around our middles, and ample pai-jamah tucked into well-cut boots. Our three maids giggled, and nervously put their hands over their mouths, as Han women always do when they laugh, but they hastened to indicate that they were tittering in admiration of our handsomeness.

Then arrived our elderly Han guide of the evening before—this time he introduced himself: Lin-ngan, the Court Mathematician—and led us from the pavilion. Now, in full morning light, I could better appreciate our surroundings, as we went along arcades and colonnades and through vine-trellised bowers and along porticoes overhung by curly-edged roof eaves and along terraces that overlooked flower-filled gardens and over high-arched bridges that spanned lotus ponds and little streams in which golden fish swam. In every place and passage we saw servants, most of them Han, male and female, richly garbed but timorously hastening on their errands, and many Mongol guardsmen in dress uniforms, standing rigid as statues but holding weapons which they looked ready to use, and we saw the occasional strolling noble or elder or courtier, as dignified and sumptuously robed and important-appearing as our guide Lin-ngan, with whom they exchanged ceremonious nods in passing.

All the unwalled passages open to the air had intricately carved and fretted balustrades and exquisitely sculptured pillars and hanging, tinkling wind chimes and silk tassels swishing like horses’ tails. All the enclosed passages where the sun did not enter were lighted by tinted Muscovy-glass lanterns like soft-colored moons, and they glowed with a lovely diffuse light, because every such passage was misted by the fragrant smoke of burning incense. And all the passages, open or enclosed, were decorated with standing objects of art: elegant marble sundials and lacquered screens and figured gongs and images of lions and horses and dragons and other animals which I could not recognize, and great urns of bronze and vases of porcelain and jade, overflowing with cut flowers.

We crossed again the gateside courtyard by which we had entered on the previous evening, and it was again or still thronged with saddle horses and pack asses and camels and carts and wagons and palanquins and people. Among that press, I happened to see two Han men just dismounting from mules and, though they were but two faces in an innumerable crowd, I had a vague sense of having seen those men before. After leading us some way farther, old Lin-ngan brought us finally to a south-facing pair of immense doors, chased and gilded and lacquered in many colors, doors so massive in size and so weighty with metal studs and bosses that they might have been intended to keep giants out—or in. Pausing with his wisp of a hand on one of the formidable wrought-dragon handles, Lin-ngan said in his whisper of a voice:

“This is the Cheng, the Hall of Justice, and this is the hour of the Khakhan’s dispensing judgment to plaintiffs and supplicants and miscreants. If you will but attend until that is concluded, my Lords Polo, he wishes to make his greetings immediately afterward.”

The frail old man, with no apparent effort, swung open the ponderous doors—they must have been cleverly counterpoised and on well-oiled hinges—and bowed us inside. He followed us in and closed the door behind us, and remained standing with us to provide helpful interpretations of what was going on in the hall.

The Cheng was a tremendous and lofty chamber, fully as big as an indoor courtyard, its ceiling held up by carved and gilded columns, its walls paneled with red leather, but its floor space empty of furniture. At the far end was a raised platform and on that a substantial thronelike chair, flanked by rows of lower and less elegantly upholstered chairs. There were dignitaries occupying all those seats, and in the shadows behind the dais were other figures standing and moving about. Between us and the platform knelt a great crowd of petitioners, enough to fill the chamber from wall to wall, most of them in coarse peasant dress but others in noble raiment.

Even from the distance at which we stood, I knew the man seated centrally on the dais. I would have known him even if he had been shabbily clothed and crammed ignominiously among the ranks of commoners on the chamber floor. The Khan Kubilai needed not his elevated throne nor his gold-threaded, fur-trimmed silk robes to proclaim himself; his sovereignty was implicit in the upright way he sat, as if he still were astride a battle charger, and in the strength of his craggy face and in the forcefulness of his voice, though he spoke only infrequently and in low tones. The men in the chairs to either side of him were almost as well dressed, but their manner made evident that they were subordinates. Our guide Lin-ngan, pointing discreetly and murmuring quietly, explained who they all were.

“One is the official called Suo-ke, which means the Tongue. Four are the Khakhan’s secretary scribes who record on scrolls the proceedings here. Eight are ministers of the Khakhan, two each of four ascending degrees. Behind the dais, those running about are relays of clerks who fetch documents from the Cheng archives, when any are needed for reference.”

The one called Tongue of the Cheng was continuously occupied, leaning down from the platform to hear a petitioner, then turning to converse with one or another of the ministers. And those eight ministers also were continuously busy, consulting with the Tongue, bidding clerks bring them documents, peering into those papers and scrolls, consulting among themselves and occasionally with the Khakhan. But the four secretaries seemed only now and then to bestir themselves to write anything on their papers. I commented that it seemed odd: the lordly ministers of the Cheng working harder than the mere secretaries.

“Yes,” said Master Lin-ngan. “The scribes do not trouble to write down anything of these proceedings except the words spoken by the Khan Kubilai himself. Everything else is but preliminary discussion, for the Khakhan’s words sum up and distill and supersede all other words spoken.”

Such a vast room with so many people in it might have been cacophonous and echoing, but the crowd was quiet and orderly, like a congregation in church. Only one person at a time went up to the dais, and he spoke only to the official called the Tongue, and in a murmur so respectful or fearful that we in the back of the room could hear nothing that passed until, after all the deliberations, the Tongue announced the judgment for all to know.

Lin-ngan said, “During the Cheng, no one but the Tongue ever addresses the Khan Kubilai directly, nor ever is directly addressed by him. A supplicant or prosecutor puts his case to the Tongue—who, incidentally, is so called because he is fluent in all the languages of the realm. The Tongue then puts the case to one of the two ministers of least degree. If that official deems it a subject of sufficient importance, he will refer it upward. At whatever level, and after whatever precedents are consulted, an adjudication is suggested and told to the Tongue, who then tells it to the Khakhan. He may give assent, or make some slight change in the ruling, or controvert it completely. Then the Tongue pronounces aloud that final decree to the persons concerned and to all within hearing —damages to be paid to a plaintiff, or to be exacted from a defendant, or a punishment laid on, or sometimes a dismissal of the whole affair—and the case is closed forever.”

I perceived that this Cheng of Khanbalik was not like the Daiwan of Baghdad, where every case had been a matter for discussion and mutual agreement among the Shah and his wazir and an assortment of officious Muslim imams and muftis. Here, the cases might be argued first among the ministers, but every single verdict was finally at the sole discretion of the Khan Kubilai, and his pronouncement was not to be disputed or appealed. I also perceived that his verdicts were sometimes witty or whimsical, but sometimes appalling in their cruel inventiveness.

Old Lin-ngan was at that moment saying, “The farmer who just petitioned the Cheng is a delegate sent by a whole district of farmers in the province of Ho-nan. He brings word that the rice fields have been chewed clean by a plague of locusts. A famine is on the land and the farm families are starving. The delegate asks relief for the people of Ho-nan and inquires what might be done. Regard, the ministers have discussed the problem and referred it to the Khakhan, and now the Tongue will deliver the Khakhan’s decree.”

The Tongue did, in a bellow of Han that I could not understand, but Lin-ngan translated:

“The Khan Kubilai speaks thus. With all that rice inside them, the locusts should be delicious. The families of Ho-nan have the Khakhan’s permission to eat the locusts. The Khan Kubilai has spoken.”

“By God,” muttered Uncle Mafio, “the old tyrant is just as flippantly imperious as I had remembered him.”

“Honey in his mouth and a dagger at his belt,” my father said admiringly.

The next case was that of a provincial notary named Xen-ning, responsible for recording deeds of land transfer and testaments of bequest and such things. He was accused, and found guilty, of having falsified his ledgers for his own aggrandizement, and the Tongue proclaimed and Lin-ngan translated the sentence accorded him:

“The Khan Kubilai speaks thus. You have lived all your life by words, Notary Xen-ning. Henceforth you shall live on them. You are to be imprisoned in a solitary cell, and at every mealtime you will be served pieces of paper inscribed ‘meat’ and ‘rice’ and ‘cha.’ Those will be your food and drink for as long as you can survive on them. The Khan Kubilai has spoken.”

“Truly,” said my father, “he has a tongue of scissors.”

The next and last case that morning was the matter of a woman taken in adultery. It would have been a thing too trivial for the Cheng’s consideration, said old Lin-ngan, except that she was a Mongol woman, and wife to a Mongol functionary of the Khanate, a certain Lord Amursama; therefore her crime was more heinous than if she had been a mere Han. Her outraged husband had stabbed her lover to death at the moment of discovery, said Lin-ngan, meaning that the miscreant had died too mercifully quickly and without the torment he deserved. So now the husband was petitioning the Cheng to decide a more salutary fate for his unfaithful wife. The cuckold’s petition was duly granted, and I trust it satisfied him. Lin-ngan translated:

“The Khan Kubilai speaks thus. The guilty Lady Amursama will be delivered to the Fondler—”

“The Fondler?” I exclaimed, and I laughed. “I thought she had just been delivered from one of those.”

“The Fondler,” the old man said stiffly, “is our name for the Court Executioner.”

“In Venice we more realistically call him the Meatmaker.”

“It so happens that in the Han language the term for physical torture, dong-xing, and the term for sexual arousal, dong-qing, are, as you have just heard, very similar in pronunciation.”

“Gèsu,” I muttered.

“I resume,” said Lin-ngan. “The wife will be delivered to the Fondler, accompanied by her betrayed husband. In the presence of the Fondler, and if necessary employing his assistance, the husband will with his teeth and fingernails tear out his wife’s pudendal sphincter, and with that he will strangle her to death. The Khan Kubilai has spoken.”

Neither my father nor my uncle saw fit to comment on that decree, but I did. I scoffed knowingly:

“Vakh! This is pure show. The Khakhan is well aware that we are present. He is only making such eccentric judgments to impress and confound us. Just as the Ilkhan Kaidu did when he spat in his guardsman’s mouth.”

My father and the Mathematician Lin-ngan gave me looks askance, and my uncle growled, “Brash upstart! Do you really think that the Khan of All Khans would exert himself to impress any human being alive? Least of all, some unimportant wretches from an inconsiderable cranny of the world far beyond his domains?”

I made no reply, but neither did I put on a contrite look, being sure that my disparaging opinion would eventually be confirmed. But it never was. Uncle Mafio was right, of course, and I was wrong, and I would soon know how foolishly I had misread the Khakhan’s temperament.

But at that moment the Cheng was emptying. The huddled ruck of petitioners humped to their feet and shuffled out through the door by which we had entered, and the presiding justices at the dais, all except the Khakhan, disappeared through some doorway at that end of the hall. When there was no one left between him and us except his ring of guards, Lin-ngan said, “The Khakhan beckons. Let us approach.”

Following the Mathematician’s example, we all knelt to make the ko-tou obeisance to the Khakhan. But before we had folded far enough to put our foreheads to the floor, he said in a boomingly hearty voice:

“Rise! Stand! Old friends, welcome back to Kithai!”

He spoke in Mongol, and I never afterwards heard him speak anything else, so I do not know if he was acquainted with Trade Farsi or any others of the multifarious languages employed in his realm, and I never heard anyone else address him in anything but his native Mongol. He did not embrace my father or uncle in the fashion of Venetian friends meeting, but he did clap each of them on the shoulder with a big, heavily beringed hand.

“It is good to see you again, Brothers Polo. How fared you in the journeying, uu? Is this the first of my priests, uu? How young he looks, for a sage cleric!”

“No, Sire,” said my father. “This is my son Marco, also now an experienced journeyer. He, like us, puts himself at the service of the Khakhan.”

“Then welcome is he, as well,” said Kubilai, nodding amiably to me. “But the priests, friend Nicolò, do they follow behind you, uu?”

My father and uncle explained apologetically, but not abjectly, that we had failed to bring the requested one hundred missionary priests—or any priests at all—because they had had the misfortune to return home during the papal interregnum and the consequent disarray of the Church hierarchy. (They did not mention the two faint-hearted Friars Preachers who had come no farther than the Levant.) While they explained, I took the opportunity to look closely at this most powerful monarch in the world.

The Khan of All Khans was then just short of his sixtieth birthday, an age which in the West would have counted him an ancient, but he was still a hale and sturdy specimen of mature manhood. For a crown, he wore a simple gold morion helmet, like an inverted soup bowl, with nape and jugular lappets depending from its back and sides. His hair, what I could see of it under the morion, was gray but still thick. His full mustache and his beard, which was close-trimmed in the style worn by shipwrights, were more pepper than salt. His eyes were rather round, for a Mongol, and bright with intelligence. His ruddy complexion was weathered but not wrinkled, as if his face had been carved from well-seasoned walnut. His nose was his only unhandsome feature, it being short like those of all Mongols, but also bulbous and quite red. His garments were all of splendid silks, thickly brocaded with figures and patterns, and they covered a figure that was stout but nowise suety. On his feet were soft boots of a peculiar leather; I learned later that they were made from the skin of a certain fish, which is alleged to allay the pains of gout, the only affliction I ever heard the Khakhan complain of.

“Well,” he said, when my father and uncle had finished, “perhaps your Church of Rome shows a cunning wisdom in keeping close its mysteries.”

I was still holding my newly formed opinion that the Khan Kubilai was like any other mortal—as evidenced by his posturings for our benefit during the proceedings of the Cheng—and now he seemed to validate that opinion, for he went on talking, as chattily as any ordinary man making idle conversation with friends.

“Yes, your Church may be right not to send missionaries here. When it comes to religion, I often think that none is better than too much. We already have Nestorian Christians, and they are ubiquitous and vociferous, to the point of pestilence. Even my old mother, the Dowager Khatun Sorghaktani, who long ago converted to that faith, is still so besotted with it that she harangues me and every other pagan she meets. Our courtiers are lately desperate to avoid meeting her in the corridors. Such fanaticism defeats its own aims. So, yes, I believe your Roman Christian Church may well attract more converts if it pretends to stand aloof from the herd. That is the way of the Jews, you know. Thus the few pagans who do get accepted into Judaism can feel flattered and honored by the fact.”

“Oh, please, Sire,” my father said anxiously. “Do not compare the True Faith with the heretic Nestorian sect. And do not equate it with the despised Judaism. Blame me and Mafio, if you will, for our error of timing. But at any and all other times, I sincerely assure you, the Church of Rome holds open its warm embrace to enfold all who desire salvation.”

The Khakhan said sharply, “Why, uu?”

That was my first experience of that particular one of Kubilai’s attributes, but I was often to remark it thereafter. The Khakhan could be as congenial and discursive and loquacious as an old woman, when it suited his mood and purpose. But when he wanted to know something, when he wanted an answer, when he sought a particle of information, he could suddenly emerge from the clouds of garrulity—his own or a whole roomful of other people’s—and swoop like a falcon to strike to the meat of a matter.

“Why?” echoed Uncle Mafio, taken aback. “Why does Christianity seek to save all mankind?”

“But we told you years ago, Sire,” said my father. “The faith which preaches love and which was founded on Jesus, the Christ and Savior, is the only hope of bringing about perpetual peace on earth, and plenty, and ease of body and mind and soul, and good will among men. And after life, an eternity of bliss in the Bosom of Our Lord.”

I thought my father had put the case for Christianity as well as any ordained cleric could have done. But the Khakhan only smiled sadly and sighed.

“I had hoped you would bring learned men of persuasive arguments, good Brothers Polo. Fond as I am of you, and much as I respect your own convictions, I fear that you—like my dowager mother and like every missionary I have ever met—offer only unsupported asseveration.”

Before my father or uncle could profess further, Kubilai launched into another of his periphrases:

“I do indeed remember your telling me how your Jesus came to earth, with His message and His promise. That was more than one thousand and two hundred years ago, you said. Well, I myself have lived long, and I have studied the histories of times before my own. In all ages, it seems, all sorts of religions have held out promises of worldwide peace and bounty and good health and brotherly love and pervading happiness—and some kind of Heaven hereafter. About the hereafter I know nothing. But of my own knowledge, most of the people on this earth, including those who pray and worship with sincerest faith and devotion, remain poor and sickly and unhappy and unfulfilled and in utter detestation of each other—even when they are not actively at war, which is seldom.”

My father opened his mouth, perhaps to comment on the incongruity of a Mongol deploring war, but the Khakhan went on:

“The Han people tell a legend about a bird called the jing-wei. Since the beginning of time, the jing-wei has been carrying pebbles in its beak, to fill in the limitless, bottomless Sea of Kithai and make solid land of it, and the jing-wei will continue that futile endeavor until the other end of time. So it must be, I think, with faiths and religions and devotions. You can hardly deny that your own Christian Church has been playing the jing-wei bird for twelve whole centuries now—forever futile, forever fatuously promising what it can never provide.”

“Never, Sire?” said my father. “Enough pebbles will fill a sea. Even the Sea of Kithai, in time.”

“Never, friend Nicolò,” the Khakhan said flatly. “Our learned cosmographers have proved that the world is more sea than land. There do not exist enough pebbles.”

“Facts cannot prevail against faith, Sire.”

“Nor against adamant folly, I fear. Well, well, enough of this. You are men in whom we placed our trust, and you have failed that trust in not fetching the priests requested. However, it is a custom here: never to dispraise men of good breeding in the presence of others.” He turned to the Mathematician, who had been listening to those exchanges with an expression of polite boredom. “Master Lin-ngan, will you kindly retire, uu? Leave me alone with these Masters Polo while I chastise them for their nonfeasance.”

I was startled and angry and a little uneasy. So that was why he had had us present in the Cheng to observe his capricious judgments—to have us already fearful and trembling even before we heard his judgment on us. Had we come all this weary way only for some frightful punishment? But he surprised me again. When Lin-ngan had gone, he chuckled and said:

“There. All the Han are notorious for their swift conveyance of gossip, and Lin-ngan is a true Han. The whole court already knew of your priestly mission, and now it will be told that our conversation concerned nothing else. Therefore, let us proceed to the nothing-else.”

Uncle Mafio said, smiling, “There are numerous nothing-elses to speak of, Sire. Which first?”

“I am told that your road brought you right into the hand of my cousin Kaidu, and that he closed his fist on you for a time.”

“A brief delay only, Sire,” said my father, and waved toward me. “Marco yonder most ingeniously aided us to elude him, but we will tell you of that another time. Kaidu wished to plunder the gifts we have brought you from your liege subjects the Shah of Persia and the Sultan of India Aryana. Your cousin might have confiscated everything, but for Marco.”

The Khakhan nodded again to me, only briefly, before he swung back to my father and uncle. “Kaidu took nothing from you, uu?”

“Nothing, Sire. At your command, we will have servants bring in and display for you the wealth of gold and jewels and finery—”

“Vakh!” the Khakhan interrupted. “Never mind the trinkets. What of the maps, uu? Besides the wretched priests, you promised to bring maps. Did you make them, uu? Did Kaidu filch them from you, uu? I would gladly have had him steal everything else but those!”

I was understandably bewildered by the several and rapid changes of topic under discussion. The Khakhan was not chastising us, but interrogating us, and on a matter until now unsuspected by me. I might have been sufficiently astonished to hear a man say vakh to a gift of trinkets that would purchase any duchy in Europe. But I was more astonished to learn that my father and uncle had all this time been engaged on a project more secret and important than just the procurement of missionaries.

“The maps are safe, Sire,” said my father. “It never occurred to Kaidu to think of any such things. And Mafio and I believe we have compiled the best maps yet done of the western and central regions of this continent—especially those regions held by the Ilkhan Kaidu.”

“Good … good … murmured Kubilai. “The maps drawn by the Han are unsurpassable, but they confine themselves to the Han lands. Those maps we captured from them in earlier years much aided the Mongol conquest of Kithai, and they will be of equal use as we march south against the Sung. But the Han have always ignored everything beyond their own borders as unworthy of consideration. If you have done your work well, then for the first time I have maps of the entire Silk Road into the farther reaches of my empire.”

Beaming with satisfaction, he looked about him and caught sight of me. Perhaps he took my vapid gawking for a look of stricken conscience, for he beamed even more broadly and spoke directly to me. “I have already promised, young Polo, never to use the maps in any Mongol campaign against the territory or the holdings of the Dogato of Venice.”

Then, turning again to my father and uncle, he said, “I will later arrange a private audience for us to sit together and examine the maps. In the meantime, a separate chamber and staff of servants have been appointed for each of you, conveniently close to my own in the main palace residence.” He added, rather as an afterthought, “Your nephew may reside in either suite, as you choose.”

(It is a curious thing, but for all Kubilai’s acuity in every other area of human knowledge and experience, he never, through all the years I knew him, bothered to remember of which elder Polo I was the son and of which the nephew.)

“For tonight,” he went on, “I have ordered a banquet of welcome, at which you will meet two other visitors newly come from the West, and we will all together discuss the vexing question of my insubordinate cousin Kaidu. Now Lin-ngan waits outside to escort you to your new quarters.”

We all began a ko-tou, and again—as he always would do—he bade us rise before we had prostrated ourselves very deeply, and he said, “Until tonight, friends Polo,” and we took our leave.

2

AS I say, that was my first realization that my father and uncle, in their assiduous making of maps, had been working at least partly for the Khan Kubilai—and this is the first time I have ever publicly revealed that fact. I did not mention it in the earlier chronicle of my travels and theirs, because at that time my father was still alive, and I hesitated to impute any suspicion that he might have served the Mongol Horde in ways inimical to our Christian West. However, as all men know, the Mongols never again have invaded or threatened the West. Our foremost enemies for many years have continued to be the Muslim Saracens, and the Mongols have frequently been our friendly allies against them.

Meanwhile, as my father and uncle all along intended, Venice and the rest of Europe have profited from increased trade with the East, a trade much facilitated by the copies of all our maps of the Silk Road which we Polos brought home from there. So I no longer see any need to maintain the slightly preposterous fiction that Nicolò and Mafìo Polo crossed and recrossed the whole extent of Asia simply to herd a flock of priests with them. And not in that other book, or ever, have I tried to keep secret the fact that I, Marco Polo, also became an agent and journeyer and observer and mapmaker for the Khan Kubilai. But I will here tell the beginning of my becoming so well regarded by the Khakhan that he entrusted me with such missions.

It was at that night’s welcoming banquet that I first attracted his notice. But it could have happened—and almost did—that Kubilai’s first attention to me might have been a command that I deliver myself to the Fondler, with my neck in my sphincter.

The banquet was laid in the largest hall of the main palace building, a hall which, one of the table servants boasted to me, would accommodate six thousand diners at a single seating. The high ceiling was held up on pillars that seemed made of solid gold, twisted and convoluted, inset with gems and jade. The walls were paneled alternately in rich carved woods and fine embossed leathers, and hung with Persian qali and Han scroll paintings and Mongol trophies of the hunt. Those included the mounted heads of snarling lions and spotted pards and great-horned artak (“Marco’s sheep”) and large bearlike creatures called da-mao-xiong, the mounted heads of which were startlingly snow-white except for black ears and black masks about the eyes.

The trophies were probably of the Khakhan’s own hunts, for he was famous for his love of the chase, and spent every spare day in forest or field. Even here in the banquet hall, his affection for that manliest of sports was evident, for the guests seated closest to him were his dearest hunting partners. On either arm of his thronelike chair was perched a hooded hunting falcon, and to each of the chair’s two front legs was tethered a hunting cat called a chita. The chita resembles a spotted pard, but is much smaller in size and proportionately much longer in the legs. It is different from all other cats in that it cannot climb a tree, and is even more different in that it will willingly chase and pull down game at its master’s bidding. Here, however, the chitas and the falcons sat quietly, now and then politely accepting tidbits which Kubilai fed to them with his own fingers.

There were not six thousand persons present on that particular night, so the hall was partitioned by screens of black and gold and red lacquer, to make a more intimate enclosure for rather fewer people. Still, there must have been close on two hundred of us, plus as many servants and a constantly changing crew of musicians and entertainers. That many people breathing and sweating, and the savory steams from the hot foods served, should have made even that huge hall rather warm on that late-summer night. But, although we were screened about and all the outer doors were shut, the hall had a cool breeze mysteriously blowing through it. Not until some while later did I learn by what ingeniously simple means that coolness was effected. But there were other mysteries in that dining hall which made me goggle and thrill and wonder, and for them I never did manage to find adequate explanation.

For example, in the middle of all the many tables stood a tall artificial tree, crafted of silver, its multiple limbs and branches and twigs hung with beaten-silver leaves that fluttered gently in the hall’s artificial breeze. Around the tree’s silver-barked trunk were coiled four golden serpents. Their tails were twined among the upper branches and their heads snaked downward to poise, open-mouthed, above four immense porcelain vases. The vases were molded in the shape of fantastic lions with their heads thrown back and their mouths also wide. There were some other artificial creatures in the room; on several tables, including the one at which we guest Polos sat, was a life-sized peacock made of gold, its tail feathers finely articulated and colored by inlaid enamels. Now, the mystery about those objects was this. When the Khan Kubilai called for drink—and only when he called aloud, not when anyone else did—those several animals of precious metals did wondrous things. I will tell what they did, though I scarcely expect to be believed.

“Kumis!” Kubilai would bellow, and one of the golden serpents coiled about the silver tree would suddenly gush from its mouth a flow of pearly liquid into the mouth of the lion vase set below. A servant would bring the vase to the Khakhan’s table and pour the beverage into his jewel-encrusted goblet and the goblets of other guests. They would sip and verify that it was indeed the mare’s-milk kumis, and they would all clap their hands in applause of that marvel, and immediately another marvelous thing would occur. The golden peacock on the table—and every golden peacock in the room—would likewise applaud, raising and beating its golden wings, erecting and fanning out its splendid tail.

“Arkhi!” the Khakhan would shout next, and the second serpent on the tree would disgorge its measure into the second lion vase, and a servant would bring the drink and we all would find it to be that finer and tastier grade of kumis called arkhi. And we would applaud and so would the peacocks. And those animated creatures, the liquor-spouting serpents and the exuberant birds, they worked, mind you, without any human agency. I several times went close to observe them, both while they were performing and while they were at rest, and I could find no wires or strings or levers that might have been manipulated from a distance.

“Mao-tai!” the Khakhan would shout next, and the whole activity would be repeated, from serpent spout to lion vase to peacock fanning. The liquor dispensed by the third serpent, mao-tai, was new to me: a yellowish, slightly syrupy beverage of a tingling flavor. The Mongol diner at my elbow cautioned me to beware of its potency, which he demonstrated. He took a tiny porcelain cup of the liquor and applied to it the flame of one of the table candles. The mao-tai caught fire with a sizzling blue flame and burned like naft oil for a good five minutes before it was consumed. I understand that mao-tai is a Han concoction somehow expressed from common millet, but it is an uncommon beverage—as fiery a fuel to the belly and the brain as it is to any open flame.

“Pu-tao!” was the fourth command the Khakhan shouted to the serpent tree; the word pu-tao means grape wine. But to the consternation of all us guests, nothing happened. The fourth serpent simply hung there, sullenly dry, and we sat gaping, almost fearful, wondering what had gone wrong. The Khakhan, though, sat grinning with secret glee, enjoying the air of suspense, until he demonstrated the last and most magical magic of the apparatus. Not until he shouted “Pu-tao!” and then added a shout of either “hong!” or “bai!” would the fourth serpent begin to gush, and according to Kubilai’s command it would dispense red (hong) or white (bai) wine, at which we guests erupted in a storm of cheers and applause, and the golden peacocks beat their wings and fanned their tails so wildly that they shed flakes of golden feathers.

The banquet guests that night, except for the visitors being welcomed, comprised the highest lords and ministers and courtiers of the Khanate, plus some women whom I took to be their wives. The lords were a mixture of nationalities and complexions: Arabs and Persians as well as Mongols and Han. But of course the women present were the non-Muslim Mongol and Han wives; if the Arabs and Persians had wives, they were not permitted to dine in mixed company. All the men were finely garbed in brocaded silks, some wearing robes, as did the Khakhan and other Mongols and the native Han, some wearing their silks in the form of Persian pai-jamah and tulband, and others wearing their silks as Arab aba and kaffiyah.

But the women were even more gorgeously arrayed. The Han ladies all had powdered their already ivory faces to the whiteness of snow, and wore their blue-black hair in voluminous piles and swirls atop their heads, pinned up there by long jeweled implements they called hair-spoons. The Mongol ladies were of slightly darker complexion, a sort of fawn color, and I was much interested to see that these women, unlike their plains-dwelling nomad sisters, were not coarsened to leather by sun and wind, nor were they bulkily muscular of body. Their coiffures were even more complex than that of the Han women. Their hair, ruddy-black instead of blue-black, was braided onto a framework to make it swoop in a wide crescent at either side of the head, rather like sheep horns, and those crescents were festooned with dangling brilliants. Also, though they wore the same simple, flowing gowns as the Han women, the Mongol ladies added to the shoulders of them some curious high fillets of padded silk that stood up like fins.

At the Khakhan’s table with him sat members of his immediate family. Five or six of his twelve legitimate sons were ranged at his right. On his left sat his first and chief wife, the Khatun Jamui, then his aged mother, the Dowager Khatun Sorghaktani, then his three other wives. (Kubilai had also a considerable and constantly varying consort of concubines, all younger than his wives. The current contingent sat at a separate table. By his concubines, Kubalai had another twenty-five sons, and God knows how many legitimate and bastard daughters besides, from all his women. )

The whole dining area was divided so that the male guests occupied the tables to Kubilai’s right and the females those to his left. Closest to the Khakhan’s table, within easy speaking distance, was the table appointed for us Polos, and with us was seated a Mongol dignitary to converse with us, interpret for us when necessary, explain to us the unfamiliar dishes and drinks served, and so on. He was a fairly young man—exactly ten years older than myself, it turned out—who introduced himself as Chingkim, saying he held the office of Wang of Khanbalik, which was to say the Chief City Officer or Magistrate. That office being equivalent to a European city’s mayor—or podestà, in the Venetian term—I gathered that we Polos were entitled to only a minor functionary as our table companion.

The Khakhan more formally introduced us to others of his lords and ministers seated at nearby tables. I will not attempt to list them all, for they included so many persons of so many different degrees of authority, and so many bore titles which I had never heard in any other court, or ever even heard of—the Master of the Black-Ink Arts (nothing but the Court Poet), the Master of the Mastiffs, Hawks and Chitas (the Khakhan’s Chief Huntsman), the Master of the Boneless Colors (nothing but the Court Artist), the Chief of Secretaries and Scribes, the Archivist of Marvels and Wonders, the Recorder of Things Strange. But I will mention by name some lords who seemed to me curiously out of place in a supposedly Mongol court—for example, Lin-ngan, whom we already knew, was one of the supposedly conquered Han, but held the fairly important post of Court Mathematician.

The young man Chingkim appeared to hold the grandest title assigned by Kubilai to any of his fellow Mongols, and Chingkim claimed to be only a mere city Wang. By contrast, the Khakhan’s Chief Minister, whose office was called by the Han title of Jing-siang, was neither a conqueror Mongol nor a subject Han. He was an Arab named Achmad-az-Fenaket, and he himself preferred to be called by the Arab title signifying his office, which is Wali. By whatever honorific he was addressed—Jing-siang or Chief Minister or Wali—Achmad was the second most powerful man in the entire Mongol hierarchy, subordinate only to the Khakhan himself, for he also held the office of Vice-Regent, meaning that he literally ruled the empire whenever Kubilai was out hunting or making war or otherwise occupied, and Achmad also held the office of Finance Minister, meaning that at all times he controlled the purse strings of the empire.

It seemed equally odd to me that the Mongol Empire’s Minister of War—war being the activity in which the Mongols most excelled and exulted—was not a Mongol but a Han gentleman named Chao Meng-fu. The Court Astronomer was a Persian named Jamal-ud-Din, a native of far-off Isfahan. The Court Physician was a Byzantine, a native of even farther-off Constantinople, the Hakim Gansui. The palace staff included other persons, not present at that banquet, of even more surprising alien origins, and I would eventually come to know them all.

The Khakhan had promised that we Polos would that night meet “two other visitors newly come from the West,” and they were present, seated at a table within speaking distance of his table and ours. They were not Westerners, but Han, and I recognized them as the two men I had seen dismounting from mules in the palace courtyard on the evening of our arrival, and I still had the feeling that I had seen them somewhere else even before that.

The tables at which we all sat were surfaced with a pinkish-lavender inlay of what looked to me like precious stones. And so they were, said our tablemate Chingkim:

“Amethyst,” he told me. “We Mongols have learned much from the Han. And the Han physicians have concluded that tables made of purple amethyst prevent drunkenness in those who sit drinking at them.”

I thought that interesting, but I should also have been interested to see how much drunker the company might have got without the countering influence of the amethyst. Kubilai was not alone in bellowing for kumis and arkhi and mao-tai and pu-tao, and ingesting quantities of all those beverages. Even of the resident Arabs and Persians, the only one who stayed Muslimly sedate and sober all night was the Wali Achmad. And the guzzling was not confined to the male guests; the female Mongols put away their share, too, and gradually got quite raucous and bawdy. The Han females kept to wine only, and only infrequent sips of it, and maintained their ladylike propriety.

But the company did not get drunk immediately, or all at once. The banquet began at what is in Kithai known as the Hour of the Cock, and the first guests did not stagger from the hall or slide insensible under the amethyst tables until well into the Hour of the Tiger, which is to say that the feasting and talking and laughing and entertainment lasted from early evening until just before dawn the next morning, and the general inebriation was not too evident until the tenth or eleventh hour of that twelve-hour festa.

“Onyx,” said Chingkim to me, and he pointed at the open area of the floor around the drink-pouring serpent tree, where at the moment two monstrously stout and sweatily naked Turki wrestlers were trying to dismember each other for our amusement. “The Han physicians have concluded that the black onyx stone imparts strength to those in contact with it. So the wrestling floor is paved with onyx to enliven the combatants.”

After the two Turki had crippled each other to the company’s satisfaction, we were regaled by a troupe of Uzbek girl singers, wearing gold-embroidered gowns of ruby red and emerald green and sapphire blue. The girls had rather pretty but exceptionally flat faces, as if their features were only painted on the fronts of their heads. They screeched for us some incomprehensible and interminable Uzbek ballads, in voices like ungreased wheels on a runaway wagon. Then some Samoyed musicians performed pieces of similar cacophony on an assortment of instruments —hand drums and finger cymbals and pipes resembling our fagotto and dulzaina.

Then there came Han jugglers who were far more entertaining, since they performed in silence as well as with incredible dexterity. It was astounding to see the tricks they could do with swords and rope loops and blazing torches, and how many such objects they could keep flying or spinning or suspended in the air at one time. But I really thought I could no longer trust my eyes when the jugglers began tossing into the air and to one another wine cups full of wine, and never spilling a drop! In the intervals between those performances, there wandered about the hall a tulhulos, which is a Mongol minstrel, sawing on a sort of three-stringed viella and dolefully wailing chronicles of battles and victories and heroes past.

Meanwhile, we all ate. And how we ate! We ate from paper-thin porcelain plates and bowls and platters, some softly colored in brown and cream colors, others blue with plum-color mottlings. I did not know then but later was told that those porcelains, called Chi-zho and Jen ware, were Han works of art, worthy of being treasured in collections, and not even the emperors of the Han would have dreamed of employing them for mere tableware. But, just as Kubilai had appropriated those art objects for his guests’ convenience, so had he acquired for his palace kitchens the foremost cooks of all Kithai, and those, more than the Chi-zho and Jen porcelain, were loudly appreciated by us guests. As we were served with each new course of the meal, and sampled it, the whole room would breathe “Hui!” and “Hao!” in approval, and the cook responsible for that particular dish would emerge from the kitchens and smile and ko-tou, and we would applaud him by clicking together our nimble tongs, making a cricket crepitation. I might remark that we guests were supplied with eating tongs of intricately carved ivory, but those used by Kubilai—so I was told by Chingkim—were made from the forearm bones of a gibbon ape, because such tongs will turn black if they touch poisoned food.

Our tablemate also explained each dish that came to our table, because almost every one was of Han origin and had a Han name that was most intriguing but gave no hint of the dish’s content, and I could not always determine what it was I was eating and applauding. Of course, at the start of the feasting, when the first dish was announced as Milk and Roses, I had no trouble seeing that those were simply white grapes and pink grapes. (A meal in the Han style goes contrary to ours; it begins with fruits and nuts and ends with a soup.) But when I was presented with a dish called Snow Babies, Chingkim had to explain that it was made of bean curd and the cooked flesh of frogs’ legs. And the dish called Red-Beaked Green Parrot with Gold-Trimmed Jade was a sort of multicolored custard containing the boiled and pulverized leaves of a Persian plant called aspanakh, creamed mushrooms and the petals of various flowers.

When the servants set before me One-Hundred-Year Eggs, I nearly declined them, for they were only hens’ and ducks’ eggs, hard-boiled, but the whites of them were a ghastly green and the yolks were black, and they smelled a hundred years old. However, Chingkim assured me that they were really only pickled, and only for sixty days, so I ate them and found them tasty. There were stranger things—the meat of bear paws, and fish lips, and a broth made of the saliva with which a certain bird glues its nest together, and pigeons’ feet in jelly, and a blob of substance called go-ba, which is a fungus that grows on ricestalks—but I valiantly partook of them all. There were also more recognizable foods—the miàn pasta in numerous shapes and sauces, dumplings stuffed and steamed, the familiar aubergine in an unfamiliar fish gravy.

The banquet, like the banqueters and the banquet hall, gave ample evidence that the Mongols had climbed a fair way from barbarism toward civilization, and had done it mainly by adopting so much of the Han people’s culture, from their foods to their costumes to their bathing habits to their architecture. But the banquet’s main culinary treat—the piatanza di prima portata—Chingkim said was a dish long ago devised by the Mongols, and only recently but happily adopted by the Han. They called it Windblown Duck, and Chingkim told me the complicated process of its preparation.

A duck, he said, came from egg to kitchen in exactly forty-eight days, then required forty-eight hours for the proper cooking. Its brief lifetime included three weeks of being force-fed (in the way that the Strasbourgeois of the Lorraine stuff their geese). The well-fatted fowl was killed and plucked and cleaned, and its body cavity was blown full of air and distended, and it was hung outdoors in a south wind. “Only a south wind will do,” said Chingkim. Then it was glazed by being smoked over a fire in which camphor burned. Then it was roasted over an ordinary fire, meanwhile being basted with wine and garlic and bead molasses and a fermented-bean sauce. Then it was cut up and served in bite-sized pieces—the flakes of crisp black skin being the most prized part—with lightly cooked onion greens and water chestnuts and a transparent miàn vermicelli, and if there was anything to make the Han people less resentful of their Mongol conquerors, in my opinion it must be Windblown Duck.

After a confection of sugared lotus petals and a clear soup made from hami melons, the very last dish was placed upon each table: a huge tureen of plain boiled rice. This was purely symbolic, and no one partook of it. Rice is the staple of the diet of the Han people—in truth, in the southern Han realms, rice is almost the whole of the people’s diet—and it therefore merits a place of honor on every table, even a rich man’s table. But a rich man’s guests will refrain from eating it, for to do so would insult the host, implying that all the foregoing delicacies had been insufficient.

Then, while the servants cleared the tables for the serious business of drinking, Kubilai and my father and uncle and some others began to converse. (As I have told, Mongol men do not customarily talk during a meal, and the other men in the hall had also observed that custom. It had, however, not at all deterred the Mongol women, who had cackled and shrieked all through the dinner.) Kubilai said to my father and uncle:

“These men, Tang and Fu”—he indicated the two Han I had already noticed—“came from the West about the same time that you did. They are spies of mine, clever and adept and unobtrusive. When I got word that a Han wagon train was going into the lands of my cousin Kaidu, to bring back Han cadavers for burial, I had Tang and Fu join that karwan.” Aha, I thought, so that explained my having seen them before, but I made no comment. Kubilai turned to them. “Tell us then, honorable spies, what secrets you ferreted out from Sin-kiang Province.”

Tang spoke, and as if he were reciting from a written list, though he used no such thing: “The Ilkhan Kaidu is orlok of a bok comprising an entire tuk, of which he can instantly put six tomans into the field.”

The Khakhan did not look much impressed, but he translated that for my father and uncle: “My cousin commands a camp containing one hundred thousand horse warriors, of whom sixty thousand stand always ready for battle.”

I wondered why the Khan Kubilai had had to employ professional spies to get such information by stealth, when I had learned as much simply by sharing a meal in a yurtu.

Fu spoke in his turn: “Each warrior goes into battle with one lance, one mace, his shield, at least one sword and dagger, one bow and sixty arrows for it. Thirty arrows are light, with narrow heads, for long-range use. Thirty are heavy, with broad heads, for use at close quarters.”

I knew that much, too, and more: that some of the arrowheads would scream and whistle furiously as they flew.

Tang took a turn again: “To be independent of the bok supplies, each warrior also carries one small earthenware pot for cooking, a small folding tent and two leather bottles. One is full of kumis, the other of grut, and on those he can subsist for a long time without weakening.”

Fu added: “If he haply procures a piece of meat, he need not even pause to cook it, but tucks it between his saddle and his mount. As he rides, the pounding and the heat and the sweat cure the meat and make it edible.”

Tang again: “If a warrior has no other nutriment, he will nourish himself and quench his thirst by drinking the blood of the first enemy he slays. He will also use that body’s fat to grease his tack and weapons and armor.”

Kubilai compressed his lips and fingered his mustache, in evident impatience, but the two Han said no more. With a trace of exasperation he muttered, “Numbers and details are all very well. But you have told me little that I have not known since I first straddled my own horse at the age of four. What of the mood and temper of the Ilkhan and his troops, uu?”

“No need to inquire privily into that, Sire,” said Tang. “All men know that all Mongols are forever ready and eager to fight.”

“To fight, yes, but to fight whom, uu?” the Khakhan persisted.

“At present, Sire,” said Fu, “the Ilkhan uses his forces only for putting down bandits in his own Sin-kiang Province, and for petty skirmishes against the Tazhiks to secure his western borders.”

“Hui!” said Kubilai, in a sort of pounce. “But is he doing those things merely to keep his fighting men occupied, uu? Or is he honing their skill and spirit for more ambitious undertakings, uu? Perhaps a rebellious thrust at my western borders, uu? Tell me that!”

Tang and Fu could only make respectful noises and shrugs to excuse their ignorance. “Sire, who can examine the inside of an enemy’s head? Even the best spy can but observe the observable. The facts we brought we have gleaned with much perseverance, and much care that they be accurate, and at much hazard of our being discovered, which would have meant our being tied spread-eagle among four horses, and they whipped toward the four horizons.”

Kubilai gave them a look of some disdain, and turned to my father and uncle. “You at least came face to face with my cousin, friends Polo. What did you make of him, uu?”

Uncle Mafio said thoughtfully, “Certain it is that Kaidu is greedy for more than he has. And he is patently a man of bellicose temper.”

“He is, after all, of the Khakhan’s own family lineage,” said my father. “It is an ancient truth: that a she-wolf does not drop lambs.”

“Those things, too, I know very well,” growled Kubilai. “Is there no one who has perceived more than the flagrantly obvious, uu?”

He had not put that “uu?” directly to me, but the question emboldened me to speak. Granted, I could more gracefully have imparted what I wanted to tell him. But I was still being scornful of what I took to have been his pose of cruel caprice when he made sure we heard his harsh sentences in the Cheng—hence I was still under the misapprehension that the Khan Kubilai was, in fondo, only an ordinary man. Perhaps also I had already imbibed rather too freely of the drinks dispensed by the serpent tree. Anyway, I spoke, and spoke somewhat more loudly than I need have done:

“The Ilkhan Kaidu called you decadent and effete and degenerate, Sire. He said that you have become no better than a Kalmuk.”

Every person present heard me. Every person present must have known what a squalid thing a Kalmuk is. An instant and vast and appalled hush fell upon the whole banquet hall. Every man stopped talking, and even the strident Mongol women seemed to suffocate in mid-gabble. My father and uncle covered their faces with their hands, and the Wang Chingkim stared at me in utter horror, and the Khakhan’s sons and wives all gasped, and Tang and Fu put trembling hands to their mouths, as if they had untimely laughed or belched, and all the other varicolored faces within my view went uniformly pale.

Only the face of the Khan Kubilai did not go ashen. It went maroon and murderous, and it began to contort as he started framing words of condemnation and command. Had he ever got those words out, I know now, he never would have retracted them, and nothing would have mitigated my gross offense or moderated my condign sentence, and the guards would have hauled me off to the Fondler, and the manner of my execution must have become a legend in Kithai forevermore. But Kubilai’s face kept on working, as he evidently discarded one set of words as too mild, and substituted another and another more terribly damnatory, and that gave me time to finish what I wished to say:

“However, when it thunders, Sire, the Ilkhan Kaidu invokes your name for protection against the wrath of Heaven. He does it silently, under his breath, but I have read your name upon his lips, Sire, and his own warriors confided the same to me. If you doubt it, Sire, you could ask the two of Kaidu’s personal guardsmen that he sent as our escort, the warriors Ussu and Donduk …”

My voice trailed off into the dreadful hush that still prevailed. I could hear droplets of kumis or pu-tao or some other of the liquids dripping, plink, plunk, from a serpent spout into a lion vase beneath. In that breathless, monumental quiet, Kubilai kept his black eyes impaling me, but his face slowly ceased its contortions and became still as stone, and the violent color slowly ebbed from it, and at last he said, only in a murmur, but again all present heard:

“Kaidu invokes my name when he is affrighted. By the great god Tengri, that single observation is worth more to me than six tomans of my best and fiercest and most loyal horsemen.”

3

I awoke the next day, in the afternoon, in a bed in my father’s chambers, with a head that I almost wished had been lopped off by the Fondler. The last thing that I clearly remembered of the banquet was the Khakhan’s roaring to the Wang Chingkim, “See to this young Polo! Appoint him separate quarters of his own! And servants of twenty-two karats!” That had sounded fine, but to be given immobile metal servants, even of nearly pure gold, did not make much sense, so I assumed that Kubilai had been as drunk as was I at the time, and Chingkim, and everybody else.

However, after my father’s two women servants had helped him and me to get up and get bathed and get dressed, and had brought us each a potion to clear the head—a spicy and aromatic drink, but so heavily laced with mao-tai that I could not force it down—Chingkim came calling, and father’s servants fell down in ko-tou to him. The Wang, looking as if he felt much the way I did, gently booted the two prostrate bodies out of his way, and told me he had come, as ordered, to conduct me to the new suite prepared for my occupancy.

As we went there—no far distance along the same hall that my father’s and uncle’s quarters opened onto—I thanked Chingkim for the courtesy and, seeking to be polite even to a minor functionary assigned to serve me, I added, “I do not know why the Khakhan should have ordered you to see to my comfort. After all, you are the Wang of the city, and an official of some small importance. Surely the palace guests should be a steward’s responsibility, and this palace has as many stewards as a Buddhist has fleas.”

He gave a laugh, only a small one, not to jar his own head, and said, “I do not object to being given a trivial duty now and then. My father believes that a man can only learn to command others by learning himself to obey the least command.”

“Your father seems to lean as heavily on wise proverbs as mine does,” I said companionably. “Who is your father, Chingkim?”

“The man who gave me the order. The Khakhan Kubilai.”

“Oh?” I said, as he bowed me through the doorway of my new quarters. “One of the bastards, are you?” I said offhandedly, as I might have spoken to the son of a Doge or a Pope, nobly born, but on the wrong side of the blanket. I was looking with appreciation at the doorway, for it was not rectangular in the Western style or peaked to an arch in the Muslim fashion. It and the others between my various rooms were called variously Moon Gate and Lute Gate and Vase Gate, because their openings were contoured in the outlines of those objects. “This is a sumptuous apartment.”

Chingkim was regarding me with somewhat the same appraisal I was giving to the suite’s luxurious appointments. He said quietly, “Marco Polo, you do have your own peculiar way of speaking to your elders.”

“Oh, you are not that much older than I, Chingkim. How nice, these windows open onto a garden.” Truly I was being very dense, but my head, as I have said, was not at its best. Also, at the banquet, Chingkim had not sat at the head table with Kubilai’s legitimate sons. That recollection made me think of something. “I saw none of the Khakhan’s concubines who looked old enough to have a son your age, Chingkim. Which of last night’s women was your mother?”

“The one who sat nearest the Khakhan. Her name is Jamui.”

I paid little attention, being occupied in the admiration of my bed-chamber. The bed was most lovelily springy, and it had a Western style pillow for me. Also—apparently in case I should invite a court lady to bed—it had one of the Han-style pillows, a sort of shallow pedestal of porcelain, itself molded in the form of a reclining woman, to prop up a lady’s neck without disarranging her coiffure.

Chingkim went on chatting idly, “Those of Kubilai’s sons who sat with him last night are Wangs of provinces and ortoks of armies, things like that.”

For summoning my servants, there was a brass gong as big around as a Kashgar wagon wheel. But it was fashioned like a fish with a great round head, mostly a vast mouth, and only a stumpy brass body, for resonance, behind its wide opening.

“I was appointed Wang of Khanbalik,” Chingkim prattled on, “because Kubilai likes to keep me near him. And he sat me at your table to do honor to your father and uncle.”

I was examining a most marvelous lamp in my main room. It had two cylindrical paper shades, one inside the other, both fitted with paper blades inside their circumference, so that somehow the heat of the lamp flame made the shades slowly turn in opposite directions. They were painted with various lines and spots, and were translucent, so that their movement and the light within made the paints intermittently resolve themselves into a recognizable picture—and the picture moved. I later saw other such lamps and lanterns displaying different scenes, but this one of mine showed, over and over, a mule kicking up its heels and catching a little man in his backside and sending him flying. I was entranced.

“I am not Kubilai’s eldest son, but I am the only son born to him by his premier wife, the Khatun Jamui. That makes me Crown Prince of the Khanate and Heir Apparent to my father’s throne and title.”

By that time, I was down on my knees, puzzling over the composition of the strange, flat, pale carpet on the floor. After close scrutiny, I determined that it was made of long strips of thin-peeled ivory, woven together, and I had never before seen or heard of any such wondrous artisanry as woven ivory. Since I was already kneeling—when Chingkim’s words at last penetrated into my dismally dimmed mind—it was easy for me to slide prostrate and make ko-tou at the feet of the next Khan of All Khans of the Mongol Empire, whom I had a moment ago addressed as Bastard.

“Your Royal Highness … ,” I began to apologize, speaking to the woven ivory on which my aching and now sweating forehead was pressed.

“Oh, get up,” the Crown Prince said affably. “Let us continue to be Marco and Chingkim. Time enough for titles when my father dies, and I trust that will not be for many years yet. Get up and greet your new servants. Biliktu and Buyantu. Good Mongol maidens, whom I selected for you personally.”

The girls made ko-tou four times to Chingkim and then four times to us both and then four times to me alone. I mumbled, “I expected to get statues.”

“Statues?” echoed Chingkim. “Ah, yes. Twenty-two karat, these maidens. That grading system is of my father’s devising. If you will command for me a goblet of head-clearing potion, we can sit down and I will explain about the karats.”

I gave the command, and ordered cha for myself, and the two girls bowed their way backwards out of the room. From their names, and from what little I had glimpsed of them, Buyantu and Biliktu were sisters. They were about my own age, and far prettier than the other Mongol females I had seen so far—certainly much prettier than the middle-aged women who had been assigned to my father and uncle. When they came back with our drinks, and Chingkim and I sat down on facing benches, and the maids brought fans to fan us, I could see that they were twins, identical in comeliness and wearing identical costumes. I would have to direct them to dress differently, I thought, so I could tell them apart. And when they were undressed? That thought, too, came naturally to my mind, but I dismissed it, to listen to the Prince, who, after taking a long draft from his goblet, had begun to talk again.

“My father, as you know, has four wedded wives. Each in her turn receives him in her own separate yurtu, but—”

“Yurtu!” I interrupted.

He laughed. “So it is called, though no Mongol plainsman would recognize it. In the old nomad days, you see, a Mongol lord kept his wives dispersed about his territory, each in her own yurtu, so that wherever he rode he never had to endure a wifeless night. Now, of course, each wife’s so-called yurtu is a splendid palace here in these grounds—and a populous place, more like a bok than a yurtu. Four wives, four palaces. And my mother’s alone has a permanent staff of more than three hundred. Ladies-in-waiting and attendants and physicians and servants and hairdressers and slaves and wardrobe mistresses and astrologers … But I started out to tell you about the karats.”

He broke off to touch a hand tenderly to his head, and swigged again from his goblet before going on:

“I think my father is now of an age that a mere four women in rotation would suffice him, even well-worn wives who are also getting on in years. But it is an ancient custom for all his subject lands—as far away as Poland and India Aryana—to send him each year the finest of their newly nubile maidens. He cannot possibly take them all as concubines, or even as servants, but neither can he disappoint his subjects by refusing their gifts outright. So he now has those annual crops of girls weeded down at least to a manageable number.”

Chingkim emptied his goblet and handed it, without looking, over his shoulder, where Biliktu-or-Buyantu took it and scurried off.

“Each year,” he resumed, “as the maidens are delivered to the various Ilkhans and Wangs in the various lands and provinces, those men examine the girls and assay them like so much gold bullion. Depending on the quality of a maiden’s facial features and bodily proportions and complexion and hair and voice and grace of gait and so on, she is rated at fourteen karats—or sixteen or eighteen, as the case may be, and so on up. Only those above sixteen karats are sent on here to Khanbalik, and only those assayed at the fineness of pure unalloyed gold, twenty-four karats, have any hope of getting near the great Khakhan.”

Though Chingkim could not have heard my maid’s silent approach, he put up his hand and she arrived just in time to place the refilled goblet in his grasp. He appeared not at all surprised to receive it—as if he had naturally assumed it would be there—and he gulped from it and went on:

“Even those comparatively few maidens of twenty-four karats must first live for a while with older women here in the palace. The old women inspect them even more closely, especially their behavior in the nighttime. Do the girls snore in their sleep, or toss restlessly in the bed? Are their eyes bright and their breath sweet when they awaken in the morning? Then, on the old women’s recommendations, my father will take a few of the girls as his concubines for the next year, others to be his maidservants. The rest of them he apportions out, according to their karat grade, to his lords and ministers and court favorites, according to their rank. Congratulate yourself, Marco, that you suddenly rank high enough to merit these twenty-two-karat virgins.”

He paused, and laughed again. “I do not quite know why you do—unless it is your propensity for reviling your betters as Kalmuks and bastards. I hope all the other courtiers do not start imitating your style of address, and expect to emulate your rise to favor.”

I cleared my throat and said, “You mentioned that the girls come from all lands. Had you any particular reason for selecting Mongols for me?”

“Again, my father’s instructions. You already speak our tongue very well, but he desires that you achieve impeccable fluency. And it is a known fact that pillow talk is the best and quickest way to learn a language. Why do you ask? Would you have preferred some other breed of women?”

“No, no,” I said hastily. “The Mongol is one breed of woman I have not yet had an opportunity to—er—assay. I look forward to the experience. I am honored, Chingkim.”

He shrugged. “They are twenty-two karat. Near perfect.” He sipped again at his drink, then leaned toward me to say seriously, speaking now in Farsi, that the maids might not eavesdrop, “There are many lords here, Marco, and older ones, and very high-ranking ones, who have never yet received better than a sixteen-karat regard from the Khan Kubilai. I suggest you keep that in mind. Any palace community is an anthill teeming with intrigues and plots and conspiracies, even at the level of page boys and kitchen scullions. It will rankle many in this court, that a young man like you is not consigned to that grub-ant level of pages and scullions. You are a newcomer and a Ferenghi, which would make you suspect enough, but abruptly and incomprehensibly you have been exalted. Overnight, you have become an interloper, a target for envy and spite. Believe me, Marco. No one else would give you this friendly warning, but I do, because I am the only one who can. Second only to my father, I am the one man in the entire Khanate who need not be fearful and jealous of his position. Everyone else must be—and so must see you as a threat. Be always on your guard.”

“I believe you, Chingkim, and I thank you. Can you suggest any way I might make myself less of a target?”

“A Mongol horseman takes care never to ride on the skyline of the hills, but always a little way below the crest.”

I sat and considered that advice. Just then, there came a scratching noise from the hall door, and one of the maids glided away to answer it. I could not quite determine how I might stay off the skyline while resident inside a palace, unless perhaps I went about in a permanent posture of ko-tou. The maid came back into the room.

“Master Marco, it is a caller who gives his name as Sindbad, and urgently entreats audience.”

“What?” I said, preoccupied with skylines. “I am acquainted with no person named Sindbad.”

Chingkim looked at me and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, “Already come the enemies?”

Then I shook my head and got it to working again, and said, “Oh, of course I know the man. Bid him come in.”

He did, and rushed straight to me, looking distraught, wringing his hands, his eyes and central orifice wildly dilated. Without ko-tou or salaam, he bleated in Farsi, “By the seven voyages of my namesake, Master Marco, but this is a terrible place!”

I held up a hand to stop his saying something as indiscreet as I had several times done lately, and turned to say to Chingkim in the same language, “Allow me, Royal Highness, to introduce my slave Nostril.”

“Nostril?” Chingkim murmured wonderingly.

Taking my hint, Nostril made a perfect ko-tou to the Prince and then to me, and said meekly, “Master Marco, I would beg a boon.”

“You may speak in the Prince’s presence. He is a friend. But why are you going about under an assumed name?”

“I have been seeking you everywhere, master. I used all my names, a different one to every person I asked. I thought it prudent, since I go in fear for my life.”

“Why? What have you done?”

“Nothing, master! I swear it! I have been so well behaved for so long that Hell itches with impatience. I am spotless as a new-dropped lamb. But so were Ussu and Donduk. Master, I beg that you rescue me from that sty called a barrack. Let me come and lodge in your quarters. I ask not even a pallet. I will lay me down across your threshold like a watchdog. For the sake of all the times I saved your life, Master Marco, now save mine!”

“What? I do not recall your ever saving my life.”

Chingkim looked amused and Nostril looked befuddled.

“Did I not? Some earlier master, perhaps. Well, if I have not, it was only for lack of opportunity. However, if and when some such dread opportunity occurs, it is best that I be near at hand and—”

I interrupted, “What about Ussu and Donduk?”

“That is what has terrified me, master. The frightful fate of Ussu and Donduk. They did nothing wrong, did they? Only escorted us from Kashgar to here, did they not, and performed capably in that duty?” He did not wait for a reply, but babbled on. “This morning a squad of guards came and manacled Donduk and dragged him away. Ussu and I, certain that some terrible mistake had been made, inquired around the barracks, and were told that Donduk was being questioned. After a while of worrying, we inquired again, and were told that Donduk had not satisfactorily answered the questions, so he was at that moment being buried.”

“Amoredèi!” I cried. “He is dead?”

“One hopes so, master; otherwise an even more terrible mistake has been made. Then, master, after a while the guards came again and manacled Ussu and dragged him away. After another while of wringing my hands, I inquired again about the two of them, and I was rudely told to inquire no more about matters of torture. Well, Donduk had been taken and slain and buried, and Ussu had been taken, and who else was there to torture but me? So I fled the barrack to come looking for you and—”

“Hush,” I said. I turned to look a query at Chingkim.

He said, “My father is anxious to know all he can learn about his eternally restive cousin Kaidu. It was you who mentioned to him last night that your escorts were men of Kaidu’s personal guard. No doubt my father assumes them to be well informed about their master—about any possible insurrection Kaidu may be planning.” He paused and looked down into his goblet and said, “It is the Fondler who does the questioning.”

“The Fondler?” Nostril murmured wonderingly.

I pondered, which hurt my head, and after a moment said to Chingkim, “It would be obtrusive of me to interfere in Mongol affairs that involve Mongols only. But I do feel in a measure responsible … .”

Chingkim drained his cup and stood. “Let us go and see the Fondler.”

I would much rather have stayed in my new quarters all day, and nursed my head, and got acquainted with the twins Buyantu and Biliktu, but I went, and made Nostril come with us.

We went a long way, through enclosed passages and open areas and more passages, and then down some stairs that led underground, and then another long way through subterranean workshops full of busy artisans, and through storage cellars and lumber rooms and wine cellars. When Chingkim was leading us through a series of torch-lit but unpeopled chambers, their rock walls damp with slime and mottled with fungus, he paused to say in an undertone to Nostril, though surely meaning the advice for me, too:

“Do not again use the word torture, slave. The Fondler is a sensitive man. He resents and recoils from such rough terms. Even when a matter of importance necessitates his plucking out a person’s eyeballs and putting hot coals in the sockets, it is never torture. Call it questioning, call it caressing, call it tickling—call it anything but torture—lest someday it is required that you be fondled by the Fondler and he remembers your disrespect of his profession.”

Nostril only gulped loudly, but I said, “I understand. In Christian dungeons the practice is formally known as the Asking of the Question Extraordinaire.”

Chingkim finally led us into a room that, except for its torch light and beslimed rock walls, might have been a counting room in a prosperous mercantile establishment. It was full of counting desks at which stood clerks busy with ledgers and documents and abachi and the petty routine of any well-run institution. This might be a human abattoir, but it was an orderly abattoir.

“The Fondler and all his staff are Han,” Chingkim said to me aside. “They are so much better at these things than we.”

Evidently even the Crown Prince did not demand entry straightaway into the Fondler’s domain. We all waited until one of the Han clerks, the tall and austerely expressionless chief of those clerks, deigned to approach us. He and the Prince spoke for a time in the Han language, then Chingkim translated to me:

“The man called Donduk was first questioned, and with propriety, but declined to betray anything he knew of his master Kaidu. So then he was questioned extraordinarily, as you put it, to the limits of the Fondler’s ingenuity. But he remained obdurate and so—as is my father’s standing order in such cases—he was relinquished to the Death of a Thousand. Then the man Ussu was brought in. He also has resisted both the questioning and the questioning extraordinary, and will also be accorded the Death of a Thousand. They deserve it, of course, being traitors to their ultimate ruler, my father. But”—he said this with some pride—“they are loyal to their Ilkhan, and they are stubborn and they are brave. They are true Mongols.”

I said, “Pray, what is the Death of a Thousand? A thousand what?”

Chingkim said, again in an undertone, “Marco, call it the death of a thousand caresses, a thousand cruelties, a thousand endearments, what matter? Given a thousand of anything, a man will die. The name only signifies a death long drawn out.”

He was plainly urging that I not pursue the matter, but I did. I said, “I never held any affection for Donduk. Ussu, though, was a more congenial companion on the long trail. I should like to know how his long trail ends.”

Chingkim made a face, but he turned to speak again to the chief clerk. The man looked surprised and doubtful, but he went out of the room by an iron-studded door.

“Only my father or I could even contemplate doing this,” muttered Chingkim. “And even I must convey to the Fondler most fulsome compliments and abject apology for interrupting him when he is actually engaged in his work.”

I expected the chief clerk to come back bringing a monstrous, shaggy brute of a man, broad of shoulder, brawny of arm, beetling of brow, black-garbed like the Meatmaker of Venice or all in Hellfire-red like the executioner of the Baghdad Daiwan. But if the chief clerk had looked the picture of a clerk, the man who returned with him was the very essence of clerkness. He was gray-haired and pale and frail, fussy and fidgety of manner, prissily dressed in mauve silks. He tripped across the room with small, precise steps, and he looked at us, despite his diminutive Han nose, very much de haut en bas. He was a man born to be a clerk. Surely, I thought, he cannot be other than that. But he spoke in the Mongol tongue, and said:

“I am Ping, the Fondler. What wish you of me?” His voice was tight, with the barely controlled and not at all concealed indignation that is the natural speech of a clerk interrupted in his clerking.

“I am Chingkim, the Crown Prince. I should like you, Master Ping, to explain to this honored guest of mine the manner of giving the Death of a Thousand.”

The creature sniffed clerkishly. “I am not accustomed to requests of that indelicate nature, and I do not grant them. Also, the only honored guests here are my own.”

Chingkim perhaps stood in awe of the Fondler’s title of office, but he himself was entitled Prince. More than that, he was a Mongol being affronted by a mere Han. He drew himself up tall and rigid, and snarled:

“You are a public servant and we are the public! You are a civil servant and you will be civil! I am your Prince and you have arrogantly neglected to make ko-tou! Do so at once!”

The Fondler Ping flinched back as if we had pelted him with some of his own hot coals, and obediently fell down and did the ko-tou. All the other clerks in the chamber peered awestricken over their counting desks at what must have been a first-ever occurrence. Chingkim smoldered down at the prostrate man for some moments before bidding him to rise. When Ping did, he was suddenly all conciliation and solicitude, as is the way of clerks when someone has the temerity to bark at them. He fawned on Chingkim and expressed himself willing, nay, avid to fulfill the Prince’s every least whim.

Chingkim said grumpily, “Just tell the Lord Marco here how the Death of a Thousand is administered.”

“With pleasure,” said the Fondler. He turned on me the same benign smile he had bestowed on Chingkim, and spoke in the same unctuous voice, but his eyes on me were snake cold and malevolent.

“Lord Marco,” he began. (Actually he said Lahd Mah-ko, in the Han manner, but I eventually got so used to not hearing r’s when a Han spoke that I will henceforth forbear from remarking on the fact.)

“Lord Marco, it is named the Death of a Thousand because it requires one thousand small pieces of silk paper, folded and tossed haphazard in a basket. Each paper bears a word or two, no more than three, signifying some part of the human body. Navel or right elbow or upper lip or left middle toe or whatever. Of course, there are not one thousand parts to the human body—at any rate, not one thousand capable of feeling sensation, like a fingertip, say, or being caused cessation of function, like a kidney. To be precise, there are, by the traditional Fondler’s Count, only three hundred and thirty-six such parts. So the inscribed papers are almost all in triplicate. That is to say, three hundred and thirty-two parts of the body are thrice written on separate papers, making a total of nine hundred and ninety-six. Are you following this, Lord Marco?”

“Yes, Master Ping.”

“Then you will have noted that there are four parts of the body not inscribed thrice on the papers. Those four are written only once apiece, on the four papers remaining of the thousand. I will later explain why—if you have not guessed by then. Very well, we have one thousand inscribed and folded little papers. Every time a man or woman is sentenced to the Death of a Thousand, before I commence my attentions to the Subject, I have my assistants newly mix and toss and tumble those papers in the basket. I do that mainly to reduce the likelihood of repetition in the Fondling, which might be unnecessarily distressing to the Subject or boring to me.”

He really was a clerk at heart, I thought, with his finicking numbers and his calling the victim the Subject and his lofty condescension to my interest in the matter. But I was not fool enough to say so. Instead, I remarked respectfully:

“Excuse me, Master Ping. But all of this—this writing and folding and tossing of papers—what has this to do with death?”

“Death? It has to do with dying!” he said sharply, as if I had strayed into irrelevance. Flicking a sly glance sideways at Prince Chingkim, he said, “Any crude barbarian can kill a Subject. But artfully to lead and guide and beckon and cajole a man or woman through the dying—ah, for that, the Fondler!”

“I see,” I said. “Please do go on.”

“After having been purged and evacuated, to avert unseemly accidents, the Subject is securely but not uncomfortably tied erect between two posts, so that I can easily do the Fondling at his or her front or back or side, as required. My work tray has three hundred and thirty-six compartments, each neatly labeled with the name of a bodily part, and in each reposes one or several instruments exquisitely designed to be used on that certain part. Depending on whether the part is of flesh or sinew or muscle or membrane or sac or gristle, the implements may be knives of certain shapes, or awls, probes, needles, tweezers, scrapers. The instruments are newly whetted and polished, and my assistants are ready —my Blotters of Fluids and Retrievers of Pieces. I commence by doing the traditional Fondler’s Meditations. Thereby I attune myself not only to the Subject’s fears, which are usually apparent, but also to his inmost apprehensions and deepest levels of response. The artful Fondler is the man who can very nearly feel the same sensations as his Subject. According to legend, the most perfect of all Fondlers was a long-ago woman, who could so closely attune herself that she would actually cry out and writhe and weep in unison with her Subject, and even plead with herself for mercy.”

“Speaking of women—” said Nostril. All this time he had been standing, almost huddling for invisibility, behind me. But his ever lewd inquisitiveness must have overcome his timorousness. He spoke in Farsi to the Prince, “Women and men do differ, Prince Chingkim. You know … in their bodily parts … here and there. How do the Master Fondler’s labels and implements reconcile those differences?”

The Fondler took a step backward and said, “Who … is … this?” with dainty revulsion, as he might have done if he had stepped on a street turd and it had had the effrontery to protest aloud.

“Forgive the slave’s impertinence, Master Ping,” Chingkim said smoothly. “But the question had occurred to me, too.” He repeated it in Mongol.

The executioner sniffed clerkishly again. “The differences between male and female, as regards the Fondling, are merely superficial. If the folded paper reads ‘red jewel,’ that means the frontmost genital organ, of which there is a large one in the male, a tiny one in the female. If the paper reads ‘jade gland,’ left or right, it means the man’s testicle or the woman’s internal gonad. If it reads ‘deep valley,’ that literally means the woman’s womb, but in the case of a man can be taken to mean his internal almond gland, the so-called third testicle.”

Involuntarily, Nostril made an “ooh!” noise of pain. The Fondler glared at him.

“Now, may I proceed? After my Meditations, the proceeding goes thus. I select a paper from the basket, at random, and unfold it, and it tells me the part of the Subject destined for the first Fondling. Suppose it says left little finger. Do I simply step up to the Subject, as a butcher would do, and saw off his left little finger? No. Or what would I do if the identical paper came up again later? So the first time I may merely drive a needle deep under that finger’s nail. The second time perhaps slice the finger to the bone all along its length. Only if it came up a third time would I lop the finger off entirely. Usually, of course, the second paper I select will direct me to a different part of the Subject—another extremity, or the nose, or the jade gland perhaps. However, given the triplication of the papers and the randomness of choice, it can occasionally happen that the same part will be called for twice in succession, but that does not occur too boringly often. And in all my career there has been just one single occasion when three papers in a row all named the exact same part of the Subject’s body. Most unusual, that. Memorable. I later asked the Mathematician Lin-ngan to calculate for me the rarity of that having happened. As I remember, he said something like one chance in three million. Years ago, that was. Her left nipple, it was …”

There he seemed to drift off into a blissful contemplation of that time past. Then, after a moment, he came abruptly back to us.

“Perhaps you have begun to perceive the expertness required in the Fondling. One does not simply run back and forth, snatching up papers and then slicing bits off the Subject. No, I proceed only leisurely—very leisurely—back and forth, for the Subject must have ample time to appreciate each individual pain. And they must vary in nature—this time an incision, next a piercing, then a rasping, a burning, a mashing, and so on. Also, the wounds must vary in keenness, so that the Subject experiences not just an overall agony, but a multitude of separate pains that he can differentiate and locate. Here, an upper molar slowly wrenched out and a nail driven where it had been, up into the frontal sinus. There, his elbow joint cracking and crumbling in an ingenious slow vise of my own invention. Yonder, a red-hot metal probe inserted down his red jewel’s inner canal—or delicately and repeatedly applied to the tender little bulb at the opening of her red jewel. And in between, perhaps, the skin flayed from the chest and peeled loose and hanging down like an apron.”

I swallowed and asked, “How long does this go on, Master Ping?”

He gave a fastidious small shrug. “Until the Subject perishes. It is, after all, called the Death of a Thousand. But no one has ever died of dying, if you take my meaning. Therein lies my greatest art—the prolongation of that dying, and the ever increasing excruciation of it. To put it another way, no one has ever died of sheer pain. Even I am sometimes astonished at how much pain can be borne, and for how long. Also, I was a physician before I became the Fondler, so I never inadvertently inflict a mortal injury, and I know how to prevent a Subject’s untimely death from blood loss or shock to his constitution. My assistant Blotters are adept at stanching blood flow and, if I am required to puncture a troublesome organ like the bladder, early on in the Fondling, my Retrievers are competent at replacing any plugs I have to take out.”

“To put it another way, then,” I said, mimicking his own words, “how long until the Subject perishes of those attentions?”

“It depends mainly on chance. On which of the folded papers, and in which order, chance puts into my hand. Do you believe in some god or gods, Lord Marco? Then presumably the gods regulate the papers’ chance according to the magnitude of the Subject’s crime and the severity of punishment it merits. Chance, or the gods, can guide my hand at any time to one of those four papers I earlier mentioned.”

He raised his thin eyebrows at me. I nodded and said:

“I think I have guessed. There must be four vital parts of the body where a wound would cause quick death instead of slow dying.”

He exclaimed, “The indigo dye is bluer than the indigo plant! Which is to say: the pupil exceeds the master.” He smiled thinly at me. “An apt student, Lord Marco. You yourself would make a good—” I expected him to say Fondler, of course. I would not wish to be a Fondler, good or not. I was perversely gratified when he said, “—a good Subject, because all your apprehensions and perceptions would be heightened by your intimate knowledge of the Fondling. Yes, there are four spots—the heart, naturally, and also one place in the spinal column and two places in the brain—where an inserted blade or point causes death quite instantaneously and, as far as one can tell, quite painlessly. That is why they are written on only one paper apiece, for if and when one of those papers comes to my hand, the Fondling is finished. I always instruct the Subject to pray that it comes soon. He or she always does pray, and eventually out loud, and sometimes very loudly indeed. The Subject’s fond entertainment of that hope—really a rather meager hope: four chances out of the thousand—seems to add a certain extra refinement to his or her agonies.”

“Excuse me, Master Ping,” Chingkim put in. “But you still have not said how long the Fondling lasts.”

“Again, it depends, my Prince. Aside from the incalculable factors of gods and chance, the duration depends on me. If I am not overpressed by other Subjects waiting their turn, if I can proceed at leisure, I may take an hour between picking up one paper and the next. If I put in a respectable working day of, say, ten hours, and if chance dictates that we must go through almost every one of the thousand folded papers, then the Death of a Thousand can last for very near a hundred days.”

“Dio me varda!” I cried. “But they tell me that Donduk is already dead. And you only got him this morning.”

“That Mongol, yes. He went deplorably quickly. His constitution had been rather impaired by the preliminary questioning. But no need to commiserate with me, though I thank you, Lord Marco. I am not unduly chagrined. I have the other Mongol already secured for Fondling.” He sniffed once more. “Indeed, if you seek reason for commiseration, do so because you interrupted my Meditations.”

I turned to Chingkim and, speaking Farsi for privacy, demanded of him, “Does your father really decree these—these hideous tortures? To be performed by this—this simpering enjoyer of other people’s torments?”

Nostril, at my side, began to make meaningful and urgent plucks at my sleeve. The Fondler was at my other side, so I did not see, as Nostril did, the man’s glower of loathing, boring into me like one of his ghastly probes.

Chingkim manfully tried to subdue his own anger at me. Through clenched teeth he said, “Elder Brother,” in the formal style of address, though he was the elder of us two. “Elder Brother Marco, the Death of a Thousand is prescribed only for a few of the most serious crimes. And of all capital crimes, treason leads the list.”

I was hastily revising my estimate of his father. If Kubilai could decree such an unspeakable end for two of his fellow Mongols—two good warriors whose only crime had been loyalty to the Khakhan’s own underchief Kaidu—then obviously I was wrong when I took his behavior in the Cheng to have been mere posturing to impress us visitors. Evidently Kubilai did not mean for the sentences he handed down to be cautionary or exemplary to others. He did not care one whit whether anyone else ever took note of them or not. (I might never have known the gruesome fate of Ussu and Donduk, so this was certainly not being done to impress our party.) The Khakhan simply exercised his absolute power absolutely. To criticize or question or deride his motives was suicidal—happily, I had done so only in the privacy of my head—and even to commend his actions would be needless and futile and ignored. Kubilai would do what he would do. Well, for me at least, this episode had been an exemplary one. From now on, as long as I was in the realms of the Khan of All Khans, I would walk lightly and speak softly.

But just this once, before I subsided into docility, I would make one attempt to change one thing.

“I told you, Chingkim,” I said to him, “Donduk was no friend of mine, and he is gone in any case. But Ussu—I liked him, and it was my incautious words that put him down here, and he still lives. Can nothing be done to moderate his punishment?”

“A traitor must die the Death of a Thousand,” Chingkim said stonily. But then he relented enough to say, “There is only one possible amelioration.”

“Ah, you know of it, of course, my Prince,” said the Fondler, with a smirk. To my surprise and horror, he spoke in perfect Farsi. “And you know the manner of arranging the amelioration. Well, my chief clerk handles that sort of transaction. If you will excuse me, Prince Chingkim, Lord Marco …”

He minced away across the room again, motioning for his chief clerk to attend upon us, and went out through the iron-studded door.

“What will be done?” I asked Chingkim.

He growled, “A bribe that is paid now and then, in these cases. Though never before by me,” he added disgustedly. “Usually it is done by the Subject’s family. They may bankrupt themselves and mortgage their whole future lives to scrape together the bribe. Master Ping must be one of the richest officials in Khanbalik. I hope my father never hears of this folly of mine; he would laugh me to scorn. And you, Marco, I suggest that you do not ask this sort of favor ever again.”

The chief clerk sauntered over to us and raised his eyebrows in inquiry. Chingkim dug into a purse at his waist, and said in the roundabout Han way:

“For the Subject Ussu, I would pay the balance weight for the scales, to make the four papers ascend.” He took out some gold coins and slipped them into the clerk’s discreetly cupped hand.

I asked, “What does that mean, Chingkim?”

“It means that the four papers naming vital parts will be moved to the top of the basket, where the Fondler’s hand is likely to pick them up soonest. Now come away.”

“But how—?”

“It is all that can be done!” he gritted at me. “Now come, Marco!”

Nostril was tugging at me, too, but I persisted. “How can we be sure it will be done? Can we trust the Fondler to do all that work—all those folded papers to be unfolded and read first—and all alike—”

“No, my lord,” said the chief clerk, unbending for the first time, almost kindly, and speaking in Mongol for my benefit. “All the others of the thousand papers are colored red, which is the Han color signifying good fortune. Only those four papers are purple, which is the Han color of mourning. The Fondler always knows where those four papers lurk.”

4

DURING the next several days, I was left on my own. I got unpacked and settled into my private quarters—with the help of Nostril, for I let the slave move in and lay his pallet in one of my more commodious closets—and I began to get acquainted with the twins Biliktu and Buyantu, and I began to learn my way around that central palace building and the rest of the edifices and gardens and courtyards that constituted the palace city-within-a-city. But I will speak later of how I spent my private time, because my working time also soon began.

One day a palace steward came to bid me attend upon the Khan Kubilai and the Wang Chingkim. The Khakhan’s suite was not far from my own, and I went there with celerity, but not with much alacrity, for I assumed that he had learned of our visit to the dungeons and was going to castigate me and Chingkim for our having meddled in the Fondler’s business. However, when I got there, and was bowed through a succession of luxurious chambers by a succession of attendants and secretaries and armed guards and beautiful women, and arrived at last in the Khakhan’s innermost sitting room, and started my ko-tou, and was bidden to take a seat, and was offered my choice of beverages from a maid’s tray laden with decanters, and took a goblet of rice wine, the Khakhan began the interview amiably enough, inquiring:

“How go your language lessons, young Polo?”

I tried not to blush, and murmured, “I have acquired numerous new words, Sire, but not of the kind I could speak in your august presence.”

Chingkim said drily, “I did not think there were any words, Marco, that you would hesitate to speak in any place.”

Kubilai laughed. “I had intended to converse politely for a while in the Han manner, rambling only indirectly to the subject at hand. But my rude Mongol son comes straight to the point.”

“I have already made a vow to myself, Sire,” I said, “that I will henceforth be careful of my too ready tongue and too abrupt opinions.”

He considered that. “Well, yes, you might be more respectfully circumspect in your choice of words before you blurt them out. But I shall want your opinions. It is for those that I would have you become fluent and precise in our language. Marco, look yonder. Do you know what that thing is?”

He indicated an object in the center of the room. It was a giant bronze urn, standing some eight feet high and about half that in diameter. It was richly engraved, and on the outside of it clung eight lithe and elegant bronze dragons, their tails curled at the top rim of the urn, their heads downward near its base. Each one held in its toothed jaws an immense and perfect pearl. There were eight bronze toads squatting around the urn’s pedestal, one under each dragon, its mouth gaping as if eager to snatch the pearl above.

“It is an impressive work of art, Sire,” I said, “but I have no idea of its function.”

“That is an earthquake engine.”

“Sire?”

“This land of Kithai is now and again shaken by earth tremors. Whenever one occurs, that engine informs me of it. The thing was designed and cast by my clever Court Goldsmith, and only he fully understands the workings of it. But somehow an earthquake, even if it is so far away from Khanbalik that none of us here can feel it, makes the jaws of one of the dragons to open, and he drops his pearl into the maw of the toad beneath. Tremors of other sorts have no effect. I have stamped and jumped and danced all about that urn—and I am no butterfly—but it ignores me.”

I saw in my mind the majestic Great Khan of All Khans bouncing about the chamber like an inquisitive boy, his rich robes billowing and his beard wagging and his helmet-crown askew, and probably all his ministers goggling. But I remembered my vow, and I did not smile.

He said, “According to which pearl drops, I know the direction where the earth shook. I cannot know how distant it was, or how devastating, but I can dispatch a troop at the gallop in that direction, and eventually they will bring me word of the damage and casualties incurred.”

“A miraculous contrivance, Sire.”

“I could wish that my human informants were as succinct and reliable in reporting the occurrences in my domains. You heard those Han spies of mine, that night at the banquet, rattling off numbers and items and tabulations, and telling me nothing.”

“The Han are infatuated with numbers,” said Chingkim. “The five constant virtues. The five great relationships. The thirty positions of the sex act, and the six ways of penetration and the nine modes of movement. They even regulate their politeness. I understand they have three hundred rules of ceremony and three thousand rules of behavior.”

“Meanwhile, Marco,” said Kubilai, “my other informants—my Muslim and even Mongol officials—they tend to leave out of their reports any fact they think I might find inconvenient or distressing. I have a large realm to administer, but I cannot personally be everywhere at once. As a wise Han counselor once said: you can conquer on horseback, but to rule you must get down from the horse. So I depend heavily on reports from afar, and they too often contain everything but the necessary.”

“Like those spies,” Chingkim put in. “Send them to the kitchen to see about tonight’s dinner soup, and they would report its quantity and density and ingredients and coloration and aroma and the volume of steam it throws off. They would report everything except whether it tastes good or not.”

Kubilai nodded. “What struck me at the banquet, Marco—and my son agrees—is that you appear to have a talent for discerning the taste of things. After those spies had talked interminably, you said only a few words. True, they were not very tactful words, but they told me the taste of the soup brewing in Sin-kiang. I should like to verify that seeming talent of yours, in order to make further use of it.”

I said, “You wish me to be a spy, Sire?”

“No. A spy must blend into the locality, and a Ferenghi could hardly do that anywhere in my domains. Besides, I would never ask a decent man to take up the trade of sneak and tattler. No, I have other missions in mind. But to undertake them you must first learn many things besides fluency of language. They will not be easy things. They will demand much time and effort.”

He was looking keenly at me, as if to see whether I flinched from the prospect of hard work, so I made bold to say:

“The Khakhan does me great honor if he asks only drudgery of me. So much greater the honor, Sire, if the drudgery is a preparation for some task of significance.”

“Be not too eager to accede. Your uncles, I hear, are planning some trading enterprises. That should be easier work, and profitable, and probably more safe and secure than what I may require of you. So I give you permission to stay in association with your uncles, if you prefer.”

“Thank you, Sire. But if I valued only safety and security I would not have left home.”

“Ah, yes. It is truly said: He who would climb high must leave much behind.”

Chingkim added, “It is also said: For a man of fortitude there are nowhere any walls, only avenues.”

I decided I would ask my father if it was here in Kithai that he had got crammed so full of proverbs that he continually overflowed.

“Let me say this, then, young Polo,” Kubilai went on. “I would not ask you to puzzle out for me how that earthquake engine performs its function—and that would be a difficult task enough—but I will ask of you something even harder. I wish you to learn as much as you can about the workings of my court and my government, which are infinitely more intricate than the insides of that mysterious urn.”

“I am at your command, Sire.”

“Come here to this window.” He led the way to it. Like those in my quarters, it was not of transparent glass, but of the shimmery, only translucent Muscovy glass, set in a much curlicued frame. He unlatched it, swung it open and said, “Look there.”

We were looking down onto a considerable extent of the palace grounds which I had not yet visited, for this part was still under construction, only an expanse of yellow earth littered with piles of wall stones and paving stones and barrows and tools and gangs of sweating slaves and—

“Amoredèi!” I exclaimed. “What are those gigantic beasts? Why do their horns grow so oddly?”

“Foolish Ferenghi, those are not horns, those are the tusks from which come ivory. That animal, in the southern tropics where it comes from, is called a gajah. There is no Mongol word for it.”

Chingkim supplied the Farsi word, “Fil,” and I knew that one.

“Elephants!” I breathed, marveling. “Of course! I have seen a drawing of one, but the drawing cannot have been very good.”

“Never mind the gajah,” said Kubilai. “Do you see what they are piling up?”

“It looks like a great mountain of kara blocks, Sire.”

“It is. The Court Architect is building for me an extensive park out there, and I instructed him to put a hill in it. I have also instructed him to plant much grass on it. Have you seen the grass in my other courtyards?”

“Yes, Sire.”

“You remarked nothing distinctive about it?”

“I fear not, Sire. It looked just like the same grass we have traveled through, for countless thousands of li.”

“That is its distinction—that it is not an ornamental garden growth. It is the simple, ordinary, sweet grass of the great plains where I was born and grew up.”

“I am sorry, Sire, but if I am supposed to draw some lesson from this …”

“My cousin the Ilkhan Kaidu told you that I had degenerated to something less than a Mongol. In a sense, he was right.”

“Sire!”

“In a sense. I did get down from my horse to do the ruling of these domains. In doing so, I have found admirable many things of the cultured Han, and I have embraced them. I try to be more mannerly than uncouth, more diplomatic than demanding, more of an ordained emperor than an occupying warlord. In all those ways, I have changed from being a Mongol of Kaidu’s kind. But I do not forget or repudiate my origins, my warrior days, my Mongol blood. That hill says it all.”

“I regret, Sire,” I said, “that the example still eludes my understanding.”

He said to his son, “Explain it, Chingkim.”

“You see, Marco, the hill will be a pleasure park, with terraces and walks and willowed waterfalls and comely pavilions cunningly set here and there. The whole thing will be an ornament to the palace grounds. In that, it is very Han, and reflects our admiration of Han art. But it will be more. The Architect could have mounded it of the local yellow earth, but my Royal Father commanded kara. The burnable rock will probably never be needed, but just in case this palace should ever come under siege, we will have there an unlimited supply of fuel. That is a warrior’s thinking. And the whole hill, roundabout the buildings and streams and flower beds, will be greened over by plains grass. A living reminder to us of our Mongol heritage.”

“Ah!” I said. “Now it all is clear.”

“The Han have a concise proverb,” said Kubilai. “Bai wen buru yi jian. To hear tell a hundred times is not as good as once seeing. You have seen. So now let me speak of another aspect of rulership.”

We returned to our seats. In response to some inaudible summons, the maidservant glided in and refilled our goblets.

The Khakhan resumed, “There are times when I, too-like you, Marco Polo—can taste the attitudes of other people. You have expressed your willingness to join my retinue, but I wonder if I taste in you a lingering trace of your disapprobation.”

“Sire?” I said, quite jolted by his bluntness. “Who am I, Sire, to disapprove of the Khan of All Khans? Why, even for me to approve would be presumptuous.”

He said, “I was informed of your visit to the Fondler’s cavern.” I must have cast an involuntary glance, for he went on, “I am aware that Chingkim was with you, but it was not he who told. I gather that you were dismayed by my treatment of Kaidu’s two men.”

“I might have hoped, Sire, that their treatment had been a little less extreme.”

“You do not tame a wolf by pulling one of his teeth.”

“They had been my companions, Sire, and they did nothing lupine during that time.”

“On arrival here, they were hospitably quartered with my own palace guards. A Mongol trooper is not ordinarily garrulous, but those two asked a great many and very searching questions of their barrackmates. My men answered only evasively, so those two would not have taken much intelligence home with them, anyway. You knew that I had sent spies into Kaidu’s lands. Did you think him incapable of doing the same?”

“I did not know—” I gasped. “I did not think—”

“As ruler of a far-spread empire, I must rule over a considerable diversity of peoples, and try to bear in mind their peculiarities. The Han are patient and devious, the Persians are couched lions and all other Muslims are rabid sheep, the Armeniyans are blustering grovelers, and so on. I may not always deal with all of them as I ought. But the Mongols I understand very well. There I must rule with an iron hand, for in them I rule an iron people.”

“Yes, Sire,” I said weakly.

“Have you reservations about my treatment of any others?”

“Well,” I said, for it seemed he already knew, “I thought—that day in the Cheng—you dismissed those starving Ho-nan farmers rather brusquely.”

Just as brusquely now, he said, “I do not help those in trouble who snivel for help. I prefer to reward those who survive the trouble. Any man who must be kept alive is generally not worth the keeping. When people are stricken with either a sudden calamity or a long siege of misfortune, the best and most worthwhile will survive. The remainder are dispensable.”

“But were they asking for a favor, Sire, or only a fair chance?”

“In my experience, when a runt piglet squeals for a fair chance at the teat, he really means a head start. Think about it.”

I thought about it. My thoughts took me a long way back in time—to when I was a child, and was trying to help the survival of the boat children. The pinched, pretty face of little Doris came to my memory.

I said, “Sire, when you speak of feckless, sniveling men and women, no one could disagree. But starving children?”

“If they are the offspring of the dispensable, they too are dispensable. Realize this, Marco Polo. Children are the most easily and cheaply renewed resource in the world. Cut down a tree for timber; it takes nearly a lifetime to replace. Dig kara from the ground for burning; it is gone forever. But if a child is lost in a famine or flood, what is required for its replacement? A man and a woman and less than a year’s time. If the man and woman are the strong and capable who have defied the disaster, the better the replacement child is likely to be. Have you ever killed a man, Marco Polo?”

I blinked and said, “Yes, Sire, I have.”

“Good. A man better deserves the space he occupies on this earth if he has cleared that space for his occupancy. There is only so much space on this earth, only so much game to hunt and grass for pasturage and kara to burn and wood to build with. Before we Mongols took Kithai, there were one hundred million people living here, the Han and their related races. Now there are only half that many, according to my Han counselors, who are anxious for their countrymen to multiply again. If I will relax some of my strictures, they say, the population will soon again be what it was. They assure me that a single mou of land is sufficient to feed and support an entire Han family. To which I retort: would that family not feed better if it had two mou of land? Or three, or five? The family would be better nourished, healthier, probably happier. The sad fact is that the fifty or so million who perished in the years of conquest were mostly the best of the Han—the soldiers, the young and strong and vital. Should I now let them be replaced with mere indiscriminate spawning? No, I will not. I think the former rulers here liked to count heads only, and boast that they ruled great swarming numbers. I had rather boast that I rule a populace of quality, not quantity.”

“You would be envied by many other rulers, Sire,” I murmured.