The Journeyer

I had been in residence at the palace for a long time before I had the opportunity to meet the courtier whose work most fascinated me: the Court Firemaster responsible for the so-called fiery trees and sparkling flowers. I was told that he was almost continuously traveling about the country, arranging those displays wherever and whenever this town or that had some festa to celebrate. But one winter day, Prince Chingkim came to tell me that the Firemaster Shi had returned to his palace quarters, to begin his preparations for Khanbalik’s biggest annual celebration—the welcoming-in of the New Year, which was then imminent—and Chingkim took me to call on him. The Master Shi had an entire small house for his residence and workshop, and it was situated—for the sake of the palace’s safety, said Chingkim—well apart from the other palace buildings, in fact on the far side of what was now the Kara Hill.

The Firemaster was bent over a littered work table when we entered, and from his garb I took him first to be an Arab. But when he turned to greet us, I decided he had to be a Jew, for I had seen those lineaments before. His blackberry eyes looked haughtily but good-humoredly at me down a long, hooked nose like a shimshir, and his hair and beard were like a curly fungus, gray but showing still a trace of red.

Chingkim said, speaking in Mongol, “Master Shi Ix-me, I would have you meet a Palace guest.”

“Marco Polo,” said the Firemaster.

“Ah, you have heard of his visit.”

“I have heard of him.”

“Marco is much interested in your work, and my Royal Father would have you tell him something of it.”

“I will attempt to do so, Prince.”

When Chingkim had gone, there was a brief silence, myself and the Firemaster eyeing each other. At last he said, “Why are you interested in the fiery trees, Marco Polo?”

I said simply, “They are beautiful.”

“The beauty of danger. That attracts you?”

“You know it always has,” I said, and waited.

“But there is also danger in beauty. That does not repel you?”

“Aha!” I crowed. “Now I suppose you are going to tell me that your name is not really Mordecai!”

“I was not going to tell you anything. Except about my work with the beautiful but dangerous fires. What would you wish to know, Marco Polo?”

“How did you get a name like Shi Ix-me?”

“That has nothing to do with my work. However …” He shrugged. “When the Jews first came here, they were allotted seven Han surnames to apportion among them. Shi is one of the seven, and was originally Yitzhak. In the Ivrit, my full name is Shemuel ibn-Yitzhak.”

I asked, “When did you come to Kithai?” expecting him to say that he had arrived only shortly before me.

“I was born here, in the city of Kai-feng, where my forebears settled some hundreds of years ago.”

“I do not believe it.”

He snorted, as Mordecai had done so often at my comments. “Read the Old Testament of your Bible. Chapter forty-nine of Isaiah, where the prophet foresees a regathering of all the Jews. ‘Behold, these shall come from afar, and behold these from the north, and from the sea, and these from the land of Sinim.’ This land of Kithai is still in Ivrit called Sina. So there were Jews here in Isaiah’s time, and that was more than one thousand eight hundred years ago.”

“Why would Jews have come here?”

“Probably because they were unwelcome somewhere else,” he said wryly. “Or perhaps they took the Han to be one of their own lost tribes, wandered away from Israel.”

“Oh, come now, Master Shi. The Han are pork eaters, and always have been.”

He shrugged again. “Nevertheless, they have things in common with the Jews. They slaughter their animals in a ceremonial manner almost kasher, except that they do not remove the terephah sinews. And they are even more than Jewishly strict in the customs of dress, never wearing garments mixed of animal and vegetable fibers.”

Stubbornly I maintained, “The Han could never have been a lost tribe. There is no least physical resemblance between them and the Jews.”

Master Shi laughed and said, “But there is now—between the Jews and the Han. Do not judge by my looks. It only happens that the Shi family never much intermarried here. Most others of the seven names did. So Kithai is full of Jews with ivory skins and squinty eyes. Only sometimes by their noses shall you know them. Or a man by his gid.” He laughed again, then said more seriously, “Or you may know a Jew because, wherever he wanders, he still observes the religion of his fathers. He still turns toward Jerusalem to pray. Also, wherever he wanders, he still keeps the memory of old Jewish legends—”

“Like the Lamed-vav,” I interrupted. “And the tzaddikim.”

“—and, wherever he wanders, he continues to share with other Jews what things he remembers of the old, and what worthwhile new things he learns along his way.”

“That is how you knew of me! One telling another. Ever since Mordecai escaped from the Vulcano—”

He gave no sign of having heard a single word I had interposed, but went right on, “Happily, the Mongols do not discriminate among us lesser races. So I, albeit a Jew, am the Court Firemaster to the Khan Kubilai, who respects my artistry and cares not at all that I bear one of the seven surnames.”

“You must be very proud, Master Shi,” I said. “I should like to hear how you came to take up this extraordinary profession, and how you became so successful in it. I have always thought of Jews as being moneylenders and pawnbrokers, not as artists or seekers of success.”

He snorted again. “When did you ever hear of an inartistic moneylender? Or an unsuccessful pawnshop?”

I could give no answer to that, and he seemed to expect none, so I inquired, “How did you come to invent the fiery trees?”

“I did not. The secret of making them was discovered by a Han, and that was ages ago. My contribution has been to make that secret more easy of application.”

“And what is the secret, Master Shi?”

“It is called huo-yao, the flaming powder.” He motioned me to the work table and, from one of the many jars and phials thereon, he took a pinch of dark-gray powder. “Observe what happens when I place this very little bit of huo-yao on this porcelain plate, and touch it with fire—so.” He picked up a stick of already smoldering incense and applied its spark end to the powder.

I started as, with a quick, angry, fizzing noise, the huo-yao burned away in a brief, intense flash, leaving a puff of the blue smoke whose acrid smell I had come to recognize.

“Essentially,” said the Firemaster, “all that the powder does is to burn with the fiercest rapidity of any substance. But when it is confined in a fairly tight container, its burning bursts that confinement, making a loud noise and much light as it does so. Adding to the basic huo-yao other powders—metallic salts of one kind or another—makes it burn in different colors.”

“But what makes it fly?” I asked. “And sometimes explode in sequacious bursts of those different colors?”

“For such an effect, the huo-yao is packed into a paper tube like this one, with a small opening at one end.” He showed me such a tube, made of stiff paper. It looked like a large, hollow candle, with a hole where the wick would have been. “When touched with a spark at that hole, the powder burns and the intense flame spurting from that aperture at the nether end throws the whole tube forward—or upward, if it is pointed that way.”

“I have seen it do so,” I said. “But why should it do so?”

“Come, come, Polo,” he chided me. “We have here one of the first principles of natural philosophy. Everything flinches away from fire.”

“Of course,” I said. “Of course.”

“This being the fiercest of fires, the container flinches away most energetically. So violently that it recoils to a great distance or a great altitude.”

“And,” I said, to show how well I understood, “having the fire in its own vitals, it perforce takes the fire with it.”

“Exactly so. And takes with it more than the fire, in fact, for I have previously attached other tubes around the one that flies. When the first has consumed itself—and I can predetermine how long that will take—it ignites the other tubes. Depending on what sorts I have used, they either explode at that instant, scattering fire of one color or another, or they go flinging off on their own, to explode at another distance. By combining in one engine a number of flying tubes and explosive tubes, I can contrive a fiery tree that sprouts upward to any height, and then bursts into one of various patterns of the sparkling flowers in many different colors. Peach blossoms, poppy flowers, tiger lilies, whatever I choose to make bloom in the sky.”

“Ingenious,” I said. “Fantastic. But the main ingredient—the huo-yao—of what magical elements is it compounded?”

“It was indeed an ingenious man who first compounded them,” the Firemaster concurred. “But the constituent elements are the simplest imaginable.” From each of three other jars he took a pinch of powder and dropped them on the table; one powder was black, one yellow, one white. “Tan-hua, liu and tung-bian. Taste them and you should know them.”

I licked a fingertip and picked up a few grains of the fine black powder and touched my tongue, then said, wondering, “Nothing but charcoal of wood.” Of the yellow powder, I said, “Only common sulphur.” Of the white powder, I said thoughtfully, “Hm. Salty, bitter, almost vinegary. But what … ?”

Master Shi grinned and said, “The crystallized urine of a virgin boy.”

“Vakh,” I grunted, and rubbed my sleeve across my mouth.

“Tung-bian, the autumn stone, so the Han call it,” he said, wickedly enjoying my discomfiture. “The sorcerers and wizards and practitioners of al-kimia deem it a precious element. They employ it in medicines, love philters and the like. They take the urine of a boy no older than twelve, filter it through wood ash, then let it solidify into crystals. Rather difficult of procurement, you see, and in only trifling amounts. But it was specified in the original recipe for making the flaming powder: charcoal, sulphur and the autumn stone—and that recipe was handed unchanged down through the ages. Charcoal and sulphur have always been plentiful, but the third ingredient was not. So there simply was not much making of the flaming powder, until my lifetime.”

“You found some way to procure maiden boys in quantity?”

He snorted, very Mordecai-like. “Sometimes there are benefits in coming from a humble family. When I first tasted the element, as you just did, I recognized it as another and much less exquisite substance. My father was a fish peddler, and to make the fillets of cheap fish look more delectably pink, he soaked them in a brine of the lowly salt called saltpeter. That is all the autumn stone is—saltpeter. I do not know why it should be present in boys’ urine, and I do not care, for I have no need of boys to make it. Kithai is abundantly supplied with salt lakes, and they are abundantly rimmed with crusts containing saltpeter. So, these many centuries after the flaming powder was first compounded by some Han genius of al-kimia, I, merely the inquisitive son of the Jewish fish peddler Shi, am the first to make it in vast quantities, and to make the glorious displays of its fiery trees and sparkling flowers enjoyable by all men everywhere.”

“Master Shi,” I said diffidently. “In addition to my admiration of the beauty of those works, I have been struck by the thought of turning them to more useful account. The thought came to me when my own horse shied and bucked at first seeing a display of the fiery trees. Could not these engines of yours be used as weapons of war? To break up a cavalry charge, for example?”

He snorted yet again. “A good idea, yes, but you are more than sixty years late with it. In the year when I was born—let me see, that would have been by your Christian count the year one thousand two hundred fourteen—my native city of Kai-feng was first besieged by the Mongols of the Khan Chinghiz. His horse troops were affrighted and dispersed by balls of fire which flew into their midst, trailing sparks and whistling and banging. The Mongols were not stopped for long, needless to say, and they eventually took the city, but that valiant defense contrived by the Kai-feng Firemaster became legendary. And, as I told you, we Jews are great rememberers of legends. Thus it was that I grew up enthralled by the subject, and finally myself became a Firemaster. That employment of the flaming powder at Kai-feng was its first recorded use in warfare.”

“Its first,” I echoed. “Then it has been used since?”

“Our Khan Kubilai is not a warrior likely to ignore any promising tool of war,” said Master Shi. “Even if I were not personally interested in trying new applications of my art, and I am, he has charged me with investigating every possible use of the huo-yao for war missiles. And I have had some partial successes.”

I said, “I should be gratified to hear of them.”

The Firemaster seemed hesitant to confide. He looked from under his fungoid eyebrows at me and said, “The Han have a story. Of the master archer Yi, all his life prevailing over every foe, until he taught all his skills to an eager pupil, and that man finally slew him.”

“I do not seek to appropriate any of your ideas,” I said. “And I will freely tell you any that might occur to me. They could be of some small worth.”

“The danger of beauty,” he mumbled. “Well, are you acquainted with the large, hairy nut called the India nut?”

Wondering what that had to do with anything, I said, “I have eaten its meat in certain confections served at table here.”

“I have taken hollowed-out India nuts and packed them full of the huo-yao, and inserted wicks to supply the spark after a suitable interval. I have done the same with joints of the stout zhu-gan cane. Those objects can be thrown by a man or a simple catapult into an enemy’s defenses and—when they work properly—they let loose their energy with such explosive force that a single nut or cane would well nigh wreck this whole house.”

“Marvelous,” I said.

“When they work. I have also used cylinders of larger zhu-gan cane in another manner. By inserting one of my flying engines into a long empty cane before lighting its wick, a warrior can literally aim the missile like an arrow, and send it flying toward a target, more or less straightly.”

“Ingenious,” I said.

“When it works. I have also made missiles in which the huo-yao is compounded with naft oil, with kara dust, even with barnyard dung. When they are hurled into an enemy’s defenses, they spread an almost inextinguishable fire, or a dense, stinking, choking smoke.”

“Fantastic,” I said.

“When they work. Unfortunately, there is one flaw in the huo-yao that renders it totally impractical for military use. Its three component elements, as you have seen, are finely ground powders. But each of those powders has a different inherent density, or weight. Therefore, no matter how tightly the huo-yao is packed into a container, the three elements gradually separate out from one another. The least movement or vibration of the container makes the heavier saltpeter discombine and sift down to the bottom, so the huo-yao becomes inert and impotent. Thus it is impossible to make and store any supply of any of my inventions. The mere movement of them into a storehouse, not to mention out of it, causes them to become absolutely useless.”

“I see,” I said, sharing his air of deep disappointment. “That is why you are perpetually on the road, Master Shi?”

“Yes. To arrange a fiery-tree display in any city, I must go there and make the things on the spot. I travel with a supply of paper tubes, wicks, barrels of each of the constituent powders, and it is no great chore to mix the huo-yao and charge my various engines. That is obviously what the Kai-feng Firemaster did, when my city was besieged. But can you imagine doing all that in wartime, in the field, in the midst of battle? Every company of warriors would have to have its own separate Firemaster, and he to have at hand all his supplies and equipment, and he would have to be inhumanly quick and proficient. No, Marco Polo, I fear that the huo-yao will forever be only a pretty toy. There seems no hope of its military application, except in the occasional case of a city under siege.”

“A pity,” I murmured. “But the only problem is the powder’s tendency to separate?”

“That is the only problem,” he said, with heavy irony, “just as the only impediment to a man’s flying is that he has no wings.”

“Only the separation … ,” I said to myself, several times, then I snapped my fingers and exclaimed, “I have it!”

“Have you now?”

“Dust blows about, but mud does not, and hardened clods do not. Suppose you wetted the huo-yao into mud? Or baked it into a solid?”

“Imbecile,” he said, but with some amusement. “Wet the powder and it does not burn at all. Put a baking fire to it and it may blow up in your face.”

“Oh,” I said, deflated.

“I told you, there is danger in this stuff of beauty.”

“I am not over timid of danger, Master Shi,” I said, still pondering the problem. “I know you are busy preparing for the New Year celebrations, so I would not obtrude my company upon you. But, while you are occupied, would you let me have some jars of the huo-yao, so that I could speculate on ways and means—”

“Bevakashà! This is nothing to play with!”

“I will be most careful, Master Shi. I will not ignite so much as a pinch of it. I will but study its properties and try to think of a solution to the problem of its sifting down—”

“Khakma! As if I and every other Firemaster have not devoted our lives to that, ever since the flaming powder was first compounded! And you, who never even saw the stuff before—you truly are suggesting that I play the master archer Yi!”

I said, with insinuation, “So might have spoken, once upon a time, the Firemaster of Kai-feng.” There was a short silence, and I said, “The inquisitive son of a Jewish fish peddler might not have been trusted, either, to bring a new idea to the art.”

There was another and longer silence. Then Master Shi sighed and said, evidently to his deity:

“Lord, I am committed. I hope You see that. This Marco Polo must once have done something right, and the proverb instructs us that one mitzva deserves another.”

From under the work table, he picked up two tightly woven cane baskets and thrust them into my arms. “Here, estimable fool. In each, fifty liang measures of huo-yao. Do as you will, and l’chaim to you. I hope the next I hear of Marco Polo is not his thunderous departure from this world.”

I took the baskets back to my apartment, intending to start my essay at al-kimia straight away. But I found Nostril again waiting for me, so I asked if he had brought any information.

“Precious little, master. Only a salacious small item about the Court Astrologer, if you are interested. It seems he is a eunuch, and for fifty years he has kept his spare parts pickled in a jar that stands beside his bed. He intends to have them buried with him, so that he will go entire to the afterworld.”

“That is all?” I said, wanting to get to work.

“Elsewhere, all is preparation for the New Year. Every courtyard is strewn with dry straw, so that any approaching evil kwei spirits will be frightened off by the crackling noise when they tread on it. The Han women are all cooking the Eight-Ingredient Pudding, which is a holiday treat, and the men are making the many lanterns to light the festivities, and the children are making little paper windmills. It is said that some families spend their entire year’s savings on this celebration. But not everybody is exhilarated; a good many of the Han are committing suicide.”

“Whatever for?”

“It is their custom that all outstanding debts be settled at this season. The creditors are going about knocking on doors, and many a desperate debtor is hanging himself—to save his face, as the Han say—from the shame of not being able to pay. Meanwhile, the Mongol folk, who do not care much about face, are smearing molasses on the faces of their kitchen gods.”

“What?”

“They have the quaint belief that the idol they keep over the kitchen hearth, the house god Nagatai, ascends to Heaven at this time to report their year’s behavior to the great god Tengri. So they feed molasses to Nagatai in the quaint belief that thus his lips are sealed, and he cannot tattle anything detrimental.”

“Quaint, yes,” I said. Biliktu came into the room just then and took the baskets from me. I motioned for her to set them on a table. “Anything else, Nostril?”

He wrung his hands. “Only that I have fallen in love.”

“Oh?” I said, immersed in my own thoughts. “With what?”

“Master, do not mock me. With a woman, what else?”

“What else? To my own knowledge, you have previously had congress with a Baghdad pony, with a young man of Kashan, with a Sindi baby of indeterminate sex—”

He wrung his hands some more. “Please, master, do not tell her.”

“Tell whom?”

“The Princess Mar-Janah.”

“Oh, yes. That one. So you have now fixed your regard on a princess, have you? Well, I give you credit for craving wide variety. And I will not tell her. Why should I tell her anything at all?”

“Because I would beg a boon, Master Marco. I would ask you to speak to her in my behalf. To tell her of my virtues and uprightness.”

“Upright? Virtuous? You? Por Dio, I have never even been sure that you are human!”

“Please, master. You see, there are certain palace rules regarding the marriage of slaves to one another—”

“Marriage!” I gasped. “You are contemplating marriage?”

“It is true, as the Prophet declares, that women are all stones,” he said meditatively. “But some are millstones hung about our neck, and some are gemstones hung about our heart.”

“Nostril,” I said, as kindly as I could be. “This woman may have come down in the world, but not—” I stopped myself. I could not say “as low down as you.” I began again, “She may be now a slave, but she was once a princess, and you said you were only a drover then. Also, from what I have heard, she is handsome, or she once was.”

“She is,” he said, and added feebly, “So was I … once.”

Exasperated anew by his persistence in that old fiction, I said, “Has she seen you lately? Look at yourself! There you stand, as graceless as a camel-bird, pot-bellied, pig-eyed, with your finger picking your one nose hole. Tell me truthfully, since you spied out her identity have you made yourself known to this Princess Mar-Janah? Did she recognize you? Did she flee in revulsion, or merely burst out laughing?”

“No,” he said, hanging his head. “I have not introduced myself. I have only worshiped her from afar. I was hoping that you would first say some words to her … to prepare her … to make her desire to know me … .”

At which, it was I who burst out laughing. “It needed but this! I have never heard such effrontery. Asking me to pimp between one slave and another. What am I to tell her, Nostril?” I put on a wheedling voice, as if I were addressing the princess: “So far as I know, Your Highness, your adoring suitor does not at this moment suffer any shameful disease of his amative parts.” Then I said sternly, “What could I possibly tell, without such lying as to imperil my immortal soul, that could possibly make any female—let alone a former princess—look favorably on such a creature as I know you to be?”

With preposterous dignity for such a creature, he said, “If the master would have the goodness to listen for just a little, I would tell some of the history of this affair.”

“Tell, then, but make haste. I have things to do.”

“It began twenty years ago in the Cappadocian capital city of Erzincan. True, she was a Turki princess, the daughter of King Kilij, and I was only a Sindi drover of horses in his employ. Neither he nor she knew it, probably, since I was only one of many stable servants they would have seen, whenever they called for a mount or a carriage. But I saw her, and then as now I worshiped her dumbly from afar. Nothing would ever have come of it, of course. Except that Allah caused both her and me to fall among Arab bandits—”

“Oh, Nostril, no!” I pleaded. “Not another account of your heroics. I have had my laugh for the day.”

“I will not dwell on the abduction episode, master. Sufficient to say that the princess had cause to notice me, then, and she regarded me with melting eyes. But when we had escaped from the Arabs and returned to Erzincan, her father rewarded me with a higher position in his service, which sent me into the countryside at a considerable remove from the palace.”

“That,” I murmured, “I believe.”

“And unhappily I once more fell among marauders. Kurdi slave-takers, this time. I was borne away, and I never saw Cappadocia or the princess again. I kept an ear open for every rumor and gossip from that part of the world, and I never heard of her marrying, so I still had some small cause for hopefulness. But then I heard of the wholesale slaughter of that Seljuk royal family, and I supposed she had died with the rest. Who knows, if I had been still at the palace when that occurred, what might not—?”

“Please, Nostril.”

“Yes, master. Well, if Mar-Janah was dead, I cared no longer what became of me. I was a slave—the lowest form of life—so I would be the lowest form of life. I endured every kind of humiliation, and I did not care. I invited humiliation. I even began to humiliate myself. I wallowed in humiliation. I would be the worst thing in the world, because I had lost the best. I became a wretch degraded and contemptible. I did not care that it cost me my handsomeness and my self-respect and the respect of all other men. I would not even have cared if it had cost me my vital parts, but, for some reason, none of my many masters ever thought to make me a eunuch. So I was still a man, but, having no hope of love, I abandoned myself to lust. I took anyone or anything accessible to a slave—and not many but vile things are. Thus I was when you found me, Master Marco, and thus I continued to be.”

“Until now,” I said. “Let me finish for you, Nostril. Now that long lost love has reentered your life. Now you are going to change.”

He surprised me by saying, “No. No, master, too many men have too often said that. None but a fool would believe that, and my master is no fool. So I will say instead that I wish only to change back. Back to what I was before I became … this Nostril.”

I looked long at him, and I considered long before I spoke.

“None but a wicked master would refuse a man the chance at that much, and I am not wicked. Indeed, I should be interested to see what it was that you once were.” I was also a little interested to see the draggled sloven he had set his heart on. She had to be a pitiful drab, of course, after eight or nine years of slavery among the Mongols, whatever she had begun as. “Very well. You wish me to apprise this Mar-Janah that her onetime hero still exists. I will do that much. How do I do it?”

“I shall simply pass the word in the slave quarters that the Master Marco wishes to speak with her. And then, if you could find it in your compassionate generosity to say—”

“I will tell no lies for you, Nostril. I promise only to skirt the nastier truths, insofar as I can.”

“It is all I could ask. May Allah ever bless—”

“Now I have other things to think about. Do not have her come here until after the New Year doings are done with.”

When he had gone, I sat down to gaze at the huo-yao I had brought, and occasionally I dabbled my fingers in it, and now and again I shook one of the baskets, to see for myself how readily the white grains of saltpeter separated from among the black specks of charcoal and the yellow sulphur, and sank out of sight. That day—and for many days afterward, because other things took precedence—I did not do anything else with the flaming powder.

That night, when I went to bed, and only Buyantu joined me, I grumbled, “What is this indisposition Biliktu is suffering? I saw her only hours ago in these rooms, and she appeared perfectly healthy. But it must be more than a month now since she has slept in this bed with me or with us. Is she avoiding me? Have I somehow displeased her?”

Buyantu made only a teasing reply: “Do you miss her? Am I not enough for you? After all, my sister and I are identical. Hold me and see.” She snuggled into my arms. “There. You cannot complain that you yearn for what you are this moment holding. But, if you like, I give you leave to pretend that I am Biliktu, and I challenge you to tell me in what respect I am not.”

She was right. When, in the dark, I pretended that she was her sister, she very well could have been, and I could hardly claim that I was being deprived.

10.

IN Venice, we do not take much account of any new year’s coming. It is merely the first day of March, on which we begin the next year’s calendar, and it is no cause for celebration unless it chances to fall on the day of Carnevale. But in Kithai every New Year was regarded as portentous, and had to be fittingly welcomed. So it was the excuse for festivities that consumed an entire month, lapping over from the old year into the new one. Like our Christian movable holy days, the entire Kithai calendar depends on the moon, so its First Day of the First Moon can fall any time between mid-January and mid-February. The celebrations commenced on the seventh night of the old year’s Twelfth Moon, when families sat down to partake of the traditional Eight-Ingredient Pudding, then exchanged gifts among themselves, their neighbors and friends and relatives.

From that time on, there seemed to be some kind of observance every day and night. On the twenty-third day of that Twelfth Moon, for example, everyone set up a clamor to wish “bon viazo” to their kitchen god Nagatai, as he ostensibly ascended to Heaven to make his report on the household of which he was overseer. Since he allegedly does not return to his place over the hearth until the eve of the New Year, the people all took advantage of his absence to indulge in libertine feasting and drinking and gambling and other things they would be afraid or ashamed to do under Nagatai’s scrutiny.

The final day of the old year was the most frenetic of the whole season, that being the last day on which debts were to be collected and accounts settled. Every street leading to a pawnshop was clogged with people pledging, for a pitiful few tsien, their valuables, furniture, even the clothes they wore. Every other street was similarly crowded and turmoiled by the creditors dashing about in search of their debtors and the debtors dashing about in desperate search of some means either to pay them or avoid them. Everybody was chasing somebody, and himself was being chased by somebody else. There was much vociferation and loud abuse and blows exchanged and even, as Nostril had told me, the occasional self-immolation of a debtor no longer able to hold up his head—or his face, as the Han say.

As that last day of the old year turned into night and became the eve of the First Day of the First Moon, it turned also into a night-long display of Master Shi’s fiery trees and sparkling flowers, in wondrous variety, accompanied by parades and street dances and tumultuous noise and the music of chimes and gongs and trumpets. When the New Year day dawned, the interminable festivities were tempered by their only token touch of a Lenten abstention, that being the one day of the year when all were forbidden to eat meat. And on the subsequent five days, no one was allowed to throw away anything at all. Even for a scullion to throw out the kitchen’s waste water would risk throwing out the household’s good fortune for the next year. Apart from those two gestures of austerity, the celebrating went on unceasingly, right through the fifteenth day of the First Moon.

The common people put up new pictures of all their old gods, ceremoniously pasting them over the tattered old ones that had hung for the past year on their house doors and walls. Every family that could afford it paid a scribe to compose for them a “spring couplet,” likewise to be pasted up somewhere. The streets perpetually teemed with acrobats, masquers, stiltwalkers, storytellers, wrestlers, jugglers, hoop twirlers, fire eaters, astrologers and fortune-tellers, purveyors of every sort of food and drink, even “dancing lions”—each consisting of two extremely agile men inside a costume of gilt plaster and red cloth, doing some unbelievable and most unleonine contortions.

In their temples, the Han priests of every religion rather unreligiously presided over public games of chance. These were attended by multitudes of players—creditors squandering their new gains, I assumed, and debtors trying to recoup their losses—and, most of them being drunk and wagering heavily and playing ineptly, their contributions no doubt supported all the temples and priests for the entire year to come. One game was merely the familiar throwing of dice. Another, called ma-jiang, was played with little bone tiles. Another game was played with stiff paper cards called zhi-pai.

(I myself later got intrigued by the intricacies of the zhi-pai and learned to play all the games—for there are innumerable gambling pastimes possible with a pack of seventy-eight cards divided into orders of hearts, bells, leaves and acorns, and they subdivided into cards of points and coats and emblems. But, since I brought back a pack of the cards to Venice, and they have been so much admired and copied and, now called tarocchi, are so well and widely known, I need not expatiate on the zhi-pai. )

The weeks of celebration concluded with the Feast of Lanterns, on the fifteenth day of the First Moon. In addition to everything else that was still going on in the streets of Khanbalik, every family vied that night to see which could flaunt the most marvelously made lantern. They paraded with their creations, of paper or silk or translucent horn or Muscovy glass, in shapes of balls, cubes, fans, little temples, all illuminated by candles or wick lamps inside.

Toward midnight occurred the romping through the streets of a wonderful dragon. More than forty paces long, it was constructed of silk stiffened with ribs of cane, the ribs outlined in little stuck-on candles, and was carried by some fifty men, of whom only their dancing feet were visible, shod with shoes made to look like great claws. The head of the dragon was of plaster and wood, gilded and enameled, with flaring gold-and-blue eyes, silver horns, a green floss beard under its chin, a red velvet tongue lolling from its fearsome mouth. The head alone was so big and heavy that it required four men to carry, and to make it lunge at the people in the streets and champ its jaws at them. The whole dragon pranced and undulated and curvetted most realistically as it wound up one street and down another. And finally, when the last late reveler went off to bed or fell drunkenly unconscious in the open, the weary dragon also slithered back to its lair, and the New Year had officially begun.

The city folk of Khanbalik had enjoyed a whole month of freedom from their more usual occupations. But the work of public servants, like the work of farmers, does not abate just because the calendar declares a holiday. The palace courtiers and government ministers, except for occasional ventures outside to watch the people’s enjoyments, went right on working through the whole festive season. I continued making my calls upon one after another of them, and every week having my audience with the Khan Kubilai, that he might judge the progress of my education. At every visit, I tried either to impress or astonish him with whatever new things I had learned. Sometimes, of course, I had nothing to report but a trifle like, “Did you know, Sire, that the eunuch Court Astrologer keeps his cast-off equipment preserved in a jar?”

To which he replied, with some asperity, “Yes. It is rumored that, in doing his predictions, the old fool consults those pickles oftener than he does the stars.”

But usually we talked of weightier matters. In one of our meetings, sometime after that New Year season, and after I had spent the foregoing week interviewing the eight Justices of the Cheng, I made so bold as to discuss with the Khakhan the laws and statutes by which his domain was regulated. The mode of that conversation was as interesting as its content, because we talked outdoors and in singular circumstances.

The Court Architect and his slaves and his elephants had, by then, finished piling up the Kara Hill, and had covered it with soft turf, and the Master Gardener and his men had planted its lawns and flowers and trees and shrubs. None of those things was yet flourishing, so the hill still was quite bald. But many of its architectural additions were already done, and they, being in the Han style, gave the hill color enough. The Khakhan and Prince Chingkim were that day inspecting the latest work completed, and they invited me to accompany them. The hill’s newest adornment was a round pavilion about ten paces across, an edifice that was all curlicues: swooping roof and convoluted pillars and filigreed balustrades, not a single straight line about it. It was encircled by a tiled terrace, as wide across as the pavilion’s diameter, and that was encircled by a solid wall about twice man-high, its entire inner and outer surface a mosaic of gems, enamels, gilt, tesserae of jade and porcelains.

The pavilion was sufficiently striking to the eye, but it had one feature apparent only to the ear. I do not know if the Court Architect had planned it so, or if it came about merely fortuitously. Two or more persons could stand anywhere within that encircling wall, at any distance apart, and, speaking even in a whisper, be able to hear each other perfectly well. The place later became known to all as the Echo Pavilion, but I believe the Khakhan, the Prince and I were the first to amuse ourselves with its peculiar property. We conversed by standing at three points equidistant inside the wall, some eighty feet from each other, none of us able to see each other around the pavilion in the middle, but all speaking in normal tones, and we conversed as easily as if we had been seated about a table indoors.

I said, “The Justices of the Cheng read to me Kithai’s current code of laws, Sire. I thought some of them severe. I remember one which commanded that, if a crime is committed, the magistrate of the prefecture must find and punish the guilty party—or himself suffer the punishment specified by law for that crime.”

“What is so severe about that?” asked Kubilai’s voice. “It only ensures that no magistrate shirks his duty.”

“But is it not likely, Sire, that an innocent person is often punished, simply because somebody must be?”

“And so?” said Chingkim’s voice. “The crime is requited, and all people know that any crime always will be. So the law tends to make all people shun all crime.”

“But I have noticed,” I said, “that the Han people, when left to themselves, seem adequately to rely on their traditions of good manners to guide their behavior in all things, from everyday matters to those of the greatest gravity. Take common courtesy, for example. If a carter were to be so rude as to ask directions of a passerby without politely getting down from his wagon, he would at the least be told a wrong direction, if not reviled for his bad behavior.”

“Ah, but would that reform him?” asked Kubilai’s voice. “As a good whipping would do?”

“He need not be reformed, Sire, because he would never do such an unmannerly thing in the first place. Take another example: simple honesty. If a man walking along the road discovers an object someone has lost, he will not appropriate it, but stand guard over it. He will relinquish that guard duty to the next comer, and he to the next. That object will be sedulously kept safe until its loser comes back looking for it.”

“You are talking now of happenstance,” said the Khakhan’s voice. “You began with crimes and laws.”

“Very well, Sire, consider an actual tort. If one man is wronged by another, he does not run to a magistrate and demand forced redress. Indeed, the Han have a proverb: advising the dead to avoid damnation and the living to avoid the law court. If a man of the Han disgraces himself, he will take his own life in expiation, as I have seen often happen during the past New Year. If another man does him a grievous wrong, and his conscience does not soon resolve the matter, the victim will go and hang himself outside the guilty man’s door. The disgrace thus conferred on the transgressor is considered far worse than any revenge that could have been inflicted.”

Kubilai inquired drily, “Would you say that that fact gives much satisfaction to the dead man? You call that redress?”

“I am told, Sire, that the malefactor can only remove the taint of that shame by making restitution to the hanged man’s surviving family.”

“So does he under the Khanate’s code of law, Marco. But if anybody has to get hanged, it is he. You may call that severity, but I see nothing unfair about it.”

“Sire, I once remarked that you were rightly to be admired and envied—for the quality of your subjects in general—by every other ruler in the world. But I wonder: how are you regarded by the people themselves? Might you not better secure their affection and fealty if you were not quite so strict in your standards for them?”

“Define that,” he said sharply. “‘Not quite so strict.’”

“Sire, regard my native Republic of Venice. It is patterned on the classical republics of Rome and Greece. In a republic, the citizen has the liberty to be an individual, to shape his own destiny. There are slaves in Venice, true, and class levels. But in theory a stalwart man can rise above his class. On his own, he can climb from poverty and misery to prosperity and ease.”

Chingkim’s quiet voice said, “Does that happen often in Venice?”

“Well,” I said, “I remember one or two who took calculated advantage of their good looks, and thereby married above their station.”

“You call that being stalwart? Here it would be called concubinage.”

“It is only that offhand I cannot think of other instances to cite. But—”

“In Rome or Greece,” said Kubilai, “were there any such instances? Your Western histories, do they record any instances?”

“I honestly cannot say, Sire, not being a scholar of history.”

Chingkim spoke again. “Do you believe it could happen, Marco? That all men could and would make themselves equal and free and rich, if only they were given the liberty to do so?”

“Why not, my Prince? Some of our foremost philosophers have believed it.”

“A man will believe anything that does not cost him anything,” said Kubilai’s voice. “That is another proverb of the Han. Marco, I know what happens when people are set free—and I did not get that knowledge from reading history. I know because I have done that for people myself.”

Some moments passed. Then Chingkim said in an amused tone, “Marco is shocked to silence. But it is true, Marco. I saw my Royal Father employ that tactic one time to conquer a province in the land of To-Bhot. The province resisted our frontal attacks, so the Khakhan simply made announcement to the Bho people: ‘You are free of your former tyrant rulers and oppressors. And I, being a liberal ruler, I give you license to take your rightful places in the world as you deserve.’ And do you know what happened?”

“I hope, my Prince, it made them happy.”

Kubilai gave a laugh that resounded around the wall like the noise of an iron cauldron being pounded with a mallet. He said:

“What happens, Marco Polo, is this. Tell a poor man that he has free permission to rob the rich he has envied for so long. Does he sally forth and ransack the gilded mansion of some lord? No, he seizes the pig owned by his peasant neighbor. Tell a slave that he is set free at last and made the equal of all other men. Perhaps his first display of equality is to murder his former master, but the second thing he does: he acquires a slave. Tell a troop of soldiers, unwillingly impressed into military service, that they may freely desert and go home. Do they, as they go, assassinate the lofty generals who drafted them? No, they butcher the man who was promoted from among them to be their troop sergeant. Tell all the downtrodden that they have free permission to rise up against their most brutal oppressor. Do they march in grand array against their tyrant Wang or Ilkhan? No, they go in a mob and tear to pieces the village moneylender.”

There was another silence. I could think of no comment to make. Finally Chingkim spoke again:

“The ruse worked there in To-Bhot, Marco. It threw the whole province into chaos, and we took it quite easily, and my brother Ukuruji is now Wang of To-Bhot. Of course, nothing is changed for the Bho people, as regards class and privilege and prosperity and liberty. Life goes on there as before.”

I still could think of no comment to make, for the Khakhan and the Prince were obviously not talking just of some ignorant rustics in the backward land of To-Bhot. The opinion they had of the common folk was of all common folk everywhere, and it was no high opinion, but I had no argument with which to controvert it. So we three moved from our places around the Echo Pavilion and went back inside the palace and drank mao-tai together and talked of other things. And I did not again suggest any moderations of the Mongol code of laws, and to this day the decrees proclaimed throughout the Khanate conclude as they did then: “The Khakhan has spoken; tremble, all men, and obey!”

Kubilai never made any comment on the order in which I was calling upon his various ministers, though he might have supposed that I should rightly have commenced with his highest of all: that Chief Minister Achmad-az-Fenaket of whom I have by now so often spoken. But I would have been glad to omit the Arab entirely, especially after I heard so many unpleasant things about him. In fact, I never did seek audience with him, and it was Achmad who impelled our meeting at last. He sent a servant to me with a testy message, requiring me to appear before him and collect my wages from his own hand, in his capacity as Finance Minister. I gathered that he had got annoyed by the money’s having accumulated untouched, and by my having let the New Year season go past without a settling of account. Ever since my being taken into employment by the Khakhan, I had not bothered to inquire by whom I was to be paid, or even how much, for I had so far had no need of a single bagatìn—or tsien, as the smallest unit of Kithai currency was called. I was elegantly housed and fed and supplied with everything, and could not imagine how I would spend any money if I had any.

Before I obeyed Achmad’s summons, I went to ask my father if the Compagnia Polo’s enterprises were still being thwarted, and, if so, whether he would like me to broach the subject with the obstructive Arab. Failing to find my father in his suite, I went to my uncle’s. He was reclining on a couch, being shaved by one of his women servants.

“What is this, Uncle Mafìo?” I exclaimed. “Getting rid of your journeyer’s beard! Why?”

Through the lather he said, “We shall be dealing mainly with Han merchants, and the Han despise hairiness as a mark of the barbarian. Since all the Arabs of the Ortaq are bearded, I thought Nico and I might enjoy some advantage if one of us was clean-shaven. Also, to be frank, it troubled my vanity that my older brother’s beard is still its natural color, while mine has gone as gray as Nostril’s.”

My uncle, I assumed, was also still keeping his crotch hairless, so I remarked, somewhat waspishly, “Many of the Han shave their heads as well. Are you going to do that, too?”

“And many of them let their hair grow as long as a woman’s,” he said equably. “I may do that. Did you come in here just to criticize my toilet?”

“No, but I think you have answered what I was going to ask. When you say you will be dealing with merchants, I gather it means that you and Father have resolved your differences with the evil Arab Achmad.”

“Yes, and quite pleasantly. He has conceded all the necessary permits. Do not speak of the Chief Minister in such a tone, Marco. He turns out to be—not so bad, after all.”

“I am pleased to hear it,” I said, though not much believing it. “I have to go and see him right now.”

Uncle Mafìo sat up from his recumbent position. “Did he bid you stop to see me—for any reason?”

“No, no. I merely must collect from him some money that I do not know what to do with.”

“Ah,” said my uncle, lying back again. “Give it to Nico to invest in the Compagnia. You could not make any better investment.”

I said, after some hesitation, “I must remark, uncle, that you seem in a much better humor now than when we last spoke in private.”

“E cussì? I am back in business again.”

“I was not referring to—well, material things.”

“Ah, my famous condition,” he said wryly. “You would prefer to see me drooped and draped in melancholy.”

“I would not, uncle. I am delighted if you have in some measure made peace with yourself.”

“That is kind of you, nephew,” he said in a more gentle voice. “And in truth I have. I discovered that a man who cannot any longer be given pleasure can yet find considerable pleasure in giving pleasure.”

“Whatever that means, I am glad for you.”

“You may not believe this,” he said, almost shyly. “But, in a mood to experiment, I found I could even give pleasure to this one who is shaving me. Yes—do not look so startled—to a female. And in return she taught me some feminine arts of giving pleasure.” He seemed suddenly embarrassed by his own air of embarrassment, and gave a loud laugh to blow it away. “I may have a whole new career ahead of me. Thank you for inquiring, Marco, but spare me my blushes. If Achmad is expecting you, you had best run along.”

When I entered the sumptuously appointed sanctum of the Chief Minister, the Vice-Regent, the Finance Minister, he did not rise or salute me. Instead, unlike the Khan of All Khans, he obviously expected me to make ko-tou, and waited for me to do it, and when I stood up again he did not offer me a seat. The Wali Achmad looked like any other Arab—hawk—beak nose, stiff black beard, dark and grainy complexion—except that he was cleaner than most Arabs I had seen in Arab lands, he having adopted the Kithai custom of frequent bathing. Also, he had the coldest eyes I ever saw in an Arab or any other Easterner. Brown eyes are usually as warm as qahwah, but his looked more like chips of the Mukha agate stone. He wore Arab aba and kaffiyah, but not of flimsy cotton; of silks colored like a rainbow.

“Your wages, Folo,” he said ungraciously, and shoved across his table no purse of money, but an untidy pile of slips of paper.

I picked them up and examined them. The slips were all alike: made of dark and durable mulberry paper, decorated on both sides with complex designs and a multitude of words both in Han characters and Mongol alphabet, done in black ink, over which a large and intricate seal mark had been added in red ink. I did not say thank you. I had taken an instant, instinctive dislike to the man, and was quite prepared to suspect chicanery. So I said:

“Excuse me, Wali Achmad, but am I being paid in pagheri?”

“I do not know,” he said languidly. “What does the word mean?”

“Pagherì are papers promising to repay a loan, or to pay in the future some pledge made. They are a convenience of the commerce of Venice.”

“Then I suppose you could call these pagherì, for they are also a convenience, being the legal tender of this realm. We took over the system from the Han, who call it ‘flying money.’ Each of those papers you hold is worth a liang of silver.”

I pushed the little pile back across the table toward him. “If it please the Wali, then, I should prefer to take the silver.”

“You have the equivalent,” he snapped. “That much silver would make your purse drag the floor. It is the beauty of the flying money that large sums, even immense sums, can be exchanged or transported without weight or bulk. Or hidden away in your mattress, if you are a miser. Also, when you pay for a purchase, the merchant need not every time weigh the currency and verify its metal’s purity.”

“You mean,” I said, unconvinced, “I could go into the market and buy a bowl of mian to eat and the vendor would accept one of these pieces of paper in payment?”

“Bismillah! He would give you his whole market-stall for it. Probably his wife and children as well. I told you: each of those is worth a whole liang. A liang is one thousand tsien, and for one tsien you could buy twenty or thirty bowls of mian. If you have need of small change—here.” He took from a drawer several packets of smaller sized papers. “How do you want it? Notes of half a liang each? A hundred tsien? What?”

Marveling, I said, “The flying money is made in all denominations? And the common folk accept them like real money?”

“It is real money, unbeliever! Cannot you read? Those words on the paper attest its realness. They proclaim its face value, and appended are the signatures of all the Khakhan’s numerous officers and bursars and clerks of the imperial treasury. My own name is among them. And over all is stamped in red ink a much bigger yin—the great seal of Kubilai himself. Those are guarantees that at any time the paper can be exchanged for its face amount in actual silver from the treasury stores. Thus the paper is as real as the silver it represents.”

“But if,” I persisted, “someday someone should wish to redeem one of these papers, and it were repudiated …?”

Achmad said drily, “If the time ever comes when the Khakhan’s yin evokes disrespect, you will have many more urgent things to worry about than your wages. We all will.”

Still examining the flying money, I mused aloud, “Nevertheless, I should think it would be less trouble for the treasury simply to issue the bits of silver. I mean, if there are sheaves of these little papers circulating throughout the realm, and if every official must write his name on every last one—”

“We do not write our names over and over again,” said Achmad, beginning to sound very annoyed. “We write them only once, and from that signature the palace Master Yinmaker makes a yin, which is a backward-written word like an engraved seal, and can be inked and stamped on paper innumerable times. Surely even you uncivilized Venetians are familiar with seals.”

“Yes, Wali Achmad.”

“Very well. For the making of a piece of money, all the necessary separate yin for words and characters and letters are arranged and locked together into a form of the proper size. The form is repeatedly inked and the papers pressed onto it one by one. It is a process the Han call zi-shu-ju, which means something like ‘the gathered writing.’”

I nodded. “Our Western monks will often cut a backward block of wood for the big initial letter of a manuscript, and impress several pages with it, for the several Friars Illuminators to color and elaborate in their individual styles, before proceeding to write the rest of the page by hand.”

Achmad shook his head. “In the gathered writing the impression need not be limited to the initial letter, and no hand writing need be done at all. By the molding in terra-cotta of many identical yin of every character in the Han language—and now having yin of every letter of the Mongol alphabet—this zi-shu-ju can combine any number of yin into any number of words. Thus can be composed whole pages of writing, and those combined into whole books. Zi-shu-ju can produce them in great quantities, every copy alike, far more quickly and perfectly than any scribes can indite by hand. If provided with yin of the Arabic alphabet and of the Roman alphabet, the process could produce books in any known language, equally easily and abundantly and cheaply.”

“Say you so?” I murmured. “Why, Wali, that is an invention more to be admired even than the advantages of the flying money.”

“You are right, Folo. I perceived that myself, the first time I saw one of the gathered-writing books. I thought of sending some of the Han experts westward to teach the doing of the zi-shu-ju in my native Arabia. But fortunately I learned in time that the zi-shu-ju forms are inked with brushes made of the bristles of swine. So it would be unthinkable to suggest the process to the nations of holy Islam.”

“Yes, I can see that. Well, I thank you, Wali Achmad, both for the instruction and for the wages.” I began to put the papers away in my belt purse.

“Allow me,” he said casually, “to proffer one or two other bits of instruction. There are some places you cannot spend the flying money. The Fondler, for example, will take bribes only in solid gold. But I think you already knew that.”

Taking care to make my face expressionless, I raised my eyes from my purse to his cold agate gaze. I wondered how much else he knew about my doings, and obligingly he told me:

“I would not dream of suggesting that you disobey the Khakhan. He did instruct you to make inquiries. But I will suggest that you confine your inquiries to the upper stories of the palace. Not down in Master Fing’s dungeons. Not even in the servants’ quarters.”

So he knew that I had put an ear belowstairs. But did he know why? Did he know that I was interested in the Minister of Lesser Races, and, if he did, why should he care? Or did he fear that I might hear something damaging to Achmad the Chief Minister? I kept my face expressionless and waited.

“Cellar dungeons are unhealthy places,” he went on, as indifferently as if he were warning me against rheumatic damp. “But tortures can happen aboveground as well, and far worse ones than anything the Fondler inflicts.”

I had to correct him there. “I am sure there could be nothing worse than the Death of a Thousand. Perhaps, Wali Achmad, you are unacquainted with—”

“I am acquainted with it. But even the Fondler knows how to inflict a death worse than that one. And I know several.” He smiled—or his lips did; his stone eyes did not. “You Christians think of Hell as the most terrible torture there can be, and your Bible tells you that Hell consists of pain. ‘To be cast into the Hell of fire, where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished.’ So spoke your gentle Jesus, at Capharnaum, to His disciples. Like your Jesus, I warn you not to flirt with Hell, Marco Folo, and not to pursue any temptations that might put you there. But I will tell you something more about Hell than your Christian Bible does. Hell is not necessarily an ever burning fire or a gnawing worm or a physical pain of any sort. Hell is not necessarily even a place. Hell is whatever hurts worst.”

11.

I went from the chambers of the Chief Minister directly to my own, intending to tell Nostril to cease his spy activities—at least until I could give some serious cogitation to the Wali’s warnings and threats. But Nostril was not there; another slave was. Biliktu and Buyantu met me in the vestibule, their eyebrows haughtily aloft, to inform me that a slave, a stranger, had come calling and had begged leave to stay and wait my return. The twins, not being owned by me or anybody, were always disdainful of their inferiors, but they seemed even more than usually bothered by this one. Rather curious to see what had provoked them, I went into my main room. A woman was seated on a bench there. When I came in, she swept down to the floor in a graceful ko-tou, and stayed kneeling until I bade her rise. She stood up, and I looked at her, and I looked with wide eyes.

The palace slaves, when their errands brought them from their cellars or kitchens or stables up among their betters, were always well dressed, to reflect credit on their masters, so it was not the woman’s fine garb that made me stare. What struck me was that she wore it as if she deserved nothing but the best, and was used to it, and was aware that no richest raiment would ever outshine her own radiance.

She was not a girl; she must have been about the same age as Nostril or my Uncle Mafio. But her face was unlined, and the years had marked her beauty only with dignity. If any youthful brook-twinkle had gone from her eyes, it had been replaced by forest-pool depth and placidity. There were some threads of silver in her hair, but it was mostly a warm, ruddy black, and not Kithai-straight, but a tumble of curls. Her figure was erect and, as far as I could make out through the brocade robes, still firm and nicely shaped.

When I continued to greet her only with a gawk, she said, in a velvet voice, “You are, I believe, the master of the slave Ali Babar.”

“Who?” I said stupidly. “Oh, him. Yes, Ali Babar belongs to me.”

To cover my momentary confusion, I mumbled an excuse-me, and went to peer into a jar to see how my flaming powder was doing. So this was the Turki Princess Mar-Janah! A day or two ago, I had poured the huo-yao from one of the two baskets into a sturdier jar. No wonder Nostril had been enamored once before, and was now again. Then I had poured some water into that portion of the powder. No wonder Nostril was ready to promise an extravagant change in himself, to win this woman. Despite the Firemaster’s skepticism, I had wanted to see whether I could make the powder more stable in the form of a thick mud. Any man would make that extravagant promise, and probably would change, too, or die trying. But it seemed the Firemaster had been right to scoff at my suggestion. How in God’s name had a buffoon like Nostril ever got even remotely acquainted with such a woman as this? The wet powder was only a morose, dark-gray sludge, and showed no sign of ever becoming anything else. A woman such as this ought to laugh at a thing like Nostril—or jeer. The powder might be stable in the form of muck, but it would never ignite. Or retch violently. Vakh!

“Tell me if I have guessed right, Master Marco,” said Mar-Janah. She sounded amused, but was obviously trying to help me compose my scattered wits. “You asked me here to regale me with praises of your slave Ali Babar.”

I coughed a few times, and tried: “Nost—” I coughed again and tried again: “Ali can boast of a good many virtues and talents and attainments.”

That much I could say without a blush, and without speaking one word of falsehood, for if any true thing could be said about Nostril it was, by God, that he could boast.

Mar-Janah smiled slightly and said, “As I have it from our fellow slaves, they cannot decide which is greater: Ali Babar’s monumental self-admiration or the windiness with which he expresses it. But all agree that those are traits to be commended in a man who has so abjectly failed at everything else.”

I stared at her, and I think my mouth hung open. Then I said, “Wait a moment. You evidently know a great deal about Nost—about Ali. Yet you are not even supposed to know he is in residence here.”

“I know more than that. I know that the other slaves are wrong in their mocking appraisal of him. When I first met Ali Babar, he was everything that he now only pretends he is.”

“I do not believe it,” I said flatly. Then I more courteously put a question, “Will you take cha with me?”

I clapped my hands and Buyantu appeared so promptly that I suspected she had been jealously lurking and listening just outside the curtained doorway. I ordered cha for the visitor and pu-tao for myself, and Buyantu went out again.

I turned back to Mar-Janah. “I would be interested to know more—about you and Ali Babar.”

“We were young then,” she said reminiscently. “The Arab bandits galloped out of the hills, down on my carriage, and they killed the coachman, but Ali was riding postilion, and they took him alive. They bore us away to their caves in the hills, and Ali was to be the messenger who would carry their ransom demand to my father. But I bade him refuse, and he did. At which, they laughed and they beat him most cruelly and they sealed him into a great jar of sesame oil. It would soften his obduracy, they said.”

I nodded. “It is a thing the Arabs do. It softens more than obduracy.”

“But Ali Babar did not soften. I did, or I pretended to. I feigned an infatuation for the bandit leader, though it was the staunch and loyal Ali with whom I had fallen in love. My pretense won me some measure of freedom, and one night I contrived to free Ali from the big jar, and to procure for him a sword.”

Buyantu returned, and Biliktu with her, each of them carrying a drink. They gave Mar-Janah her cup, and me my goblet, lingering to get a good look at the handsome visitor, as if they feared that I was recruiting an unwelcome fourth for our menage. I waved them out, and prompted Mar-Janah to continue: “Well?”

“All went well. On Ali’s instructions, I pretended further. I feigned submission to the chieftain’s lust that night, and, as planned, when I had him most vulnerable, Ali Babar leapt through the bed curtains and slew him. Then Ali bravely slashed our way through the other bandits, as they awakened and converged, and we got to the horses. By Allah’s mercy, we got safe away.”

“This is all very hard to believe.”

“The only disadvantage to our plan was that I had to make my escape stark naked.” She modestly turned her face away from me. “But that made it sublimely easy for me—when we lay down for the rest of the night in a friendly forest glade—to reward Ali as he deserved.”

“A better reward—or so I understand—than your father the King gave him.”

She sighed. “He promoted Ali to Chief Drover, and sent him far away from the palace. A royal father prefers a royal son-in-law. He never got one, though. Much to his vexation, I spurned all later suitors, even after I heard that Ali Babar had been taken in slavery. My spinsterhood probably saved my life when, some years afterward, our royal house was overthrown.”

“I know about that, yes.”

“I was left my life, but not much else. Allah’s ways are sometimes inscrutable. When I was handed over to the Ilkhan Abagha, he thought he was getting a royal concubine. He was outraged to find I was not a virgin, and he gave me to his Mongol troops. They cared nothing about virginity and were much amused to have a royal plaything. When they had had their sport, the remains of me were sold in the slave market. I have passed through many hands since then.”

“I am sorry. What can one say? It must have been terrible.”

“Not so very.” Like a spirited mare, she tossed her mane of dark curls. “I had learned how to pretend, you see. I pretended that every man was my handsome, brave Ali Babar. And now I hope Allah has brought me near to my own reward. If you had not summoned me to this meeting, Master Marco, I should have sought audience—to ask if you will assist our reunion. Will you tell Ali that I yearn to be his again, and that I hope we will be allowed to marry?”

I coughed some more, uncertain of how to proceed. “Ahem—Princess Mar-Janah …”

“Slave Mar-Janah,” she corrected me. “There are even stricter marriage rules for slaves than for royalty.”

“Mar-Janah, the man you remember so fondly—I assure you he remembers you the same way. But he believes you have not yet recognized him. Frankly, I am amazed that you could have done.”

She smiled again. “You see him, then, as his fellow slaves do. From what they tell me, he has changed most markedly.”

“From what they—? Then you have not seen him.”

“Oh, of course I have. But I do not know what he looks like. I still see the champion who battled for me against the Arab abductors, twenty years ago, and made tender love to me that night. He is young, and as straight and slender as the written letter alif, and beautiful in a manly way. Much as you are, Master Marco.”

“Thank you,” I said, but faintly, for I was still bemused. Had she not even noticed the one outstanding unbeautifulness that had earned him the name of Nostril? I said, “Far be it from me to disillusion a lovely lady of her lovely imaginings, but—”

“Master Marco, no woman can ever be disillusioned about the man she truly loves.” She set down her cup and came close to me and shyly put out a hand to touch my face. “I am near old enough to be your mother. May I tell you a motherly thing?”

“Please do.”

“You too are handsome, and young, and someday soon a woman will truly love you. Whether Allah grants that you and she live together all your lives—or requires, as happened to Ali Babar and me, that you be not united until a long time after your first meeting—you will grow older, and so will she. I cannot predict whether you will grow feeble and bent, or gross, or bald, or ugly, but it will not matter. This I can say with certainty: she will see you always as you were when you met. To the very end of your days. Or hers.”

“Your Highness,” I said, and with feeling, for if ever anyone merited a lofty title, it was she. “God grant that I find a woman of such loving heart and eye as you possess. But, in conscience, I must remark that a man can change in ways that cannot be seen.”

“You feel you must inform me that Ali Babar has not remained a good man during all these years? Not a steadfast or faithful or admirable or even a manly man? I know that he has been a slave, and I know that slaves are expected to be creatures less than human.”

“Well, yes,” I muttered. “He said something of the same sort. He said he tried to become the worst thing in the world, because he had lost the best.”

She thought about that, and said pensively, “Whatever he and I have been, he will more readily see the marks on me than I on him.”

It was my turn to correct her. “That is flagrantly untrue. To say that you have survived beautifully would be to say the least. When I first heard of Mar-Janah, I expected to see a pitiable ruin, but I see a princess still.”

She shook her head. “I was a maiden when Ali Babar knew me, and I was entire. That is to say, although I was born a Muslim, I was of royal blood and so had not been deprived of my bizir in infancy. I had then a body to be proud of, and Ali exulted in it. But since then, I have been the toy of half a Mongol army, and of as many men afterward, and some men mistreat their toys.” She looked away from me once more, but went on: “You and I have spoken frankly; I will continue to do so. My meme are ringed with the scars of teethmarks. My bizir has been stretched to flaccidity. My gobek is slack and loose-lipped. I have miscarried three times and now can never conceive again.”

I had to guess the meaning of the Turki words she had used, but I could not mistake the sincerity with which she concluded:

“If Ali Babar can love what is left of me, Master Marco, do you think I cannot love what is left of him?”

“Your Highness,” I said again, and again with feeling, though my voice was a little choked, “I stand abashed and ashamed—and enlightened. If Ali Babar can deserve a woman like you, he is more of a man than I ever suspected. And I should be less the man if I did not exert myself to see you wed to him. So that I may start immediately to make arrangements, tell me: what are the palace rules regarding slave marriages?”

“That the owners of both parties must give permission, and must concur in the matter of where the couple shall reside. That is all, but not every master is so lenient as you.”

“Who is your master? I will send to ask audience with him.”

Her voice faltered a bit. “My master, I am sorry to say, has little mastery in his household. You will have to address his wife.”

“Singular household,” I observed. “But that need not complicate matters. Who is she?”

“The Lady Chao Ku-an. She is one of the court artists, but by title she is the Armorer of the Palace Guard.”

“Oh. Yes. I have heard of her.”

“She is—” Mar-Janah paused, to choose carefully the description. “She is a strong-willed woman. The Lady Chao desires that her slaves be entirely hers, and commandable at all hours.”

“I am not exactly weak-willed, myself,” I said. “And I have promised that your twenty-year separation is to end here and now. As soon as the arrangements are made, I will see you and your champion reunited. Until then …”

“May Allah bless you, good master and friend Marco,” she said, with a smile as bright as the tears in her eyes.

I called for Buyantu and Biliktu, and told them to see the visitor to the door. They accompanied her ungraciously, with frowning brows and curled lips, so, when they returned, I spoke to them severely.

“Your superiority of manner is less than mannerly, and it ill becomes you, my dears. I know you to be of only twenty-two-karat valuation. The lady you have so grudgingly attended is, in my estimation, of a perfect twenty-four. Now, Buyantu, you go and present my compliments to the Lady Chao Ku-an, and say that Marco Polo requests an appointment to call upon her.”

When she left, and Biliktu flounced off to sulk in some other room, I went and took one more disappointed look at my jar full of huo-yao sludge. Clearly, those fifty liang of the flaming powder were now ruined beyond salvage. So I set the jar aside, picked up the remaining basket and contemplated the contents of that. After a while, I began very carefully to pick out from the mixture some grains of the saltpeter. When I had a dozen or so of the white specks, I lightly moistened the end of an ivory fan handle. I picked up the saltpeter with that, and idly held it in the flame of a nearby candle. The grains instantly melted into a glaze on the ivory. I gave that some thought. The Firemaster had been right about wetting the powder, and he had warned me not to try baking it. But suppose I set a pot of the huo-yao on a low fire, not very hot, so that its integral saltpeter melted and thereby held the whole together … ? My meditations were interrupted by the return of Buyantu, reporting that the Lady Chao would see me that very moment.

I went, and I introduced myself, “Marco Polo, my lady,” and I made a proper ko-tou.

“My lord husband has spoken of you,” she said, indicating that I should rise by giving me a playful nudge with a bare foot. Her hands were occupied in playing with an ivory ball, as her husband had done, for the suppling of the fingers.

As I stood, she went on, “I wondered when you would deign to call upon this lowly female courtier.” Her voice was as musical as wind chimes, but seemed somehow just as devoid of any human agency in the making of that music. “Would you wish to discuss my titular office, or my real work? Or my pastimes in between?”

That last was said with a leer. Lady Chao evidently and correctly assumed that, like everyone else, I had heard of her gluttonous appetite for men. I will confess that I was briefly tempted to join her cupboard of morsels. She was about my own age and would have been fetchingly beautiful if she had not had her eyebrows plucked entirely off and her delicate features coated with a dead-white powder. I was, as always, curious to discover what was beneath the rich silk robes—in this case, especially, because I had not yet lain with a woman of the Han race. But I restrained my curiosity and said:

“None of those today, my lady, if you please. I come on a different—”

“Ah, a bashful one,” she said, and changed her leer to a simper. “Let us begin, then, by talking of your favorite pastimes.”

“On some other occasion, perhaps, Lady Chao. I would speak today of your female slave named Mar-Janah.”

“Aiya!” she exclaimed, which is the Han equivalent of “vakh!” She sat abruptly upright on her couch, and she frowned—and a frown is very unpleasant to look at when it is done without eyebrows—and she snapped, “You find that Turki wench more appealing than I am?”

“Why, no, my lady,” I lied. “Having been nobly born in my native land, I would never—there or here—even consider admiring any but a woman of perfect pedigree, such as yourself.” I tactfully did not point out that she was only nobility and Mar-janah was royalty.

But she seemed mollified. “That is well said.” She leaned voluptuously back again. “On the other hand, I have sometimes discovered that a grimy and sweaty soldier can be appealing … .”

She trailed off, as if inviting comment, but I did not care to be drawn into a contest of comparing our experiences of perversity. So I attempted to continue, “Regarding the slave—”

“The slave, the slave …” She sighed, and pouted, and petulantly tossed and caught the ivory ball. “For a moment there, you were well spoken, as a gallant should be when calling on a lady. But you prefer to talk of slaves.”

I reminded myself that any business with a Han ought to be approached roundabout, only after long exchanges of trivialities. So I said gallantly, “I would much rather talk of my Lady Chao, and her surpassing beauty.”

“That is better.”

“I am a little surprised that, with such a choice model so conveniently at hand, the Master Chao has not made many paintings of her.”

“He has,” she said, and smirked.

“I regret that he showed me none.”

“He would not if he could, and he cannot. They are in the possession of the various other lords who were portrayed in the same pictures. And those lords are not likely to show them to you, either.”

I did not have to ponder on that remark to realize what it meant. I would defer making judgment on Master Chao—whether I felt sympathy for his predicament or disgust for his pliant complicity in it—but I knew that I did not much like his young lady, and I would be glad to quit her company. So I made no further attempt at small talk.

“I beg that my lady will forgive my persistence in the subject of the slave, but I seek to right a wrong of long duration. I entreat the Lady Chao’s permission for her slave Mar-Janah to marry.”

“Aiya!” she exclaimed again, and loudly. “That aging slut is pregnant!”

“No, no.”

Unhearing, she went on, while her nonexistent eyebrows writhed. “But that does not obligate you! No man weds a slave just because he has impregnated her.”

“I did not!”

“The embarrassment is slight, and easily disposed of. I will call her in and kick her in the belly. Concern yourself no further.”

“My concern is not—”

“It is, however, a matter for speculation.” Her little red tongue came out and licked her little red lips. “The physicians all pronounced that woman barren. You must be exceptionally potent.”

“Lady Chao, the woman is not pregnant and it is not I who would marry her!”

“What?” For the first time, her face lost all expression.

“It is a man slave of my own who has been long enamored of your Mar-Janah. I merely entreat your concurrence in my permission for them to wed and live together.”

She stared at me. Ever since I had come in, the young lady had been assuming one expression after another—of invitation, of coyness, of petulance—and now I saw why she had kept her features so much in motion. That white face, without some conscious contortion, was as empty as a sheet of unwritten paper. I wondered: would the rest of her body be as unexciting? Were Han women all blanks that only sporadically assumed human semblance? I was almost grateful when she put on a look of annoyance and said:

“That Turki woman is my dresser and applier of cosmetics. Not even my lord husband infringes on her time. I do not see why I should share her with a husband of her own.”

“Then perhaps you would sell her outright? I can pay a sum that will purchase an excellent replacement.”

“Are you now trying to insult me? Do you imply that I cannot afford to give away a slave, if I so choose?”

She bounded up from the couch and, her little bare feet twinkling, her robes and ribbons and tassels and perfumed powder swirling in her wake, she left the room. I stood and wondered if I had been summarily dismissed or if she had gone for a guardsman to take me in charge. The young woman was as exasperatingly changeable as her inconstant face. In just our brief conversation, she had managed to accuse me in quick succession of being bashful, presumptuous, salacious, meddlesome, gullible and finally offensive. I was not surprised that such a woman required an endless supply of lovers; she probably forgot each one in the moment that he slunk from her bed.

But she came tripping into the room again, unaccompanied, and flung at me a piece of paper. I snatched and caught it before it drifted to the floor. I could not read the Mongol writing on it, but she told me what it was, saying contemptuously:

“Title to the slave Mar-Janah. I give it to you. The Turki is yours to do with as you please.” In its fickle way, her face went from contempt to a seductive smile. “And so am I. Do what you will—to render me proper thanks.”

I might have had to, and I could probably have nerved myself to do it, if she had commanded it earlier. But she had incautiously given me the paper now, before setting a price on it. So I folded it into my purse, and bowed, and said with all the floweriness I could muster:

“Your humble supplicant does indeed most fervently thank the gracious Lady Chao Ku-an. And, I am sure, so will the lowly slaves likewise honor and bless your name, as soon as I inform them of your bountiful goodness, which I shall this minute go and do. Until we meet again, then, noble lady—”

“What?” she screeched, like a wind chime being blown to pieces. “You would simply turn and walk away?”

I was inclined to say no, that I would run if it were not undignified. However, having told her I was well born, I maintained my courteous manner and bowed repeatedly as I backed toward the door, murmuring things like “most benevolent” and “undying gratitude.”

Her paper face was now a palimpsest written over with disbelief, shock and outrage, all at once. She was holding the ivory ball as if about to throw it at me. “Many men have regretted my sending them away,” she said menacingly, through clenched teeth. “You will be the first to regret having gone away unbidden.”

I had bowed my way out into the corridor by then, but I heard her shriek a few words as I turned to flee for my own chambers.

“And I promise! That you will! Regret it!”

I have to say that it was not any sudden access of rectitude that made me run from the Lady Chao’s proffered embrace, nor any concern I felt for her husband’s sensibilities, nor any fear of compromising consequences that might ensue. It seemed likelier that consequences would ensue from my not having ravished her. No, it was none of those things, and it was not even the general repugnance she inspired in me. To be perfectly honest, I had been mainly repelled by her feet. I must explain about that, because many other Han women had the same sort of feet.

They were called “lotus points,” and the incredibly tiny shoes for them were called “lotus cups.” Not until later did I learn that the Lady Chao—apart from her other immodesties which I easily recognized—had been lascivious beyond the bounds of harlotry just in letting me see her feet bare of their lotus cups. The lotus points of a woman were deemed by the Han her most intimate parts, to be kept more carefully covered than even the pink parts between her legs.

It seems that, many years ago, there lived a Han court dancer who could dance on her toes, and that posture—her seeming to be balanced on points—excited every man who saw her dance. So other women, ever since, had enviously been trying to emulate that fabled seductress. Her contemporary sister dancers must have tried various ways to diminish their already woman-sized feet, and not too successfully, for the women of later days went further. By the time I came to Khanbalik, there were many Han women who had had their feet compressed by their mothers from their infancy, and had grown up thus crippled, and were carrying on the gruesome tradition by binding their own daughters’ feet.

What a mother would do was take her girl-child’s foot and double it under, the toes as near to the heel as possible, and tie it so, until it stayed that way, and then double it even more tightly, and tie it so. By the time a girl reached womanhood, she could wear lotus cups that were literally no bigger than drinking cups. Naked, those feet looked like the claws of a small bird just yanked from its grip on a twig perch. A lotus-pointed woman had to walk with mincing, precarious steps, and only seldom walked at all, because that gait was regarded by the Han as other people would regard a woman’s most flagrantly provocative gesture. Just to say certain words—feet or toes or lotus points or walking—in reference to a woman, or in the presence of a decent woman, would cause as many gasps as shouting “pota!” in a Venetian drawing room.

I grant that the lotus crippling of a Han woman constituted a less cruel mutilation than the Muslim practice of snipping off the butterfly from between the petals of her lotus higher up her body. Nevertheless, I winced at sight of such feet, even when they were modestly shod, for the lotus-cup shoes resembled the leather pods with which some beggars cover the stumps of their amputations. My detestation of the lotus points made me something of a curiosity among the Han. All the Han men with whom I became acquainted thought me odd—or maybe impotent, or even depraved—when I averted my eyes from a lotus-pointed woman. They frankly confessed that they got aroused by the glimpse of a woman’s nether extremities, as I might by a glimpse of her breast. They proudly averred that their little virile organs actually came erect whenever they heard an unmentionable word like “feet,” or even when they let their minds imagine those unrevealable parts of a female person.

At any rate, the Lady Chao that afternoon had so dampened my natural ardors that, when Buyantu undressed me at bedtime, and insinuated into the act some suggestive fondling, I asked to be excused. So she and Biliktu lay down together on my bed and I merely sat drinking arkhi and looking on, while the naked girls played with each other and with a su-yang. That was a kind of mushroom native to Kithai, shaped exactly like a man’s organ, even to having a reticulation of veins about it, but somewhat smaller in length and girth. However, as Buyantu demonstrated, when she gently slid it in and out of her sister a few times, and Biliktu’s yin juices began to flow, the su-yang somehow absorbed those juices and got bigger and firmer. When it had attained a quite prodigious size, the twins had themselves a joyous time, using that phallocrypt on each other in various and ingenious ways. It was a sight that should have been as rousing to me as feet to a Han man, but I only smiled on them tolerantly and, when they had exhausted each other, I lay down between their warm, moist bodies and went to sleep.

12.

THE twins, fatigued, were still sleeping when I eased out from between them the next morning. Nostril had not been anywhere in evidence the night before, and was not in his closet when I went to look for him. So, being temporarily without any servants at all, I stirred up the embers of the brazier in my main room and brewed myself a pot of cha with which to break my fast. While I sipped at it, I bethought myself of trying the experiment I had been contemplating the previous day. I put just enough charcoal on the brazier to keep it burning, but at a very low flame. Then I rummaged about my chambers until I found a stoneware pot with a lid, and I poured into that my remaining fifty-liang measure of flaming powder, lidded it securely and set it on the brazier. At that moment, Nostril came in, looking rather rumpled and seedy, but pleased with himself.

“Master Marco,” he said, “I have been up all night. Some of the menservants and horse herders started a gambling game of zhi-pai cards in the stable, and it is still going on. I watched the play for some hours until I grasped the rules of the game. Then I wagered some silver, and I won, too. But when I scooped in my winnings I was dismayed to see that I had won only this sheaf of dirty papers, so I quit in disgust at men who play only with worthless vouchers.”

“You ass,” I said. “Have you never seen flying money before? As well as I can tell, you are holding there the equivalent of a month of my wages. You should have stayed, as long as you were doing so well.” He looked bewildered, so I said, “I will explain later. Meanwhile, I rejoice to see that one of us can squander his time in frivolity. The slave plays the prodigal while his master labors and scurries about on the slave’s errands. I have had a visit from your Princess Mar-Janah and—”

“Oh, master!” he exclaimed, and turned colors, as if he had been an adolescent boy and I were twitting him on his first mooncalf love.

“We will speak later of that also. I will just say that your gambling earnings should serve you and her to set up housekeeping together.”

“Oh, master! Al-hamdo-lillah az iltifat-i-shoma!”

“Later, later. Right now, I must bid you to cease your spying activities. I have heard intimations of displeasure, from a lord whom I think we would be wise not to displease.”

“As you command, master. But it may be that I have already procured a trifle of information that may interest you. That is why I stayed sleepless and absent from my master’s quarters all the night long, being not frivolous but assiduous in my master’s behalf.” He put on a look of self-sacrifice and self-righteousness. “Men get as talkative as women when they play at cards. And these men, for mutual comprehension, all talked in the Mongol tongue. When one of them made a passing reference to the Minister Pao Nei-ho, I thought I ought to linger. Since I was instructed by my master to make no overt inquiries, I could only listen. And my devoted patience kept me there all night, never drowsing, never getting drunk, never even departing to relieve my bladder, never—”

“No need to beat me over the head with hints, Nostril. I accept that you were working while you played. Come to the point.”

“For what it is worth, master, the Minister of Lesser Races is himself of a lesser race.”

I blinked. “How say you?”

“He evidently passes here for a Han, but he is really of the Yi people of Yun-nan Province.”

“Who told you so? How reliable is this information?”

“As I said, the game was played in the stables. That is because a stud of horses was yesterday brought in from the south, and their drovers are at leisure until they are dispatched on another karwan. Several of them are natives of Yun-nan, and one of them said, offhand, that he had glimpsed the Minister Pao here at the palace. And later another said yes, he had recognized him also, as a former petty magistrate of some little Yun-nan prefecture. And later another said yes, but let us not give him away. If Pao has escaped from the backwoods and prospers by passing as a Han here in the great capital, let us let him go on enjoying his success. Thus they spoke, Master Marco, and not falsely but credibly, it seemed to me.”

“Yes,” I murmured. I was remembering: the Minister Pao had indeed spoken of “us Han” as if he belonged among that people, and of “the obstreperous Yi” as if he concurred in regarding that people as distasteful. Well, I mused, the Chief Minister Achmad may have warned me too late to cease my covert investigations. But, if he was to be angry because I had learned this much of a secret, I must risk making him angrier still.

The twins had waked, perhaps from hearing us talking, and Buyantu came into the main room, looking rather prettily tousled. To her I said, “Run straight to the chambers of the Khan Kubilai, and present to his attendants the compliments of Marco Polo, and inquire if an early appointment can be fixed for me to see the Khakhan on a matter of some urgency.”

She started to go back into the bedroom to arrange her dress and hair more orderly, but I said, “Urgency, Buyantu, is urgency. Go as you are, and go quickly.” To Nostril I said, “You go to your closet and catch up on your sleep. We will discuss our other concerns when I return.”

If I return, I thought, as I went into my bedchamber to dress in my most formal court costume. For all I knew, the Khakhan might, like the Wali Achmad, disapprove of my having taken it upon myself to ferret out secrets, and might express his disapproval in some violent manner not at all to my liking.

Biliktu was just then making up the very disordered bed, and she grinned impishly at me when she found among the covers the su-yang phallocrypt, now as small and limp as any real organ would have been after the exercise it had enjoyed. Seeing it, I decided to take this opportunity for some similar exercise of my own, since there was no knowing whether it might not be my last opportunity for a while. So, being at that moment undressed, I took gentle hold of Biliktu and began to undress her.

She seemed faintly startled. It had, after all, been a long time since she and I had indulged. She struggled a little and murmured, “I do not think I should, Master Marco.”

“Come,” I said heartily. “You cannot be still indisposed. If you could employ that”—I nodded at the discarded su-yang—“you can employ a real one.”

And she did, with no further demur except an occasional whimper, and a tendency to keep moving away from my caresses and thrusts, as if to prevent my penetrating her very deeply. I assumed that she was merely still weary, or perhaps a little sore, from the preceding night, and her maidenly show of reluctance did not prevent my enjoying myself. Indeed, my enjoyment may have been keener than it had been for some while past, from the realization that I was inside Biliktu for a change, and not her twin.

I had finished, and most delightfully, but still had my red jewel inside Biliktu, relishing the final few diminishing squeezes of her lotus-petal muscles, when a voice said harshly, “The Khakhan will see you as soon as you can get there.”

It was Buyantu, standing over the bed, glowering fiercely at me and her sister. Biliktu gave another whimper that was almost a whinny of fright, wriggled out of my embrace and out of the bed. Buyantu spun on her heel and stamped from the room. I also got up and got dressed, taking great care with my appearance. Biliktu dressed at the same time, but seemed to be dawdling, as if deliberately to make sure that I was the first to confront Buyantu.

That one stood waiting in the main room, with her arms folded tight inside her sleeves and a thundercloud expression on her face, like a schoolmistress waiting to chastise a naughty pupil. She opened her mouth, but I raised a masterly hand to stop her.

“I had not realized until now,” I said. “You are displaying jealousy, Buyantu, and I think that is most selfish of you. For months now, it is clear, you have been gradually weaning me away from Biliktu. I ought to be flattered, I suppose, that you want me all for yourself. But I really must protest. Any such unsisterly jealousy could disturb the peace our little domicile has heretofore enjoyed. We will all continue to share, and share alike, and you must simply resign yourself to sharing with your sister my affection and attentions.”

She stared at me as if I had uttered pure gibberish, and then she burst into a laughter that did not signify amusement.

“Jealous?” she cried. “Yes, I have grown jealous! And you will regret having taken that sordid advantage of my absence. You will regret that furtive quick frolic! But you think I am jealous of you? Why, you blind and strutting fool!”

I rocked with astonishment, never in my life having been so addressed by any servant. I thought she must have lost her senses. But in the next instant, I was even more severely shaken, for she raged on:

“You conceited goat of a Ferenghi! Jealous of you? It is her love I want! And for me alone!”

“You have it, Buyantu, and you know you have it!” cried Biliktu, hastening into the room and laying a hand on her sister’s arm.

Buyantu shrugged the hand away. “That is not what I saw.”

“I am sorry that you saw. And I am sorrier for having done it.” She glanced hatefully at me, where I stood stunned. “He took me unaware. I did not know how to resist.”

“You must learn to say no.”

“I will. I have. I promise.”

“We are twins. Nothing should ever come between us.”

“Nothing ever will, dearest, not ever again.”

“Remember, you are my little one.”

“Oh, I am! I am! And you are mine!”

Then they were in each other’s arms, and weeping lovers’ tears down each other’s necks. I stood shifting foolishly from one foot to the other, and finally cleared my throat and said:

“Well …”

Biliktu gave me a wet-eyed look of hurt and reproach.

“Well … uh … the Khakhan is waiting for me, girls.”

Buyantu gave me a look brimming with massacre.

“When I come back, we will … that is, I will be glad to hear suggestions … that is, somehow to rearrange …” I gave it up, and said instead, “Please, my dears. Until I return, if you can leave off groping at each other, I have a small chore for you. Do you see this pot on this brazier?”

They turned their heads to cast an indifferent regard on it. The pot had got quite hot, so I used a corner of my robe to lift its lid and look in. The contents emitted a thin, peevish sort of smoke, but showed no sign of having melted at all. I set the lid securely on it again and said, “Keep up the fire under it, girls, but keep it a very low fire.”

They unwound from each other, and dutifully came to the brazier, and Biliktu laid a few new chips of charcoal on the embers.

“Thank you,” I said. “It will require no other attendance than that. Simply stay close by it and keep it at a simmering heat. And when I return …”

But they had already dismissed me and were gazing soulfully at each other, so I went on my way.

Kubilai received me in his earthquake-engine chamber, and with no one else present, and he greeted me cordially but not effusively. He knew that I had something to say, and he was ready for me to say it at once. However, I did not wish just to blurt out the information I had brought, so I began circumspectly.

“Sire, I am desirous that I do not, in my ignorance, give undue weight or impetuosity to my small services. I believe I bring news of some value, but I cannot properly evaluate it without knowing more than the little I now know of the Khakhan’s disposition of his armies, and the nature of their objectives.”

Kubilai did not take affront at my presumption or tell me to go and inform myself from his underlings.

“Like any conqueror, I must hold what I have won. Fifteen years ago, when I was chosen Khan of All Khans of the Mongols, my own brother Arikbugha challenged my accession, and I had to put him down. More recently, I have several times had to stifle similar ambitions on the part of my cousin Kaidu.” He waved a dismissal of such trifles. “The mayflies continually plot to topple the cedar. Nuisances only, but they require my keeping portions of my troops on all the borders of Kithai.”

“May I ask, Sire, about those on the march, not in garrison?”

He gave me another summary, just as succinct. “If I am to keep secure this Kithai I won from the Chin, I must also have the southern lands of the Sung. I can best conquer them by encirclement, taking first the province of Yun-nan. So that is the only place where my armies are actively campaigning right now, under my very capable Orlok Bayan.”

Not to impugn the capability of his Orlok Bayan, I chose my next words with care.

“He has been engaged in that for some while now, I understand. Is it possible, Sire, that he is finding the conquest of Yun-nan more difficult than expected?”

Kubilai regarded me narrowly. “He is not about to be defeated, if that is what you mean. But neither is he having an easy victory. His advance had to be made from the land of To-Bhot, meaning that he had to come down into Yun-nan through the steeps of the Hang-duan Mountains. Our horse armies are better suited and more accustomed to fighting on flat plains. The Yi people of Yun-nan know every crevice of those mountains, and they fight in a shifty and cunning way—never facing us in force, but sniping from behind rocks and trees, then running to hide somewhere else. It is like trying to swat mosquitoes with a hod of bricks. Yes, you could fairly say that Bayan is finding it no easy conquest.”

I said, “I have heard the Yi called obstreperous.”

“Again, a fair enough description. From their safe concealments, they shout taunts of defiance. They evidently hold the delusion that they can resist long enough to make us go away. They are wrong.”

“But the longer they resist, the more men dead on both sides, and the land itself made poorer and less worth the taking.”

“Again, true enough. Unfortunately.”

“If they were disabused of their delusion of invincibility, Sire, might not the conquest be easier? With fewer dead and less ravagement of the province?”

“Yes. Do you know some way to dissolve that delusion?”

“I am not sure, Sire. Let me put it this way. Do you suppose the Yi are bolstered in their resistance by knowing that they have a friend here at court?”

The Khakhan’s gaze became that of a hunting chita. But he did not roar like a chita, he said as softly as a dove, “Marco Polo, let us not dance around the subject, like two Han in the market. Tell me who it is.”

“I have information, Sire, apparently reliable, that the Minister of Lesser Races, Pao Nei-ho, though posing as a Han, is really a Yi of Yun-nan.”

Kubilai sat pensive, though the blaze in his eyes did not abate, and after a while he growled to himself, “Vakh! Who can tell the damnable slant-eyes apart? And they are all equally perfidious.”

I thought I had better say, “That is the only information I have, Sire, and I accuse the Minister Pao of nothing. I have no evidence that he has spied for the Yi, or even been in communication with them in any way.”

“Sufficient is it that he misrepresented himself. You have done well, Marco Polo. I will call Pao in for questioning, and I may later have reason to speak to you again.”

When I left the Khakhan’s suite, I found a palace steward waiting for me in the corridor, with a message that the Chief Minister Achmad would have me call upon him that moment. I went to his chambers, not gleefully, thinking: How could he have heard already?

The Arab received me in a room decorated with a single massive piece of—I suppose it would be called a sculpture made by nature. It was a great rock, twice as tall as a man and four times as big around, a tremendous piece of solidified lava that looked like petrified flames, all gray twists and convolutions and holes and little tunnels. Somewhere in the base of it a bowl of incense smoldered, and the perfumed blue smoke rose and coiled through the sculpture’s sinuosities and seeped out from some apertures and in through others, so that the whole thing seemed to writhe in a slow, ceaseless torment.

“You disobeyed and defied me,” Achmad said immediately, with no greeting or other preliminary. “You kept listening until you heard something damaging to a high minister of this court.”

I said, “It was a piece of news that came to me before I could withdraw the ear.” I offered no further apology or extenuation, but boldly added, “I thought it had come only to me.”

“What is spoken on the road is heard in the grass,” he said indifferently. “An old Han proverb.”

Still boldly, I said, “It requires a listener in the grass. All this time, I had assumed that my maidservants were reporting my doings to the Khan Kubilai or the Prince Chingkim, and I accepted that as reasonable. But all this time they have been your spies, have they not?”

I do not know whether he would have bothered to lie and deny it, or would even have bothered to confirm the fact, for at that moment came a slight interruption. From an adjoining room, a woman started in through the curtained doorway, and then, perceiving that Achmad had company, abruptly swished back through them again. All I saw of her was that she was a strikingly large woman, and elegantly garbed. From her behavior, it was evident that she did not wish to be seen by me, so I supposed that she was somebody else’s wife or concubine engaging in an illicit adventure. But I could not recall ever having seen such a tall and robust woman anywhere about the palace. I reflected that the painter, Master Chao, in speaking of the Arab’s depraved tastes, had not said anything about the objects of his tastes. Did the Wali Achmad have a special liking for women who were larger than most men? I did not inquire, and he paid no attention to the interruption, but said:

“The steward found you at the Khakhan’s chambers, so I take it that you have already imparted to him your information.”

“Yes, Wali, I have. Kubilai is summoning the Minister Pao to interrogate him.”

“A fruitless summons,” said the Arab. “It seems that the Minister has made a hasty departure, destination unknown. Lest you be so brash as to accuse me of having connived in his flight, let me suggest that Fao probably recognized the same visitors from the southland who recognized him, and whose indiscreet gossip your ear overheard.”

I said, and truthfully, “I am not brash to the extreme of being suicidal, Wali Achmad. I would accuse you of nothing. I will only mention that the Khakhan seemed gratified to have the information I brought him. So, if you deem that a disobedience to you, and punish me for it, I imagine Kubilai will wonder why.”

“Impertinent piglet of a sow mother! Are you daring me to punish you, with a threat of the Khakhan’s displeasure?”

I made no reply to that. His black agate eyes got even stonier, and he went on:

“Get this clear in your mind, Folo. My fortunes are dependent on the Khanate of which I am Chief Minister and Vice-Regent. I would be not only traitorous—I would be imbecilic—if I did anything to undermine the Khanate. I am as eager as Kubilai that we take Yun-nan, and then the Sung Empire, and then all the rest of the world as well, if we can do so and if Allah wills it so. I do not berate you for having discovered, before I did, that the Khanate’s interests may have been imperiled by that Yi impostor. But get this also clear in your mind. I am the Chief Minister. I will not tolerate disobedience or disloyalty or defiance from my inferiors. Especially not from a younger man who is an inexperienced outsider in these parts and a despicable Christian and a rank newcomer to this court and, for all that, an impudent upstart of overweening ambition.”

I started angrily to say, “I am no more an outsider here than—” but he imperiously raised his hand.

“I will not utterly demolish you for this instance of disobedience, since it was not to my disservice. But I promise that you will regret it, Folo, sufficiently that you will not be inclined to repeat it. Earlier, I only told you what Hell is. It seems you require a demonstration.” Then, perhaps reflecting that his lady visitor might be within hearing, he lowered his voice. “In my own good time, I will provide that demonstration. Go now. And go well away from me.”

I went, but not too far, in case I should be wanted again by the Khakhan. I went outdoors and through the palace gardens and up the Kara Hill to the Echo Pavilion, to let the clear breezes of the heights blow through my cluttered mind. I strolled around the promenade within the mosaic wall, mentally sorting among all the numerous things I had recently been given or had taken upon myself to worry about: Yun-nan and the Yi, Nostril and his lady lost and found, the twins Buyantu and Biliktu, now revealed as more than sisters to each other and less than faithful to me … .

Then, as if I had not enough to concern me, I was suddenly given a new thing. A voice whispered in my ear, in the Mongol tongue, “Do not turn. Do not move. Do not look.”

I froze where I was, expecting next to feel a stabbing point or a slashing blade. But there came only the voice again:

“Tremble, Ferenghi. Dread the coming of what you have deserved. But not now, for the waiting and the dread and the not knowing are part of it.”

By then, I had realized that the voice was not really at my ear. I turned and looked all about me, and I saw no one, and I said sharply, “What have I deserved? What do you want of me?”

“Only expect me,” whispered the voice.

“Who? And when?”

The voice whispered just seven more words—seven short and simple words, but words freighted with a menace more chilling than the most fearsome threat—and it never spoke again afterward. It said only and flatly and finally:

“Expect me when you least expect me.”

13

I waited for more, and, when I heard no more, I asked another question or two, and got no answer. So I ran around the terrace to my right, and got to the Moon Gate in the wall without having seen anyone, so I continued to run all the way around the Echo Pavilion, back to the Moon Gate again, and still had seen no one. There was only that one entranceway in the wall, so I stood in it and looked down the Kara Hill. There were several lords and ladies also taking the air that day, strolling about in ones and twos on lower levels of the hill. Any one of them could have been the person who had invisibly accosted me—could have run that far, then slowed to a walk. Or the whisperer could have run another way. The flagstone pathway from the Moon Gate descended only a short distance before forking in two, and one of the paths circled around behind the pavilion to descend the back slope of the hill. Or the whisperer could still be right inside the wall with me, and could easily keep the pavilion between us, no matter how speedily I ran or how stealthily I prowled around the promenade. It was useless to search, so I simply stood there in the entranceway and pondered.

The voice could have been that of either a man or a woman, and of any of several people who had lately had cause to wish me hurt. Just since this hour yesterday, I had been told by three people that I would “regret” some action of mine: the icy Achmad, the irate Buyantu and the outraged Lady Chao. I could also assume that the fugitive Minister Pao was not now any friend of mine, and might still be within the palace confines. And, if I were to count all the palace people whom I had alienated since coming here, I would have to include Master Ping, the Fondler. All of those persons spoke Mongol, as had the whisperer.

There were even other possibilities. The immense lady lurking in Achmad’s chambers might think that I had recognized her, and resent me for it. Or the Lady Chao could have told her lord husband some lie about my visit to her, and he might now be as angry at me as she was. I had repeated nasty gossip about the eunuch Court Astrologer, and eunuchs were notoriously vindictive. For that matter, I had once remarked to Kubilai that I thought most of his ministers were misemployed, and that word could have got back to them, and every single one of them might be mortally peeved at me.

I was casting my gaze back and forth over the curly-eaved roofs of the many palace edifices, as if trying to see through their yellow tiles to identify my accoster, when I saw a vast cloud of smoke erupt abruptly from the main building. The smoke was too much to have come from a brazier or a kitchen hearth, and was too sudden to have come from a room caught fire or anything of that sort. The black cloud seemed to boil as it billowed, and it appeared to have fragments of the building and the roof mixed into it. A fraction of an instant later, the sound of it reached me—a thunderclap so loud and slapping that it actually stirred my hair and the loose folds of my robes. I saw the other few persons on the hill also wince at the sound, and turn to look, and then we were all running down the slope toward the scene.

I did not have to get very close before I recognized that the eruption had come from my own chambers. In fact, the main room of my suite had burst its walls and roof, and was now laid open to the sky and the view of the gathering crowd, and what few of its contents had not disintegrated outright were now burning. The black cloud of the initial blast, still quite intact and still writhing in its slow boil, was now drifting out over the city, but the lesser smoke from the room’s burning was yet dense enough to keep most of the onlookers at a respectful distance. Only a number of palace servants were scuttling in and out of the smoke, carrying buckets of water and dashing them into the burning remains. One of them dropped his bucket when he saw me, and came running—tottering, rather—to meet me. He was so blackened by smoke and singed of garments that it was a moment before I recognized Nostril.

“Oh, master, come no closer! It is a frightful destruction!”

“What happened?” I asked, though I had already guessed.

“I do not know, master. I was asleep in my closet when all of a sudden—bismillah!—I found myself awake and floundering here on the grass of this garden court, my clothes all a-smolder, and shards of broken furniture falling all about me.”

“The girls!” I said urgently. “What of the girls?”

“Mashallah, master, they are dead, and in a most horrible manner. If this was not the doing of a vengeful jinni, it was the attack of a fire-breathing dragon.”

“I think not,” I said miserably.

“Then it must have been a rukh, insanely tearing with its beak and talons, for the girls are not just dead—they no longer exist, not as separate girls. They are nothing but a spatter on the remaining walls. Bits of flesh and blobs of gore. Twins they were in life, and twinned they have gone into death. They will be inseparable forever, since no funeral practitioner could possibly sort out the fragments and say which were of whom.”

“Bruto barabào,” I breathed, appalled. “But it was not any rukh or jinni or dragon. Alas, it was I who did this.”

“And to think, master, you once told me that you could never kill a woman.”

“Unfeeling slave!” I cried. “I did not do it deliberately!”

“Ah, well, you are young yet. Meanwhile, let us be thankful that those two did not keep any pet dog or cat or ape, to be intermingled also with them in the afterlife.”

I swallowed sickly. Whether this was my fault or God’s doing, it was a terrible loss of two lovely young women. But I had to reflect that, in a very real sense, to me they had been lost already. One or both of them had been betraying me to the inimical Achmad, and I had entertained suspicion of Buyantu as the secret whisperer at the Echo Pavilion. Whoever that was, though, it evidently had not been she. But just then I jumped, as another voice spoke in my ear:

“Lamentable mamzar, what have you done?”

I turned. It was the Court Firemaster, who no doubt had come at a run because he had known the distinctive noise of his own product.

“I was trying an experiment in al-kimia, Master Shi,” I said, contrite. “The girls were instructed to keep the fire very low, but they must have—”

“I told you,” he said through his teeth. “The flaming powder is not a thing to play with.”

“No one can tell Marco Polo anything,” said Prince Chingkim, who, as Wang of Khanbalik, had come apparently to see what havoc had been visited upon his city. He added drily, “Marco Polo must be shown.”

“I would rather not have been shown this,” I mumbled.

“Then do not look, master,” said Nostril. “For here come the Court Funeralmaster and his assistants, to gather the mortal remains.”

The fire had been damped down, by now, to wisps of smoke and occasional little sizzles of steam. The spectators and the water-carrying servants all went away, for people naturally disliked to linger in the vicinity of the funeral preparers. I remained, out of respect for the departed, and so did Nostril, to keep me company, and so did Chingkim, in his capacity as Wang, to see that all was properly concluded, and so did the Master Shi, out of a professional desire to examine the wreckage and make notes for future reference in his work.

The purple-garbed Funeralmaster and his purple-garbed men, although they must have been accustomed to seeing death in many forms, clearly found this job distasteful. They took a look about, then went away, to return with some black leather containers and wooden spatulas and cloth mops. With those objects, and with expressions of revulsion, they went through my rooms and the garden area outside, scraping and swabbing and depositing the results in the containers. When finally they were done, we other four went in and examined the ruins, but only cursorily, for the smell was dreadful. It was a stink compounded of smoke, char, cooked meat and—though it is ungallant to say of the beautiful young departed—the stench of excrement, for I had given the girls no opportunity that morning to make their toilet.

“To have done all this damage,” said the Firemaster, as we were glumly poking about in the main room, “the huo-yao must have been tightly confined at the moment it ignited.”

“It was in a securely lidded stoneware pot, Master Shi,” I said. “I would have thought no spark could have got near it.”

“The pot itself only had to get hot enough,” he said, with a glower at me. “And a stoneware pot? More explosive potential than an Indian nut or a heavy zhu-gan cane. And if the women were huddled over it at the time …”

I moved away from him, not wanting to hear any more about the poor girls. In a corner, to my surprise, I found one undestroyed thing in that destroyed room. It was only a porcelain vase, but it was entire, unbroken, except for some chips lost from its rim. When I looked into it, I saw why it had survived. It was the vase into which I had poured the first measure of huo-yao, and then poured in water. The powder had dried to a solid cake that nearly filled the vase, and so had made it impervious to damage.

“Look at this, Master Shi,” I said, taking it to show to him. “The huo-yao can be a preservative as well as a destroyer.”

“So you first tried wetting it,” he said, looking into the vase. “I could have told you that it would dry solid and useless like that. As a matter of fact, I believe I did tell you. Ayn davàr, but the Prince is right. You cannot be told anything by anybody … .”

I had stopped listening, and went away from him again, for a dim recollection was stirring in my mind. I took the vase out into the garden, and pried up a stone from a whitewashed ring of them around a flower bed, and used it for a hammer to shatter the porcelain. When all the fragments fell away, I had a heavy, gray, vase-shaped lump of the solid-caked powder. I regarded it, and the dim memory came clearer in my mind. What I remembered was the making of that foodstuff the Mongols called grut. I remembered how the Mongol women of the plains would spread milk curd in the sun, and let that dry to a hard cake, then crumble it into pellets of grut, which would keep indefinitely without spoiling, until someone wished to make an emergency meal of it. I took up my stone again, and hammered on the lump of huo-yao until a few pellets, the size and appearance of mouse droppings, crumbled off from it. I regarded them, then went once again to the Firemaster and said diffidently:

“Master Shi, would you look at these and tell me if I am wrong—”

“Probably,” he said, with a contemptuous snort. “They are mouse turds.”

“They are pellets broken from that lump of huo-yao. It appears to me that these pellets hold in firm suspension the correct proportions of the three separate powders. And, being now dry, they should ignite just as if—”

“Yom mekhayeh!” he exclaimed huskily, in what I took to be the Ivrit language. Very, very slowly and tenderly, he picked the pellets from my palm, and held them in his, and bent to peer closely at them, and again huskily exclaimed, in what I recognized as Han, several other words like “hao-jia-huo,” which is an expression of amazement, and “jiao-hao,” which is an expression of delight, and “chan-juan,” which is a term usually employed to praise a beautiful woman.

He suddenly began dashing about the ruined room, until he found a splinter of wood still smoldering. He blew that into a glow, and ran out into the garden. Chingkim and I followed him, the Prince saying, “What now?” and “Not again!” as the Firemaster touched the ember to the pellets and they went off with a bright flare and fizz, just as if they had been in their original finely powdered form.

“Yom mekhayeh!” Master Shi breathed once more, and then turned to me and, wide-eyed, murmured, “Bar mazel!” and then turned to Prince Chingkim and said in Han, “Mu bu jian jie.”

“An old proverb,” Chingkim told me. “The eye cannot see its own lashes. I gather that you have discovered something new about the flaming powder that is new even to the experienced Firemaster.”

“It was just an idea that came to me,” I said modestly.

Master Shi stood looking at me, still saucer-eyed, and shaking his head, and muttering words like “khakhem” and “khalutz.” Then again he addressed Chingkim :

“My Prince, I do not know if you were contemplating a prosecution of this incautious Ferenghi for the damage and casualties he has caused. But the Mishna tells us that a thinking bastard, even, is more highly to be regarded than a high priest who preaches by rote. I suggest that this one has accomplished something worth more than any number of women servants and bits of palace.”

“I do not know what the Mishna is, Master Shi,” grumbled the Prince, “but I will convey your sentiments to my Royal Father.” He turned to me. “I will convey you, too, Marco. He had already sent me looking for you when I heard the thunder of your—accomplishment. I am glad I do not have to carry you to him in a spoon. Come along.”

“Marco,” said the Khakhan without preamble, “I must send a messenger to the Orlok Bayan in Yun-nan, to apprise him of the latest developments here, and I think you have earned the honor of being that messenger. A missive is now being written for you to take to him. It explains about the Minister Pao and suggests some measures that Bayan may take, now that the Yi are deprived of their secret ally in our midst. Give Bayan my letter, then attend upon him until the war is won, and then you will have the honor of bringing me the word that Yun-nan at last is ours.”

“You are sending me to war, Sire?” I said, not quite sure that I was eager to go. “I have had no experience of war.”

“Then you should have. Every man should engage in at least one war in his lifetime—else how can he say that he has savored all the experiences which life offers a man?”

“I was not thinking of life, Sire, so much as death.” And I laughed, but not with much merriment.

“Every man dies,” Kubilai said, rather stiffly. “Some deaths are at least less ignominious than others. Would you prefer to die like a clerk, dwindling and wilting into the boneyard of a secured old age?”

“I am not afraid, Sire. But what if the war drags on for a long time? Or never is won?”

Even more stiffly, he said, “It is better to fight in a losing cause than to have to confess to your grandchildren that you never fought at all. Vakh!”

Prince Chingkim spoke up. “I can assure you, Royal Father, that this Marco Polo would never dodge any confrontation imaginable. He is, however, at the moment a trifle shaken by a recent calamity.” He went on to tell Kubilai about the accidental—he stressed accidental—devastation of my menage.

“Ah, so you are bereft of women servants and the services of women,” the Khakhan said sympathetically. “Well, you will be traveling too rapidly on the road to Yun-nan to have need of servants, and you will be too fatigued each night to yearn for anything more than sleep. When you get there, of course, you will do your share of the pillage and rape. Take slaves to serve you, take women to service you. Behave like a Mongol born.”

“Yes, Sire,” I said submissively.

He leaned back and sighed, as if he missed the good old days, and murmured in reminiscence:

“My esteemed grandfather Chinghiz, it is said, was born clutching a clot of blood in his tiny fist, from which the shaman foretold for him a sanguinary career. He lived up to the prophecy. And I can still remember him telling us, his grandsons, ‘Boys, a man can have no greater pleasure than to slay his enemies, and then, besmeared and reeking with their blood, to rape their chaste wives and virgin daughters. There is no more delightful sensation than to spurt your jing-ye into a woman or a girl-child who is weeping and struggling and loathing you and cursing you.’ So spake Chinghiz Khan, the Immortal of Mongols.”

“I will bear it in mind, Sire.”

He sat forward again and said, “No doubt you have arrangements to make before your departure. But make them as expeditiously as possible. I have already sent advance riders to ready your route. If, on’your way along it, you can sketch for me maps of that route—as you and your uncles did of the Silk Road—I shall be grateful and your reward will be handsome. Also, if in your travels you should catch up to the fugitive Minister Pao, I give you leave to slay him, and your reward for that would also be handsome. Now go and prepare for the journey. I will have fast horses and a trustworthy escort ready when you are.”

Well, I thought, as I went to my chambers, this would at least put me out of reach of my court adversaries—the Wali Achmad, the Lady Chao, the Fondler Ping, whoever else that whisperer might have been. Better to fall in open warfare than to someone sneaking up behind me.

The Court Architect was in my suite, making measurements and muttering to himself and snapping orders to a team of workmen, who were commencing the replacement of the vanished walls and roof. Happily, I had kept most of my personal possessions and valuables in my bedroom, which had been unravaged. Nostril was in there, burning incense to clear the air. I bade him lay out a traveling wardrobe for me and to make a light pack of other necessities. Then I gathered up all the journal notes I had written and accumulated since leaving Venice, and carried them to my father’s chambers.

He looked a little surprised when I dropped the pile on a table beside him, for it was an unprepossessing mound of smudged and wrinkled and mildewed papers of all different sizes.

“I would be obliged, Father, if you would send these to Uncle Marco, the next time you entrust some shipment of goods to the Silk Road horse post, and ask him to send them on to Venice for safekeeping by Maregna Fiordelisa. The notes may be of interest to some future cosmographer, if he can decipher them and arrange them in order. I had intended to do that myself—someday—but I am bidden to a mission from which I may not return.”

“Indeed? What mission?”

I told him, and with dramatic somberness, so I was taken aback when he said, “I envy you, doing something I have never done. You should appreciate the opportunity Kubilai is giving you. Da novèlo tuto xe belo. Not many white men have watched the Mongols make war—and lived to remember it.”

“I only hope I do,” I said. “But survival is not my sole consideration. There are other things I had rather be doing. And I am sure that there are more profitable things I could be doing.”

“Now, now, Marco. To a good hunger there is no bad bread.”

“Are you suggesting, Father, that I should enjoy wasting my time in a war?”

He said reprovingly, “It is true that you were trained for trade, and you come from a merchant lineage. But you must not look at everything with a tradesman’s eye, always asking yourself, ‘What is this good for? What is this worth?’ Leave that grubby philosophy to the tradesmen who never step beyond their shop doors. You have ventured out to the farthest edge of the world. It would be a pity if you take home only profit, and not at least a little of poetry.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “I turned a profit yesterday. May I borrow one of your maidservants for an errand?”

I sent her to fetch from the slave quarters the Turki woman called Mar-Janah, formerly the possession of the Lady Chao Ku-an.

“Mar-Janah?” my father repeated, as the servant departed. “And a Turki … ?”

“Yes, you know of her,” I said. “We have spoken of her before.” And I told him the whole story, of which he had so long ago heard only a part of the beginning.

“What a wondrously intricate web!” he exclaimed. “And to have been at last unraveled! God does not always pay His debts just on Sundays.” Then, as I had done on first seeing her, he widened his eyes when the lovely woman came smiling into the chamber, and I introduced him to her.

“My Mistress Chao did not seem pleased about it,” she said shyly to me, “but she tells me that I am now your property, Master Marco.”

“Only briefly,” I said, taking the paper of title from my purse and holding it out to her. “You are your own property again, as you should be, and I will hear you call no one Master any more.”

With a tremulous hand she accepted the paper, and with her other hand she brushed tears from her long eyelashes, and she seemed to have trouble finding words to speak.

“Now,” I went on, “I doubt not that the Princess Mar-Janah of Cappadocia could take her pick of men from this court or any other. But if Your Highness still has her heart set on Nost—on Ali Babar, he awaits you in my chambers down the hall.”

She started to kneel in ko-tou, but I caught her hands, raised her, turned her to the door, said, “Go to him,” and she went.

My father approvingly followed her with his gaze, then asked me, “You will not wish to take Nostril with you to Yun-nan?”

“No. He has waited twenty years or more for that woman. Let them be married as soon as can be. Will you tend to those arrangements, Father?”

“Yes. And I will give Nostril his own certificate of title as a wedding present. I mean Ali Babar. I suppose we ought to accustom ourselves to addressing him more respectfully, now that he will be a freeman and consort to a princess.”

“Before he is entirely free, I had better go and make sure he has packed for me properly. So I will say goodbye now, Father, in case I do not see you or Uncle Mafio before I leave.”

“Goodbye, Marco, and let me take back what I said before. I was wrong. You may never make a proper tradesman. You just now gave away a valuable slave for no payment at all.”

“But, Father, I got her free of payment.”

“What better way to turn a clear profit? Yet you did not. You did not even set her free with fanfare and fine words and noble gesticulations, letting her kiss and slobber over your hands, while a numerous audience applauded your liberality and a palace scribe recorded the scene for posterity.”

Mistaking the tenor of his words, I said in some exasperation, “To quote one of your own adages, Father: one minute you are lighting torches and the next you are counting candle wicks.”

“It is poor business to give things away, and worse business to get not even praise for doing so. Clearly you know the value of nothing—except perhaps a human being or two. I despair of you as a tradesman. I have hope of you as a poet. Goodbye, Marco, my son, and come back safe.”

I got to see Mar-Janah one more time. The next morning, she and Nostril-now-Ali came to wish me “salaam aleikum” before my departure, and to thank me again for having helped to bring them together. They had risen early, to make sure of catching me—and evidently had got up from a shared bed, for they were disheveled and sleepy-eyed. But they were also smiling and blithesome, and, when they tried to describe to me their rapturous reunion, they were quite rapturously and absurdly inarticulate.

He began, “It was almost as if—”

“No, it was as if—” said she.

“Yes, it was indeed as if—” he said. “All the twenty years since we last knew each other—it was as if they, well—”

“Come, come,” I said, laughing at the foolish locutions. “Neither of you used to be such an inept teller of tales.”

Mar-Janah laughed too, and finally said what was meant: “The twenty intervening years might never have been.”

“She still thinks me handsome!” exclaimed Nostril. “And she is more beautiful than ever!”

“We are as giddy as two youngsters in first love,” she said.

“I am happy for you,” I said. Though they were both perhaps forty-five years old, and though I still could not help feeling that a love affair between persons nearly old enough to be my parents was a quaint and risible thing, I added, “I wish you joy forever, young lovers.”

I went then to call on the Khakhan, to collect his letter for the Orlok Bayan—and found that he already had visitors: the Court Firemaster, whom I had seen only the day before, the Court Astronomer and the Court Goldsmith, whom I had not seen for quite some time. They all three looked curiously bloodshot, but their red eyes gleamed with something like excitement.

Kubilai said, “These gentlemen courtiers wish you to carry to Yun-nan something of theirs also.”

“We have been up all night, Marco,” said the Firemaster Shi. “Now that you have devised a way to make the flaming powder transportable, we are eager to see it employed in combat. I have spent the night wetting quantities of it and drying it into cakes and then pulverizing it into pellets.”

“Et voila, I have been making new containers for it,” said the Goldsmith Boucher, displaying a shiny brass ball, about the size of his head. “Master Shi told us how you destroyed half the palace with just a stoneware pot.”

“It was not half the palace,” I protested. “It was only—”

“Qu’importe?” he said impatiently. “If a mere lidded pot could do that, we reckoned that an even stouter confinement of the powder should make it trebly powerful. We decided on brass.”

“And I worked out, by comparison with the planetary orbs,” said the Astronomer Jamal-ud-Din, “that a globular container would be best. It can be most accurately and farthest thrown by hand or by catapult, or can even be rolled among the enemy, and its shape—inshallah!—will most effectually disperse its destructive forces in all directions.”

“So I made balls like this, in sections of two hemispheres,” said Master Boucher. “Master Shi filled them with the powder pellets, and then I brazed them together. Nothing but their internal force will ever break them apart. But when it does—les diables sont déchaînés!”

“You and the Orlok Bayan,” said Master Shi, “will be the first to put the huo-yao to practical use in field warfare. We made a dozen of the balls. Take them with you and let Bayan use them as he will, and they ought to work without fail.”

“So it sounds,” I said. “But how do the warriors ignite them?”

“You see this string like a wick sticking out? It was inserted before the halves were brazed together. It is actually of cotton twisted around a core of the huo-yao itself. Only touch a spark to it—a smoldering stick of incense will serve—and it will give a long count of ten before the spark reaches the charge inside.”

“Then they cannot discharge accidentally? I am disinclined to devastate some innocent karwansarai before I even get there.”

“No fear,” said Master Shi. “Just please do not let any women play with them.” He added drily, “It is not for nothing that my people’s morning thanksgiving prayer contains the words ‘Blessed art Thou, 0 Lord our God, Who hath not made me a woman.’”

“Is that a fact?” said the Master Jamal, sounding interested. “Our Quran says likewise, in the fourth sura: ‘Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which Allah has gifted the one above the other.’”

I decided the old men must be lightheaded from lack of sleep, to be starting a discussion of the demerits of women, so I cut it short by saying, “I will gladly take the things, then, if the Khan Kubilai is in favor.”

The Khakhan made a gesture of assent, and the three courtiers hurried off to load the dozen balls onto my train’s pack horses. When they had gone, Kubilai said to me:

“Here is the letter to Bayan, sealed and chained for carrying safely about your neck, under your clothes. Here also is my yellow-paper letter of authority, as you have seen your uncles carry. But you should not often have to show it, for I am giving you also this more visible pai-tzu. You have only to wear it on your chest or hung on your saddle, and at sight of it anyone in this realm will do you ko-tou and accord you every hospitality and service.”

The pai-tzu was a tablet or plaque, as broad as my hand and nearly as long as my forearm, made of ivory with an inset silver ring for hanging it by, and inlaid gold lettering, in the Mongol alphabet, instructing all men to welcome and obey me, under pain of the Khakhan’s displeasure.

“Also,” Kubilai went on, “since you may have to sign vouchers of expenses, or messages, or other documents, I had the Court Yinmaster engrave this personal yin for you.”

It was a small block of smooth stone, a soft gray in color with blood-red veinings through it, about an inch square and a finger-length long, rounded at one end for comfortable holding in the hand. The squared-off front end of it was intricately incised, and Kubilai showed me how to stamp that end on an inked pad of cloth and then onto any paper that required my signature. I never would have recognized the imprint it made—as being my signature, I mean—but it looked nicely impressive, and I commented admiringly on the fineness of the work.

“It is a good yin, and it will last forever,” said the Khakhan. “I had the Yinmaster Liu Shen-dao make it of the marble which the Han call chicken-blood stone. As to the fineness of the engraving, that Master Liu is so expert that he can inscribe an entire prayer on a single human hair.”

And so I left Khanbalik for Yun-nan, carrying, besides my own pack and clothes and other necessities, the twelve brass balls of flaming powder, the sealed letter to the Orlok Bayan, my own letter of authority and the confirming pai-tzu plaque—and my very own personal yin, with which I could leave my name stamped, if I chose, all across Kithai. This is what my name looks like, in the Han characters, for I still have the little stone yin:

I was not sure, when I set out to war, how long I would last. But, as the Khan Kubilai had said, my yin could last forever, and so might my name.