The Journeyer

YUN-NAN

1

IT had to be done either quickly or in a secrecy so strict that it would have been almost impossible to sustain. So it was done quickly.

The first thing done was the posting of pickets all around the Ba-Tang valley, alert day and night to stop any Yi scouts from sneaking into the area, or any already planted Yi spies from sneaking out with word of what we were up to.

I have seen animal flocks march willingly to a slaughter pen when led by a Judas goat, but the Bho required not even that much cajolery or duress. Ukuruji merely outlined our plan to the lamas he had evicted from the Pota-lá. Those selfish and heartless holy men were all too anxious to do anything that would get the Wang and his court out of their lamasarai and themselves back into it—and the Bho would do anything their holy men told them to do. So the lamas, evincing no fatherly concern for their Potaist followers, no feeling for their fellows, no loyalty to their own country or reluctance to aid their Mongol overlords, showing no qualms or scruples whatever, made proclamation to the people of Ba-Tang that they must obey every order the Mongol officers gave them, and go anywhere they might be sent—and the mindless Bho complied.

Bayan immediately had his warriors begin corralling every able-bodied Bho in the city and environs—men, women, boys and girls of sufficient size—and begin outfitting them with cast-off Mongol arms and armor, giving them the more worn horses for mounts, and forming them into columns complete with pack animals and yurtu-carrier wagons, Bayan’s own orlok flag, the yak tails of his sardars, other suitable pennants and guidons. Except for the lamas and trapas and chabis, only the very oldest, youngest and frailest Bho were spared to be left behind—plus a few others. Ukuruji kindly excepted the several culled-out women he had been keeping for the enjoyment of himself and his courtiers, and I likewise sent Ryang and Odcho safely to their homes, each with a necklace of coins to help her further her career of bedding toward a prospect of wedding.

Meanwhile, Bayan sent heralds under white flags of truce riding southward to bellow over and over, in the Yi language, something like this: “Your traitor spy in the capital of Kithai has been exposed and overthrown! You have no more hope of standing under siege! Therefore this province of Yun-nan is declared annexed to the Khanate! You are to throw down your arms and welcome the conquerors when they come! The Khan Kubilai has spoken! Tremble, all men, and obey!” Of course, we did not expect the Yi either to tremble or to obey. We merely trusted that they would be enough bemused and distracted by those heralds arrogantly riding through the valleys that they would not notice the other men flitting furtively along the mountaintops—engineers finding the best places to secrete the brass balls, and then hiding near them, ready to fire their wicks on a signal from me.

In case the Yi had any watchers of excellent eyesight posted far beyond our pickets surrounding Ba-Tang, the whole bok was struck and the yurtu tents collapsed, and all that equipment and the wagons and animals not going with the pretended invasion were hidden away. All the thousands of real Mongol men and women moved into the evacuated buildings of the city. But they did not don the drab and dirty civilian clothing of the displaced Bho. They—and I and Ukuruji and his courtiers as well—stayed clad in battle dress and armor and accouterments, ready to move out on the track of the doomed columns as soon as we got word that the trap was sprung.

It was necessary to send some real Mongols along with those decoy columns of mock Mongols, but Bayan only had to call for volunteers and he got them. The men knew they were volunteering to commit suicide, but these were warriors who had bested death so often that they firmly believed their long service under the Orlok had imbued them with some power always to do so. Any few who survived this latest perilous mission would simply rejoice in Bayan’s having once again proved their indestructibility, and the dead would not reproach him. So a band of the men rode at the front of the simulated invasion army, playing on musical instruments the Mongols’ war anthems and marching music (which the Bho, for all their willingness, would not have known how to play), and, with that music, setting the alternate canter-walk-canter pace for the thousands behind. At the tail end of that army had to ride another troop of real Mongols, to keep the columns from straggling, and also to send couriers back to us when the Yi—as we hoped—began to congregate for their assault.

The Bho knew very well that they were posing as Mongols, and their lamas had commanded them to do so with a will—though I doubt that the lamas had told them it was probably the last thing they would ever do—and they entered into the pretense most heartily. When they learned that they would be led by a band of military musicians, some of them asked Bayan and Ukuruji, “Lords, should not we chant and sing, as real Mongols do on the march? What should we chant? We know nothing but the ‘om mani pémé hum.’”

“Anything but that,” said the Orlok. “Let me think. The capital of Yun-nan is named Yun-nan-fu. I suppose you could go clamoring, ‘We march to seize Yun-nan-fu!’”

“Yun-nan-pu?” they said.

“No,” said Ukuruji, laughing. “Forget about shouting or chanting.” He explained to Bayan, “The Bho are incapable of enunciating the sounds of v and f. Better have them not voice anything at all, or the Yi may recognize that deficiency.” He paused, struck by a new idea. “One other thing we might have them do, though. Tell the leaders always to lead the column to the right around any holy structure, like a mani wall or a ch’horten stone pile, leaving that on their left hand.”

The Bho made a feeble wail of protest at that—it would be an insult to those monuments to the Pota—but their lamas quickly stepped in and bade them obey, and even took the pains to say a hypocritical prayer giving the people special dispensation on this occasion to insult the almighty Pota.

The preparations took only a few days, while the heralds and the engineers went on ahead, and the columns moved out as soon as they were finally formed up, on a beautiful morning of bright sunshine. I must say that even that mock army made a magnificent sight and sound as it left Ba-Tang. Up front, the band of Mongol musicians led with an unearthly but blood-stirring martial music. The trumpeters sounded the great copper trumpets called karachala, which name could rightly translate as “the hellhorns.” The drummers had tremendous copper and hide drums like kettles, one slung on either side of the saddle, and they did marvels of twirling and flailing their mallets and crossing and uncrossing their arms as they hammered the thunderous beat for the march. Cymbalists clashed immense brass platters that flashed a flare of sunlight with every stunning ring of sound. Bell players beat a sort of scampanio —metal tubes of various sizes arranged in a lyre-shaped frame. Between and among the louder, blaring noises could be heard the sweeter string music of lutes made with specially short necks for playing while riding.

The music moved on and gradually diminished as it blended into the sound of the thousands of hoofs clip-clopping along behind, and the heavy rumble of wagon wheels, and the creak and jingle of armor and harness. The Bho, for once in their lives, looked not pathetic or contemptible, but as proud and disciplined and determined as if they had actually been going out to war, and on their own account. The horsemen rode rigidly upright in their saddles and facing sternly forward, except to do a very respectable eyes-right when they passed the reviewing Orlok Bayan and his sardars. As the Wang Ukuruji remarked, the decoy men and women did indeed resemble genuine Mongol warriors. They had even been persuaded to ride using the long Mongol stirrups—which enable a hard-riding bowman to stand for better aim with his arrows—instead of the short, cramped, knees-up stirrups favored by the Bho and the Drok and the Han and the Yi.

When the last column’s last rank and its rear guard of real Mongols had disappeared downriver, there was nothing for the remainder of us to do except wait and, while waiting, try to maintain, for the benefit of any putative keen-eyed watchers from afar, the illusion that Ba-Tang was an ordinary, nasty Bho city going about its ordinary, nasty Bho business. In the daytimes, our people thronged the market areas and, at twilights, gathered on rooftops as if praying. Whether we ever really were spied upon, I do not know. But if we were, our stratagem could not have been discovered by the Yi down south, for it worked exactly as planned—up to a point, anyway.

About a week after the leavetaking, one of the rear-guard Mongols came galloping to report that the decoy army had got well within Yun-nan, and was still proceeding forward, and the Yi apparently had been fooled by the imposture. Scouts, he said, had seen the scattered individual snipers in the mountains, and outpost groups of them, beginning to collect together and to move downhill like tributary streams converging to become a river. We waited some more, and in another few days another rider came galloping to report that the Yi were unmistakably massing in force behind and on both rear quarters of our mock army—that, in fact, he had had to ride most evasively to get around the gathering Yi and get out of Yun-nan with that information for us.

So now the real army rode forth, and—though it moved as discreetly as possible, with no marching music—that must have been a really magnificent sight to see. The entire half a tuk surged out of the Ba-Tang valley like an elemental force of nature on the move. The fifty thousand troops were divided into tomans of ten thousand, each led by a sardar, and those divided into the flag-captains’ thousands, and those into the chiefs’ hundreds—each riding in broad ranks of ten in files of ten—and each hundred riding far enough apart not to be suffocated by the dust kicked up by those ahead. I say the departure must have made a magnificent spectacle, because I did not get to see it go past me. I rode out well ahead of it, in company with Bayan, Ukuruji and a few senior officers. The Orlok, of course, had to go first, and Ukuruji was in the forefront because he wished to be, and I was there because Bayan ordered me to be there. I had been provided with a special, immense banner of brilliant yellow silk, and I was to unfurl that at the proper moment to signal for the avalanche. Any trooper could have done the signaling, but Bayan insisted on regarding the brass balls as “mine,” and their employment as my responsibility.

So we cantered a good many li in advance of the tuk, following the river Jin-sha and the broad, trampled track beside it that was the spoor of the mock army. After only a few days of hard riding and spartan camping, the Orlok grunted, “Here we are crossing the border into Yun-nan Province.” A few days farther on, we were intercepted by a Mongol sentry, one of that army’s rear guard set to wait for us, and he led us off the river route, taking us to one side of the line of march and around a hill. At the far side of that hill, in late afternoon, we came upon eight more of the Mongol rear guard, where they had made a fireless camp. The captain of the guard respectfully invited us to dismount and share some of their cold rations of dried meat and tsampa balls.

“But first, Orlok,” he said, “you may wish to climb to the top of this hill and look over. It will give you a view down this valley of the Jin-sha, and I think you will recognize that you have come just in time.”

The captain led the way, as Bayan, Ukuruji and I all made the climb on foot. We did it rather slowly, being stiff from our long ride. Toward the top, our guide motioned for us to crouch and then to crawl, and at last we only cautiously poked our heads over the grass at the crest. We could see that it was well we had been intercepted. Had we followed the river and the tracks for a few hours more, we should have rounded the other side of this hill and entered the long but narrow valley opening before us, in which our mock army was camped. The Bho, as instructed, were behaving more like an occupying force than an invading one. They had not erected any tents, but they had camped this evening as nonchalantly as if they had been invited by the Yi to Yun-nan and were welcome there—with innumerable camp fires and torches twinkling throughout the twilit valley, and only a few guards negligently posted around the camp perimeter, and much movement and noise going on.

“We would have ridden right into the camp,” said Ukuruji.

“No, Lord Wang, you would not,” said our guide. “And I respectfully suggest that you subdue your voice.” Keeping his own voice low, the captain explained, “All down the other side of this hill are the Yi, lurking in force, and at the entrance to the valley, and on the farther slopes—in fact, everywhere between us and that camp, and beyond. You would have ridden right into their rear, and been seized. The foe are massed in a great horseshoe, around this end and both valley sides of the decoy camp. You cannot see the Yi because, like us, they have lighted no fires and they are concealed in every available cover.”

Bayan asked, “They have done so every night the army has camped?”

“Yes, Lord Orlok, and each time increasing in their numbers. But I think tonight’s camp will be the last that mock army will make. I might be wrong. But, as best I could count, today was the first day the foe have not added to their numbers. I think every fighting man in this area of Yun-nan is now congregated in this valley—a force of some fifty thousand, about equal to our own. And, if I were commanding the Yi, I should deem this rather narrow defile the perfect place to make a crushing assault on what appears to be a singularly unapprehensive invader. As I say, I might be wrong. But my warrior instinct tells me the Yi will attack at tomorrow’s dawn.”

“A good report, Captain Toba.” I think Bayan knew by name every man of his half a tuk. “And I am inclined to share your intuition. What of the engineers? Have you any idea of their disposition?”

“Alas, no, Lord Orlok. Communication with them would be impossible without revealing them to the enemy. I have had to assume and trust that they have been keeping pace along the mountain crests, and each day newly placing and readying their secret weapons.”

“Let us trust they did it this day, anyway,” said Bayan. He lifted his head enough to make a slow scan of the mountains ringing the valley.

So did I. If the Orlok was going to persist in holding me responsible for the secret weapons, it was to my best interest that the things do what I hoped they would. If they did, some fifty thousand Bho were going to perish, and about that many Yi as well. It was a considerable responsibility, indeed, for a noncombatant and a Christian. But it would mean winning the war for my chosen side, and a victory would show that God was also on our side, and that would allay any Christian qualms about wholesale slaughter. If the brass balls did not perform as warranted, the Bho would die anyway, but the Yi would not. The war would have to go on, and that might cause me some Christian pangs of conscience—killing so many people, even if they were only Bho, to no purpose at all.

But what mainly concerned me, I must confess, was the satisfaction of my curiosity. I was interested to see if the flaming-powder balls did work, and how well. Certainly, I said to myself, I could see a dozen vantage points on the mountains where, if I had been doing the placing, I would have laid the charges. Those were outcrops of bare rock, like Crusader castles towering up from the forest growth, and showing clefts and checkerings where they had been split by time or weather, and where, if they were suddenly split farther asunder, the slabs ought to topple and fall and, in falling, take other chunks of their mountains with them … .

Bayan grunted a command, and we slithered down the hill the way we had come. At the bottom, he gave orders to the waiting men:

“The real army should be about forty or fifty li behind us, and also preparing to stop for the night. Six of you start riding toward it, this instant. One of you pull off to the trailside every ten li, and wait there, so your horses will be fresh tomorrow. The sixth rider should reach there before sunrise. Tell the sardars not to start marching again. Tell them to wait where they are, lest the dust of their march be visible from here, and spoil all our plans. If all goes as planned tomorrow, I will send Captain Toba riding next and riding hard, and you will rush the word on in relays to the tuk. The word will be for the sardars to bring the whole army on, at a stretch-out gallop, to do the mopping up of any remnants of the enemy that might be left alive in this valley. If things go wrong here, well … I will send Captain Toba with different orders to impart. Now go. Ride.”

The six men left, leading their horses until they should be well out of hearing. Bayan turned to the rest of us.

“Let us eat a little and sleep a little. We must be watching from the hilltop before first light.”

2

AND we were there: the Orlok Bayan and his accompanying officers, the Wang Ukuruji, myself, Captain Toba and the remaining two men of his troop. The others were each carrying a sword, a bow and a quiver of arrows, and Bayan—ready for combat, not parade—was toothless. I, since I had the unwieldy flag-lance to handle, had no other weapon but my belt knife. We lay in the grass and watched as the scene before us slowly became visible. The morning would have to be well advanced before the sun would show itself above the mountaintops, but its rise lightened the cloudless blue sky, and that light gradually reflected down into the black bowl of the valley, and it sucked a mist up off the river. At first, that was the only movement we could see, a milky luminescence drifting against the blackness. But then the valley assumed shape and color: misty blue at its mountain edges, dark green of forests, paler green of the grass and undergrowth in the clearings, silver glitter of the river as the obscuring mist evaporated. With shape and color came movement also: the horse herd began to stir and mill a little, and we could hear an occasional distant whicker and neigh. Then the women of the bok began to arise from their bedrolls and move about, blowing the banked camp fires into flame and setting water to heat for cha—we heard the distant clink of kettles—before waking the menfolk.

The Yi had often enough, by now, watched that camp awaken to know its routine. And they chose this moment for their assault: when there was light enough for them to see their objective clearly, but only the women were astir and the men still asleep. I do not know how the Yi signaled for the attack; I saw no banner waved and heard no trumpet blown. But the Yi warriors moved all in an instant and all together, with admirable precision. One moment, we watchers were looking down an empty hill slope at the bok in the valley; we might have been at the top of an empty amphitheater, looking down the unpeopled seat-shelves at a tableau on the distant stage. The next moment, our view was blocked by the slope’s being no longer empty, as if all the amphitheater’s shelves had magically and silently sprouted a vast audience in tier upon tier. Out of the grass and weeds and bushes downhill of us, there sprang erect a taller growth—leather-armored men, each with a bow already bent and an arrow already nocked to the string. So abruptly did it happen that it seemed to me that some of them had arisen from right before my face; I fancied I could smell the half dozen nearest; and I think I was not the only one of us lurkers who did not have to repress an impulse to start up, too. But I only widened my eyes and moved my head enough to gaze about, seeing all around the valley amphitheater that suddenly visible and menacing audience, standing in thousands, in horseshoe rows and tiers—man-sized where they were near me, doll-sized farther away, insect-sized on the more distant valley slopes—all those ranks quilled and fringed and fuzzed with arrows aimed at a central point that was the stage-tableau encampment.

That had all happened in near silence, and far more quickly than it takes to tell. The next thing that happened—the first sound made by the Yi—was not a concerted, ululating battle cry, as a Mongol army would have made. The sound was only the weird, whishing, slightly whistling noise of all their arrows loosed at once, the thousands of them making all together a sort of fluttering roar, like a wind soughing along the valley. Then the sound, as it diminished away from us, was repeated, but fragmented and doubled into an overlapping noise of whish-whish-whish as the Yi, with great rapidity but no longer simultaneity, plucked from their quivers more arrows—while the first were still in flight—and nocked them and loosed them, meanwhile running full tilt toward the bok. The arrows went high against the sky and briefly darkened the blue of it, even as they dwindled in size from discernible sticks to twigs to slivers to toothpicks to whiskers, and then arced lazily over to become a dim, shady haze that drizzled down on the camp, looking no more dreadful than a gray patter of early morning rain. We watchers, being out behind and near to the archers, had seen and heard that first movement of the assault. But its targets—the standing women and horses and recumbent men in the bok—would probably have noticed nothing until the thousands of arrows began showering down and among and around and into them. No mere haze or fuzz at that extremity of their flight, the arrows were sharp-pointed and heavy and moving fast from their long fall, and many must have fallen upon flesh and struck to the bone.

And by then the ranks of the Yi nearest to the camp were running into the outskirts of it, still making no warning outcry and heedless of their own fellows’ arrows still falling, their swords and lances already flashing and stabbing and slashing. All the time, up where we were, we watched the Yi warriors still new-sprouting from our hillside and all the mountainsides around, as if the valley greenery was incessantly blooming over and over again into dark flowers that were standing archers, then shedding those and letting them run down toward the bok, then blossoming with more of them. Now there was also noise, louder than the wind-and-rain sound of the arrows—shouts of alarm and outrage and fright and pain from the people in the camp. When that noise began and surprise was no longer enjoined, the Yi also began to bellow battle cries as they ran and converged on their objective, now at last allowing themselves the yells that raise a warrior’s courage and ferocity and, he hopes, strike terror into his foe.

When all was clamor and confusion down in the valley, Bayan said, “I think now is the time, Marco Polo. The Yi are all running for the bok, and no more are springing up, and I see none held in reserve outside the combat area.”

“Now?” I said. “Are you sure, Orlok? I will be highly visible, standing here and waving a flag. It may give the Yi reason for suspicion and pause. If they do not drop me with an immediate arrow.”

“No fear,” he said. “No advancing warrior ever looks back. Get up there.”

So I clambered to my feet, expecting any moment to feel a thumping puncture of my leather cuirass, and hurriedly unfurled the silk from my lance. When nothing struck me down, I gripped the lance in both hands, raised the banner as high as I could, and began waving it from left to right and back again, the yellow shining bright in the morning light and the silk snapping briskly. I could not just wave it once or twice and then again drop prone, on the assumption that it had been seen from afar. I had to stand there until I knew that the distant engineers had seen the signal and acted on it. I was mentally calculating:

How long will it take? They must be already looking this way. Yes, they would have known where we had to come from, at the rear of the enemy. So, from their hiding places, the engineers are peering in this direction. They are scanning this end of the valley, alert for a moving dot of yellow among all the ambient greenery. Now—hui! alalà! evviva!—they see the distant, tiny, wagging banner. Now they scramble back from their lookout positions to wherever they earlier secreted the brass balls. That may take them some moments. Allow a few moments for that. Very well, now they pick up their smoldering incense sticks and blow on them—if they had the good sense to have them already alight and waiting. Perhaps they did not! So now they must fumble with flint and steel and tinder … .

Allow a few more moments for that. God, but the banner was getting heavy. Very well, so now they have their tinder glowing, and now they are wheedling into flame a pile of dry leaves or something. Now they have each got a twig or an incense stick afire, and now they are bearing those over to the brass balls. Now they are touching the fire to the wicks. Now the wicks are burning and sputtering and the engineers are leaping up and running hard for safe distance … .

I wished them good luck and much distance and safe shelter, for I myself was feeling exceptionally exposed and visible and vulnerable. I seemed to have been flaunting my flag and my bravata and my person for an eternity already, and the Yi must be blind not to have spotted me. Now—how long had the Firemaster said?—a slow count of ten after the wicks were lit. I counted ten slow wags of my big, rippling yellow banner … .

Nothing happened.

Caro Gesu, what had gone wrong? Could it be that the engineers had misunderstood? My arms were weary of the waving, and I was sweating profusely, though the sun was still behind the mountains and the morning was not yet warm. Could it be that the engineers had waited to see my signal before even placing the balls? Why had I entrusted this enterprise—and now my very life—to a dozen thickheaded Mongol rankers? Would I have to stand here, waving more and more feebly, for another eternity or two, while the engineers leisurely did what should have been done already? And how long after that would it be before they even began lackadaisically to rummage around in their belt purses for flint and steel? And during all that time, must I stand here flailing this extremely eye-inviting yellow flag? Bayan might be convinced that no warrior ever looked back voluntarily, but any of those Yi had only to stumble and fall, or be knocked sprawling, so that his head turned this way. He could hardly fail to see such an uncommon battlefield sight as I presented. He would yell to his companion warriors, and they would come pelting toward me, loosing arrows as they came … .

The green landscape was blurred by sweat running into my eyes, but I saw a brief flicker of yellow at the corner of my vision. Maledetto! I was letting the banner sag; I must hold it higher. But then, where the flick of yellow had been, there was now a puff of blue against the green. I heard a chorus of “Hui!” from my fellows still prone in the grass, and then they leapt up to stand beside me, cheering “Hui!” again and again. I let the flag and its lance drop, and I stood panting and sweating and watching the yellow flashes and blue smokes of the huo-yao balls doing what they had been intended to do.

The whole center of the valley, where now the Yi and the Bho mock-Mongols were intimately commingled, was clouded by the dust raised by their fierce confusion. But the flashes and smokes were high above that dome of dust, and not obscured by it. They were up where I would have put them myself, twinkling and puffing from those crevices in the castle-like rock outcrops. They did not all ignite at once, but flared by ones and twos, from one mountain height and then another. I was pleased that the engineers had placed them where I would have done, and I was pleased when I counted twelve ignitions; every single ball had performed as warranted—but I was dismayed by the apparent puniness of them. Such tiny flashes of fire, and so soon extinguished—and leaving only such insignificant plumes of blue smoke. The sound of them came much later and, though the noises were loud enough to be heard above the clamor of shouting and scuffling down in the valley, they were no such thunderous roar as I had heard when my palace chamber was demolished. These noises of ignition were only sharp slaps of sound—as might have been produced by a Yi warrior yonder hitting the flat of his sword on a horse’s flank—one and two slapping sounds, and then several together in a sustained crackle of slaps, and then the final few separate again.

And then nothing more happened, except that the furious but futile battle continued unabated down in the valley, where none of the combatants seemed to have noticed our byplay in the heights. The Orlok turned and gave me a lacerating look. I shrugged my eyebrows helplessly at him. But suddenly all the other men were murmuring “Hui!” in a wondering way, and they were all pointing, and most of them in different directions. Bayan and I looked first where one was pointing, and then where another was, and another. Over here, high up, the cleft gashed in a wall-like rock was perceptibly widening. Over there, high up, two great slabs of rock that had been side by side were gradually leaning apart. Over yonder, high up, a pinnacle of rock like a castle keep was toppling over, and breaking into separate rocks as it did so, and spraying those rocks apart, and doing all those things as slowly as if it had been under water.

If those mountains truly never had suffered an avalanche before, then because they never had, they may have been ready and poised for one. I think we could have accomplished our intentions with just three or four of the brass balls lodged on either side of the valley; we had put six on each side, and all had done their work. And, puny as was the commencement of the performance, the conclusion was spectacular. I can best describe it thus: consider the high rocks to have been a few exposed knobs of the backbones of the mountains, and consider our charges to have been hammer blows that broke the bones. As the mountains’ spines crumbled, their earth cover began to peel away here and there, like a hide being skinned piecemeal off an animal. And as the hide wrinkled and folded, the forests began to shed and shred off it, as a camel’s fur does in summertime, in unsightly tufts and patches.

As early as the breaking-away of the first rocks, we watchers could feel the hill under us tremble, though we were many li distant from the very nearest of those rockslides. The valley floor had to be quivering then, too, but the two armies conjoined in battle still took no notice; or, if they did, every man and woman no doubt believed it to be only his or her own personal quaking of fear and rage. I remember thinking: that must be the way we mortals will ignore the first tremors of Armageddon, continuing to pursue our trivial and pitiful and spiteful little strifes even while God is loosing the unimaginable devastation that will end the world and all.

But a goodly piece of the world was being devastated right here. The falling rocks dislodged other rocks below them and, rolling and sliding, they gouged up great swathes and whole zonte of earth and then, rocks and earth together, they scoured their various mountainsides of their vegetation, the trees toppling and colliding and heaping up and overlying and splintering, and then the surface of each mountain and everything that grew upon it or was contained within it—boulders, rocks, stones, clods, loose earth, meadow-sized pieces of rumpled turf, trees, bushes, flowers, probably even the forest creatures caught unawares—all came down, down into the valley, in a dozen or more separate avalanches, and the noise of them, until now delayed by distance, finally began to batter our ears. It was a mutter that grew to a growl that grew to a roar that grew to a thunder, but a thunder like I never heard before—not even in the unstable heights of the Pai-Mir, where the noises had often been loud, but never for longer than a few minutes. This thunder here continued to grow in volume and to create echoes and to collect and absorb the echoes, and to bellow ever louder, as if it never would reach its loudest. Now the hill on which we stood was quivering like a jelly—the noise alone might have been enough to shake it—so that we could scarcely keep our feet, and all the trees nearby us were rustling so they shed many of their leaves, and birds were bursting up everywhere, squawking and screeching, and the very air around us seemed to quake.

The rumblings of the several avalanches would have overwhelmed the noise of battle in the valley, but there was no more of that shouting and war-crying and clinking together of sword blades. The poor people had at last perceived what was happening, and so had the camp’s herds of horses, and the people and horses were scurrying hither and thither. Being myself in a state of some agitation, I could not too well discern what the people were doing individually. I saw them rather as an indistinct mass—like the blurred masses of landscape coming down the mountains roundabout—the thousands of people and horses all running in a tremendous, untidy bunch. The way they were moving, I might have thought the whole valley floor was tilting back and forth and sloshing them from side to side of it. Except for the numbers already struck down in combat, lying motionless or moving only feebly, the people and horses seemed first, and all at the same time, to glimpse the havoc hurtling toward them down the western slopes, and they all ran in a body away from there, only to see the other calamity coming down the eastern slopes, and all in a body they surged back again to the middle of the valley floor, all but a few who jumped into the river, as if they were fleeing a forest fire and might find safety in the cool water. Some two or three dozen individuals—I did make out that much—were running straight down the valley’s middle, toward us, and probably others were scampering up it in the other direction. But the avalanches were moving faster than any mere human could.

And down they came. Though the swooping blurs of brown and green contained whole forests of full-sized trees and countless boulders as big as houses, they looked, from where we stood, like cascades of dirty, gritty, lumpy tsampa porridge being poured down the sides of a giant tureen to puddle in its bottom, and the towering clouds of dust they raised on the way looked like the steam rising from that tsampa porridge. When the several separate slides reached the lower skirts of their mountains, they coalesced on either side into a single stupendous avalanche roaring into the valley—one from the east, one from the west —to meet in the middle. Rasping across the flat valley floor, they must have slowed their rush to some slight degree, but not so I could see it, and the front face of each cataract was still as high as a three-story wall when they came together. And when they did that, it made me remember once having seen two great mountain rams, in the season of rut, gallop at each other and butt their huge horned heads together with a shock that made my own teeth shake.

I would have expected to hear a similarly teeth-rattling crash when the two monster avalanches met head on, but their thunder climaxed instead with a sort of cosmically loud kissing noise. The Jin-sha River, on its way through this valley, ran along its eastern edge. So the landslide sluicing down from the east simply scooped up a considerable length of that river as it careered across it, and, as it continued on, must have churned that water into its forward content so that its front became a wall of sticky muck. When the two careening masses came together, then, it was with a loud, slapping, moist slurp!, suggesting that the avalanches were cemented there to be the valley’s new and higher floor for all time to come. Also, at the instant of their collision, the sun bounded into view beyond the eastern mountains, but the sky was so thick with dust that its disk was discolored. The sun came up as suddenly and as brassy of hue and as blurred around the rim as if it had been a cymbal thrown up there to ring the finale to all the commotion in the valley. And, while the trailing rubble skirts of the slides continued to sweep down from the heights, the noise did indeed die down, not all at once, but with the kind of wobbling, clashing, diminishing clangor that a cymbal makes as its blur slows to stillness.

In the sudden hush—it was not a total silence, for many boulders were still thudding and bouncing down from the heights, and trees still crunching and skidding down, and patches of turf still skittering down, and unidentifiable other things still caroming about in the distance—the first words I heard were the Orlok’s:

“Ride now, Captain Toba. Fetch our army.”

The captain went back the way we had come. Bayan leisurely took out from a purse the great gleaming device of gold and porcelain that was his teeth, and forced it into his mouth, and gnashed it a few times to settle its jaws to his own. Looking now a proper Orlok, ready for his triumphal parade, he strode off down the hill in the direction we were facing. When he dimmed into the cloud of dust, the rest of us followed after him. I did not know why we were doing that, unless to gloat on the completeness of our unusual victory. But there was nothing to be seen of it, or of anything really, in that dense and stifling pall. When we had gone only as far as the bottom of the hill, I had lost sight of my companions, and only heard Bayan’s muffled voice, off to my right somewhere, saying to somebody, “The troops will be disappointed when they get here. No battlefield loot to pick over.”

The enormous cloud of dust thrown up by the avalanches had, by the time the two masses met, entirely obscured our view of the valley and its ultimate devastation. So I cannot say that I actually witnessed the annihilation of something like a hundred thousand people. Nor, in all the noise, did I hear their last hopeless screams or the snapping of their limbs. But they were now gone, together with all the horses, weapons, their personal belongings and other equipment. The valley had been resurfaced, and the people had been wiped out as if they had been no bigger or more worth keeping than the crawling ants and beetles that had inhabited the old ground.

I remembered the bleached bones and skulls I had seen lying about the Pai-Mir, the remains of animal herds and karwan trains that had encountered other avalanches. There would not be even that much trace left here. None of the Ba-Tang Bho we had excused from the march—little Odcho and Ryang, for instance—if they journeyed here to visit the place where their city’s population was last seen, would ever find the skull of a father or brother to fashion into a sentimental keepsake like a drinking bowl or a festa drum. Maybe some Yi farmer tilling this valley in some far distant century would turn up with his digging stick a fragment of one of the less deeply buried corpses. But, until then … .

It occurred to me that, of all the men and women who had been so frantically running about, and those who had crouched pathetically in the river, and those who had been already lying wounded or unconscious or dead, only the insensible had been the fortunate few. The others had had to endure at least one terrible last moment of knowing that they were about to be stamped on like insects or, even worse, buried alive. Maybe some of them were yet alive, uncrushed, still conscious, trapped underground in dark, tight, contorted little graves and tunnels and pockets of air that would persist until the great weight of earth and rocks and rubble had finished shifting and settling in its new location.

It would take some while for the valley to accommodate itself to its changed topography. I could tell that because, even while I groped about and coughed and sneezed in the cloud of dry dust, I found that I was sloshing about in muddy water that had not been there before. The Jin-sha River was nuzzling and probing at the barrier that had so abruptly impeded its flow, and was having to spread out sideways beyond what had formerly been its banks. Evidently, in my trudging about in the dimness, I had veered over to the left, to the eastward. Not wanting to walk any deeper into the gathering water, I turned right and, my boots alternately sucking and slipping in the new mud, went to rejoin the others. When a human shape loomed up before me in the murk, I called to him in the Mongol language, and that was an almost fatal mistake.

I never had a chance to inquire how he had survived the catastrophe —whether he was one of those who had gone running the length of the valley instead of back and forth, or whether he had simply and inexplicably been lifted up by the avalanche instead of crushed beneath it. Maybe he could not have told me, for maybe he did not know himself how he had been spared. It seems that there are always at least a few survivors of even the worst disaster—perhaps there will even be a few after Armageddon—and in this case we would discover that there were about four score still alive of the hundred thousand. Half of those were Yi, and about half of the Yi were quite undamaged and ambulatory—and at least two of them were still armed and brimming with a rage for immediate revenge—and I had had the misfortune to meet one of those.

He may have believed himself to be the only Yi left alive, and may have been startled to encounter another human form in the dust cloud, but I gave him the advantage when I spoke in Mongol. I did not know what he was, but he knew instantly that I was an enemy—one of the enemy that had just swept away his army and his companions in arms and probably close friends, even brothers of his. With the instinctive action of an angered hornet, he made a swipe at me with his sword. Had it not been for the new mud in which we stood, I should have perished at that moment. I could not have consciously dodged the sudden blow, but my involuntary flinch made me slip in the mud, and I fell down as the sword went whish! where I had been.

I still did not know who or what had attacked me—one thing went through my mind: “Expect me when you least expect me”—but there was no mistaking the attack. I rolled away from his feet and grabbed for the only weapon I carried, my belt knife, and tried to stand, but got only to one knee before he lunged again. We were both still only indistinct figures in the dust, and his footing was as slippery as mine, so his second swing also missed me. That blow brought him close enough to me that I made a dart with my knife point, but it fell short when I slid again in the mud.

Let me say something about close combat. I had earlier, in Khanbalik, seen the imposing map of the Minister of War, with its little flags and yak tails marking the positions of armies. At other times, I have watched high officers plotting out battle tactics and following the progress of them, using a tabletop and colored blocks of different sizes. Such exercises make battle look neat and tidy and perhaps, to a remote officer or an observer not involved, even predictable in the outcome. Back home in Venice, I had seen pictures and tapestries depicting famous Venetian victories on land and sea—over here Our fleet or cavalry, over yonder Theirs, the combatants always facing each other squarely and loosing arrows or aiming lances with precision and assuredness and even a calm look of equanimity. A viewer of such pictures would take a battle to be a thing as orderly and trim and methodical as a Game of Squares, or Shahi, played on a flat board in a well-lighted, comfortable room.

I doubt that any battle has ever been like that, and I know that close combat cannot be. It is a flailing, messy, desperate confusion, usually on wretched terrain and in vile weather, one man against another, both of them having forgotten in their rage and terror everything they ever were taught about how to fight. I suppose every man has learned the rules of swordplay and knifeplay: do thus and so to parry your opponent’s offense, move like this to get past his guard, execute these other feints to expose the weak places in his defense and the gaps in his armor. Perhaps those rules apply when two masters stand toe to toe in a gara di scherma, or when two duelists politely face off in a pleasant meadow. It is quite different when you and your opponent are grappling in a mud puddle with dense cloud all about, when both of you are dirty and sweaty, when your eyes are gritty and watering so you can barely see.

I will not try to describe our struggle, blow by blow. I do not remember the sequence. All I recall is that it was a time of grunting, panting, squirming, thrashing desperation—a very long time, it seemed —with me trying to get close enough to him to stab with my knife, and he trying to keep enough distance to swing his sword. We were both body-armored in leather, but differently, so that we each had an advantage over the other. My cuirass was of supple hides, allowing me freedom to move and dodge. His was of cuirbouilli so stiff that it stood out around him like a barrel; it hampered his agility, but made an effective barrier against my short, wide-bladed knife. When at last, more by chance than skill, I struck at his chest and the blade went in, I realized that it had penetrated the cuirass, and was stuck there, but could only lightly have pricked his rib cage. So in that moment he had me at his mercy, my knife wedged in his leather, I clinging to its handle, while he was free to wield his sword.

He took that moment to laugh derisively, triumphantly before he struck, and that was his mistake. My knife was the one I had long ago been given by a Romm girl whose name meant Blade. I squeezed its haft in the proper way, and I felt the wide blades jar apart, and I knew the inner, slim, third blade had leapt out from between them, for my foe bulged his eyes in unbelieving surprise. He gave a snarling gasp and his mouth stayed open, and his back-flung hand let drop his sword, and he belched blood all over me, and he toppled away from me and fell. I yanked my knife loose of him and wiped it clean and closed it up again, and I stood up, thinking: now I have slain two men in my lifetime. Not to mention the twin women in Khanbalik. Do I also take credit for the whole victory here, and count my lifetime kill as one hundred thousand and four? The Khan Kubilai ought to be proud of me, having cleared such ample room for myself on the overcrowded earth.

3

MY companions, I saw when I located and rejoined them, had also encountered a vengeful enemy in the fog, but had not fared so well as I. They were grouped around two figures stretched on the ground, and Bayan whirled with his sword in his hand as I approached.

“Ah, Polo,” he said, relaxing as he recognized me, though I must have been bloody all over. “Looks as if you met one, too—and dispatched him. Good man. This one was insanely fierce.” He pointed his blade at one of the supine figures, a Yi warrior, much hacked about and obviously dead. “It took three of us to slay him, and not before he had got one of us.” He indicated the other figure.

I exclaimed, “A tragedy! Ukuruji has been hurt!” The young Wang was lying with his face screwed up in pain, and his own two hands clutched around his neck. I cried, “He seems to be strangling!” and bent to loosen his hands and examine the injury to his throat. But when I raised the clenched hands, his head came along in their grasp. It had been completely severed from his body. I grunted and recoiled, then stood looking sadly down at him, and murmured, “How terrible. Ukuruji was a good fellow.”

“He was a Mongol,” said one of the officers. “Next to killing, dying is what Mongols do best. It is nothing to weep over.”

“No,” I agreed. “He was eager to help win Yun-nan, and he did.”

“He will not govern it, unfortunately,” said the Orlok. “But his last sight was of our total victory. That is no bad moment to die.”

I asked, “You regard Yun-nan as ours, then?”

“Oh, there will be other contested valleys. And cities and towns to take. We have not annihilated every last one of the foe. But the Yi will be demoralized by this crushing defeat, and will be putting up only token resistance. Yes, I can safely say that Yun-nan is ours. That means we will next be battering at the back door of the Sung, and the whole empire must fall very soon. That is the word you will take back to Kubilai.”

“I wish I were taking him the good news unalloyed with bad. It cost him a son.”

One of the officers said, “Kubilai has many other sons. He may even adopt you, Ferenghi, after what you did for him here. Behold, the dust is settling. You can see what you accomplished with your ingenious brass engines.”

We all turned from contemplating Ukuruji’s body, and looked down the valley. The dust was finally sifting out of the air and laying itself like a soft, gentle, age-yellowed shroud on the tormented and tumbled landscape. The mountain slopes on both sides, which earlier in the morning had been thickly forested, now had trees and greenery only fringing the edges of their open wounds—great gouged-out gullies and gorges of raw brown earth and new-broken rock. There was just enough foliage left on the mountains that they looked like matronly women who had been stripped and violated, and now were clutching to themselves the vestiges of their finery. Down in the valley, some few living people were picking their way through the last shreds of dust fog, across the jumble of rubble and rocks and tree limbs and upended tree roots. They had apparently espied us, gathered at this clear end of the valley, and decided this was the place to regroup.

They kept plodding and hobbling up to us during the rest of that day, singly and in little groups. Most of them, as I have said, were Bho and Yi survivors of the devastation—with no idea how they had lived through it—some injured or crippled, but some entirely unscathed. Most of the Yi, even the unhurt ones, had lost all will to fight, and approached us with the resignation of prisoners of war. Some of them might have come running and frothing and swinging steel, as two of them already had done, but they came in custody of Mongol warriors who had disarmed them on the way. The Mongols were the volunteers who had accompanied the mock army as musicians and rear guards. Since they had been at the leading and trailing ends of the march, hence at the farther ends of the camp, and had had foreknowledge of our plans, they had had the best chance to run out of the way of the avalanches. Though they were only a score or two in number, those men were loud with congratulations on the success of our stratagem, and with self-congratulation on their own escape from it.

Even more to be congratulated—and I made sure to give each of them a comradely embrace—were the Mongol engineers. They were the last survivors to join us, for they had to come all the way down the ravaged mountain slopes. They arrived looking justifiably proud of what they had done, but looking also rather stunned, some of them because they had been standing close to the concussion when their engines ignited, but some because of the sheer awesomeness of what had then occurred. But I told every one of them, and sincerely, “I could not have done the positioning better myself!” and took his name, to praise him personally to the Khakhan. I must remark, though, that I collected only eleven names. Twelve men had gone up into the mountains, and twelve balls had done what they were supposed to do, but we never learned what happened to the man who did not return.

It was the middle of the night when Captain Toba returned, in company with the leading columns of the authentic Mongol army, but I was still awake at that hour and glad to see them. Some of the blood with which I was caked was my own, and some of it was still flowing, for I had not emerged entirely undamaged from my private contest with the Yi. That warrior had given me some cuts on the hands and forearms, which I had hardly noticed at the time, but by now were quite painful. The first thing the army troops did was to erect a small yurtu for a hospital tent, and Bayan made sure that I was the first casualty attended by the shaman physician-priest-sorcerers.

They cleaned my cuts and anointed them with vegetable salves and bandaged them, which would have sufficed me. But then they had to engage in some sorcery to divine whether I might have sustained internal injuries not visible. The chief shaman set upright before me a knotted bunch of dried herbs that he called the chutgur, or “demon of fevers,” and read aloud to it from a book of incantations, while all the lesser physicians made an infernal noise with little bells and drums and sheep’shorn trumpets. Then the head shaman tossed a sheep’s shoulder bone onto the brazier burning in the middle of the tent and, when it had charred black, raked it out and peered at it to read the cracks the heat had produced. He finally adjudged me to be internally intact, which I could have told him with a lot less fuss, and let me leave the hospital. The next casualty brought in was the Wang Ukuruji, to be sewn back together and made presentable for his funeral the next day.

Outside the yurtu, the darkness of the night had been considerably abolished by the light of many tremendous camp fires. Around them, the troops were doing their stamping, leaping, pounding victory dances, and yelling “Ha!” and “Hui!” and liberally sloshing all onlookers with arkhi and kumis from the cups they held while they danced. They were all rapidly getting quite drunk.

I found Bayan and a couple of the just-arrived sardars, still fairly sober, waiting to present me with a gift. On the army’s march south from Ba-Tang, they told me, its advance scouts had routinely swept every town and village and isolated building, to rout out any suspicious persons who might be Yi soldiers passing as civilians to get behind the Mongol lines as spies or agents of random destruction. And, in a run-down karwansarai on a back road, they had found a man who could not give a satisfactory account of himself. They produced him for me, with the air of giving me a great prize, but he looked no such thing. He was just another dirty, smelly Bho trapa with his head shaven and his face clotted with that medicinal brown plant-sap.

“No, a Bho he is not,” said one of the sardars. “A question was put to him which contained the name of the city Yun-nan-fu, in such a way that he had to repeat the name in his reply. And he said fu, not Yun-nan-pu. Further, he claims his own name to be Gom-bo, but he was carrying in his loincloth this signature yin.”

The sardar handed the stone seal to me, and I duly examined it, but it could equally well have said Gom-bo or Marco Polo, as far as I could tell. I asked what it did say.

“Pao,” said the sardar. “Pao Nei-ho.”

“Ah, the Minister of Lesser Races.” Now that I knew who he was, I could recognize him despite the disguise. “I remember once before, Minister Pao, you had trouble speaking out plain and clear.”

He only shrugged and did not speak at all.

I said to the sardar, “The Khan Kubilai commanded that, if this man was found, I was to slay him. Will you have someone see to that for me? I have already done enough killing for one day. I will keep this yin to show to the Khakhan as evidence that his order was obeyed.” The sardar saluted, and began to lead the prisoner away. “One moment,” I said, and again addressed Pao. “Speaking of speaking—did you ever have occasion to whisper the words, ‘Expect me when you least expect me’?”

He denied it, as he probably would have done in any case, but his expression of genuine surprise and bafflement convinced me that he had not been the whisperer in the Echo Pavilion. Very well, one after another, I was diminishing my list of suspects: the servant girl Buyantu, now this Minister Pao … .

But the next day I found that Pao was still alive. The whole bok woke late, and most of its people with aching heads, but all of them immediately set to preparing for Ukuruji’s sepulture. Only the shamàns seemed to be taking no part in the preparations, now that they had readied the funeral’s centerpiece. They sat apart, in a group, with the condemned Minister Pao among them, and they appeared to be solicitously feeding him his breakfast meal. I went in search of the Orlok Bayan, and asked in annoyance why Pao had not been slain.

“He is being slain,” said Bayan. “And in a particularly nasty way. He will be dead by the time the tomb is dug.”

Still somewhat testily, I inquired, “What is so nasty about letting him eat himself to death?”

“The shamans are not feeding him, Polo. They are spooning quicksilver into him.”

“Quicksilver?”

“It kills with cruelly agonizing cramps, but it is also a most efficacious embalming agent. When he is dead, he will keep. And he will retain the color and freshness of life. Go look at the Wang’s corpse, which the shamans also filled with quicksilver. Ukuruji looks as healthy and rosy as any bouncing babe, and will look so throughout eternity.”

“If you say so, Orlok. But why accord the same funerary rites to the treacherous Pao?”

“A Wang must go to his grave attended by servants for the afterlife. We will also be killing and entombing with him all the Yi who emerged from the disaster yesterday—and a couple of Bho women survivors, too, for his afterlife enjoyment. They may get handsomer in the afterlife; one never knows. But we are giving special attention to Pao. What better servant could Ukuruji take into death than a former Minister of the Khanate?”

When the shamans adjudged the hour to be auspicious, the troops did a lot of marching about the catafalque on which Ukuruji lay, some afoot and others on horseback, with commendable dash and precision, and with much martial music and doleful chanting, and the shamans lit many fires making colored smokes, and wailed their foolish incantations. Those performances were all recognizably funerary of aspect, but some other details of the ceremony had to be explained to me. The troops had dug for Ukuruji a cave in the ground, right at the edge of the avalanche rubble. Bayan told me the position was chosen so it would be unnoticeable to any potential grave robbers.

“We will eventually erect a properly grandiose monument over it. But while we are still occupied with the war, some Yi might sneak back into this valley. If they cannot find the Wang’s resting place, they cannot loot his belongings or mutilate his corpse or desecrate the tomb by making water and excrement in it.”

Ukuruji’s body was reverentially laid in the grave, and about it were laid the fresher cadavers of the newly slaughtered Yi prisoners and the two unfortunate Bho females, and close beside Ukuruji was laid the body of the Minister of Lesser Races. Pao had so contorted himself in his death agonies that the proceedings had to be briefly delayed while the shamans broke numerous of his bones to straighten him out decently. Then the burial detail of troops set up a wooden rack between the bodies and the cave entrance, and began to affix to it some bows and arrows. Bayan explained that for me:

“It is an invention of Kubilai’s Court Goldsmith Boucher. We military men do not always scorn inventors. Regard—the arrows are strung so they aim at the entrance, and the bows are hard bent, and that rack holds them so, but on a sensitive arrangement of levers. If grave robbers ever should find the place and dig into it, their opening the tomb will trip those levers, and they will be met by a killing barrage of arrows.”

The gravediggers closed the entrance with earth and rocks so deliberately untidy that the tomb was indistinguishable from the nearby rubble, at which I inquired:

“If you take such pains to make the tomb undiscoverable, how will you find it when the time comes to build the monument?”

Bayan merely glanced to one side, and I looked over there. Some troopers had brought one of their herd mares on a lead rein, closely accompanied by her nursling foal. Some of the men held to the lead rein while the others dragged the little infant horse away from its mother and over to the grave site. The mare began to plunge and whinny and rear, and did so even more frantically when the men holding the foal raised a battle-ax and brained it. The mare was led kicking and neighing away, while the buriers scraped earth over the new body, and Bayan said:

“There. When we come this way again, even if it is two or three or five years hence, we have only to let the same mare loose and she will lead us to this spot.” He paused, and champed his great teeth thoughtfully, and said, “Now, Polo, although you deserve much credit for the victory here, you did it so thoroughly that there is no plunder for you to share in, and I think that deplorable. However, if you care to continue riding with us, we shall next assail the city of Yun-nan-fu, and I promise that you will be among the high officers who are let to take first choice of the loot. Yun-nan-fu is a large city, and respectably rich, I am told, and the Yi women are not at all repulsive. What say you?”

“It is a generous offer, Orlok, and a tempting one, and I am honored by your kind regard. But I think I had best resist the temptation, and hurry back to tell the Khakhan all the news, good and bad, of what has occurred here. By your leave, I shall depart tomorrow, when you march on southward.”

“I thought as much. I took you to be a dutiful man. So I have already dictated to a yeoman scribe a letter for you to carry to Kubilai. It is properly sealed for his eyes only, but I make no secret of its highly praising you and suggesting that you deserve more praise than only mine. I will go now to detach two advance riders to leave immediately and start making ready your route for you. And when you depart tomorrow, I will provide two escorts and the best horses.”

So that was all I got to see of Yun-nan, and that was my only experience of war on land, and I took no plunder, and I had no chance to form any opinion of the Yi women. But those who had observed my brief military career—the survivors of it, anyway—seemed to agree that I had acquitted myself well. And I had ridden with the Mongol Horde, which was something to tell my grandchildren, if I ever had any. So I turned again for Khanbalik, feeling quite the seasoned old campaigner.