The Journeyer

KHANBALIK AGAIN

1

IN addition to the troop of horsemen staying a day ahead of us, there were other riders continually galloping off to Khanbalik or galloping up to us, ostensibly to keep the Khakhan informed of developments there. Ali Babar anxiously questioned each arriving courier, but none had any further word of his missing wife. In fact, the riders’ only function was to keep track of the train of the Dowager Empress of the Sung, which was also approaching the city. That enabled Kubilai to set our rate of march so that our procession finally swept down the great central avenue of Khanbalik on the same day—at the same hour—that hers entered from the south.

The entire populace of the city, and probably of the whole province for hundreds of li around, was jammed along the sides of the avenue and clogging every fringe street and dangling from windows and clinging to roof eaves, to greet the triumphant Khakhan with roars of approval, with flapping banners and swirling pennants, with the booming and flaring overhead of the fiery trees and sparkling flowers, with a ceaseless and ear-thumping fanfare of trumpets and gongs and drums and bells. The people continued to carry on as the only slightly less splendiferous train of the Sung Empress came up the avenue and halted respectfully on meeting ours. The crowds muted their clamor a little when the Khakhan got chivalrously down from his throne-carriage and advanced to take the old Empress’s hand. He gently helped her down from her carriage to the street, and enfolded her in a brotherly embrace of welcome, at which the people bellowed and blared a really deafening uproar of noise and music.

After the Khan and the Empress had both got into his throne-carriage, there was a period of confused milling, as the contingents of the two trains churned about to coalesce and march all together to the palace, where would begin the many days required for the ceremonies of formal surrender: the conferences and discussions, the drafting and inditing and signing of documents, the handing over to Kubilai of Sung’s great seal of state or Imperial Yin, the public readings of proclamations, the balls and banquets mingling celebration of victory and condolence of defeat. (So condolent was Kubilai’s chief wife, the Khatun Jamui, that she settled a generous pension on the deposed Empress and granted that she and her two grandsons be let to live out their lives in religious retirement, the old woman in a Buddhist nunnery, the boys in a lamasarai.)

I held my horse back in the less congested rear of the procession as it moved toward the palace, and motioned for Ali to do the same. When I had the opportunity, I reined my mount alongside his and leaned close so he could hear me over the ambient tumult without my having to shout: “You see now why I wanted us to arrive with the Khakhan. Everybody in the city is congregated here today, including any who know where Mar-Janah is, and so now they know we are here, too.”

“It would seem so,” he said. “But no one has plucked at my stirrup to volunteer any word.”

“I think I know where the word will be volunteered,” I said. “Stay with me as far as the palace courtyard and then, when we dismount, let us seem to separate, for I am sure we are being watched. Then this is what we will do.” And I gave him certain instructions.

The untidy procession went shouldering and elbowing and nudging its way through the pressing onlookers and well-wishers, so slowly that the day was ending when we finally reached the palace, and Ali and I entered the stable court as we had done on our very first arrival at Khanbalik, in a deepening twilight. The courtyard was a turmoil of people and animals and noise and confusion; if anyone was watching us, he could not have had a very clear view. Nevertheless, when we got down from our horses and handed them over to stable hands, we made a distinct show of waving farewells and going off in opposite directions.

Walking as tall and visibly as I could, I went to a horse trough and splashed water at my dusty face. When I straightened up, I looked about and made faces expressive of distaste at the surrounding commotion. I started jostling through the mob toward the nearest palace portal, then stopped and made flagrant gestures of repugnance—not worth the effort —and plowed my way out of the crowd to where I was conspicuously alone and apart. Keeping my distance from everyone I met, I sauntered slowly across uncovered walks and through gardens and over streamlet bridges and along terraces until I came to the newer parkland on the other side of the palace. I stayed always in the open, out from under roofs or trees, so that anyone who wanted to could see me and follow me. On the farther side of the palace grounds, there were fewer people, but still there were people about—minor functionaries trotting here and there on court business, servants and slaves scurrying about at their chores—for the Khakhan’s arrival naturally caused a beehive stir.

However, when I came to the Kara Hill and began idly to climb its path, as if I were only seeking to get away from the crush of people below, I really did. There was no one else in sight up there. So I strolled on uphill to the Echo Pavilion, and first walked around its entire outside perimeter, to give my putative pursuer a chance to dodge inside the wall. Finally, as if paying no least attention to where I was or what I was doing, I ambled through the Moon Gate in the wall and around the inside terrace. When I was at the farthest remove from the Moon Gate, the pavilion squarely between me and it, I leaned back against the ornamental wall and contemplated the stars coming out one by one in the plum-colored sky above the pavilion’s dragon-ridge roof. I had moved only leisurely the whole way from the entry courtyard to here, but my heart was beating as if I had run hard, and I feared that its thumping must be audible all around the pavilion precincts. But I had not long to worry about that. The voice came, as it had come before: a whisper in the Mongol tongue, low and sibilant and unidentifiable even as to gender, but as clearly as if the whisperer were right at my side, whispering the words I expected:

“Expect me when you least expect me.”

I immediately bellowed, “Now, Nostril”—in my excitement forgetting his new name and estate.

So did he, for he bellowed back, “I have him, Master Marco!”

And then I heard the grunts and gasps of a scuffle, as clearly as if it were being fought right at my feet, though I had to run all the way around the pavilion before I found the two rolling and struggling together on the very jamb of the Moon Gate. One of them was Ali Babar. The other I could not recognize; he appeared to be just a shapeless welter of robes and scarves. But that one I seized and tore away from Ali and held while Ali got to his feet. Panting, he pointed and said, “Master —it is no man—it is the veiled woman.”

I realized then that I was clutching a not very big or muscular body, but I did not lessen my grip. I held on, and the body writhed fiercely, while Ali reached out and yanked the veils off her.

“Well?” I snarled. “Who is the bitch?” All I could see was the back of her dark hair and, past that, Ali’s face, which got very round of eye and dilated of nostril and astonished and almost comically frightened.

“Mashallah!” he gasped. “Master—it is the dead come alive! It is your onetime maidservant—Buyantu!”

At that exclamation of her name she ceased to struggle and stood slumped in sullen resignation. So I eased my tight grasp of her, and turned her around to scrutinize her in what remained of the twilight. She did not look as if she had ever been dead, but her face was much harder and tight-skinned and colder than I remembered it, and her dark hair had much silver in it, and her eyes were defiant slits. Ali was still regarding her with wary consternation, and my voice was not entirely steady when I said:

“Tell us everything, Buyantu. I am glad to see you still among the living, but by what miracle did you survive? Is it possible that Biliktu lives, too? Somebody died in that calamity in my chambers. And what do you here, whispering in the Echo Pavilion?”

“Please, Marco,” said Ali, in an even more trembly voice. “First things first. Where is Mar-Janah?”

Buyantu snapped, “I will not talk to a lowly slave!”

“He is no longer a slave,” I said. “He is a freeman who has been bereft of his wife. She is a freewoman besides, so her abductor faces execution as a felon.”

“I do not choose to believe a word you say. And I will not talk to a slave.”

“Talk to me, then. You had best unburden yourself, Buyantu. I can promise no pardon for a felony but, if you tell us all—and if Mar-Janah is safely restored to us—the penalty may be something more lenient than execution.”

“I spit on your pardon and leniency!” she said wildly. “The dead cannot be executed. I did die in that calamity!”

Ali’s eyes and nostril widened again, and he took a step backward from her. I almost did, too, her words sounded so dreadfully sincere. But I stood my ground, and grasped her again and shook her and said menacingly, “Talk!”

Still stubborn, she said only, “I will not talk before a slave.”

I could have wrung her until she did, but it might have taken all night. I turned to Ali and suggested:

“This may go more quickly if you absent yourself, and quickness may be vital.” Either he saw the sense of that or he was not unwilling to leave the vicinity of one apparently come alive from the dead. Anyway, he nodded, so I told him, “Wait for me in my chambers. You can make sure for me that I do have those chambers again, and that they are habitable. I will come for you as soon as I know anything useful. Trust me.”

When he had gone down the hill, out of hearing, I said again to Buyantu, “Talk. Is the woman Mar-Janah safe? Is she alive?”

“I do not know and I do not care. We dead care nothing. For the living or the dead.”

“I have no time to hear your philosophies. Just tell me what happened.”

She shrugged and said sullenly, “That day …” I did not have to inquire what day she meant. “On that day I first began to hate you, and I continued to hate you, and I hate you still. But on that day I also died. Dead bodies cool, and I suppose burning hatreds do, too. Anyway, I do not mind now, letting you know of my hatred and how I manifested it. That can make no difference now.”

She paused, and I prodded, “I know you were spying on me for the Wali Achmad. Start with that.”

“That day … you sent me to request audience for you with the Khakhan. When I returned, I found you and my—you and Biliktu in bed together. I was enraged, and I let you see some of how enraged I was. You left me and Biliktu to tend the brazier fire under a certain pot. You did not tell us it was dangerous, and I did not suspect. Being still in a rage and wishing you harm, I left Biliktu to watch the brazier, and I went to the Minister Achmad, who had long been paying me to inform him of your doings.”

Even though I had known about that, I must have made a noise of displeasure, for she shrieked at me:

“Do not sniff! Do not pretend it is a practice beneath your high principles. You used a spy, too. That slave yonder.” She waved in the direction Ali had gone. “And you paid him, too, by pimping for him! You paid him with the female slave Mar-Janah.”

“Never mind that. Go on.”

She paused to recollect her thoughts. “I went to the Minister Achmad, for I had much to tell him. I had, that very morning, overheard you and the slave talking of the Minister Pao, a Yi passing as a Han. It was that morning, too, that you promised the slave he would wed that woman Mar-Janah. I told those things to the Minister Achmad. I told him that you were at that moment impeaching the Minister Pao to the Khan Kubilai. The Minister Achmad immediately wrote a message and sent it by a servant to that Minister Pao.”

“Aha,” I muttered. “And Pao made a timely escape.”

“Then the Minister Achmad sent another steward to fetch you to him when you left the Khakhan. He bade me wait, meanwhile, and I did. When you came, I was hiding in his private quarters.”

“And not alone,” I interrupted. “There was someone else in there that day. Who was she?”

“She?” echoed Buyantu, as if puzzled. Then she gave me á calculating look from her slit eyes.

“The large woman. I know she was there, for she almost came out into the room where the Arab and I were talking.”

“Oh … yes … the large woman. That exceptionally large woman. We did not speak. I assumed that person to be merely some new fancy of the Minister Achmad. Perhaps you are aware that he has some eccentric fancies. If that person had a woman’s name, I did not ask it, and do not know it. We merely sat in each other’s company, looking sidelong at each other, until you departed again. Are you much interested in learning the identity of that large woman?”

“Perhaps not. Surely not everyone in Khanbalik was involved in these devious plots. Go on, Buyantu.”

“As soon as you left his chambers, the Minister Achmad came for me again and took me to the window. He showed me—you were wandering up the Kara Hill—up here, to this Echo Pavilion. He told me to run after you, but unseen, and whisper the words you heard. I was pleased to make secret threats against you, even though I did not know what was threatened, for I hated you. Hated you!”

She choked on her rabid words, and stopped. I could not help feeling some compassion, so I said, “And a few minutes later, you had even more reason for hating me.”

She nodded wretchedly, and swallowed, and got her voice working again. “I was returning to your chambers when they flew all apart, before my eyes, with that terrible noise and flame and smoke. Biliktu died then—and so did I, in everything but body. She had long been my sister, my twin, and we had long loved each other. I might have felt wrath enough if I had lost only my twin sister. But it was you who made us more than sisters. You made us lovers. And then you destroyed my loved one. You!”

That last word burst out in a spray of spittle. I prudently said nothing, and again it took her a moment before she could go on.

“I would happily have killed you then. But too many things were happening, too many people about. And then you went suddenly away. I was left alone. I was as alone as a person can be. The only one I loved in the world was dead, and everyone else thought I was, too. I had no employment to occupy me, no one to answer to, no place I was expected to be. I felt quite thoroughly dead, myself. I still do.”

She fell morosely silent again, so I prodded. “But the Arab found employment for you.”

“He knew I had not been in the room with Biliktu. He was the only one who knew. No one else suspected my existence. He told me he might have use for such an invisible woman, but for a long time he did not. He paid me wages, and I lived alone in a room down in the city, and I sat and looked at the walls of it.” She sighed deeply. “How long has it been?”

“Long,” I said sympathetically. “It has been a long time.”

“Then one day he sent for me. He said you were on your way back, and we must prepare a suitable surprise with which to welcome you home. He wrote out two papers, and had me heavily veil myself—even more of an invisible woman—and I delivered them. One I gave to your slave to give to you. If you have seen it, you know it was not signed. The other paper he did sign, but not with his own yin, and that one I delivered some while later to the Captain of the Palace Guard. It was an order to arrest the woman Mar-Janah and take her to the Fondler.”

“Amoredèi!” I exclaimed in horror. “But … but … the guardsmen do not arrest and the Fondler does not punish just on someone’s whim! What was Mar-Janah charged with? What did the paper say? And how did the vile Wali sign it, if not with his own name?”

While Buyantu had been telling of occurrences, her voice had had some spirit in it, if only the spirit of a venomous snake taking satisfaction in malevolent accomplishment. But when I began demanding details, the spirit went out of her, and her voice got leaden and lifeless.

She said, “When the Khan is away from the court, the Minister Achmad is Vice-Regent. He has access to all the yins of office. I suppose he can use whichever he pleases, and sign it to any paper. He used the yin of the Armorer of the Palace Guard, who was the Lady Chao Ku-an, who was the former owner of the slave Mar-Janah. The order charged that the slave was a runaway, passing as a freewoman of property. The guardsmen would not question the written word of their own Armorer, and the Fondler questions nobody but his victims.”

I was still sputtering in appalled bewilderment. “But … but … even the Lady Chao—she is no paragon of virtue, but even she would refute an untrue charge illicitly made in her name.”

Buyantu said dully, “The Lady Chao died very shortly thereafter.”

“Oh. Yes. I had forgotten.”

“She probably never knew of the misuse of her official yin. In any case, she did not halt the proceedings, and now she never will.”

“No. How very convenient for the Arab. Tell me, Buyantu. Did he ever confide to you why he was taking so much trouble, and involving so many people—or eliminating them—on my account?”

“He said only ‘Hell is what hurts worst,’ if that means anything to you. It does not to me. He said it again this evening, when he sent me again to follow you up here and whisper that threat once more.”

I said between my teeth, “I think it is time I spread some of that Hell around.” Then a chilling realization struck me, and I exclaimed, “Time! How much time? Buyantu—quick, tell me—what punishment would the Fondler inflict for Mar-Janah’s alleged crime?”

She said, with indifference, “A slave posing as a free subject? I do not really know, but—”

“If it is not too severe, we still have hope,” I breathed.

“—but the Minister Achmad said that such a crime is tantamount to treason against the state.”

“Oh, dear God!” I groaned. “The penalty for treason is the Death of a Thousand! How—how long ago was Mar-Janah taken?”

“Let me think,” she said languidly. “It was after your slave had gone to catch up to you and give you the unsigned message. So it has been … about two months … two and a half … .”

“Sixty days … seventy-five …” I tried to calculate, though my mind was in a ferment. “The Fondler once said he could stretch out that punishment, when he had the leisure and was in the mood, to near a hundred days. And a beautiful woman in his clutches ought to put him in a most leisurely mood. There might yet be time. I must run!”

“Wait!” said Buyantu, seizing my sleeve. Again there came a trace of life into her voice, though not very fittingly, for what she said was, “Do not go until you have slain me.”

“I will not slay you, Buyantu.”

“You must! I have been dead all this long time. Now kill me, so I can lie down at last.”

“I will not.”

“You would not be punished for it, since you could justify it. But you will not even be charged—for you are slaying an invisible woman, nonexistent, already attested dead. Come! You must feel the same rage that I felt when you slew my love. I have been long working to your hurt, and now I have helped to send your lady friend to the Fondler. You have every reason to slay me.”

“I have more reason to let you live—and atone. You will be my proof of Achmad’s involvement in these filthy doings. There is no time now to explain. I must run. But I need you, Buyantu. Will you just stay here until I return? I will be as quick as I can.”

She said wearily, “If I cannot lie in my grave, what matter where I am?”

“Only wait for me. Try to believe that you owe me that much. Will you?”

She sighed and sank down, her back bowed against the inner curve of the Moon Gate. “What matter? I will wait.”

I went down the hill in long bounds, asking myself whether I ought first accost the instigating Achmad or the perpetrating Fondler. Better hasten first to the Fondler, and hope I could stay his hand. But would he still be working at this late hour? As I scurried through the subterranean tunnels toward his cavern chambers, I groped in my purse and tried to count my money by feel. Most of it was paper, but there were some coins of good gold. The Fondler might be wearying of his enjoyment by now, and be cheaply bribable. As it turned out, he was still at his labors, and was surprisingly amenable to my appeal—but not from either boredom or avarice.

I had to do a lot of shouting and pounding of my fist on a table and shaking of it at the austere and aloof chief of the chambers clerks, but he finally unbent and went to interrupt his master at his work. The Fondler came mincing out through the iron-studded door, fastidiously wiping his hands on a silk cloth. Restraining my impulse to throttle him then and there, I upended my purse on the table between us, and poured out all its contents, and said breathlessly, “Master Ping, you hold a Subject woman named Mar-Janah. I have this moment learned that she was unjustly condemned to you. Does she still live? Can I request a temporary cessation of due process?”

His eyes glittered as he studied me. “I have a warrant for her execution,” he said. “Do you bring a revoking warrant?”

“No, but I will get one.”

“Ah. When you do, then … .”

“I ask only that the proceedings be suspended until I can do so. That is—if the woman still lives. Does she?”

“Of course she lives,” he said haughtily. “I am not a butcher.” He even laughed and shook his head, as if I had foolishly disparaged his professional skill.

“Then do me the honor, Master Ping, of accepting this token of my appreciation.” I indicated the litter of money on the table. “Will that requite your kindness?”

He only grunted a noncommittal “Humpf,” but began swiftly picking out the gold coins from the pile, without seeming to look at what he was doing. For the first time, I noticed that his fingers had nails incredibly long and curved, like talons.

I said anxiously, “I understand that the woman was sentenced to the Death of a Thousand.”

Contemptuously disregarding the paper money, he scooped the coins into his belt purse, and said, “No.”

“No?” I echoed, hopefully.

“The warrant specified the Death Beyond a Thousand.”

I was briefly stunned, and then afraid to ask for elucidation. I said, “Well, can that be suspended for a time? Until I can fetch a revocation order from the Khakhan?”

“It can,” he said, rather too readily. “If you are certain that that is what you want. Mind you, Lord Marco—that is your name? I thought I remembered you. I am honest in my transactions, Lord Marco. I do not sell goods sight unseen. You had best come and take a look at what you are buying. I will refund your—token of appreciation—if you ask it.”

He turned and tripped across the chamber to the iron-studded door, and held it open for me, and I followed him into the inner chamber, and—dear God—I wish I had not.

However, in my desperate urgency to rescue Mar-Janah, I had neglected to bear in mind certain things. She, simply in being a beautiful female Subject, would have inspired the Fondler to inflict his most infernal tortures, and to drag them out as cruelly long as possible. But more than that. The warrant would have told him that Mar-Janah was the spouse of one Ali Babar, and it would have been an easy matter for Master Ping to discover that Ali was the onetime slave who had visited these very chambers, to the Fondler’s extreme disgust. (He had said in revulsion, “Who … is … this?”) And Ping would have remembered that that slave was my slave, and that I had been an even more obnoxious visitor. (I had, not knowing that he understood Farsi, called him “this simpering enjoyer of other people’s torments.”) So he would have had every excuse for exerting himself to the utmost in his attentions to the condemned Subject, who was wife to the lowly slave of Marco Polo, who had once so brashly insulted him. And now he had the very same Marco Polo before him, abjectly suppliant and pleading and cringing. The Fondler was not just willing, but fiendishly eager and proud, to show me the handiwork he had wrought—and to let me realize that it had resulted, in no small part, from my own foolhardy impertinence.

In the stone-walled, torch-lighted, blood-warmed, gore-spattered, nauseously reeking inner chamber, Master Ping and I stood side by side and looked at the room’s central object, red and shiny and dripping and ever so slightly steaming. Or rather, I looked at it, and he looked sideways at me, gloating and waiting for my comment. I said nothing for a while. I could not have done, for I was repeatedly swallowing, determined not to let him hear me retch or see me vomit. So, probably to goad me, he began pedantically to explain the scene before us:

“You realize, I trust, that the Fondling has been going on for some time now. Observe the basket, and in it the comparatively few papers still unpicked from it and unfolded. Only those eighty-seven papers are left, because I had this day got to the nine hundred and thirteenth of them. You may believe it or not, but just that single paper has occupied my entire afternoon, and kept me working this late into the evening. That was because, when I unfolded it, it was the third directive to the Subject’s ‘red jewel,’ which was somewhat hard to find in all that mess down there between the thigh stumps, and which of course had already received attention twice before. So it required all my skill and concentration to—”

I was able finally to interrupt him. I said harshly, “You told me this was Mar-Janah, and she was still living. This thing is not she, and it cannot conceivably be alive.”

“Yes, it is, and yes, it is. Furthermore, she is capable of staying alive, too, with proper treatment and care—if anyone were unkind enough to want her to. Step closer, Lord Marco, and see for yourself.”

I did. It was alive and it was Mar-Janah. At the top end of it, where must have been the head, there hung down, from what must have been the scalp, a single matted lock of hair not yet torn out by the roots, and it was long—a woman’s hair—and it was still discernibly ruddy-black in color, and curly—Mar-Janah’s hair. Also the thing made a noise. It could not have seen me, but it might dimly have heard my voice, through the remaining aperture where an ear had been, and perhaps even recognized my voice. The noise it made was only a faint bubbling blubber of sound, but it seemed feebly to say, “Marco?”

In a controlled and level voice—I would not have believed that I could manage that—I remarked to the Fondler, almost conversationally:

“Master Ping, you once described to me, in loving detail, the Death of a Thousand, which is what this seems to me to be. But you called this one by another name. What is the difference?”

“A trivial one. You could not be expected to notice. The Death of a Thousand, as you know, consists of the Subject’s being gradually reduced —by the cutting off of bits, and slicings and probings and gougings and so on—a process prolonged by intervals of rest, during which the Subject is given sustaining food and drink. The Death Beyond a Thousand is much the same, differing only in that the Subject is given nothing but the bits of herself to eat. And to drink, only the—what are you doing?”

I had taken out my belt knife and plunged it into the glistening red pulp that I took to be the remains of Mar-Janah’s breast, and I gave the haft the extra squeeze to ensure that all three blades stabbed deep. I could only hope that the thing was more certainly dead than before, but it did seem to slump a little more limply, and it did not make any more utterances. In that moment, I remembered how I had protested to Mar-Janah’s husband, a long time ago, that I could never knowingly kill a woman, and he had said casually, “You are young yet.”

Master Ping was speechlessly grinding his teeth at me, and glaring at me with furious eyes. But I coolly reached out and took from him the silk cloth with which he had wiped his hands. I used it to clean my knife, and rudely tossed it back at him as I closed up the knife and returned it to my belt sheath.

He sneered hatefully and said, “An utter waste of the most refined finishing touches yet to come. And I was going to accord you the privilege of looking on. What a waste!” He replaced the sneer with a mocking smile. “Still, an understandable impulse, I daresay, for a layman and a barbarian. And you had, after all, paid for her.”

“I have not done paying for her, Master Ping,” I said, and shoved past him and went out.

2

I was anxious to get back to Buyantu, worried that she might have got restless by now, and I would gladly have put off telling Ali Babar the sad news. But I could not leave him wringing his hands in the Purgatory of not knowing, so I went to my old chambers, where he was waiting. In a pretense of cheerfulness, he made a sweeping gesture and said:

“All restored and refurnished and redecorated. But no one thought to assign you new servants, it seems. So I will stay tonight, in case you should need … .” His voice faltered. “Oh, Marco, you look stricken. Is it what I fear it is?”

“Alas, yes, old comrade. She is dead.”

Tears started in his eyes, and he whispered, “Tanha … hamishè … .”

“I know no easier way to tell it. I am sorry. But she is free of captivity and free of pain.” Let him, at least for now, think that she had had an easy death. “I will tell you, another time, the how and the why of it, for it was an assassination, and unnecessary. It was done only to hurt you and me, and you and I will avenge it. But tonight, Ali, do not question me and do not stay. You will wish to go and grieve by yourself, and I have many things to do—to set our vengeance in train.”

I turned and went out abruptly, for if he had asked me anything I could not have lied to him. But just the telling of that much had made me more angry and determined and bloodthirsty than before, so, instead of going directly to the Echo Pavilion for Buyantu, I went first to the chambers of the Minister Achmad.

I was briefly impeded by his sentries and servants. They protested that the Wali had endured a hectic day of making preparations for the Khakhan’s return and the reception of the Dowager Empress, that he was much fatigued and had gone already to bed, and that they dared not announce a visitor. But I snarled at them—“Do not announce me! Admit me!”—so ferociously that they moved out of my way, muttering fearfully, “On your head be it, then, Master Polo,” and I slammed unannounced and ungentlemanly through the door of the Arab’s private apartments.

I was immediately reminded of Buyantu’s words about Achmad’s “eccentric fancies” and similar words spoken by the artist Master Chao long before. As I burst into the bedroom, I surprised a very large woman already there, and she whisked out through another door. I got only a glimpse of her, voluptuously gowned in filmy, flimsy, fluttering robes the color of the flower called lilak. But I had to assume that she was the same tall and robust woman I had seen in these chambers before. This particular one of Achmad’s fancies, I thought, seemed to have lasted for some while; but then I gave it no more thought. I confronted the man who lay in the vast, lilak-sheeted bed, propped against lilak-colored pillows. He regarded me calmly, his black stone-chip eyes not flinching from the storm he must have seen in my face.

“I trust you are comfortable,” I said, through clenched teeth. “Enjoy your swinishness. You will not for long.”

“It is not mannerly to speak of swine to a Muslim, pork eater. You are also addressing the Chief Minister of this realm. Have a care how you do it.”

“I am addressing a disgraced and deposed and dead man.”

“No, no,” he said, with a smile that was not a pleasant smile. “You may be Kubilai’s current great favorite, Folo—even invited to share his concubines, I hear—but he will never let you lop off his good right hand.”

I considered that remark, and said, “You know, I should never have thought myself a very important personage in Kithai—certainly not any rival to you, or any danger to you—were it not that you have so plainly thought me so. And now you mention the Mongol maidens I enjoyed. Are you resentful that you never have? Or that you never could? Was that the latest corrosive to eat at your good sense?”

“Haramzadè! You important? A rival? A danger? I have only to touch this bedside gong and my men will mince you in an instant. Tomorrow morning, I should have only to explain to Kubilai that you had spoken to me as you have just done. He would make no least fuss or comment, and your existence would be forgotten as readily as the ending of it.”

“Why do you not do that, then? Why have you never done that? You said you would make me regret my having once flouted your express command—but why do so by attrition? Why have you only furtively and indolently made threats and menaces, while destroying instead the innocent folk around me?”

“It amused me to do so—Hell is what hurts worst—and I can do as I please.”

“Can you? Until now, perhaps. Not any more.”

“Oh, I think so. For my next amusement, I think I will make public some paintings the Master Chao did for me. The very name of Folo will be a laughingstock throughout the Khanate. Ridicule hurts worst of all.” Before I could demand to know what he was talking about, he had gone on to another subject. “Are you really aware, Marco Folo, of who this Wali is that you presume to challenge? It was many years ago that I started serving as an adviser to the Princess Jamui of the Kungurat tribe of the Mongols. When the Khan Kubilai made her his first wife, and she therefore became the Khatun Jamui, I accompanied her to this court. I have served Kubilai and the Khanate ever since, in many capacities. Most recently, for many years, in this next-highest office of all. Do you really think you could topple an edifice of such firm foundation?”

Again I considered, and said, “It may surprise you, Wali, but I believe you. I believe that you have been dedicated in your service. I will probably never know why, at this late date, you have let an unworthy jealousy corrupt you into malversation.”

“So say you. In all my career, I have done nothing wrong.”

“Nothing wrong? Shall I enumerate? I do not think you conspired to put the Yi named Pao in a ministerial office. I do not think you even knew of his subversive presence. But you most certainly connived in his escape when he was revealed. I call that treasonous. You have misused another courtier’s yin to your private purpose, and I call that malfeasance of office, if nothing worse. You have most foully murdered the Lady Chao and the woman Mar-Janah—one a noble, one a worthy subject of the Khan—all for no reason but to afflict me. You have done nothing wrong?”

“Wrong must be proven,” he said, in a voice as stony as his eyes. “Wrong is an abstract word of no independent existence. Wrong is, like evil, only a matter of other people’s judgment. If a man do a deed and none call it wrong, then he did no wrong.”

“You did, Arab. Many wrongs. And so they will be adjudged.”

“Take murder now … ,” he went on, as if I had not interrupted. “You have imputed to me murder. However, if some woman named Mar-Janah is truly dead, and wrongfully, there is a reputable witness to her last hours. He can testify that the Wali Achmad never once laid eyes on the woman, let alone murderous hands. That witness can testify that the woman Mar-Janah died from a knife wound administered by a certain Marco Folo.” He turned on me a gaze of arch and mocking good humor. “Why, Marco Folo, how you do look! Is that a look of astonishment or guilt or shame at being found out? Did you suppose I have been tucked abed here all the night? I have been going about, cleaning up after you. I was only just now able to lay my weary self down to rest, and in you come, to annoy me yet further.”

But I was not discomfited by his sarcasm. I simply shook my head and said, “I will freely confess the knife wound, when we are on trial in the Hall of Justice.”

“This will never get to the Cheng. I have just told you that a wrong must be proven. But, before that, the wrongdoer must be accused. Could you do such a reckless and profitless thing? Would you really dare to lay charges against the Chief Minister of the Khanate? The word of an upstart Ferenghi against the reputation of the longest-serving and highest-ranking courtier of the court?”

“It will not be only my word.”

“There is no other to speak against me.”

“There is the woman Buyantu, my former maidservant.”

“Are you sure you wish to bring that up? Would it be wise? She also died by your doing. The whole court knows that, and so will every justice of the Cheng.”

“You know different, damn you. She spoke to me this very evening, and told me everything. She waits for me now on the Kara Hill.”

“There is no one on the Kara Hill.”

“This once, you are mistaken,” I said. “There is Buyantu.” And I may even have smiled smugly at him.

“There is no one on the Kara Hill. Go and see. It is true that earlier this evening I sent a servant up there. I disremember her name, and now I cannot even recollect on what errand I sent her. But when she did not return after a time, I went to look for her. Most considerate of me, to do that personally, but Allah bids us be considerate of our underlings. Had I found her, it might have been she who told me you had gone running to visit the Fondler. However, I regret to report that I did not find her. Nor will you. Go and see.”

“You murdering monster! Have you slain yet another—?”

“Had I found her,” he went on implacably, “she might also have told me that you refused her exactly that consideration. But Allah bids us be more considerate than you heartless Christians. So—”

“Dio me varda!”

He dropped the mocking tone and snapped, “I begin to tire of this jousting. Let me say just one thing more. I foresee that it will raise some eyebrows, Folo, if you start claiming publicly to have heard disembodied voices in the Echo Pavilion, especially if you insist that you have heard the voice of a person known by all to be long defunct, and she a person slain in a misadventure of which you were the cause. The most charitable interpretation of your babblings will be that you are woefully demented by grief and guilt arising from that incident. Anything else you may babble—such as accusations against important and well-esteemed courtiers—will be similarly regarded.”

I could only stand there and seethe at him, impotently.

“Mind you,” he went on, “your pitiable affliction may redound to the public good, after all. In civilized Islam, we have institutions called Houses of Delusion, for the safe confinement of those persons possessed by the demon of insanity. I have long pressed Kubilai to establish the same hereabout, but he stubbornly maintains that no such demon infests these more wholesome regions. Your obviously troubled mind and troublesome behavior may convince him otherwise. In which event, I shall order the commencement of construction of Kithai’s first House of Delusion, and I leave you to guess the identity of its first occupant.”

“You—you—!” I might have lunged across the lilak bed at him, but he was stretching a hand toward the bedside gong.

“Now, I have told you to go and look and satisfy yourself that there is no one on the Kara Hill—no one anywhere to substantiate your demented imaginings. I suggest you go. There or somewhere. But go!”

What could I do but go? I went, miserably disheartened, and I plodded hopelessly up the Kara Hill to the Echo Pavilion once more, though knowing it would be as the Arab had said, barren of people, and it was. There was no least trace of Buyantu’s ever having been there, or ever having been anything but dead. I came with dragging steps down the hill again, even more dejected and demolished, “with my bagpipes turned inside their sack,” as the old Venetian phrase—and my father—would express it.

The sardonic thought of my father put me in mind of him and, having now no other destination, I trudged off to his chambers to pay a homecoming call. Maybe he would have some sage advice for me. But one of his maidservants answered to my scratch at the portal, and told me that her Master Polo was out of the city—still or again, I did not ask which. So I moped on farther along the corridor to Uncle Mafìo’s suite. The maidservant there told me that yes, her Master Polo was in residence, but that he did not always spend the night in his chambers, and sometimes, not to disturb his servants unnecessarily, he came and went by a back door he had had cut in a rear wall of the suite.

“So I never know, at night, whether he is in his bedroom or not,” she said, with a slightly sad smile. “And I would not intrude upon him.”

I remembered that Uncle Mafìo had once claimed to have “given pleasure” to this servant woman, and I had been glad for him. Perhaps it had been only a brief foray into normal sexuality, and he had since found it unsatisfactory, and desisted, and that was why she looked a little sad, and why she would not “intrude upon him.”

“But you are his family, no intruder,” she said, bowing me in the door. “You may go and see for yourself.”

I went through the rooms to his bedchamber, and it was dark and the bed was unoccupied. He was not there. My homecoming, I thought wryly, was not exactly being greeted with open arms and shouts of joy, not by anybody. In the lamplight spilling in from the main room, I began feeling about for a piece of paper and something to write with, to leave a note saying at least that I was back in residence. When I groped in the drawer of a cabinet, my fingernails snagged in some curiously filmy and flimsy cloth goods. Wondering, I held them up in the half-light; they seemed hardly garments sturdy enough for a man’s wear. So I went back to the main room and brought a lamp, and held them up again. They were indisputably feminine gowns, but of voluminous size. I thought: Dear God, is he nowadays disporting himself with some female giant? Was that why the maidservant seemed sad: because he had discarded her for something grotesque and perverse? Well, at least it was female … .

But it was not. I lowered the robes to fold them away again, and there stood Uncle Mafìo, who had evidently that moment come sidling in through his new back door. He looked startled, embarrassed and angry, but that was not what I noticed first. What I saw immediately was that his beardless face was powdered blank white all over, even over his eyebrows and lips, and his eyes were darkened and lengthened with an application of al-kohl rimming the eyelids and extending out from them, and a little puckered rosebud mouth had been painted in the middle of where his wide mouth should have been, and his hair was elaborately skewered by hair-spoons, and he was dressed all in gossamer robes and wispy scarves and fluttering ribbons the color of the flower called lilak.

“Gesu …” I breathed, as my initial shock and horror gave way to realization—or as much of realization as I needed, and more than I wanted. Why had it not dawned on me long ago? I had heard from enough people, God knows, about the Wali Achmad’s “eccentric tastes,” and I had long known of my uncle’s desperate clutchings, like those of a man adrift on an outgoing tide, at one crumbling anchorage after another. Just tonight, Buyantu had looked puzzled when I mentioned Achmad’s “large woman,” and then she had said evasively, “If that person had a woman’s name … .” She had known, and she had probably decided, with female cunning, to save the knowledge for bargaining with, later on. The Arab had more forthrightly threatened, “I will make public some paintings …” and I should have remembered then the kind of pictures the Master Chao was forced to paint in private. “The very name of Polo will be a laughingstock … .”

“Gèsu, Uncle Mafìo …” I whispered, with pity, revulsion and disillusionment. He said nothing, but he had the good grace to look now ashamed instead of angry at being discovered. I slowly shook my head, and considered several things I might say, and at last said:

“You once preached to me, uncle, and most persuasively, on the profitable uses of evil. How it is only the boldly evil person who triumphs in this world. Have you followed your own preachings, Uncle Mafio? Is this”—I gestured at his squalid disguise, his whole aspect of degradation—“is this the triumph it won for you?”

“Marco,” he said defensively, and in a husky voice. “There are many kinds of love. Not all of them are nice. But no kind of love is to be despised.”

“Love!” I said, making of it a dirty word.

“Lust, lechery … last resort … call it what you will,” he said bleakly. “Achmad and I are of an age. And both of us, feeling much apart from other people … outcasts … uncommon … .”

“Aberrant, I would call it. And I would think you both of an age to subdue your more egregious urges.”

“To retire to the chimney corner, you mean!” he flared, angry again. “To sit quiet there and decay, and gum our gruel and nurse our rheumatics. Do you think, because you are younger, that you have a monopoly on passion and longing? Do I look decrepit to you?”

“You look indecent!” I shouted back at him. He quailed and covered his horrible face with his hands. “At least the Arab does not parade his perversions in gossamer and ribbons. If he did, I should only laugh. When you do it, I weep.”

He almost did, too. Anyway, he began sniffling pitifully. He sank down on a bench and whimpered, “If you are fortunate enough to enjoy whole banquets of love, do not ridicule those of us who must make do with the leavings and droppings from the table.”

“Love again, is it?” I said, with a scathing laugh. “Look, uncle, I grant that I am the last man qualified to lecture on bedroom morality and propriety. But have you no sense of discrimination? Surely you know how vile and wicked that man Achmad is, outside the bedroom.”

“Oh, I know, I know.” He flapped his hands like a woman in distress, and gave a sort of womanish squirm. It was ghastly to see. And it was ghastly to hear him gibber, like a woman agitated beyond coherence, “Achmad is not the best of men. Moody. Fearsome temper. Unpredictable. Not admirable in all his behavior, public or private. I have realized that, yes.”

“And did nothing?”

“Can the wife of a drunkard stop him drinking? What could I do?”

“You could have ceased whatever it is that you have been doing.”

“What? Loving? Can the wife of a drunkard cease loving him just because he is a drunkard?”

“She can refuse submission to his embrace. Or whatever you two—never mind. Please do not try to tell me. I do not want even to imagine it.”

“Marco, be reasonable,” he whined. “Would you give up a lover, a loving mistress, simply because others found her unlovable?”

“Per dio, I hope I would, uncle, if her unlovable characteristics included a penchant for cold-blooded murder.”

He appeared not to hear that, or veered away from it. “All other considerations aside, nephew, Achmad is the Chief Minister, and the Finance Minister, hence he is head of the mercantile Ortaq, and on his permission has depended our success as traders here in Kithai.”

“Was that permission contingent on your crawling like a worm? Demeaning and debasing yourself? Dressing up like the world’s largest and least beautiful whore? Having to flit through back halls and back doors in that ridiculous garb? Uncle, I will not excuse depravity as good business.”

“No, no!” he said, squirming some more. “Oh, it was far more than that to me! I swear it, though I can hardly expect you to understand.”

“Sacro, I do not. If it were only the casual experiment in curiosity, yes, I have done some such things myself. But I know how long you have persisted in this folly. How could you?”

“He wanted me to. And after a time, even degradation becomes habitual.”

“You never felt the least impulse to break the habit?”

“He would not let me.”

“Not let you! Oh, uncle!”

“He is a … wicked man, perhaps … but a masterful one.”

“So were you, once. Caro Gèsu, how far you have fallen. However, since you spoke of this as a business affair—tell me, I must know—has my father been aware of this development? This entanglement?”

“No. Not this one. Not this time. No one knows, except you. And I wish you would put it out of your mind.”

“Be sure I will,” I said acidly, “when I am dead. I trust you know that Achmad is bent on my destruction. Have you known it all this time?”

“No, I have not, Marco. That, too, I swear.”

Then, in the manner of a woman—who, in any conversation, is always eager to turn it down some avenue where she can run without check or hindrance or contradiction—he began to prattle most fluently:

“I know it now, yes, because tonight when you came there and I fled from the room, I put my ear to the door. But only once before was I in his chambers when you and he had words, and that time I took mannerly pains not to overhear. He never otherwise disclosed to me the full extent of his animosity toward you, or the clandestine moves he was making to harm you. Oh, I did know—I confess this much—that he was no friend of yours. He often made disparaging remarks to me about ‘that pestiferous nephew of yours,’ and sometimes facetious references to ‘that pretty nephew of yours,’ and sometimes, when we were every close, he would even say ‘that provocative nephew of ours.’ And lately, after a messenger from Xan-du confided to him that Kubilai had rewarded your war service by letting you play stud to a string of Mongol mares, Achmad began speaking of you as ‘our wayward warrior nephew’ and ‘our misguided voluptuary nephew.’ And recently, in our most intimate moments, when we were … when he was … well, he would do it uncommonly hard and deep, as if to hurt, and he would moan, ‘Take that, nephew, and that!’ And at the surge, he would almost shriek, saying—”

He stopped, for I had clapped my hands over my ears. Sounds can sicken, as well as sights. And I felt nearly as nauseated as I had felt earlier, when I had to look upon the flayed and limbless meat that had been Mar-Janah.

“But no,” he said, when I would listen again, “I did not know until tonight how much he really hates you. How he has been impelled by that passion to do so many dreadful things—and how he still seeks to discredit and destroy you. Of course, I knew him to be a passionate man … .” And the nausea rose in me again, as he once more lapsed into broken sniveling. “But to threaten to use even me … the paintings of us … .”

I barked harshly at him, “Well, then? It was some while ago that you heard those threats. What have you been doing since? Did you linger in his company—I devoutly hope—to kill the son of a bitch shaqàl ?”

“Kill my—kill the Chief Minister of the Khanate? Come, come, Marco. You had as much opportunity as I, and more reason, but you did not. Would you have your poor old uncle do the deed instead, and doom him to the fondling of the Fondler?”

“Adrìo de vu! I have known you to kill before, and without such womanly compunction. In this instance, you would have had at least more chance than I to escape undetected. I presume Achmad has a back door for sneaking through, as you do.”

“Whatever else he is, Marco, he is the Chief Minister of this realm. Can you imagine the hue and cry? Can you believe that his slayer would go undiscovered? How long would it have been before I was revealed, not only as his murderer but—but—so much else revealed besides?”

“There. You almost said it. It is not the murder that you shy from, nor the penalty for it. Well, neither do I fear killing or death. So this I promise you: I will get Achmad before he gets me. You can tell him so, next time you cuddle together.”

“Marco, I beg you—as I begged him—consider! He at least told you the truth. There exists no single witness or slightest evidence with which to impugn him, and his word will carry more weight than yours. If you contend with him, you are bound to lose.”

“And if I do not, I lose. So the only matter still in doubt—and all you care about—is whether you lose your unnatural lover. Whoever is with him is against me. You and I are of a blood, Mafìo Polo, but if you can forget that, so can I.”

“Marco, Marco. Let us discuss this like rational men.”

“Men?” My voice cracked on the word, out of sheer fatigue and confusion and grief. I had been used to feeling, in the presence of my uncle, that I had grown up not at all from the boy I was when we first began our journeying together. Now suddenly, in the presence of this travesty of him, I felt much older than he was, and much the stronger of us two. But I was not sure that I was strong enough to endure this new conflict of feelings—in addition to all the other emotions that had been provoked in me this day—and I feared that I might myself break down into sobs and snivelings. To avert that, I raised my voice to a shout again. “Men? Here!” I seized up a shiny brass hand mirror from his bedside table. “Look at yourself, man!” I flung it into his silken and matronly lap. “I will converse no more with a painted drab. If you would speak again, let it be tomorrow—and come to me with a clean face. I am going to bed now. This has been the hardest day of all my life.”

And indeed it had been, and it was not over yet. I tottered to my chambers like a hard-hunted and much-torn hare getting to its burrow just one jaw snap ahead of the hounds. The rooms were dark and empty, but I did not mistake them for any safe burrow. The Wali Achmad could very well know that I was alone and unattended—he might even have had the palace stewards arrange it so—and I decided to sit up all night, awake and full-dressed. I was too utterly tired to disrobe, in any case, but so very drowsy that I wondered how I could fend off sleep.

I had no sooner sunk down on a bench than I was jolted wide awake, to hunted-hare awareness, as my door silently swung open and a dim light shone in. My hand was already on my knife when I saw that it was only a maidservant, unarmed, no menace. Servants usually coughed politely or made some premonitory noise before entering a room, but this one had not because she could not. She was Hui-sheng, the silent Echo. The palace stewards might have neglected to provide attendants for me, but the Khan Kubilai never neglected or forgot anything. Even with all his press of other concerns, he had remembered his latest promise to me. Hui-sheng came in carrying a candle in one hand and cradled in the other arm—perhaps she worried that I would not recognize her without it—that white porcelain incense burner.

She set it down on a table and came across the room, smiling, to me. The burner was already charged with that finest quality tsan-xi-jang incense, and she brought with her the fragrance of its smoke, the scent of clover fields that have been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain. I was immediately, blessedly refreshed and heartened, and I would always thereafter associate Hui-sheng and that aroma inseparably. Long years afterward, the very thought of Hui-sheng reminds me of the incense, or the actual smell of such a fragrant field reminds me of her.

She took from her bodice a folded paper and handed it to me, and held the candle so I could read. I had been so nicely calmed and newly invigorated, by the sweet sight of her and the sweet scent of clover, that I opened the paper without hesitation or apprehension. It bore a thicket of black-inked Han characters, incomprehensible to me, but I recognized the big seal of Kubilai stamped in red over much of the writing. Huisheng raised an ivory small finger and pointed to another word or two, then tapped her own breast. I understood that—her name was on the paper—and I nodded. She pointed to another place on the paper—I recognized the character; it was the same as on my own personal yin—and she shyly tapped my chest. The paper was the deed to ownership of the slave girl Hui-sheng, and the Khan Kubilai had transferred that title to Marco Polo. I nodded vigorously, and Hui-sheng smiled, and I laughed aloud—the first joyful noise I had made in ever so long—and I caught her to me in an embrace that was not passionate or even amorous, but only glad. She let me hug her small self, and she actually hugged back with her free arm, for we were celebrating the event of our first communication.

I sat down again and sat her beside me, and went on holding her close like that—probably to her extreme discomfort and bewilderment, but she never once wriggled in complaint—all through that long night, and it seemed not long at all.

3

I was eager to make my next communication to Hui-sheng—actually to make a gift to her—which meant waiting for daylight when I could see what I was doing. But, by the time the first light of dawn shone upon the translucent windowpanes, she had fallen fast asleep in my arms. So I simply sat still and held her, and took the opportunity to look closely and admiringly and affectionately at her.

I knew that Hui-sheng was rather younger than I, but by how many years I never would know, for she herself had no idea of her exact age. Neither could I divine whether it was owing to her youth or her race—or just her personal perfection—but her face did not loosen and sag in sleep as I had seen other women’s faces do. Her cheeks, lips, jaw line, all remained firm and composed. And her pale-peach complexion, seen close, was the clearest and most finely textured I ever saw, even on statues of polished marble. The skin was so clear that, at her temples and just under either ear, I could trace the faint-blue hint of delicate veins beneath, glowing through the skin the way the Master Potter’s paper-thin porcelain vases showed their inside-painted designs when held to a light.

Another thing I realized while I had this chance to examine her features so closely. I had previously believed that all the men and women of these nations had narrow, slitlike eyes—slant eyes, Kubilai had once called them—barren of eyelashes, expressionless and inscrutable. But now I could see that it was only a matter of their having just a tiny extra inner corner to their upper eyelids that made the eyes look so, and then only from a distance. Up close, I could see that Hui-sheng’s eyes were most gorgeously equipped with perfect fans of perfectly fine, long, gracefully curved black lashes.

And when the increasing daylight in the room finally roused her and she opened her eyes, I could see that they were, if anything, even larger and more brilliant than those of most Western women. They were a rich, dark, qahwah brown, but with tawny glints inside them, and the whites around them were so pure-white that they had almost a blue sheen. Hui-sheng’s eyes, when first opened, were perceptibly brimming with leftover dreams—as anyone’s are at waking—but as they took cognizance of the real and daytime world, her eyes became lively and expressive of mood and thought and emotion. They were different from Western women’s eyes only in that they were not so readily readable; not inscrutable at all, merely requiring of a looker some attention and some caring to see what message they held. What a Western woman’s eyes have to tell, they usually tell to anyone who will look. What was in Hui-sheng’s eyes was ever discernible only to one—like me—who really wanted to know, and took the trouble to gaze deep and see it.

By the time she woke, the morning was full upon us, and it brought a scratching at my outer door. Hui-sheng of course did not hear it, so I went to open the door—with some caution, being still apprehensive of who might be calling. But it was only a matched pair of Mongol maidservants. They made ko-tou and apologized for not having been earlier in attendance, and explained that the palace’s Chief Steward had only belatedly realized that I was without servants. So now they had come to inquire what I would eat to break my fast. I told them, and told them to bring enough for two, and they did. Unlike my earlier servants, the twins, these maids seemed to have no objection to serving a slave in addition to myself. Or maybe they took Hui-sheng to be a visiting concubine, and possibly of noble blood; she was pretty enough, and noble enough in her bearing. Anyway, the maids served us both without demur, and hovered solicitously nearby while we dined.

When we were done, I made gestures to Hui-sheng. (I did this most awkwardly, with broad and unnecessary flourishes, but in time she and I would get so accomplished in sign language, and so well attuned, that we could make each other understand even complex and subtle communications, and with movements so slight that people around us seldom noticed them, and marveled much that we could “talk” in silence.) On this occasion, I wished to tell her to go and bring to my chambers—if she wished to do so—all her wardrobe and personal belongings. I clumsily ran my hands up and down my own costume, and pointed to her, and pointed to my closets, and so on. To a less perceptive person, it might have seemed that I was directing her to go and garb herself, as I was dressed at the time, in Persian-style male attire. But she smiled and nodded her understanding, and I sent the two maids with her to help carry her things.

While they were gone, I got out the paper Hui-sheng had brought me: the formal title to possession of her, relinquished by Kubilai to me. This was the gift I wanted to give her—namely, herself. I would sign the paper over to her, thereby manumitting her to the full status of freewoman, belonging to nobody, beholden to nobody. I had several reasons for wanting to do so, and to do it right away. For one, if I was likely soon to be condemned by the Arab to the cavern of the Fondler or the cell of a House of Delusion, I should have to flee or fight my way out, or fall in the fight—and so I wanted Hui-sheng to be in no way involved with me. But if I should live and keep my freedom and my courtier status, I hoped that eventually I would have possession of Hui-sheng in a different relation than master-and-slave. If it was to come about, it had to be of her own bestowing, and she could bestow herself only if she was at full liberty to do so.

I got from my bedroom the packs I had most recently carried and turned them out on the floor, looking for the little chicken-blood stone yin seal for affixing my signature firmly on the paper. When I found it, I also found the yellow-paper letter of authority and the large pai-tzu plaque Kubilai had given me to carry on my mission to Yun-nan. I probably ought to return those things to him, I thought. And that reminded me of something else I had brought for him: the paper on which I had scrawled the names of Bayan’s engineers who had placed the brass balls, and whom I had promised to praise by name to the Khakhan. I found that, too, and it in turn made me recollect many other mementos I had picked up during even earlier journeying.

For all I knew, I might never have another chance to review my past, since I might not have any future to look forward to. So I went and rummaged among the older packs and saddlebags I had carried, and got out all those items and regarded them fondly. All my notes and partial maps I had given to my father to tend for me, but I had quite a few other things—dating clear back to the wood-and-string kamàl that a man named Arpad had given me in Suvediye to track our wanderings north and south … and a now rather rusty shimshir sword I had taken from the store of an old man named Beauty of Faith’s Moon, and … .

There was another scratching at the door, and this time it was Mafìo. I was not overjoyed to see him, but at least he was dressed in man’s clothes, so I let him come in. As if the change of raiment had restored some of his manhood, he spoke in the gruff voice of old, and even seemed emboldened to bluster. After giving me a perfunctory “Bondì,” he began a harangue:

“I have lain awake all night, Neodo Marco, worrying over your situation—our several situations—and I came straight here without even taking time to break my fast, to tell you-”

“No!” I snapped. “I am long past being a little nephew boy, and you will do no telling to me. I also sat up all night, determining what I must do, though I have not yet determined exactly how I will do it. So, if you have any ideas, I shall be willing to hear them. But I will hear no telling of instructions or ultimatums.”

He immediately pleaded, “Adasio, adasio,” and raised his hands appeasingly, and let his shoulders slump as if he were enduring a lash. I was almost sorry to see him so quickly cowed by my strong rejoinder, so I said less harshly, “If you have not yet broken fast, yonder is a pot of cha still hot.”

“Thank you,” he said meekly, and sat down and poured a cup, and began again. “I came only to say, Marco—to suggest, that is—that you not embark on any drastic plan of action until I can talk again to the Wali Achmad.”

Since I had in fact no plan of action, drastic or otherwise, I only shrugged and sat down on the floor to continue sorting through my keepsakes. He went on:

“As I tried to tell you last night, I have already petitioned Achmad to consider a truce between him and you. Mind you, I hold no brief for the atrocities he has committed. But, as I pointed out to him, in the doing of those things, he has bereft you of supporting witnesses, so he need not fear your crying calumny against him. At the same time, as I also pointed out, he has sufficiently punished you for having angered him in the first place.” Mafio sipped at his cup of cha, then leaned down to see what I was doing. “Cazza beta! The relics of our journeys. I had forgotten some of those things. Arpad’s kamal. And there, a jar of the mumum shaving ointment. And that phial, is that not a memento of the charlatan Hakim Mimdad? And a pack of the zhi-pai playing cards. Ola, Marco, but you and I and Nico were once a carefree threesome of journeyers, were we not?” He sat back again. “So my argument is this. If Achmad has no reason to pursue his campaign against you, and you have no weapons against him, then a declaration of truce between you—”

“Would mean,” I said scornfully, “that nothing disrupts your cozy affair with your masterful lover. Dolce far niente. That is all you care about.”

“That is not true. And if necessary, I am prepared to prove my caring for—for all concerned. But even if you deplore that side result, there is much else to be said for a truce. No one gets hurt and all are benefited.”

“It does not much benefit the slain Mar-Janah and Buyantu and Lady Chao. Achmad slew them all, and all were innocent of any harm or wrong to him, and Mar-Janah was a friend of mine.”

“What would benefit the dead?” he cried. “Nothing you could do would bring them back alive!”

“I am still alive, and I must live with my conscience. You just now mentioned us three carefree journeyers, forgetting that for most of our journeys we were four. Nostril was one of us. And later, as Ali Babar, he was Mar-Janah’s devoted husband, and on my account he has lost her. Your conscience may be infinitely pliable, but I will not be able to look Ali in the eye again until I avenge Mar-Janah.”

“But how? Achmad is too powerful—”

“He is only a human being. He can die, too. I tell you honestly that I do not know how I shall do it, but I swear to you that I will kill the Wali Achmad-az-Fenaket.”

“You would die for doing it.”

“Then I die, as well.”

“And what of me? What of Nicolò? What of the Compagnia—?”

“If you suggest good business to me again—” I began, but I strangled on it.

“Look, Marco. Do only what I asked a moment ago. Do not so rashly commit yourself until I have talked again with Achmad. I shall go immediately and plead with him. He may offer a palliative to your anger. Something you would accept. A new wife for Ali, perhaps.”

“Gèsu,” I said, with the deepest disgust I had felt yet. “Go away, you creature. Go and crawl before him. Go and do whatever sordid things you do with him. Get him so delirious with love that he promises anything … .”

“I can do that!” he said eagerly. “You think you make only a cruel jest, but I can do that!”

“Enjoy the doing, then, for it will probably be the last time. I will see Achmad dead, and as soon as I can arrange it.”

“You really mean that, I think.”

“Yes! How can I make you understand? I care not what it costs me—or you—or the Compagnia or the Khanate or the Khan Kubilai himself. I shall seek only to shield my innocent father from the repercussions of my act, so I must do it before he returns. And I will. Achmad will die, and by my doing.”

He must have been at last convinced, for he only said dully, “There is nothing I can say to dissuade you? Nothing I can do?”

I shrugged again. “If you are going to him now, you could kill him yourself.”

“I love him.”

“Kill him lovingly.”

“I think I could not live, now, without him.”

“Then die with him. Must I say it to you straight—to you who were my uncle and companion and trusted ally? I say it then: the friend of my enemy is as much my enemy!”

I did not even see him leave the room, because Hui-sheng and the two maids came back just then, and I was briefly occupied in showing them where to stow her little stock of clothes and belongings. Then, during another little while, I managed totally to forget the evil Achmad and my pitifully decayed Uncle Mafìo and all the other cares that weighed upon me and all the hazards that waited for me beyond this place and this moment—for I was happily engaged in giving to Hui-sheng the deed to herself.

I motioned for her to sit down at a table, which had on it the brushes and arm rest and ink block that the Han use for writing. I unfolded the title paper and laid it before her. I wetted the block to make ink, and brushed some of that onto the engraved surface of my yin, then pressed that firmly on a clear space on the paper, and showed her the mark. She looked at it and then at me, her lovely eyes striving to comprehend what I meant by those actions. I pointed to her, to the mark on the paper, to myself, then made dismissing gestures—the paper is no longer mine, you are no longer mine—and thrust the paper at her.

A great light came into her face. She imitated my gestures of dismissal, and looked questioningly at me, and I nodded definitely. She held the paper, still gazing at me, and made as if to tear it up—though she did not—and I nodded even more definitely, to assure her: that is correct, the slave deed no longer exists, you are a free woman. Tears came into her eyes, and she stood up and let go the paper and let it flutter to the floor, and gave me one last questioning look: there is no mistake? I made a wide, sweeping motion to indicate: the world is yours, you are free to go. There ensued one frozen moment, during which I held my breath, and we simply stood and regarded each other, and it seemed an interminably long moment. All she had to do was gather up her belongings again and take her leave; I could not have prevented her. But then the frozen moment fractured. She made two gestures that I hoped I understood—putting one hand to her heart, the other to her lips, then extending both to me. I smiled uncertainly, and then I gave a happy laugh, for she threw her small self against me, and we were embracing as we had done the night before—not passionately or even amorously, but gladly.

I silently thanked and blessed the Khan Kubilai for having given me that yin seal. This was the first time I had ever used it, and behold, it had put this darling girl in my arms. It was truly amazing, I thought, what the simple impress of a mere carved stone on a piece of paper could accomplish … .

And then, abruptly, I let go of Hui-sheng and turned away from her and threw myself on the floor.

On the way down, I had a flashing glimpse of her startled little face, but there was no time to explain or apologize for my rudeness. I had been suddenly possessed of an idea—an outrageous and maybe even a lunatic idea, but a most enthralling one. It might have been Hui-sheng’s own refreshing touch that had stimulated my wits to think of it. If it was, I would thank her later. Right now, sprawled on the floor, I ignored what must have been her great astonishment, and anxiously began pawing through the litter of oddments I had emptied from my packs. I found the pai-tzu plaque I had decided to return to Kubilai, and the list of engineers’ names I wanted to give him, and—yes! there it was!—the yin seal engraved Pao Nei-ho, which I had taken from the Minister of Lesser Races just before his execution, and kept ever since. I seized upon it and gleefully regarded it and stood up clutching it, and I think I sang some song words and danced a few steps. I desisted when I realized that Hui-sheng and my two new servants were staring at me with wonder and dubiety.

One of the maids waved toward the door and said hesitantly, “Master Marco, a caller asking to see you.”

I sobered immediately, for it was Ali Babar. I felt ashamed that he had found me capering, as if I were light of heart when he was bereaved and grieving. But it could have been worse; I should have felt more guilty if he had entered while I was embracing Hui-sheng. I strode to him and clasped his hand and drew him in, murmuring words of greeting and condolence and friendship. He looked terrible. His eyes were red from weeping, his great nose seemed to droop even more than usual, and he was wringing his hands, but that did not keep them from trembling.

“Marco,” he said in a quaver. “I have just been to the Court Funeralmaster, seeking to look one last time at my dear Mar-Janah. But he says he has, among his store of the departed, not any such person!”

I should have anticipated that, and averted his going, and saved him the bewilderment of that announcement. I knew that executed felons did not go to the Funeralmaster; the Fondler disposed of them himself, without sacrament or ceremony. But I said nothing of that, only said soothingly, “Doubtless some confusion caused by the turmoil of the court’s return from Xan-du.”

“Confusion,” mumbled Ali. “I am much confused.”

“Leave everything to me, old friend. I will make all straight. I was just this moment about to do that. I am on my way to make various arrangements pertaining to this matter.”

“But wait, Marco. You said you would tell me … all the how and the why of her dying … .”

“I will, Ali. As soon as I return from this errand. It is urgent, but it will not take long. Do you rest here, and let my ladies attend you.” To the maids I said, “Prepare for him a hot bath. Rub him with balms. Fetch for him food and drink. Every kind of drink, and as much as he will take.” I started out, but then thought of something else, and commanded most strictly, “Admit no one else to these chambers until I am back again.”

I went, almost running, to call upon the Minister of War, the artist Master Chao, and by good fortune found him not occupied with either war or art so early in the day. I commenced by saying that I had heard of the accident which had taken his lady, and that I was sorry for it.

“Why?” he said languidly. “Were you among her stable of stallions?”

“No. I am merely observing the decencies.”

“I must thank you. It is more than she ever did. But I imagine you did not come visiting for that only.”

“No,” I said again. “And if you prefer bluntness, so do I. Are you aware that the Lady Chao died by no accident? That it was so arranged by the Chief Minister Achmad?”

“I must thank him. It is more than he ever did for me before. Have you any notion why he took such an abrupt interest in tidying up the disarray of my small household?”

“He did not, Master Chao. It was purely in his own interest.” I went on to tell of Achmad’s use of the Lady Chao’s official yin for the disposal of Mar-Janah, and the several preceding and subsequent events. I did not mention Mafìo Polo, but I did conclude by saying, “Achmad has threatened also to make public certain paintings done by you. I thought you might be averse to that.”

“It would be embarrassing, yes,” he murmured, still languidly, but his keen glance told me that he knew what paintings I referred to, and that they would be embarrassing to the Famiglia Polo as well. “I take it that you would like to interrupt the Jing-siang Achmad’s suddenly headlong career of destruction.”

“Yes, and I believe I know how. It occurred to me that if he could employ someone else’s signature to covert purpose, so could I. And I also happen to be in possession of another courtier’s yin.”

I handed the stone to him, and I did not have to tell him whose it was, for he was able to read the name from it. “Pao Nei-ho. The former and impostor Minister of Lesser Races.” He looked up at me and grinned. “Are you suggesting what I think you are?”

“The Minister Pao is dead. No one really knows why he had insinuated himself into this court, or whether he ever really used his office to the subversion of the Khanate. But if, all at once, a letter or a memorandum were found, bearing his signature, concerning some nefarious intention—say, a conspiracy somehow to defame the Khan and upraise the Chief Minister—well, Pao is not around to disown it, and Achmad might have a hard time refuting it.”

Chao exclaimed delightedly, “By my ancestors, Polo, but you show certain ministerial talents yourself!”

“One talent I do not possess is an ability to write in the Han character. You do. There are others I could have applied to, but I took you to be no friend of the Arab Achmad.”

“Well, if all you say is true, he did relieve me of one burden. But I still groan under his lading of others. You are right: I would happily join in deposing that son of a turtle. Except, you overlook one detail. You are proposing a real conspiracy. If it fails, you and I have an early appointment with the Fondler. If it succeeds—even worse—you and I are in each other’s power forever after.”

“Master Chao, I desire only vengeance against the Arab. If I can hurt him in the least degree, I care not if it costs me my head—tomorrow or some years hence. Simply by proposing this action, I have already put myself in your power. I can offer you no other surety of my bona fides.”

“It is enough,” he said with decision, and got up from his work table. “In any case, this is so wondrously grand a jest that I could not refuse. Come here.” He led me into the next room, and whisked the cover off the tremendous map table. “Let us see. The Minister Pao was a Yi of Yun-nan, which was then under siege … .” We stood and looked at Yun-nan, which now was dotted with Bayan’s flags. “Suppose the Minister Pao was trying to aid his home province … and the Minister Achmad was hoping to dethrone the Khan Kubilai … . We need something to link those two ambitions … some third component … I have it! Kaidu!”

“But the Ilkhan Kaidu rules way over yonder in the northwest,” I said dubiously, pointing to the Sin-kiang Province. “Is he not rather remote to be involved in the conspiracy?”

“Come, come, Polo,” he chided me, but with high good humor. “In this sin of perpetrating a lie, I am incurring the wrath of my revered ancestors, and you are putting at peril your immortal soul. Would you go to Hell for a merely feeble and pusillanimous lie? Have you no artistry, man? No sweeping scope of vision? Let us make it a thundering lie, and a sin to scandalize all the gods!”

“It should at least be a believable lie.”

“Kubilai will believe anything of his barbarian cousin Kaidu. He loathes the man. And he knows Kaidu to be reckless and voracious enough to enter into any wildest scheme.”

“That is true enough.”

“So there we have it. I shall concoct a missive in which the Minister Pao privily discusses with the Jing-siang Achmad their mutual and secret and culpable conspiracy with the Ilkhan Kaidu. Those are the picture’s main outlines. Leave the details of its composition to a master artist.”

“Gladly,” I said. “God knows you paint believable pictures.”

“Now. How will you have come to be in possession of this highly volatile document?”

“I was one of the last to see the Minister Pao alive. I shall have discovered the paper while searching him. As I really did find the yin.”

“You never found the yin. Forget that altogether.”

“Very well.”

“You found on him only an old and much-creased paper. I shall make it a letter which, here in Khanbalik, Pao wrote to Achmad but had no chance to deliver, because he was forced to flee. So he simply and foolishly carried it with him. Yes. I shall rumple and dirty it a bit. How soon do you want this?”

“I should have given it to the Khan back when I first arrived at Xandu.”

“Never mind. You had no way of recognizing its significance. You have just now found it while unpacking your travel gear. Give it to Kubilai, saying most ingenuously, ‘Oh, by the way, Sire … .’ The very offhandedness will lend verisimilitude. But the sooner the better. Let me get right at it.”

He sat down to his work table again, and began busily to get out papers and brushes and ink blocks of red and black and other appurtenances of his art, saying meanwhile:

“You applied to the right man for your conspiracy, Polo, though I would wager much money that you do not even realize why. To you, no doubt, any two pages of Han characters look alike, so you are unaware that not every scribe can counterfeit another’s writing. I must now try to remember Pao’s hand, and practice until I can fluently imitate it. But that should not take me too long. Go now and leave me to it. I will have the paper in your hands as soon as I can.”

As I moved toward the door, he added, in a voice combining cheer and rue, “Do you know something else? This may be the crowning effort of my whole career, the masterpiece of my entire life.” And as I went out, he was saying, though still cheerfully enough, “Why could you not have conceived a work to which I could sign Chao Meng-fu? Curse you, Marco Polo.”

4

“IF all goes well,” I told Ali, “the Arab will be flung to the Fondler. And, if you like, I will petition permission for you to be present and help the Fondler put Achmad to the Death of a Thousand.”

“I should like to help put him to death,” mumbled Ali. “But help the hateful Fondler? You said it was he who did the actual ravagement of Mar-Janah.”

“That is true, and God knows he is hateful in the extreme. But in this case he was acting at the Arab’s bidding.”

I had returned to my chambers to find, as I had hoped, that the maidservants had plied Ali Babar with enough liquor to numb him somewhat. So, although he variously had gasped with horror, wailed with grief and moaned with regret, as I told him all the circumstances attendant on Mar-Janah’s demise, he had not indulged in the extravagant thrashing about and howling which most Muslims consider the only proper form of lamentation. Of course, I had not dwelt in detail on what last remnants I had found of Mar-Janah, or her last minutes of life.

“Yes,” said Ali, after a long, pensive silence. “If you can arrange it, Marco, I would like to be present at the Arab’s execution. Without Mar-Janah, I have not any other desires or anticipations to be realized. If only that wish is granted, it will suffice.”

“I shall see to it—if all does go well. You might sit there and beseech Allah that all does go well.”

Saying which, I got out of my own chair and knelt down on the floor again, to pick up and put away the litter of keepsakes. As I collected the various things—Arpad’s kamàl, the pack of zhi-pai cards, and so on—I got the curious impression that something was gone from among them. I sat back and wondered, what could that be? I was not missing the Minister Pao’s yin, for I had taken that away myself. But something was gone that had been there when I first emptied my packs. Suddenly I realized what it was.

“Ali,” I said. “Did you perhaps pick up something from among this mess while I was absent?”

“No, nothing,” he said, with an air of not even having noticed the litter on the floor, which in his stunned and preoccupied condition he probably had not.

I asked the two Mongol maids, and they denied having touched anything. I went and got Hui-sheng, who was in the bedroom putting her own few belongings carefully away in closets and drawers. I smiled at that; it indicated that she planned to stay, and for more than a brief while. I took her hand and drew her into the main room, and indicated the goods on the floor, and made questioning gestures. Evidently she comprehended, for she replied with a shake of her pretty head.

So only Mafio could have taken it. What was missing was the small clay phial at which he had exclaimed, “Is that not a memento of the charlatan Hakim Mimdad?”

It was. It was the love philter the Hakim had given me on the Roof of the World, the potent potion allegedly employed by the long-ago poet Majnun and his poetess Laila to enhance their making of love. Mafìo knew exactly what it was, and he knew it was unpredictably dangerous, for he had heard me berating Mimdad after my one horrible experience with the stuff, and he had seen me only warily accept from the Hakim a second little bottle to carry away with me. Now he had filched that phial. What could he want it for?

There came to me, with a jolt, some other words he had spoken this morning: “If necessary, I am prepared to prove my caring …” And when I jeered, “Go and get the Arab delirious with love!” he had said: “I can do that!”

Dio le varda! I must run and find him and stop him! God knows I had ample reason to be disillusioned and disgusted with Mafìo Polo, and not to care a bagatìn what became of him, but still … he was blood of my blood. And any self-pitying or self-glorifying act of self-sacrifice he might make now was futile and unnecessary, for I already had a trap in preparation for the damnable Arab Achmad. So I scrambled to my feet —causing Hui-sheng again to regard me with mild wonderment. But I got only as far as the door, for there stood the happily beaming Master Chao.

“It is accomplished,” he said. “And so is your vengeance, the moment you show this to Kubilai.”

He glanced past me and saw the others in the room, and tugged me by my sleeve out of their hearing down the corridor. He took out from some recess of his robes a folded, wrinkled, smudged paper that truly looked as if it had had a hard journey from Khanbalik to Yun-nan and back again. I opened it and gazed at what looked to me—as all Han documents looked to me—like a garden plot much tracked over by a flock of chickens.

“What does it say?”

“Everything necessary. Let us not take time for a translation. I hurried with it, and so must you. The Khan is right now on his way to the Hall of Justice, where he is about to declare the Cheng in session. Many matters of litigation have accumulated to await his judgment. He is conscientious about such things, even to the delaying of his acceptance of Sung’s surrender. But if you do not catch him before the Cheng convenes, he will be occupied there, and later in negotiations with the Sung Empress. It may be days before you can get to him again, and in that time Achmad could be busy to your detriment. Go quickly.”

“The moment I do this,” I said, “I am putting not just Achmad’s fate, but mine also, irrevocably in your hands, Master Chao.”

“And I mine, Polo, in yours. Go.”

I went, after running into my rooms again to gather up the other things I had for the Khakhan. And I did catch him, just as he and the lesser justices and the Tongue were taking their seats on the dais of the Cheng. He motioned amiably for me to approach the dais, and, when I gave him the items I had brought, he said, “There was no hurry about returning these things, Marco.”

“I had already kept them longer than I should have done, Sire. Here is the ivory pai-tzu plaque, and your yellow-paper letter of authority, and a paper the late Minister Pao was carrying at the time of his capture, and this note of mine, which lists those engineers who so capably positioned the huo-yao balls. Since I set down their names in Roman letters, Sire, perhaps you would listen as I read them. I hope I can pronounce them correctly, and that you can comprehend them, for you may wish to reward those men with some mark of—”

“Read, read,” he said indulgently.

I did so, while he idly laid aside the plaque and the letter he had given me to carry, and idly opened and glanced at the paper the Master Chao had forged. When he saw that it was written in Han, he idly handed it to the many-tongued Tongue, and went on listening to me. I was struggling to comprehend my own not clearly legible list of scrawls, reading aloud, “A man named Gegen, of the Kurai tribe … a man named Jassak, of the Merkit tribe … a man named Berdibeg, also of the Merkit—” when the Tongue suddenly leapt to his feet and, for all his grasp of many languages, gave a cry that was entirely inarticulate.

“Vakh!” exclaimed the Khakhan. “What ails you, man?”

“Sire!” the Tongue gasped excitedly. “This paper—a matter of the utmost importance! It must take precedence over all else! This paper—brought by that man yonder.”

“Marco?” Kubilai turned back to me. “You said it was taken from the late Minister Pao?” I said it was. He turned again to the Tongue. “Well?”

“You might prefer, Sire—” said the Tongue, looking pointedly at me, at the other justices and the guards. “You might prefer to clear the hall before I divulge the contents.”

“Divulge them,” growled the Khan, “and then I will decide if the hall is to be cleared.”

“As you command, Sire. Well, I can give you a word by word translation at your leisure. But suffice it now to say that this is a letter signed with the yin Pao Nei-ho. It hints—it implies—no, it bluntly reveals—a treacherous conspiracy between your cousin the Ilkhan Kaidu and—and one of your most trusted ministers.”

“Indeed?” said Kubilai frostily. “Then I think it best that no one leave this hall. Go on, Tongue.”

“In brief, Sire, it appears that the Minister Pao, whom we all now know to have been a Yi impostor here, hoped to avert the total devastation of his native Yun-nan. It appears that Pao had persuaded the Ilkhan Kaidu—or perhaps bribed him; money is mentioned—to march south and fling his forces upon the rear of ours then invading Yun-nan. It would have been an act of rebellion and civil war. In that event, it was expected that you yourself, Sire, would take the field. In your absence and the ensuing confusion, the—the Vice-Regent Achmad was to proclaim himself Khakhan—”

The assembled Cheng justices all cried “Vakh!” and “Shame!” and “Aiya!” and other expressions of horror.

“—upon which,” the Tongue resumed, “Yun-nan would declare its surrender and fealty to the new Khakhan Achmad, in return for an easy peace. Next, it seems also to have been agreed, the Yi would join with Kaidu in falling upon the Sung, and help to conquer that empire. And after all was done, Achmad and Kaidu would divide and rule the Khanate between them.”

There were more exclamations of “Vakh!” and “Aiya!” Kubilai had yet made no comment, but his face was like the black buran sandstorm rising over the desert. While the Tongue waited for some command, the ministers began passing the letter around among them.

“Is it truly Pao’s hand?” asked one.

“Yes,” said another. “He always wrote in the grass stroke, not the formal upright character.”

“And there, see?” said another. “To write money, he used the character for kauri-shell, which is currency among the Yi.”

Another asked, “What of the signature?”

“It looks to be genuinely his.”

“Send for the Yinmaster!”

“No one is to leave this room.”

But Kubilai heard and nodded, and a guard went running out. In the meantime, the ministers kept up a muted hubbub of argument and expostulation, and I heard one say solemnly, “It is too outrageous to be believed.”

“There is precedent,” said another. “Remember, some years ago, our Khanate acquired the land of Cappadocia by a similar ruse. A likewise trusted Chief Minister of the Seljuk Turki enlisted the covert aid of our Ilkhan Abagha of Persia to help him overthrow the rightful King Kilij. And, once the treachery was accomplished, the upstart allied Cappadocia to our Khanate.”

“Yes,” remarked another. “But happily there was a difference in those circumstances. Abagha conspired not for his own aggrandizement, but for the benefit of his Khakhan Kubilai and the whole Khanate.”

“Here comes the Yinmaster.”

Hurried along by the guardsman, old Master Yiu came shuffling into the Cheng. He was shown the paper, and had to squint at it only briefly before he pronounced:

“I cannot mistake my own work, my lords. That is indeed the yin I cut for the Minister of Lesser Races, Pao Nei-ho.”

“There!” said several of them, and “It is all true!” and “It is beyond question now!” and they all looked to Kubilai. He inhaled a great breath of air, and slowly sighed it out, and then said in a doomful voice, “Guards!” Those men snapped to rigid attention, and thumped their lances on the floor in unison. “Go and demand the presence here of the Chief Minister Achmad-az-Fenaket.” They thumped their lances again, and wheeled to march out, but Kubilai halted them for a moment and turned to me.

“Marco Polo, it seems that you have once again been of service to our Khanate—albeit inadvertently this time.” The words were commendatory enough, but, from the expression on his face, one would have thought I had tracked into the hall on my boots some dog dirt from the outdoors. “You may see it through to the close, Marco. Go with the guards and yourself utter to the Chief Minister the formal command: ‘Arise and come, dead man, for Kubilai the Khan of All Khans would hear your last words.’”

So I went, as instructed. But the Khakhan had not ordered me to return to the Cheng in company with the Arab, and, as it happened, I did not. I and my troop of guards arrived at Achmad’s chambers to find its outer doors unguarded and wide open. We went inside, and found his own sentries and all his servants gathered in attitudes of anxious listening and hand-wringing indecision outside his closed bedroom door. When they saw our arrival, the servants raised a clamor of greeting, and thanked Tengri and praised Allah that we had come, and it was some time before we could quiet them down and get a coherent account of what was going on.

The Wali Achmad, they said, had been in his bedchamber all day. That was not an uncommon occurrence, they said, because he often took work with him at night and continued, after awakening and breaking his fast, to deal with it while lying comfortably abed. But this day, there had begun to proceed from inside the bedroom some extraordinary noises and, after some understandable hesitation, a maidservant had pecked at the door to inquire if all was well. She had been answered by a voice recognizably the Wali’s, but in an unnaturally high and nervous tone, commanding, “Leave me be!” The unaccountable sounds had then resumed and continued: giggles rising to wild laughter, squeaks and sobs increasing to moans and groans, laughter again, and so on. The listeners —by then comprising Achmad’s whole staff clustered against the door—had been unable to decide whether the noises expressed pleasure or distress. In the course of what had now been some hours, they had frequently called out to their master and knocked on the door and tried to open it and peer in. But the door was fastened tight shut, and they were debating the propriety of breaking through it when fortunately we arrived and saved them having to decide.

“Listen for yourselves,” they said, and I and the corporal of the guard pressed our ears to the panels.

After an interval, the corporal said wonderingly to me, “I never heard anything like it.”

I had, but it had been a long time ago. In the anderun of the palace of Baghdad, I had once watched through a peephole as a young girl inmate seduced an ugly, hairy simiazza ape. The sounds I now heard through this door were much like the sounds I had heard then—the girl’s murmured endearments and encouragements, the ape’s puzzled gibbering, his grunts and her moans of consummation, all mingled with little yips and squeaks of pain, because the ape, in clumsily satisfying her, had also clumsily given her many small bites and scratches.

I said nothing of that to the corporal, saying only, “I suggest that you have your men clear all these servants away from here, away to their quarters. We must arrest the Minister Achmad, but we need not humiliate him before his staff. Get rid of his guards, too. We have enough of our own.”

“We go in, then?” asked the corporal, as that was being done. “Even if he is indisposed?”

“We go in. Whatever is happening in there, the Khakhan wants that man and wants him now. Yes, force the door.”

I had ordered the onlookers removed, not because I was concerned for Achmad’s feelings, but for my own, since I expected to find my uncle conspicuously present in there. To my considerable relief, he was not, and the Arab was in no condition to care about humiliation.

He lay naked on the bed, his scrawny and sweaty brown body squirming in a welter of his own secretions. The bedclothes today were of pale-green silk, but much slimed and crusted with white and also with pink, for it appeared that, after many emissions, Achmad’s later ones had been streaky with blood. He was still uttering the gibberish noises, though only in a muffled voice, for he had in his mouth one of those su-yang mushroom phallocrypts, moisture-bloated to such a bigness that it stretched his lips and cheeks. There was another pretend-organ protruding from his backside, but that was made of fine green jade. At his front, his own true organ was invisible inside something that looked like a Mongol warrior’s wintertime fur hat, and with both hands he was frantically jerking it back and forth to fricate himself. His agate eyes were wide open, but their stoniness looked blurred, as if by moss, and, whatever he was seeing, it was not us.

I gestured to the guards. A couple of them bent over the Arab and began plucking the various devices off him and out of him. When the su-yang was withdrawn from his sucking mouth, his whimpered utterances got louder, but were still only senseless noises. When the jade cylinder was yanked out of him, he moaned lasciviously and his body briefly convulsed. When the furry thing was taken off him, he feebly continued moving his hands, though they had not much left to play with down there, for he was rubbed raw and bloody and small. The corporal of the guard turned the hatlike object over and over, curiously examining it, and I observed that it was hairy only in part, but then I averted my eyes, as a quantity of white substance and stringy blood oozed out of it.

“By Tengri!” growled the corporal to himself. “Lips?” Then he flung it down and said loathingly, “Do you know what that is?”

“No,” I said. “And I do not wish to know. Stand the creature on his feet. Throw cold water on him. Wipe him down. Get some clothes on him.”

As those things were done to him, Achmad seemed to revive to some degree. At first he was utterly limp, and the guards attending him had to hold him upright. But gradually, after much wobbling and teetering, he was able to stand alone. And, after several drenchings with cold water, he began to make comprehensible words of his whimpers, though they were still disjointed.

“We were both dewy children … ,” he said, as if repeating some poetry that only he could hear. “We fitted well together … .”

“Oh, shut up,” grunted the grizzled soldier who was swabbing the sweat and scum off him.

“Then I grew up, but she stayed small … with only tiny apertures … and she cried … .”

“Shut up,” grunted the other leathery veteran who was trying to get an aba onto him.

“Then she became a stag … and I a doe … and it was I who cried … .”

The corporal snapped, “You have been told to be silent!”

“Let him talk and clear his head,” I said indulgently. “He will have need of it.”

“Then we were butterflies … embracing inside a fragrant flower blossom … .” His rolling eyes momentarily steadied on me, and he said quite distinctly, “Folo!” But the eyes’ stone hardness was still mossed over, and so were his other faculties, for he added only a mumble: “Make that name a laughingstock … .”

“You may try,” I said indifferently. “I am commanded to speak to you thus: Go with these guards, dead man, for Kubilai the Khan of All Khans would hear your last words.” I motioned one more time and said, “Take him away.”

I had let Achmad continue babbling just to prevent the guards’ noticing another sound I had heard in that room—a faint but persistent and musical sort of noise. As the guards left with their prisoner, I stayed behind to investigate the source of that sound. It did not come from anywhere in the room itself, nor from outside either of the room’s two doors, but from behind some one of the walls. I listened closely and traced it to one particularly garish Persian qali hanging opposite the bed, and I swept that aside. The wall behind it looked solid, but I had only to lean on it and a section of the paneling swung inward like a door, giving on a dark stone passage, and I could make out now what the noise was. It was a strange sound to be hearing in a secret corridor in the Mongol palace of Khanbalik, for it was an old Venetian song being sung. And it was most exceedingly strange in these circumstances, for it was a simple song in praise of Virtue—something notably lacking in the Wali Achmad and his vicinity and everything to do with him. Mafìo Polo was singing, in a low quaver:

La virtù te da grazia anca se molto

Vechio ti fussi e te dà nobil forme … .

I reached back into the bedroom for a lamp to light my way, and went into the darkness and swung the secret door shut behind me, trusting that the qali would fall and cover it. I found Mafìo sitting on the cold, damp stone floor, not far along the passage. He was again costumed in the ghastly “large woman” raiment—this time all in pale green —and he looked even more dazed and deranged than the Arab had done. But at least he was not smeared or caked with blood or any other body fluids. Evidently, whatever part he had played in the love-philter orgy, it had not been a very active one. He showed no recognition of me, but he made no resistance when I took him by the arm and stood him up and began walking him farther along the passage. He only went on singing quietly:

La virtù te fa belo anca deforme,

La virtù te fa vivo anca sepolto.

Though I had never been in that secret walkway before, I was well enough acquainted with the palace to have a general idea of where the passage’s twists and turns were taking us. The whole way, Mafìo went on murmurously singing the virtues of Virtue. We passed numerous other closed doors in the wall, but I took us a considerable distance before choosing one door to open just a crack and peep out.

It gave on a small garden not far from the palace wing where we were quartered. I tried to hush Mafìo as I drew him outdoors, but to no avail. He was abiding in some other world, and would have taken no notice if I had dragged him through the garden’s lotus pond. However, by good fortune, there was no one about, and I think no one at all saw us as I hurried him the rest of the way to his chambers. But there, since I did not know how to find his back door, I had to take him in through the usual one, and we were met there by the same woman servant who had admitted me the night before. I was somewhat surprised but much pleased when she evinced no shock or horror at seeing her master and onetime paramour so grotesquely attired. She only looked sad again, and pitying, as he crooned to her:

La virtù è un cavedàl che sempre è rico,

Che no patisse mai rùzene o tarlo … .

“Your master is taken ill,” I told the woman, that being the only explanation I could think of—and it was true enough.

“I will attend him,” she said, with calm compassion. “Do not worry.”

… Che sempre cresse e no se pol robarlo,

E mai no rende el possessòr mendico.

I gladly left him in her care. And I might as well tell, here, that it was in her tender and solicitous care that Mafìo remained long afterward, for he never recovered his reason.

It had already been quite an arduous day, and the one before had been even worse, and I had passed a sleepless night between. So I dragged myself to my own chambers, to rest and myself enjoy some solicitude from my servants and pretty Hui-sheng, while I kept Ali Babar company and watched him drink himself unconscious of his own misery.

I never saw Achmad again. He was accused and tried and judged and convicted and sentenced, all in that same day, and I will tell of it just as quickly. I have no wish to dwell on the subject, because it happened that, even in winning my vengeance, I had to suffer one more loss.

In all the long time since then, I have felt no least remorse for having destroyed Achmad-az-Fenaket through the agency of a forged letter, nor for its having implicated him in a crime which was never committed. He was guilty of enough other crimes and vices. Indeed, the false letter might easily have failed in its purpose, but for the Arab’s truly perverted nature, which had led him to indulge in the love philter with Mafìo. From that experiment in hallucination, he emerged with his shrewd mind addled and his sharp wits blunted and his serpent tongue knotted. Perhaps he had been less severely impaired by the experience than had my uncle—the Arab at least briefly recognized me afterward, and Mafìo did not, ever again—and perhaps Achmad would have recovered after a time, but he did not get that time.

When he was dragged before the irate Khakhan that day and confronted with the really flimsy evidence of his “treason,” he could readily have talked his way out of the predicament. All he had to do was invoke the privilege of office and request an adjournment of the Cheng until an embassy could be sent to the Ilkhan Kaidu, the other of the alleged triumvirate of conspirators. Kubilai and the justices could hardly have refused to wait and hear what word Kaidu might send back. But Achmad never asked for that or for anything else, according to those who were present. He was unprepared to defend himself at all, they said, they not being aware that he was unable to defend himself, incapable of it. They said he only gibbered and ranted and twitched, giving the unmistakable impression of a culprit felon deranged by his guilt and his having been apprehended and his dread of the penalty. Then and there, the assembled justices of the Cheng found against him, and the still outraged Kubilai did not overrule them. Achmad was adjudged guilty of treason, and the punishment for that was the Death of a Thousand.

The whole affair had blown up as suddenly as a summer storm, but it constituted the most serious and spectacular scandal in the memory of the oldest courtier. People talked of nothing else, and were avid to hear or to recount any least detail of news or rumor, and anyone who had a juicy tidbit to impart was a center of a crowd. The greatest celebrity accrued to the Fondler, who had been given the most illustrious Subject of his career, and Master Ping reveled in that celebrity. Contrary to his usual dark secrecy, he boasted openly that he was stocking his cavern dungeon with provender to last for a hundred days, and that he was dismissing all his assistants and clerks on holiday—even his Blotters and Retrievers—so that he could give this distinguished Subject his undivided and unshared attention.

I went to call on Kubilai. By then, he had calmed somewhat and resigned himself to the defection and loss of his Chief Minister, and he no longer looked at me the way ancient kings used to look at the bearers of ill tidings. I told him, without going into unnecessary detail, that Achmad had been responsible for the inexcusable murder of Ali Babar’s blameless wife. I asked, and got, the Khakhan’s permission for Ali to attend the execution of his wife’s executioner. The Fondler Ping was aghast at this, of course, but he could not countermand the permission, and he did not even dare make any loud complaint, lest a closer look be given to his own willing part in Mar-Janah’s murder.

So, on the appointed day, I went with Ali to the underground cavern, and bade him be manfully stalwart as he witnessed the piecemeal reduction of our mutual enemy. Ali looked pale—he had never had stomach for bloodshed—but he looked determined, even while he said his salaams and farewells to me as solemnly as if he himself were going to the Death of a Thousand. Then he and the Master Ping, who was still grumbling at this unwelcome intrusion, went through the iron-studded door to where Achmad was already dangling and waiting, and closed the door behind them. I came away with only one regret at the time: that the Arab, from what I had heard, was still numb and bemazed. If it was true, as Achmad had once told me, that Hell is what hurts worst, then I regretted that he might not feel the hurts as keenly as I would have wished.

Since the Fondler had given notice that this Fondling might occupy a full hundred days, everyone naturally expected that it would. So not until the expiration of that time did his clerks and assistants return to congregate in the outer chamber and await their master’s triumphant emergence. When several more days passed, they began to fidget, but dared not intrude. Not until I sent one of my maidservants, seeking word of Ali Babar, was the chief clerk emboldened to open the iron-studded door a crack. He was met by a charnel-house stench that sent him reeling backward. Nothing else came out of the inner room, and no one could even peek in without fainting dead away. The Palace Engineer had to be sent for and asked to direct his artificial breezes through the underground tunnels. When the chambers had been blown clean enough to be bearable, the Fondler’s chief clerk ventured in and came out, looking stunned, to report what he had found.

There were three dead bodies, or the constituents and remains of three bodies. That of the ex-Wali Achmad was a mere shred, obviously having endured at least a Death of Nine Hundred and Ninety-nine. As well as could be ascertained, Ali Babar had watched that entire dissolution, had then seized and bound the Fondler, and proceeded to imitate, on his sacrosanct and inviolate person, the whole process of the Fondling. However, the chief clerk reported, it had not gone much beyond a Death of Perhaps One or Two Hundred. The supposition was that Ali had got too ill—from the miasma of Achmad’s decay and all the other accumulated gore and carnage and excrement—to persevere to the end. He had left the only partially dismembered Master Ping hanging to die at his leisure, and had taken up one of the longer knives and plunged it into his own breast, and died himself.

So Ali Babar, Nostril, Sindbad, Ali-ad-Din, whom I had scorned and derided as a coward and an empty braggart all the time I had known him, at the very last was impelled by the one praiseworthy motive of his life—his love for Mar-Janah—to do something eminently courageous and laudable. He took revenge on both of her slayers, the instigator and the perpetrator, and then took his own life, so that none other (meaning myself) could be blamed for the deed.

The palace population, and the city of Khanbalik, and probably all of Kithai, if not the whole of the Mongol Empire, were still buzzing and twittering with the scandal of Achmad’s precipitous downfall. The new scandal from underground provided still more fodder for the gossips to chew—and set Kubilai to regarding me again with stern exasperation. But this latest news contained one revelation so macabre, so almost risible, that even the Khakhan was bemused and distracted from any inclination to vindictiveness. What happened was that, when the Fondler’s assistants collected and reassembled his cadaver for decent burial, they discovered that the man had all his life had lotus feet, bound since infancy, warped and contorted to dainty points, like those of a Han noblewoman. So the resultant mood of everybody, including Kubilai, was not so much glowering: “Now who should pay for this outrage?”—but speculative and almost amused, people asking each other: “What awful kind of mother must the Master Ping have had?”

My own mood, I have to say, was less frivolous. My vengeance had been accomplished, but at the cost of a long-time companion, and I was melancholy. That depression was not alleviated when I went to Mafìo’s chambers, as I did every day or so, to regard what was left of him. That devoted woman servant kept him clean and nicely dressed (in proper men’s clothes), and she kept neatly trimmed the gray beard that was growing in again. He appeared well-fed and healthy enough, and he might have been taken for the hearty and blustering Uncle Mafio of old, except that his eyes were vacant and he was again singing, in a sort of cow-moo voice, his litany to Virtue:

La virtù è un cavedal che sempre è rico,

Che no patisse mai rùzene o tarlo … .

I was contemplating him morosely and feeling very low indeed when another visitor unexpectedly arrived, finally come back from his latest trading karwan around the country. I had never—not even on his first arrival in Venice when I was a boy—been so glad to see my bland and gentle and dull and benign and colorless old father.

We fell into each other’s arms and made the Venetian abrazzo, and then stood side by side while he looked sadly at his brother. He had, on the roads hither, heard in broad outline of all the events that had occurred during his journeying: the end of the Yun-nan war, my return to court, the surrender of Sung, the death of Achmad and the Master Ping, the suicide of his once-slave Nostril, the unfortunate indisposition of the Ferenghi Polo, his brother. Now I told him all the facts of those events which only I could tell. I omitted nothing but the most vile details and, when I had done, he looked again at Mafìo and shook his head, fondly, ruefully, regretfully, murmuring, “Tato, tato …” the diminutive and affectionate way of saying, “Brother, brother … .”

“ … Belo anca deforme,” Mafìo mooed, in seeming response. “Vivo anca sepolto … .”

Nicolò Polo mournfully shook his head again. But then he turned and clapped a comradely hand on my sagging shoulders, and squared his own, and perhaps for the very first time I was grateful to hear one of his stock encouragements:

“Ah, Marco, sto mondo xe fato tondo.”

Which is to say that, whatever happens, good or bad, cause for rejoicing or lament, “the world will still be round.”