The Journeyer

MANZI

1

THE storm of scandal gradually abated. The Khanbalik court, like a ship that had been dangerously careened, gradually came upright again and steadied on its keel. As far as I know, Kubilai never tried to call his cousin Kaidu to account for his presumed part in the recent outrages. Kaidu being still far away in the west, and all danger of his involvement being now past, the Khakhan was content to leave him there, and instead devoted his energies to cleaning up the mess on his own doorstep. He sensibly began by dividing the late Achmad’s three different offices among three different men. To his son Chingkim’s duties as Wang of the city, he added the responsibility to serve as Vice-Regent during the Khakhan’s absences. He promoted my old battlefield companion Bayan to the rank of Chief Minister, but, since Bayan preferred to stay in the field as an active orlok, that office too devolved onto Prince Chingkim. Kubilai might have desired another Arab to replace Achmad as Finance Minister—or a Persian or a Turki or a Byzantine—since he had such a high opinion of Muslims’ financial abilities, and since that ministry had charge of the Muslim Ortaq of merchants and traders. However, the settling of the late Achmad’s estate produced another revelation that soured the Khakhan on Muslims forever after. It was the rule in Kithai, as in Venice and elsewhere, that a traitor’s belongings be confiscated by the state. And it was discovered that the Arab’s estate consisted of a vast amount of wealth he had fraudulently appropriated and embezzled and extorted during his official career. (Some others of his belongings—including his hoard of paintings—never did come to light.)

The irrefutable evidence of Achmad’s longtime duplicity so enraged Kubilai, all over again, that he appointed as Finance Minister the elderly Han scholar of my acquaintance, the Court Mathematician Lin-ngan. In his new detestation of Muslims, Kubilai went further, proclaiming new laws that severely abridged the freedom of Kithai’s Muslims, and limited the extent of their mercantile activities, and forbade them to practice usury as heretofore, and diminished their exorbitant profits. He also made all Muslims publicly forswear that part of their Holy Quran which permits them to dupe, cheat and kill all who are not of Islam. He even passed a law requiring Muslims to eat pork, if it were served to them by a host or innkeeper. I think that law was never much obeyed or stringently enforced. And I know that the other laws envenomed many already rich and powerful Muslims resident in Khanbalik. I know because I heard them muttering imprecations, not against Kubilai, but against us “infidel Polos” whom they held to blame for inciting him to the persecution of Muslims.

Ever since my return from Yun-nan to Khanbalik, I had been finding the city not a very hospitable or pleasant place. Now the Khakhan, occupied with so many other things, including the posting of a Wang and magistrates and prefects in the newly acquired Manzi, assigned me no work to do for him, and the Compagnia Polo likewise had no need of me. The appointment of our old acquaintance Lin-ngan as Finance Minister had caused no interference in my father’s trading activities. If anything, the new suppression of Muslim business had meant an increase in his own, but he was capable of handling it all by himself. He was currently engaged in picking up the reins of what ventures Mafio had guided, and in training new overseers for the kashi works Ali Babar and Mar-Janah had headed. So I was at loose ends anyway, and it occurred to me that by leaving Khanbalik for a while I might allay some of the local unrest and grievances still smoldering. I went to the Khakhan and asked if he had any mission abroad that I could undertake for him. He studied on the matter and then said, with a trace of malicious amusement:

“Yes, I have, and I thank you for volunteering. Now that Sung has become Manzi, it is a part of our Khanate, but it is not yet subscribing any funds to our treasury. The late Finance Minister would already have flung his Ortaq net over that whole land, and would by now be seining rich tribute out of it. Since he is not, and since you contributed to the fact that he is not, I think it only right that you volunteer to take on the task in his place. You will go to the Manzi capital of Hang-zho and inaugurate some system of tax collection that will satisfy our imperial treasury and not too seriously dissatisfy the Manzi population.”

It was rather more of a mission than I had meant to volunteer for. I said, “Sire, I know nothing about taxation—”

“Then call it something else. The former Finance Minister called it a tariff on trade transactions. You can call it impost or levy—or involuntary benevolence, if you like. I will not ask you to bleed those newly annexed subjects of every drop in their veins. But I shall expect a respectable amount of tribute paid by every head of household in all the provinces of Manzi.”

“How many heads are there, Sire?” I was sorry I had ever come calling on him. “How much would you deem a respectable amount?”

He said drily, “I daresay you can count the heads yourself, when you get there. As to the amount, I will let you know very promptly if it is not to my liking. Now do not stand there gulping at me like a fish. You requested a mission. I have given you one. All the necessary documents of appointment and authority will be ready by the time you are ready to leave.”

I set off for Manzi not much more enthusiastically than I had set off for the war in Yun-nan. I could not know that I was setting forth upon the happiest and most satisfying years of my whole life. In Manzi, as in Yun-nan, I would successfully accomplish the mission set me, and again win the plaudits of the Khan Kubilai, and become quite legitimately wealthy—in my own right, by my own doing, not merely as a sharer in the Compagnia Polo—and I would be entrusted with other missions, and would accomplish them as well. But when I now say “I” it should be taken as “I and Hui-sheng,” for the silent Echo was now my traveling partner and my wise adviser and my steadfast comrade, and without her beside me I could not have accomplished what I did in those years.

The Holy Bible tells us that the Lord God said, “It is not good for man to be alone: let Us make him a help like unto himself.” Well, even Adam and Eve were not entirely like unto each other—a fact for which I, all these generations later, have never ceased thanking God—and Hui-sheng and I were physically different in many other ways. But more of a help no man could ever have asked, and many of our unlikenesses consisted, I must honestly say, in her being superior to me: in calm temperament, in tenderness of heart, in a wisdom that was something deeper than mere intelligence.

Even had she continued as a slave, doing nothing but serve me, or become my concubine, doing nothing but satisfy me, Hui-sheng would have been a valuable and welcome addition to my life, and an ornament to it, and a delight. She was beautiful to look at, and delicious to love, and a high-spirited joy to have around. Unbelievable as it may seem, her conversation was a pleasure to be enjoyed. As the Prince Chingkim had once remarked to me, pillow talk is the very best way to learn any language, and that was just as true for a language of signs and gestures, and no doubt our loving closeness on the pillow made our mutual learning quicker and our invented mutual language more fluent. When we got adept at that method of communication, I found that Hui-sheng’s conversation was rich with meaning and good sense and nuances of real wittiness. All in all, Hui-sheng was far too bright and too talented to have been relegated to any of the underling positions where most women belong and are pleased to be and are best useful.

Hui-sheng’s deprivation of sound had made all her other senses superlatively keen. She could see or feel or smell or somehow detect things that would have gone by me unnoticed, and she would direct my notice to them, so that I was perceiving more than I ever had before. For a very trivial example, she would sometimes dart from my side, when we were out walking, and run to what looked to me like a distant bank of nothing but weeds. She would kneel and pluck something unremarkably weed-looking, and bring it to show me that it was a flower not yet even budded, and she would keep that sprig and tend it until it bloomed and was beautiful.

Once, in the early days when we were still inventing our language, we were idling away an afternoon in one of those garden pavilions where the Palace Engineer had so miraculously piped water to play jug flutes positioned under the eaves. I awkwardly managed to convey to Hui-sheng how those things worked, though I assumed she had not the least idea what music was, and I waved my hands about in time to that murmurous warbling. She nodded brightly, and I supposed she was pretending to comprehend, to please me. But then she caught one of my hands and put it against one of the carved side columns, and held it there, and signed for me to be very, very still. Perplexed but fondly amused, I did so, and after a moment I realized, with vast amazement, that I was feeling the very, very faintest vibration—from the jug flute overhead, down through the wood and so to my touch. My silent Echo had shown me an echo in silence, indeed. She was capable of appreciating and even enjoying the rhythms of that unhearable music—perhaps even better than I could, hearing it—so delicate were her hands and her skin.

Those extraordinary faculties of hers were of incalculable value to me in my travels and my work and my dealings with others. That was especially true in Manzi, where I was naturally regarded with distrust as an emissary of the conquerors, and where I had to do business with resentful former overlords and grasping merchant chiefs and reluctant hirelings. Just as Hui-sheng could discern a flower invisible to others, so could she often discern a person’s unvoiced thoughts and feelings and motives and intentions. She could reveal them to me, too—sometimes in private, sometimes while that very person sat talking with me—and on many occasions that gave me a notable advantage over other folk. But even more often, I had an advantage in her merely being at my side. The men of Manzi, nobles and commoners alike, were unused to women sitting in on masculine conferences. If mine had been an ordinary woman—plain, voluble, strident—they would have disdained me as an uncouth barbarian or a henpecked capon. But Hui-sheng was such a charming and attractive adornment to any gathering (and so blessedly silent) that every man put on his most courtly manners, and spoke most chivalrously, and postured and almost pranced for her admiration, and many times—I know for a fact—deferred to my demands or acceded to my instructions or gave me the better of a bargain, just to earn Hui-sheng’s look of approbation.

She was my fellow journeyer, and she adopted a costume that enabled her to ride a horse astride, and she rode always beside me. She was my capable companion, my trusted confidante and, in everything but title, my wife. I would have been ready at any time for us to have “broken the plate,” as the Mongols called it (because their ceremony of wedding, performed by a shamàn-priest, culminated in the ceremonial smashing of a piece of fine porcelain). But Hui-sheng, again unlike the commonalty of women, attached no importance to tradition or formality or superstition or ritual. She and I made what vows we wished to make, and made them in private, and that sufficed us both, and she was happy to forgo any public trumpeting and trumpery exhibition.

Kubilai advised me once, when the subject came up, “Marco, do not break the plate. So long as you have not yet taken a First Wife, you will find pliant and conciliatory every man with whom you have to deal, in matters of commerce or treaty negotiation or whatever. He will seek your good regard and he will not obstruct your good fortune, because he will be nursing the secret hope of making his daughter or niece your First Wife and mother of your principal heir.” That advice might well have made me hasten immediately to break a plate with Hui-sheng, for I scorned ever to order my life according to the dictates of “good business.” But Hui-sheng pointed out, with some vigor, that as my wife she would have to observe some traditions—at least those enjoining wifely subordination—and so could not any longer ride joyously at my side, but, if she was allowed to go anywhere at all, would have to travel in a closed palanquin, and she could not any longer assist me in my working conferences with other men, and tradition would forbid her to—

“Enough, enough!” I said, laughing at her agitation. I caught and stopped her flickering fingers, and promised that nothing would make me marry her, ever.

So we remained lovers only, which may be the very best sort of marriage there could be. I did not treat her as a wife, an inferior, but accorded her—and insisted that all others accord her—full equality with myself. (That may not have been so liberal of me as it sounds, since I well recognized her many points of superiority, and so perhaps did some cognitive others.) But I did treat her as a wife, a most noble wife, in regaling her with gifts of jewelry and jade and ivory, and the richest and most becoming garments for her to wear, and, for her personal mount, a superb white mare of the Khan’s own “dragon horses.” Only one husbandly rule did I lay down: she was never to mask her beauty with cosmetics, in the Khanbalik fashion. She complied, and so her peach-bloom complexion was never slathered rice-white, her rose-wine lips were not discolored or redrawn with garish paint, her feathery brows were not plucked bald. That made her unfashionable, and so radiantly lovely that all other women cursed the fashion, and their own slavishness to it. I did allow Hui-sheng to dress her hair as she liked, since she never did it any way I did not like, and I bought her jeweled combs and hair-spoons for it.

Of jewels and gold and jade and such, she eventually owned a trove that a Khatun might envy, but she always treasured one thing most of all. So did I, really, though I often pretended to consider it trash and urged her to throw it away. It was a thing I had not given her, but one of the pathetically few belongings she had brought when she first came to me: that plain and inelegant white porcelain incense burner. She lovingly bore it everywhere we journeyed and, in palace or karwansarai or yurtu or on open camp ground, Hui-sheng made sure that the sweet scent of warm clover after a gentle rain was the accompaniment of all our nights.

All our nights …

We were lovers only, never wedded man and wife. Nevertheless, I will invoke the privacy of the marriage bed and decline to relate the particulars of what she and I did there. In recalling others of my intimate relationships, I have spoken without reserve, but I prefer to keep some things private to me and Hui-sheng.

I will make only some general observations on the subject of anatomy. That will not violate the privacy of Hui-sheng, and would not cause her any blushes, for she often maintained that she was physically no different from any other female of the Min, and that those women were no different from the Han or any other race native to Kithai and Manzi. I beg to differ with her. The Khan Kubilai himself had once observed that the Min women were above all others in beauty, and Hui-sheng was outstanding even among the Min. But when she insisted, with modest and self-deprecatory gestures, that she was only ordinary of features and figure, I sensibly made no demur—for the most beautiful woman is the woman who does not realize she is.

And Hui-sheng was beautiful all over. That would adequately describe her, but I must go into some detail, to correct a few misapprehensions I myself had earlier entertained. I have mentioned the fine floss of hair that grew in front of her ears and at her nape, and I said then that I wondered if it implied an abundant hairiness in other places on her body. I could not have been more mistaken in that expectation. Hui-sheng was totally hairless on her legs and arms, under her arms, even on her artichoke. She was as clean and silkily smooth in that place as had been the child Doris of my youth. I did not mind that at all—an organ so accessible permits of various close attentions that a furred one does not—but I made mild inquiry. Was the hairlessness peculiar to her, or did she perhaps use a mumum to achieve it? She replied that no women of the Min (or the Han or the Yi or other such races) had hair on their bodies, or, if they did, had but the merest trace.

Her whole body was similarly childlike. Her hips were narrow and her buttocks small, just right for cupping in my hands. Her breasts were also small, but perfectly shaped and distinctly separate. I had long ago conceived a private belief that women with large nipples and a considerable dark halo around them were far more sexually responsive than women with small and pale ones. Hui-sheng’s nipples were minute by comparison with other women’s, but not when regarded in proportion to her porcelain-cup breasts. They were neither dark nor pale, but bright, as pink as her lips. And they indicated no lack of responsiveness, because Hui-sheng’s breasts, unlike those of larger women which are ticklish only at the extremity, were marvelously sensitive over their whole hemispheres. I had but to caress them anywhere, and their “small stars” pouted out as perkily as little tongues there. The same below. Perhaps because of the hairlessness, her lower belly and adjacent thighs were sensitive all over. Caress her anywhere there, and from her maidenly modest cleft would slowly emerge her pink and pretty “butterfly between the petals,” the more appreciable and enticing for its not being concealed within any tuft.

I never knew, and refrained from ever asking, whether Hui-sheng had been a virgin when she first came to me. One reason that I never knew was that she was so perpetually virginal, which I will explain in a moment. Another reason was that—as she told me—women of those races never came to marriage with a maidenhead. They were accustomed to being bathed in infancy, and later bathing themselves, several times a day, and not only on the outside but—with dainty fluids made of flower juices—inside as well. Their fastidiousness went far beyond that of even the most civilized, refined, high-born Venetian ladies (at least until I later dictated that the custom be adopted by the women of my own Venetian family). One result of that scrupulous cleanliness was that a young girl’s maidenhead got gradually, painlessly dilated and folded away to nonexistence. So she came to her nuptial bed with no fear of the first penetration, and no least twinge of hurt when it happened. And, in consequence, those races of Kithai and Manzi made no such fuss as other peoples do, about the sheet-stain certification of defloration.

While I am speaking of other peoples, let me remark that men of the Muslim countries treasure a certain belief. They believe that, when they die and go to the Heaven they call Djennet, they will disport themselves throughout eternity with whole anderuns of heavenly women called haura, who have, among their many other talents, the ability continually to renew their virginity. Buddhist men believe the same about the Devatas women they will enjoy in their heavenly Pure Land between lives. I do not know whether any such supernatural females exist in any afterlife, but I can testify that the Min women right here on earth possessed that wondrous quality of never getting slack and flaccid in their parts. Or at least Hui-sheng did.

Her opening was not just childishly small on the outside—the shyest and dearest dimple—but inside as well, most thrillingly tight and close-clasping. Yet it was mature, too, in that it was somehow delicately muscular all up along its inside length, so that it imparted not a constant squeeze but a repetitive rippling sensation from one end to the other. Aside from the other delicious effects produced by her smallness, my every entering of Hui-sheng was like a first time. She was haura and Devatas: perpetually virginal.

Some of her anatomical uniqueness I recognized on our very first night in bed together, and even before we coupled. I should also say of that first coupling that it occurred not from my taking of Hui-sheng, but from her giving herself to me. I had resolutely kept my resolve not to urge or press her, and instead had courted her with all the genteel gallantries and flourishes of a trovatore minstrel demonstrating his affection for a lady high above his humble station. During that time, I ignored all other women and every other sort of distraction, and spent every possible moment with Hui-sheng or nearby, and she slept in my chambers, but we slept always apart. What attraction or attention of mine finally won her, I do not know, but I know when it happened. It was the day she showed me, in the jug-flute pavilion, how to feel music as well as hear it. And that night, for the first time in my chambers, she brought the incense burner and set it alight beside my bed, and got into the bed with me, and—let me put it this way—she allowed me again to feel music as well as hear it and see it and taste it (and smell it, too, in that sweet incense aroma of warm clover after gentle rain).

There was yet another smell and taste perceptible in my making love to Hui-sheng. That first night, before we began, she inquired timidly whether I would desire children. Yes, truly I would have, from one as precious as she—but, because she was precious to me, I would not subject her to the horrors of childbirth—so I said a definite no. She looked a trifle downcast at that, but immediately took precautions against the eventuality. She went and got a very small lemon, and peeled it to the white and cut it in half. I expressed some disbelief that anything as simple and common as a lemon could do something as difficult as preventing conception. She smiled assurance and showed me how it was employed. In fact, she gave me the piece of lemon and let me do the applying. (In fact, she let me do that every night we slept together, ever after. ) She lay back and spread her legs, baring the creased little peach-hued purse down there, and I gently parted its cleft and eased the bit of lemon inside. That was when I first realized how very small and virginally tight she was, a snug fit even for my one finger, as it carefully, tremulously, worked the lemon up along the warm channel to the firm, smooth nub of her womb, where the lemon almost eagerly and lovingly cupped over it.

As I withdrew my hand, Hui-sheng smiled again—perhaps at the expression on my flushed face, or my breathlessness—and perhaps she mistook my excitement for concern, because she hastened to assure me that the lemon cap was a sure and certain preventive of accidents. She said it was provably superior to any other means, such as the Mongol women’s fern seed, or the Bho women’s insertion of a jagged nugget of rock salt, or the witless Hindu women’s puffing of wood smoke inside themselves, or the Champa women’s making their men clamp onto their organ a little hat of tortoise-shell. Most of those methods I had never heard of, and I cannot comment on the practicality of them. But I later had proof of the lemon’s efficacy in that respect. And I also discovered, that same night, that it was a much more pleasing method than most, because it added a fresh, tart, bright scent and taste to Hui-sheng’s already impeccably clean and fragrant parts and their emanations and essences … .

But there. I said I would not dwell on the particulars of our bedtime enjoyments.

2

WHEN we departed for Hang-zho, our karwan train consisted of four horses and ten or twelve asses. One horse was Hui-sheng’s own high-stepping white mare; the other three, not quite so handsome, were for me and two armed Mongol escorts. The asses carried all our traveling packs, a Han scribe (to interpret and write for me), one of my Mongol maidservants (brought along to attend Hui-sheng), two nondescript male slaves to do the camping chores and any other hard labor.

I had another of Kubilai’s gold-inscribed ivory plaques hanging at my saddle horn, but not until we were on the road did I open the documents of authority he had given me. They were of course written in Han, for the convenience of the Manzi officials to whom I would be showing them, so I ordered my scribe to tell me what they said. He reported, in tones of some awe, that I had been appointed an agent of the imperial treasury, and accorded the rank of Kuan, meaning that all the magistrates and prefects and other governing officers, everyone except the Wang overlord, would be required to obey me. The scribe added, as a point of information, “Master Polo—I mean Kuan Polo—you will be entitled to wear the coral button.” He said it as if that would be the greatest honor of all, but it was not until later that I found out what that meant.

It was an easy, leisurely, pleasant and mostly level ride southward from Khanbalik through the province of Chih-li—the Great Plain of Kithai—which was one vast farmland from horizon to horizon, except that it was crazily fenced into minuscule family holdings of just a mou or two apiece. Since no two adjoining farm families seemed to agree on the ideal crop for the land and the season, one plot would be of wheat, the next of millet, the next of clover or garden truck or something else. So that whole nation of greenery actually comprised a checkering and speckling of every different hue and tint and shade of green. After Chih-li came the province of Shan-dong, where the farms gave way to groves of mulberry trees, the leaves of which are sustenance for silkworms. It was from Shan-dong that came the heavy, nubbed, much-prized silk fabric also called shan-dong.

One thing I noticed on all the main roads in this southern region of Kithai: they were posted at intervals with informative signboards. I could not read the Han writing, but my scribe translated them for me. There would be a column erected at the roadside, with a board sticking out from it each way, and on one might be painted: “To the North to Gai-ri, nineteen li,” and on the other: “To the South to Zhen-ning, twenty-eight li.” So a traveler always knew where he was, and where he was going, and where (if he had forgotten) he had just come from. The signposts were especially informative at crossroads, where a whole thicket of them would list every city and town in every direction from there. I made a note of that very helpful Han contrivance, thinking it could well be recommended for adoption in all the rest of the Khanate—and, for that matter, all over Europe—where there were no such things.

Most of the way southward through Kithai, we were either riding close beside the Great Canal, or within sight of it, and it teemed with water traffic, so, whenever we were any distance from it, we had the odd view of boats and ships apparently sailing seas of grain fields and navigating among orchard trees. That canal was inspired, or made necessary, by the fact that the Huang or Yellow River had so often changed its channel. Within recorded history, the eastern length of the river had whipped back and forth across the land like a snapped rope—though of course not so rapidly. In one century or another, it had emptied into the Sea of Kithai way up north of the Shan-dong Peninsula, just a couple of hundred li south of Khanbalik. Some centuries later, its immense and serpentine length had wriggled down the map to flow into the sea far south of the Shan-dong Peninsula, fully a thousand li distant from its earlier outlet. To envision that, try to imagine a river flowing through France and at one time spilling into the Bay of Biscay at the English port of Bordeaux, then squirming across that whole breadth of Europe to empty into the Mediterranean at the Republic of Marseilles. And the Yellow River, at other times in history, had pushed out to the Sea of Kithai at various shore points intermediate between those northernmost and southernmost reaches.

The river’s inconstancy had left many lesser streams and isolated lakes and ponds all across the lands where it used to run. Some of the earlier ruling dynasties cunningly took advantage of that, to dig a canal interconnecting and incorporating the existent waters and make a navigable waterway running roughly north and south, inland of the sea. I believe it was, until recently, only a desultory and fragmentary canal, connecting just two or three towns in each stretch. But Kubilai, or rather his Chief of Digging the Great Canal, with armies of conscript labor, had done more trenching and dredging, and done it better. So the canal was now broad and deep and permanent, its banks neatly beveled and faced with stone, with locks and hoisting engines provided wherever it had to vault intervening highlands. It enabled vessels of every size, from san-pan scows to seagoing chuan ships, to sail or row or be towed all the way from Khanbalik to the southern border of Kithai, where the delta of the other great river, the Yang-tze, fanned out into the Sea of Kithai. And now that Kubilai’s realm extended south of the Yang-tze, the Great Canal was being pushed clear to Manzi’s capital city of Hang-zho. It was a modern-day accomplishment nearly as grand and sightly and awesome as the ancient Great Wall—and far more useful to mankind.

When our little karwan train was ferried across the Yang-tze, the Tremendous River, it was like crossing a dun-colored sea, so broad that we could barely distinguish the darker dun line on the far side that was the shore of Manzi. I had some difficulty in reminding myself that this was the water I had been able to throw a stone across, away to the west and upriver in Yun-nan and To-Bhot where it was called the Jin-sha.

Until now, we had been traversing a country inhabited mostly by Han, but a country that had been for many years under Mongol domination. Now here, in what had until very recently been the Sung Empire, we were among Han peoples whose ways of life had not yet been in the least impressed or overlaid by the more robust and vigorous Mongol society. To be sure, Mongol patrols roamed hither and yon, to preserve order, and every community had a new headman who, though usually a Han, had been imported from Kithai and installed by the Mongols. But those had not had time to make any changes in what the country had been. Also, because Sung had surrendered to become Manzi without any struggle, the land had not been fought over or ravaged or blighted in any way. It was peaceful and prosperous and pleasing to the eye. So, from the moment of our landing on the Manzi shore, I began to take an even keener interest in our surroundings, eager to see what the Han were like in their natural state, so to speak.

The most noticeable aspect of them was their incredible ingenuity. I had been inclined in the past to denigrate that much-vaunted quality of theirs, having so often found their inventions and discoveries to be as impractical as, for instance, their circle divided into three hundred sixty-five and a quarter segments. But I was more taken with the cleverness of the Han in Manzi, and it was never better demonstrated than by a prosperous landowner who took me on a tour of his holdings, just outside the city of Su-zho. I was accompanied by my scribe, who translated for me.

“A vast estate,” said our host, waving at it expansively.

Perhaps it was, in a country where the average farmer owned a miserable mou or two of land. But it would have been accounted ridiculously tiny anywhere else—say, in the Vèneto, where the properties are measured in sweeps of zonte. All I could see here was a plot of ground just barely big enough to contain the owner’s one-room shack—his “country house”; he had a substantial mansion in Su-zho—and a cramped truck garden beside the shack, a single trellis thickly grown with grapevine, some rickety pig sties, a pond no bigger than the smallest in a Khanbalik palace garden, and a sparse grove of trees which, from their gnarled fistlike limbs, I took to be mere mulberries.

“Kan-kàn! Behold! My orchard, my piggery, my vineyard and my fishery!” he boasted, as if he were describing an entire and fertile and thriving prefecture. “I harvest silk and pork and zu-jin fish and grape wine, four staples of gracious living.”

That they were, I agreed, but remarked that there seemed little room here to harvest any profitable quantity of any of them, and that they struck me, besides, as a strangely assorted quartet of crops.

“Why, they all support and increase one another,” he said, with some surprise. “So they do not require much space to produce a bountiful harvest. You have seen my abode in the city, Kuan Polo, so you know I am wealthy. My wealth came all from this estate.”

I could not gainsay him, so I asked politely if he would explain his farming methods, for they must be masterful. He began by telling me that in the skimpy garden plot he grew radishes.

That sounded so trifling that I murmured, “You failed to mention that staple of gracious living.”

“No, no, not for the table, Kuan, nor for marketing. The radishes are only for the grapes. If you bury your grapes among a bin of radish roots, the grapes will stay fresh and sweet and delicious for months, if necessary.”

He continued. The radish tops, the greens, he fed to the pigs in the sties. The sties were uphill of the mulberry grove, and tiled channels were laid between, so the pigs’ offal sluiced downhill to fertilize the trees. The trees’ green summer leaves nourished the silkworms, and, in autumn when the leaves turned brown, they too were fodder for the pigs. Meanwhile, the excreta of the silkworms was the favorite food of the zu-jin fish, and the fishes’ excrement enriched the pond bottom, the silt of which was dredged up at intervals to nourish the grape arbor. And so-kan-kàn! ecco! behold!—in this miniature universe, every living thing was interdependent, and flourished by being so, and made him wealthy.

“Ingenious!” I exclaimed, and sincerely meant it.

The Han of Manzi were clever in other, less striking ways, too, and not just the upper classes, but the least of them. A Han farmer, when he judged the time of day by glancing at the altitude of the sun, was of course doing nothing that any Vèneto peasant could not. However, indoors, that farmer’s wife at home in their hut could tell precisely when it was time to start making her man’s evening meal—merely by glancing at the eyes of the family cat and judging how much its pupils had dilated in the waning light. The commonfolk were diligent, too, and thrifty and unbelievably patient. No farmer ever bought a pitchfork, for example. He would find a tree limb terminating in three pliable twigs, tie those twigs parallel, wait years until they grew into sturdy branches, saw off the limb, and he would have a tool that would serve him and probably his grandsons as well.

I was much impressed by the ambition and perseverance of one farm boy I met. The majority of the Han country folk were illiterate and content to remain so, but this one lad had somehow learned to read, and was determined to rise above his poverty, and had borrowed books to study. Since he could not neglect his farm work—being the only stay of aged parents—he would tie a book to the horns of his ox and read while he led the beast about in tilling the field. And at night, because the household could not afford even a grease wick-lamp, he would read by the light of glowworms which he plucked from the farm furrows during the day.

I do not mean to assert that every Han in Manzi was the embodiment of virtues and talents and no less worthy attributes. I saw also some egregious evidences of fatuity and even lunacy. One night we came to a village where a religious festa of some sort was going on. There was music and song and dance and merry fires burning all about, and every so often the night was rent by the thunder and flash of the fiery trees and sparkling flowers. The center of all the celebration was a table set up in the village square. It was piled with offerings to the gods: samples of the finest local farm produce, flasks of pu-tao and mao-tai, slaughtered piglet and lamb carcasses, fine cooked viands, beautifully arranged vases of flowers. There was a gap among all that bounty, where a hole was cut in the middle of the table, and one villager after another would crawl under the table, put his head up through the hole, pose that way for a time, then remove himself to make way for another. When I inquired in amazement what that was meant to signify, my scribe asked about and then reported:

“The gods look down and see the sacrifices heaped up for them. Among the offerings, the heads. So each villager goes away confident that the gods, having seen him already dead, will take his name off their list of local mortals to be afflicted with ills and sorrows and death.”

I might have laughed. But it occurred to me that, however simple-mindedly those people were behaving, at least they were being ingeniously simpleminded. After some time in Manzi, and after admiring innumerable instances of the Han’s intelligence, and after deploring as many instances of witlessness, I eventually came to a conclusion. The Han possessed prodigious intellect and industry and imagination. They were mainly flawed in this respect: they too often wasted their gifts in fanatic observance of their religious beliefs, which were flagrantly fatuous. If the Han had not been so preoccupied with their notions of godliness, and so bent on seeking “wisdom instead of knowledge” (as one of them had once expressed it to me), I think those people, as a people, could have done great things. If they had not forever lain worshipfully prostrate—a position which invited their being trodden on by one oppressive dynasty after another—they might themselves by now be rulers of the whole world.

That farm boy I earlier spoke of, whose initiative and assiduity I found admirable, forfeited some of my regard as we talked further and he told me, by way of my scribe:

“My passion for reading and my yearning for learning might distress my aged parents. They might decry my ambition as an overweening arrogance, but—”

“Why on earth should they?”

“We follow the Precepts of Kong Fu-tze, and one of his teachings was that a low-born person should not presume above his ordained station in life. But I was about to say that my parents do not object, for my reading affords me opportunity also to manifest my filial piety, and another of the Precepts is that parents be honored above all else. So, since each night I am so eager to get to my books and my glowworms, I am the first of us to retire. I can lie on my pallet and force myself to lie perfectly still while I read, so that all the mosquitoes in the house can freely suck my blood.”

I blinked and said, “I do not understand.”

“By the time my aged parents stretch their old bodies on their pallets, you see, the mosquitoes are gorged and sated, and do not molest them. Yes, my parents often boast of me to our neighbors, and I am held an example to all sons.”

I said unbelievingly, “This is something marvelous. The old fools boast of you letting yourself be eaten alive, but not of your striving to better yourself?”

“Well, doing the one is being obedient to the Precepts, while the other … .”

I said, “Vakh!” and turned and went away from him. A parent too apathetic to swat his own mosquitoes seemed not much worth honoring, or humoring with attention—or preserving, for that matter. As a Christian, I believe in devotion to one’s father and mother, but I think that not even the Commandment enjoins abject filiality to the exclusion of everything else. If that were so, no son would ever have time or opportunity to produce a son to honor him.

That Kong Fu-tze, or Kong-the-Master, of whom the boy had spoken, was a long-ago Han philosopher, the originator of one of the three chief religions of those people. The three faiths all were fragmented into numerous contradictory and antagonistic sects, and all three were much intermingled in popular observance, and they were interlarded with traces of ever so many lesser cults—worship of gods and goddesses, demons and demonesses, nature spirits, ancient superstitions —but in the main there were three: Buddhism, the Tao and the Precepts of Kong Fu-tze.

I have already mentioned Buddhism, holding out to man a salvation from the rigors of this world by means of continual rebirths ascending to the nothingness of Nirvana. I have also mentioned the Tao, the Way by which a man could hope to harmonize and live happily with all the good things of the world around him. The Precepts dealt less with the here or the hereafter than with all-that-has-gone-before. To put it simplistically, a practitioner of Buddhism looked to the empty void of the future. A follower of the Tao did his best to enjoy the teeming and eventful present. But a devotee of the Precepts was concerned mostly with the past, the old, the dead.

Kong Fu-tze preached respect for tradition, and tradition is what his Precepts became. He ordained that younger brothers must revere the older, and a wife revere her husband, and all revere the parents, and they the community elders, and so on. The result was that the greatest honor accrued not to the best, but to the oldest. A man who had heroically prevailed against fierce odds—to win some notable victory or attain to some notable eminence—was accounted less worthy than some human turnip who had merely sat inert and existed and survived to a venerable age. All the respect rightly owed to excellence was bestowed upon vegetable antiquity. I did not think that reasonable. I had known enough old fools—and not just in Manzi—to know that age does not, as a matter of inevitability, confer wisdom, dignity, authority or worth. Years do not do that by themselves; the years must have contained experience and learning and achievement and travail overcome; and most people’s years do not.

Worse yet. If a living grandfather was to be venerated, well, his father and grandfather, though dead and gone, were even older—no xe vero?—and even more highly to be venerated. Or so the Precepts were interpreted by their devotees, and those Precepts had permeated the consciousness of all the Han, including those who professed faith in Buddhism or the Tao or the Mongols’ Tengri or the Nestorian version of Christianity or some one of the lesser religions. There was a general attitude of “Who knows? It may not help, but it does no harm, to burn a bit of incense to the next fellow’s deity, however absurd.” Even the most nearly rational persons, those Han who had converted to Nestorian Christianity—who would never have made ko-tou to the next fellow’s absurd fat idol, or a shaman’s divining bones, or a Taoist’s advice-giving sticks, or whatever—saw no harm, and possible benefit, in making ko-tou to his own ancestors. A man may be poor in all material assets, but even the most impoverished wretch has whole nations of ancestors. Paying the requisite reverence to all of them kept every living person of the Han perpetually prone—if not in physical fact, certainly in his outlook on life.

The Han word mian-tzu meant literally “face,” the face on the front of one’s head. But, because the Han seldom let their faces show much surface expression of their feelings, the word had come to mean the feelings going on behind those faces. To insult a man or humiliate him or best him in a contest was to cause him to “lose face.” And the vulnerability of his feeling-face persisted beyond the grave, into uttermost eternity. If a son dared not behave in any way to shame or sadden the feeling-faces of his living elders, how much more reprehensible it would have been to hurt the disembodied feeling-faces of the dead. So all the Han ordered their lives as if they were being watched and scrutinized and judged by all their forebear generations. It might have been a worthwhile superstition, if it had spurred all men to attempt feats that their ancestors would applaud. But it did not. It made them only anxious to evade their ancestors’ disapproval. A life entirely devoted to the avoidance of wrong seldom achieves anything exceptionally right—or anything at all.

Vakh.

3

THE city named Su-zho, through which we passed on our way south, was a lovely city, and we were almost loath to leave it. But when we reached our destination, Hang-zho, we found it an even more beautiful and gracious place. There is a rhyming adage which is known even to faraway Han who have never visited either of the cities:

Shang ye Tian tang,

Zhe ye Su, Hang!

Which could be translated thus:

Heaven is far from me and you,

But here for us are Hang and Su!

As I have said, Hang-zho was like Venice in one respect, being girt all about by water and riddled by waterways. It was both a riverside and a seaside city, but not a port city. It was situated on the north bank of a river called the Fu-chun, which here widened and shallowed and fanned out, eastward of the city, into many separate runnels across a vast, spreading, flat delta of sand and pebbles. That empty delta extended for some two hundred li, from Hang-zho to what was, most of the time, the distant edge of the Sea of Kithai. (I will shortly make plain what I mean by “most of the time.”) Since no seaborne vessels could cross that immense sandy shoal, Hang-zho had no port facilities, except what docks were necessary to handle the comparatively few and small boats that plied the river inland from the city.

All the many main avenues of Hang-zho were canals running from the riverside into the city and through it and round about it. At places those canals broadened out into wide, serene, mirror-smooth lakes, and in those were islands that were public parks, all flowers and birds and pavilions and banners. The lesser streets of the city were neatly cobbled, and they were broad but tortuous and twisty, and they humped themselves over the canals on ornate, high-arched bridges, more of them than I could ever count. At every bend in every street or canal, one had a view of one of the city’s many high and elaborate gates, or a tumultuous marketplace, or a palatial building or temple, as many as ten or twelve stories high, with the distinctive curly Han eaves projecting from every single story.

The Court Architect of Khanbalik had once told me that Han cities never had straight streets because the Han commonfolk foolishly believed that demons could travel only in straight lines, and foolishly believed that they were thwarting the demons by putting kinks in all their streets. But that was nonsense. In truth, the streets of any Han city—including both the paved and the watery ones of Hang-zho—were laid out in deliberate emulation of the Han style of writing. The city’s marketplace—or each of the marketplaces, in a city like Hang-zho that had so many—was a straight-edged square, but all the surrounding streets would have bends and curves and sinuosities, gentle or abrupt, just as do the brush strokes of a written Han word. My own personal yin signature could very well be the street plan of some walled Han town.

Hang-zho was, as befits a capital city, very civilized and refined, and it exhibited many touches of good taste. At intervals along every street were tall vases in which the householders or shopkeepers put flowers for the delight of the passersby. At this season they were all brimming with glowing, dazzling chrysanthemums. That flower, incidentally, was the national symbol of Manzi, reproduced on all official signboards and documents and such, revered because the exuberant florets of its blossom are so reminiscent of the sun and its sunbeams. Also at intervals along the streets were posts bearing boxes labeled—so my scribe told me—“Receptacle for the respectful deposit of sacred paper.” That meant, he told me, any piece of paper with writing on it. Ordinary litter was simply swept up and removed, but the written word was held in such high regard that all such papers were taken to a special temple and ritually burned.

But Hang-zho also was, as befits a prosperous trading city, rather gaudily voluptuous in other respects. It seemed that every last person on the streets, except for travel-dusted new arrivals like us, was luxuriously garbed in silks and velvets, and jingling with jewelry. Although admirers of Hang-zho called the city a Heaven on earth, people in other cities enviously called it “the Melting-Pot of Money.” I also saw on the streets, in full daylight, numbers of the sauntering young women-for-hire whom the Han called “wild flowers.” And there were many open-fronted little wine shops and cha shops—with names like the Pure Delight and the Fount of Refreshment and the Garden of Djennet (that one patronized by Muslim residents and visitors)—some of which shops, said my scribe, actually dispensed wine and cha, but all of which mainly traded in wild flowers.

The names of Hang-zho’s streets and landmarks, I suppose, ranked somewhere between the tasteful and the voluptuous. Many of them were nicely poetic: one park island was called the Pavilion from Which the Herons Take Flight at Dawn. Some names seemed to record some local legends: one temple was the Holy House That Was Borne Here Through the Sky. Some were tersely descriptive: a canal known as Ink to Drink was not inky, but clear and clean; it was lined with schoolhouses, and when a Han spoke of drinking ink, he was referring to scholastic study. Some names were more lavishly descriptive: the Lane of Flowers Worked with Colorful Birds’ Feathers was a short street of shops where hats were made. And some names were simply unwieldy: the main road going from the city inland was labeled the Paved Avenue Which Winds a Long Way Between Gigantic Trees, Among Streams Falling in Cascades, and Upward at Last to an Ancient Buddhist Temple on a Hilltop.

Hang-zho was again like Venice in not allowing large animals into the center of the city. In Venice, a rider coming from Mestre on the mainland must tether his horse in a campo on the northwest side of the island, and go by gòndola the rest of the way. We, arriving at Hang-zho, left our mounts and pack asses at a karwansarai on the outskirts, and went leisurely on foot—the better to examine the place—through the streets and over the many bridges, our slaves carrying our necessary luggage. When we came to the Wang’s immense palace, we even had to leave our boots and shoes outside. The steward who met us at the main portal advised us that that was the Han custom, and gave us soft slippers to wear indoors.

The recently appointed Wang of Hang-zho was another of Kubilai’s sons, Agayachi, a little older than myself. He had been informed by an advance rider of our approach, and he greeted me most warmly, “Sain bina, sain urkek,” and Hui-sheng too, addressing her respectfully as “sain nai.” When she and I had bathed and changed into presentable attire, and sat down with Agayachi to a welcoming banquet, he seated me on his right and Hui-sheng at his left, not at a separate women’s table. Few people had given much notice to Hui-sheng in the days when she had been a slave, because, although she had been then no less comely, and had dressed as well as all court slaves were made to do, she had cultivated the slave’s demeanor of unobtrusiveness. Now, as my consort, she dressed as richly as any noblewoman, but it was her letting her radiant personality shine forth that made people notice her—and approvingly, and admiringly.

The table fare of Manzi was opulent and delicious, but somewhat different to what was popular in Kithai. The Han, for some reason, did not care for milk and milk products, of which their neighbor Mongols and Bho were so fond. So we had no butter or cheeses or kumis or arkhi, but there were enough novelties to make up for the lack. When the servants loaded my plate with something called Mao-tai Chicken, I expected to get drunk from it, but it was not spirituous, only delightfully delicate. The dining hall steward told me that the chicken was not cooked in that potent liquor, but killed with it. Giving a chicken a drink of mao-tai, he said, made it as limp as it would make a man, relaxing all its muscles, letting it die in bliss, so it cooked most tenderly.

There was a tart and briny dish of cabbage, shredded and fermented to softness, which I praised—and got myself laughed at—my table companions informing me that it was really a peasant food, and had first been concocted, ages ago, as a cheap and easily portable provender for the laborers who built the Great Wall. But another dish with a genuinely peasant-sounding name, Beggar’s Rice, was not likely ever to have been available to many peasants. It got the name, said the steward, because it had originated as a mere tossing together of kitchen scraps and oddments. However, at this palace table, it was like the most rich and various risotto that ever was. The rice was but a matrix for every kind of shellfish, and bits of pork and beef, and herbs and bean sprouts and zhu-gan shoots and other vegetable morsels, and the whole tinted yellow—with gardenia petals, not with zafràn; our Compagnia had not yet started selling in Manzi.

There were crisp, crunchy Spring Rolls of egg batter filled with steamed clover sprigs, and the little golden zu-jin fish fried whole and eaten in one bite, and the mian pasta prepared in various ways, and sweet cubes of chilled pea paste. The table also was laden with salvers of delicacies peculiar to the locality, and I took at least a taste of all of them—tasting first and then inquiring their identity, lest their names make me reluctant. They included ducks’ tongues in honey, cubes of snake and monkey meat in savory gravy, smoked sea slugs, pigeon eggs cooked with what looked like a sort of silvery pasta, which was really the tendons from the fins of sharks. For sweets, there were big, fragrant quinces, and golden pears the size of rukh’s eggs, and the incomparable hami melons, and a soft-frozen, fluffy confection made, said the steward, of “snow bubbles and apricot blossoms.” For drink there was amber-colored kao-liang wine, and rose wine the exact color of Hui-sheng’s lips, and Manzi’s most prized variety of cha, which was called Precious Thunder Cha.

After we had concluded the meal with the soup, a clear broth made from date plums, and after the soup cook had emerged from the kitchen for us all to applaud him, we repaired to another hall to discuss my business here. We were a group of a dozen or so, the Wang and his staff of lesser ministers, all of whom were Han, but only a few of them locals retained from the Sung administration; most had come from Kithai and so could converse in Mongol. All of them, including Agayachi, wore the floor-sweeping, straight-lined but elegantly embroidered Han robes, with ample sleeves for tucking the hands in and carrying things in. The first order of business was the Wang’s remarking to me that I was at liberty to wear any costume I pleased—I was then wearing, and had long been partial to, the Persian garb of neat tulband and blouse with tight sleeve cuffs, and a cape for outdoors—but he suggested that, for official meetings, I ought to replace the tulband with the Han hat, as worn by himself and his ministers.

That was a shallow, cylindrical thing like a pillbox, with a button on its top, and the button was the only indication of rank among all those in the room. There were, I learned, nine ranks of ministers, but all were dressed so finely and looked so distinguished that only by the discreet insignia of the buttons could they be told apart. Agayachi’s hat button was a single ruby. It was big enough to have been worth a fortune, and it betokened his being of the very highest rank possible here, a Wang, but it was much less conspicuous than, say, Kubilai’s gleaming gold morion or a Venetian Doge’s scufieta. I was entitled to a hat with a coral button, indicating the next-most rank, a Kuan, and Agayachi had such a hat all ready to present to me. The other ministers variously wore the buttons of descending rank: sapphire, turquoise, crystal, white shell, and so on, but it would be a while before I learned to sort them out at a glance. I unwound my tulband and perched the pillbox on my head, and all said I looked the very picture of a Kuan, all but one aged Han gentleman, who grumbled:

“You ought to be more fat.”

I asked why. Agayachi laughed and said:

“It is a Manzi belief that babies, dogs and government officials ought to be fat, or else they are assumed to be ill-tempered. But never mind, Marco. A fat official is assumed to be filching from the treasury and taking bribes. Any government official—fat, thin, ugly or handsome —is always an object of revilement.”

But the same old man grumbled, “Also, Kuan Polo, you ought to dye your hair black.”

Again I asked why, for his own hair was a dusty gray. He said:

“All Manzi loathes and fears the kwei—the evil demons—and all Manzi believes the kwei to have reddish fair hair, like yours.”

The Wang laughed again. “It is we Mongols who are to blame for that. My great-grandfather Chinghiz had an orlok named Subatai. He did many depredations in this part of the world, so he was the Mongol general most hated by the Han, and he had reddish fair hair. I do not know what the kwei were supposed to look like in earlier times, but ever since Subatai’s day, they have looked like him.”

Another man chuckled and said, “Keep your kwei hair and beard, Kuan Polo. Considering what you are here to do, it may help if you are feared and hated.” He spoke Mongol well enough, but it was obviously a newly acquired language for him. “As the Wang has remarked, all government officials are reviled. You can imagine that, of all officials, tax collectors are the most detested. And I hope you can imagine how a foreign tax collector, collecting for a conqueror government, is going to be regarded. I propose that we spread the word that you really are a kwei demon.”

I gave him a look of amusement. He was a plump, pleasant-faced Han of middle age, and he wore a wrought-gold button on his hat, identifying him as being of the seventh rank.

“The Magistrate Fung Wei-ni,” Agayachi introduced him. “A native of Hang-zho, an eminent jurist and a man much esteemed by the people for his fairness and acumen. We are fortunate that he has consented to keep the same magistracy he held under the Sung. And I am personally pleased, Marco, that he has agreed to serve as your adjutant and adviser while you are attached to this court.”

“I am also much pleased, Magistrate Fung,” I said, as he and I both made the sedate, hands-together bow that passes for a ko-tou between men of near equal rank. “I will be grateful for any assistance. In undertaking this mission of collecting taxes in Manzi, I am ignorant of two things only. I know nothing whatever about Manzi. And I know nothing whatever about tax collecting.”

“Well!” grunted the grumbly gray-haired man, this time grudgingly complimentary. “Well, frankness and a lack of self-importance are at least refreshingly new qualities in a tax collector. I doubt, however, that they will help you in your mission.”

“No,” said the Magistrate Fung. “No more than getting fat or blacking your hair, Kuan Polo. I will be frank, also. I see no way for you to extract taxes from Manzi for the Khanate, except by going yourself from door to door and demanding, or having a whole army of men to do it for you. And even at starvation wages, an army would cost more than you would collect.”

“In any case,” said Agayachi, “I have no army of men to delegate to you. But I have provided—for you and your lady—a fine house in a good quarter of the city, well staffed with domestics. When you are ready, my stewards will show you to the place.”

I thanked him and then said to my new adjutant, “If I cannot immediately start learning my job, perhaps I can start learning of my surroundings. Would you accompany us to our house, Magistrate Fung, and on the way show us something of Hang-zho?”

“With pleasure,” he said. “And I will show you first the single most spectacular sight of our city. This is the phase of the moon and—yes—the very hour is at hand for the appearance of the hai-xiao. Let us go at once.”

There was no clock of sand or water in the room, and not even a cat about, so I did not know how he could be so precise about the hour, or what the time had to do with seeing a hai-xiao, or what a hai-xiao was. But Hui-sheng and I made our good nights to the Wang and his staff, and we and our little company of scribe and slaves left the palace with the Magistrate Fung.

“We will take boat from here to your residence,” he said. “There is a royal barge waiting on the canal side of the palace. But first, let us walk up the promenade here, along the riverside.”

It was a fine night, balmy, softly lighted by a full moon, so we had a good view. From the palace, we went along a street that paralleled the river. It had a waist-high balustrade on that side, mainly constructed of some curiously shaped stones. They were circular, each with a hole in its center, and they were as big around as my encircled arms and as thick as my waist. They were too small to have been millstones, but too heavy to have been wheels. Whatever they had once been used for, they had been retired to serve here, set on edge, rim to rim, and the spaces between filled in with smaller stones, to make the balustrade a solid wall and flat on top. I looked over, and saw that the parapet fell away on the other side, a vertical wall of stone, some two house-stories’ distance to the river surface below.

I said, “I take it that the river rises considerably in flood season.”

“No,” said Fung. “The city is built high above the water on this side to allow for the hai-xiao. Fix your eyes yonder, eastward, toward the ocean.”

So he and I and Hui-sheng stood leaning against the parapet and gazed out toward the sea, across the flat, moonlit plain of delta sand that stretched featurelessly to the black horizon. Of course, there was no ocean to be seen; it was some two hundred li away beyond that shoal. Or it usually was. For now I began to hear, from that far distance, a murmur of sound, like a Mongol army on horseback galloping toward us. Hui-sheng tugged at my sleeve, which surprised me, for she could not have heard anything. But she indicated her other hand, which rested on the parapet, and she gave me a querying look. Hui-sheng, I realized, was again feeling the sound. However far away it was, I thought, it must be a veritable thunder to be vibrating a stone wall. I could only give her a shrug, no explanation. Fung evidently expected whatever was coming, and without misgivings.

He pointed again, and I saw a line of bright silver suddenly split the darkness of the horizon. Before I could ask what it was, it was close enough for me to make out: a line of sea foam, brilliant in the moonlight, coming toward us across the desert of sand, as rapidly as a line of charging, silver-armored horsemen. Behind it was the whole weight of the Sea of Kithai. As I have said, that shoal was fan-shaped—a hundred li broad out where it met the ocean, narrow here at the river mouth. So the inrushing sea came into the delta as a tumbling sheet of water and spume, but was rapidly constricted as it came, and compressed and piled up, and all its dark color was churned into white. The hai-xiao happened too quickly for me even to exclaim in astonishment. There, pounding toward us, was a wall of water as wide as the delta and as high as a house. But for its foamy glitter, it looked like the avalanche that had scoured across the Yun-nan valley, and rumbled very like it, too.

I glanced down at the river below us. Like a small animal emerging from its burrow and encountering a foam-muzzled rabid dog, it was flowing backward, recoiling, trying to vacate its invaded burrow mouth and retreat back toward the mountains it had come from. The next moment, that vast roaring wall of water surged by us, just below the level of the parapet, a welter and tumult of foam, and flecks of it spattered up upon us. I had been transfixed by the spectacle, but at least I had seen seawater before; I think Hui-sheng never had, so I turned to see if she was frightened. She was not. She was bright-eyed and smiling, and moon-glowing spindrift was in her hair like opals. To someone in a soundless world, I suppose, more than to the rest of us, it must be a delight to see splendid things, especially when they are so splendid as to be feelable. And even I had felt the stone balustrade beside us and the night all about us tremble under that impact. The rumbling, fizzing, sizzling sea continued to seethe past and upstream, the bright white of it getting streaked with black-green, and finally the black-green predominating, until it was all an unfoamed choppy sea occupying the whole river breadth beneath us.

When I could make myself heard, I said to Fung, “What in the name of all the gods is it?”

“Newcomers usually are impressed,” he said, as if he had done it all himself. “It is the hai-xiao. The tidal bore.”

“Tidal!” I exclaimed. “Impossible! Tides come and go with stately decorum.”

“The hai-xiao is not always so dramatic,” he conceded. “Only when the season and the moon and the time of day or night properly coincide. On those occasions, as you just saw, they bring the sea across those sands at the pace of a galloping horse—across two hundred li in no longer than it takes a man to eat a leisurely meal. The river boatmen learned, ages ago, to take advantage of it. They cast off from here at just the right moment, and the hai-xiao takes them upriver, hundreds of li, without their having to stroke an oar.”

I said politely, “Forgive my doubting you, Magistrate Fung. But I come from a sea city myself, and I have seen tides all my life. They move the sea perhaps an arm’s-reach up and down. This was a mountain of sea!”

He said politely, “Forgive my contradicting you, Kuan Polo. But I must presume that your native city is on a small sea.”

I said loftily, “I never thought of it as small. But yes, there are greater ones. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the limitless Ocean Sea Atlantic.”

“Ah. Well. So is this one a great sea. Beyond this coast there are islands. Many of them. To the north of east, for example, the islands called Jihpen-kwe, which compose the Empire of the Dwarfs. But go east far enough, and the islands thin out, become sparse, are left behind. And still goes on the Sea of Kithai. On and on.”

“Like our Ocean Sea,” I murmured. “No mariner has ever crossed it, or knows its end, or what lies there, or if it has an end.”

“Well, this one does,” said Fung, very matter of fact. “Or at least there is one record of its having been crossed. Hang-zho now is separated from the ocean by that two-hundred-li delta. But you see these stones?” He indicated the rounds that constituted most of the balustrade. “They are anchors for mighty seagoing vessels, and the counterweights for those vessels’ boom ends. Or they were.”

“Then Hang-zho was once a seaport,” I said. “And it must have been a busy one. But a long time ago, or so I judge from the extent that the delta has silted over.”

“Yes. Nearly eight hundred years ago. There is in the city archives a journal written by a certain Hui-chen, a Buddhist trapa, and it is dated—by our count—in the year three thousand one hundred, or thereabout. It tells how he was aboard a seagoing chuan which had the misfortune to be blown from this coast by the tai-feng—the great storm—and kept on going eastward and at long last made landfall somewhere yonder. By the trapa’s estimate, a distance of more than twenty-one thousand li to there. Nothing but water all the way. And another twenty-one thousand li back again. But he did come back from wherever he went, for the journal exists.”

“Hui! Twenty-one thousand li! Why, that is as far as from here overland all the way back to Venice.” A thought came to me, and it was an excitingly beguiling one. “If there is land that far from here to the eastward across this sea, it must be my own continent of Europe! This continent of Kithai and Manzi must be the far side of our own Ocean Sea! Tell me, Magistrate, did the monk mention cities on the other side? Lisboa? Bordeaux?”

“No cities, no. He called the land Fu-sang, which means nothing more than the Place We Drifted To. The natives, he said, resembled Mongols or Bho rather than Han, but were even more barbaric, and spoke an uncouth tongue.”

“It must have been Iberia … or Morocco … ,” I said thoughtfully. “Both full of Muslim Moors even that long ago, I think. Did the monk say anything else of the place?”

“Very little. The natives were hostile, so it was only with hazard and difficulty that the mariners managed to restock the chuan with food and water. They cast off in a hurry, to come west again. The only other thing that seems to have impressed Hui-chen was the vegetation. He described the trees of Fu-sang as being very odd. He said they were not of wood and leafy branches, but of green flesh and wicked thorns.” Fung made a face of amused disbelief. “That signifies little. I think all holy men tend to see flesh and thorns everywhere.”

“Hm. I do not know what kind of trees grow in Iberia or Morocco,” I muttered, unable to cease speculating. “But it is awesome even to think that—just possibly—one could sail from here to my homeland.”

“Better not try it,” Fung said offhandedly. “Not many men since Hui-chen have encountered a tai-feng on the open sea and lived to tell of it. That storm rages frequently, between here and the Jihpen-kwe islands. The Khan Kubilai has twice now attempted to invade and conquer that empire, sending fleets of chuan full of warriors. The first time, he sent too few, and the dwarfs repulsed them. The last time, he sent hundreds of ships and nearly an entire tuk of men. But the tai-feng came up and ravaged the fleet, and that invasion failed also. I hear that the dwarfs, grateful to the storm, have named the tai-feng the kamikaze, which in their uncouth language means Divine Wind.”

“However,” I said, still ruminating, “if the storm rages only between here and Jihpen-kwe, then—if Kubilai ever does take those islands—one might be able to sail safely eastward from there … .”

But Kubilai never made another sortie against them, and never took those islands, and I never got to them, or any farther eastward. I was several times upon the Sea of Kithai, but never for long out of sight of the mainland. So I do not know whether that far-off Fu-sang was, as I suspected, the western shores of our known Europe, or if it was some new land, still undiscovered to this day. I am sorry for having failed, in that instance, to satisfy my curiosity. I should very much have liked to go there and see that place, and I never did.

4

HUI-SHENG and I and the Magistrate Fung and our servants stepped from the palace dock into an intricately carved teakwood san-pan, and sat under a stretched-silk canopy as ornate and curly-edged as any Han roof. A dozen oarsmen, naked to the waist and their bodies oiled so they gleamed in the moonlight, rowed us from there, along a winding canal route, to our new abode, and along the way Fung pointed out various things worth our notice.

He said, “That short street you see going off on our left is the Lane of Sweet Breezes and Stroking Airs. In other words, the lane of the fanmakers. Hang-zho’s fans are prized throughout the land—this is where the folding fan was invented—some having as many as fifty sticks, and all being painted with the most exquisite pictures, often naughty ones. Nearly a hundred of our city’s families have been engaged in the making of fans for generations, father to son to grandson.”

And he said, “That building on our right is the biggest in the city. Only eight stories high, so it is not our tallest, but it extends from street to street in one direction, and canal to canal in the other. It is Hang-zho’s permanent indoor marketplace, and I believe the only one in Manzi. In its hundred or more rooms are displayed for sale those wares too precious or too fragile to be outdoors in the weather of the open markets—fine furnishings, works of art, perishable goods, child slaves and the like.”

And he said, “Here, where the canal has broadened out so expansively, this is called Xi Hu, the West Lake. You see the brightly lighted island in the middle? Even at this hour, there are barges and san-pans moored all around it. Some of the people may be visiting the temples on the island, but most are making merry. You hear the music? The inns there stay open all night long, dispensing food and drink and good cheer. Some of the inns are hospitable to all comers, others are for hire to wealthy families for their private celebrations and weddings and banquets.”

And he said, “That street going off to our right, you will note, is hung all with lanterns of red silk over the doors, marking that as one of the streets of brothels. Hang-zho regulates its prostitutes most strictly, grading them into separate guilds, from grand courtesans down to riverboat drabs, and they are periodically examined to make sure they maintain good health and cleanliness.”

I had so far been making only murmurs of acknowledgment and appreciation of Fung’s remarks, but when he touched on the matter of prostitutes, I said:

“I noticed quite a number of them actually strolling the streets in daylight, something I never saw in any other city. Hang-zho seems quite tolerant of them.”

“Ahem. Those abroad in daylight would have been the male prostitutes. A separate guild, but also regulated by statute. If you ever are solicited by a whore, and are inclined to use her, first examine her bracelets. If one among them is copper, she is not a female, however feminine her attire. That copper bracelet is dictated by the city—to prevent the male whores, poor wretches, from passing themselves off as what they are not.”

Unpleasurably recollecting that I was the nephew of just such a wretch, I said, perhaps a little peevishly, “Hang-zho seems quite tolerant in many respects, and so do you.”

He only said affably, “I am of the Tao. Each of us goes his own Way. A male lover of his own sex is, by choice, only what a eunuch is involuntarily. Both of them being a reproach to their ancestors, in not continuing their line, they require no additional rebuke from me. Now yonder, on our right, that high drum tower marks the center of the city, and is our tallest structure. It is manned day and night to drum the alarm of any fire. And Hang-zho does not depend on passersby and volunteers to quench any fires. There are one thousand men employed and paid to do nothing else but stand ready for that duty.”

The barge eventually deposited us at the dock of our own house, just as if we had been in Venice, and the house was quite a palazzo. A sentry was posted on either side of the main portal, each man holding at attention a lance that had an ax blade as well as a point, and both the men were the biggest Han I had ever seen.

“Yes, good robust specimens,” said Fung, when I admired them. “Each, I would say, easily sixteen hands tall.”

“I think you are mistaken,” I said. “I myself am seventeen handspans high, and they are half a head taller than I.” I added jestingly, “If you are so inept at counting, I wonder if you are really suited to the arithmetical work of tax collecting.”

“Oh, eminently so,” he said, in an equally cheerful way, “for I know the Han methods of counting. A man’s height is ordinarily reckoned to the top of his head, but a soldier’s is measured only to his shoulders.”

“Cazza beta! Why?”

“So they can be assigned in pairs to the carrying poles. Being foot soldiers, not horsemen, they are their own load bearers. But also it is taken for granted that a good and obedient soldier has no need for a mind, or a head to carry it in.”

I shook my own head in admiring amazement, and apologized to the magistrate for having even mildly disparaged his knowledge. Then, when we had again exchanged our shoes for slippers, he accompanied me and Hui-sheng on a tour of the house. While servants in one room after another fell down in ko-tou to us, he pointed out this and that facility provided for our comfort and pleasure. The house even had its own garden, with a lotus pond in the middle and a flowering tree overhanging that. The gravel of the winding paths was not just raked smooth, but raked into graceful patterns. I was particularly taken by one ornament there: a carving of a large seated lion that guarded the doorway between house and garden. It was sculptured from a single immense piece of stone, but done so cleverly that the lion had a stone ball in its half-open mouth. The ball could, with a finger, be rolled back and forth in there, but could never be pried out from behind the lion’s teeth.

I think I slightly impressed the Magistrate Fung with my eye for artwork when, admiring the painted scrolls on the walls of our bedroom, I remarked that those pictures of landscapes were done differently here than by the artists of Kithai. He gave me a sidewise look and said:

“You are right, Kuan. The northern artists think of all mountains as resembling the rugged and craggy peaks of their Tian Shan range. The artists here in Sung—Manzi, I mean; excuse me—are better acquainted with the soft, lush, rounded, woman’s-breast mountains of our south.”

He took his departure, declaring himself ready to be with me again at the instant of my summons, whenever I should feel like starting work. Then Hui-sheng and I strolled about the new residence by ourselves, dismissing one servant after another to their quarters, and getting acquainted with the place. We sat for a while in the moonlit garden while, with gestures, I apprised Hui-sheng of what details of the day’s various events and comments she might have failed to comprehend on her own. I concluded by conveying the general impression I had got: that no one seemed to hold very high hopes of my success as a tax gouger. She nodded her understanding of each of my explications and, in the tactful way of a Han wife, made no comment on my fitness for my work or my prospects in it. She asked only one question:

“Will you be happy here, Marco?”

Feeling a truly hai-xiao surge of affection for her, I gestured back, “I am happy—here!” making it plain that I meant “with you.”

We allowed ourselves a holiday week or so to get settled into our new surroundings, and I learned quickly to leave all the multitudinous details of housekeeping to Hui-sheng’s supervision. As she had earlier done with the Mongol maid who came with us, she seemed easily to establish some imperceptible mode of communication with the new Han servants, and they leaped to obey her every whim, and usually did so to perfection. I was not so good a master as she was a mistress. For one thing, I could no more talk in Han than she could. But also I had been long accustomed to having Mongol servants, or servants trained by Mongols, and these of Manzi were different.

I could recite a whole catalogue of differences, but I will mention just two. One was that, owing to the Han reverence for antiquity, a servant could never be dismissed or retired on the mere ground of his or her getting old, useless, senile, even immobile. And, as servants got older, they got cranky and crafty and impudent, but they could not be discharged for that, either, or even beaten. One of ours was an ancient crone whose only duty was to make up our bedroom each morning after we arose. Whenever she smelled the scent of lemon on me or Hui-sheng or the bedclothes, she would cackle and whinny most abominably, and I would have to grit my teeth and bear it.

The other difference had to do with the weather, of all unlikely things. Mongols were indifferent to weather; they would go about their occupations in sunshine, rain, snow—probably in the chaos of a tai-feng, if they were ever to encounter one. And God knows, after all my journeying, I was as impervious to cold or heat or wet as any Mongol. But the Han of Manzi, for all their devotion to bathing at every opportunity, had a catlike aversion to rain. When it rained, nothing that involved going outdoors ever got done—and I do not mean just by servants; I mean by anybody.

Agayachi’s ministers mostly resided in the same palace that he did, but those who lived elsewhere stayed at home when it rained. The marketplaces of the city, on rainy days, were vacant of both buyers and sellers. So was the vast indoor market, though it was under shelter, because people would have had to endure the rain to get there. Though I went about as I had always done, I had to do it on foot. There was not a palanquin to be found, nor even a canal boat. Though the boatmen spent all their lives on the water, most of the time soaked with water, they would not go out in the water that fell from the sky. Even the male prostitutes did not parade the streets.

Even my so-called adjutant, the Magistrate Fung, had the same eccentricity. He would not come across the city to my house on rainy days, and would not even make his appointed judicial sittings at the Cheng. “Why bother? No litigants would be there.” He expressed sympathy at my annoyance over the many wasted wet days and evinced a mild amusement at his own and his countrymen’s peculiarity, but he never tried to cure himself of it. Once, when I had not seen him during a whole week of rain, and railed at him indignantly, “How am I supposed to get anything done, when I have only a fair-weather adjutant?” he sat down, got out a paper and brushes and ink block, and wrote for me a Han character.

“That says ‘an urgent action not yet taken,’” he informed me. “But see: it is composed of two elements. This one says ‘stopped’ and this one ‘by rain.’ Clearly, a trait enshrined in our writing must be ingrained in our souls.”

But on clement days, anyway, we sat in my garden and had many long talks about my mission and about his own magistracy. I was interested to hear some of the local laws and customs, but, as he explained them, I gathered that in his judicial practice he relied more on his people’s superstitions and his own arbitrary caprices.

“For example, I have my bell which can tell a thief from an honest man. Suppose something has been stolen, and I have a whole array of suspects. I bid each of them reach through a curtain and touch the hidden bell, which will ring at the guilty man’s touch.”

“And does it?” I asked skeptically.

“Of course not. But it is smeared with ink-powder. Afterward, I examine the men’s hands. The man with clean hands is the thief, the one who feared to touch the bell.”

I murmured, “Ingenious,” a word I found myself often uttering here in Manzi.

“Oh, judgments are easy enough. It is the sentences and penalties that require ingenuity. Suppose I sentence that thief to wear the yoke in the jail yard. That is a heavy wooden collar, rather like the stone anchors, which gets locked around his neck, and he must sit in the jail yard while he wears it, to be jeered at by passersby. Suppose I judge that his crime merits his suffering that discomfort and humiliation for, say, two months. However, I know very well that he or his family will bribe the jailers, and they will only put him into the yoke at times when they know I will be passing in and out of the yard. Therefore, to make sure he is properly chastised, I sentence him to six months in the yoke.”

“Do you,” I said hesitantly, “do you employ a Fondler for the more felonious culprits?”

“Yes, indeed, and a very good one,” he said cheerfully. “My own son, in preparation for the study of law, is currently apprenticed to our Fondler. By way of teaching him the trade, the Master has had young Fung beating a pudding for some weeks now.”

“What?”

“There is a punishment called chou-da, which is to whip a felon with a zhu-gan cane split at the end into a many-thonged scourge. The object is to inflict the most terrible pain and rupture all the internal organs without causing visible mutilation. So, before he is permitted to wreak chou-da on a human, young Fung must learn to pulverize a pudding without breaking its surface.”

“Gesu. I mean interesting.”

“Well, there are punishments more popular with the crowds that come to look on—and some less so, of course. They depend on the severity of the crime. Simple branding on the face. A stay in the cage. The kneeling on sharp-linked chains. The medicine that bestows instant old age. Women especially like to watch that one inflicted on other women. Another one popular with the women is to see an adultress upended and poured full of boiling oil or molten lead. And there are the punishments with self-descriptive names: the Bridal Bed, the Affectionate Snake, the Monkey Sucking a Peach Dry. I must say modestly that I myself recently invented rather an interesting new one.”

“What was that?”

“It was done to an arsonist who had burned down the house of an enemy. He failed to get the enemy, who had gone on a journey, but burned to death the wife and children. So I decreed a punishment to fit the crime. I directed the Fondler to pack the man’s nostrils and mouth with huo-yao powder, and seal him tightly with wax. Then, before he could suffocate or strangle, the wicks were ignited and his head was blown to pieces.”

“While we are on the subject of meet punishments, Wei-ni”—we were by this time informally using first names—“what do you predict the Khakhan will inflict on you and me, for indigence in office? We have not got very far with our strategies for tax imposition. I do not believe Kubilai will accept rainy weather as an excuse.”

“Marco, why weary ourselves with the making of plans that cannot be put into practice?” he said lazily. “And today is not rainy. Let us just sit here and enjoy the sun and the breeze and the tranquil sight of your lovely lady gathering flowers from the garden.”

“Wei-ni, this is a rich city,” I persisted. “The only marketplace under roof I ever saw, and ten more market squares outdoors. All of them teeming—except when it rains, anyway. Pleasure pavilions on the lake islands. Prosperous families of fanmakers. Thriving brothels. Not a single one of them yet paying a single tsien to the new government’s treasury. And if Hang-zho is so wealthy, what must the rest of Manzi be like? Are you asking me to sit still and let no one in the nation ever pay a head tax or a land tax or a trade tax or a—?”

“Marco, I can only tell you—as both I and the Wang have told you repeatedly—every last tax record maintained by the Sung regime disappeared with the Sung regime. Perhaps the old Empress ordered them destroyed, out of female malice. More likely her subjects invaded the halls of records and the Cheng archives, the moment she left for Kahn-balik to surrender her crown, and they destroyed the records. It is understandable. It is expectable. It happens in every newly conquered place, before the conquerors march in, so that—”

“Yes, yes, I have accepted that as a fact. But I am not interested in knowing who paid how much to the late Sung’s tax officers! What do I care about a lot of old ledgers?”

“Because without them—look.” He leaned forward and held three fingers in front of my face. “You have three possible courses of action. Either you go yourself into every single market stall, every inn on every island, every whore’s working cubicle—”

“Which is impossible.”

“—or you have an army of men to do it for you.”

“Which you have declared impractical.”

“Yes. But, just for argument, say that you go to a market stall where a man is peddling mutton. You demand the Khan’s share of the value of that mutton. He says, ‘But Kuan, I am not the owner of this stall. Speak to the master yonder.’ You accost the other man and he says, ‘I am master here, yes, but I only manage this stall for its owner, who lives in retirement in Su-zho.’”

“I would refuse to believe either of them.”

“But what do you do? Wring money from one? From both? From whom you would get only a dribble. And perhaps overlook the real owner—perhaps the purveyor of all the mutton in Manzi—who really is luxuriating beyond your grasp in Su-zho. Also, do you go through the same fuss at every market stall at every tax time?”

“Vakh! I would never get out of the one market!”

“But if you had the old ledgers, you would know who was obligated and where to find him and how much he paid last time around. So there is your third course of action, and the only practical one: compile new records. Even before you begin dunning, you must have a list of every going business and shop and whorehouse and property and plot of land. And the names of all their owners and proprietors and heads of household. And an estimate of what their holdings are worth and what their annual profits amount to and—”

“Gramo mi! That alone would take my lifetime, Wei-ni. And meanwhile I am collecting nothing!”

“Well, there you are.” He sat indolently back again. “Enjoy the day and the view of the eye-soothing Hui-sheng. Salve your conscience with this consideration. The Sung dynasty had existed here for three hundred and twenty years before its recent fall. It had had that long to collect and codify its records and make its taxation methods workable. You cannot expect to do the same thing overnight.”

“No, I cannot. But the Khan Kubilai can expect just that. What do I do?”

“Nothing, since anything you did do would be futile. Do you hear that cuckoo in the tree yonder? ‘Cu-cu … cu-cu …’ We Han like to think that the cuckoo is saying ‘pu-ju ku-ei.’ That means ‘why not go home?’”

“Thank you, Wei-ni. I expect I will go home, someday. All the way home. But I will not go, as we Venetians say, with my bagpipes turned inside their sack.”

There was some while of peaceful silence, except for the cuckoo’s reiterated advice. At last Fung resumed:

“Are you happy here in Hang-zho?”

“Exceptionally so.”

“Then be happy. Try to regard your situation like this. It may be a long and pleasant time before the Khakhan even remembers he sent you here. When he does, you may still evade his inquisition for a long and pleasant time. When he finally does demand an accounting, he may accept your explanation of your delinquency. If he does not, then he may or may not put you to death. If he does, your worries are all over. If he does not, but only has you broken by the chou-da scourge, well, you can live out your life as a crippled beggar. The market stallkeepers will be kind and let you have a begging station in the market square—because you never harried and hounded them for taxes, do you see?”

I said rather sourly, “The Wang called you an eminent jurist, Wei-ni. Is that a sample of your jurisprudence?”

“No, Marco. That is Tao.”

Some while later, after he had departed for his own dwelling, I said again, “What do I do?”

I said it again in the garden, but now it was the cool of the early evening, and the cuckoo had taken its own advice and gone home, too, and I was sitting with Hui-sheng after our dinner. I had related to her all that Fung and I had said about my predicament, and now appealed for her advice.

She sat pensive for a time, then signaled, “Wait,” and got up and went to the house kitchen. She came back with a bag of dry beans and indicated that I was to sit with her on the ground among a bed of flowers. In a bare patch of earth there, she traced with her slim forefinger the figure of a square. Then she traced a line down the center of that and another across it, to divide the square into four smaller ones. Inside one of those she scratched a single little line, in the next two lines, in the next three, and in the last a sort of squiggle, then looked up at me. I recognized the marks as Han numerals, so I nodded and said, “Four little boxes, numbered one, two, three and four.”

While I wondered what this had to do with my current and pressing and frustrating problems, Hui-sheng took out of the bag one bean, showed it to me and placed it on box number three. Then, without looking, she reached into the bag, took out a casual handful of beans and spread them beside the square. Very rapidly, she flicked out four beans from that spread, and four more, shoving them to one side, and kept on separating out four beans at a time from that spread. When they had all, by fours, been moved apart, there remained two beans over. She pointed to those two, pointed to the empty number-two box drawn on the ground, snatched up the bean from the box numbered three, added it to the ones she still had, grinned impishly at me, and made a gesture signifying “too bad.”

“I understand,” I said. “I wagered on box number three, but number two won, so I lost my bean. I am desolated.”

She scooped all the beans back into the bag, took one out, ostentatiously put it on a number for me again—this time number four. She started to reach into the bag again, but stopped, and motioned for me to do that. I understood: the game was totally fair, the counting beans were grabbed up at random. I took a considerable handful from the bag and spread them beside her. She rapidly flicked them aside again, four at a flick, and this time they happened to be divisible by four. There were none left to one side at the finish.

“Aha,” I said. “That means my number four wins. What do I win?”

She held up four fingers, pointed to my wager, added to it three beans more, and shoved them all toward me.

“If I lose, I lose my bean. If my numbered box is the winner, I get my bean back fourfold.” I made a face of toleration. “It is a simple game, a childish game, no more complex than the old mariners’ game of venturina. But if you are suggesting that we play at it for a while—very well, my dear, let us play. I assume you are trying to convey something more than boredom.”

She gave me an ample stock of beans to wager with, and indicated that I could risk as many as I liked, and on as many boxes as I chose. So I piled ten beans in each of them, all four boxes, to see what would happen. With an impatient look at me, and without even delving into her bag to ascertain the winning number, she simply gave me forty beans from it, then scooped up the forty on the ground. I realized that, by such a system of play, I could do no more than stay even. So I began trying varieties of play—leaving one box empty, piling different numbers of beans on the other boxes, and so on. The game became a puzzle in arithmetical terms. Sometimes I would win a whole handful of beans, and Hui-sheng would retain only a few. Sometimes the favor of chance went the other way: I would heavily augment her supply and diminish my own.

I perceived that, if a man were seriously playing this game, he could, by one lucky win, come out of it much richer in beans—if he got up with his winnings, and went away, and could refuse the temptation to try again. But there was always the urge, especially when one was ahead, to try for more yet. I could also imagine, if one player were vying with three others, plus the banker with the bean bag, it could get absorbing, challenging, tantalizing. But, as well as I could gauge the probabilities, the banker would be getting richer all the time, and any winning player would be enriching himself mainly at the expense of the other three.

I gestured for Hui-sheng’s attention. She raised her eyes from the playing ground, and I pointed to myself, to the game, to my money purse, indicating: “If a man were playing for money instead of beans, this could be an expensive sport.”

She smiled, and her eyes danced, and she nodded emphatically: “That is what I was trying to convey.” And she swept an arm to indicate all of Hang-zho—or maybe all of Manzi—completing the sweep by pointing to the room in our house that I and my scribe used for our working quarters.

I stared at her eagerly glowing little face, then at the beans on the ground. “Are you suggesting this as a substitute for tax collecting?”

Emphatic nodding: “Yes.” And a spreading of hands: “Why not?”

What a ridiculous idea, was my first thought, but then I reflected. I had seen Han men risking their money on the zhi-pai cards, on the ma-jiang tiles, even on the feng-zheng flying toys—and doing it avidly, feverishly, madly. Could they possibly be enticed into a madness for this simpleminded game? And with me—or rather, the imperial treasury—holding the bank?

“Ben trovato!” I muttered. “The Khakhan said it himself: involuntary benevolence!” I sprang up and raised Hui-sheng from the flower bed and embraced her enthusiastically. “You may have provided my succor and salvation. Tell me, did you learn this game as a child?”

Yes, she had. Some years ago—after a Mongol band of marauders torched her village and slew all the adults, and took her and the other children as slaves, and she was chosen to be raised as a lon-gya of concubines, and a shaman did the cutting that made her and the whole world silent—the old woman who tended her convalescence had kindly taught her that game, because it was one that could be played without words spoken or heard. Hui-sheng thought she had been about six years old at the time.

I tightened my embrace of her.

5

WITHIN three years, I was accounted the richest man in Manzi. Of course, I really was not, because I scrupulously and punctiliously sent on all my profits to the imperial treasury in Khanbalik, by trustworthy Mongol carriers with heavily armed outriders. Over the years, they transported a fortune in paper money and coins, and, for all I know, they still are transporting more.

Hui-sheng and I between us decided on the name for the game—Hua Dou Yin-hang, which means roughly “Break the Bean Bank”—and it was a success from the very start. The Magistrate Fung, though at first incredulous, was soon enchanted with the idea, and convened a special session of his Cheng just to put the seal of legality on my venture and issue to me letters of patent and entitlement—all embossed with the Manzi chrysanthemum—so that no others could copy the idea and set up in competition to me. The Wang Agayachi, though at first dubious of the propriety of my venture—“Who ever heard of a government sponsoring a game of chance?”—soon was praising it, and me, and declaring that I had made Manzi the most lucrative of all the Khanate’s acquired lands. To every accolade, I said modestly and truthfully, “It was not my doing, but that of my intelligent and talented lady. I am only the harvester. Hui-sheng is the gardener with the golden touch.”

She and I commenced the venture with an investment so trivial and meager that it would have shamed a fishmonger outfitting a poor stall in the marketplace. Our equipment consisted of nothing but a table and a tablecloth. Hui-sheng procured a piece of brilliant vermilion red cloth—the Han color signifying good fortune—and embroidered on it in black the quartered square, and in gold the four numbers inside the boxes, and we spread that cloth over a stone table in our garden, and we sent all our servants out to cry along the streets and canals and the riverfront: “Come one, come all venturesome souls! Wager a tsien and win a liang! Come and Break the Bean Bank! Make your dreams come true and your ancestors raise their hands in wonderment! Quick fortune awaits at the establishment of Polo and Echo! Come one and all!”

They came. Perhaps some people came just to steal a close look at me, the demon-haired Ferenghi. Perhaps some came out of actual avarice to win an easy fortune, but most seemed merely curious to see what we were offering, and some simply idled in on their way to somewhere else. But they came. And, although some jested and jeered—“A game for children!”—all made at least one play at it. And, although they tossed their tsien or two onto the red cloth in front of Hui-sheng as if they were only humoring a pretty child, they waited to see if they had won or lost. And, although many then just laughed good-humoredly and left the garden, some got intrigued and stayed to play again. And again. And, because only four could play at once, there was some mild wrangling and pushing among them, and those who could not play stayed to watch enthralled. And by the end of the day, when we declared the game over, it was quite a crowd our servants ushered out of the garden. Some of the players went away with more money than they had brought, and went rejoicing that they had found “an unguarded money vault,” and vowed to keep coming back and plundering it. And some went away rather lighter in the purse than when they had come, and they went berating themselves for having been bested by “such a juvenile sport,” and vowed to come back for retaliation on the Bean Bank table.

So that night Hui-sheng embroidered another cloth, and our servants nearly ruptured themselves manhandling another stone table into the garden. And the next day, instead of just standing about to keep order while Hui-sheng played banker, I took the other table. I was not so swift at the play as she, and did not collect as much money, but we both were hard worked all the day and fatigued by the end of it. Most of the winners of the day before had come back again—and the losers, as well—and more people besides, who had heard of this unheard-of new establishment in Hang-zho.

Well, I need hardly go on. We never again had to send our servants out crying in public, “Come all!” The house of Polo and Echo had overnight become a fixture, and a popular one. We taught the servants—the brighter ones—how to act as bankers, so Hui-sheng and I could take a rest now and then. It was not long before Hui-sheng had to make more of the black-gold-and-red tablecloths, and we purchased all the stone tables in the stock of a neighbor mason, and we set the servants at them as permanent bankers. Curiously enough, our aged crone who always got so gleeful at the smell of lemon turned out to be the best of our apprentice bankers, as swift and accurate as Hui-sheng herself.

I suppose I did not fully realize what a grand success we had made of our venture until one day the sky drizzled rain, and no one fled from the garden, and still more patrons arrived, having come through the rain, and they all went on playing all day, oblivious to the wet! No man of the Han would previously have let himself get rained on, even for the sake of visiting Hang-zho’s most legendary courtesan. When I realized that we had contrived a diversion more compelling than sex, I went out and about the city and took hire of other disused gardens and empty plots, and instructed our neighbor stonemason to start chiseling more tables for us in a hurry.

Our patronage came from all levels of Hang-zho society—rich nobles retired from the old regime, prosperous and oily-looking merchants, harassed-looking tradesmen, starved-looking porters and palanquin carriers, smelly fishermen and sweaty boatmen—Han, Mongols, a scattering of Muslims, even some men I took to be native Jews. The few fluttery and twittery players who looked at first to be women turned out to be wearing copper bracelets. I do not recall a genuine woman ever coming to our establishment, except to look on with supercilious amusement, as I have seen the visitors do in a House of Delusion. The Han women simply had no wagering instinct, but with the Han men it was more of a passion than drinking to excess or exercising their wee masculine organs.

The men of lower classes, who came desperately hoping to improve their lot, wagered usually only the little center-punched tsien coins that were the currency of the poor. Men of the middle classes usually risked flying money, but of small face-value (and often tattered paper). The already rich men who came, thinking they could Break the Bean Bank by heavy siege or long attrition, would thump down large wads of the more valuable notes of flying money. But a man, whether he wagered a single tsien or a heap of liang, had the same chance of winning when the banker’s counting beans were flicked aside, four by four, to disclose the winning box number. What exactly the chance of anyone’s making a fortune was, I never even troubled to calculate. All I know is that about the same number of patrons went home richer as went home poorer, but it was their own money they had exchanged, and an appreciable portion of it had remained with our Bean Bank. My scribe and I spent much of every night sorting the paper money into sheaves of the same face-values, and threading the little coins into strings of hundreds and skeins of thousands.

Eventually, of course, the business got too big and complex for me and Hui-sheng to be personally involved at all. After we had established many Bean Banks all over Hang-zho, we did the same in Su-zho, and then in other cities, and within a few years there was not a single least village in Manzi that did not have one in operation. We employed only tested and trusted men and women to act as the bankers of them, and my Adjutant Fung, for his contribution, put into every establishment a sworn officer of the law to act as general overseer and auditor of accounts. I promoted my scribe to be my manager of the entire wide-flung operation, and thereafter I had nothing to do with the business except to keep tally of the receipts from all over the nation, pay expenses out of that amount, and send on the considerable residue—the eminently considerable residue—to Khanbalik.

I took nothing of the profits for myself. Here in Hang-zho, as in Khanbalik, Hui-sheng and I had an elegant residence and plenty of servants and we dined from an opulent table. All of that was provided to us by the Wang Agayachi—or rather, by his government, which, since it shared in the imperial revenue, was largely supported by our Bean Banks. For indulgence in any additional luxuries or follies I might desire for myself and Hui-sheng, I had my income from my father’s Compagnia Polo, still thriving and now sending zafràn and other commodities for trade here in Manzi. So, from the Bean Banks’ receipts, I regularly deducted only enough to pay the rentals and maintenance of the banks’ gardens and buildings, the wages of the bankers and overseers and couriers, and the ludicrously small costs of equipment (nothing much beyond tables and tablecloths and supplies of dried beans). What went every month to the treasury was, as I have said, a fortune. And, as I have also said, it is probably still a continuing stream.

Kubilai had cautioned me not to bleed every drop from the veins of his Manzi subjects. It might seem that I was contravening his orders and doing precisely that. But I was not. Most players ventured at our Bean Banks the money they had already earned and hoarded and could afford to risk. If they lost it, they were impelled to work harder and earn some more. Even those who injudiciously impoverished themselves at our tables did not simply slump into hopeless idleness and beggary, as they would have done if they had lost their all to a tax collector. The Bean Banks offered always a hope of recovering one’s losses—a tax collector never lets anything be retrieved—so even the very bankrupts had reason to work their way up again from nothing toward a prosperity that would enable them to return to our tables. I am happy to say that our system did not—as the old tax systems had done—force anyone to the desperate expedient of borrowing at usurious terms and getting into the dire clutches of deep debt. But I take no credit for that; it was thanks to the Khakhan’s strictures against the Muslims; there simply were no longer any usurers to borrow from. So in sum, as well as I could see, our Bean Banks—far from bleeding Manzi—gave it new drive and industry and productiveness. They benefited all concerned, from the Khanate as a whole, to the working population at large (not to forget the many people who found steady employment in our banks), and so on down to the poorest peasant in the farthest corner of Manzi, to whom the lure of easy fortune gave at least an aspiration.

Kubilai had threatened that he would let me know promptly if he was dissatisfied with my performance as his treasury’s agent in Hang-zho. Of course, he never had reason to do any such thing. Quite to the contrary, he eventually sent the highest possible dignitary, the Crown Prince and Vice-Regent Chingkim, to convey to me his heartiest regards and congratulations on the exceptional job I was doing.

“Anyway, that is what he told me to tell you,” said Chingkim, in his usual lazily humorous way. “In truth, I think my Royal Father wanted me to spy about and see if you were actually leading bandits in plundering the whole countryside.”

“No need to plunder,” I said airily. “Why bother to rob what people are eager to bestow?”

“Yes, you have done well. The Finance Minister Lin-ngan tells me that this Manzi is pouring more wealth into the Khanate even than my cousin Abagha’s Persia. Oh, speaking of family, Kukachin and the children also send their greetings to you and Hui-sheng. And so does your own estimable father Nicolò. He said to let you know that your uncle Mafìo’s condition has improved enough that he has learned several new songs from his lady attendant.”

Chingkim, instead of putting up at his half-brother Agayachi’s palace, had done me and Hui-sheng the high honor of lodging with us during his visit. Since she and I had long ago delegated the management of our Bean Banks to our hirelings, we were now nobles of unlimited leisure, so we were able to devote all our time and attention to entertaining our royal guest. This day, the three of us, without any servants in attendance, were enjoying a merenda in the open country. Hui-sheng had with her own hands prepared a basket of food and drink, and we had got horses from the karwansarai where we kept them, and we had ridden out of Hang-zho along that Paved Avenue Which Winds a Long Way Between Gigantic Trees, Eccètera, and, well away from the city, we had spread a cloth and dined under those trees, while Chingkim told me of other things going on here and there in the world.

“We are now waging war in Champa,” he said, as idly as a non-Mongol might remark, “We are building a lotus pond in our back garden.”

“So I gathered,” I said. “I have seen the troops moving overland, and transports of men and horses coming down the Great Canal. I take it that your Royal Father, balked of expanding eastward to Jihpen-kwe, has determined to expand southward instead.”

“Actually it came about rather fortuitously,” he said. “The Yi people of Yun-nan have accepted our sovereignty there. But there is a lesser race in Yun-nan, a people called the Shan. Unwilling to be ruled by us, they have been emigrating southward into Champa in great numbers. So my half-brother Hukoji, the Wang of Yun-nan, sent an embassy into Champa, to suggest to the King of Ava that he might obligingly turn those refugees around and send them back to us, where they belong. However, our ambassadors had not been warned that all persons, when calling on the King of Ava, are expected to remove their shoes, and they did not, and he was insulted, and he ordered his guards, ‘Remove their feet instead!’ So, of course, having our ambassadors mutilated was an insult to us, and ample incentive for the Khanate to declare war on Ava. Your old friend Bayan is on the march again.”

“Ava?” I inquired. “Is that another name for Champa?”

“Not exactly. Champa refers to that whole tropical land, the country of jungles and elephants and tigers and heat and humidity. The people down there are of—who knows?—ten or twenty separate races, and almost every one has its own midget kingdom, and every kingdom has various names, depending on who is speaking of it. Ava, for example, is also known as Myama and Burma and Mien. The Shan people fleeing from our Yun-nan are seeking refuge in a kingdom that earlier Shan emigrants established in Champa a long time ago. It is variously known as Sayam and Muang Thai and Sukhothai. There are other kingdoms down there—Annam and Cham and Layas and Khmer and Kambuja—and maybe many more.” Again offhandedly, he said, “While we are taking Ava, we may well take two or three of the others.”

Like a proper merchant, I remarked, “It would save our paying the exorbitant prices they demand for their spices and woods and elephants and rubies.”

“I had intended,” said Chingkim, “to proceed southward from here and follow Bayan’s route of march and have a look for myself at those tropical lands. But I really do not feel up to making such a rigorous journey. I shall simply rest here for a while with you and Hui-sheng, and then return to Kithai.” He sighed and said, a little wistfully, “I am sorry not to be going there. My Royal Father is getting old, and it cannot be too long before I must succeed him as Khakhan. I should have liked to do a lot more traveling before I got permanently stabled in Khanbalik.”

Such an air of lassitude and resignation was not usual to the Prince Chingkim, and now I took notice that he was indeed looking rather worn and weary. A little later, when he and I walked a way into the wood to make water in private, I noticed something else, and commented lightly on it:

“At some inn on the road hither, you must have dined on that slimy red vegetable called dai-huang. You did not eat it at our table, for I do not care for it.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “And neither have I taken a fall from any horse lately, which might account for my pissing pink like this. But I have been doing it for some time. The Court Physician has been treating me for it—in the Han manner, by sticking pins in my feet and burning little heaps of moxa fluff up and down my spine. I keep telling the idiot old Hakim Gansui that I do not piss through my feet or—” He stopped and looked up into the trees. “Listen, Marco. A cuckoo. Do you know what the Han believe the cuckoo is saying?”

Chingkim did go home, as the cuckoo advised, but not until he had spent a month or so enjoying our company and the restful ambience of Hang-zho. I am glad he had that month of simple pleasure, far from the cares of office and state, for when he went home, he went to a much more distant home than Khanbalik. It was not long before the couriers came galloping to Hang-zho, on horses blanketed in purple and white, to tell the Wang Agayachi to drape his city in those Han and Mongol colors of mourning, for his brother Chingkim had arrived home only to die.

As it happened, our city had no more than finished the term of mourning for the Crown Prince, and started to take down the crape bunting, than the couriers came again, with orders to leave it hanging. Now it was in mourning for the Ilkhan Abagha of Persia, who had died also—and also not in battle, but of some illness. The loss of a nephew was of course not so terrible a tragedy to Kubilai as the loss of his son Chingkim, and it did not cause the same widespread murmurs of speculation about future succession. Abagha had left a full-grown son, Arghun, who immediately assumed the Ilkhanate of Persia—and even married one of his late father’s Persian wives, to further secure his claim to that throne. But Chingkim’s son Temur, the next heir apparent to the whole Mongol Empire, was still under-age. Kubilai was well along in years, as Chingkim had remarked. The people worried that, if he were soon to die, the Khanate might be much riven and convulsed by claimants older than Temur, the many uncles and cousins and such, eager to oust him and make the Khanate theirs.

But, for the time being, we suffered nothing worse than grief from Chingkim’s untimely demise. Kubilai did not let his sorrow distract him from the affairs of state, and I did not let mine interfere with my regular transmittal of Manzi’s tribute to the treasury. Kubilai continued to prosecute the war against Ava, and even extended the Orlok Bayan’s mission —as Chingkim had predicted—to seize, as well, any of Ava’s neighbor nations in Champa that might be ripe for conquest.

It made me restless, to know that so much was happening in the world outside, while I simply lolled in luxury in Hang-zho. My restlessness was irrational, of course. Look at all I had. I was quite an esteemed personage in Hang-zho. No one even looked askance at my kwei-colored hair any more when I walked the streets. I had many friends, and I was ever so comfortable, and I was blissfully content with my loving and lovely consort. Hui-sheng and I might have lived—as is said of the lovers at the concluding page of a roman courtois—happily ever after, just as we were. I possessed everything that any rational man could desire. All those most precious things were mine then, at that high moment, that skyline crest of my lifetime. Furthermore, I was no longer the reckless stripling I once had been, with only tomorrows stretching out before me. There were a lot of yesterdays behind me now. I was past thirty years of age, and I found an occasional gray hair among the demon-colored, and I might sensibly have been giving thought to making the downhill slope of my life a soft and easy glide.

Nevertheless, I was restless, and the restlessness inexorably became dissatisfaction with myself. I had done well in Manzi, yes, but was I to bask in the reflected glow of that for the remainder of my days? Once the great thing had been accomplished, it was no great thing merely to perpetuate it. That required no more than my stamping my yin signature on papers of receipt and dispatch, and waving my couriers off to Khanbalik once a month. I was no better than a roadside postmaster of the horse relay stations. I decided I had for too long now enjoyed too much of having; I wanted something to want. I flinched at the vision of myself growing old in Hang-zho, like a vegetable Han patriarch, and having nothing to take pride in except my survival to old age.

“You will never get old, Marco,” Hui-sheng told me when I broached the subject. She looked affectionately amused, but sincere, as she conveyed that pronouncement.

“Old or not,” I said, “I think we have luxuriated in Hang-zho long enough. Let us move on.”

She concurred: “Let us move on.”

“Where would you like to go, my dearest?”

Simply: “Wherever you go.”

6

SO my next northbound courier took a message from me to the Khakhan, respectfully requesting that I be relieved of my long-since accomplished mission and my Kuan title and my coral hat button; that I be given permission to return to Khanbalik, where I could cast about for some new venture to occupy me. The courier returned with Kubilai’s amiable acquiescence, and it took me and Hui-sheng not long to make ready to depart from Hang-zho. Our native servants and slaves all wept and agonized and fell about in frequent ko-tou, but we assuaged their bereavement by making gifts to them of many things we decided not to take with us. I made other parting gifts—and rich ones—to the Wang Agayachi and my Adjutant Fung Wei-ni and my manager-scribe and other worthies who had been our friends.

“The cuckoo calls,” they all said sadly, one after another, as they toasted us with their wine goblets at the countless farewell banquets and balls given in our honor.

Our slaves packed into bales and crates our personal belongings and our wardrobes and our many Hang-zho acquisitions—furnishings, painted scrolls, porcelains, ivories, jades, jewelry and such—that we were taking with us. Taking also the Mongol maid we had brought from Khanbalik, and Hui-sheng’s white mare (now somewhat silvery about the muzzle), we went aboard a sizable canal barge. Only one of our possessions would Hui-sheng not let be crated and stowed in the hold: she herself carried her white porcelain incense burner.

During our residence, the Great Canal had been completed all the way to Hang-zho’s riverside. But because we had already covered the canal route before, following it on our way south, we had decided to take a very different way home. We stayed on the barge only as far as the port of Zhen-jiang, where the Great Canal met the Yang-tze River. There, for the first time (for either me or Hui-sheng), we boarded a gigantic oceangoing chuan, and sailed down the Tremendous River and out into the boundless Sea of Kithai and northward up the coast.

That chuan made the good ship Doge Anafesto, the galeazza in which I had crossed the Mediterranean, seem like a gòndola or a san-pan. The chuan—I cannot call it by name, because it purposely had no name, so it could not be cursed by rival shipowners, who might persuade the gods to send it contrary winds or other misfortune—had five masts, each like a tree. From them depended sails as big as some towns’ market squares, made of slats of the zhu-gan cane, and employed as I have described elsewhere. The bigness of the chuan’s duck-shaped hull was in proportion to its sky-scraping upper works. On the deck and in the passenger quarters below were more than one hundred cabins, each comfortably adequate for six persons. That is to say, the ship could carry more than six hundred passengers in addition to its crew, which totaled fully four hundred men, of several different races and languages. (There were only a few passengers on this short trip. Besides Hui-sheng, myself and the maid, there were some traveling merchants, some minor government officials, and a number of other ships’ captains, idle between voyages, aboard just for a seaman’s holiday.) In the chuan’s holds was loaded a variety of goods, seeming enough to stock a city. But, simply for a measure of the holds’ capacity, I would say the ship could have carried two thousand Venetian butts.

I have said “holds” advisedly, instead of hold, because every chuan was ingeniously built with bulkheads dividing the hull’s interior into numerous compartments, end to end, and they were tarred watertight, so that if the chuan should strike a reef or otherwise hole itself below the waterline, only that one compartment would flood, while the others stayed dry and kept the ship afloat. However, it would have required a sharp and solid reef to hole that chuan. Its entire hull was triply planked, actually built three times over, one shell enveloping another. The Han captain, who spoke Mongol, took great pride in showing me how the innermost hull had its planking set vertically, from keel to deck, and the next was planked at an angle diagonal to that, and the outermost was laid in horizontal strakes, stem to stern.

“Solid as rock,” he boasted, slamming his fist into a bulwark and producing a sound as of a rock hit with a mallet. “Good Champa teakwood, held with good iron spikes.”

“We do not have teakwood in the West where I come from,” I said, almost apologetically. “Our shipbuilders rely on oak. But we do use iron spikes.”

“Foolish Ferenghi shipbuilders!” he roared, with a mighty laugh. “Have they not yet realized that oak wood exudes an acid which corrodes the iron? Teak, on the other hand, contains an essential oil which preserves iron!”

So I had once again been presented with an example of ingenious Eastern artistry that made my native West seem backward. Somewhat spitefully, I hoped for an example of Eastern simplemindedness to balance the scales, and I expected I would encounter one before the voyage was over—and I thought I had when one day, well out of sight of the safe shore, we sailed into a rather nasty thunderstorm. There was wind and rain and lightning, and the sea got choppy, and the ship’s masts and yards got all laced with flickering blue Santermo’s fire, and I heard the captain shouting to his crew, in various languages:

“Prepare the chuan for sacrifice!”

It seemed a shockingly unnecessary early surrender, when the chuan’s ponderous bulk was barely rocking to the storm. I was only a “sweet-water seaman”—as real Venetian mariners derisively say—and such are supposed to be overly apprehensive of danger on the sea. But I saw no danger here that called for more than a simple shortening of sail. Certainly this was not the fierce storm that merited the dread name of tai-feng. However, I was seaman enough to know better than to volunteer advice to the captain, or to show any contempt of his apparently over-extreme agitation.

I am glad I did not. For, as I started glumly below to prepare my womenfolk to abandon ship, I met two seamen coming not fearfully but gaily up the companionway, carrying with care a ship made all of paper, a toy ship, a miniature replica of ours.

“The chuan for sacrifice,” the captain told me, quite unperturbed, as he tossed it over the side. “It deceives the sea gods. When they see it dissolve in the water, they think they have sunk our real ship. So they let the storm abate instead of making it more troublesome.”

It was just one more reminder to me that even when the Han did something simpleminded, they did it ingeniously. Whether or not the paper-ship sacrifice had any effect, the storm did soon abate, and a few days later we made landfall at Qin-huang-dao, which was the coast city nearest Khanbalik. From there we proceeded overland, with a small train of carts carrying our goods.

When we got to the palace, Hui-sheng and I naturally went first to make ko-tou to the Khakhan. At his royal chambers, I noticed that the elderly stewards and women servants formerly in attendance seemed to have been replaced by some half a dozen young page boys. They were all much of an age, and all handsome, and all had uncommonly light hair and eyes, rather like those tribesmen in India Aryana who had claimed to be descended from Alexander’s soldiers. I vaguely wondered if Kubilai, in his old age, was developing a perverse affection for pretty boys, but then I gave it no further mind. The Khakhan greeted us most warmly, and he and I exchanged mutual condolences on the loss of his son and my friend, Chingkim. Then he said:

“I must congratulate you again, Marco, on the splendid success you made of your mission to Manzi. I believe you did not take a single tsien of the tribute for yourself during all these years? No, I thought not. It was my own fault. I neglected to tell you, before you left here, that a tax collector customarily gets no wage, but earns his keep by taking a twentieth part of what he collects. It makes him work more diligently. I have no complaint, however, about the diligence of your own work. Therefore, if you will call upon the Minister Lin-ngan, you will find that he has, all this while, been putting aside your share, and it is a respectable amount.”

“Respectable!” I gasped. “Why, Sire, it must amount to a fortune! I cannot accept it. I was not working for gain, but for my Lord Khakhan.”

“All the more reason why you deserve it, then.” I opened my mouth again, but he said sternly, “I will hear no dispute about it. However, if you would care to demonstrate your gratitude, you might take on one more charge.”

“Anything, Sire!” I said, still gasping at the magnitude of the surprise.

“My son and your friend Chingkim wished most earnestly to see the jungles of Champa, and he never got there. I have messages for the Orlok Bayan, currently campaigning in the land of Ava. They are only routine communications, nothing urgent, but they would give you reason to make the journey which Chingkim did not. And your going as surrogate for him might be a consolation to his spirit. Will you go?”

“Without hesitation or delay, Sire. Is there anything else I can do for you down there? Dragons I might slay? Captive princesses I could rescue?” I was only halfway being facetious. He had just made me a wealthy man.

He chuckled appreciatively, but a little sadly. “Bring me back some small memento. Something that a fond son might have brought home to his aged father.”

I promised I would seek for something unique, something never before seen in Khanbalik, and Hui-sheng and I took our departure. We went next to greet my father, who embraced us both, and wept a little for joy, until I stopped his tears by telling him of the great beneficence just bestowed on me by the Khakhan.

“Mefè!” he exclaimed. “That is no hard bone to gnaw! I always thought of myself as a good businessman, but I swear, Marco, you could sell sunshine in August, as they say on the Rialto.”

“It was all Hui-sheng’s doing,” I said, giving her an affectionate squeeze.

“Well … ,” said my father thoughtfully. “This … on top of what the Compagnia has already sent home by way of the Silk Road … Marco, it may be time we started thinking of going home ourselves.”

“What?” I said, startled. “Why, Father, you have always had another saying. To the right sort of man, the whole world is home. As long as we continue to prosper here—”

“Better an egg today than a chicken tomorrow.”

“But our prospects all are still rosy. We are still in the Khakhan’s high regard. The whole empire is at its richest, ripe for our exploitation. Uncle Mafìo is being well attended, and—”

“Mafìo is four years old again, so he cares not where he is. But I am touching sixty, and Kubilai is at least ten years older.”

“You look nowhere near senility, Father. True, the Khakhan shows his age—and some despondency—but what of that?”

“Have you thought what our position would be if he should die suddenly? Just because he favors us, others resent us. Only furtively now, but they are likely to manifest that resentment when his protecting hand falls away. The very rabbits dance at the funeral of a lion. Also, there will be a resurgence of the Muslim factions he suppressed, and they love us not at all. I hardly need mention the likelihood of even worse troubles —upheavals from here to the Levant—if there should be a war of succession. But I am increasingly glad that I have all these years been sending our profits west to your Uncle Marco in Constantinople. I shall do the same with this new fortune of yours. However, anything else we shall have accrued at the moment of Kubilai’s death is bound to be sequestered here.”

“Can we really gnash our teeth if that happens, Father, considering all the wealth we have already taken out of Kithai and Manzi?”

He shook his head somberly. “What good our fortune waiting in the West, if we are marooned here? If we are dead here? Suppose, of all the claimants to the Khanate succession, it should be Kaidu who won!”

“Verily, we should be at hazard,” I said. “But need we abandon ship right now, so to speak, when there is not yet any cloud in the sky?” With some amusement, I realized that, as usual in my father’s presence, I was beginning to talk like him, in parables and metaphors.

“The hardest step is the one across the threshold,” he said. “However, if your reluctance signifies a concern for your sweet lady here, I hope you do not think I am suggesting her abandonment. Sacro, no! Of course you will bring her with you. She may be a curiosity in Venice, for a little while, but she will be a beloved one. Da novèlo xe tuto belo. You would not be the first to come home with a foreign wife. I recall, there was a ship’s captain, one of the Doria, who brought home a Turki wife when he retired from the sea. Tall as a campanile, she was … .”

“I take Hui-sheng everywhere,” I said, and smiled at her. “I should be lost without her. I will be taking her on this journey to Champa. We will not even stop to unpack the household goods we brought from Manzi. And I have always intended to take her home to Venice. But, Father, you are not recommending, I trust, that we slip away this very day?”

“Oh, no. Only that we make plans. Be ready to go. Keep one eye on the frying pan and the other on the cat. It would take me some time, in any event, to close or dispose of the kashi works—to tidy up many other loose ends.”

“There should be ample time. Kubilai looks old, but not moribund. If he has the vivacity, as I suspect, to be playing with boys, he is not apt to drop dead as suddenly as Chingkim did. Let me comply with this latest mission he has set me, and when I return …”

He said portentously, “No one, Marco, can foretell the day.”

I almost snapped an exasperated reply. But it was impossible for me to feel exasperation at him, or share his morbidity, or work myself into a mood of apprehension. I was a new-made wealthy man, and a happy one, and about to go journeying into new country, and with my dearest companion at my side. I merely clapped an assuring hand on my father’s shoulder and said, not with resignation but with genuine jollity, “Let come the day! Sto mondo xe fato tondo!”