The Journeyer

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1

MY father greeted me with joy, and then with condolence when I told him why I had returned to Khanbalik without Hui-sheng. He started somberly to tell me that life was like a something or other, but I interrupted the homily.

“I see we are no longer the most recently arrived Westerners in Kithai,” I said, for there was a stranger sitting with my father in his chambers. He was a white man, a little older than myself, and his garb, though travel-worn, identified him as a cleric of the Franciscan order.

“Yes,” said my father, beaming. “At long last, a real Christian priest comes to Kithai. And a near countryman of ours, Marco, from the Campagna. This is Pare Zuàne—”

“Padre Giovanni,” said the priest, pettishly correcting my father’s Venetian pronunciation. “Of Montecorvino, near Salerno.”

“Like us, some three years on the road,” said my father. “And very nearly our same route.”

“From Constantinople,” said the priest. “Down into India, where I established a mission, then up through High Tartary.”

“I am sure you will be welcome here, Pare Zuàne,” I said politely. “If you have not yet been presented to the Khakhan, I am having audience with him shortly, and—”

“The Khan Kubilai has already most cordially received me.”

“Perhaps,” said my father, “if you asked, Marco, the Pare Zuàne would consent to say a few words in memory of our dear departed Hui-sheng …”

I would not have asked him anyway, but the priest said stiffly, “I gather that the departed was not a Christian. And that the union was not according to the Sacrament.”

So I rudely turned my back on him and rudely said, “Father, if these once remote and unknown and barbaric lands are now attracting civilized arrivisti like this one, the Khakhan should not feel too forlorn when we few pioneers take our departure. I am ready to leave whenever you are.”

“I expected you would be,” he said, nodding. “I have been converting all the holdings of the Compagnia into portable goods and currencies. Most has already gone westward by horse post along the Silk Road. And the rest is all packed. We need only to decide on our mode of travel and the route we shall take—and get the Khakhan’s consent, of course.”

So I went to get that. First I presented to Kubilai the Buddha relic I had brought, at which he expressed pleasure and some awe and many thanks. Then I presented a letter which Bayan had given me to carry, and I waited while he read it, and then I said:

“I also brought back with me, Sire, your personal physician, the Hakim Gansui, and I am eternally grateful for your having sent him to care for my late lady consort.”

“Your late lady? Then Gansui could not have cared for her very effectively. I am desolated to hear it. He has always done well enough in treating my ever afflicting gout, and my more recent ills of old age, and I should be sorry to lose him. But ought he be executed for this lamentable dereliction?”

“Not at my behest, Sire. I am satisfied that he did what he could. And putting him to death would not bring back my lady or my unborn son.”

“I commiserate, Marco. A lovely and beloved and loving lady is indeed irreplaceable. But sons?” He gave a casual wave, and I thought he was referring to his own considerable brood of progeny. But he made me start when he said, “You already have these half a dozen. And, I believe, three or four daughters besides.”

For the first time, I realized who were the page boys that had replaced his former elderly stewards. I was speechless.

“Most handsome lads,” he went on. “A great improvement in the sightliness of my throne room. Visitors can rest their gaze on those comely young men, instead of this aged hulk on the throne.”

I looked around at the pages. The one or two within earshot, who had probably overheard that astonishing revelation—astonishing to me, anyway—gave me back timid and respectful smiles. Now I knew where they had got their lighter-than-Mongol complexions and hair and eyes, and I even fancied I could see a vague resemblance to myself. Still, they were strangers to me. They had not been conceived in love, and I would probably not recognize their mothers if we passed in a palace corridor. I set my jaw and said:

“My only son died in childbirth, Sire. The loss of him and his mother has left me sore of soul and heart. For that reason, I ask my Lord Khakhan’s permission to make my report on this latest mission of mine, and then to request a favor.”

He studied me for a time, and the age-eroded wrinkles and channels of his leather face seemed to deepen perceptibly, but he said only, “Report.”

I did it briefly enough, since I had really had no mission except to observe. So I gave my impressions of what I had seen: that India was a country totally worthless of his acquisition or least attention; that the lands of Champa offered the same resources—elephants, spices, timber, slaves, precious gems—and much nearer at hand.

“Also, Ava is already yours, of course. However, I have one observation to make, Sire. Like Ava, the other nations of Champa may be susceptible to easy conquest, but I think the holding of them will be hard. Your Mongols are northern men, accustomed to breathing freely. In those tropical heats and damps, no Mongol garrison can endure for long without falling prey to fevers and diseases and the ambient indolence. I suggest, instead of actual occupation, Sire, that you simply install submissive natives as your Champa administrators and overseeing forces.”

He nodded and again picked up the letter I had brought from Bayan. “The King Rama Khamhaeng of Muong Thai is already proposing just such an arrangement, as alternative to our demanding his unconditional surrender. He offers all the produce of his country’s tin mines in continuing tribute. I think I shall accept those terms, and leave Muong Thai nominally an independent nation.”

I was pleased to hear that, having conceived a real fondness for the Thai people. Let them have their Land of the Free.

Kubilai went on, “I thank you for your report, Marco. You have done well, as always. I should be an ungrateful lord were I to refuse any favor in my granting. Make your request, then.”

He knew what I was going to ask. Nevertheless, I did not care to ask it baldly and abruptly: “Give me leave to leave you.” So I began in the Han manner, with circumlocution.

“A long time ago, Sire, I had occasion to say, ‘I could never slay a woman.’ And when I said that, a slave of mine, a man wiser than I realized, said, ‘You are young yet.’ I could not then have believed it, but I have recently been the cause of the dying of the woman most dear to me in all the world. And I am no longer young. I am a man of middle age, well along in my fourth decade. That death has caused me much hurt and, like a wounded elephant, I should like to limp away to the seclusion of my home ground, there to recover from my wound or to languish of it. I ask your permission, Sire—and I hope your blessing—for the departure from your court of myself and my father and my uncle. If I am no longer young, they are already old, and their dying should also be done at home.”

“And I am older yet,” said Kubilai, with a sigh. “The scroll depicting my life has been wound much farther from the one hand to the other. And every turn of the scroll’s rods reveals a picture with fewer friends standing about me. Someday, Marco, you will envy your lost lady. She died in the summer of her life, not having to see all that was flowery and green about her turn brown and dwindle and blow away like autumn leaves.” He shivered as if he felt already the gusts of winter. “I shall be sorry to see my friends Polo depart, but I should be ill repaying your family’s long service and companionship if I whined for its continuance. Have you yet made any travel arrangements?”

“Of course not, Sire. Not without your permission.”

“You have it, certainly. But now I should like to ask a favor. One last mission for you, which you can perform on your way, and it will make easier your way.”

“You have only to command it, Sire.”

“I would ask if you and Nicolò and Mafìo could deliver a certain valuable and delicate cargo to my grandnephew Arghun in Persia. When Arghun succeeded to that Ilkhanate, he took a Persian wife as a politic gesture to his subjects. He doubtless has other wives, as well, but now he wishes to have for his premier wife and Ilkhatun a woman of pure Mongol blood and upbringing. So he sent envoys to ask me to procure such a bride for him, and I have chosen a lady named Kukachin.”

“The widow of your son Chingkim, Sire?”

“No, no. She has the same name, but she is no relation, and you have never met her. A young maiden straight from the plains, from the tribe called Bayaut. I have provided for her an ample dowry and the usual rich bridal furnishings and a retinue of servants and maids, and she is ready to journey to Persia to meet her pledged husband. However, to send her overland would mean her having to traverse the territories of the Ilkhan Kaidu. That dastardly cousin of mine is as unruly as ever, and you know how inimical he always has been to his cousins who hold the Ilkhanate of Persia. I would not put it past Kaidu to capture the Lady Kukachin on her way and hold her—either to demand a ransom payment from Arghun or just to enjoy the spitefulness of the deed.”

“You wish us to escort her through that unsafe territory?”

“No. I had rather she avoided it altogether. My notion is to send her the whole way by sea. However, all my ships’ captains are of the Han, and vakh!—the Han mariners performed so disappointingly during our attempted invasions of Jihpen-kwe that I hesitate to trust them with this mission. But you and your uncles are also of a seafaring people. You are familiar with the open sea and with the handling of ships.”

“True, Sire, but we have never actually sailed one.”

“Oh, the Han can do that well enough. I should ask you only to be in command. To keep a stern eye on the Han captains, so they do not run off with the lady, or sell her to pirates, or lose her along the way. And you would keep an eye on the course, so the captains do not sail the whole fleet off the edge of the world.”

“Yes, we could see to those things, Sire.”

“You would again carry my pai-tzu, and have unquestioned and unlimited authority, both on the sea and at every landfall you may have to make. It would mean comfortable traveling for you, from here to Persia, in good shipboard accommodations, with good food and good servants all the way. Especially it would mean easy travel for the invalid Mafìo, and attendants to care for him. You would be met in Persia by a train sent to fetch the Lady Kukachin, and you would be well and comfortably transported to wherever Arghun is currently making his capital. And surely he would see that you have good transport from there onward. So, Marco, that is the mission. Would you confer with your uncles and consider undertaking it?”

“Why, Sire, I am certain that I can speak now for all of us. We would not only be honored to do it, and eager, we are obligated to you for making the journey so easy for us.”

And so, while the bridal fleet was being assembled and provisioned, my father did the final clearing up of some loose ends of our Compagnia’s business, and I attended to some loose ends of my own affairs. I dictated to Kubilai’s court scribes a letter to be enclosed with the next official dispatch the Khakhan sent to the Wang Bayan in Ava. I sent warm greetings and regards and farewells to my old friend, and then suggested that, since the nation of Muong Thai was to be left free and uninvaded, I would take it as a personal favor if Bayan would see to it that the little Pagan maidservant Arùn was given her liberty and conveyed safely to that land of her own people.

Then, from the last Kithai gains of the Compagnia Polo, which my father had converted into portable goods for us to carry home, I took my share—a parcel of fine rubies—and carried it only as far as the chambers of the Finance Minister Lin-ngan. He was the first Khanbalik courtier I had met, and the first to whom I now said my goodbyes in person. I gave him the parcel of gems and asked him to use their value to make payment of a bequest to the Khakhan’s page boys, as each of them reached manhood, so they would have a start when they set out to seek their own fortunes.

Then I went about the palace, saying my farewells to other people. Some of my calls were for duty’s sake: on such dignitaries as the Hakim Gansui and the Khatun Jamui, Kubilai’s aged premier wife. And some of my calls were less formal, but still brief: on the Court Astronomer and the Court Architect. And one call I made—on the Palace Engineer Wei —was just to thank him for having constructed that garden pavilion in which Hui-sheng had enjoyed the warbling water-piped music. And one call I made—on the Minister of History—was just to tell him:

“Now you can write in your archives another trifle. In the Year of the Dragon, by the Han count the year three thousand nine hundred ninety, the foreigner Po-lo Mah-ko finally left the City of the Khan to return to his native Wei-ni-si.”

He smiled, remembering our one conversation so long ago, and said, “Do I record that Khanbalik was made better by his presence here?”

“That is for Khanbalik to say, Minister.”

“No, that is for history to say. But here—see—” He took up a brush, wetted his ink block and wrote, on a paper already crowded with writing, a vertical line of characters. Among them I recognized the character that was on my yin seal. “There. The trifle is mentioned. Come back in a hundred years, Polo, or in a thousand, and see if this trifle is still remembered.”

Others of my farewell visits were more warm and lingering. In fact, three of them—my calls on the Court Firemaster Shi Ix-me and the Court Goldsmith Pierre Boucher and especially my call on Chao Meng-fu, War Minister, Court Artist, once fellow conspirator—each lasted long into the night and concluded only when we were too drunk to drink more.

When word came that the ships were ready and waiting for us at the port of Quan-zho, my father and I led Uncle Mafìo to the Khakhan’s chambers for our introduction to our lady charge. Kubilai first presented to us the three envoys who had come to procure her for the Ilkhan Arghun—their names were Uladai, Koja and Apushka—and then the Lady Kukachin, who was a girl of seventeen, as pretty as any Mongol female I had ever seen, dressed in finery designed to dazzle all Persia. But the young lady was not haughty and imperious, as might have been expected in a noblewoman on her way to become an Ilkhatun, heading an entourage of nearly six hundred, counting all her servants, maids, noble courtiers-to-be and escorting soldiers. As befitted a girl so suddenly promoted from a plains tribe—where probably her entire court had consisted of a horse herd—Kukachin was forthright and natural and pleasant of manner.

“Elder Brothers Polo,” she said to us, “it is with the utmost trust and confidence that I put myself in the keeping of such renowned journeyers.”

She and the leading nobles of her company and the three envoys from Persia and we three Polos and most of the Khanbalik court all sat down with Kubilai to a farewell banquet in the same vast chamber where we had enjoyed our welcoming banquet so long before. It was a sumptuous feast, and even Uncle Mafìo appeared to enjoy it—he being fed by his constant and faithful woman servant, who would remain with him as far as Persia—and the night was riotous with many and varied entertainments (Uncle Mafìo at one point rising to sing to the Khakhan a verse or two of his well-worn “Virtue” song) and everyone got exceedingly drunk on the liquors which the gold-and-silver serpent tree still dispensed on call. Before we got quite unconscious, my father and I and Kubilai made our mutual leavetakings, a process as lengthy and emotional and replete with embraces and fulsome toasts and speeches as a Venetian wedding.

But Kubilai also managed one private short colloquy with me. “Although I have known your uncles longer, Marco, I have known you best, and I shall be sorriest for your going. Hui, I remember, the first words you ever spoke to me were insulting.” He laughed in recollection. “That was not wise of you, but it was brave of you, and it was right of you to speak so. Ever since then, I have relied much on your words, and I shall be the poorer for hearing no more of them. I will hope that you may come this way again. I will not be here to greet you. But you would be doing me a service still, if you befriended and served my grandson Temur with the same dedication and loyalty you have shown to me.” He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder.

I said, “It will always be my proudest boast, Sire, and my only claim to having lived a useful life, that once, for a while, I served the Khan of All Khans.”

“Who knows?” he said jovially. “The Khan Kubilai may be remembered only because he had for good adviser a man named Marco Polo.” He gave my shoulder a companionable shake. “Vakh! Enough of sentiment. Let us drink and get drunk! And then”—he raised to me a jeweled beaker brimming with arkhi—“a good horse and a wide plain to you, good friend.”

“Good friend,” I dared to echo, raising my goblet, “a good horse and a wide plain to you.”

And the next morning, with heavy heads and not entirely light hearts, we took our departure. Just getting that populous train out of Khanbalik was a tactical problem very nearly on the order of the Orlok Bayan’s moving his tuk of warriors about in the Ba-Tang valley—and this was a herd consisting mostly of civilians not trained in military discipline. So, the first day, we did not get farther than the next village to the south, where we were received with cheers and thrown flowers and hosannahs and incense and bursts of the fiery trees. We did not make much better progress on the succeeding days, either, because of course every least village and town wanted to display its enthusiasm. Even after we got our company accustomed to forming up and moving out each morning, the train was so immense—my father and I and the three envoys, like most of the servants and all the escort troops, mounted on horses; the Lady Kukachin and her women and my Uncle Mafìo riding in horse-borne palanquins; a number of Khanbalik nobles riding elephant haudas; plus all the pack animals and drovers necessary for the luggage of six hundred persons—that we made a procession sometimes stretching the entire length of the road between the community where we had just spent the night and the next one we were bound for. Our final destination, the port of Quan-zho, was much farther south than I had ever been in Manzi—very far south of Hang-zho, my onetime city of residence—so the journey took an unconscionably long time. But it was an enjoyable journey because, for a change, the column was not of soldiers going to war, and we were welcome everywhere we arrived.

2

AT last we got to Quan-zho, and some of our escorting troops and nobles and the pack train turned back for Khanbalik, and the rest of us filed on board the great chuan ships, and at the next tide we put out into the Sea of Kithai. We made a water-borne procession even more imposing than our land parade had been, for Kubilai had provided an entire fleet: fourteen of the massive four-masted vessels, each crewed by some two hundred mariners. We had apportioned our company among them, my father and uncle and I and the envoy Uladai aboard the one carrying the Lady Kukachin and most of her women. The chuan vessels were good and solid, of the triple-planked construction, and our cabins were luxuriously furnished, and I think every one of us passengers had four or five servants from the lady’s entourage to wait upon us, in addition to the sea stewards and cooks and cabin boys also seeing to our comfort. The Khakhan had promised good accommodations and service and food, and I will give just one instance to illustrate how the ships lived up to that promise. On each of the fourteen vessels there was one seaman detailed to a single job throughout the voyage: he kept forever paddling and stirring the water in a deck tank the size of a lotus pool, in which swam freshwater fish for our tables.

My father and I had little to do in the way of command or supervision. The captains of the fourteen vessels had been sufficiently impressed and awed, to see us white men striding magisterially aboard with the Khakhan’s pai-tzu tablets slung on our chests, that they were commendably sedulous and punctilious in all their responsibilities. As for making sure that the fleet did not wander about, I would from time to time stand conspicuously on deck at night, eyeing the horizon through the kamàl I had kept ever since Suvediye. Though that little wooden frame told me nothing except that we were bearing constantly south, it always brought our ship’s captain scurrying to assure me that we were unswervingly keeping proper course.

The only complaint we passengers might have voiced was about the slowness of our progress, but that was caused by our captains’ devotion to their duty and our comfort. The Khakhan had chosen the ponderous chuan vessels especially to ensure for the Lady Kukachin a safe and smooth voyage, and the very stability of the big ships made them exceedingly slow in the water, and the necessity for all fourteen to stay together imposed even more slowness. Also, whenever the weather looked at all threatening, the captains would steer for a sheltered cove. So, instead of making a straight southward run across the open sea, the fleet followed the far longer westering arc of the coastline. Also, though the ships were lavishly provisioned with food and other supplies for fully two years’ sailing, they could not carry enough drinking water for more than a month or so. To replenish those supplies, we had to put in at intervals, and those were lengthier stops than the occasional shelterings. Just the heaving-to and anchoring of such a numerous fleet of such leviathan ships occupied most of a day. Then the rowing back and forth of barrels in the ships’ boats took another three or four days, and the weighing of anchor and setting sail again took yet another day. So every watering stop cost us about a week’s progress. After leaving Quan-zho, I remember, we stopped for water at a great island off Manzi, called Hainan, and at a harbor village on the coast of Annam in Champa, called Gai-dinh-thanh, and at an island as big as a continent, called Kalimantan. In all, we were three months making just the southward leg of our voyage down the coast of Asia before we could turn westward in the direction of Persia.

“I have watched you, Elder Brother Marco,” said the Lady Kukachin, coming up to me on deck one night, “standing here from time to time, manipulating a little wooden device. Is that some Ferenghi instrument of navigation?”

I went and fetched it, and explained to her its function.

“It might be a device unknown to my pledged husband,” she said. “And I might gain favor in his eyes if I introduced him to it. Would you show me how to employ it?”

“With pleasure, my lady. You hold it at arm’s length, like this, toward the North Star—” I stopped, appalled.

“What is the matter?”

“The North Star has vanished!”

It was true. That star had, every night lately, been lower toward the horizon. But I had not sought it for several nights, and now I was aghast to see that it had sunk entirely out of view. The star which I had been able to see almost every night of my life, the steadfast beacon which throughout history had guided all journeyers on land and sea, had totally gone from the sky. That was frightening—to see the one constant, immutable, fixed thing in the universe disappear. We might really have sailed over some farthest edge of the world, and fallen into some unknown abyss.

I frankly confess that it made me uneasy. But, for the sake of Kukachin’s confidence in me, I tried to dissemble my anxiety as I summoned the ship’s captain to us. In as steady a voice as possible, I inquired what had become of the star, and how he could keep a course or know his position without that fixed point of reference.

“We are now below the bulge of the world’s waist,” he said, “where the star is simply not visible. We must rely on other references.”

He sent a cabin boy running to the ship’s bridge to bring him back a chart, and he unrolled it for me and Kukachin. It was not a depiction of the local coasts and landmarks, but of the night sky: nothing but painted dots of different sizes indicating stars of different luminosities. The captain pointed upward, showing us the four brightest stars in the sky—positioned as if marking the arms of a Christian cross—and then pointed to their four dots on the paper. I recognized that the chart was an accurate representation of those unfamiliar skies, and the captain assured us that it was sufficient for him to steer by.

“The chart appears as useful as your kamàl, Elder Brother,” Kukachin said to me, and then to the captain, “Would you have a copy made for me—for my Royal Husband, I mean, in case he should ever wish to campaign southward from Persia?”

The captain obligingly and immediately set a scribe to doing that, and I voiced no more misgivings about the lost North Star. However, I still felt a little uneasy in those tropic seas, because even the sun behaved oddly there.

What I had always thought of as “sunset” might have been better called “sunfall” there, for the sun did not ease itself down from the sky each evening and gently settle beneath the sea—it made a sudden and precipitous plunge. There was never a flamboyant sunset sky to admire, nor any gradual twilight to soothe the way from day to night. One moment we would be in bright daylight, and in little more than an eye blink we would be in dark night. Also, there was never any perceptible change in the length of day and night. Everywhere from Venice to Khanbalik, I had been accustomed to the long days and short nights of summertime, and the opposite in wintertime. But, in all the months we spent making our way through the tropics, I never could notice any seasonal lengthing of either day or night. And the captain verified that: he told me that the difference between the tropics’ longest day of the year and the shortest was only three-quarters of an hour’s trickle of sand in the glass.

Three months out from Quan-zho, then, we came to our farthest southern reach, in the archipelago of the Spice Islands, where we would alter course to the westward. But first, since our water needed replenishment again, we made landfall at one of the islands, called Jawa the Greater. From the moment we first saw it on the horizon until we reached it, a good half a day later, we passengers were already saying among ourselves that this must be a most felicitous place. The airs were warm and so laden with the heady aromas of spices that we were almost made giddy, and the island was a tapestry of rich greens and flower colors, and the sea all about was the soft, translucent, glowing color of milk-green jade. Unfortunately, our first impression of having found an island of Paradise did not endure.

Our fleet anchored in the mouth of a river called Jakarta, offshore of a port called Tanjung Priok, and my father and I went ashore with the water-barrel boats. We discovered the so-called seaport to be only a village of zhu-gan cane houses built on high stilts because all the land was quagmire. The community’s grandest edifices were some long cane platforms, with palm-thatch roofs but no walls, piled with bags of spices —nuts and barks and pods and powders—waiting for the next passing trade ship. What we could see of the island beyond the village was only dense jungle growing out of more quagmire. The warehouses of spices did provide an aroma that overwhelmed the jungle’s miasmic smell and the stench common to all tropical villages. But we learned that this island of Jawa the Greater was only by courtesy called one of the Spice Islands, for nothing more valuable than pepper grew here, and the better spices—nutmeg and clove and mace and sandal and so on—grew on more remote islands of the archipelago and were merely collected in this place because it was more convenient to the sea lanes.

We also soon discovered that Jawa had no Paradise climate, for we had no sooner got ashore than we were drenched by a thunderstorm. Rain falls on that island one day of every three, we were told, and usually in the form of a thunderstorm which, we did not have to be told, was a fair imitation of the end of the world. I trust that, after our eventual departure, Jawa enjoyed an uncommonly long spell of fine weather, because we had nothing but bad. That first storm simply continued, day and night, for weeks, the thunder and lightning taking a rest now and then, but the rain falling interminably, and we rode it out there at anchor in the river mouth.

Our captains had intended to go west from this place through the narrow passage called the Sunda Strait, which separates Jawa the Greater from the next westward island, Jawa the Lesser, also called Sumatera. They said that strait allowed the easiest run to India, but they also said the strait could only be negotiated in calm seas and unimpeded visibility. So our fleet stayed in the Jakarta River mouth, where the downpour was so continuous and so heavy that Jawa was not even visible through it. But we knew the island was still there, because we were waked at every dawn by the howling and whistling of the gibbon apes in the jungle treetops. It was not really an uncomfortable place to be marooned—our boatmen brought from shore fresh pork and fowl and fruits and vegetables to augment our stores of smoked and salted foods, and we had a plenitude of spices to enhance our meals—but the waiting got extremely tiresome.

Whenever I got insupportably weary of seeing nothing but the harbor water jumping up to meet the rain, I would go ashore, but the view there was not much better. The Jawa people were quite comely of appearance—small and neatly proportioned and of golden skin, and the women as well as the men went bare to the waist—but the entire populace of Jawa, whatever religion it had originally espoused, had long ago been converted to Hinduism by the Indians who were the chief spice buyers. Inevitably, the Jawa people had adopted everything else that seems to go with the Hindu religion, meaning squalor and torpor and reprehensible personal habits. So I found the people no more appealing than any other Hindus, and Jawa no more appealing than India.

Some of the others of our company tried to alleviate their boredom in other ways, and came to grief by it. All the Han crewmen of our fleet, like mariners of every race and nationality, were mortally terrified of getting into water. But the Jawa people were quite at home on it and in it as well. A Jawa fisherman would skim about on even a turbulent sea in a craft called a prau, so small and flimsy that it would have been careened by the waves except that it was balanced by a log carried at some distance alongside on long cane spars. And even the Jawa women and children swam considerable distances from the shore through quite fearsome surf. So a number of our Mongol male passengers, and a few venturesome females, all of them inland-born and therefore incautious about large bodies of water, decided to emulate the Jawa folk and frolic in that warm sea.

Though the ambient air, full of the downpouring rain, was almost as liquid as the sea, the Mongols stripped down to a minimum of clothing and slid overboard to splash about. As long as they held onto the many rope ladders dangling overside, they were in no great danger. But many got overdaring, and tried swimming at liberty, and of every ten of them who vanished beyond the curtain of rain, perhaps seven would reappear. We never knew what happened to the missing ones, but the attrition kept on. It did not frighten others from venturing out, and we must have lost at least twenty men and two women from Kukachin’s retinue.

We did know what happened to two of our casualties. One man who had been swimming climbed back onto the ship, cursing “Vakh!” to himself and shaking drops of blood from one hand. As the ship’s Han physician salved it and bound it up, the man reported that he had rested his hand on a rock, and a fish had been clinging to it, a fish mottled with algae and looking just like the rock, and its dorsal spines had stung him. He said that much, and then screamed, “Vakh! Vakh! Vakhvakhvakh!” and went into insane paroxysms, thrashing all about the deck, foaming at the mouth, and when he finally slumped in a heap, we found that he was dead.

A Jawa fisherman, who had just brought his catch to sell to us, regarded that performance without emotion, and then said—a Han crewman translating—“The man must have touched a stonefish. It is the most venomous creature in any sea. Touch it, you endure such terrible agony that you go mad before you die. If that happens to anyone else, split a ripe durian and apply it to his wound. It is the only remedy.”

I knew that the durian had many praiseworthy qualities—I had been voraciously eating of them ever since I discovered that they grew in profusion here—but I would never have suspected that the fruit had medicinal qualities. However, soon afterward, one of Kukachin’s hairdressing women also went for a swim, and came back weeping from the pain of a spine-stung arm, and the physician tried the durian remedy. To everyone’s pleased surprise, it worked. The girl suffered no more than a swollen and painful arm. The physician made a careful note for his collection of materia medica, saying in some amazement, “As nearly as I can judge, the durian pulp somehow digests the stonefish poison before it can take dire effect.”

And we also saw what accounted for the loss of another two of our company. The rain had finally stopped, and the sun had come out, and our captains were all standing on their decks, scrutinizing the sky and waiting to see if the weather might continue fine, long enough for us to up anchor and be away, and they were muttering Han incantations to make it so. The jade-green Jawa Sea that day looked so pretty as almost to tempt me into it—a gentle chop, fish-scaled with glittering lunettes of light—and did tempt two other men, Koja and Apushka, two of the three envoys of the Ilkhan Arghun. They challenged each other to a water race to a distant reef, and plunged from the chuan’s side and went flailing and splashing away, and we all gathered at the rail to cheer them on.

Then down from the sky swooped a number of albatrosses. The birds, I suppose, had been balked in their usual fishing by the long spell of rain, and were weary of scavenging our ships’ garbage and wanted some fresh meat. They began making dives at the two swimmers, stabbing their long hooked beaks at whatever parts of the men showed above the water, which was their heads. Koja and Apushka stopped swimming, trying to fend off the clustering birds and stay above water at the same time. We could hear them shouting, then cursing, then screaming, and see the blood running down their faces. And, when the albatrosses had plucked the eyes out of both of them, the men in desperation sank under water. They tried to rise up for a gasp of air a time or two, but the birds were waiting. And finally the two men simply let themselves drown, in preference to being torn to pieces. But, of course, as soon as their bodies floated limply and soggily on the surface, the albatrosses settled on them and peeled and shredded them for all the rest of that day.

It was sad, that Apushka and Koja had come safely through the countless hazards of journeying overland from Persia to Kithai, and then the long sea way to here, to die so abruptly and in such an un-Mongol-like way. We were all, Kukachin especially, much grieved by the loss. We did not think to take it as a premonition of any future and perhaps more grievous loss—my father did not even murmur about “bad things always happening in threes”—though, as events turned out, we might well have seen an omen in it.

When the weather had kept bright and clear for two more days, our captains decided to trust that it would go on holding. The crews were set to their immense oar beams, and rowed our ponderous ships slowly out of the river mouth to the open sea, and the vast slatted sails were raised, and we again were taken by the wind, and turned westward toward home. But when we had rounded a high headland and turned southwest into a channel narrow enough that we could see another distant coast on our other side, a mast-top lookout on the leading ship called down. He did not cry one of the usual curt sea calls, like “Ship in sight!” or “Reefs ahead!”—no doubt because there was no accepted and abbreviated call for what he saw. He only shouted down, in a voice of wonderment, “Look how the sea boils!”

All of us on the decks went to look overside—and that is exactly what the Sunda Strait seemed to be doing: boiling and bubbling, like a pot of water set on a brazier to make cha. And then, right in the middle of the fleet, the sea heaved up in a hump, opened like a monster mouth and exhaled a great gust of steam. The plume kept spewing upwards for several minutes, and the steam drifted all among the ships. We passengers had been making exclamations of one kind or another, but when the cloud of steam enveloped us we began to cough and sputter, for it had the suffocating stench of rotten eggs. And when the steam had passed over us, we were all dusted with a fine yellow powder on our skin and clothes. I wiped the dust from my stinging eyes and licked it from my lips, and tasted the distinctive musty taste of sulphur.

The captains were shouting to their crews, and there was a deal of running about and shifting of sail spars, and all our ships turned about and fled the way they had come. When the boiling and belching patch of sea was safely behind us, our vessel’s captain told me, apologetically:

“Farther along the strait lies the brooding black ring of sea mountains called the Pulau Krakatau. Those peaks are actually the tops of undersea volcanoes, and they have been known to erupt with devastating effect. Making waves as high as mountains, waves that scour the strait clean of every living thing, from end to end. Whether that boiling of the water yonder presaged an eruption I cannot know, but we cannot take the risk of sailing through.”

So the fleet had to double back through the Jawa Sea and then turn northwestward up the Malacca Strait between Jawa the Lesser, or Sumatera, and the land of the Malayu. That was a reach of water three thousand li long and so broad I might have taken it for a sea, except that circumstances forced us to carom back and forth from one side of it to the other, so I knew well that there was extensive land on both verges of it, and got to know those lands rather better than I would have wished. What happened was that the weather turned foul again, and perniciously stayed so, harrying us constantly from the swampy western Sumatera side to the forested eastern Malayu side of the strait and back again, and making us take shelter in bays or coves on one shore or the other—and put in for water and fresh foods at wretched little cane villages too negligible to deserve names, though they all had names: Muntok and Singapura and Melaka and many others I have forgotten.

It took us fully five months to beat our way up the Malacca Strait. There was open sea at the northern end, where we might have turned due west, but our captains kept on northwestward, sailing us in prudent short lunges from one island to the next of a long string of islands called the Necuveram and Angamanam archipelago, using them in the manner of stepping-stones. Finally we came to the island that they said was the farthermost of the Angamanam, and there we anchored offshore and passed enough time to fill all our water tanks and take on all the fruits and vegetables we could wheedle out of the inhospitable natives.

Those were the smallest people I ever saw, and the ugliest. Men and women alike went about stark naked, but the sight of an Angamanam female would arouse no least lust even in a mariner long at sea. Men and women alike were squat and chunky of form, with enormous protruding underjaws, and skin blacker and glossier than any African’s. I could easily have rested my chin atop the head of the tallest person among them—except that I would not have done any such thing, because their hair was their most repellent feature: merely random tufts of reddish fuzz. One would expect a people so grotesquely ugly to try to make up for it by cultivating a gracious nature, but the Angamanam folk were uniformly scowling and surly. That was because, a Han seamen told me, they were disappointed and irate that we had not wrecked a vessel or two of our fleet on the island’s coral reefs, for the people’s only occupation and only religion and only joy was the plundering of grounded ships and the slaughter of their crews and the ceremonial eating of them.

“Eating them? Why?” I asked. “Surely no inhabitants of a tropic isle, with all the provender of sea and jungle, can lack for food to eat.”

“They do not eat the shipwrecked mariners for nourishment. They believe that the ingestion of an adventurous seafarer makes them as bold and venturesome as he was.”

But we were too many and too well armed for the black dwarfs to make any assault on us. Our only problem was persuading them to part with their water and vegetables, for of course such people had no interest in gold or any other sort of monetary recompense. They did, however, like so many hopelessly ugly folk, have a high vanity. So, by doling out among them bits of trumpery cheap jewelry and ribbons and other fripperies with which they could adorn their unspeakable selves, we got what we required, and we sailed away.

From there, our fleet had an uneventful westward run across the Bay of Bangala, which is the only foreign sea that I have now traversed three times, and I will be gratified if I never have to do so again. This crossing was somewhat more to the southerly than my other two had been, but the view was the same: an infinite expanse of azure water with little white trapdoors of foam opening and closing here and there, as if mermaids were taking peeps at the upper world, and herds of pork-fish frisking about our hulls, and so many flying-fish hurtling aboard that our cooks, having long since depleted our tanks of Manzi freshwater fish, periodically collected them from the decks and made us meals of them.

The Lady Kukachin humorously inquired, “If those Angamanam people acquired courage by eating courageous people, will these meals make us able to fly like flying-fish?”

“More likely make us smell like them,” grumbled the maid who attended her bathing chamber. She was disgruntled because, on this long run across the bay, the captains had commanded that we could bathe only in sea water dipped up in buckets, not to waste the fresh. Salt water gets one clean enough, but it leaves one cursedly gritty and scratchy and uncomfortable afterward.

3

AT the western side of the great bay, we made landfall on the island of Srihalam. That was not far south of the Cholamandal of India, where I had earlier made sojourn, and the islanders were physically very similar to the Cholas and, like the Cholas, the island’s coastal residents were mainly engaged in the trade of fishing for pearls. But there the similarity ended.

The Srihalam islanders had adhered to the religion of Buddha, hence were vastly superior to their mainland Hindu cousins in morals and customs and vivacity and personal appeal. Their island was a lovely place, tranquil and lush and of generally balmy weather. I have often noticed that the most beautiful places are given a multiplicity of names: witness the Garden of Eden, which is also variously called Paradise and Arcadia and Elysium and even Djennet by the Muslims. Just so, Srihalam has been severally named by every people who ever admired it. The ancient Greeks and Romans called it Taprobane, meaning Lotus Pond, and the early Moorish seafarers called it Tenerisim, or Isle of Delight, and nowadays Arab mariners call it Serendib, which is only their faulty pronunciation of the islanders’ own name for the place, Srihalam. That name, Place of Gems, is variously translated in other languages: Ilanare by the mainland Cholas, Lanka by other Hindus, Bao Di-fang by our Han captains.

Though we had put into Srihalam of necessity, for water and other supplies, our captains and crews and Lady Kukachin and her retinue and I and my father were not a bit reluctant to tarry there for a while. My father even did some trading—the name Place of Gems being descriptive as well as poetic—and acquired some sapphires of a fineness we had never seen elsewhere, including some immense, deep-blue stones with starlike rays coruscating in their depths. I did not engage in any business, but merely wandered about to see the sights. Those included some ancient cities, deserted and abandoned to the jungle, but still displaying a beauty of architecture and adornment that made me wonder if these people of Srihalam could be the remnants of the admirable race that had inhabited India before the Hindus, and had built the temples which the Hindus now pretended were their own.

Our ship’s captain and I, glad to be stretching our legs after so long on shipboard, spent a couple of days climbing all the way to the shrine at the top of a mountain peak where, as I had once been told by a pongyi in Ava, the Buddha had left his footprint. I should say that Buddhists call it the imprint of the Buddha. Hindu pilgrims aver that it is the print of their god Siva, and Muslim pilgrims insist that it was made by Adam, and some Christian visitors have surmised that it must have been done by San Tommaso or Prete Zuàne, and my Han companion gave it as his opinion that it had been put there by Pan-ku, the Han ancestor of all mankind. I am no Buddhist, but I am inclined to think that the oblong indentation in the rock there—nearly as long and as broad as I am—must have been done by the Buddha, because I have seen his tooth and I know him to have been a giant, and I have never personally beheld any evidence pertaining to the other claimants.

To be honest, I was less interested in the footprint than in a story told to us by the shrine’s attendant bhikku (as a pongyi was called in Srihalam). He said the island was rich in gems because the Buddha had spent time there, and had wept for the wickedness of the world, and each of his holy tears had congealed into a ruby, an emerald or a sapphire. But, said the bhikku, those gems could not just be picked up from the ground. They had all washed into valleys in the interior of the island, and those chasms were unapproachable because they teemed and squirmed with venomous snakes. So the islanders had had to contrive an ingenious method for harvesting the precious stones.

In the mountain crags about the valleys nested eagles which preyed on the serpents. So the islanders would sneak at night among those crags and throw cuts of raw meat down into the chasms, and when the meat hit the ground down there, some few gems would stick to it. Next day, the foraging eagles would pick up and eat the meat in preference to the snakes. Then, whenever an eagle was absent from its nest, a man could climb up there and finger through the bird’s droppings and pick out the undigested rubies, sapphires and emeralds. I not only thought that an ingenious method of mining, I also thought it must be the origin of all the legends about the monster rukh bird, which allegedly snatches up and flies off with even bigger meats, includings persons and elephants. When I got back to our ship, I told my father he ought to treasure his newly acquired sapphires for more than their inherent value—for their having been got for him by the fabled rukh.

We might have stayed on longer yet in Srihalam, but one day the Lady Kukachin remarked, rather wistfully, “We have been journeying for a whole year now, and the captain tells me that we are only about two-thirds of the way to our destination.”

I knew the lady well enough by this time to know that she was not being sordidly greedy for her entitlement as Ilkhatun of Persia. She merely was eager to meet her betrothed and marry him. She was, after all, a year older now and still a spinster.

So we called an end to our tarrying, and pushed off from the pleasant island. We sailed northward, close along the western coast of India, and made the best time possible, for none of us had any desire to visit or explore any part of that land. We put in to shore only when our water barrels absolutely had to be replenished—at a fair-sized port called Quilon, and at a river-mouth port called Mangalore, where we had to anchor far offshore of the delta flats, and at a settlement scattered over seven pimples of land called the Bombay islets, and at a dismal fishing village called Kurrachi.

Kurrachi at least had good fresh water, and we made sure our tanks were topped full, because from that point we were sailing directly west again, and for some two thousand li—or I should say, now that I was back again where Persian measurements were used, about three hundred farsakhs—we were skirting the dry, dun-colored, baking, thirsty desert coast of the empty land called Baluchistan. The view of that sere coastline was only occasionally enlivened by two things peculiar to it. All year round, a south wind blows from the sea into Baluchistan, so wherever we saw a tree it was always grown in a contorted arc, bending inland, like an arm beckoning us to come ashore. The other peculiarity of that coast was its mud volcanoes: dumpy cone-shaped hills of dried mud, every so often spewing a gush of new, wet mud from the top, to slither down and slowly bake and await a new gush and a new layer. It was a most uninviting land.

But, following that drear shore, we did at last enter the Strait of Hormuz, and that led us to the city of that name, and once again I was in Persia. Hormuz was a very big and bustling city, so populous that some of its residential quarters were spilling from the mainland city center over to the islands offshore. It was also Persia’s busiest port, a forest of masts and spars, a tumult of noise and a medley of smells, most of them not nice. The ships tied up or coming and going were, of course, mostly Arab qurqurs and falukahs and dhaos, the biggest of them looking like dinghis and praus alongside our massive vessels. No doubt an occasional trading chuan had been seen here before, but surely never such a fleet as we now brought into the harbor roads. As soon as a pilot boat had fussily led us to anchorage, we were surrounded by the skiffs and scows and barges of every kind of vendor, guide, pimp and waterfront beggar, all of them screeching solicitations. And what appeared to be the entire remainder of the population of Hormuz was collected along the dockside, gawking and jabbering excitedly. However, among that mob we could see nothing like what we had expected—a resplendent gathering of nobles to welcome their new Ilkhatun-to-be.

“Curious,” muttered my father. “Surely the word of our coming raced ahead of us along the coast. And the Ilkhan Arghun must by now have been getting mightily impatient and eager.”

So, while he turned to the daunting job of commanding the debarkation of all our company and our gear, I hailed a karaji ferry skiff and, fending off the solicitors, was the first to go ashore. I accosted an intelligent-looking citizen and made inquiry. Then I immediately had myself rowed back to our ship, to tell my father and the envoy Uladai and the anxious-eyed Kukachin:

“You may wish to postpone the debarkation until we have held conference. I am sorry to be the one to bring this news, but the Ilkhan Arghun died of an illness, many months ago.”

The Lady Kukachin burst into tears, as sincerely as if the man had been her long-wedded and much-loved husband, instead of just a name to her. As the lady’s maids helped her away to her suite of cabins, and my father thoughtfully chewed on a corner of his beard, Uladai said, “Vakh! I will wager that Arghun died at the very moment my fellow envoys Koja and Apushka perished in Jawa. We should have suspected something dire.”

“We could not have done much about it, if we had,” said my father. “The question is: what do we do now about Kukachin?”

I said, “Well, there is no Arghun waiting for her. And they told me ashore that his son Ghazan is still under age to succeed to the Khanate.”

“That is correct,” said Uladai. “I suppose his Uncle Kaikhadu is ruling as Regent in the meantime.”

“So they say. And either this Kaikhadu knew nothing of his late brother’s having sent for a new wife, or he is not at all interested in exercising any levirate right to take her for himself. Anyway, he has sent no embassy to meet her and no transport for her.”

“No matter,” said Uladai. “She comes from his Lord Khakhan, so he is obliged to relieve you of her care and take her into his own. We shall take her to the capital at Maragheh. As for transportation, you carry the Khakhan’s pai-tzu. We have only to command the Shah of Hormuz to supply us with everything we require.”

And that is what we did. The local Shah received us not just dutifully but hospitably, and lodged us all in his palace—though we filled it nearly to bursting—while he assembled all his own camels and probably every other one within his domain, and loaded them with provisions and water bags, and marshaled camel-pullers for them, and also troops of his own to augment ours, and in a few days we were journeying overland, northwest toward Maragheh.

It was a traverse as long as the one my father and uncle and myself had previously made across Persia from west to east. But this time, going south to north, we had no very terrible terrain to cross, for our route took us well west of the Great Salt Desert, and we had good riding camels and copious supplies, and plenty of attendants to do every bit of work for us, and a formidable guard against any possible molesters. So it was a fairly comfortable trip, if not a very merry one. The Lady Kukachin did not wear any of the bridal finery she had brought, but every day wore brown, the Persian color of mourning, and on her pretty face wore a look that was partly apprehensive of what her fate might now be, and partly resigned to it. Since all the rest of us had got very fond of her, we worried with her, but did everything we could to make the journey easy and interesting for her.

Our route did take us through a number of places where I or my father or my uncle—or all of us together—had been before, so my father and I were constantly looking to see what changes, if any, had occurred in the years since then. Most of our stops along the way were only for a night’s sleep, but when we got to Kashan, my father and I commanded an extra day’s stay, so we could stroll about that city where we had rested before our plunge into the forbidding Dasht-e-Kavir. We led Uncle Mafìo walking with us, in a sort of meager hope that those scenes of long ago might jar him back to a semblance of what he had been long ago. But nothing in Kashan woke any glimmer in his dulled eyes, not even the “prezioni” boys and young men who were still the city’s most visible asset.

We went to the house and stable where the kindly Widow Esther had given us lodging. The place was now in the possession of a man, a nephew who had inherited it years ago, he said, when that good lady died. He showed us where she was buried—not in any Jewish, cemetery but, at her own deathbed insistence, in the herb garden behind her own abode. That was where I had watched her pounding scorpions with her slipper, while she exhorted me never to neglect any opportunity to “taste everything in this world.”

My father respectfully crossed himself, and then went on along the street, leading Uncle Mafìo, to go and look again at Kashan’s kashi-tile workshops, the which had inspired him to set up the same in Kithai, and from which our Compagnia had realized such handsome profits. But I stayed on with the widow’s nephew for a while, looking pensively down at her herb-grown grave and saying (but not aloud) :

“I followed your advice, Mirza Esther. I let no chance go by untaken. I never hesitated to follow where my curiosity beckoned. I willingly went where there was danger in beauty and beauty in danger. As you foretold, I had experiences in plenty. Many were enjoyable, some were instructive, a few I would rather have missed. But I had them, and I have them still in memory. If, as soon as tomorrow, I go to my grave, it will be no black and silent hole. I can paint the darkness with vivid colors, and fill it with music both martial and languorous, with the flicker of swords and the flutter of kisses, with flavors and excitements and sensations, with the fragrance of a field of clover that has been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain, the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth. Yes, I can enliven eternity. Others may have to endure it; I can enjoy it. For that I thank you, Mirza Esther, and I would wish you shalom … but I think that you, too, would not be happy in an eternity of nothing but peace … .”

A black Kashan scorpion came scrabbling along the garden path, and I stepped on it for her. Then I turned to the nephew and said, “Your aunt once had a house maid named Sitarè …”

“Another of her deathbed dispositions. Every old woman is a matchmaker at heart. She found for Sitarè a husband, and had them married in this house before she died. Neb Efendi was a cobbler, a good craftsman and a good man, though a Muslim. He was also an immigrant Turki, which made him not very popular hereabout. But it also made him not a pursuer of boys, and I trust he was a good husband to Sitarè.”

“Was?”

“They moved away from here shortly afterward. He was a foreigner, and evidently folk prefer to have their shoes made and mended by their home folk, even if they are inept in their work. So Neb Efendi picked up his awls and his lasts and his new wife and departed—to his native Cappadocia, I believe. I hope they are happy there. It was a long time ago.”

Well, I was a little disappointed not to get to see Sitarè again, but only a little. She would be a matron now, of about my own middle age, and to see her might be even more of a disappointment.

So we pushed on, and eventually arrived at Maragheh. The Regent Kaikhadu did receive us, not grudgingly but not with wild enthusiasm either. He was a typical, shaggy Mongol man at arms, who clearly would have been more comfortable astride a horse, hacking with a blade at some battlefield opponent, than he was on the throne to which his brother’s death had shoved him.

“I truly did not know of Arghun’s embassy to the Khakhan,” he told us, “or you may be sure I would have had you escorted hither in great pomp and ceremony, for I am a devoted subject of the Khakhan. Indeed, it is because I have spent all my time afield, fighting the Khanate’s campaigns, that I was unaware of Arghun’s canvass for a new wife. Right this minute, I should properly be putting down a band of brigands that are rampaging over in Kurdistan. Anyway, I do not know quite what to do with this woman you have brought.”

“She is a handsome one, Lord Kaikhadu,” said the envoy Uladai. “And a good-natured one.”

“Yes, yes. But I already have wives—Mongol, Persian, Circassian, even one frightful Armeniyan—in yurtus scattered from Hormuz to Azerbaizhan.” He threw up his hands distractedly. “Well, I suppose I can inquire among my nobles … .”

“We will stay,” my father said firmly, “until we see the Lady Kukachin settled according to her station.”

But the lady took care of that herself, before we had been many days in residence at the Maragheh palace. My father and I were airing Uncle Mafìo in a rose garden one afternoon when she came running up to us, smiling for the first time since our arrival at Hormuz. She also had someone in tow: a boy, very short and ugly and pimply, but in courtier’s rich attire.

“Elder Brothers Polo,” she said breathlessly. “You need fret over me no longer. By good fortune, I have met a most wonderful man, and we plan shortly to announce our betrothal.”

“Why, that is stupendous news,” said my father, but cautiously. “I do hope, my dear, that he is of suitably high birth and position and prospects … .”

“The highest!” she said happily. “Ghazan is the son of the man I came here to wed. He will be Ilkhan himself in two years.”

“Mefe, you could not have done better! Lassar la strada vechia per la nova. Is this his page? Can he fetch the good fellow for us to meet?”

“But this is he. This is the Crown Prince Ghazan.”

My father had to swallow before he could say, “Sain bina, Your Royal Highness,” and I bowed deeply to give myself time to compose my face to sobriety.

“He is two years younger than myself,” Kukachin chattered on, not giving the boy much chance to speak for himself. “But what is two years in a lifetime of happy marriage? We will be wed as soon as he ascends to the Ilkhanate. In the meantime, you dear devoted Elder Brothers can leave me in good conscience, knowing I am in good hands, and go on about your own affairs. I shall miss you, but I shall not be lonely or despondent any more.”

We made the proper congratulations and good wishes, and the boy grinned like an ape and mumbled acknowledgment, and Kukachin beamed as if she had just won an unimaginably great trophy, and the two of them went off hand in hand.

“Well,” said my father with a shrug, “better the head of a cat than the tail of a lion.”

But Kukachin must have seen in the boy what we could not. God knows he could never have been better than a goblin for looks and physical stature—he was afterward styled in all the Mongol chronicles “Ghazan the Ugly”—but the fact that he did make history is proof that he was more than he appeared to be. He and the lady were wed when he replaced Kaikhadu as Ilkhan of Persia, and then he went on to become the ablest Ilkhan and warrior of his generation, making many wars and winning many new lands for the Khanate. Unhappily, his loving Ilkhatun Kukachin did not live to share all his triumphs and celebrity, for she died in childbirth two years or so after their marriage.

4

SO, having completed our last mission for the Khan Kubilai, my father and uncle and I pressed onward. We left at Maragheh the populous company we had so far been traveling with, but Kaikhadu generously gave us good horses and remounts and packhorses and ample provisions and an escort of a dozen mounted men of his own palace guard, to see us safely through all the Turki lands. However, as things turned out, we would have traveled more safely without that Mongol troop.

From the capital, we circled around the shores of a sea-sized lake named Urumia, which was also called the Sea of the Sunset. Then we climbed up and over the mountains which marked the northwestern frontier of Persia. One of the mountains in that range, said my father, was the biblical Mount Ararat, but it was too far off our route for me to go and climb it to see if any trace of the Ark was still there. Anyway, having recently scaled another mountain to see a footprint that might well have been Adam’s, I was now inclined to think of Noah as rather a latecomer in history. On the other side of the mountains, we descended into the Turki lands at another sea-sized lake, this one named Van, but called the Sea Beyond the Sunset.

The country hereabout, and the nations composing it, and the borders thereof, were all in flux and had been for many years. What had formerly been part of the Byzantine Empire under Christian rulers was now the Seljuk Empire under rulers of the Turki race and Muslim religion. But these eastern parts of it were also known by older names, bestowed by peoples who had inhabited these lands since time before time, who had never conceded that they were not still the rightful owners of them, and who recognized none of the vagaries of modern claimants and modern boundary lines. Thus, at the point where we emerged from Persia, we came down from the mountains into a country which could equally well be named Turki, after the race of its rulers, or the Seljuk Empire, as those Turki called it, or Cappadocia, which was its name on older maps, or Kurdistan, for the Kurdi people who populated it.

The land was a green and pleasant one, the wildest parts of it seeming hardly wild at all, but looking almost neatly cultivated, with rolling hills of meadow grass tidily separated by clumps of forest, so that the whole countryside was as trim as an artificial parkland. There was plenty of good water, in sparkling streams as well as immense blue lakes. The people here were all Kurdi, some of them farmers and villagers, but most of them nomad families following flocks of sheep or goats. They were as handsome a race as I have seen in any Islamic land. They had very black hair and eyes, but a complexion as fair as my own. The men were large and solidly built, and wore great black mustaches, and were famously fierce fighters. The Kurdi women were not particularly delicate, either, but withal were well formed and good-looking—and independent; they scorned to wear the veil or live hidden in the pardah imposed on most other women of Islam.

The Kurdi received us journeyers cordially enough—nomads usually are hospitable to other seeming nomads—but they cast unloving looks at our Mongol escorts. There were reasons for that. Besides all the other complications of national names and dominions and boundary lines, this Seljuk Empire was also in enforced vassalage to the Ilkhanate of Persia. That situation dated from the time when a traitorous Turki minister had foully murdered the King Kilij—he who was the father of my onetime princess friend Mar-Janah—and usurped the throne by promising to lay it under subjection to the then Ilkhan Abagha. So this Seljuk Empire, though nominally ruled now by a King Masud in the capital city of Erzincan, was really subordinate to Abagha’s surviving son, the Regent Kaikhadu, whose Maragheh court we had just come from and whose palace guards were accompanying us. We journeyers were welcome here; the warriors with us were not.

One might have supposed that the Kurdi—rebellious throughout history against every non-Kurdi ruler ever imposed upon them—would have cared little whether Erzincan or Maragheh was the real ruling capital, because out here, a hundred farsakhs or more from either city, they were pretty much left unruled by anybody. But they seemed to regard the Mongols as a tyranny inflicted on top of the Turki tyranny they already chafed under, and the one to be even more hotly resented and hated. We learned how well the Kurdi could hate when, one afternoon, we stopped at an isolated hut to buy a sheep for our evening meal.

The evident proprietor of the hut was sitting in the doorway of it, holding his sheepskin robes around him as if he had a chill. My father and I and just one of our Mongols rode into the dooryard and politely dismounted, but the shepherd impolitely did not stand up. The Kurdi had a language of their own, but almost all of them spoke Turki as well, and so did our Mongol escorts, and in any case the Turki tongue was similar enough to the Mongol that I could usually understand any overheard conversation. Our Mongol asked the man if we might buy a sheep. The man, still seated, his eyes glumly on the ground, refused us.

“I think I ought not to trade with our oppressors.”

The Mongol said, “No one is oppressing you. These Ferenghi wayfarers ask a favor of you, and will pay for it, and your Allah enjoins hospitality toward wayfarers.”

The shepherd said, not in an argumentative way, but in seeming melancholy, “But the rest of you are Mongols, and you will also eat on the sheep.”

“What of that? Once you sell the animal to the Ferenghi, what matter to you what becomes of it?”

The shepherd sniffled and said, almost tearfully, “I did a favor to a passing Turki not long since. Helped him change a broken shoe on his horse. And for that I have been chastised by the Chiti Ayakkabi. A small favor for a mere Turki. Estag farullah! What will the Chiti do to me if he hears I did a favor for a Mongol?”

“Come!” snapped our escort. “Will you sell us a sheep?”

“No, I cannot.”

The Mongol sneered down at him. “You do not even stand like a man when you speak defiance. Very well, cowardly Kurdi, you refuse to sell. Then would you care to stand up and try to prevent my taking a sheep?”

“No, I cannot. But I warn you. The Chiti Ayakkabi will make you regret the robbery.”

The Mongol laughed harshly and spat in the dust in front of the seated man, then remounted and rode to cut a fat ewe out of the flock grazing in the meadow beyond the hut. I remained there, curious, staring down at the slumped and defeated-looking shepherd. I knew that Chiti meant a brigand and, as best I knew, Ayakkabi meant a shoe. I wondered what kind of bandit would style himself “the Shoe Brigand” and would occupy himself in punishing his own fellow Kurdi for giving aid and comfort to their presumed oppressors.

I managed to inquire of the man, “What did this Chiti Ayakkabi do to chastise you?”

He did not speak a reply, but showed me, lifting the skirts of his sheepskins to reveal his feet. It was evident why he had not stood to greet us, and I got some idea of why the Kurdi bandit had such a strange name. Both of the shepherd’s feet, otherwise bare, were clotted with dried blood and studded with nails—not nail heads but the upthrusting points of nails—where both his feet had been shod with iron horseshoes.

Two or three nights later, near a village called Tunceli, the Chiti Ayakkabi made us regret our robbery of the sheep. Tunceli was a village of the Kurdi, and it had only one karwansarai, and that very small and dilapidated. Since our company of fifteen riders and thirty-odd horses would have crowded it intolerably, we rode on through the village and made camp in a grassy glade beyond, convenient to a clear-flowing brook. We had eaten and rolled ourselves in our blankets and gone to sleep, leaving just one Mongol on guard, when the night erupted with bandits.

Our lone sentry had only time to bellow “Chiti!” before he was brained with a battle-ax. The rest of us thrashed free of our bedrolls, but the brigands were among us, with blades and cudgels, and all was a confused turbulence in the dim remaining firelight. My father and I had Uncle Mafìo to thank that we were not slain as abruptly as all our Mongol troop. Those warriors thought first to snatch for their weapons, so the bandits flew first at them. But my father and I both saw Mafìo standing by the fire, looking about him in numb bemusement, and we both at the same moment threw ourselves toward him, and seized him and dragged him to the ground, so he made not such a prominent target. The next moment, something clouted me above the ear and, for me, the night went totally dark.

I woke, lying on the ground with my head cradled in a soft lap, and as my vision cleared I looked up into a female face illumined by the now built-up fire. It was not the square, strong face of a Kurdi woman, and it was framed by a tumble of hair that was not black, but dark-red. I labored to collect my wits, and said in Farsi, in a voice that croaked:

“Am I dead, and are you a peri now?”

“You are not dead, Marco Efendi. I saw you just in time to cry to the men to desist.”

“You used to call me Mirza Marco, Sitarè.”

“Marco Efendi means the same. I am more of a Kurdi now than a Persian.”

“What of my father? My uncle?”

“They are not even bruised. I am sorry you had to take a blow. Can you sit up?”

I did, though the movement threatened to make my head roll off my shoulders, and I saw my father sitting with a group of the black-mustached bandits. They had made qahwah, and he and they were drinking and chatting amiably together, with Uncle Mafìo sitting placidly by. It would have looked quite a civilized scene, except that others of the brigands were stacking the bodies of our dead Mongols like cordwood off to one side of the glade. The largest and most fiercely mustached of the newcomers, seeing me stir, came over to me and Sitare.

She said, “This is my husband, Neb Efendi, known also as Chiti Ayakkabi.”

He spoke Farsi as well as she did. “I apologize to you, Marco Efendi. I would not knowingly have attacked the man who made possible the treasure of my life.”

I was still addled in my wits, and did not know what he was talking about. But as I drank bitter black qahwah and my head gradually cleared, he and Sitarè explained. He was the Kashan cobbler whom the Almauna Esther had introduced to her maidservant Sitarè. He had loved her at first sight, but their marriage would of course have been unthinkable had Sitarè not been a virgin, and Sitarè had told him frankly that her being still intact was thanks to a certain gentlemanly Mirza Marco’s having declined to take advantage of her. I felt more than a little uncomfortable, listening to a rough and murderous bandit expressing his indebtedness for my not having preceded him in making “sikis,” as he called it, with his bride. But also, if I was ever grateful for my onetime constraint, it was now.

“Qismet, we call it,” he said. “Destiny, fate, chance. You were good to my Sitarè. Now I am being good to you.”

It further transpired that Neb Efendi, having been balked of prospering as a cobbler in Kashan—where the people did not know the difference between a noble Kurdi and a vile Turki, but would have despised him in any event—had brought his wife back here to his native Kurdistan. But here he felt also estranged, a vassal to the Turki regime which was in turn vassal to the Mongol Ilkhanate. So he had given up his trade entirely, keeping only the name of it, and turned to insurrection as the Shoe Brigand.

“I have seen some of your cobblery,” I told him. “It was—distinctive.”

He said modestly, “Bosh,” which is a Turki word meaning “you flatter me overmuch.”

But Sitarè nodded proudly. “You mean the shepherd. It was he who set us on your trail to Tunceli here. Yes, Marco Efendi, my dear and valorous Neb is determined to rouse up all Kurdi against the oppressors, and to discourage any weaklings who truckle to them.”

“I had rather divined that.”

“Do you know, Marco Efendi,” he said, thumping a fist loudly against his broad chest, “that we Kurdi are the oldest aristocracy in the world? Our tribal names go back to the days of Sumer. And all that time we have been fighting one tyranny after another. We battled the Hittites, the Assyrians, we helped Cyrus overthrow Babylon. We fought with Salah-ed-Din the Great against the first marauding Crusaders. Not forty years ago, unaided, we slaughtered twenty thousand Mongols at the battle of Arbil. But still we are not free and independent. So now it is my mission—first to throw off from Kurdistan the Mongol yoke and then the Turki.”

“I wish you success, Chiti Ayakkabi.”

“Well, my band and I are poor and ill-equipped. But your Mongols’ weapons and your good horses and the considerable treasure in their packs will help us immensely.”

“You are going to rob us? You call that being good to us?”

“I could have been less good.” He waved casually at the bloody heap of dead Mongols. “Be glad your qismet decreed otherwise.”

“Speaking of qismet,” Sitarè said brightly, to distract me, “tell me, Marco Efendi. What of my darling brother Aziz?”

We were in a precarious enough situation, I decided, that I would not hazard making it more so. Neither she nor her ferocious mate would be overjoyed to hear that her little brother had been dead for more than twenty years, that we had let him be slain by a robber band very like their own. Anyway, I was loath to sadden an old friend unnecessarily. So I lied, and lied loudly enough that my father could overhear, and not later contradict me.

“We carried Aziz to Mashhad, as you desired, Sitarè, and we guarded his chastity the whole way. There, he was fortunate enough to catch the admiring eye of a fine and prosperously fat merchant prince. We left them together, and they seemed more than fond of each other. As far as I know, they are still trading together, up and down the Silk Road between Mashhad and Balkh. Aziz would by now be a well-grown man, but I have no doubt he is still as beautiful as he was then. And as you are, Sitarè.”

“Al-hamdo-lillah, I hope so,” she sighed. “I saw much resemblance to Aziz in my own two sons, as they grew up. But my manly Neb, not being a Kashanite, would not let me insert the golulè in our boys, or show them how to use cosmetics, in preparation for their someday securing male lovers. So they have grown up to be most manly men themselves, and they sikismek only with women. Those are the boys, over yonder, Nami and Orhon, stripping the boots off those dead Mongols. Would you believe, Marco Efendi, that my sons are both older than you were when last I saw you? Ah, well, it is good to have news of dear Aziz after all these years, and to know that he made as glowing a success of his life as I have made of mine. We owe it all to you, Marco Efendi.”

“Bosh,” I said modestly.

I could have suggested that we might be owed our own possessions, but I did not. And my father, when he too realized that we were to be plundered, merely sighed in resignation and said, “Well, when there is no banquet, at least the candles are happy.”

True, our lives had been spared. And of our portable valuables I had already dispensed with a third part before we left Khanbalik, and anyway they represented only a trifle compared to what our Compagnia had earlier sent home from Kithai. And the brigands took only the things they could easily spend, sell or trade, meaning that they left us our clothes and personal belongings. So, while we could hardly rejoice at being robbed at this late stage in our long journeying—we especially regretted the loss of the magnificent star sapphires acquired in Srihalam —we neither of us repined too much.

Neb Efendi and his band did allow us to ride our own horses as far as the coast city of Trebizond, and even rode that far with us as a protection against any further Kurdi assault, and they courteously refrained from slaughtering or shoeing anyone else along the way. When we dismounted at the outskirts of Trebizond, the Chiti Ayakkabi gave us back a handful of our own coin, sufficient to pay for our transport and sustenance the rest of the way to Constantinople. So we and they parted in a friendly enough way, and the Shoe Brigand did not strike me dead when Sitarè, as she had done twenty-some years before, kissed me a voluptuous and lingering goodbye.

At Trebizond, on the shore of the Euxine or Kara or Black Sea, we were still more than two hundred farsakhs east of Constantinople, but we were glad to be standing again on Christian ground for the first time since we had left Acre in the Levant. My father and I decided against the purchase of new horses, not out of dread of the overland journey, but out of concern that it might be too hard on Uncle Mafìo, with none but us now to take care of him. So, carrying what was left of our packs, we went to the Trebizond waterfront and, after some search, found a barge-like gektirme fishing boat whose Christian Greek captain—he was captain of a crew consisting of his four loutish sons—would, with Christian goodness, sail us to Constantinople, and would feed us on the way and, with Christian goodness, would charge us only all we had.

It was a tediously slow and miserable voyage, for the gektirme was netting all the way, and netting only anchovies, so anchovies were what we were fed all the way, with pilaf of rice cooked in anchovy oil, and we lived in, slept in, breathed in the smell of anchovies all the way. Besides us and the Greeks, there was a mangy dog aboard, for no discernible reason, and I frequently wished we had not already paid over every coin we possessed, so that I could have bought the dog and offered him up to be cooked, just for a change from the anchovies. But just as well. The dog had been aboard for so long that I suppose he would have tasted no different.

After nearly two dismal months aboard our floating anchovy-cask, we finally made our way into the strait called Bosphorus, and along it to where it met the estuary called the Golden Horn, and there we raised the great city of Constantinople—but on a day of such dense fog that I could not see and appreciate the city’s magnificence. The fog did permit me, however, to learn the reason for the gektirme’s resident dog. One of the sons beat it regularly with a stick as we crept cautiously through the fog, so that the dog barked and snarled and cursed continuously. I could hear other invisible dogs similarly yowling all about us, and our captain at the steering oar kept his ear cocked to the noises, so I perceived that dog-beating—instead of bell-ringing, as in Venice—was the locally accepted fog warning device.

Our ungainly gektirme groped its way without collision across the Horn and under the walls of the city. Our captain told us he was heading for the Sirkeci dock allocated to fishing boats, but my father prevailed on him to take us instead to the Phanar quarter, which was the Venetian section of the city. And somehow, in that thick fog and after not having seen Constantinople for some thirty years, he managed to direct the captain there. Meanwhile, somewhere behind the fog, the sun was setting, and my father was in a fever of impatience, grumbling, “If we do not get there before dark, we must sleep another night on this wretched scow.” We and the nightfall, about simultaneously, touched a wooden dock, and he and I said hasty farewells to the Greeks, helped Uncle Mafio ashore, and my father led us at an old man’s trot through the fog, through a gate in the high wall and then through a labyrinth of sinuous, cramped streets.

We came at last to one of many identical narrow-fronted buildings, this one with a shop at the street level, and my father gave a glad cry—“Nostra compagnia!”—at seeing still a light within. He flung the door open and ushered me and Mafìo inside. A white-bearded man was bent over an open ledger at a table piled with many ledgers, writing in the light of a candle at his elbow. He looked up and growled:

“Gèsu, spuzzolenti sardòni!”

They were the first Venetian words I had heard from anyone except Nicolò and Mafìo Polo in twenty-three years. And thus—as “stinking anchovies”—we were greeted by my Uncle Marco Polo.

But then, marveling, he recognized his brothers—“Xestu, Nico? Mafìo? Tati!”—and he bounded up most spryly from his chair, and the company clerks at counting tables roundabout looked on in wonder at our flurry of abrazzi and backslappings and handshakings and laughs and tears and exclamations.

“Sangue de Bacco!” he bellowed. “Che bon vento? But you have both gone gray, my Tati!”

“And you have gone white, Tato!” my father bellowed back.

“And what took you so long? Your last consignment brought your letter that you were on your way. But that was nearly three years ago!”

“Ah, Marco, do not ask! We have had the wind at our front the whole way.”

“E cussì? But I expected you on jeweled elephants—I Re Magi, coming out of the East in a triumphal parade, with Nubian slaves beating drums. And here you creep in from a foggy night, smelling like the crotch of a Sirkeci whore!”

“From shallow waters, insignificant fish. We come penniless, marooned, derelict. We are castaways washed up on your doorstep. But we will talk of that later. Here, you have never yet met your namesake nephew.”

“Neodo Marco! Arcistupendonazzìsimo!” So I got a hearty embrace too, and a benvegnùo, and my back pounded. “But our tonazzo Tato Mafio, usually so loud. Why so silent?”

“He has been ill,” said my father. “We will also talk of that. But come! For two months we have been eating nothing but anchovies, and—”

“And they have given you a powerful thirst! Say no more!” He turned to his clerks and bellowed for them to go home, and not to come in to work the next day. They all stood and gave us a rousing cheer—whether for our safe return or for their getting an unexpected holiday, I do not know—and we went out again into the fog.

Uncle Marco took us to his villa on the Marmara seaside, where we spent our first night, and the subsequent week or more, in swilling down good wines and rich viands—none of which was fish—and being bathed and scrubbed and rubbed in my uncle’s private hammam—here called a humoun—and sleeping long hours in luxurious beds, and being waited on, hand and foot, by his numerous house servants. Meanwhile, Uncle Marco sent a special courier vessel hastening to Venice to apprise Dona Fiordelisa of our safe arrival here.

When I felt rested and well-fed enough, and looked and smelled presentable, I was introduced to Uncle Marco’s son and daughter, Nicolò and Maroca. They were both about my own age, but Cousin Maroca was still a spinster, and kept giving me looks half speculative, half suggestive. I was not interested in responding; I was much more interested in sitting with my father and Uncle Marco as we bent our attention on the books of the Compagnia Polo. They quickly reassured us that we were anything but penniless. We were more than respectably wealthy.

Some of the shipments of goods and valuables my father had entrusted to the Mongol horse post had failed to make it the whole way along the Silk Road, but that was only to have been expected; what was more remarkable was that so many had got through to Constantinople. And here Uncle Marco had variously banked and invested and traded most shrewdly with those goods, and by his advice Dona Fiordelisa in Venice had been able to do the same. So by now our Compagnia Polo ranked with the mercantile houses of Spinola of Genoa and Carrara of Padua and Dandolo of Venice as a prima di tuto in the world of commerce. I was especially pleased that, among the consignments which had arrived intact, were those which had contained all the maps my father and Uncle Mafìo and I had made, and all the notes I had jotted down in all those years. Since the Shoe Brigand at Tunceli had not relieved me of my journal notes scribbled since leaving Khanbalik, I now possessed at least a fragmentary record of every one of my journeys.

We stayed on at the villa until spring, so I had time to get well acquainted with Constantinople. And that made for an easy transition between our long sojourn in the East and our return to the West, for Constantinople itself was a blend of both those ends of the earth. It was Eastern of architecture and bazàr markets and variegated races and complexions and costumes and languages and such. But its guazzabuglio of nationalities included some twenty thousand Venetians, about a tenth as many as in Venice itself, and the city had many other similarities to Venice—including its being overrun with cats. Most of the Venetians resided and did business in the Phanar quarter of the city allotted to them, and across the Golden Horn, in the so-called New City, about an equal number of Genoans occupied the Galata quarter.

The exigencies of commerce necessitated daily transactions between Venetians and Genoans. Nothing would ever stop them doing business. But they did their mutual dealings very coolly, at arm’s length, so to speak, and were not mingling sociably or friendlily, because back home —as so often before—their native republics were again at war. I mention that because I was later to have some minor involvement in it. But I will not describe all the aspects of Constantinople, or dwell on our stay there, for it was really only a recuperative and resting place in our journey, and our hearts were already in Venice, and we were eager to follow them there.

So it was that, on a blue and gold May morning, twenty-four years after we had left La Città Serenissima, our galeazza tied up at the dock of our company warehouse, and my father and Uncle Mafìo and I walked down the plank and stepped again upon the cobblestones of the Riva Ca’ de Dio, in the Year of Our Lord one thousand two hundred ninety-five, or, as it would have been counted in Kithai, the Year of the Ram, three thousand nine hundred ninety-three.

5

THE story of the Prodigal Son notwithstanding, I maintain that there is nothing like coming home successful to make the homecoming warm and tumultuous and welcoming. Of course, Dona Fiordelisa would have welcomed us happily, however we had arrived. But if we had slunk into Venice the way we had done at Constantinople, I wager we would have been contemptuously received by our merchant confratelli and the citizenry at large, and they would have cared nothing for the greater fact that we had made such journeys and seen such things as none other of them had ever done. However, since we did come home rich and well-dressed and walking tall, we were greeted like champions, like victors, like heroes.

For weeks after our arrival, there came so many people calling at the Ca’ Polo that we hardly had time of our own to get reacquainted with Dona Lisa and other relatives and friends and neighbors, or to catch up on family news, or to learn the names of all our new servants and slaves and company workers. The old maggiordomo Attilio had died during our absence, and the old chief clerk Isidoro Priuli—and also our aged parish priest, Pare Nunziata—while other house servants, slaves and working men had departed our employ or been dismissed or been freed or been sold, and we had to meet and get to know their successors.

The converging crowds of visitors included some whom we knew from years past, but many others were total strangers. Some came just to fawn on us newly rich arrichisti and seek some advantage from us, the men bringing schemes and projects and soliciting our investment, the women bringing nubile daughters to present for my delectation. Others came with the obvious and venal hope of prying from us information and maps and advice that would enable them to emulate us. Some few came to say sincere congratulations on our safe return, many came to ask inane questions like, “How does it feel to be back?”

To me, at least, it felt good. It was good to walk about the dear old city and glory in the perpetually changing, lapping, liquid mirror light of Venice, so different from the infernal blaze of deserts and the harsh glare of mountain heights and the abrupt white sun and black shade of Eastern bazàrs. It was good to stroll through the piazza and hear all about me the softly inflected cantilena speech of Venice, so different from the rapid jabber of Eastern throngs. It was good to see that Venice was much as I had remembered it. The piazza campanile had been built somewhat taller, some few old buildings had been torn down and new ones put in their places, the interior of San Marco had been adorned with many new mosaics. But nothing was jarringly changed, and that was good.

And still the callers kept coming to the Ca’ Polo. Some of them were agreeable to receive, some were nuisances, some were crass annoyances, and one of them, a fellow merchant, came to cast a pall on our homecoming. He told us, “Word has just arrived from the East, by way of my factor in Cyprus. The Great Khan is dead.” When we pressed for details, we determined that the Khakhan must have died about the time we were making our way through Kurdistan. Well, it was saddening news, but not unexpected: he had been then seventy-eight years old, and simply had succumbed to the ravages of time. Some while later, we got further news: that his death had not precipitated any wars of succession; his grandson Temur had without opposition been elevated to the throne.

There had been changes of sovereignty here in the West, too, while we had been away. That Doge Tiepolo who banished me from Venice had died, and the scufieta was now worn by a Piero Gradenigo. Also long dead was His Holiness Pope Gregory X, whom we had known in Acre as the Archdeacon Visconti, and there had been a number of other Popes of Rome since then. Also, that city of Acre had fallen to the Saracens, so the Kingdom of Jerusalem was no more, and the whole of the Levant was now held by the Muslims—and appears likely to be theirs forever. Since I had been in Acre to witness briefly that eighth Crusade being desultorily directed by Edward of England, I think I can say that, among all the other things I saw during my journeyings, I saw the very last of the Crusades.

Now my father and stepmother—possibly impelled to the idea by the visitors thronging our Ca’ Polo, or perhaps thinking we ought to start living up to our new prosperity, or perhaps deciding that we could now at last afford to live like the Ene Aca nobility we Polos always had been—began talking of building a new and grander Casa Polo. So to the streams of visitors were now added architects and stonemasons and other aspiring artisans, all eagerly bringing with them sketches and proposals and suggestions that would have had us building something to rival the Doge’s palazzo. That reminded me of something, and I reminded my father:

“We have not yet made our courtesy call upon the Doge Gradenigo. I realize that the moment we give official notice of our being in residence in Venice again, we subject ourselves to inquisition by the Dogana tax collectors. They will no doubt find some trinket among all our imports over the years on which Zio Marco failed to pay some trifling duty, and they will insist on wringing every possible bagatìn out of us. Nevertheless, we cannot postpone forever the paying of our respects to our Doge.”

So we made formal request for a formal audience, and on the appointed day we took Zio Mafìo with us, and when, as custom dictates, we made gifts to the Doge, we presented some in Mafìo’s name as well as ours. I have forgotten what he and my father presented, but I gave to Gradenigo one of the gold and ivory pai-tzu plaques we had carried as emissaries of the Khan of All Khans, and also the three-bladed squeeze knife which had served me so well so often in the East. I showed the Doge how cleverly it worked, and he played with it for a while, and asked me to tell him about the occasions of my employment of the knife, and I did, in brief.

Then he put some polite questions to my father, relevant mainly to East-West trade affairs, and Venice’s prospects for an increase of that traffic. Then he expressed his delight that we—and through us, Venice—had prospered so richly by our sojourn abroad. Then, as expected, he said he hoped we would satisfy the Dogana that the proper share of all our successful enterprises had been duly paid into the coffers of the Republic. We said, as expected, that we looked forward to the tax collectors’ scrutiny of our Compagnia’s unfaultable books of account. Then we stood up, expecting to be dismissed. But the Doge raised one of his heavily beringed hands and said:

“Just one thing more, Messeri. Perhaps it has escaped your recollection, Messer Marco—I know you have had many other things on your mind—but there is the minor matter of your banishment from Venice.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. Surely he was not going to resurrect that old charge against a now most respectable and esteemed (and heavily tax-paying) citizen. With an air of offended hauteur I said, “I assumed, So Serenità, that the statute of enforcement had expired with the Doge Tiepolo.”

“Oh, of course I am not obliged to respect the judgments made and sentences imposed by my predecessor. But I too like to keep my books unfaultable. And there is that little blot upon the pages of the archives of the Signori della Notte.”

I smiled, thinking I understood now, and said, “Perhaps a suitable fine would pay for the blot’s erasure.”

“I was thinking rather of an expiation in accordance with the old Roman lege de tagiòn.”

I was again dumbfounded. “An eye for an eye? Surely the books show that I was never guilty of the killing of that citizen.”

“No, no, of course you were not. Nevertheless, that sad affair involved a passage at arms. I thought you might atone by engaging in another. Say, in our current war with our old enemy Genoa.”

“So Serenità, war is a game for young men. I am forty years old, which is somewhat over-age for wielding a sword, and—”

Snick! He squeezed the knife and made its inner blade dart forth.

“By your own account, you wielded this one not too many years since. Messer Marco, I am not suggesting that you lead a frontal assault on Genoa. Only that you make a token appearance of military service. And I am not being despotic or spiteful or capricious. I am thinking of the future of Venice and the house of Polo. That house has now been raised among the foremost of our city. After your father, you will be the head of it, and your sons after you. If, as seems likely, the house of Polo keeps its commanding position through the generations, I believe the family arms should be totally senza macchia. Wipe off the blot now, lest it embarrass and trouble all your posterity. It is easily accomplished. I have only to write against that page: ‘Marco Polo, Ene Aca, loyally served the Republic in her war against Genoa.’”

My father nodded his agreement and contributed, “What is well closed is well kept.”

“If I must,” I said with a sigh. I had thought my war service was all behind me. However, I must confess, I thought it perhaps would look fine in the family history: that Marco Polo in his lifetime fought both with the Golden Horde and with the War Fleet of Venice. “What would you have me do, So Serenità?”

“Serve only as a gentleman at arms. Say, in supernumerary command of a supply ship. Make one sally with the fleet, out to sea and back to port, and then you retire—with new distinction and with old honor preserved.”

Well, that is how, when a squadra of the Venetian fleet sailed out some months later under Almirante Dandolo, I came to be aboard the galeazza Doge Particiaco, which was actually only the victualler vessel to the squadra. I bore the courtesy rank of Sopracomito, meaning that I had approximately the same function I had had on the chuan that carried the Lady Kukachin—to look commanding and warlike and knowledgeable, and to stay out of the way of the Comito, the real master of the vessel, and the mariners who took his orders.

I do not aver that I could have done any better if I had been in command—of the galeazza or of the whole squadra—but I could hardly have done any worse. We sailed down the Adriatic and, near the island of Kurcola off the Dalmatia coast, we encountered a squadra of Genoan ships, flying the ensign of their great Almiranet Doria, and he demonstrated to us why he was called great. Our squadra, we could see from a distance, outnumbered the Genoans, so our Almirante Dandolo commanded that we surge forward in immediate attack. And Doria let our ships close with and disable some nine or ten of his, a deliberate sacrifice, just so our squadra would be enticed inextricably in amongst his own. And then, out of nowhere—or rather, out from behind the island of Peljesac, where they had been concealed—came ten or fifteen more fleet Genoan warships. The two-day battle cost many slain or wounded on both sides, but the victory was Doria’s, for by sunset of the second day, the Genoans had taken our entire squadra and some seven thousand Venetian seamen prize of war, and I was one of them.

The Doge Particiaco, like all the other Venetian galleys, was sailed —still by its prize crew, but under command of a captor Genoan Comito —around the foot of Italy and up through the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian seas to Genoa. From the water, that looked no bad city in which to be interned: its palazzi like layered cakes of alternate black and white marble stacked up the slopes from the harbor. But when we were marched ashore, we found Genoa to be sadly inferior to Venice: all cramped streets and alleys and meager little piazze, and very dirty, not having canals to flush away its effluents.

I do not know where the ordinary seamen and rowers and archers and balestrieri and such were imprisoned, but, if tradition was observed, they no doubt sat out the war in misery and deprivation and squalor. The officers and gentlemen at arms like myself were considerably better treated, and put only under house arrest in the abandoned and run-down palazzo of some defunct religious order, in the Piazza of the Five Lanterns. The building was very little furnished, and very cold and dank—I have suffered worsening twinges of backache in chill weather ever since —but our jailers were courteous and they fed us adequately, and we were allowed to give money to the visiting Prisoners’ Friends of the Brotherhood of Justice, to buy for us any extra comforts and refinements we might wish. All in all, it was a more tolerable confinement than I had once endured in the Vulcano prison of my own native Venice. However, our captors told us that they were breaking with tradition in one respect. They would not allow the ransoming of prisoners by their families back home. They said they had learned that it was no profit to profit from ransom payments, only to have to face the same officers again, a little while later, across some other contested piece of water. So we would stay in internment until this war was concluded.

Well, I had not lost my life by going to war, but it appeared that I was going to lose a substantial piece of it. I had carelessly squandered months and years before, making my way across interminable barren deserts or mountain snowfields, but at least I had been in the healthy open air during those journeys, and perhaps had learned something along the way. There was not much to be learned while languishing in prison. I had no Mordecai Cartafilo for cellmate this time.

As well as I could ascertain, all my fellow prisoners were either dilettanti like myself—noblemen who had been only desultorily whiling away their military service obligation—or professional men of war. The dilettanti were devoid of conversation except whines and yearnings to get back to their feste and ballrooms and dancing partners. The officers at least had some war stories to tell. But each such story gets very like every other story after a telling or two, and the rest of their conversation had all to do with rank and promotions and seniority of service, and how unappreciated by their superiors they were. I gather that every military man in Christendom is undeservedly ranked at least two stripes below the grade he ought to have.

So, if I could learn nothing here in prison, perhaps I could instruct, or at least amuse. When the dull conversations threatened to get absolutely stultifying, I might venture a remark like:

“Speaking of stripes, Messeri, there is in the lands of Champa a beast called the tiger, which has stripes all over it. And curiously enough, no two tigers are striped exactly the same. The natives of Champa can recognize one tiger from another by the distinctive striping of its face. They call the beast Lord Tiger, and they say that by drinking a decoction made from the eyeballs of a dead one, you can always see My Lord Tiger before he sees you. Then, by the striping of his face, you can tell if he is a known man-eater or a harmless hunter of only lesser animals.”

Or, when one of our jailers brought us our tin supper dishes and the meal was as unsavory as usual, and we greeted him with our usual taunts, and he complained that we were a troublesome bunch, that he wished he had volunteered for duty elsewhere, I might suggest to him:

“Be glad, Genovese, you are not on duty in India. When the servants brought me dinner there, they had to enter the dining room crawling on their bellies and pushing the trays of food before them.”

At first, my unsolicited contributions to the barrack conversations were sometimes received with strange and wondering looks, as when, for instance, two foppish gentlemen might be discussing, in high-flown language, the comparative virtues and charms of their lady loves back home, and I might venture:

“Have you yet determined, Messeri, whether your maidens are winter or summer women?” I would be regarded blankly, so I would explain: “The men of the Han say that a woman whose intimate aperture is situated unusually near the front of her artichoke is most suitable for cold winter nights, because you and she must closely intertwine to effect penetration. But a woman whose orifice is situated farther back between her legs is better for summertime. She can sit on your lap in a cool and breezy outdoor pavilion, while you enter her from the rear.”

The two elegant gentlemen might then reel away in horror, but less dandified sorts would come congregating to hear more such revelations. And it was not long before, every time I opened my mouth, I would have more listeners than any expounder of ballroom manners or sea-war logistics, and they would listen raptly. Not only did my fellow Venetians cluster about me when I spun my tales, but also the Genoan warders and guards, and the visiting Brothers of Justice, and also Pisan and Corsican and Paduan prisoners taken by the Genoans in other wars and battles. And one day I was approached by one who said:

“Messer Marco, I am Luigi Rustichello, late of Pisa …”

And you introduced yourself as a scrivener, a fableor, a romancier, and you asked my permission to write down my stories in a book. So we sat down together and I told my tales to you, and, through the agency of the Brotherhood of Justice, I was enabled to send a request to Venice, and my father dispatched to Genoa my collection of notes and scraps and journals, which added to my recollection many things that I myself had forgotten. Thus our year of confinement passed not wearisomely but busily and productively. And when the war was finally over, and a new peace signed between Venice and Genoa, and we prisoners were released to go home, I could say that the year had not been a wasted time, as I had feared. Indeed, it may have been the most fruitful year of my entire life, in that I accomplished one thing that has lasted, and gives promise of lasting longer than I shall. I mean our book, Luigi, the Description of the World. Certainly, in the score or so of years that now have passed since we said goodbye outside that Genoa palazzo, I have accomplished nothing that gave me comparable satisfaction.

So here we are, Luigi. I have once more recounted my life from childhood to the end of my journeying. I have told again many of the tales you heard that long time ago, and many of those in more detail, and I have retold some others which you and I decided not to put into the earlier book, and I think many other stories besides, which I never did confide to you before. Now I give you leave to take any or all of my adventures, and ascribe them to the fictional hero of your latest work in progress, and make of them what you will.

There is not much more to tell of myself, and probably none of it would you find of any application to your new work, so I will tell it briefly.

6

I got back to Venice to find that my father and Marègna Lisa were well along in the building of our luxurious new Casa Polo—or rather, the making new of an old palazzo they had bought. It was on the Corte Sabionera, in a much more fashionable confino than our previous residence. It was also nearer to the Rialto, where, now that I was the recognized head of the Compagnia Polo, I was expected by tradition to mingle and converse with my fellow merchants twice a day, each morning just before noon and each evening at the close of the working day. That was and still is a pleasant custom, and I have often picked up the odd bit of useful information that might not have come to me in the ordinary course of business. I did not at all mind being respectfully addressed there as Messere, and respectfully listened to when I gave my sage opinion on this or that question of statutes or tariffs or whatever. I also did not too much mind being now head of the Compagnia Polo, though I had arrived at that eminence rather by default.

My father never did actually resign in my favor. He merely, from this time on, paid less and less attention to the company and more to other interests. For a while, he gave all his energies to supervision of the building and furnishing and decoration of the new Ca’ Polo. On several occasions during its construction, he pointed out to me that this new palazzo was ample enough for many more people than we were preparing to put into it.

“Remember what the Doge said, Marco,” he reminded me. “If there is to be a Compagnia Polo and a house of Polo after you, there must be sons.”

“Father, you of all people must know how I feel on that subject. I should not mind paternity, but maternity has cost me more than I can ever count.”

“Nonsense!” my stepmother put in sternly, but then she softened. “I do not mean to deprecate what you lost, Marco, but I must protest. When you told that tragic story, you were telling of a frail foreign woman. Venetian women are born and bred to breed. They enjoy being ‘pregnant to the ears,’ as the vulgar describe it, and they keenly feel the lack when they are not. Find yourself a good, wide-hipped Venetian wife, and leave the rest to her.”

“Or,” said my practical father, “find yourself a wife you can love sufficiently to want to have children with, but one you can love lightly enough that her loss would not be insupportable.”

When the Ca’ Polo was finished and we had moved in, my father turned his attention to a project even more novel and extraordinary. He founded what I might call a School for Merchant Adventurers. In actuality, it never had a name and it was not any academy of formal study. My father simply offered his experience and advice and access to our map collection, to any who might care to seek their fortune on the Silk Road. It was mostly young men who applied to him for schooling, but a few were as old as myself. For a stipulated percentage of the profit from a student’s putative first successful trading expedition—to Baghdad, Balkh, anywhere else in the East, even all the way to Khanbalik—Nicolò Polo would impart to the apprentice adventurer all the useful information at his command, let the apprentice copy the route from our own maps, teach the apprentice some necessary phrases of Trade Farsi, even give the apprentice the names he remembered of native merchants, camel-pullers, guides, drovers and such, all along the route. He guaranteed nothing—since, after all, much of his knowledge had to be out of date by now. But neither did the apprentice journeyers have to pay him anything for their schooling, until and unless they profited from it. As I recall, many novices did set out in the direction Maistro Polo had twice gone, and some came safely back from as far away as Persia, and one or two of them came back prosperous, and paid their dues. But I think my father would have continued in that whimsical occupation even if it had never paid him a bagatìn, for in a sense it kept him still journeying afar—and even into his last years.

However, the consequence was that I, who had been a vagabond as carefree and wandersome and willful as any wind, now found my once wide horizons narrowed down to daily attendance at the company counting house and warehouse, with twice-a-day intervals of conviviality and gossip on the Rialto. It was my obligation; somebody had to keep up the Compagnia Polo; my father had in effect retired from it, and Zio Mafìo was still and forever a housebound invalid. In Constantinople, my eldest uncle also gradually edged out of the business (and died, I think of boredom, not long after). So there my cousin Nicolò and here myself found ourselves inheriting the full responsibility of our separate branches of the company. Cuzìn Nico actually seemed to enjoy being a merchant prince. And I? Well, it was honest and useful and not onerous work I was doing, and I had not yet got bored with the humdrum sameness of it day after day, and I had more or less resigned myself to this being all of my life. But then two new things happened.

The first was your sending me, Luigi, my copy of your just-completed Description of the World. I immediately gave over every spare moment to reading our book and savoring it and, as I finished each sheet, giving it to a copyist to make additional manuscripts. I found it in all ways admirable, with only a few errors, which were no doubt to be blamed on my pace of narration while you set down the words, and my neglect to read over your original draft with a critical eye.

The errors consisted only in an occasional misdating of this or that event, an occasional adventure set down out of sequence, an occasional one of the difficult Eastern place-names misheard or misspelled—your writing Saianfu, for example, where it should have been Yun-nan-fu, and Yang-zho for Hang-zho (which would have put me and my Manzi tax-collector career in a quite different city and distant from the one where I actually served). However, I never earlier bothered to point out those minor errors to you, and I hope my doing so now does not distress you. They could mean nothing to anyone but me—who else in this Western world would know there is any difference between Yang-zho and Hang-zho? —and I did not even trouble to have my scribe correct them while making his copies.

I made formal presentation of one of the copies to the Doge Gradenigo, and he must immediately have circulated it among his Council of nobles, and they to all their families and even servants. I presented another copy to the priest of our new parish of San Zuàne Grisostomo, and he must have circulated it among all his clergy and congregation, because in no time I was famous again. With even more avidity than they had shown when I first came home from Kithai, people began seeking to scrape my acquaintance, accosting me at public functions, pointing at me in the street, on the Rialto, from passing gòndole. And your own copies, Luigi, must have proliferated and scattered like dandelion seeds, for merchants and travelers visiting Venice from abroad said they came as much for a look at me as to see the San Marco Basilica and other notable sights of the city. If I received them, many told me they had read the Description of the World in their home country, already translated into their native language.

As I have said, Luigi, it did us little good to omit from that narrative many things we thought too marvelous to be believed. Some of the enthusiasts seeking to meet me were seeking to meet what they properly considered a Far Journeyer, but a great many wished to meet a man they mistakenly considered Un Grand Romancier, author of an imaginative and entertaining fiction, and others clearly wished only to ogle a Prodigious Liar, as they might have flocked to watch the frusta of some eminent criminal at the piazzetta pillars. It seemed that the more I protested—“I told nothing but the truth!”—the less I was believed, and the more humorously (but fondly) I was regarded. I could hardly complain of being the cynosure of all eyes, and all those eyes warmly admiring, but I should have preferred that they admired me as something other than a fablemaker.

I earlier said that our family’s new Ca’ Polo was situated in the Corte Sabionera. It was, yes, and of course it still is, physically, and I suppose even the latest street map of Venice gives the official name of that little square as Ships-Ballast Court. But no resident of the city called it that any more. It was known to everybody as the Corte del Milione—in my honor—for I was now known as Marco Milione, man of the million lies and fictions and exaggerations. I had become both famous and notorious.

In time, I learned to live with my new and peculiar reputation, and even to disregard the troops of urchins who sometimes followed me on my walks from the Corte to the Compagnia or the Rialto. They would brandish stick swords and prance in a sort of gallop gait, and spank their own behinds while they did so, and shout things like “Come hither, great princes!” and “The orda will get you!” Such constant attention was a nuisance, and enabled even strangers to recognize me and greet me at times when I might have preferred anonymity. But it was partly on account of my being now conspicuous that another new thing occurred.

I forget where I was walking that day, but, on the street, I came face to face with the little girl Doris who had been my childhood playmate and had in those days so much adored me. I was astonished. By rights, Doris should have been nearly as old as I was—in her early forties—and probably, she being of the lower class, already a gray and wrinkled and worn-out drudge of a maràntega. But here she was, grown only to young womanhood—in her middle twenties, no more—and decently attired, not in the shapeless black of old street women, and just as golden blonde and fresh-faced and pretty as she had been when I last saw her. I was more than astonished, I was thunderstruck. I so far forgot my manners as to blurt her name, right there on the street, but at least I thought to address her respectfully:

“Damìna Doris Tagiabue!”

She might have bridled at my effrontery and swept her skirts aside and stalked on past me. But she saw my trailing retinue of urchins playing Mongols, and she had to suppress a smile, and she said amiably enough:

“You are Messer Marco of the—I mean—”

“Marco of the Millions. You can say it, Doris. Everyone does. And you used to call me worse things. Marcolfo and such.”

“Messere, I fear you have mistaken me. I assume you must once have known my mother, whose maiden name was Doris Tagiabue.”

“Your mother!” For a moment I forgot that Doris must by now be a matron, if not a crone. Perhaps because this girl was so like my memory of her, I remembered only the unformed and untamed little zuzzurrullona I had known. “But she was just a child!”

“Children grow up, Messere,” she said, and added mischievously, “Even yours will,” and she indicated my half-dozen miniature Mongols.

“Those are not mine. Beat the retreat, men!” I shouted at them, and with much rearing and wheeling of their imaginary steeds they retired to a distance.

“I was but jesting, Messere,” said the so-familiar stranger, smiling openly now, and even more resembling the merry sprite of my recollection. “Among the things well-known in Venice is that the Messer Marco Polo is still a bachelor. My mother, however, grew up and married. I am her daughter and my name is Donata.”

“A pretty name for a pretty young lady: the given one, the gift.” I bowed as if we had been formally introduced. “Dona Donata, I would be grateful if you would tell me where your mother lives now. I should like to see her again. We were once—close friends.”

“Almèi, Messere. Then I regret to tell you that she died of an influenza di febbre some years ago.”

“Gramo mi! I lament to hear it. She was a dear person. My condolences, Dona Donata.”

“Damìna, Messere,” she corrected me. “My mother was the Dona Doris Loredano. I am, like you, unmarried.”

I started to say something outrageously daring—and hesitated—and then said it:

“Somehow I cannot condole on your being unmarried.” She looked faintly surprised at my boldness, but not scandalized, so I went on, “Damìna Donata Loredano, if I sent acceptable sensàli to your father, do you think he might be persuaded to let me call at your family residence? We could talk of your late mother … of old times … .”

She cocked her head and regarded me for a moment. Then she said forthrightly, without archness, as her mother might have done:

“The famous and esteemed Messer Marco Polo surely is welcome everywhere. If your sensali will apply to the Maistro Lorenzo Loredano at his place of business in the Merceria …”

Sensàli can mean business brokers or marriage brokers, and it was the latter kind I sent, in the person of my staid and starched stepmother, together with a formidable maid or two of hers. Marègna Lisa returned from that mission to report that the Maistro Loredano had acceded most hospitably to my request for permission to pay a series of calls. She added, with a noticeable elevation of her eyebrows:

“He is an artisan of leather goods. Evidently an honest and respectable and hardworking currier. But, Marco, only a currier. Morel di mezo. You could be paying calls on the daughters of the sangue blo. The Dandolo family, the Balbi, the Candiani …”

“Dona Lisa, I once had a Nena Zulià who likewise complained of my tastes. Even in my youth I was contrary, preferring a savory morel to one with a noble name.”

However, I did not swoop upon the Loredano household and abduct Donata. I paid court to her as properly and ritually and for as long a time as if she had been of the very bluest blood. Her father, who gave the impression of having been assembled from some of his own tanned hides, received me cordially and made no comment on the fact that I was nearly as old as he. After all, one of the accepted ways for a daughter of the “middle mushroom” class to sprout higher in the world was for her to make an advantageous May-December marriage, usually to a widower with numerous children. On that scale, I was really no older than November, and I came unencumbered with any step-brood. So the Maistro Lorenzo merely mumbled some of the phrases traditionally spoken by an unmoneyed father to a wealthy suitor, to dispel any suspicion that he was voluntarily surrendering his daughter to the diritto di signoria:

“I must make known my reluctance, Messere. A daughter should not aspire to higher station than life gave her. To the natural burden of her low birth she risks adding a heavier servitude.”

“It is I who aspire, Messere,” I assured him. “I can only hope that your daughter will favor my aspirations, and I promise that she would never have cause to regret having done so.”

I would bring flowers, or some small gift, and Donata and I would sit together, always with an accompagnatrice—one of Fiordelisa’s iron-corseted maids—sitting nearby to make sure we behaved with rigid respectability. But that did not prevent Donata’s speaking to me as freely and frankly as Doris had been wont to do.

“If you knew my mother in her youth, Messer Marco, then you know that she began life as a poor orphan. Literally of the low popolàzo. So I shall put on no false airs and graces in her behalf. When she married a prospering currier, owner of his own workshop, she did marry above her class. But no one would ever have known it, if she had not chosen to make no secret of it. There was never anything coarse or vulgar about her during all the rest of her life. She made a good wife to my father and a good mother to me.”

“I would have made wager on it,” I said.

“I think she was a credit to her higher station in life. I tell you this, Messer Marco, so that if you—if you should have any doubts about my own qualifications for moving higher yet …”

“Darling Donata, I have had no least doubt at all. Even when your mother and I were children together, I could see the promise in her. But I will not say ‘like mother, like daughter.’ Because, even if I had never known her, I should quickly have recognized your own promise. Shall I, like a mooning and courting trovatore, sing your qualities? Beauty, intelligence, good humor—”

“Please do not omit honesty,” she interrupted. “For I would have you know everything there is to know. My mother never whispered any hint of this to me, and I should certainly never breathe it in my good father’s hearing, but—but there are things a child gets to know, or at least suspect, without being told. Mind you, Messer Marco, I admire my mother for having made a good marriage. But I might be less admiring of the way she must have done it, and so might you. I have an unshakable suspicion that her marriage to my father was impelled by their having—how do I say?—their having anticipated the event to some degree. I fear that a comparison of the date written on their consenso di matrimonio and that written on my own atta di nascita might prove embarrassing.”

I smiled at young Donata’s thinking she might shock someone as inured and impervious to shock as I was. And I smiled more broadly at her innocent simplicity. She must be quite unaware, I thought, that a great many marriages among the lower classes never were solemnized by any document or ceremony or sacrament. If Doris had indeed, by the oldest of feminine ruses, exalted herself from the popolàzo to the morel di mezo, it did not lessen my regard for her—or for this pretty product of her ruse. And if that was the only impediment Donata could fear as a possible interference to our marriage, it was a trifling one. I made two promises at that moment. One was only to myself, and unspoken: I took oath that never during our married lifetime would I reveal any of the secrets of my past or the skeletons in my own cupboard. The other promise I made aloud, after smoothing away my smile and assuming a very solemn face:

“I swear, dearest Donata, that I shall never hold it against you—that you were prematurely born. There is no disgrace in that.”

“Ah, you older men are so commendably tolerant of human frailty.” I may have winced at that, for she added, “You are a good man, Messer Marco.”

“And your mother was a good woman. Do not think ill of her for having been a determined woman, as well. She knew how to get her own way.” I remembered, somewhat guiltily, one instance of that. The recollection made me say, “I take it that she never mentioned having been acquainted with me.”

“Not that I recall. Should she have?”

“No, no. I was nobody worth mentioning in those days. But I should confess—” I stopped, for I had just sworn not to confess anything that had happened in my past life. And I could hardly confess that Doris Tagiabue had come to Lorenzo Loredano no virgin as a consequence of her having first practiced her wiles on me. So I merely repeated:

“Your mother knew how to get her own way. If I had not had to leave Venice, it could very well have happened that she would have married me when we were a little older.”

Donata pouted prettily. “What an ungallant thing to say, even if it is true. Now you make me seem like a second choice.”

“And now you make me seem like someone browsing in a market. I did not choose you by volition, dear girl. I had no part in it. When I first saw you, I said to myself, ‘She must have been put on this earth for me.’ And when you spoke your name, I knew it. I knew that I had been given a gift.”

And that pleased her, and made things right again.

On another occasion during our courtship, when we sat together, I put to her this question: “What of children when we are married, Donata?”

She blinked at me in perplexity, as if I had asked whether she intended to go on breathing after we were married. So I went on:

“A married couple are of course expected to have children. It is the natural thing. It is expected by their families, the Church, the Lord God, the community. But despite those expectations, there must be some people who do not wish to conform.”

“I am not among them,” she said, like a response to a catechism.

“And there are some who simply cannot.”

After a moment of silence, she said, “Are you intimating, Marco—?” She had by this time eased into addressing me informally. Now she said, choosing her words with delicacy, “Are you intimating, Marco, that perhaps you were, um, during your journeying, um, injured in some way?”

“No, no, no. I am whole and healthy, and competent to be a father. As far as I know, I mean. I was rather referring to those unfortunate women who are, for one reason or another, barren.”

She looked away from me, and blushed as she said, “I cannot protest ‘no, no, no,’ for I have no way of knowing. But I think, if you were to count the barren women you have heard of, you would find that they are mostly pale and fragile and vaporish noblewomen. I come of good, solid, redblooded peasant stock and, like any Christian woman, I hope to be the mother of multitudes. I pray to the good Lord that I will. But if He in His wisdom should somehow choose to make me barren, I would try with fortitude to bear the affliction. However, I have confidence in the Lord’s goodness.”

“It is not always of the good Lord’s doing,” I said. “In the East there are known various ways to prevent conception—”

Donata gasped and crossed herself. “Never say such a thing! Do not even speak of such a dreadful sin! Why, what would the good Pare Nardo say, if he even dreamed you had imagined such things? Oh, Marco, do assure me that you put no mention in your book of anything so criminal and sordid and un-Christian. I have not read the book, but I have heard some people call it scandalous. Was that the scandal they spoke of?”

“I really do not remember,” I said placatively. “I think that was one of the things I left out. I merely wished to tell you that such things are possible, in case—”

“Not in Christendom! It is unspeakable! Unthinkable!”

“Yes, yes, my dear. Forgive me.”

“Only if you promise me,” she said firmly. “Promise me you will forget that and all other vile practices you may have witnessed in the East. That our good Christian marriage will never be tainted by anything un-Christian you learned or saw or even heard of in those pagan lands.”

“Well, not everything pagan is vile … .”

“Promise me!”

“But, Donata, suppose I should have another opportunity or occasion to go eastward, and wished to take you with me. You would be the first Western woman, to my knowledge, ever to—”

“No. I will never go, Marco,” she said flatly, and her blush had gone now. Her face was very white and her lips set. “I should not wish you to go. There. I have said it. You are a wealthy man, Marco, with no need to increase your wealth. You are famous for your journeying already, with no need to increase that fame or to journey ever again. You have responsibilities, and will shortly have me for another, and I hope we will both have others. You are no longer—you are no longer the boy you were when you set out before. I should not have wished to marry that boy, Marco, not then or now. I want a mature and sober and dependable man, and I want him at home. I took you to be that man. If you are not, if you still harbor a restless and reckless boy inside you, I think you had better confess it now. We will have to put on a good face for our families and friends and all the gossips of Venice, when we announce the dissolution of our betrothal.”

“You are indeed very like your mother.” I sighed. “But you are young. In time to come, you might even desire to journey—”

“Not outside Christendom,” she said, still in that flat voice. “Promise me.”

“Very well. I shall never take you outside Chris—”

“Nor will you go.”

“Now that, Donata, I could not swear in good faith. My very business may require at least a return visit to Constantinople on occasion, and all around that city are un-Christian lands. My foot might slip, and—”

“This much, then. Promise me you will not go away until our children, if God gives us children, are grown to a responsible age. You have told me how your own father left his son to run wild among the street folk.”

I laughed. “Donata, they were not all vile, either. One of them was your mother.”

“My mother raised me to be better than my mother. My own children are not to be abandoned. Promise me.”

“I promise,” I said. I did not pause then to calculate that, if our marriage produced a son in the ordinary interval, I would be something like sixty-five years old before he had reached his majority. I was only thinking that Donata, still young herself, might have many changes of mind during our life together. “I promise, Donata. As long as there are children at home, and unless you decree otherwise, so will I be at home.”

And in the first year of the new century, in the year one thousand three hundred and one, we were married.

All was done with punctilious observance of the proprieties. When our period of courtship was deemed suitably long enough, Donata’s father and mine and a notary convened at the Church of San Zuàne Grisostomo for the ceremony of impalmatura, and they severally perused and signed and affirmed the marriage contract, just as if I had been some shy and awkward and adolescent bridegroom—when in fact it was I who had seen to the drawing up of the contract, with the counsel of my Compagnia attorneys-at-law. At the conclusion of the impalmatura, I put the betrothal ring on Donata’s finger. On subsequent Sundays, Pare Nardo proclaimed from the pulpit the bandi, and posted them on the church door, and no one came forward to dispute the proposed marriage. Then Dona Lisa engaged a friar-scribe with an excellent hand to write the partecipazioni di nozze, and sent them, each with the traditional gift parcel of confèti almonds, by liveried messenger to all the invited guests. They included everyone of any consequence in Venice, for, although there were sumptuary laws limiting the extravagance of most families’ public ceremonies, the Doge Gradenigo graciously granted us exemption. And, when the day came, it was a celebration on the scale of a citywide festa—after the nuptial mass, the banquet and feasting, the music and song and dancing, the drinking and brindisi and tipsy guests falling into the Corte canal, the confèti and coriàndoli thrown. When all that required the participation of Donata and myself was over, her bridal maids gave her the donora: setting in her arms for a moment a borrowed baby and tucking in her shoe a gold sequin coin, symbols of her being evermore blessed with fecundity and richness—and then we left the still uproarious festa and betook ourselves inside the Ca’ Polo, deserted of all but servants, the family to stay with friends during our luna di miele.

And in our bedchamber, in private, in Donata I discovered Doris all over again, for her body was the same milk-white, adorned with the same two small shell-pink points. Except that Donata was a grown woman and fully developed in womanhood, with a golden floss to prove it, she was the image of her mother, even to the identical appurtenance that I had once likened to the morsel called ladylips. Much else of the night was a repetition of a stolen afternoon long years ago. As I had taught then, so I taught now, beginning with the turning of Donata’s shell-pink points to a blushing and eager coral-pink. But here I will again draw the curtain of connubial privacy, though a little belatedly, for I have already told it all—the events of this night being very nearly the same as on that long-ago afternoon. And this time, too, it delighted us both. At risk of sounding disloyal to olden time, I might even say that this occasion was more delicious than the earlier, because this time we were not sinning.

7

WHEN Donata came to her confinement, I was there at home, in the house, close at hand, partly in compliance with my promise to her and our then-unarrived family, partly in memory of another time when I had so unforgivably been absent. They would not let me into Donata’s chamber for the event, of course, and I had no desire to be there. But I had done everything possible to prepare for the event, including the engagement of the sage physician Piero Abano, whom I paid lavishly to bequeath all his other patients to another mèdego and do nothing but attend Donata throughout her pregnancy. He early inculcated what he called his Six-Element Regimen: proper diet and drink, properly alternating periods of motion and rest, sleep and waking, evacuation and retention, fresh air during the day and close air at night, and “assuagement of the passions of the mind.” Whether that regimen was the more to be credited, or Donata’s “good peasant stock,” there was no childbed difficulty. Dotòr Abano and his two midwives and my stepmother came, in a bunch, to tell me that Donata’s labor had been easy and the birth like the squirting of an orange pip. They had to shake me awake to tell me, for I had again been reliving my own onetime experience of such travail and, to ameliorate it, had drunk three or four bottles of Barolo and succumbed into blessed oblivion.

“I am sorry she is not a boy,” murmured Donata, when they let me into the chamber to view our daughter for the first time. “I should have known. The carrying and the labor were too easy. Next time I shall pay heed to what the old women say: Labor a little longer, and give birth to a male child.”

“Hush, hush,” I said. “Now I am the happy recipient of two gifts.”

We named her Fantina.

Although Donata was from our earliest acquaintance wary of having me introduce any “un-Christian ideas” into our household, I was able to convince her of the worthiness of some alien customs. I do not mean any of the things I taught her in bed. Donata was a virgin when we wed, so she had no way of distinguishing the practices Venetian or exotic, universal or especial. But I also taught her, for instance, what I knew of the way the Han women kept themselves clean inside and out. I very delicately imparted that information to her, early in our marriage, and she saw the merit in that un-Christian bathing habit, and adopted it. After Fantina’s birth I insisted that she be likewise frequently bathed on the outside and, when she was older, on the inside as well. Donata briefly balked, saying:

“Bathed, yes. But the inner irrigation? That is all very well for a woman already married, but it would efface Fantina’s maidenhead. She would never have proof of her virginity.”

I said, “In my opinion, purity is best detected in the wine, not in the waxen seal on the flask. Teach Fantina to keep her body clean and sweet, and I believe her morals are likely to remain so, as well. Any future husband will recognize that quality in her, and require no mere physical token of it.”

So Donata complied, and instructed Fantina’s nurse to bathe her frequently and thoroughly, and so instructed every subsequent nena we had in the house. Some were at first amazed and critical, but they gradually came to approve, and I think spread the word among their servant circles that an un-Christian cleanliness was not, as commonly believed, debilitating, for in time the Venetians of both sexes and all ages got noticeably cleaner than in the olden days. By introducing just that one custom of the Han, I may have done much to improve the entire city of Venice—from the skin out, so to speak.

Our second child was born almost exactly a year later, and also without difficulty, but not in the same place. The Doge Gradenigo had summoned me one day and asked if I would accept a consular post abroad, the one in Bruges. It was an honor to be invited to that civic duty, and I had by then trained up a good staff of assistants who could look after the Compagnia Polo during my absence, and in Bruges I could accomplish many things to the company’s advantage. But I did not say yes on the spot. Although the post was in good Christian Flanders, I thought I ought to confer first with Donata.

She agreed with me that she should at least once in her lifetime see something outside her native Venice, so I accepted the posting. Donata was already big with child when we sailed, but we took our sage Venetian physician along and, the voyage being made on a heavy, rock-solid Flemish cog, it caused no distress to either her or our infant Fantina, but Dotòr Abano was seasick all the way. Happily, he was well recovered by the time Donata came to term, and again it was an easy birth, and again Donata complained only that it had been too easy, for it produced another daughter.

“Hush, hush,” I said. “In the lands of Champa a man and woman do not even get married until after they have produced two children. So, in effect, we are just getting started.”

We named that one Bellela.

Venice maintained a permanent consulate in Bruges—and favored its more distinguished Ene Aca citizens with the opportunity to serve there in rotation—because twice a year a numerous fleet of Venetian galleys sailed from Bruges’s harbor suburb of Sluys, laden with the produce of all northern Europe. So Donata and I and Fantina—and shortly little Bellela—spent a most enjoyable year or so in the fine consular residence on the Place de la Bourse, a house luxuriously furnished with every convenience, including a permanent staff of servants. I was not overburdened with work, not having much to do except look over the shipping manifests of the bi-yearly fleet, and decide whether this time it would sail direct to Venice, or whether it had hold room for other goods, in which case I might route some or all of the ships by way of London or Southampton across the Channel, or by way of Ibiza or Majorca in the Mediterranean, to pick up some of the produce of those places.

Most of that consular year Donata and I spent being royally entertained by other consular delegations and by Flemish merchant families, at balls and banquets and local feste like the Procession of the Holy Blood. Many of our hosts had read the Description of the World, in one language or another, and all had heard about it, and all spoke the Sabir trade tongue, so I was much questioned on this or that of the book’s contents, and encouraged to elaborate on this and that aspect of it. An evening’s entertainment would often go on late into the night, because the company would keep me talking, and Donata would sit and smile proprietorially. While there were ladies present, I would confine myself to innocuous subjects.

“Our fleet was today loading your good North Sea herring, my lords merchants. They are excellent fish, but I myself prefer to dine on fresh, as we did tonight, not salted or smoked or pickled fish. I suggest you consider marketing them fresh. Yes, yes, I know; fresh fish do not travel. But I have seen them do so in the north of Kithai, and your climate here is very similar. You might speculate on adopting the method used there, or some variant of it. In the north of Kithai, the summer is only three months long, so the fishermen plunder the lakes and rivers with all their energy, taking far more fish than they can sell in the same time. They toss the surplus fish into a shallow reservoir of water and keep them alive there until wintertime. Then they break the ice on the reservoir and take the fish out singly, at which exposure to the winter air the fish freeze solid. They are packed like kindling logs, in bundles on pack asses, and are sent thus to the cities, where the rich folk pay exorbitant prices for such delicacies. And when the fish are thawed and cooked, they taste as fresh as any caught in the summertime.”

Such remarks would often inspire two or three of the more ambitious merchants present to call for a servant to carry an urgent message to their place of business: I suppose something on the order of “Let us try this man’s preposterous notion.” But the merchants themselves would not leave the gathering because, when the ladies had betaken themselves elsewhere to chat of feminine things, I would regale the men with more piquant tales.

“My personal traveling physician, the Dotòr Abano, pronounces himself dubious of this, Messeri, but I brought back from Kithai a prescription for long life, and I will share it with you. The men of the Han who profess the religion called Tao have a firm belief that the exhalations of all things contain particles so tiny they are invisible, but have a potent effect nonetheless. For example, the rose particles we call the fragrance of a rose make us feel benign when we inhale them. The meat particles given off as scent by a good roast of meat make our mouths water. Just so, the Taoists profess that the breath passing through the lungs of a young girl gets charged with particles of her young, fresh body and then, when she exhales, imbue the ambient air with vigorous and invigorating qualities. Thus the prescription: if you would live a long time, surround yourself with vivacious young maidens. Stay as close to them as you can. Inhale their sweet exhalations. They will enhance your blood and humors and other juices. They will strengthen your health and lengthen your life. It goes without saying that, if you should meanwhile find other employment for the delicious young virgins …”

Raucous laughter, loud and prolonged, and one old Fleming pounded a bony hand on his spiky knee and cried, “Damn your personal physician, Mynheer Polo! I think it a damned fine prescription! I would resort to the young girls in an instant, damn me if I would not, except that my damned old wife would think of some objection to make.”

Louder laughter, over which I called to him, “Not if you go about it cunningly, Messere. The prescription for elderly women is, of course, young boys.”

Louder laughter yet, and boisterous jests shouted, and the handing around of pitchers of the strong Flemish ale, and often, when Donata and I departed the company, I was glad I had a consular palanquin to ride home in.

Having less to do in the daytime, and Donata being then usually occupied as a mother to our daughters, I applied myself to what I believed would be a project beneficial to trade in general and Venice in particular. I decided to institute here in the West something I had found eminently useful in the East. I established a horse post in imitation of that devised so long ago by the Khan Kubilai’s Minister of Roads and Rivers. It took some time and labor and argument to accomplish, since in these lands I had no absolute authority, as I would have had anywhere in the Khanate. I had to overcome a good deal of government torpor, timidity and opposition. And those difficulties were multiplied by the number of governments involved: Flanders, Lorraine, Swabia and so on—every suspicious, narrow-minded duchy and principality between Bruges and Venice. But I was determined and stubborn, and I did it. When I had that post-chain of riders and relay stations established, I could send to Venice the cargo manifests of the fleet as soon as it sailed from Sluys. The post would convey the papers those seven hundred miles in seven days, or one-quarter of the best time the fleet could make, so the recipient merchants in Venice often had every item of the cargo sold at a profit before it even reached them.

When it came time for me and my family to quit Bruges, I was much tempted to try posting us home the same swift way. But two of the family consisted of infant children, and Donata was pregnant again, so the idea was impractical. We came home as we had gone, by ship, and arrived in good time for our third daughter, Morata, to be born in Venice.

The Ca’ Polo was still a place of pilgrimage for visitors wishing to meet and converse with Messer Marco Milione. During my stay in Flanders, my father had been receiving them. But he and Dona Lisa were wearying of that obligation, both of them being now very old and failing in health, and they were glad to have me assume the duty again.

There came to see me, during the years, besides mere gapers and gawkers, some distinguished and intelligent men. I remember a poet, Francesco da Barberino, who (like you, Luigi) wished to know some things about Kithai for a chanson de geste he was writing. And I remember the cartographer Marino Sanudo, who came asking to incorporate some of our maps into a great Map of the World he was compiling. And there came several friars-historians, Jacopo d‘Acqui and Francesco Pipino and one from France, Jean d’Ypres, who were severally writing Chronicles of the World. And there came the painter Giotto di Bondone, already famous for his O and his chapel frescoes, who wished to know something of the illustrative arts as practiced by the Han, and seemed impressed by what I could tell him and show him, and went away saying he was going to try some of those exotic effects in his own paintings.

There came also, during the years, from my many correspondents in countries East and West, news of people and places I had known. I heard of the death of Edward, King of England, whom I had known as a Crusader prince in Acre. I heard that the priest Zuàne of Montecorvino, whom I had known just long enough to detest, had been appointed by the Church its first Archbishop of Khanbalik, and had been sent a number of under-priests to minister to the missions he was establishing in Kithai and Manzi. I heard of the many successful wars waged by the once insignificant boy Ghazan. Among his several triumphs, he swallowed the Seljuk Empire wholly into his Ilkhanate of Persia, and I wondered what became of the Kurdi Shoe Brigand and my old friend Sitarè, but I never heard. I learned of other expansions of the Mongol Khanate —in the south it took Jawa, both the Greater and the Lesser, and in the west moved into Tazhikistan—but, as I had advised Kubilai not to do, none of his successors ever bothered to invade India.

Things happened closer to home, too, not all of them joyous things. In fairly close succession, my father and then my Zio Mafio and then my Marègna Fiordelisa died. Their funerals were of such splendid pomp and thronged attendance and citywide mourning as almost to overshadow the obsequies for the Doge Gradenigo, who died shortly afterward. About the same time, we here in Venice were set aghast when the Frenchman who had become Pope Clement V summarily removed the Apostolic See from Rome to Avignon in his native France, so that His Holiness might remain near to his mistress, who, being the wife of the Count of Périgord, could not conveniently visit him in the Eternal City. We might have looked tolerantly on that as a temporary aberrancy, typical of a Frenchman, except that, three years ago, Clement was succeeded by another Frenchman, and John XXII seems satisfied that the papal palace remain in Avignon. My correspondents have not kept me well informed of what the rest of Christendom thinks of this sacrilege, but, to judge from the tempest it has raised here in Venice—including some not at all frivolous suggestions that we Venetian Christians contemplate shifting our allegiance to the Greek Church—I must surmise that poor San Piero is raging in his Roman catacomb.

The Doge succeeding Gradenigo was only briefly in office before he too died. The current Doge Zuàne Soranzo is a younger man and should be with us for a while. He has also been a man of innovations. He instituted an annual race of gòndole and batèli on the Grand Canal, and called it the Regata, because prizes were awarded to the winners. In each of the four years since, the Regata has got more lively and colorful and popular—being now a day-long festa, with races for boats of one oar, of two oars, even boats rowed by women, and the prizes have got ever richer and more sought after—until the Regata has become as much of a yearly spectacle as the Wedding of the Sea.

Another thing the Doge Soranzo did was to ask me to assume civic office again, as one of the Proveditori of the Arsenàl, and I still continue in that post. It is purely a ceremonial duty, like being supracomito of a warship, but I do go out to that end of the island once in a while, to pretend that I really am supervising the shipyard. I enjoy being out there in the eternal aroma of boiling pitch, watching a galley begin life at one corner of the yard as just a single keel timber—then take shape as it moves along the ways, from one team of workers to the next, getting ribs and planking and, still slowly moving all the time, goes on through the sheds where workers on both sides stock its hull and holds with every necessity, from cordage and spare sails to armaments and staple provisions, while its decking and upper works are still being finished by other arsenaloti—until it floats out into the Arsenàl basin, a complete new vessel ready for auction to some buyer, ready to dip oars or hoist sail and go a-journeying. It is a poignant sight to one who will journey no more.

I shall not be going away again, not anywhere, and in many respects I might almost never have been away. I am still esteemed in Venice, but as a fixture now, not a novelty, and children do not prance behind me in the streets any more. An occasional visitor from some foreign country, where the Description of the World has just made its first appearance, still comes seeking to meet me, but my fellow Venetians have tired of hearing my reminiscences and they do not thank me for my contributions of ideas I picked up in far places.

Not long ago, at the Arsenàl, the Master Shipwright got quite red in the face when I told, at some length, how the Han mariners somehow guide their massive chuan vessels more deftly—with only a single, centered steering oar—than do the helmsmen of our smaller galeazze with their double oars, one on each side. The Master Shipwright listened patiently while I discoursed, but he went away grumbling audibly about “dilettanti disrespectful of tradition.” Only a month or so afterward, though, I saw a new galley come down the ways, not with the usual lateen sail but square-rigged in the manner of a Flemish cog, and with only a single, centered, stern-mounted steering oar. I was not invited aboard for that ship’s trial voyage, but it must have handled well, for the Arsenàl has since been turning out more and more of the same design.

Also not long ago, when I was honored with an invitation to dine at the palazzo of the Doge Soranzo, the dinner was accompanied by muted music from a band of players in the gallery overlooking the chamber. At a lull in the conversation, I remarked to the table at large:

“Once upon a time, in the palace of Pagan, in the nation of Ava, in the lands of Champa, we were entertained at dinner by a troupe of musicians who were all blind men. I inquired of a steward if blind men in that country found easiest employment as musicians. The steward told me, ‘No, U Polo. If a child shows a talent for music, he is deliberately blinded by his parents, so that his hearing will sharpen and he will concentrate his attention only on perfecting his music, so that someday he may be accorded a place as a palace musician.’”

There was a general silence. Then the Dogaressa said crisply, “I do not think that a fit story for the dining table, Messer Marco.” And I have not been invited there since.

When a young man named Marco Bragadino, who has lately been making the cascamorto at my eldest daughter Fantina, lavishing on her languishing looks and heartfelt sighs, finally took his courage in both hands and came to me to inquire if he might commence formal calls of courtship, I tried to put him at ease by saying jovially:

“That reminds me, young Bragadino, of an occurrence in Khanbalik once upon a time. There was hauled into the Cheng—into the court of justice—a man accused of beating his wife. The Tongue of the Cheng asked the man if he had good reason for this behavior, and the wretch said yes, he was beating his wife for her having suffocated their baby daughter immediately after its birth. The wife was asked if she had anything to say, and she cried, ‘It was only a daughter, my lords. There is no crime in disposing of excess daughters. Anyway, that happened fifteen years ago.’ The Tongue then asked the man, ‘Man, why in the world are you beating your wife for that now?’ And the man said, ‘My lords, fifteen years ago it did not matter. But recently a plague of some female disease has killed off almost all the other young maidens in our district. Brides are now at a premium, and the few available are fetching princess prices!’”

After a while, young Bragadino cleared his throat and asked, “Er, is that all, Messere?”

“That is all,” I said. “I do not remember how the Cheng ruled in that case.”

When young Bragadino had departed, looking confused and shaking his head, my wife and Fantina stormed into the room and began berating me. They had evidently both been listening behind the door.

“Papà, what have you done? Gramo mi, you have repulsed my best hope of marriage! I shall be a lonely and despised zitella all my life! I shall die with the jewel! What have you done?”

“Marcolfo vechio!” said Donata, in the memorable style of her own mother. “We have no scarcity of daughters in this house! You can ill afford to turn away any of their suitors!” She spared Fantina none of her frankness, either. “It is not as if they were sensational beauties, much sought after!” Fantina gave a despairing wail and flung herself out of the room. “Can you not curb your everlasting old reminiscences and your wandering old wits?”

“You are right, my dear,” I said contritely. “I know better. One of these days I shall do better.”

She was right, too. I concede that. In the matter of children, Donata had reposed her confidence in her Lord’s goodness, but, after giving us three daughters, evidently her good Lord despaired of ever providing a son and heir to the Venetian house of Polo. That I had no male issue did not crushingly disappoint me or blight my life. It is not very Christian of me to say so, I know, but I do not believe that when my own life is over I shall be taking much interest in the affairs of this world, or wringing the pale hands of my soul because I left no Marcolino Polo in charge of all the warehouse goods and zafran plantations I could not take with me. I did not confess this recusancy of mine to old Pare Nardo before he died (and that clement old man would probably have given me small penance for it)—and I shall not confess it to the grim-lipped young Pare Gasparo (who would be righteously severe)—but I am inclined to believe that if there is a Heaven I have not much hope of it; if there is a Hell, I daresay I will have other things to worry about than how my progeny are faring on the Rialto.

I may be less than a model Christian, but neither am I like those Eastern fathers whom I have heard say such things as: “No, I have no children. Only three daughters.” I have never been prejudiced against daughters. Of course, I might have hoped for daughters with better looks and brighter wits. I am perhaps overparticular in that regard, having myself been blessed with the knowing of so many extraordinarily beautiful and intelligent women in my younger days. But Donata was one of those, in her younger days. If she could not replicate herself in her daughters, the fault must be mine.

The little Raja of the Hindus once harangued me about no man’s ever knowing with surety who is the father of any of his children, but I have never had the least cause for anxiety. I have only to look at any one of them—Fantina, Bellela or Morata—they all look too exactly like me for there to be any doubt. Now, I hasten to asseverate that Marco Polo has all his life been no bad-looking man. But I should not wish to be a nubile young maiden and look like Marco Polo. If I was, and did, I should hope at least to have a bright intelligence by way of compensation. Unfortunately, my daughters have been scanted in that respect, as well. I do not mean to say that they are drooling imbeciles; they are no worse than unperceptive and lackluster and charmless.

But they are of my making. Should the potter despise the only pots he will ever produce? And they are good girls, with good hearts, or so I am repeatedly and consolingly told by my acquaintances who possess comely daughters. All I can say, from my own knowledge, is that my girls are cleanly of person and smell good. No, I can also say that they are fortunate in having a Papà who can dower them with the attractions of affluence.

Young Bragadino was not so repulsed by my dithering that day as to stay away forever, and the next time he called I confined my disquisition to topics like bequests and prospects and inheritances. He and Fantina are now formally betrothed, and Bragadino the Elder and I will shortly be convening with a notary for the impalmatura. My second daughter, Bellela, is being sedulously courted by a young man named Zanino Grioni. Morata will have someone, too, in due time. I have no doubt that all three girls will be grateful to be known no longer as the Damìne Milione, and I have no overwhelming regrets that the Compagnia and the fortune and the house of Polo will henceforth percolate down through the generations as the Compagnie and houses of Bragadino, Grioni, Eccètera. If the precepts of the Han are true, this may cause consternation among my ancestors, from Nicolò all the way back to the Dalmatian Pavlo, but it causes not much to me.

8

IF I had any real lament to make about our lack of sons, it would be a lament for what that did to Donata. She was only about thirty-two years old when Morata was born, but the birth of a third daughter clearly convinced her that she was incapable of male issue. And, as if to avert any hazard of producing yet another daughter, Donata thereafter began to discourage our further indulgence in conjugal relations. She never, by word or gesture, refused my amorous overtures, but she began to dress and look and comport herself in a manner calculated to diminish her appeal for me and dampen my ardor for her.

At thirty-two she began to let her face lose its radiance and her hair its luster and her eyes their lively sparkle, and she started dressing in the black bombazine and shawls of an old woman. At thirty-two! I was then fifty years old, but I was still straight and slim and strong, and I wore the rich garb to which my station entitled me and my taste for color inclined me. My hair and beard were still more life-colored than gray, and my blood was still unthinned, and I still had all my lusty appetites for life and pleasure, and my eyes still kindled when I glimpsed a lovely lady. But I have to say that they glazed when I looked at Donata.

Her posturing as an old woman made her an old woman. She is younger today than I was when Morata was born. But over these ensuing fifteen years, she has put on all the unsightly lineaments and contours of a woman many years older—the sagging facial features, the stringed and corded throat and that old-woman’s hump at the back of the neck, and those tendons that operate the fingers are visible through the spotted skin of her hands, and her elbows have become like old coins, and the meat of her upper arms hangs loose and wobbly, and when she raises her skirt to hobble and lurch from the Corte landing down the steps to one of our boats, I can see that her ankles lop over her shoes. What has become of the milk-white and shell-pink and golden-flossed body, I do not know; I have not seen it in a long time.

During these years, I repeat, she never denied me any of my conjugal rights, but she always moped afterward, until the moon came round again and relieved her of the fear that she might again be pregnant. After a while, of course, that became nothing to fear, and anyway by then I was not giving her any cause to fear it. By then, too, I was occasionally spending an afternoon or a whole night away from home, but she never even required from me a mendacious excuse, let alone castigated me for my pecatazzi. Well, I could not complain of her forbearance; there are many husbands who would be glad to have themselves such a lenient and unshrewish wife. And if today, at the age of forty-seven, Donata is woefully and prematurely ancient, I have caught up to her. I am now in my sixty-fifth year, so there is nothing premature or extraordinary in my looking as old as she does, and I no longer spend nights away from home. Even if I wished to wander, I do not get many alluring invitations to do so, and I should regretfully have to decline them if I did.

A German company has recently opened a branch manufactory here in Venice, producing a newly perfected sort of looking glass, and they sell every one they make, and no fashionable Venetian household, including ours, can be without one or two of those. I admire the lucent mirrors and the undistorted reflections they provide, but I consider them also a mixed blessing. I should prefer to believe that what I see when I look into a glass is blamable on imperfection and distortion, rather than have to concede that I am seeing what I really look like. The now totally gray beard and the thinning gray hair, the wrinkles and liverish skin splotches, the dispirited pouches under eyes that are now bleared and dimmed …

“No need to have dim eyes, friend Marco,” said Dotòr Abano, who has been our family physician all these years, and who is as old as I am. “Those ingenious Germans have created another marvel of glass. They call this device the Brille—occhiale, if you prefer. The two glass pieces in it do wonders for the eyesight. Merely hold the thing up before your face and look at this page of writing. Is it not clearer to read? Now look at yourself in the mirror.”

I did, and murmured, “Once, in a harsh wintertime, at a place called Urumqi, I saw some savage-looking men come out of the frozen Gobi, and they frightened me to terror, for they all had great gleaming eyes of copper. When they got nearer, I saw that they were each wearing a device rather like this. A sort of dòmino mask made of thin copper and pierced with many pinholes. A man could not see very well through the thing, but they said it protected them from going blind in the snow glare.”

“Yes, yes,” Abano said impatiently. “You have told me more than once about the men with the copper eyes. But what do you think of the occhiale? Cannot you see more vividly?”

“Yes,” I said, but not very enthusiastically, for what I was seeing was myself in the mirror. “I am noticing something I never noticed before. You are a mèdego, Abano. Is there a medical reason to account for my losing the hair from the top of my head but simultaneously growing bristles on the point of my nose?”

Still impatiently, he said, “The recondite medical term for that is ‘old age.’ Well, what of the occhiale? I can order a device made especially for you. Plain or ornate, made for holding in the hand or strapping around the head, gem-inlaid wood or tooled leather—”

“Thank you, old friend, but I think not,” I said, laying down the mirror and giving him back the apparatus. “I have seen much in my lifetime. It might be a mercy now not to see all the signs of decay.”

Just today, I realized that this is the twentieth day of the month of September. My birthday. I am no longer in my sixty-fifth year. I have this day tottered across the invisible but all too distinct line into my sixty-sixth. The realization bowed me down for a moment, but I raised myself to my fullest height—ignoring the twinge in my lower back—and squared my shoulders. Determined not to wallow in a maudlin mood of self-pity, thinking to cheer myself up, I ambled into the kitchen and leaned on the chopping block while our cook bustled about at her work, and I said conversationally:

“Nastàsia, I will tell you an improving and edifying tale. About this time every year, in the Kithai and Manzi lands, the Han people celebrate what they call the Moon Cake Festa. It is a warm and loving family holiday, nothing grandiose. The families simply gather affectionately together and enjoy the eating of Moon Cakes. Those are small, round pastries, heavy with richness and very tasty. I will tell you how they are made, and perhaps you would oblige me by making some, and the Dona and the Damìne and I could pretend we are celebrating in the Han manner. You take nuts and dates and cinnamon and—”

And almost immediately I was out of the kitchen and careering about the house in search of Donata. I found her in her dressing chamber, doing needlework, and I bellowed:

“I have just been expelled from my own kitchen by my own cook!”

Donata, not looking up, said with mild reproof, “Have you been bothering Nata again?”

“Bothering her, indeed! Is she employed to serve us or is she not? The woman had the effrontery to complain that she is tired of hearing of the sumptuous viands I used to enjoy abroad, and she will hear not another word about them! Che braga! Is that any way for a domestic to speak to her own master?”

Donata clucked sympathetically. I stumped about the room for a bit, peevishly kicking things that got in my way. Then I resumed, and tragically:

“Our domestics, the Dogaressa, even my fellows on the Rialto, they all seem disinclined nowadays to learn anything. They wish only to stagnate, and not to be stirred or leavened out of their stagnation. Mind you, Donata, I do not much care about outsiders, but my own daughters! My own daughters heave sighs and drum their fingers and look out the window when I try to relate some improving and edifying tale from which they might derive great benefit. Are you by any chance encouraging this disrespect for the patriarch of the family? I think it is reprehensible. I begin to feel like that prophet of whom Jesus spoke—the one who was not without honor, save in his own country and in his own house.”

Donata sat smiling through my tirade, and imperturbably plying her needle, and when I was out of breath she said, “The girls are young. Young folk often find us older folk tiresome.”

I roved about the room some more, until my wheezing abated. Then I said, “Old. Yes. Behold us dismal old folk. At least I can claim that I got old in the ordinary way, through the accumulation of years. But you did not have to, Donata.”

“Everybody gets old,” she said placidly.

“You are just about exactly the same age now, Donata, as I was on our wedding day. Was I old then?”

“You were in your prime of life. Stalwart and handsome. But women age differently than men do.”

“Not if they do not wish to. You only desired to hasten past the childbearing years. And you need not have done. I told you long ago that I knew simple things that would prevent—”

“Things not fit to be mentioned by a Christian tongue, or heard by Christian ears. I do not wish to hear them now, any more than I did then.”

“If you had listened then,” I said accusingly, “you would not now be an Autumn Fan.”

“A what?” she said, looking up at me for the first time.

“It is a very descriptive term the Han have. An Autumn Fan means a woman past her years of appeal and attractiveness. You see, in the autumn the air is cool and there is no necessity for a fan. It becomes an object without use or purpose or reason for existence. Just so, a woman who has ceased to be womanly, as you deliberately did, solely to avoid having more children—”

“All these years,” she interrupted, but in a very soft voice. “All these years, have you thought that was why?”

I stopped, with my mouth still open. She laid down her needlework on her black bombazine lap, and folded her yellowed hands atop it, and fixed me with the faded eyes that had once been bright blue, and said:

“I ceased being a woman when I could no longer deceive myself. When I wearied of pretending to myself that you loved me.”

I blinked in bewilderment and disbelief, and had to grope for my voice. “Donata, was I ever anything but tender and caring? Did I fail you in any way? Was I ever less than a good husband?”

“There. Even now you do not speak the word.”

“I thought it was implicit. I am sorry. Very well, then. I did love you.”

“There was something or someone you loved more, and always have. At our closest, Marco, we were never close. I could look into your face and see only distance, far distance. Was it farness of miles or of years? Was it another woman? God forgive me for believing this, but … was it not my mother?”

“Donata, she and I were children.”

“Children who are parted forget each other when they are grown. But you mistook me for her when we first met. On our wedding night, I was still wondering if I might not be just a substitute. I was a virgin, yes, and innocent. All I knew to expect was what I had been told by older confidantes, and you made it much better than what I had expected it to be. Nevertheless, I was not oblivious and obtuse, as one of our empty-headed daughters might be. In our cleaving together, Marco, there seemed to be … something … not quite right. That first time and every time afterward.”

Justifiably affronted, I said stiffly, “You never made complaint.”

“No,” she said, looking pensive. “And that was part of the seeming wrongness: that I did enjoy it—always—and somehow felt I should not. I cannot explain it to you, any more than I could explain it to myself. All I ever could think was: it must be that I am enjoying what should rightly have been my mother’s.”

“How ridiculous. Whatever in your mother I was fond of, I have found also in you. And more. You have been much more to me, Donata —and much more dear to me—than she ever was.”

Donata moved her hand across her face, as if brushing away a cobweb that had fallen there. “If it was not she, if it was not some other woman, then it must have been the sheer distance that I felt always between us.”

“Come, my dear! I have scarcely been out of your sight since our wedding day, and never out of your reach.”

“Not in your physical person, no. But yes, in the parts of you I could not see or reach. You have been ever in love with distance. You never really came home at all. It was unfair of you, to ask a woman to vie for your love with a rival she never could best. The distance. The far horizons.”

“You exacted a promise about those far horizons. I made the promise. I kept to it.”

“Yes. In your physical person, you kept to it. You never went away again. But did you ever once talk or think of anything but journeying?”

“Gèsu! Who is being unfair now, Donata? For nearly twenty years I have been as passive and compliant as that zerbino by the door yonder. I gave you possession of me, and the saying of where I should be and what I should do. Are you now complaining that I gave you no authority over my memory, my thoughts, my sleeping or waking dreams?”

“No, I am not complaining.”

“That does not exactly answer the question I asked.”

“You have left a few unanswered yourself, Marco, but I shall not pursue them.” She finally took her mourning eyes off me, and picked up her needlework again. “After all, what are we arguing about? None of it matters anymore.”

Again I was stopped with my mouth open and words unsaid—words unsaid by both of us, I imagine. I took another ruminative turn or two about the room.

“You are right,” I said at last, and sighed. “We are old. We are past passion. Past striving and past strife. Past the beauties of danger and the dangers of beauty. Whatever we did right, whatever we did wrong, none of it matters any more.”

She sighed also, and bent again to her sewing. I stood for a while in thought, watching her across the room. She sat in a shaft of September afternoon sunlight, where she could see best to work. The sun did not much enliven her sober attire, and her face was downcast, but the light did play in her hair. There was a time when that sunshine would have made her tresses gleam as golden bright as summer grain. Now her bowed head had more the sweetly melancholy glow of grain in the sheaf, a quiet, drowsy dun color, rimed with the first frost of autumn.

“September,” I mused, not realizing that I said it aloud.

“What?”

“Nothing, my dear.” I crossed the room to her and bent and, not amorously but only in a fond fatherly sort of way, kissed the top of her dear head. “What are you working on?”

“Parechio. Trifles of apparel for the wedding, for the luna di miele. No harm in getting started on them well ahead of time.”

“Fantina is a fortunate girl, to have such a thoughtful mother.”

Donata looked up and gave me a wan, shy smile. “You know, Marco … I was just thinking. That promise you made—it has been well kept, but it is near its expiration. I mean—Fantina about to be married and gone, Bellela betrothed, Morata nearly full grown. If you did still yearn to begone somewhere …”

“You are right again. I had not been counting, but I am very nearly at liberty again, am I not?”

“I freely give you leave. But I would miss you. Whatever I said before, I would miss you dreadfully. Still, I keep my promises, too.”

“You do, yes. And now you mention it, I might just give the matter some thought. After Fantina’s wedding, I could go abroad for—oh, no more than a short journey, to be back in time for Bellela’s wedding. Maybe go only as far as Constantinople, see old Cuzìn Nico. Yes, I might do that. As soon as my back is better, anyway.”

“Your back is ailing you again? Oh, my dear.”

“Niente, niente. A twinge now and then, no more. Nothing to fret about. Why, my dear girl, one time in Persia, and again in Kurdistan, I had to get on a horse—no, the first time it was a camel—and ride despite having had my head near broken by the cudgels of brigands. I may have told you of those occurrences, and the—”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Well. I do thank you for the suggestion, Donata. Journeying again. I will indeed give it some thought.”

I went into the next room, which was my working chamber for when I brought home work to do, and she must have heard me rummaging about, for she called through the door:

“If you are looking for any of your maps, Marco, I think you have them all stored at the Compagnia fondaco.”

“No, no. Merely getting some paper and a quill. I thought I would finish this latest letter to Rustichello.”

“Why do you not do it in the garden? It is a tranquil and pleasant afternoon. You should be outside enjoying it. There will not be many more such days before winter.”

As I started downstairs, she said, “The young men are coming to dinner tonight. Zanino and Marco. That is why Nata was so busy in the kitchen, and probably why she spoke rudely to you. Since we will be having guests, can we make a small pact? Not to bring any of our quarreling to the table?”

“No more quarreling, Donata, not tonight or ever. I am heartily sorry for whatever cause for quarrel I ever gave. As you say, let us tranquilly enjoy the remaining days. All that went before—none of it matters any more.”

So I brought my writing materials out here to the little canalside courtyard we call our garden. It is planted now with chrysanthemums, the flower of Manzi, from seeds I brought from there, and the gold and fire and bronze colors make a gallant show in the mellow September sun. The occasional gòndola going by on the canal steers close here, so its occupants can admire my exotic blossoms, for most of the other gardens and window boxes in Venice contain summer flowers that have gone brown and limp and sad by this time of year. I sat myself down on this bench—slowly and carefully, not to rouse the twinge in my lower back—and I wrote down the conversation just concluded, and now for some time I have only sat here, thinking.

There is a word, asolare, that was first minted here in Venice but has now, I believe, been appropriated into every language of the Italian peninsula. It is a good and useful word, asolare—it means to sit in the sun and do absolutely nothing—all that in one word. I would not have thought it could ever in my whole life apply to me. For most of my life, God knows, it did not. But now, as I think back—over those busy years, the ceaseless journeying, the eventful miles and li and farsakhs, the friends and enemies and loved ones who journeyed too for a while and then were lost along the way—of all those things, I remember now a rule my father taught me long ago, when I first strode out as a journeyer. He said, “If ever you are lost in a wilderness, Marco, go always downhill. Always downhill, and eventually you will come to water, and where there is water there will also be provender and shelter and companionship. It may be a long way, but go always downhill and you will come at last to some place safe and warm and secure.”

I have come a long, long way, and here is the foot of the hill at last, and here am I: an old man sunning himself in the last beams of an afternoon late in a waning month of the season of the falling leaf.

Once, when I rode with the Mongol army, I noticed a war horse galloping along in one of the columns, neatly keeping gait and place with the troops, handsomely caparisoned in leather body armor, with sword and lance in scabbard—but the horse’s saddle was empty. The Orlok Bayan told me, “That was the steed of a good warrior named Jangar. It bore him into many battles in which he fought bravely, and into his last battle, in which he perished. Jangar’s horse will continue to ride with us, fully armed, as long as its heart calls it to battle.”

The Mongols knew well that even a horse would prefer to fall in combat, or run until its heart failed, than be retired to lush pasture and uselessness and the idle waiting, waiting, waiting.

I think back on everything I have chronicled here, and everything that was written in the earlier book, and I wonder if I might not have put it all into just seven small words: “I went away and I came back.” But no, that would not be quite true. It is never the same man who comes home, whether he be returning from a humdrum day’s labor at his counting house, or returning after many years in the far places, the long ways, the blue distances, in lands where magic is no mystery but an everyday occurrence, in cities fit to have poems made about them:

Heaven is far from me and you,

But here for us are Hang and Su!

For a while when I came home—before I was relegated to a commonplace, and ignored—I was derided as a liar and a braggart and a fableor. But those who derided me were wrong. I came back with not nearly so many lies as I took with me when I went away. I departed Venice shining-eyed with expectation of finding those Cockaigne-dream lands described by the earlier Crusaders and the biographers of Alexander and all the other mythmakers—expecting unicorns and dragons and the legendary king-saint Prete Zuàne and fantastic wizards and mystical religions of enviable wisdom. I found them, too, and if I came back to tell that not all of them were what legend has made us believe, was not the truth about them just as wonderful?

Sentimental people speak of heartbreak, but those people are wrong, too. No heart ever really breaks. I know it well. When my heart leans eastward, as it does so often, it bends most poignantly, but it does not break.

Up there in Donata’s chamber, I let her believe that she was pleasantly surprising me with the news that my long bondage to Home was finally over. I pretended I had not for years been thinking, “Shall I go now?” and each time deciding, “No, not now”—deferring to my responsibilities, to my promise to stay, to my aging wife and my three unexceptional daughters—every time saying to myself, “I will wait for a more propitious occasion to take my leave.” Up there in Donata’s chamber, I pretended also to receive her news gladly, that now I could go. And, just to appear properly grateful for her having volunteered that news, I pretended also that yes, I might now go again a-journeying. I know I will not. I was deceiving her when I implied that, but it was only a small deception of her, and I meant it kindly, and she will not be displeased when she realizes that I was deceiving her. But I cannot deceive myself. I waited too long, I am now too old, the time has come too late.

Old Bayan was still a fighting man at about the age I am now. And, at about this same age, my father and even my sleepwalking uncle made the long and rigorous return journey from Khanbalik to Venice. Old as I am, I am no more derelict than they were. Perhaps even my backache would benefit from being jolted by a long saddle ride. I do not believe it to be physical debility that dissuades me now from journeying again. Rather, I have the melancholy suspicion that I have seen all the best and worst and most interesting there was to see, and wherever I might go now would prove a disappointment by comparison.

Of course, if I could have the least hope that on some street in some city in Kithai or Manzi, I might astonishingly meet again a beautiful woman—as here in Venice I met Donata—who would remind me irresistibly of yet another beautiful woman long gone … Ah, for that chance I would journey, on hands and knees if necessary, to the ends of the earth. But that is an impossibility. And however much a new-met woman might resemble my remembered one, it would not be she.

So I go no more. Io me asolo. I sit in the last sunlight, here on the last slope of my life’s long hill, and I do absolutely nothing … except remember, for I have much to remember. As I long ago remarked at someone else’s graveside, I possess a treasure trove of memories with which to enliven eternity. I can enjoy those mementos through all the dying afternoons like this one, and then through the endless dead night underground.

But I also said once, maybe more than once, that I should like to live forever. And a lovely lady once told me that I would never get old. Well, thanks to you, Luigi, both those marvelous things may come to pass. Whether the fictional and disguised Marco Polo of your new work will be well received, I cannot predict, but the earlier book which you and I compiled together seems to have made its place secure in the libraries of many countries, and appears likely long to endure. In those pages I was not old, and in them I will go on living as long as the pages are read. I am grateful to you for that, Luigi.

Now the sun is setting, and the golden light fades, and the flowers of Manzi begin to fold their petals, and the blue mist rises from the canal, as blue as reminiscence, and now I would go to an old man’s sleep, a young man’s dreams. I bid you farewell, Rustichello of Pisa, and I subscribe myself

MARCO POLO OF VENICE AND THE WORLD, HIS YIN:

set down this 20th day

of September in the

Year of Our Lord 1319,

by the Han count 4017,

the Year of the Ram.