Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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When Marco Polo lay on his deathbed,

his priest, his friends and relations

clustered around him to plead that he

at last renounce the countless lies he

had related as his true adventures, so his

soul would go cleansed to Heaven. The

old man raised up, roundly damned them

all and declared, “I have not told

the half of what I saw and did!”

ACCORDING TO

FRA JACOPO D’ACQUI,

MARCO POLO’S CONTEMPORARY

AND HIS FIRST BIOGRAPHER

Come hither, great princes! Come hither, emperors and kings, dukes and marquises, knights and burgesses! Come hither, you people of all degrees, who wish to see the many faces of mankind and to know the diversities of the whole world! Take up this book and read it, or have it read to you. For herein you will find all the greatest wonders and most marvelous curiosities … .

AH, LUIGI, LUIGI! In the worn and wrinkled fustian of those old pages I hear your very voice again.

It had been many years since I last looked into our book, but when your letter came I fetched it out once more. I can still smile at it and admire it simultaneously. The admiration is for its having made me famous, however little I may deserve that fame, and the smile is for its having made me notorious. Now you say that you wish to write another work, an epic poem this time, again incorporating the adventures of Marco Polo—if I will grant that liberty—but attributing them to an invented protagonist.

I cast back in my memory to our first meeting, in the cellars of that Genoa palazzo where we prisoners of war were lodged. I remember how diffidently you approached me, and with what reticence you spoke:

“Messer Marco, I am Luigi Rustichello, late of Pisa, and I have been a captive here since long before you arrived. I have listened to you telling that hilariously ribald story of the Hindu with his ahemcaught in the holy rock hole. I have heard you tell it three times now. Once to your fellow prisoners, again to the warder, and yet again to the visiting almoner of the Brotherhood of Justice.”

I inquired, “Are you weary of hearing it, Messere?”

And you said, “Not at all, Messere, but you will soon be weary of the telling. Many more persons will want to hear that tale, and all the other tales you have told, and any others which perhaps you have not told yet. Before you tire of the telling, or of the stories themselves, why do you not simply tell to meall your recollections of your travels and adventures? Tell them only the once and let me set them down on paper. I am a writer of some facility and much experience. Your tales could make a considerable book, Messer Marco, and multitudes of people then can read it for themselves.”

And so I did, and so you did, and so the multitudes have done. Though many other journeyers before me had written of their travels, none of those works ever enjoyed the immediate and continuing popularity of our Description of the World.Perhaps, Luigi, it was because you chose to transcribe my words in French, the most widely known Western language. Or perhaps you made my stories better in the writing than I could do in the telling. At any rate, somewhat to my surprise, our book became much read and talked of and sought after. It was copied and recopied, and by now has been translated into every other language of Christendom, and of those versions, too, countless copies have been taken and circulated.

But none of them tells the singular story of the anguished Hindu and his rape of a rock.

When I sat in that clammy Genoa prison, recounting my reminiscences, and you sat putting them into proper words, we decided that they would be told in onlythe most proper words. You had your reputation to consider, and I had my family name. You were the Rustichello of Pisa, and I was a Polo of Venice. You were the romancier courtois, already known for your retellings of the classic tales of chivalry—of Tristan and Isolde, of Lancelot and Ginevra, of Amys and Amyllion. I was, as you described me in the book, representative of the “sajes et nobles citaiens de Venece.” So we agreed that our pages would contain only those of my adventures and observations which we could publish without a blush or a qualm, and which could be read without offending the Christian sensibilities even of maiden ladies or nuns.

Further, we determined to leave out of the book anything which might strain the credence of any stay-at-home reader. I recall that we even debated before we included my encounters with the stone that burns and the fabric that will not. Thus many of the most marvelous incidents of my travels were, so to speak, abandoned by the wayside of my wanderings. We left out the unbelievable and the bawdy and the scandalous. But now, you tell me, you want to mend those gaps—though still without hazarding my good name.

So your new protagonist will be called Monsieur Bauduin, not Messer Marco, and he will hail from Cherbourg, not Venice. But in all else he will be me. He will experience, enjoy, endure all that I did– andall that I left untold heretofore—if I will refresh your memory by telling those many stories to you again.

It is a great temptation, certainly. It would be like living those days anew—and those nights—and that is a thing I have long yearned to do. I always intended, you know, to journey again to the far eastward. But no, you could not have known. I have not spoken of that even in my family circle. It has been a dream I treasured too much to share … .

Yes, I meant to go again sometime. But when I was freed from Genoa and returned to Venice, the family business demanded my attention, and so I hesitated to depart. And then I met Donata, and she became my wife. So I hesitated again a while, and then there was a daughter. Naturally that gave me cause to hesitate, and there came a second daughter, and then there were three. So, for one reason and another, I kept on hesitating, and suddenly one day I was old.

Old! It is inconceivable! When I look into our book, Luigi, I see myself there a boy, and then a youth, and then in my manhood, and even at the book’s very end I am still a stalwart. But when I look into a glass, I see there an aged stranger, sapped and sagged and blemished and enfeebled by the corroding rusts of five and sixty years. I murmur, “Thatold man cannot go again a-journeying,” and then I realize: that old man is Marco Polo.

So your letter came to me at a vulnerable moment. And your suggestion that I contribute to a new book is an opportunity I will not let pass. If I cannot do again the things I once did, at the least I can remember them and take relish in them while I relate them, since I can now do that with the impunity of your Bauduin disguise. You may wonder at my so welcoming that disguise, as you may also have wondered at my remark that the earlier book earned me both undeserved renown and undeserved notoriety. I shall explain.

I never claimed to have been the first man to travel from the West into the far East, and you did not put any such boast into our book. Nevertheless, that seems to have been the impression produced upon most of its readers—or those readers living elsewhere than Venice, where no such illusion obtains. After all, my own Venetian father and uncle had gone to and returned from the East before they retraced their journey and that time took me with them. Also, in the East itself I met many other Westerners, of all nations from England to Hungary, who had arrived there before me, and some of whom stayed there longer than I did.

But long previous to them, many other Europeans had traversed the same Silk Road I trod. There was the Spanish rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, and the Franciscan friar Zuàne of Carpini, and the Flemish friar Guillaume of Rubrouck—and, like me, all those men published accounts of their travels. As far back as seven or eight hundred years ago, there were missionaries of the Nestorian Christian Church penetrating into Kithai, and there are many laboring there today. Even before Christian times, there must have been Western traders wandering to and from the East. It is known that the Pharaones of ancient Egypt wore the silk of the Orient, and silk is thrice mentioned in the Old Testament.

Numerous other things and the words describing them were, long before my time, made part of our Venetian language. Several of our city’s buildings are decorated, inside or out, with that sort of filigree fancywork we adopted from the Arabs and have long called arabesco. The murderous sassìn gets his name from the hashishiyin of Persia, men who kill at the instigation of a religious fervor induced by the drug hashish. The making of that cheap glazed fabric called indiana was learned in India, where that cloth is called chint, and where the inhabitants also inspired our Venetian expression “far l’Indiàn,” meaning to behave utterly stupidly.

No, I was not the first to go East or to return from there. Insofar as my fame rests on the misapprehension that I was, it is indeed unmerited. But my notoriety is even less deserved, for it depends on the widespread assumption of my dishonesty and untruthfulness. You and I, Luigi, put into our book only those observations and experiences we judged believable, but even so I am disbelieved. Here in Venice I am jeeringly called Marco Millions—an epithet implying not any wealth of ducats, but my supposed store of lies and exaggerations. That amuses me more than it annoys me, but my wife and daughters are exceedingly vexed at being known as the Dona and Damìne Milioni.

Hence my willingness to put on the mask of your fictional Bauduin as I commence to tell everything that has not until now been told. Let the world, if the world chooses, think it alla fiction. It is better to be disbelieved in such matters than to remain forever mute about them.

But first, Luigi:

From the sample of manuscript you sent with your letter, to show me how you propose to open Bauduin’s story, I gather that your command of French has considerably improved since you set down our Description of the World.I am emboldened to make another small comment on that earlier book. A reader of those pages might think that Marco Polo had been a man of sober age and judgment through all his traveling days—and that he had somehow done that traveling through the sky, so high aloft that he could see all at once the entire breadth of our earth, and point to one and then another land and say with certainty, “Herein this one differs from that.” True, I was forty when I came home from my journeying. I hope I came back a little more wise and discerning than when I went, for I was then only a wide-eyed adolescent—ignorant, inexperienced, foolish. Also, like any journeyer, I had to see all lands and the contents of them, not from the hindsight vantage of some twenty-five years later, but in the order in which I came upon them in my travels. It was kind and flattering of you, Luigi, to portray me in that earlier book as having been always a man all-seeing and all-knowing, but your new work might benefit if you made its narrator somewhat more true to life.

I would further suggest, Luigi, if you truly intend to cut your Monsieur Bauduin to the pattern of Marco Polo, that you commence his career by giving him a misspent youth of reckless abandon and misbehavior. That is one thing which I am here telling for the first time. I did not depart from Venice merely because I was eager for new horizons. I left Venice because I had to—or, at any rate, because Venice decreed that I had to.

Of course I cannot know, Luigi, howclosely you wish to make your Bauduin’s history parallel my own. But you did say “tell all,” so I will begin even before the beginning.

FOR GLENDA

VENICE

1

ALTHOUGH the Polo family has been Venetian, and proud of it, for perhaps three hundred years now, it did not originate on this Italian peninsula, but on the other side of the Adriatic Sea. Yes, we were originally from Dalmatia, and the family name would then have been something like Pavlo. The first of my forebears to sail to Venice, and stay here, did so sometime after the year 1000. He and his descendants must have risen rather quickly to prominence in Venice, for already in the year 1094 a Domènico Polo was a member of the Grand Council of the Republic, and in the following century so was a Piero Polo.

The most remote ancestor of whom I have even a dim recollection was my grandfather Andrea. By his time, every man of our house of Polo was officially designated an Ene Aca (meaning N.H., which in Venice means Nobilis Homo or gentleman), and was addressed as Messere, and we had acquired the family arms: a field argent bearing three birds sable with beaks gules. This is actually a visual play on words, for that emblematic bird of ours is the bold and industrious jackdaw, which is called in the Venetian tongue the pola.

Nono Andrea had three sons: my uncle Marco, for whom I was named, my father Nicolò and my uncle Mafìo. What they did when they were boys I do not know, but when they grew up, the eldest son, Marco, became the Polo trading company’s agent in Constantinople in the Latin Empire, while his brothers remained in Venice to manage the company’s headquarters and keep up the family palazzo. Not until after Nono Andrea’s death did Nicolò and Mafìo scratch the itch to go traveling themselves, but when they did they went farther than any Polo before them had gone.

In the year 1259, when they sailed away from Venice, I was five years old. My father had told my mother that they intended to go only as far as Constantinople, to visit their long-absent elder brother. But, as that brother eventually reported to my mother, after they had stayed with him there for a time, they took a notion to go on eastward. She never heard another report of them, and, after a twelvemonth, she decided they must be dead. That was not just the vaporings of an abandoned and grieving woman; it was the most likely possible surmise. For it was in that year of 1259 that the barbarian Mongols, having conquered all the rest of the Eastern world, pushed their implacable advance to the very gates of Constantinople. While every other white man was fleeing or quailing before “the Golden Horde,” Mafìo and Nicolò Polo had gone marching foolhardily right into their front line—or, considering how the Mongols were then regarded, better say: into their slavering and champing jaws.

We had reason to regard the Mongols as monsters, did we not? The Mongols were something more and something less than human, were they not? More than human, in their fighting ability and physical endurance. Less than human, in their savagery and lust for blood. Even their everyday food was known to be reeking raw meat and the rancid milk of mares. And it was known that, when a Mongol army ran out of those rations, it would unhesitatingly cast lots to choose every tenth man of its ranks to be slaughtered for food for the others. It was known that every Mongol warrior wore leather armor only on his breast, not his back; so that, if he ever didfeel cowardice, he could not turn and run from an opponent. It was known that the Mongols polished their leather armor with grease, and they procured that grease by boiling down their human victims. All those things were known in Venice, and were repeated and retold, in hushed voices of horror, and some of those things were even true.

I was just five years old when my father went away, but I could share the universal dread of those savages from the East, for I was already familiar with the spoken threat: “The Mongols will get you! The orda will get you!” I had heard that all through my childhood, and so had every other little boy whenever he required admonishment. “The orda will get you if you do not eat up all your supper. If you do not go straight to bed. If you do not cease your noise.” The orda was wielded by mothers and governesses, in those times, as they had earlier threatened their misbehaving children with “The orco will get you!”

The orco is the demon giant that mothers and nursemaids have forever kept on call, so it was no strain for them to substitute the word orda: the horde. And the Mongol horde was assuredly the more real and believable monster; the women invoking it did not have to feign the fright in their voices. The fact that they even knew that word is evidence that they had reason to fear the orda as much as any child did. For it was the Mongols’ own word, yurtu, originally meaning the great pavilioned tent of the chieftain of a Mongol encampment, and it was adopted, only slightly changed, into all the European languages, to mean what Europeans thought of when they thought of Mongols—a marching mob, a teeming mass, an irresistible swarm, a horde.

But I did not much longer hear that threat from my mother. As soon as she decided that my father was dead and gone, she commenced to languish and dwindle and weaken. When I was seven years old, she died. I have only one recollection of her, from a few months before that. The last time she ventured outside our Casa Polo, before she took to her bed and never got up again, was to accompany me on the day I was enrolled in school. Indeed, although that day was in another century, nearly sixty years ago, I recall it quite clearly.

At that time, our Ca’ Polo was a small palazzo in the city’s confino of San Felice. In the bright morning hour of mezza-terza, my mother and I came out the house door onto the cobbled street alongside the canal. Our old boatman, the black Nubian slave Michièl, was waiting with our batèlo moored to its striped pole, and the boat was freshly waxed for the occasion, gleaming in all its colors. My mother and I got into it and seated ourselves under the canopy. Also for the occasion, I was dressed in new and fine raiment: a tunic of brown Lucca silk, I remember, and hose soled with leather. So, as old Michièl rowed us down the narrow Rio San Felice, he kept exclaiming things like “Che zentilòmo!” and “Dassèno, xestu, Messer Marco?”—meaning “Quite the gentleman!” and “Truly, is that you, Master Marco?”—which unaccustomed admiration made me feel proud and uncomfortable. He did not desist until he turned the batèlo into the Grand Canal, where the heavy boat traffic required all his attention.

That day was one of Venice’s best sort of days. The sun was shining, but its light lay on the city in a manner more diffused than sharp-edged. There was no sea mist or land haze, for the sunlight was by no means diminished. Rather, the sun seemed to shine not in direct beams, but with a more subtle luminosity, the way candles glow when they are set in a many-crystaled chandelier. Anyone who knows Venice has known that light : as if pearls had been crushed and powdered—pearl-colored pearls and the pale pink ones and the pale blue—and that powder ground so fine that its particles hung in the air, not dimming the light but making it more lustrous yet soft at the same time. And the light came from other places than the sky alone. It was reflected from the canals’ dancing waters, so it put dapples and spangles and roundels of that pearl-powder light bouncing about on all the walls of old wood and brick and stone, and softened their rough textures as well. That day had a gentling bloom on it like the bloom on a peach.

Our boat slid under the Grand Canal’s one bridge, the Ponte Rialto —the old, low, pontoon bridge with the swing-away center section; it had not then been rebuilt as the arched drawbridge it is now. Then we passed the Erbarìa, the market where young men, after a night of wine, go strolling in the early morning to clear their heads with the fragrance of its flowers and herbs and fruits. Then we turned off the canal again into another narrow one. A little way up that, my mother and I debarked at the Campo San Todaro. Around that square are situated all the lower-grade schools of the city, and at that hour the open space seethed with boys of all ages, playing, running, chattering, wrestling, while they waited for the school day to begin.

My mother presented me to the school maistro, presenting him also with the documents pertaining to my birth and to my registry in the Libro d’Oro. (“The Golden Book” is the popular name for the Register of Protocol in which the Republic keeps the records of all its Ene Aca families. ) Fra Varisto, a very stout and forbidding man in voluminous robes, appeared less than impressed by the documents. He looked at them and snorted, “Brate!” which is a not very polite word meaning a Slav or Dalmatian. My mother countered with a ladylike sniff, and murmured, “Veneziàn nato e spuà.”

“Venetian spawned and born, perhaps,” rumbled the friar. “But Venetian bred,not yet. Not until he has endured proper schooling and the stiffening of school discipline.”

He took up a quill and rubbed the point of it on the shiny skin of his tonsure, I suppose to lubricate its nib, then dipped it in an inkwell and opened a tremendous book. “Date of Confirmation?” he inquired. “Of First Communion?”

My mother told him and added, with some hauteur, that I had not, like most children, been allowed to forget my Catechism as soon as I had been confirmed, but could still say it and the Creed and the Commandments on demand, as facilely as I could say the Our Father. The maistro grunted, but made no additional notation in his big book. My mother then went on to ask some questions of her own: about the school’s curriculum and its examinations and its rewards for achievement and its punishments for failure and …

All mothers take their sons to school for the first time with a considerable pride, I suppose, but also, I think, with an equal measure of wariness and even sadness, for they are relinquishing those sons to a mysterious realm they never can enter. Almost no female, unless she is destined for holy orders, ever gets the least bit of formal schooling. So her son, as soon as he learns just so much as to write his own name, has vaulted somewhere beyond her reach forever after.

Fra Varisto patiently told my mother that I would be taught the proper use of my own language and of Trade French as well, that I would be taught to read and to write and to figure in numbers, that I would learn at least the rudiments of Latin from the Timenof Donadello, and the rudiments of history and cosmography from Callisthenes’ Book of Alexander,and religion from Bible stories. But my mother persisted with so many other anxious questions that the friar finally said, in a voice mingling compassion and exasperation, “Dona e Madona, the boy is merely being enrolled in school. He is not taking the veil. We will immure him merely during the daylight hours. You will still have him the rest of the time.”

She had me for the rest of her life, but that was not long. So thereafter I heard the threat that “the Mongols will get you if” only from Fra Varisto at school, and at home from old Zulià. This was a woman who really was a Slav, born in some back corner of Bohemia, and clearly of peasant stock, for she always walked like a washerwoman waddling with a full wash bucket dangling from either hand. She had been my mother’s personal maid since before I was born. After my mother’s death, Zulià took her place as my nurse and monitor, and took the courtesy title of Aunt. In assuming the task of raising me up to be a decent and responsible young man, Zia Zulià did not exert much strictness—apart from frequently invoking the orda—nor did she, I must confess, have much success in her self-appointed task.

In part, this was because my namesake Uncle Marco had not come back to Venice after the disappearance of his two brothers. He had for too long made his home in Constantinople, and was comfortable there, although by this time the Latin Empire had succumbed to the Byzantine. Since my other uncle and my father had left the family business in the keeping of expert and trustworthy clerks, and the family palazzo in the keeping of similarly efficient domestics, Zio Marco left them so. Only the most weighty but least urgent matters were referred to him, by courier vessel, for his consideration and decision. Managed in that manner, both the Compagnia Polo and the Ca’ Polo went on functioning as well as ever.

The one Polo property that misfunctioned was myself. Being the last and sole male scion of the Polo line—the only one in Venice, anyway—I had to be tenderly preserved, and I knew it. Though I was not of an age to have any say in the management of either the business or the house (fortunately), neither was I answerable to any adult authority for my own actions. At home I demanded my own way, and I got it. Not Zia Zulià, nor the maggiordomo, old Attilio, nor any of the lesser servants dared to raise a hand against me, and seldom a voice. My Catechism I never again recited, and soon forgot all the responses. At school I began to shirk my lessons. When Fra Varisto despaired of wielding the Mongols and resorted to wielding a ferrule, I simply stayed away from school.

It is a small wonder that I got as much formal education as I did. But I remained in school long enough to learn to read and write and do arithmetic and speak the Trade French of commerce, mainly because I knew I should need those abilities when I grew old enough to take over the family business. And I learned what history of the world, and what description of it, is supplied by The Book of Alexander.I absorbed all of that, mainly because the great Alexander’s journeys of conquest had taken him eastward, and I could imagine my father and uncle having followed some of the same trails. But I saw little likelihood of my ever needing a knowledge of Latin, and it was when my school class had its collective nose forced into the boring rules and precepts of the Timenthat I pointed my nose elsewhere.

Though my seniors loudly lamented and predicted dire ends for me, I really do not think that my willfulness signified that I was an evil child. My chief besetting sin was curiosity, but of course that is a sin by our Western standards. Tradition insists that we behave in conformity with our neighbors and peers. The Holy Church demands that we believe and have faith, that we stifle any questions or opinions derived from our own reasoning. The Venetian mercantile philosophy decrees that the only palpable truths are those numerated on the bottommost ledger line where debits and credits are balanced.

But something in my nature rebelled against the constraints accepted by all others of my age and class and situation. I wished to live a life beyond the rules and the ruled ledger lines and the lines written in the Missal. I was impatient and perhaps distrustful of received wisdom, those morsels of information and exhortation so neatly selected and prepared and served up like courses of a meal, for consumption and assimilation. I much preferred to make my own hunt for knowledge, even if I found it raw and unpalatable to chew and nauseating to swallow, as often I would do. My guardians and preceptors accused me of lazy avoidance of the hard work required to gain an education. They never realized that I had chosen to follow a far harder path, and would follow it—wherever it led—from that childhood time through all the years of my manhood.

On the days when I stayed away from the school and could not go home, I had to idle the days away somewhere, so sometimes I loitered about the establishment of the Compagnia Polo. It was situated then, as now, on the Riva Ca’ de Dio, the waterfront esplanade which looks directly out onto the lagoon. On the water side, that esplanade is fringed with wooden quays, between which are ships and boats moored stem to stern and side by side. There are vessels of small and medium size: the shallow-draft batèli and gòndole of private houses, the bragozi fishing boats, the floating saloons called burchielli. And there are the much grander seagoing galleys and galeazze of Venice, interspersed with English and Flemish cogs, Slavic trabacoli and Levantine caïques. Many of those ocean vessels are so large that their stems and bowsprits overhang the street, and cast a latticed shadow on its cobbles, almost all the way to the variegated building fronts that line the esplanade’s landward side. One of those buildings was (and still is) ours: a cavernous warehouse, with one little interior space of it partitioned off for a counting room.

I liked the warehouse. It was aromatic of all the smells of all the countries of the world, for it was heaped and piled with sacks and boxes and bales and barrels of all the world’s produce—everything from Barbary wax and English wool to Alexandria sugar and Marseilles sardines. The warehouse workers were heavily muscled men, hung about with hammers, fist-hooks, coils of rope and other implements. They were forever busy, one man perhaps wrapping in burlap a consignment of Cornish tinware, another hammering the lid on a barrel of Catalonia olive oil, yet another shouldering a crate of Valencia soap out to the docks, and every man seeming always to be shouting some command like “logo!” or “a corando!” at the others.

But I liked the counting room, too. In that cramped coop sat the director of all that business and busy-ness, the old clerk Isidoro Priuli. With no apparent exertion of muscle, no rushing about or bellowing, no tools but his abaco, his quill and his ledger books, Maistro Doro controlled that crossroads of all the world’s goods. With a little clicking of the abaco’s colored counters and a scribble of ink in a ledger column, he could send to Bruges an ànfora of Corsican red wine and to Corsica, in exchange, a skein of Flanders lace, and, as the two items passed each other in our warehouse, dip off a metadella measure of the wine and snip off a braccio length of the lace to pay the Polos’ profit on the transaction.

Because so many of the warehouse’s contents were flammable, Isidoro did not allow himself the aid of a lamp or even a single candle to light his working space. Instead, he had arranged on the wall above and behind his head a large concave mirror made of real glass, which scooped in what light it could from the day outside and directed it down onto his high table. Seated there at his books, Maistro Doro looked like a very small and shriveled saint with an oversized halo. I would stand peering over the edge of that table, marveling that just the twitch of the maistro’s fingers could exercise so much authority, and he would tell me things about the work in which he took such pride.