Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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Any Mongol officer, besides being a good leader in combat, must at other times be what Moses was to the Israelites on the move. Whether he is the captain of ten men or the sardar of ten thousand, he is responsible for the movement and the provisioning of them and their wives and their women and their children and many other camp followers—such as the aged veterans who have no usefulness whatever, but who have the right to refuse retirement into garrison inactivity. The officer is also responsible for the herds of livestock that go afield with his troops: the horses for riding, the beasts for butchering, the yaks or asses or mules or camels for pack carrying. To count just the horses, every Mongol man travels with a string of war steeds and kumis-milk mares that number, on the average, eighteen all together.

Of the various leading officers mentioned by my hosts, the only name I recognized was that of the Ilkhan Kaidu. So I asked if they had ever been led in battle by the Khakhan Kubilai whom I hoped to meet in the not too distant future. They said they had never had the high honor to be directly under his command, but had been fortunate enough to glimpse him once or twice at some remove. They said he was of manly beauty and soldierly bearing and statesmanlike wisdom, but that the most impressive of his qualities was his much-feared temper.

“He can be more fierce even than our fierce Ilkhan Kaidu,” said one of them. “No man is eager to raise the wrath of the Khakhan Kubilai. Not even Kaidu.”

“Nor the very elements of the earth and sky,” said another. “Why, people call out the name of the Khakhan when it thunders—‘Kubilai!’—so the lightning will not strike them. I have heard even our fearless Kaidu do that.”

“Truly,” said another, “in the presence of the Khakhan Kubilai, the wind does not presume to blow too strongly, or the rain to fall harder than a drizzle, or to splash up any mud on his boots. Even the water in his pitcher shrinks fearfully from him.”

I commented that that must be rather a nuisance when he was thirsty. That was a sacrilegious remark to make about the most powerful man in the world, but no one present raised an eyebrow, for we were all quite drunk by then. We were seated again in the yurtu, and my hosts had gone through several flagons of kumis, and I had imbibed a goodly amount of their arkhi. The Mongols will not ever constrain themselves to have just one drink, or let a guest have just one, for when the one is downed they exclaim:

“A man cannot walk on one foot!” and they pour another. And that one foot requires another, and that another, and so on. The Mongols go even into death still drinking, so to speak. A slain warrior is always buried on the battlefield under a cairn of stones, and he is interred in a seated position, holding his drinking horn in his hand at waist level.

The day had given way to darkness when I decided that I had better stop drinking or risk qualifying for interment myself. I climbed to my feet and thanked my hosts for their hospitality and made my farewells and took my leave of them, while they cried cordially after me, “Mendu, sain urkek! A good horse and a wide plain to you, until we meet again!”

I was not on a horse, but afoot, and therefore staggered somewhat. But that excited no comment from anybody, as I weaved through the bok and back through the Kashgar gate and through the scented streets to the karwansarai of the Five Felicities. I lurched into our chamber, and stopped short, staring. A large, black-garbed, black-bearded priest stood there. It took me a moment to recognize him as my Uncle Mafio and, in my fuddled condition, all I could think was, “Dear God, what depth of depravity has he sunk to now? Uu?”

3

I slumped onto a bench and sat grinning as my uncle preened piously in his cassock. My father, sounding peeved, quoted an old saying: “The clothes make the man, but a habit does not make a monk. Let alone a priest, Mafio. Where did you get it?”

“I bought it from that Father Boyajian. You remember him, Nico, from when we were here last.”

“Yes. An Armeniyan would probably peddle the Host. Why did you not make him an offer for that?”

“A sacramental wafer would mean nothing to the Ilkhan Kaidu, but this disguise will. His own chief wife, the Ilkhatun, is a converted Christian—at least a Nestorian. So I am trusting that Kaidu will respect this cloth.”

“Why? Youdo not. I have heard you criticize the Church in utterances that verge on heresy. And now this. It is blasphemy!”

Uncle Mafio protested, “The cassock is not in itself a liturgical garment. Anybody can wear one, as long as he does not pretend to its sanctity. I do not. I could not, if I wanted to. Deuteronomy, you know: ‘An eunuch, whose testicles are broken, shall not enter into the Church of the Lord.’ Capòn mal caponà.”

“Mafìo! Do not try to justify your impiety with self-pity.”

“I am only saying that if Kaidu mistakes me for a priest, I see no need to correct him. Boyajian gives it as his opinion that a Christian may employ any subterfuge in dealing with a heathen.”

“I do not accept a Nestorian reprobate as an authority on Christian behavior.”

“Had you rather accept Kaidu’s decree? Confiscation, or worse? Look, Nico. He has Kubilai’s letter; he knows that we were bidden to bring priests to Kithai. Without any priests, we are mere vagrants wandering through Kaidu’s domain with a most tempting lot of valuables. I will not claim that I am a priest, but if Kaidu supposes it—”

“That white collar never protected anybody’s neck from a headsman’s ax.”

“It is better than nothing. Kaidu can do as he pleases to ordinary travelers, but if he slays or detains a priest, the ripples will eventually reach Kubilai’s court. And a priest whom Kubilai sentfor? We know that Kaidu is temerarious, but I doubt that he is suicidally so.” Uncle Mafio turned to me. “What do you say, Marco? Observe your uncle as a reverend father. How do I look?”

“Magnissifent,” I said thickly.

“Hm,” he murmured, regarding me more closely. “It will help, yes, if Kaidu is as drunk as you are.”

I started to say that he probably would be, but I fell suddenly asleep where I sat.

The next morning, my uncle was again wearing the cassock when he came to the karwansarai’s dining table, and my father again began berating him. Nostril and I were present, but did not participate in the dispute. To the Muslim slave it was, I suppose, a matter of total unconcern. And I stayed silent because my head was hurting. But both the argument and our breaking of our fast were interrupted by the arrival of a Mongol messenger from the bok. The man, dressed in splendid war regalia, swaggered into the inn like a newcome conqueror, strode directly to our table and, without any courtesy of greeting, said to us—in Farsi to make sure we all understood:

“Arise and come with me, dead men, for the Ilkhan Kaidu would hear your last words!”

Nostril gasped so that he choked on whatever he was eating, and began to cough, meanwhile goggling his eyes with terror. My father pounded him on the back and said, “Be not alarmed, good slave. That is the usual wording of a summons from a Mongol lord. It portends no harm.”

“Or it does not necessarily,” my uncle amended. “I am still glad that I thought of this disguise.”

“Too late to make you doff it now,” muttered my father, for the messenger was pointing imperiously toward the outer door. “I just hope, Mafio, that you will temper your profane performance with priestly decorum.”

Uncle Mafio raised his right hand to each of the three of us in the sign of benediction, smiled beatifically and said with utmost unction, “Si non caste, tamen caute.”

The mock-pious gesture and the mock-solemn Latin play on words were so typical of my uncle’s mischievously cheerful bravado that I—even feeling as sour as I did—had to laugh aloud. Granted, Mafio Polo had some lamentable shortcomings as a Christian and as a man, but he was a good companion to have standing by in an uneasy situation. The Mongol messenger glowered at me when I laughed, and he barked his command at us again, and we all got up and followed him from the building at a quick march.

It was raining that day, which did not do much to lighten my mal di capo, or to make more cheerful our trudge through the streets and beyond the city wall and through the packs of yapping and snarling dogs of the Mongol bok. We hardly raised our heads to look around until the messenger shouted, “Halt!” and directed us to pass between the two fires burning before the entrance to Kaidu’s yurtu.

I had not been near it on my previous visit to the camp, and now I realized that thiswas the sort of yurtu which must have inspired the Western word “horde.” It would indeed have encompassed a whole horde of the ordinary yurtu tents, for this was a grand pavilion. It was almost as high and as big around as the karwansarai in which we were residing; but that was a solidly built edifice, and this was entirely of yellow-clayed felt, supported by tent poles and stakes and braided horsehair ropes. Several mastiffs roared and lunged against their chains at the south-facing entrance, and on either side of that flapped opening hung elaborately embroidered felt panels. The yurtu was no palace, but it certainly overshadowed the lesser ones of the bok. And next to it rested the wagon which transported it from place to place, for Kaidu’s pavilion was usually moved intact, not dismantled and bundled. The wagon was the most huge I have ever seen anywhere: a flat bed of planks, as big as a meadow, balanced on an axle like a tree trunk and with wheels like mill wheels. The drawing of it, I learned later, required fully twenty-two yaks hitched in two wide spans of eleven abreast. (The drafters had to be placid yaks or oxen; no horses or camels would have worked in such close proximity. )

The messenger ducked under the yurtu’s flap to announce us to his lord, emerged again and jerked his arm to order us inside. Then, as we passed him, he barred Nostril’s way, growling, “No slaves!” and kept him outside. There was a reason for that. The Mongols regard themselves as naturally superior to all other freemen in the world, even kings and such, so any man who is held inferior by theirinferiors is considered unworthy even of contempt.

The Ilkhan Kaidu regarded us in silence as we crossed the brilliantly carpeted and pillow-furnished interior, to where he sat sprawled on a heap of furs—all gorgeously striped and spotted: evidently the pelts of tigers and pards—on a dais that set him above us. He was dressed in battle armor of polished metals and leathers, and wore on his head an earflapped hat of karakul. He had eyebrows that looked like detached bits of the kinky black karakul, and not small bits either. Under them, his slit eyes were red-shot, seemingly inflamed by rage at the very sight of us. On his either side stood a warrior, as handsomely caparisoned as the man who had fetched us. One held a lance erect, the other held a sort of canopy on a pole over Kaidu’s head, and both stood as rigid as statues.

We three made a slow approach. In front of the furry throne, we made a dignified slight bow, all together, as if we had rehearsed it, and looked up at Kaidu, waiting for him to make the first indication of the mood of this meeting. He continued for some moments to stare at us, as if we were vermin that had crawled out from under the yurtu’s carpetings. Then he did something disgusting. He made a hawking noise from deep in his throat, bringing up a great wad of phlegm into his mouth. Then he languidly unsprawled himself from his couch and stood upright and turned to the guardsman at his right, and with his thumb pressed the man’s chin so that his mouth opened. Then Kaidu spat his hawked-up gob of substance directly into the man’s mouth and thumbed it shut again—the warrior’s expression and rigidity never changing—and languidly resumed his seat, his eyes again on us and glittering evilly.

It had clearly been a gesture intended to awe us with his power and arrogance and uncordiality, and it would have served to cow me, I think. But at least one of us—Mafìo Polo—was not impressed. When Kaidu spoke his first words, in the Mongol language and in a harsh voice: “Now, interlopers—” he got no further, for my uncle daringly interrupted, in the same language:

“First, if it please the Ilkhan, we will sing a praise to God for having conducted us safely across so many lands into the Lord Kaidu’s august presence.” And, to the astonishment of myself—probably also of my father and the Mongols—he began bawling out the old Christmas hymn:

A solis orbu cardine

Et usque terre limitem …

“It does not please the Ilkhan,” Kaidu said through his teeth, when my uncle drew breath at that point. But my father and I, emboldened, had joined in for the next two lines:

Christum canamus principem

Natum Maria virgine …

“Enough!”bellowed Kaidu, and our voices trailed off. Fixing his red eyes on Uncle Mafio, the Ilkhan said, “You are a Christian priest.” He said it natly—loathingly, in fact—so my uncle did not have to take it as a question, which would have required him to deny it.

He said only, “I am here at the behest of the Khan of All Khans,” and indicated the paper Kaidu was holding clenched in one hand.

“Hui, yes,” said Kaidu, with an acid smile. He unfolded the document in a manner suggesting that it was filthy to the touch. “At the behest of my esteemed cousin. I notice that my cousin wrote this ukaz on yellow paper, as the Chin emperors used to do. Kubilai and I conquered that decadent empire, but he more and more imitates its effete customs. Vakh! He has become no better than a Kalmuk! And our old war god Tengri is no longer good enough for him, either, it seems. Now he must import womanish Ferenghi priests.”

“Merely to enlarge his knowledge of the world, Lord Kaidu,” said my father, in a conciliatory voice. “Not to propagate any new—”

“The only way to know the world,” Kaidu said savagely, “is to seize it and wring it!” He flicked his lurid gaze from one to another of us. “Do you dispute that, uu?”

“To dispute the Lord Kaidu,” murmured my father, “would be like eggs attacking stones, as the saying goes.”

“Well, at least you manifest some good sense,” the Ilkhan said grudgingly. “I trust you also have the sense to realize that this ukaz is dated some years ago and some seven thousand li distant from here. Even if cousin Kubilai has not totally forgotten it by now, I am in no way bound to honor it.”

My uncle murmured, even more meekly than my father had done, “It is said: How can a tiger be subject to the law?”

“Exactly,” grunted the Ilkhan. “If I choose, I can regard you as mere trespassers. Ferenghi interlopers with no good intent. And I can condemn you to summary execution.”

“Some say,” murmured my father, more meekly yet, “that tigers are really the agents of Heaven, appointed to chase down those who have somehow eluded their deserved date with death.”

“Yes,” said the Ilkhan, looking slightly exasperated by all this agreement and mollification. “On the other hand, even a tiger can sometimes be lenient. Much as I detest my cousin for abandoning his Mongol heritage—much as I despise the increasing degeneracy of his court—I I would let you go there and join his retinue. I could, if I so choose.”

My father clapped his hands, as if in admiration of the Ilkhan’s wisdom, and said with delight, “Clearly the Lord Kaidu remembers, then, the old Han story of the clever wife Ling.”

“Of course,” said the Ilkhan. “It was in my mind as I spoke.” He unbent enough to smile frigidly at my father. My father smiled warmly back. There was an interval of silence. “However,” Kaidu resumed, “that story is told in many variations. In which version did you hear it, uu, trespasser?”

My father cleared his throat and declaimed, “Ling was wife to a rich man who was overfond of wine, and was forever sending her to the wine shop to fetch bottles for him. The lady Ling, fearing for his health, would deliberately prolong the errands, or water the wine, or hide it, to keep him from drinking so much. At which her husband would be wroth and would beat her. Finally, two things happened. The lady Ling fell out of love with her husband, although he was rich, and she noticed how handsome was the wine-shop clerk, although he was a humble tradesman. Thereafter, she willingly bought wine at her husband’s command, and even poured it for him, and urged it on him. Eventually the husband died in a drunkard’s convulsions, and she inherited all his wealth, and she married the wine-shop clerk, and they both were rich and happy ever after.”

“Yes,” said the Ilkhan. “That is the correct story.” There was another silence, and a longer one. Then Kaidu said, more to himself than to us, “Yes, the drunkard caused his own rot, and others helped it along, until he rotted through and fell, and was supplanted by a better. It is legendary, and it is salutary.”

Just as quietly, my uncle said, “Also legendary is the tiger’s patience in the tracking of his prey.”

Kaidu shook himself, as if awakening from a reverie, and said, “A tiger can be lenient as well as patient. I have already said so. I shall therefore let you all proceed in peace. I will even give you an escort against the hazards of the road. And you, priest, for all I care, you may convert cousin Kubilai and his entire court to your enfeebling religion. I hope you do. I wish you success.”

“One nod of the head,” my father exclaimed, “is heard farther than a thunderclap. You have done a good thing, Lord Kaidu, and its echoes will long resound.”

“Just one thing,” said the Ilkhan, again using a tone of severity. “I am told by my Lady Ilkhatun, who is a Christian and should know, that Christian priests maintain a vow of poverty, and possess nothing of material value. But I am also informed that you men travel with horses heavy-laden with treasure.”

My father threw my uncle a look of annoyance, and said, “Some baubles, Lord Kaidu. They belong to no priest, but are destined for your cousin Kubilai. They are tokens of tribute from the Shah of Persia and the Sultan of India Aryana.”

“The Sultan is my liege subject,” said Kaidu. “He has no right to give away what belongs to me. And the Shah is a subject of my cousin the Ilkhan Abagha, who is no friend to me. Whatever he sends is contraband, subject to confiscation. Do you understand me, uu?”

“But, Lord Kaidu, we have promised to deliver—”

“A broken promise is no more than a broken pot. The potter can always make more. Have no concern for your promises, Ferenghi. Just bring your packhorses at this hour tomorrow, here to my yurtu, and let me see which of the baubles catch my fancy. I may let you keep some few of them. Do you understand, uu?”

“Lord Kaidu—”

“Uu! Do you understand?”

“Yes, Lord Kaidu.”

“Since you understand, then obey!” He abruptly stood up, signaling the end of the audience.

We bowed our way out of the great yurtu, and collected Nostril from where he waited outside, and we started back through the rain and the mud underfoot, this time unaccompanied, and my uncle said to my father:

“I think we did rather well, Nico, in concert there. Especially adroit of you to remember that Ling story. I never heard it before.”

“Neither did I,” my father said drily. “But surely the Han have some such instructive tale, among the many they do have.”

I opened my mouth for the first time. “Something else you said, Father, gave me an idea. I will meet you back at the inn.”

I parted from them, to go and call on my Mongol hosts of the day before. I requested an introduction to one of their armorers, and got it, and asked the man at the forge if I might borrow for a day one of his yet-unhammered sheets of metal. He graciously found for me a piece of copper that was long and broad, but thin, so it wobbled and rippled and thrummed as I carried it to the karwansarai. My father and uncle paid no attention as I carried it into our room and leaned it against the wall, for they were again arguing.

“All the fault of that cassock,” said my father. “Your being an impoverished priest gave Kaidu the notion of impoverishing us.”

“Nonsense, Nico,” said my uncle. “He would have found some other excuse, if that had not occurred to him. What we must do is offer him freely something from our hoard, and hope he will ignore the rest.”

“Well … ,” said my father, thinking. “Suppose we give him our cods of musk. At least they are ours to give.”

“Oh, come, Nico! To that sweaty barbarian? Musk is for making fine perfume. You might as well give Kaidu a powder puff, for all the use he would have of it.”

They kept on like that, but I stopped listening, for I had my own idea, and I went to explain to Nostril the part he would play in it.

The next day, a day of only drizzling rain, Nostril loaded two of the three packhorses with our cargo of valuables—we of course always kept them safe inside our chambers whenever we lodged in a karwansarai—and also roped my sheet of metal onto one of the horses, and led them for us to the Mongol bok. There, when we entered the Ilkhan’s yurtu, he stayed outside to unload the goods, and Kaidu’s guardsmen began carrying them in and stripped off their protective wrappers.

“Hui!” Kaidu exclaimed, as he started to inspect the various objects. “These engraved golden platters are superb! A gift from the Shah Zaman, you said, uu?”

“Yes,” my father said coldly, and my uncle added, in a melancholy voice, “A boy named Aziz once strapped them on his feet to cross a quicksand,” and I took out a kerchief and loudly blew my nose.

There came from outside a low, mumbling, bumbling mutter of sound. The Ilkhan looked up, surprised, saying, “Was that thunder, uu? I thought there was only a sprinkle of rain … .”

“I beg to inform the Great Lord Kaidu,” said one of his guardsmen, bowing low, “that the day is gray and wet, but there are no thunderclouds to be seen.”

“Curious,” Kaidu muttered, and put down the golden dishes. He rummaged among the many other things accumulating in the tent and, finding a particularly elegant ruby necklace, again exclaimed, “Hui!” He held it up to admire it. “The Ilkhatun will thank you personally for this.”

“Thank the Sultan Kutb-ud-Din,” said my father.

I blew my nose into my kerchief. The rippling rumble of thunder came again from outside, and somewhat louder now. The Ilkhan started so that he dropped the string of rubies, and his mouth closed and opened soundlessly—but framing a word I could read from his lips—and then said aloud, “There it is again! But thunder without thunderclouds … uu … ?”

When a third item caught his greedy eye, a bolt of fine Kashmir cloth, I barely gave him time to cry “Hui!” before I blew my nose, and the thunder gave a menacing grumble, and he jerked his hand away as if the cloth had burned him, and again he mouthed the word, and my father and uncle gave me an odd look.

“Pardon, Lord Kaidu,” I said. “I think this thunder weather has given me a head cold.”

“You are pardoned,” he said offhandedly. “Aha! And this, is this one of those famous Persian qali carpets, uu?”

Nose blow. Veritable clamor of thunder. His hand again jerked away and his lips convulsively made the word, and he glanced fearfully skyward. Then he looked around at us, his slit eyes almost opened to roundness, and he said:

“I was but toying with you!”

“My lord?” inquired Uncle Mafio, whose own lips were twitching now.

“Toying! Jesting! Teasing you!” Kaidu said, almost pleadingly. “A tiger sometimes toys with his quarry, when he is not hungry. And I am not hungry! Not for tawdry acquisitions. I am Kaidu, and I own countless mou of land and innumerable li of the Silk Road and more cities than I have hairs and more subject people than a gobi has pebbles. Did you really think I lack for rubies and gold dishes and Persian qali, uu?” He feigned a hearty laugh, “Ah, ha, ha, ha!” even bending double to pound his meaty fists on his massive knees. “But I had you worried, did I not, uu? You took my toying in earnest.”

“Yes, you truly fooled us, Lord Kaidu,” said my uncle, managing to subdue his own incipient merriment.

“And now the thunder has ceased,” said the Ilkhan, listening. “Guards! Wrap up all these things again and reload them on the horses of these elder brothers.”

“Why, thank you, Lord Kaidu,” said my father, but his twinkling eyes were on me.

“And here, here is my cousin’s letter of ukaz,” said the Ilkhan, pressing it into my uncle’s hand. “I return it to you, priest. Take yourself and your religion and these paltry baubles to Kubilai. Perhaps he is a collector of such trinkets, but Kaidu is not. Kaidu does not take, he gives! Two of the best warriors of my personal pavilion guard will attend you to your karwansarai, and they will ride with you whenever you are ready to continue your journey eastward … .”

I slipped out of the yurtu as the guardsmen began to carry out the rejected goods, and slipped around to the back side of it, where Nostril stood holding the metal sheet by one edge and waiting to flap it again whenever he heard me blow my nose. I gave him the signal employed throughout the East to mean “purpose accomplished”—showing him my fist with upraised thumb—took the piece of copper from him and trotted across the bok to return it to the armorer, and got back to the Ilkhan’s yurtu by the time the horses were reloaded.

Kaidu stood in the entrance of his pavilion, waving and shouting, “A good horse and a wide plain to you!” until we were out of earshot.

Then my uncle said, in Venetian, not to be overheard by the two Mongol escorts leading our horses and theirs, “Verily, we have all done well in concert. Nico, you only invented a good story. Marco invented a thunder god!” and he flung his arms about my shoulders and Nostril’s, and gave us both a hearty squeeze.

4

WE had now come so far around the world, and into lands so very little known, that our Kitab was no longer of the slightest use to us. Clearly, the mapmaker al-Idrisi had never ventured into these regions, and apparently never had met anyone who had, from whom he could ask even hearsay information. His maps rounded off the eastern edge of Asia much too shortly and abruptly at the great ocean called the Sea of Kithai. Thus they gave the false impression that Kashgar was at no enormous distance from our destination, Kubilai’s capital city of Khanbalik, which itself lies well inland of that ocean. But, as my father and uncle warned me, and as I wearily verified for myself, Kashgar and Khanbalik in fact are a whole half a continent apart—half of a continent immeasurably bigger than al-Idrisi had imagined it to be. We journeyers had almost exactly as far yet to go as we had already comefrom Suvediye away back on the Levant shore of the Mediterranean.

Distance is distance, no matter whether it is calculated in the number of human footsteps or the number of days on horseback required to get over it. Nevertheless, here in Kithai, any distance always soundedlonger, because here it was counted not in farsakhs but in li. The farsakh, comprising about two and a half of our Western miles, was invented by Persians and Arabs who, having always been far travelers, are accustomed to think in expansive terms of measurement. But the li, which is only about one-third of a mile, was invented by the Han, and they are for the most part homebodies. The common Han peasant in his lifetime probably never ventures more than a few li away from the farm village where he was born. So I suppose, to his mind, a third of a mile is a far distance. Anyway, when we Polos left Kashgar, I was still accustomed to calculating in farsakhs, so it did not much dismay me to say to myself that we had only some eight or nine hundred of them to go to Khanbalik. But when I gradually got used to calculating in li, the number of them was appalling: some six thousand seven hundred from Kashgar to Khanbalik. If I had not previously appreciated the vastness of the Mongol Empire, I surely did now, as I contemplated the vastness of just its central nation of Kithai.

There were two ceremonies attendant on our departure from Kashgar. Our Mongol escorts insisted that our horses—now numbering six mounts and three pack animals—must be treated to a certain ritual for protection against the “azghun” of the trail. Azghun means “desert voices,” and I gathered that those were some sort of goblins which infest the wilderness. So the warriors brought from their bok a man called a shamàn—what they would describe as a priest and we would describe as a sorcerer. The wild-eyed and paint-daubed shaman, who looked rather like a goblin himself, mumbled some incantations and poured some drops of blood on the heads of our horses and pronounced them protected. He offered to do the same for us unbelievers, but we politely declined on the ground that we had our own accompanying priest.

The other ceremony was the settling of our bill with the landlord of the karwansarai, and that involved more time and fuss than the sorcery had. My father and uncle did not simply accept and pay the innkeeper’s account, but haggled with him over every single item. And the bill did include every single item of our stay—the space we had occupied in the inn and our beasts had occupied in the stable, the quantity of food eaten by ourselves and grain eaten by our horses, the amounts of water we and they had swallowed, and the cha leaves steeped in ours, the kara fuel that had been burned for our comfort, the amount of lamplight we had enjoyed and the measures of oil required for that—everything but the air we had breathed. As the discussion heated up, it was joined by the inn’s cook, or Governor of the Kettle, as he styled himself, and the man who had served our meals, or the Steward of the Table, and they two began vociferously adding up the number of paces they had walked and the weights they had carried and the amounts of efficiency and sweat and genius they had expended in our behalf … .

But I soon realized that this was not a contest of larceny on the landlord’s part versus outrage on ours. It was merely an expected formality—another custom derived from the complicated comportment of the Han people—a ceremony that is so enjoyed by both creditor and debtor that they can string it out to hours of eloquent argument, mutual abuse and reconciliation, claim and denial, refusal and compromise, until eventually they agree to agree, and the account is paid, and they emerge better friends than they were before. When we finally rode away from the inn, the landlord, the Kettle Governor, the Table Steward and all the other servants stood at the door, waving and calling after us the Han farewell: “Man zou,” which means, “Leave us only if you must.”