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The Journeyer
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Текст книги "The Journeyer"


Автор книги: Gary Jennings



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Текущая страница: 38 (всего у книги 78 страниц)

“These men, Tang and Fu”—he indicated the two Han I had already noticed—“came from the West about the same time that you did. They are spies of mine, clever and adept and unobtrusive. When I got word that a Han wagon train was going into the lands of my cousin Kaidu, to bring back Han cadavers for burial, I had Tang and Fu join that karwan.” Aha, I thought, so that explained my having seen them before, but I made no comment. Kubilai turned to them. “Tell us then, honorable spies, what secrets you ferreted out from Sin-kiang Province.”

Tang spoke, and as if he were reciting from a written list, though he used no such thing: “The Ilkhan Kaidu is orlok of a bok comprising an entire tuk, of which he can instantly put six tomans into the field.”

The Khakhan did not look much impressed, but he translated that for my father and uncle: “My cousin commands a camp containing one hundred thousand horse warriors, of whom sixty thousand stand always ready for battle.”

I wondered why the Khan Kubilai had had to employ professional spies to get such information by stealth, when I had learned as much simply by sharing a meal in a yurtu.

Fu spoke in his turn: “Each warrior goes into battle with one lance, one mace, his shield, at least one sword and dagger, one bow and sixty arrows for it. Thirty arrows are light, with narrow heads, for long-range use. Thirty are heavy, with broad heads, for use at close quarters.”

I knew that much, too, and more: that some of the arrowheads would scream and whistle furiously as they flew.

Tang took a turn again: “To be independent of the bok supplies, each warrior also carries one small earthenware pot for cooking, a small folding tent and two leather bottles. One is full of kumis, the other of grut, and on those he can subsist for a long time without weakening.”

Fu added: “If he haply procures a piece of meat, he need not even pause to cook it, but tucks it between his saddle and his mount. As he rides, the pounding and the heat and the sweat cure the meat and make it edible.”

Tang again: “If a warrior has no other nutriment, he will nourish himself and quench his thirst by drinking the blood of the first enemy he slays. He will also use that body’s fat to grease his tack and weapons and armor.”

Kubilai compressed his lips and fingered his mustache, in evident impatience, but the two Han said no more. With a trace of exasperation he muttered, “Numbers and details are all very well. But you have told me little that I have not known since I first straddled my own horse at the age of four. What of the mood and temper of the Ilkhan and his troops, uu?”

“No need to inquire privily into that, Sire,” said Tang. “All men know that all Mongols are forever ready and eager to fight.”

“To fight, yes, but to fight whom,uu?” the Khakhan persisted.

“At present, Sire,” said Fu, “the Ilkhan uses his forces only for putting down bandits in his own Sin-kiang Province, and for petty skirmishes against the Tazhiks to secure his western borders.”

“Hui!” said Kubilai, in a sort of pounce. “But is he doing those things merely to keep his fighting men occupied, uu? Or is he honing their skill and spirit for more ambitious undertakings, uu? Perhaps a rebellious thrust at mywestern borders, uu? Tell me that!”

Tang and Fu could only make respectful noises and shrugs to excuse their ignorance. “Sire, who can examine the inside of an enemy’s head? Even the best spy can but observe the observable. The facts we brought we have gleaned with much perseverance, and much care that they be accurate, and at much hazard of our being discovered, which would have meant our being tied spread-eagle among four horses, and they whipped toward the four horizons.”

Kubilai gave them a look of some disdain, and turned to my father and uncle. “You at least came face to face with my cousin, friends Polo. What did you make of him, uu?”

Uncle Mafio said thoughtfully, “Certain it is that Kaidu is greedy for more than he has. And he is patently a man of bellicose temper.”

“He is, after all, of the Khakhan’s own family lineage,” said my father. “It is an ancient truth: that a she-wolf does not drop lambs.”

“Those things, too, I know very well,” growled Kubilai. “Is there no one who has perceived more than the flagrantly obvious, uu?”

He had not put that “uu?” directly to me, but the question emboldened me to speak. Granted, I could more gracefully have imparted what I wanted to tell him. But I was still being scornful of what I took to have been his pose of cruel caprice when he made sure we heard his harsh sentences in the Cheng—hence I was still under the misapprehension that the Khan Kubilai was, in fondo, only an ordinary man. Perhaps also I had already imbibed rather too freely of the drinks dispensed by the serpent tree. Anyway, I spoke, and spoke somewhat more loudly than I need have done:

“The Ilkhan Kaidu called you decadent and effete and degenerate, Sire. He said that you have become no better than a Kalmuk.”

Every person present heard me. Every person present must have known what a squalid thing a Kalmuk is. An instant and vast and appalled hush fell upon the whole banquet hall. Every man stopped talking, and even the strident Mongol women seemed to suffocate in mid-gabble. My father and uncle covered their faces with their hands, and the Wang Chingkim stared at me in utter horror, and the Khakhan’s sons and wives all gasped, and Tang and Fu put trembling hands to their mouths, as if they had untimely laughed or belched, and all the other varicolored faces within my view went uniformly pale.

Only the face of the Khan Kubilai did not go ashen. It went maroon and murderous, and it began to contort as he started framing words of condemnation and command. Had he ever got those words out, I know now, he never would have retracted them, and nothing would have mitigated my gross offense or moderated my condign sentence, and the guards would have hauled me off to the Fondler, and the manner of my execution must have become a legend in Kithai forevermore. But Kubilai’s face kept on working, as he evidently discarded one set of words as too mild, and substituted another and another more terribly damnatory, and that gave me time to finish what I wished to say:

“However, when it thunders, Sire, the Ilkhan Kaidu invokes your name for protection against the wrath of Heaven. He does it silently, under his breath, but I have read your name upon his lips, Sire, and his own warriors confided the same to me. If you doubt it, Sire, you could ask the two of Kaidu’s personal guardsmen that he sent as our escort, the warriors Ussu and Donduk …”

My voice trailed off into the dreadful hush that still prevailed. I could hear droplets of kumis or pu-tao or some other of the liquids dripping, plink, plunk, from a serpent spout into a lion vase beneath. In that breathless, monumental quiet, Kubilai kept his black eyes impaling me, but his face slowly ceased its contortions and became still as stone, and the violent color slowly ebbed from it, and at last he said, only in a murmur, but again all present heard:

“Kaidu invokes my name when he is affrighted. By the great god Tengri, that single observation is worth more to me than six tomans of my best and fiercest and most loyal horsemen.”

3

I awoke the next day, in the afternoon, in a bed in my father’s chambers, with a head that I almost wished hadbeen lopped off by the Fondler. The last thing that I clearly remembered of the banquet was the Khakhan’s roaring to the Wang Chingkim, “See to this young Polo! Appoint him separate quarters of his own! And servants of twenty-two karats!” That had sounded fine, but to be given immobile metal servants, even of nearly pure gold, did not make much sense, so I assumed that Kubilai had been as drunk as was I at the time, and Chingkim, and everybody else.

However, after my father’s two women servants had helped him and me to get up and get bathed and get dressed, and had brought us each a potion to clear the head—a spicy and aromatic drink, but so heavily laced with mao-tai that I could not force it down—Chingkim came calling, and father’s servants fell down in ko-tou to him. The Wang, looking as if he felt much the way I did, gently booted the two prostrate bodies out of his way, and told me he had come, as ordered, to conduct me to the new suite prepared for my occupancy.

As we went there—no far distance along the same hall that my father’s and uncle’s quarters opened onto—I thanked Chingkim for the courtesy and, seeking to be polite even to a minor functionary assigned to serve me, I added, “I do not know why the Khakhan should have ordered you to see to my comfort. After all, you are the Wang of the city, and an official of some small importance. Surely the palace guests should be a steward’s responsibility, and this palace has as many stewards as a Buddhist has fleas.”

He gave a laugh, only a small one, not to jar his own head, and said, “I do not object to being given a trivial duty now and then. My father believes that a man can only learn to command others by learning himself to obey the least command.”

“Your father seems to lean as heavily on wise proverbs as mine does,” I said companionably. “Who is your father, Chingkim?”

“The man who gave me the order. The Khakhan Kubilai.”

“Oh?” I said, as he bowed me through the doorway of my new quarters. “One of the bastards, are you?” I said offhandedly, as I might have spoken to the son of a Doge or a Pope, nobly born, but on the wrong side of the blanket. I was looking with appreciation at the doorway, for it was not rectangular in the Western style or peaked to an arch in the Muslim fashion. It and the others between my various rooms were called variously Moon Gate and Lute Gate and Vase Gate, because their openings were contoured in the outlines of those objects. “This is a sumptuous apartment.”

Chingkim was regarding me with somewhat the same appraisal I was giving to the suite’s luxurious appointments. He said quietly, “Marco Polo, you do have your own peculiar way of speaking to your elders.”

“Oh, you are not that much older than I, Chingkim. How nice, these windows open onto a garden.” Truly I was being very dense, but my head, as I have said, was not at its best. Also, at the banquet, Chingkim had not sat at the head table with Kubilai’s legitimate sons. That recollection made me think of something. “I saw none of the Khakhan’s concubines who looked old enough to have a son your age, Chingkim. Which of last night’s women was your mother?”

“The one who sat nearest the Khakhan. Her name is Jamui.”

I paid little attention, being occupied in the admiration of my bed-chamber. The bed was most lovelily springy, and it had a Western style pillow for me. Also—apparently in case I should invite a court lady to bed—it had one of the Han-style pillows, a sort of shallow pedestal of porcelain, itself molded in the form of a reclining woman, to prop up a lady’s neck without disarranging her coiffure.

Chingkim went on chatting idly, “Those of Kubilai’s sons who sat with him last night are Wangs of provinces and ortoks of armies, things like that.”

For summoning my servants, there was a brass gong as big around as a Kashgar wagon wheel. But it was fashioned like a fish with a great round head, mostly a vast mouth, and only a stumpy brass body, for resonance, behind its wide opening.

“I was appointed Wang of Khanbalik,” Chingkim prattled on, “because Kubilai likes to keep me near him. And he sat me at your table to do honor to your father and uncle.”

I was examining a most marvelous lamp in my main room. It had two cylindrical paper shades, one inside the other, both fitted with paper blades inside their circumference, so that somehow the heat of the lamp flame made the shades slowly turn in opposite directions. They were painted with various lines and spots, and were translucent, so that their movement and the light within made the paints intermittently resolve themselves into a recognizable picture—and the picture moved. I later saw other such lamps and lanterns displaying different scenes, but this one of mine showed, over and over, a mule kicking up its heels and catching a little man in his backside and sending him flying. I was entranced.

“I am not Kubilai’s eldest son, but I am the only son born to him by his premier wife, the Khatun Jamui. That makes me Crown Prince of the Khanate and Heir Apparent to my father’s throne and title.”

By that time, I was down on my knees, puzzling over the composition of the strange, flat, pale carpet on the floor. After close scrutiny, I determined that it was made of long strips of thin-peeled ivory, woven together, and I had never before seen or heard of any such wondrous artisanry as woven ivory.Since I was already kneeling—when Chingkim’s words at last penetrated into my dismally dimmed mind—it was easy for me to slide prostrate and make ko-tou at the feet of the next Khan of All Khans of the Mongol Empire, whom I had a moment ago addressed as Bastard.

“Your Royal Highness … ,” I began to apologize, speaking to the woven ivory on which my aching and now sweating forehead was pressed.

“Oh, get up,” the Crown Prince said affably. “Let us continue to be Marco and Chingkim. Time enough for titles when my father dies, and I trust that will not be for many years yet. Get up and greet your new servants. Biliktu and Buyantu. Good Mongol maidens, whom I selected for you personally.”

The girls made ko-tou four times to Chingkim and then four times to us both and then four times to me alone. I mumbled, “I expected to get statues.”

“Statues?” echoed Chingkim. “Ah, yes. Twenty-two karat, these maidens. That grading system is of my father’s devising. If you will command for me a goblet of head-clearing potion, we can sit down and I will explain about the karats.”

I gave the command, and ordered cha for myself, and the two girls bowed their way backwards out of the room. From their names, and from what little I had glimpsed of them, Buyantu and Biliktu were sisters. They were about my own age, and far prettier than the other Mongol females I had seen so far—certainly much prettier than the middle-aged women who had been assigned to my father and uncle. When they came back with our drinks, and Chingkim and I sat down on facing benches, and the maids brought fans to fan us, I could see that they were twins, identical in comeliness and wearing identical costumes. I would have to direct them to dress differently, I thought, so I could tell them apart. And when they were undressed? That thought, too, came naturally to my mind, but I dismissed it, to listen to the Prince, who, after taking a long draft from his goblet, had begun to talk again.

“My father, as you know, has four wedded wives. Each in her turn receives him in her own separate yurtu, but—”

“Yurtu!” I interrupted.

He laughed. “So it is called, though no Mongol plainsman would recognize it. In the old nomad days, you see, a Mongol lord kept his wives dispersed about his territory, each in her own yurtu, so that wherever he rode he never had to endure a wifeless night. Now, of course, each wife’s so-called yurtu is a splendid palace here in these grounds—and a populous place, more like a bok than a yurtu. Four wives, four palaces. And my mother’s alone has a permanent staff of more than three hundred. Ladies-in-waiting and attendants and physicians and servants and hairdressers and slaves and wardrobe mistresses and astrologers … But I started out to tell you about the karats.”

He broke off to touch a hand tenderly to his head, and swigged again from his goblet before going on:

“I think my father is now of an age that a mere four women in rotation would suffice him, even well-worn wives who are also getting on in years. But it is an ancient custom for all his subject lands—as far away as Poland and India Aryana—to send him each year the finest of their newly nubile maidens. He cannot possibly take them all as concubines, or even as servants, but neither can he disappoint his subjects by refusing their gifts outright. So he now has those annual crops of girls weeded down at least to a manageable number.”

Chingkim emptied his goblet and handed it, without looking, over his shoulder, where Biliktu-or-Buyantu took it and scurried off.

“Each year,” he resumed, “as the maidens are delivered to the various Ilkhans and Wangs in the various lands and provinces, those men examine the girls and assay them like so much gold bullion. Depending on the quality of a maiden’s facial features and bodily proportions and complexion and hair and voice and grace of gait and so on, she is rated at fourteen karats—or sixteen or eighteen, as the case may be, and so on up. Only those above sixteen karats are sent on here to Khanbalik, and only those assayed at the fineness of pure unalloyed gold, twenty-four karats, have any hope of getting near the great Khakhan.”

Though Chingkim could not have heard my maid’s silent approach, he put up his hand and she arrived just in time to place the refilled goblet in his grasp. He appeared not at all surprised to receive it—as if he had naturally assumed it would be there—and he gulped from it and went on:

“Even those comparatively few maidens of twenty-four karats must first live for a while with older women here in the palace. The old women inspect them even more closely, especially their behavior in the nighttime. Do the girls snore in their sleep, or toss restlessly in the bed? Are their eyes bright and their breath sweet when they awaken in the morning? Then, on the old women’s recommendations, my father will take a few of the girls as his concubines for the next year, others to be his maidservants. The rest of them he apportions out, according to their karat grade, to his lords and ministers and court favorites, according to their rank. Congratulate yourself, Marco, that you suddenly rank high enough to merit these twenty-two-karat virgins.”

He paused, and laughed again. “I do not quite know whyyou do—unless it is your propensity for reviling your betters as Kalmuks and bastards. I hope all the other courtiers do not start imitating your style of address, and expect to emulate your rise to favor.”

I cleared my throat and said, “You mentioned that the girls come from all lands. Had you any particular reason for selecting Mongols for me?”

“Again, my father’s instructions. You already speak our tongue very well, but he desires that you achieve impeccable fluency. And it is a known fact that pillow talk is the best and quickest way to learn a language. Why do you ask? Would you have preferred some other breed of women?”

“No, no,” I said hastily. “The Mongol is one breed of woman I have not yet had an opportunity to—er—assay. I look forward to the experience. I am honored, Chingkim.”

He shrugged. “They are twenty-two karat. Near perfect.” He sipped again at his drink, then leaned toward me to say seriously, speaking now in Farsi, that the maids might not eavesdrop, “There are many lords here, Marco, and older ones, and very high-ranking ones, who have never yet received better than a sixteen-karat regard from the Khan Kubilai. I suggest you keep that in mind. Any palace community is an anthill teeming with intrigues and plots and conspiracies, even at the level of page boys and kitchen scullions. It will rankle many in this court, that a young man like you is notconsigned to that grub-ant level of pages and scullions. You are a newcomer and a Ferenghi, which would make you suspect enough, but abruptly and incomprehensibly you have been exalted. Overnight, you have become an interloper, a target for envy and spite. Believe me, Marco. No one else would give you this friendly warning, but I do, because I am the only one who can. Second only to my father, I am the one man in the entire Khanate who need not be fearful and jealous of his position. Everyone else must be—and so must see you as a threat. Be always on your guard.”

“I believe you, Chingkim, and I thank you. Can you suggest any way I might make myself less of a target?”

“A Mongol horseman takes care never to ride on the skyline of the hills, but always a little way below the crest.”

I sat and considered that advice. Just then, there came a scratching noise from the hall door, and one of the maids glided away to answer it. I could not quite determine how I might stay off the skyline while resident inside a palace, unless perhaps I went about in a permanent posture of ko-tou. The maid came back into the room.

“Master Marco, it is a caller who gives his name as Sindbad, and urgently entreats audience.”

“What?” I said, preoccupied with skylines. “I am acquainted with no person named Sindbad.”

Chingkim looked at me and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, “Already come the enemies?”

Then I shook my head and got it to working again, and said, “Oh, of course I know the man. Bid him come in.”

He did, and rushed straight to me, looking distraught, wringing his hands, his eyes and central orifice wildly dilated. Without ko-tou or salaam, he bleated in Farsi, “By the seven voyages of my namesake, Master Marco, but this is a terrible place!”

I held up a hand to stop his saying something as indiscreet as I had several times done lately, and turned to say to Chingkim in the same language, “Allow me, Royal Highness, to introduce my slave Nostril.”

“Nostril?” Chingkim murmured wonderingly.

Taking my hint, Nostril made a perfect ko-tou to the Prince and then to me, and said meekly, “Master Marco, I would beg a boon.”

“You may speak in the Prince’s presence. He is a friend. But why are you going about under an assumed name?”

“I have been seeking you everywhere, master. I used all my names, a different one to every person I asked. I thought it prudent, since I go in fear for my life.”

“Why? What have you done?”

“Nothing, master! I swear it! I have been so well behaved for so long that Hell itches with impatience. I am spotless as a new-dropped lamb. But so were Ussu and Donduk. Master, I beg that you rescue me from that sty called a barrack. Let me come and lodge in your quarters. I ask not even a pallet. I will lay me down across your threshold like a watchdog. For the sake of all the times I saved your life, Master Marco, now save mine!”

“What? I do not recall your ever saving my life.”

Chingkim looked amused and Nostril looked befuddled.

“Did I not? Some earlier master, perhaps. Well, if I have not, it was only for lack of opportunity. However, if and when some such dread opportunity occurs, it is best that I be near at hand and—”

I interrupted, “What about Ussu and Donduk?”

“That is what has terrified me, master. The frightful fate of Ussu and Donduk. They did nothing wrong, did they? Only escorted us from Kashgar to here, did they not, and performed capably in that duty?” He did not wait for a reply, but babbled on. “This morning a squad of guards came and manacled Donduk and dragged him away. Ussu and I, certain that some terrible mistake had been made, inquired around the barracks, and were told that Donduk was being questioned.After a while of worrying, we inquired again, and were told that Donduk had not satisfactorily answered the questions, so he was at that moment being buried.”

“Amoredèi!” I cried. “He is dead?”

“One hopes so, master; otherwise an even more terrible mistake has been made. Then, master, after a while the guards came again and manacled Ussu and dragged himaway. After another while of wringing my hands, I inquired again about the two of them, and I was rudely told to inquire no more about matters of torture.Well, Donduk had been taken and slain and buried, and Ussu had been taken, and who else was there to torture but me?So I fled the barrack to come looking for you and—”

“Hush,” I said. I turned to look a query at Chingkim.

He said, “My father is anxious to know all he can learn about his eternally restive cousin Kaidu. It was you who mentioned to him last night that your escorts were men of Kaidu’s personal guard. No doubt my father assumes them to be well informed about their master—about any possible insurrection Kaidu may be planning.” He paused and looked down into his goblet and said, “It is the Fondler who does the questioning.”

“The Fondler?” Nostril murmured wonderingly.

I pondered, which hurt my head, and after a moment said to Chingkim, “It would be obtrusive of me to interfere in Mongol affairs that involve Mongols only. But I do feel in a measure responsible … .”

Chingkim drained his cup and stood. “Let us go and see the Fondler.”

I would much rather have stayed in my new quarters all day, and nursed my head, and got acquainted with the twins Buyantu and Biliktu, but I went, and made Nostril come with us.

We went a long way, through enclosed passages and open areas and more passages, and then down some stairs that led underground, and then another long way through subterranean workshops full of busy artisans, and through storage cellars and lumber rooms and wine cellars. When Chingkim was leading us through a series of torch-lit but unpeopled chambers, their rock walls damp with slime and mottled with fungus, he paused to say in an undertone to Nostril, though surely meaning the advice for me, too:

“Do not again use the word torture, slave. The Fondler is a sensitive man. He resents and recoils from such rough terms. Even when a matter of importance necessitates his plucking out a person’s eyeballs and putting hot coals in the sockets, it is never torture. Call it questioning, call it caressing, call it tickling—call it anything but torture—lest someday it is required that you be fondled by the Fondler and he remembers your disrespect of his profession.”

Nostril only gulped loudly, but I said, “I understand. In Christian dungeons the practice is formally known as the Asking of the Question Extraordinaire.”

Chingkim finally led us into a room that, except for its torch light and beslimed rock walls, might have been a counting room in a prosperous mercantile establishment. It was full of counting desks at which stood clerks busy with ledgers and documents and abachi and the petty routine of any well-run institution. This might be a human abattoir, but it was an orderly abattoir.

“The Fondler and all his staff are Han,” Chingkim said to me aside. “They are so much better at these things than we.”

Evidently even the Crown Prince did not demand entry straightaway into the Fondler’s domain. We all waited until one of the Han clerks, the tall and austerely expressionless chief of those clerks, deigned to approach us. He and the Prince spoke for a time in the Han language, then Chingkim translated to me:

“The man called Donduk was first questioned, and with propriety, but declined to betray anything he knew of his master Kaidu. So then he was questioned extraordinarily, as you put it, to the limits of the Fondler’s ingenuity. But he remained obdurate and so—as is my father’s standing order in such cases—he was relinquished to the Death of a Thousand. Then the man Ussu was brought in. He also has resisted both the questioning and the questioning extraordinary, and will also be accorded the Death of a Thousand. They deserve it, of course, being traitors to their ultimate ruler, my father. But”—he said this with some pride—“they are loyal to their Ilkhan, and they are stubborn and they are brave. They are true Mongols.”

I said, “Pray, what is the Death of a Thousand? A thousand what?”

Chingkim said, again in an undertone, “Marco, call it the death of a thousand caresses, a thousand cruelties, a thousand endearments, what matter? Given a thousand of anything,a man will die. The name only signifies a death long drawn out.”

He was plainly urging that I not pursue the matter, but I did. I said, “I never held any affection for Donduk. Ussu, though, was a more congenial companion on the long trail. I should like to know how his long trail ends.”

Chingkim made a face, but he turned to speak again to the chief clerk. The man looked surprised and doubtful, but he went out of the room by an iron-studded door.

“Only my father or I could even contemplate doing this,” muttered Chingkim. “And even I must convey to the Fondler most fulsome compliments and abject apology for interrupting him when he is actually engaged in his work.”

I expected the chief clerk to come back bringing a monstrous, shaggy brute of a man, broad of shoulder, brawny of arm, beetling of brow, black-garbed like the Meatmaker of Venice or all in Hellfire-red like the executioner of the Baghdad Daiwan. But if the chief clerk had looked the picture of a clerk, the man who returned with him was the very essence of clerkness. He was gray-haired and pale and frail, fussy and fidgety of manner, prissily dressed in mauve silks. He tripped across the room with small, precise steps, and he looked at us, despite his diminutive Han nose, very much de haut en bas. He was a man born to be a clerk. Surely, I thought, he cannot be other than that. But he spoke in the Mongol tongue, and said:

“I am Ping, the Fondler. What wish you of me?” His voice was tight, with the barely controlled and not at all concealed indignation that is the natural speech of a clerk interrupted in his clerking.

“I am Chingkim, the Crown Prince. I should like you, Master Ping, to explain to this honored guest of mine the manner of giving the Death of a Thousand.”

The creature sniffed clerkishly. “I am not accustomed to requests of that indelicate nature, and I do not grant them. Also, the only honored guests here are my own.”

Chingkim perhaps stood in awe of the Fondler’s title of office, but he himself was entitled Prince. More than that, he was a Mongol being affronted by a mere Han. He drew himself up tall and rigid, and snarled:

“You are a public servant and we are the public! You are a civil servant and you will be civil! I am your Prince and you have arrogantly neglected to make ko-tou! Do so at once!”

The Fondler Ping flinched back as if we had pelted him with some of his own hot coals, and obediently fell down and did the ko-tou. All the other clerks in the chamber peered awestricken over their counting desks at what must have been a first-ever occurrence. Chingkim smoldered down at the prostrate man for some moments before bidding him to rise. When Ping did, he was suddenly all conciliation and solicitude, as is the way of clerks when someone has the temerity to bark at them. He fawned on Chingkim and expressed himself willing, nay, avid to fulfill the Prince’s every least whim.


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