Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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“If you say so, Orlok. But why accord the same funerary rites to the treacherous Pao?”

“A Wang must go to his grave attended by servants for the afterlife. We will also be killing and entombing with him all the Yi who emerged from the disaster yesterday—and a couple of Bho women survivors, too, for his afterlife enjoyment. They may get handsomer in the afterlife; one never knows. But we are giving special attention to Pao. What better servant could Ukuruji take into death than a former Minister of the Khanate?”

When the shamans adjudged the hour to be auspicious, the troops did a lot of marching about the catafalque on which Ukuruji lay, some afoot and others on horseback, with commendable dash and precision, and with much martial music and doleful chanting, and the shamans lit many fires making colored smokes, and wailed their foolish incantations. Those performances were all recognizably funerary of aspect, but some other details of the ceremony had to be explained to me. The troops had dug for Ukuruji a cave in the ground, right at the edge of the avalanche rubble. Bayan told me the position was chosen so it would be unnoticeable to any potential grave robbers.

“We will eventually erect a properly grandiose monument over it. But while we are still occupied with the war, some Yi might sneak back into this valley. If they cannot find the Wang’s resting place, they cannot loot his belongings or mutilate his corpse or desecrate the tomb by making water and excrement in it.”

Ukuruji’s body was reverentially laid in the grave, and about it were laid the fresher cadavers of the newly slaughtered Yi prisoners and the two unfortunate Bho females, and close beside Ukuruji was laid the body of the Minister of Lesser Races. Pao had so contorted himself in his death agonies that the proceedings had to be briefly delayed while the shamans broke numerous of his bones to straighten him out decently. Then the burial detail of troops set up a wooden rack between the bodies and the cave entrance, and began to affix to it some bows and arrows. Bayan explained that for me:

“It is an invention of Kubilai’s Court Goldsmith Boucher. We military men do not always scorn inventors. Regard—the arrows are strung so they aim at the entrance, and the bows are hard bent, and that rack holds them so, but on a sensitive arrangement of levers. If grave robbers ever should find the place and dig into it, their opening the tomb will trip those levers, and they will be met by a killing barrage of arrows.”

The gravediggers closed the entrance with earth and rocks so deliberately untidy that the tomb was indistinguishable from the nearby rubble, at which I inquired:

“If you take such pains to make the tomb undiscoverable, how will youfind it when the time comes to build the monument?”

Bayan merely glanced to one side, and I looked over there. Some troopers had brought one of their herd mares on a lead rein, closely accompanied by her nursling foal. Some of the men held to the lead rein while the others dragged the little infant horse away from its mother and over to the grave site. The mare began to plunge and whinny and rear, and did so even more frantically when the men holding the foal raised a battle-ax and brained it. The mare was led kicking and neighing away, while the buriers scraped earth over the new body, and Bayan said:

“There. When we come this way again, even if it is two or three or five years hence, we have only to let the same mare loose and she will lead us to this spot.” He paused, and champed his great teeth thoughtfully, and said, “Now, Polo, although you deserve much credit for the victory here, you did it so thoroughly that there is no plunder for you to share in, and I think that deplorable. However, if you care to continue riding with us, we shall next assail the city of Yun-nan-fu, and I promise that you will be among the high officers who are let to take first choice of the loot. Yun-nan-fu is a large city, and respectably rich, I am told, and the Yi women are not at all repulsive. What say you?”

“It is a generous offer, Orlok, and a tempting one, and I am honored by your kind regard. But I think I had best resist the temptation, and hurry back to tell the Khakhan all the news, good and bad, of what has occurred here. By your leave, I shall depart tomorrow, when you march on southward.”

“I thought as much. I took you to be a dutiful man. So I have already dictated to a yeoman scribe a letter for you to carry to Kubilai. It is properly sealed for his eyes only, but I make no secret of its highly praising you and suggesting that you deserve more praise than only mine. I will go now to detach two advance riders to leave immediately and start making ready your route for you. And when you depart tomorrow, I will provide two escorts and the best horses.”

So that was all I got to see of Yun-nan, and that was my only experience of war on land, and I took no plunder, and I had no chance to form any opinion of the Yi women. But those who had observed my brief military career—the survivors of it, anyway—seemed to agree that I had acquitted myself well. And I had ridden with the Mongol Horde, which was something to tell my grandchildren, if I ever had any. So I turned again for Khanbalik, feeling quite the seasoned old campaigner.

XAN-DU

1

IT was again a long ride, and again my escorts and I rode hard. But, when we were yet some two hundred li southwest of Khanbalik, we found our advance riders waiting at a crossroads to intercept us. They had already been to Khanbalik, and had ridden back along the route to inform us that the Khan Kubilai was not presently in residence there. He was out enjoying the hunting season, meaning that he was staying at his country palace of Xan-du, to which the riders would lead us instead. Waiting with them was another man, and he was so richly attired, in Arab-style garments, that at first I mistook him for some gray-bearded Muslim courtier unknown to me. He waited for the riders to give me their message, and then addressed me exuberantly:

“Former Master Marco! It is I!”

“Nostril!” I exclaimed, surprised that I was glad to see him. “I mean Ali Babar. It is good to see you! But what do you out here, so far from city comforts?”

“I came to meet you, former master. When these men brought word of your imminent return, I joined them. I have been given a missive to deliver to you, and it seemed a good excuse to take a holiday from toil and care. Also, I thought you might have some use for the services of your former slave.”

“That was thoughtful of you. But come, we will make holiday together.”

The Mongols led the way, the two advance riders and my two escorts, and Ali and I rode side by side behind them. We turned more northerly than we had been traveling, because Xan-du is up in the Da-ma-qing Mountains, a considerable distance directly north of Khanbalik. Ali groped about under his embroidered aba and brought out a paper, folded and sealed, with my name written on the outside in Roman letters and also in the Arabic and Mongol letters and in the Han character.

“Someone wanted to make sure I got it,” I muttered. “From whom did it come?”

“I know not, former master.”

“We are equally freemen now, Ali. You may call me Marco.”

“As you will, Marco. The lady who gave me that paper was heavily veiled, and she accosted me in private and in the nighttime. Since she spoke no word, neither did I, taking her probably to be—ahem—some secret friend of yours, and maybe the wife of some other. I am far more discreet and less inquisitive than perhaps I used to be.”

“You have the same perfervid imagination, however. I was conducting no such intrigue at court. But thank you, anyway.” I tucked the paper away to read that night. “But now, what of you, old companion? How fine you do look!”

“Yes,” he said, preening. “My good wife Mar-Janah insists that I dress and comport myself now like the affluent proprietor and employer I have become.”

“Indeed? Proprietor of what? Employer of whom?”

“Do you remember, Marco, the city called Kashan in Persia?”

“Ah, yes. The city of beautiful boys. But surely Mar-Janah has not let you open a male brothel!”

He sighed and looked pained. “Kashan is also famous for its distinctive kashi tiles, you may recall.”

“I do. I remember that my father took an interest in the process of their manufacture.”

“Just so. He thought there might be a market here in Kithai for such a product. And he was right. He and your Uncle Mafio put up the capital for the establishment of a workshop, and helped teach the art of kashi-making to a number of artificers, and put the whole enterprise in the charge of Mar-Janah and myself. She designs the patterns for the kashi and supervises the workshop, and I do the peddling of the product. We have done very well, if I may say so. The kashi tiles are much in demand as an adornment for rich men’s houses. Even after paying the share of the profits owed to your father and uncle, Mar-Janah and I have become eminently affluent. We are all still learning our trade—she and I and our artificers—but earning while we do so. Prospering to such an extent that I could well afford to take some time off to do this bit of journeying with you.”

He chattered on for the rest of the day, telling me every last detail of the business of making and selling tiles—not all of which I found compellingly interesting—and occasionally imparting other news of Khanbalik. He and the beautiful Mar-Janah were blissfully happy. He had not seen my father in some time, the elder Polo being also out traveling on some mercantile venture, but he had glimpsed my uncle about the city, now and then of late. The beautiful Mar-Janah was more beautiful than ever. The Wali Achmad was holding the Vice-Regency and the reins of government in the Khan’s absence. The beautiful Mar-Janah was still as loving of Ali Babar as he of her. Many courtiers had accompanied Kubilai to Xan-du for the autumn hunting, including several of my acquaintances: the Wang Chingkim, the Firemaster Shi and the Goldsmith Boucher. The beautiful Mar-Janah agreed with Ali that the time they had so far spent in wedlock had been, though coming late in life, the best time of both their lives, and worth having waited all their lives to attain … .

We put up that night at a comfortable Han karwansarai in the shadow of the Great Wall, and when I had bathed and dined, I sat down in my room to open the missive Ali had brought me. It did not take me long to read it—though I had to spell it out letter by letter, being still not very accomplished at the Mongol alphabet—for it consisted of only a single line, translating as: “Expect me when you least expect me.” The words had lost none of their chill, but I was getting rather more weary of their refrain than apprehensive of their threat. I went to Ali’s room and demanded:

“The woman who gave you this for me. Surely you would have recognized her, even veiled, if she had been the Lady Chao Ku-an … .”

“Yes, and she was not. Which reminds me: the Lady Chao is dead. I only heard of it myself a day or two ago, from a courier riding the horse-post route. It happened since I left Khanbalik. An unfortunate accident. According to the courier, it is believed that the lady must have been chasing from her chambers some lover who had displeased her, and in running after him—you know she had the lotus feet—she tripped on the staircase and fell headlong.”

“I regret to hear it,” I said, though I really did not. One more off my list of suspect whisperers. “But about the letter, Ali. Was the lady who brought it perhaps a very largelady?” I was remembering the extraordinary female I had briefly seen in the chambers of the Vice-Regent Achmad.

Ali thought about it, and said, “She may have been taller than I am, but most people are. No, I would not say she was notably large.”

“You said she did not speak. It suggests that you would have known her by her voice, does it not?”

He shrugged. “How do I answer that? Since she did not, I did not. Does the letter contain bad news, Marco, or some other cause for despondency?”

“I could better decide that if I knew where it came from.”

“All I can tell you is that your advance riders arrived in the city on a day some days ago, heralding your imminent return, and—”

“Wait. Did they announce anything else?”

“Not really. When people asked how went the war in Yun-nan, the two would say nothing—except that youwere bringing the official word —but their swaggering implied that the word would be of some Mongol victory. Anyway, it was in the night of that day that the veiled lady came to me with that missive for you. So, with Mar-Janah’s blessing, when the two men left again the next morning to ride back to you, I rode with them.”

He could add nothing more, and I truly could not think of any females who might be nursing a grudge against me, what with the Lady Chao and the twins Buyantu and Biliktu all dead. If the veiled woman had been someone else’s agent, I had no idea whose. So I said no more about the matter, and tore up the vexing letter, and we continued on our journey, reaching Xan-du without anything dreadful happening to us, of either unexpected or expectable nature.

Xan-du was just one of four or five subsidiary palaces that the Khakhan maintained in places outside Khanbalik, but it was the most sumptuous of those. In the Da-ma-qing Mountains, he had had an extensive hunting park laid out, and stocked with all manner of game, and staffed with expert huntsmen and gamekeepers and beaters, who lived there the year around, in villages on the park’s outskirts. In the center of the park stood a marble palace of goodly size, containing the usual halls for gathering and dining and entertaining and holding court, plus ample quarters for any number of the royal family and their courtiers and guests, and for all the numerous servants and slaves they would require, and for all the musicians and mountebanks brought along to enliven the nighttime hours. Every room, down to the smallest bedchamber, was decorated with wall paintings done by the Master Chao and other court artists, depicting scenes of the chase and the course and the hunt, and all marvelously done. Outside the main palace building were grand stables for the mounts and the pack animals—elephants as well as horses and mules—and mews for the Khan’s hawks and falcons, and kennels for his dogs and chita cats, and all those buildings were as finely built and adorned and as spotlessly clean as the palace itself.

The Khakhan had also at Xan-du a sort of portable palace. It was like a tremendous yurtu pavilion, only so verytremendous that it could not have been constructed of cloth or felt. It was mostly made of the zhu-gan cane and palm leaves, and was supported on wooden columns carved and painted and gilded to seem dragons, and was held together by an ingenious webbing of silk ropes. Although of great size, it could be taken apart and carried about and put up again as easily as a yurtu. So it was continually being moved about the Xan-du parkland and the surrounding countryside—a train of elephants was reserved for the task of transporting its components—to wherever the Khakhan and his company chose to hunt on any day.

Every time Kubilai went out to hunt, he did it in consummate style. He and his guests would depart from the marble palace in a numerous and colorful and glittering train. Sometimes the Khan rode on one of his “dragon steeds”—the milk-white horses specially bred for him in Persia—and sometimes in the little house called a hauda, rocking atop an elephant’s high shoulders, and at other times in a lavishly ornamented, two-wheeled chariot, drawn by either horses or elephants. When he went on horseback, he always carried one of the sleek chita cats draped elegantly across the horse’s withers in front of his saddle, and would loose it whenever some small animal started up in his path. The chita could run down anything that moves, and would always dutifully fetch its catch back to the train, but, since a chita always mangled its prey considerably, a huntsman would toss that game into a separate bag and later mince it for feed for the birds in the palace mews. When Kubilai rode out in a hauda or his chariot, he always had two or more of his milk-white gerfalcons perched on its rim and would start them at sight of small game running or flying.

Behind the Khakhan’s chariot or steed or elephant would come the train of his company, all lords and ladies and distinguished guests mounted only a little less royally than the Khan himself, and all—depending on the game to be sought that day—carrying hooded hawks on their gauntleted wrists, or accompanied by servants carrying their lances or bows or leading on leash their chase dogs. Out ahead of the train, earlier in the day, would have gone the many beaters, to form up in three sides of a vast square and, at the proper time, to start flushing the game—stags or boars or otters or whatever—out the fourth side of the square, toward the approaching hunters.

Whenever Kubilai’s train passed through or by one of the villages situated around his parkland, all the families of women and children living there would run outdoors to cry “Hail!” They also kept welcome fires always burning, in case the Khan should come that way, and would cast into the flames spices and incense to perfume the air as the Khakhan went by. At midday, the hunting party would repair to the zhu-gan palace, always set up at a convenient place, for food and drink and soft music and a brief nap before going afield again in the afternoon. And when the day’s hunt was done, depending on how tired they all might be, or how far from the main palace, they would either return there or stop the night in the zhu-gan palace, for it had copious room and comfortable bedding.

I and Ali and our four Mongols reached Xan-du in the middle of a morning, and were told by a steward where to find the Khakhan’s portable palace, and arrived there at midday, when the whole party was lolling over its meal. Several people recognized me and hailed me, including Kubilai. I introduced Ali Babar to him as “a citizen of Khanbalik, Sire, one of your rich merchant princes,” and Kubilai received him cordially, not having noticed Ali in my company in the days when he had been the lowly slave Nostril. Then I started to say, “I bring from Yunnan both good and bad news, Sire—” but he held up his hand to stop me.

“Nothing,” he said firmly. “Nothing is important enough to interrupt a good hunt. Hold your news until we return to the Xan-du palace this evening. Now, are you hungry?” He clapped for a servant to bring food. “Are you fatigued? Would you rather precede us to the palace and rest while you wait, or would you take a lance with us? We have been starting some admirably big and vicious boar hogs.”

“Why, thank you, Sire. I should like to join the hunt. But I have little experience with a lance. Can boar be killed with bow and arrow?”

“Anything can be killed with anything, including bare hands. And those you may have to use, to finish a boar.” He turned and called, “Hui! Mahawat, make ready an elephant for Marco Polo!”

It was my first ride aboard an elephant, and it was most pleasant, infinitely more so than riding a camel, and very different from riding a horse. The hauda was made like a basket, of woven zhu-gan strips, with a little bench on which I sat beside the elephant driver, who is properly called a mahawat. The hauda had high sides to protect us from flicking tree branches, and a roof canopy over us, but was open in the front, so the mahawat could direct the elephant by prodding it with a stick, and so I could let fly my arrows. At first I was a little dizzied by my great height above the ground, but I soon got used to that. And when the animal first stepped out on the march through the park, I did not immediately realize that it was walking rather faster than a horse or camel does. Also, when it came time to chase a fleeing boar, it took me a while to realize that the elephant, for all its immense bulk, was running as fast as a galloping horse.

The mahawat took great pride in his great charges, and bragged about them, and I found his bragging informative. Only cow elephants, he told me, were used as working beasts. The bulls being not very amenable to training, only a few of those were kept in any domestic herd, as company for the cows. The elephants all wore bells, big chunky things carved of wood, that sounded with a hollow thunking noise instead of a jangle. The mahawat said that if I ever heard a clanging metal bell, I had better move in a hurry, because metal bells were hung only on elephants that had misbehaved and so could not any longer be trusted—in other words, those elephants most resembling people: usually a cow maddened, like any human mother, by the loss of a calf, or a bull gone grumpy and mean and irascible with age, like any old man.

An elephant, said the mahawat, was more intelligent than a dog, and more obedient than a horse, and more adept with its trunk and tusks than a monkey with its paws, and could be taught to do many things both useful and entertaining. In the timber forests, two elephants could work a saw between them to cut down a tree, then pick up and stack the giant logs or drag them to a log road, with the attendance of only a single human logger to select the trees to be cut. As a beast of burden, the elephant was incomparable to any others—being able to carry as much of a load as three strong oxen, and carry it for a distance of thirty to forty li in an ordinary working day, or more than fifty li in an emergency. The elephant was not at all shy of water, as a camel is, for it is a good swimmer, and a camel cannot swim at all.

I do not know if an elephant could have negotiated a precarious trail like the Pillar Road, but that animal carried us swiftly and surely across a variety of Da-ma-qing terrain. Since my elephant was just one in a line of them, the Khan’s and several others ahead of me, my mahawat did not have to do much directing. But when he wished the elephant to turn, he merely had to touch one or the other of the door-sized ears. When we were traveling among trees, the animal would, unbidden, use its trunk to move aside any impeding limbs, and the more whippy branches it would even break off to ensure that they did not swipe back at us riders. It went sometimes between trees that looked too close together to allow passage, and did that so sinuously and smoothly as not to scrape the belts that held our hauda on its shoulders. When we came to the wet clay bank of a small stream, the elephant, almost as playfully as a child, put its four tree-trunk feet close together and sliddown the slope to the water’s edge. At that place, the river was laid with stepping stones for crossing. Before venturing out onto them, the elephant first gently tested its weight on one, and sounded with its trunk the depth of the water roundabout. Then, seeming satisfied, it stepped out onto the stones and from one to the next, never hesitating, but treading as delicately and precisely as a fat man who has drunk a drop too much.

If the elephant has one unlovely trait, it is one that is common to all creatures, but is amplified to a prodigious degree by the animal’s size. That is to say that the elephant I rode frequently and appallingly broke wind. Other animals do that—camels, horses, even human beings, God knows—but no other animal in God’s Creation can do it so thunderously and odoriferously as an elephant, which produces a noxious miasma almost as visible as it is audible. With heroic effort, I pretended not to notice those lapses of manners. But I did make some small complaint of another trait: the elephant several times coiled its trunk back over its head and sneezedin my face—so windily as to rock me on my seat, and so wetly that I was soon damp all over. When I voiced my vexation at the sneezing, the mahawat said loftily:

“Elephants do not sneeze. The cow is just blowing your aroma away from her.”

“Gèsu,” I muttered. “ Myaroma is bothering her?”

“It is only that you are a stranger, and she is unaccustomed to you. When she gets to know you, she will put up with your smell and will moderate her behavior.”

“I rejoice to hear it.”

So we rollicked along, rhythmically swaying in the high hauda, and the mahawat told me other things. Down in the jungles of Champa, he said, where the elephants came from, there were such things as white elephants.

“Not reallywhite, of course, like the Khakhan’s snow-white horses and hawks. But a paler gray than ordinary. And because they are rare, like albinos among humans, they are held to be sacred. They are often employed for revenge against an enemy.”

“Sacred,” I repeated, “but instruments of revenge? I do not understand.”

He explained. When a white elephant was caught, it was always presented to the local king, because only a king could afford to keep one. Being sacred, the elephant could never be put to labor, but had to be pampered with a fine stable and dedicated attendants and a princely diet, and its only function was to march in religious processions, when it had to be festooned with gold-threaded blankets and jeweled chains and baubles and such. That was a burdensome expense even for a king. However, said the mahawat, suppose a king got displeased with some one of his lords, or feared his rivalry, or simply took a dislike to him … .

“In the old days,” he said, “a king would have sent him poisoned sweetmeats, so that the recipient would die when he ate them—or a beautiful slave girl poisoned in her pink places, so that the noble would die after he lay with her. But those stratagems are now too well-known. So the king nowadays simply sends the noble a white elephant. He cannot refuse a sacred gift. He can make no profit from it. But he has the ruinous expense of maintaining it in proper style, so he is soon bankrupted and broken—if he waits to be. Most commit suicide on first receiving the white elephant.”

I refused to believe such a story, and accused the mahawat of inventing it. But then he told me something else unbelievable—that he could calculate for me the exact height of any elephant without even seeing it—and when at the close of the day we got down from ours, he demonstrated that ability, and even I could do it. So, being forced to believe him about that, I ceased scoffing at his white elephant story. Anyway, the measurement is done thus. You simply find an elephant’s track and pick out the print of one of its forefeet and measure the circumference of that. Everyone knows that a perfectly proportioned woman has a waist exactly twice the circumference of her neck, and her neck twice that of her wrist. Just so, the elephant’s height at the shoulder is exactly twice the circumference of its forefoot.

When we heard the beaters hooting and thrashing up ahead of us, I nocked an arrow to my bowstring. And when a spiny black shape shouldered its way through a thicket and snorted at us, and clashed its yellow tusks as if it would challenge those of my elephant, I let fly the arrow. I hit the boar; I could hear the thwockand see the puff of dust go up from the coarse-haired hide. I believe he would have gone down on the instant if I had chosen one of the heavy, broad-headed arrows. But I had expected it to be a long shot, and it had been, so I had used one of the narrow-headed, long-range arrows. It pierced the boar clean and deep, but only made him turn and run.

Without waiting for the goad, my elephant ran after him, following as closely on his jinks and curvettings as a trained boar-hound, while I and the mahawat bounced about in the jouncing hauda. It was impossible for me to nock another arrow, let alone shoot it and hope to hit anything. But the wounded boar soon realized that it was fleeing into the line of beaters. It skidded awkwardly to a stop in a dry creek bed, and turned at bay, and lowered its long head, its red eyes blinking angrily above and behind the four upcurved tusks. My elephant also slid to a halt, which must have made a humorous sight to see, if I had been elsewhere looking on. But the mahawat and I were pitched out of the hauda’s open front to sprawl atop the elephant’s great head, and would have gone on falling, if we had not been clutching at each other and the beast’s big ears and the straps holding the hauda and anything else in reach.

When the elephant again curled her trunk backward over her head, I confusedly wished she had thought of something better to do than sneeze-but it turned out that she had. She curled the trunk around my waist and, as if I had been no weightier than a dry leaf, lifted me off her head, twirled me in midair and set me down on my feet—between her and the enraged, pawing, snorting boar. I did not know whether the elephant maliciously intended that I, the new-smelling stranger, should suffer the brunt of the boar’s charge, or whether she was trained to do that in order to give a hunter a second shot at the quarry. But if she thought she was being helpful, she was mistaken, for she had put me down without my bow and arrows, still up in the hauda. I could have turned to see whether the little eyes among her wrinkles were bright with mischief or solemn with concern—elephants’ eyes are as expressive as women’s—but I dared not turn my back to the wounded boar.

From where I now stood, it looked bigger than a barnyard brood sow, and inexpressibly more savage. It stood with its black snout close to the ground, above it the four wicked tusks curling up and out, above them the blazing red eyes, the tufty ears twitching and, behind them, the powerful black shoulders hunching for a lunge. I threw my hand to my belt knife, yanked it out and in front of me, and flung myself headlong toward the boar in the same moment that it charged. Had I waited a breath longer, I should have moved too late. I fell atop the boar’s long snout and high-humped back, but the beast did not jerk its tusks upward into my groin, for it died too quickly. My knife went through the hide and deep into flesh, and I squeezed its handle in the instant of thrust, so that I struck with all three blades at once. The boar’s dying plunge carried me with it for some way, then its legs crumpled and we came down in a heap.