Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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So, on the appointed day, I went with Ali to the underground cavern, and bade him be manfully stalwart as he witnessed the piecemeal reduction of our mutual enemy. Ali looked pale—he had never had stomach for bloodshed—but he looked determined, even while he said his salaams and farewells to me as solemnly as if he himself were going to the Death of a Thousand. Then he and the Master Ping, who was still grumbling at this unwelcome intrusion, went through the iron-studded door to where Achmad was already dangling and waiting, and closed the door behind them. I came away with only one regret at the time: that the Arab, from what I had heard, was still numb and bemazed. If it was true, as Achmad had once told me, that Hell is what hurts worst, then I regretted that he might not feel the hurts as keenly as I would have wished.

Since the Fondler had given notice that this Fondling might occupy a full hundred days, everyone naturally expected that it would. So not until the expiration of that time did his clerks and assistants return to congregate in the outer chamber and await their master’s triumphant emergence. When several more days passed, they began to fidget, but dared not intrude. Not until I sent one of my maidservants, seeking word of Ali Babar, was the chief clerk emboldened to open the iron-studded door a crack. He was met by a charnel-house stench that sent him reeling backward. Nothing else came out of the inner room, and no one could even peek in without fainting dead away. The Palace Engineer had to be sent for and asked to direct his artificial breezes through the underground tunnels. When the chambers had been blown clean enough to be bearable, the Fondler’s chief clerk ventured in and came out, looking stunned, to report what he had found.

There were three dead bodies, or the constituents and remains of three bodies. That of the ex-Wali Achmad was a mere shred, obviously having endured at least a Death of Nine Hundred and Ninety-nine. As well as could be ascertained, Ali Babar had watched that entire dissolution, had then seized and bound the Fondler,and proceeded to imitate, on his sacrosanct and inviolate person, the whole process of the Fondling. However, the chief clerk reported, it had not gone much beyond a Death of Perhaps One or Two Hundred. The supposition was that Ali had got too ill—from the miasma of Achmad’s decay and all the other accumulated gore and carnage and excrement—to persevere to the end. He had left the only partially dismembered Master Ping hanging to die at his leisure, and had taken up one of the longer knives and plunged it into his own breast, and died himself.

So Ali Babar, Nostril, Sindbad, Ali-ad-Din, whom I had scorned and derided as a coward and an empty braggart all the time I had known him, at the very last was impelled by the one praiseworthy motive of his life—his love for Mar-Janah—to do something eminently courageous and laudable. He took revenge on both of her slayers, the instigator and the perpetrator, and then took his own life, so that none other (meaning myself) could be blamed for the deed.

The palace population, and the city of Khanbalik, and probably all of Kithai, if not the whole of the Mongol Empire, were still buzzing and twittering with the scandal of Achmad’s precipitous downfall. The new scandal from underground provided still more fodder for the gossips to chew—and set Kubilai to regarding me again with stern exasperation. But this latest news contained one revelation so macabre, so almost risible, that even the Khakhan was bemused and distracted from any inclination to vindictiveness. What happened was that, when the Fondler’s assistants collected and reassembled his cadaver for decent burial, they discovered that the man had all his life had lotus feet,bound since infancy, warped and contorted to dainty points, like those of a Han noblewoman. So the resultant mood of everybody, including Kubilai, was not so much glowering: “Now who should pay for thisoutrage?”—but speculative and almost amused, people asking each other: “What awful kind of mother must the Master Ping have had?”

My own mood, I have to say, was less frivolous. My vengeance had been accomplished, but at the cost of a long-time companion, and I was melancholy. That depression was not alleviated when I went to Mafìo’s chambers, as I did every day or so, to regard what was left of him.That devoted woman servant kept him clean and nicely dressed (in proper men’s clothes), and she kept neatly trimmed the gray beard that was growing in again. He appeared well-fed and healthy enough, and he might have been taken for the hearty and blustering Uncle Mafio of old, except that his eyes were vacant and he was again singing, in a sort of cow-moo voice, his litany to Virtue:

La virtù è un cavedal che sempre è rico,

Che no patisse mai rùzene o tarlo … .

I was contemplating him morosely and feeling very low indeed when another visitor unexpectedly arrived, finally come back from his latest trading karwan around the country. I had never—not even on his first arrival in Venice when I was a boy—been so glad to see my bland and gentle and dull and benign and colorless old father.

We fell into each other’s arms and made the Venetian abrazzo, and then stood side by side while he looked sadly at his brother. He had, on the roads hither, heard in broad outline of all the events that had occurred during his journeying: the end of the Yun-nan war, my return to court, the surrender of Sung, the death of Achmad and the Master Ping, the suicide of his once-slave Nostril, the unfortunate indisposition of the Ferenghi Polo, his brother. Now I told him all the facts of those events which only I could tell. I omitted nothing but the most vile details and, when I had done, he looked again at Mafìo and shook his head, fondly, ruefully, regretfully, murmuring, “Tato, tato …” the diminutive and affectionate way of saying, “Brother, brother … .”

“ … Belo anca deforme,” Mafìo mooed, in seeming response. “Vivo anca sepolto … .”

Nicolò Polo mournfully shook his head again. But then he turned and clapped a comradely hand on my sagging shoulders, and squared his own, and perhaps for the very first time I was grateful to hear one of his stock encouragements:

“Ah, Marco, sto mondo xe fato tondo.”

Which is to say that, whatever happens, good or bad, cause for rejoicing or lament, “the world will still be round.”

MANZI

1

THE storm of scandal gradually abated. The Khanbalik court, like a ship that had been dangerously careened, gradually came upright again and steadied on its keel. As far as I know, Kubilai never tried to call his cousin Kaidu to account for his presumed part in the recent outrages. Kaidu being still far away in the west, and all danger of his involvement being now past, the Khakhan was content to leave him there, and instead devoted his energies to cleaning up the mess on his own doorstep. He sensibly began by dividing the late Achmad’s three different offices among three different men. To his son Chingkim’s duties as Wang of the city, he added the responsibility to serve as Vice-Regent during the Khakhan’s absences. He promoted my old battlefield companion Bayan to the rank of Chief Minister, but, since Bayan preferred to stay in the field as an active orlok, that office too devolved onto Prince Chingkim. Kubilai might have desired another Arab to replace Achmad as Finance Minister—or a Persian or a Turki or a Byzantine—since he had such a high opinion of Muslims’ financial abilities, and since that ministry had charge of the Muslim Ortaq of merchants and traders. However, the settling of the late Achmad’s estate produced another revelation that soured the Khakhan on Muslims forever after. It was the rule in Kithai, as in Venice and elsewhere, that a traitor’s belongings be confiscated by the state. And it was discovered that the Arab’s estate consisted of a vast amount of wealth he had fraudulently appropriated and embezzled and extorted during his official career. (Some others of his belongings—including his hoard of paintings—never did come to light.)

The irrefutable evidence of Achmad’s longtime duplicity so enraged Kubilai, all over again, that he appointed as Finance Minister the elderly Han scholar of my acquaintance, the Court Mathematician Lin-ngan. In his new detestation of Muslims, Kubilai went further, proclaiming new laws that severely abridged the freedom of Kithai’s Muslims, and limited the extent of their mercantile activities, and forbade them to practice usury as heretofore, and diminished their exorbitant profits. He also made all Muslims publicly forswear that part of their Holy Quran which permits them to dupe, cheat and kill all who are not of Islam. He even passed a law requiring Muslims to eat pork,if it were served to them by a host or innkeeper. I think that law was never much obeyed or stringently enforced. And I know that the other laws envenomed many already rich and powerful Muslims resident in Khanbalik. I know because I heard them muttering imprecations, not against Kubilai, but against us “infidel Polos” whom they held to blame for inciting him to the persecution of Muslims.

Ever since my return from Yun-nan to Khanbalik, I had been finding the city not a very hospitable or pleasant place. Now the Khakhan, occupied with so many other things, including the posting of a Wang and magistrates and prefects in the newly acquired Manzi, assigned me no work to do for him, and the Compagnia Polo likewise had no need of me. The appointment of our old acquaintance Lin-ngan as Finance Minister had caused no interference in my father’s trading activities. If anything, the new suppression of Muslim business had meant an increase in his own, but he was capable of handling it all by himself. He was currently engaged in picking up the reins of what ventures Mafio had guided, and in training new overseers for the kashi works Ali Babar and Mar-Janah had headed. So I was at loose ends anyway, and it occurred to me that by leaving Khanbalik for a while I might allay some of the local unrest and grievances still smoldering. I went to the Khakhan and asked if he had any mission abroad that I could undertake for him. He studied on the matter and then said, with a trace of malicious amusement:

“Yes, I have, and I thank you for volunteering. Now that Sung has become Manzi, it is a part of our Khanate, but it is not yet subscribing any funds to our treasury. The late Finance Minister would already have flung his Ortaq net over that whole land, and would by now be seining rich tribute out of it. Since he is not, and since you contributed to the fact that he is not, I think it only right that you volunteer to take on the task in his place. You will go to the Manzi capital of Hang-zho and inaugurate some system of tax collection that will satisfy our imperial treasury and not too seriously dissatisfy the Manzi population.”

It was rather more of a mission than I had meant to volunteer for. I said, “Sire, I know nothing about taxation—”

“Then call it something else. The former Finance Minister called it a tariff on trade transactions. You can call it impost or levy—or involuntary benevolence, if you like. I will not ask you to bleed those newly annexed subjects of every drop in their veins. But I shall expect a respectable amount of tribute paid by every head of household in all the provinces of Manzi.”

“How many heads are there, Sire?” I was sorry I had ever come calling on him. “How much would you deem a respectable amount?”

He said drily, “I daresay you can count the heads yourself, when you get there. As to the amount, I will let you know very promptly if it is not to my liking. Now do not stand there gulping at me like a fish. You requested a mission. I have given you one. All the necessary documents of appointment and authority will be ready by the time you are ready to leave.”

I set off for Manzi not much more enthusiastically than I had set off for the war in Yun-nan. I could not know that I was setting forth upon the happiest and most satisfying years of my whole life. In Manzi, as in Yun-nan, I would successfully accomplish the mission set me, and again win the plaudits of the Khan Kubilai, and become quite legitimately wealthy—in my own right, by my own doing, not merely as a sharer in the Compagnia Polo—and I would be entrusted with other missions, and would accomplish them as well. But when I now say “I” it should be taken as “I and Hui-sheng,” for the silent Echo was now my traveling partner and my wise adviser and my steadfast comrade, and without her beside me I could not have accomplished what I did in those years.

The Holy Bible tells us that the Lord God said, “It is not good for man to be alone: let Us make him a help like unto himself.” Well, even Adam and Eve were not entirely like unto each other—a fact for which I, all these generations later, have never ceased thanking God—and Hui-sheng and I were physically different in many other ways. But more of a help no man could ever have asked, and many of our unlikenesses consisted, I must honestly say, in her being superior to me: in calm temperament, in tenderness of heart, in a wisdom that was something deeper than mere intelligence.

Even had she continued as a slave, doing nothing but serve me, or become my concubine, doing nothing but satisfy me, Hui-sheng would have been a valuable and welcome addition to my life, and an ornament to it, and a delight. She was beautiful to look at, and delicious to love, and a high-spirited joy to have around. Unbelievable as it may seem, her conversationwas a pleasure to be enjoyed. As the Prince Chingkim had once remarked to me, pillow talk is the very best way to learn any language, and that was just as true for a language of signs and gestures, and no doubt our loving closeness on the pillow made our mutual learning quicker and our invented mutual language more fluent. When we got adept at that method of communication, I found that Hui-sheng’s conversation was rich with meaning and good sense and nuances of real wittiness. All in all, Hui-sheng was far too bright and too talented to have been relegated to any of the underling positions where most women belong and are pleased to be and are best useful.

Hui-sheng’s deprivation of sound had made all her other senses superlatively keen. She could see or feel or smell or somehowdetect things that would have gone by me unnoticed, and she would direct my notice to them, so that I was perceiving more than I ever had before. For a very trivial example, she would sometimes dart from my side, when we were out walking, and run to what looked to me like a distant bank of nothing but weeds. She would kneel and pluck something unremarkably weed-looking, and bring it to show me that it was a flower not yet even budded, and she would keep that sprig and tend it until it bloomed and was beautiful.

Once, in the early days when we were still inventing our language, we were idling away an afternoon in one of those garden pavilions where the Palace Engineer had so miraculously piped water to play jug flutes positioned under the eaves. I awkwardly managed to convey to Hui-sheng how those things worked, though I assumed she had not the least idea what music was, and I waved my hands about in time to that murmurous warbling. She nodded brightly, and I supposed she was pretending to comprehend, to please me. But then she caught one of my hands and put it against one of the carved side columns, and held it there, and signed for me to be very, verystill. Perplexed but fondly amused, I did so, and after a moment I realized, with vast amazement, that I was feeling the very, veryfaintest vibration—from the jug flute overhead, down through the wood and so to my touch. My silent Echo had shown me an echo in silence, indeed. She was capable of appreciating and even enjoying the rhythms of that unhearable music—perhaps even better than I could, hearingit—so delicate were her hands and her skin.

Those extraordinary faculties of hers were of incalculable value to me in my travels and my work and my dealings with others. That was especially true in Manzi, where I was naturally regarded with distrust as an emissary of the conquerors, and where I had to do business with resentful former overlords and grasping merchant chiefs and reluctant hirelings. Just as Hui-sheng could discern a flower invisible to others, so could she often discern a person’s unvoiced thoughts and feelings and motives and intentions. She could reveal them to me, too—sometimes in private, sometimes while that very person sat talking with me—and on many occasions that gave me a notable advantage over other folk. But even more often, I had an advantage in her merely being at my side. The men of Manzi, nobles and commoners alike, were unused to women sitting in on masculine conferences. If mine had been an ordinary woman—plain, voluble, strident—they would have disdained me as an uncouth barbarian or a henpecked capon. But Hui-sheng was such a charming and attractive adornment to any gathering (and so blessedly silent) that every man put on his most courtly manners, and spoke most chivalrously, and postured and almost pranced for her admiration, and many times—I know for a fact—deferred to my demands or acceded to my instructions or gave me the better of a bargain, just to earn Hui-sheng’s look of approbation.

She was my fellow journeyer, and she adopted a costume that enabled her to ride a horse astride, and she rode always beside me. She was my capable companion, my trusted confidante and, in everything but title, my wife. I would have been ready at any time for us to have “broken the plate,” as the Mongols called it (because their ceremony of wedding, performed by a shamàn-priest, culminated in the ceremonial smashing of a piece of fine porcelain). But Hui-sheng, again unlike the commonalty of women, attached no importance to tradition or formality or superstition or ritual. She and I made what vows we wished to make, and made them in private, and that sufficed us both, and she was happy to forgo any public trumpeting and trumpery exhibition.

Kubilai advised me once, when the subject came up, “Marco, do not break the plate. So long as you have not yet taken a First Wife, you will find pliant and conciliatory every man with whom you have to deal, in matters of commerce or treaty negotiation or whatever. He will seek your good regard and he will not obstruct your good fortune, because he will be nursing the secret hope of making his daughter or niece your First Wife and mother of your principal heir.” That advice might well have made me hasten immediately to break a plate with Hui-sheng, for I scorned ever to order my life according to the dictates of “good business.” But Hui-sheng pointed out, with some vigor, that as my wife she would haveto observe some traditions—at least those enjoining wifely subordination—and so could not any longer ride joyously at my side, but, if she was allowed to go anywhere at all, would have to travel in a closed palanquin, and she could not any longer assist me in my working conferences with other men, and tradition would forbid her to—

“Enough, enough!” I said, laughing at her agitation. I caught and stopped her flickering fingers, and promised that nothingwould make me marry her, ever.

So we remained lovers only, which may be the very best sort of marriage there could be. I did not treat her as a wife, an inferior, but accorded her—and insisted that all others accord her—full equality with myself. (That may not have been so liberal of me as it sounds, since I well recognized her many points of superiority, and so perhaps did some cognitive others.) But I did treat her as a wife, a most noble wife, in regaling her with gifts of jewelry and jade and ivory, and the richest and most becoming garments for her to wear, and, for her personal mount, a superb white mare of the Khan’s own “dragon horses.” Only one husbandly rule did I lay down: she was never to mask her beauty with cosmetics, in the Khanbalik fashion. She complied, and so her peach-bloom complexion was never slathered rice-white, her rose-wine lips were not discolored or redrawn with garish paint, her feathery brows were not plucked bald. That made her unfashionable, and so radiantly lovely that all other women cursed the fashion, and their own slavishness to it. I did allow Hui-sheng to dress her hair as she liked, since she never did it any way I did not like, and I bought her jeweled combs and hair-spoons for it.

Of jewels and gold and jade and such, she eventually owned a trove that a Khatun might envy, but she always treasured one thing most of all. So did I, really, though I often pretended to consider it trash and urged her to throw it away. It was a thing I had not given her, but one of the pathetically few belongings she had brought when she first came to me: that plain and inelegant white porcelain incense burner. She lovingly bore it everywhere we journeyed and, in palace or karwansarai or yurtu or on open camp ground, Hui-sheng made sure that the sweet scent of warm clover after a gentle rain was the accompaniment of all our nights.

All our nights …

We were lovers only, never wedded man and wife. Nevertheless, I will invoke the privacy of the marriage bed and decline to relate the particulars of what she and I did there. In recalling others of my intimate relationships, I have spoken without reserve, but I prefer to keep some things private to me and Hui-sheng.

I will make only some general observations on the subject of anatomy. That will not violate the privacy of Hui-sheng, and would not cause her any blushes, for she often maintained that she was physically no different from any other female of the Min, and that those women were no different from the Han or any other race native to Kithai and Manzi. I beg to differ with her. The Khan Kubilai himself had once observed that the Min women were above all others in beauty, and Hui-sheng was outstanding even among the Min. But when she insisted, with modest and self-deprecatory gestures, that she was only ordinary of features and figure, I sensibly made no demur—for the most beautiful woman is the woman who does not realize she is.

And Hui-sheng was beautiful all over. That would adequately describe her, but I must go into some detail, to correct a few misapprehensions I myself had earlier entertained. I have mentioned the fine floss of hair that grew in front of her ears and at her nape, and I said then that I wondered if it implied an abundant hairiness in other places on her body. I could not have been more mistaken in that expectation. Hui-sheng was totally hairless on her legs and arms, under her arms, even on her artichoke. She was as clean and silkily smooth in that place as had been the child Doris of my youth. I did not mind that at all—an organ so accessible permits of various close attentions that a furred one does not—but I made mild inquiry. Was the hairlessness peculiar to her, or did she perhaps use a mumum to achieve it? She replied that no women of the Min (or the Han or the Yi or other such races) had hair on their bodies, or, if they did, had but the merest trace.

Her whole body was similarly childlike. Her hips were narrow and her buttocks small, just right for cupping in my hands. Her breasts were also small, but perfectly shaped and distinctly separate. I had long ago conceived a private belief that women with large nipples and a considerable dark halo around them were far more sexually responsive than women with small and pale ones. Hui-sheng’s nipples were minute by comparison with other women’s, but not when regarded in proportion to her porcelain-cup breasts. They were neither dark nor pale, but bright, as pink as her lips. And they indicated no lack of responsiveness, because Hui-sheng’s breasts, unlike those of larger women which are ticklish only at the extremity, were marvelously sensitive over their whole hemispheres. I had but to caress them anywhere, and their “small stars” pouted out as perkily as little tongues there. The same below. Perhaps because of the hairlessness, her lower belly and adjacent thighs were sensitive all over. Caress her anywhere there, and from her maidenly modest cleft would slowly emerge her pink and pretty “butterfly between the petals,” the more appreciable and enticing for its not being concealed within any tuft.

I never knew, and refrained from ever asking, whether Hui-sheng had been a virgin when she first came to me. One reason that I never knew was that she was so perpetuallyvirginal, which I will explain in a moment. Another reason was that—as she told me—women of those races never came to marriage with a maidenhead. They were accustomed to being bathed in infancy, and later bathing themselves, several times a day, and not only on the outside but—with dainty fluids made of flower juices—inside as well. Their fastidiousness went far beyond that of even the most civilized, refined, high-born Venetian ladies (at least until I later dictated that the custom be adopted by the women of my own Venetian family). One result of that scrupulous cleanliness was that a young girl’s maidenhead got gradually, painlessly dilated and folded away to nonexistence. So she came to her nuptial bed with no fear of the first penetration, and no least twinge of hurt when it happened. And, in consequence, those races of Kithai and Manzi made no such fuss as other peoples do, about the sheet-stain certification of defloration.

While I am speaking of other peoples, let me remark that men of the Muslim countries treasure a certain belief. They believe that, when they die and go to the Heaven they call Djennet, they will disport themselves throughout eternity with whole anderuns of heavenly women called haura, who have, among their many other talents, the ability continually to renew their virginity. Buddhist men believe the same about the Devatas women they will enjoy in their heavenly Pure Land between lives. I do not know whether any such supernatural females exist in any afterlife, but I can testify that the Min women right here on earth possessed that wondrous quality of never getting slack and flaccid in their parts. Or at least Hui-sheng did.

Her opening was not just childishly small on the outside—the shyest and dearest dimple—but inside as well, most thrillingly tight and close-clasping. Yet it was mature, too, in that it was somehow delicately muscular all up along its inside length, so that it imparted not a constant squeeze but a repetitive rippling sensation from one end to the other. Aside from the other delicious effects produced by her smallness, my every entering of Hui-sheng was like a first time. She was haura and Devatas: perpetually virginal.

Some of her anatomical uniqueness I recognized on our very first night in bed together, and even before we coupled. I should also say of that first coupling that it occurred not from my taking of Hui-sheng, but from her giving herself to me. I had resolutely kept my resolve not to urge or press her, and instead had courted her with all the genteel gallantries and flourishes of a trovatore minstrel demonstrating his affection for a lady high above his humble station. During that time, I ignored all other women and every other sort of distraction, and spent every possible moment with Hui-sheng or nearby, and she slept in my chambers, but we slept always apart. What attraction or attention of mine finally won her, I do not know, but I know when it happened. It was the day she showed me, in the jug-flute pavilion, how to feel music as well as hear it. And that night, for the first time in my chambers, she brought the incense burner and set it alight beside my bed, and got into the bed with me, and—let me put it this way—she allowed me again to feel music as well as hear it and see it and taste it (and smell it, too, in that sweet incense aroma of warm clover after gentle rain).

There was yet another smell and taste perceptible in my making love to Hui-sheng. That first night, before we began, she inquired timidly whether I would desire children. Yes, truly I would have, from one as precious as she—but, because she wasprecious to me, I would not subject her to the horrors of childbirth—so I said a definite no. She looked a trifle downcast at that, but immediately took precautions against the eventuality. She went and got a very small lemon, and peeled it to the white and cut it in half. I expressed some disbelief that anything as simple and common as a lemon could do something as difficult as preventing conception. She smiled assurance and showed me how it was employed. In fact, she gave me the piece of lemon and let me do the applying. (In fact, she let me do that every night we slept together, ever after. ) She lay back and spread her legs, baring the creased little peach-hued purse down there, and I gently parted its cleft and eased the bit of lemon inside. That was when I first realized how verysmall and virginally tight she was, a snug fit even for my one finger, as it carefully, tremulously, worked the lemon up along the warm channel to the firm, smooth nub of her womb, where the lemon almost eagerly and lovingly cupped over it.

As I withdrew my hand, Hui-sheng smiled again—perhaps at the expression on my flushed face, or my breathlessness—and perhaps she mistook my excitement for concern, because she hastened to assure me that the lemon cap was a sure and certain preventive of accidents. She said it was provably superior to any other means, such as the Mongol women’s fern seed, or the Bho women’s insertion of a jagged nugget of rock salt, or the witless Hindu women’s puffing of wood smoke inside themselves, or the Champa women’s making their men clamp onto their organ a little hat of tortoise-shell. Most of those methods I had never heard of, and I cannot comment on the practicality of them. But I later had proof of the lemon’s efficacy in that respect. And I also discovered, that same night, that it was a much more pleasingmethod than most, because it added a fresh, tart, bright scent and taste to Hui-sheng’s already impeccably clean and fragrant parts and their emanations and essences … .