Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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That ugliness was reserved to the males, but they generously let the females share in another one: the unsightly habit of constantly chewing. Indeed, I believe the jungle Mien did their forestry work only so they could afford to purchase another tree product—a chewable one—that they could not grow, but had to import. It was the nut of a tree called the areca, which was found only in seacoast regions. The Mien bought those nuts, boiled them, sliced them and let them dry black in the sun. Whenever they felt like having a treat—which was all the time—they would take a slice of the areca nut, dab a little lime on it, roll it in a leaf of a vine called the betel, pop that wad into the mouth and chew it—or rather, chew a constant succession of wads—the whole day long. It was to the Mien what the cud is to cows: their only diversion, their only enjoyment, the only activity they engaged in that was not absolutely necessary to existence. A village full of Mien men, women and children was not pretty. It was not made prettier by the sight of all of them champing their jaws up and down and about.

Even that was not the extremity of their deliberate self-defilement. The chewing of a wad of areca and betel had the further effect of making the chewer’s saliva bright red. Since a Mien child began chewing as soon as it was off the teat, it grew up to have gums and lips as red as open sores, and teeth as dark and corrugated as teak bark. Just as the Mien accounted handsome a man who elaborated on his already awful body colors, they accounted beautiful a woman who put a coat of lacquer on her already teak-bark teeth and thereby colored them absolutely dead black. The first time a Mien beauty gave me a smile all tar-black and ulcer-red, I reeled backward in revulsion. When I recovered, I asked Yissun the motive for that ghastly disfigurement. He asked the woman, and relayed to me her haughty response:

“Why, whiteteeth are for dogs and monkeys!”

Speaking of whiteness, I would have expected those people to show some surprise or even fright at my approach—since I must have been the first white man ever seen in the Ava nation. But they evinced no emotion whatever. I might have been one of the less fearsome nat, and an inept one, which had chosen to appear in a defectively colorless human-body disguise. But neither did the Mien show any resentment, fear or loathing of Yissun and our boatmen, though they were all aware that the Mongols had recently conquered their country. When I remarked on their lackadaisical attitude, they only shrugged and repeated—and Yissun translated—what I took to be a Mien peasant proverb:

“When the karbau fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.”

And when I inquired if they were not dismayed because their king had fled into hiding, they only shrugged and repeated what they said was a traditional peasant prayer: “Spare us the five evils,” and then enumerated the five: “Flood, fire, thieves, enemies and kings.”

When I inquired of one village’s headman, who seemed a degree more intelligent than the village’s karbau oxen, what he could tell me of the history of his Mien people, this is what Yissun relayed to me:

“Ame, U Polo! Our great people once had a splendid history and a glorious heritage. It was all written down in books, in our poetic Mien language. But there came a great famine, and the books were boiled and sauced and eaten, so now we remember nothing of our history and know nothing of writing.”

He did not elucidate further, and neither can I, except to explain that “amè!” was the Mien’s favorite exclamation and expletive and profanity (though it meant nothing but “mother”) and “U Polo” was their way of addressing me respectfully. They entitled me “U” and Huisheng “Daw,” which was their equivalent of saying Messere e Madona Polo. As for the story of the history books’ having been “sauced and eaten,” I can verify at least this much. The Mien did have a sauce that was their favorite food—they used it as often as they uttered “amè!”—and it was a stinking, revolting, absolutely nauseous liquid condiment which they expressed from fermented fish.The sauce was called nuoc-mam, and they slathered it on their rice, their pork and chicken, their vegetables, on everything they ate. Since nuoc-mam made everything taste ghastlily like itself, and since the Mien would eat any ghastlily thing if it had nouc-mam poured on it, I did not for a moment disbelieve that they could have “sauced and eaten” all their historical archives.

We came one evening to a village where the inhabitants were, most unnaturally, notbeing phlegmatic and idle, but were leaping about in great excitement. They were all women and children, so I bade Yissun inquire what was happening and where all the men had gone to.

“They say the men have caught a badak-gajah—a unicorn—and should shortly be fetching it in.”

Well, that news excited even me. As far away as Venice, unicorns were known by repute, and some people believed in their existence, and others regarded them as mythical creatures, but all thought fondly and admiringly of the ideaof unicorns. In Kithai and Manzi, I had known many men—usually those well along in years—to ingest a medicine made of powdered “horn of unicorn,” as an enhancer of virility. The medicine was scarce and only seldom available, and prodigiously costly, so that gave some evidence that unicorns really existed, and were as rare as the legends said they were.

On the other hand, the legends told in Venice and Kithai alike, and the pictures artists drew, depicted the unicorn as a beautiful, graceful, horse– or deerlike animal with a long, sharp, twisted, single golden horn springing from its forehead. Somehow I had doubts that this Ava unicorn could be the same. For one thing, it was hard to conceive of such a dreamlike creature living in these nightmarish jungles, and letting itself be caught by the dullard Mien. For another, that local name, badak-gajah, translated only as “an animal as big as an elephant,” which did not sound right at all.

“Ask them, Yissun, if they take the unicorn by setting out a virgin maiden to entice it to capture.”

He asked, and I could see the blank looks with which that query was received, and several of the women murmured “amè!” so I was not surprised when he reported that no, they had never had opportunity to try that method.

“Ah,” I said. “The unicorns are that scarce, are they?”

“The virgins are that scarce.”

“Well, let us see how they do take the creature. Can someone show us where it is now?”

A little naked boy, running almost energetically ahead of us, led me and Hui-sheng and Yissun there, to a mud flat near the river. Unaccountably, a vast pile of rubbish was burning furiously in the very middle of the mud, and all the village men, exhibiting none of their usual torpor, were actually dancing around the fire. There was no sign of any unicorn, or any other animal, caught or not. Yissun asked about and reported to me:

“The badak-gajah, like the karbau ox and the ghariyal serpent, likes to sleep in the coolness of the mud. These men, early this dawn, found one here asleep, only its horn and nostrils visible above the surface. They took it in their usual manner. Moving quietly, they piled over the spot reeds and cane and dry grass, and set it afire. The beast awoke, of course, but could not wallow loose of the mud before the fire began to crust it, and the smoke quickly rendered the unicorn unconscious.”

I exclaimed, “What a dreadful way to treat an animal of so many pretty legends! So then they made it captive, I suppose. Where is it?”

“Not captive. It is still under there. In the mud under the fire. Baking.”

“What?” I cried. “They are bakingthe unicorn?”

“These people are Buddhists, and Buddhism forbids their hunting and killing any wild animal. But their religion cannot hold them to account if the animal simply suffocates and then cooks, all by itself. They then can eat it without committing any sacrilege.”

“Eat a unicorn?I cannot conceive of a worse sacrilege!”

However, when the sacrilege was finally concluded, and the middle of the mud flat had baked to pottery hardness, and the Mien chipped it apart and revealed the cooked animal, I saw that it was not a unicorn—anyway, not the unicorn of legend. The only thing it had in common with the stories and the pictures was its single horn. But that grew not from its forehead, it grew out of an ugly long snout. The rest of the animal was just as ugly and, though nowhere near as big as an elephant, at least as big as a karbau. It did not resemble a horse or a deer, or my image of a unicorn, or anything else I had ever seen. It had a leathery skin that was all in plates and folds, rather like cuirbouilli armor. Its feet were vaguely elephantine in shape, but its ears were only little tufts, and the long snout had an overhanging upper lip, but no trunk.

The whole animal had been cooked quite black by the mud baking, so I could not say what its original color was. But the single horn had never been golden. In fact, as I could see when the Mien carefully sawed it off the animal’s casklike head, it was not really made of horn substance at all, nor of ivory, like a tusk. It seemed merely a compaction of long hairs all grown in a hard, heavy clump that rose to a blunt point. But the Mien assured me, with much exuberance at their good fortune, that this really was the source of the “horn of unicorn” virility enhancer, and they would receive much payment for it—by which I daresay they meant an ample exchange in areca nuts.

Their headman took possession of the precious horn, and the others began to skin off the heavy hide and cut up the carcass and bear the steaming portions back to the village. One of the men handed to me and Hui-sheng and Yissun each a piece of the meat—straight from the oven, so to speak—and we all found it tasty, though somewhat stringily fibrous. We looked forward to sharing the Mien’s evening meal, but we returned to the village to find that every last morsel of the unicorn meat had been drenched in the reeking nuoc-mam sauce. So we declined to join in, and instead that night ate some fish our boatmen had caught from the river.

Although the Mien claimed to be Buddhists, the only remotely religious behavior we saw for a long time was their fearful and fretful concern about the surrounding nat demons. The Mien addressed their children, whatever their names, as “Worm” and “Pig,” so the nat would deem them beneath notice. Although there was plenty of oil locally available—oil of fish and sesame and even naft oil seeping from the jungle ground in places—the Mien would never grease their elephants’ harness or their cart and barrow wheels. They said the squeaking kept the nat away. In one village, where I saw that the women had to carry water from a distant spring, I suggested building a conduit of split zhu-gan cane to bring the water right into the village. “Amè!” cried the villagers; that would bring the spring’s resident “water nat” too dangerously close to human habitation. The first time the Mien saw Hui-sheng light her incense burner in our camp at bedtime, they muttered “amè!” and got Yissun to tell us that they never employed incense or perfumes—as if we needed to be told that—for fear sweet smells might attract the nat.

However, as our company got farther down the Irawadi, into more populous country, we began to find in many villages a mud-brick temple. It was called a p’hra, and it was circular, shaped like a large hand bell with its mouth on the ground and its steeple-handle sticking up in the air, and in each p’hra lived a Buddhist lama, here called a pongyi. Each was shaven-headed and yellow-robed, each was disapproving of this world and his fellow Mien and life in general, and was morosely impatient to get out of Ava and on to Nirvana. But I met one who was at least convivial enough to converse with Yissun and me. That pongyi proved to be so educated that he could even write, and he showed me how the Mien writing was done. He could not add anything to the tale I had heard—that the Mien’s earlier history had ended in their bellies—but he did know that writing had been nonexistent in Ava until less than two hundred years ago, when the nation’s then King Kyansitha, all by himself, invented an alphabet.

“The good king was careful,” he said, “not to make any of the letters angular in shape.” He drew them for us with a finger in the dusty yard of his p’hra. “Our people have nothing to write on but leaves, and only sticks to scratch on them with, and angular characters might tear the leaves. So, you see, all the letters are rounded and easy-flowing.”

“Cazza beta!” I blurted. “Even the languageis lazy!”

Until now, I had been blaming the Mien people’s lassitude and slovenliness on the Ava climate, which God knows was oppressive and enervating. But the friendly pongyi volunteered the real and astonishing and terrible truth about the Mien. They had taken that name, he said, when they first came to Champa and settled this country that was now the Ava nation—and that had happened, he said, only about four hundred years ago.

“Who were they originally?” I asked. “Where did they come from?”

He said, “From To-Bhot.”

Well, that explained the Mien! They were really nothing but a displaced overflow of To-Bhot’s wretched Bho. And if the Bho could be lethargic of both intellect and energy, up in the bracing clean air of their native highlands, it was no wonder that, down here in the vigor-sapping hot low country, they should have degenerated even further—to where their only willful exertion was a bovine chewing and their most strenuous profanity was a milk-mild “mother!” and even their king’s writing was limp.

In all charity, I have to say that not much ambition and vitality can rightly be expected of any people who live in a tropical climate and jungle conditions. It must take all their will just to exist at all. I myself was not usually a sluggard, but in Ava I felt always drained of strength and purpose, and even my usually pert and lively Hui-sheng got quite languid in her movements. I had known heat in other places, but never such a damp, heavy, dragging-down heat as I felt in Ava. I might as well have wrung a blanket in hot water, then flung it over my head so that I had both to wear it and try to breathe through it.

The cloacal climate would have been affliction enough, but it bred various other torments, chief among them the jungle vermin. During the daytimes, our barge went downriver in a thick accompanying cloud of mosquitoes. We could reach out and catch them by handfuls, and their massed buzzing was as loud as the snores of the ghariyal serpents on the mudbanks, and their biting was so continuous that it eventually and blessedly induced a sort of numb indifference. When any of our men stepped into the river shallows while beaching the barge at evening, he stepped out again with his legs and garments striped black and red, the black being long, slimy, clinging leeches that had fastened to him, right through the fabric of his clothes, sucking so avidly that they drooled streaks of his blood. Then, on land, we might be attacked either by enormous red ants or by darting oxflies, either insect’s bite so painful that, we were told, they could drive even elephants to mad rampage. Nighttime brought little respite, because all the ground was infested with a breed of fleas so tiny they could hardly be seen and never be caught, but whose bite raised an enormous welt. Hui-sheng’s incense smoke gave us some relief from the night-flying insects, and we did not care how many nat it might attract.

I do not know whether it was because of the heat, the humidity or the insects, or all those miseries, but many people in that jungle suffered from illnesses that seemed never to conclude either in death or recovery. (The people of Yun-nan referred to the whole of Champa as “the Valley of Fever.”) Two of our sturdy Mongol boatmen fell to one of those maladies, or maybe several, and Yissun and I had to take over their chores. The men’s gums bled almost as red as those of a Mien cud-chewer, and much of their hair fell out. Under their arms and between their legs the skin began to rot, getting green and crumbly, like cheese going bad. Some kind of fungus attacked their fingers and toes, so that their fingernails and toenails got soft and moist and painful, and often bled.

Yissun and I asked a Mien village headman for advice from his own experience, and he told us to rub pepper into the men’s sores. When I protested that that was bound to cause excruciating pain, he said, “Amè, of course, U Polo. But it will hurt the disease nat even worse, and the demon may depart.”

Our Mongols bore that treatment stoically enough, but so did the nat, and the men stayed ill and prostrate all the way downriver. At least they, and we other men, did not contract another jungle affliction I heard about. Numerous Mien men confided dolefully to us that they suffered from it, and always would. They called it koro, and they described its very terrible effect: a sudden and dramatic and irreversible shrinking of the virile organ, a retraction of it up into the body. I did not inquire for further details, but I could not help wondering if the jungle koro was related to the fly-borne kala-azar that had commenced my Uncle Mafìo’s pathetic dissolution.

For a time, Yissun and Hui-sheng and her Mongol maid and I took turns tending our two sick men. From our experience and observation so far, we had got the impression that the jungle’s diseases troubled only the male sex, and Yissun and I were not much inclined to worry about ourselves. But when the maidservant also started to show signs of illness, I made Hui-sheng leave off her nursing, and confine herself to the farthest end of the barge, and sleep well apart from the rest of us at night. Meanwhile, our best efforts did not improve the condition of the two men. They were still ill and flaccid and gaunt when we finally reached Pagan, and they had to be carried ashore to be put in the care of their army’s shamàn-physicians. I do not know what became of them after that, but at least they survived to get that far. Hui-sheng’s maid did not.

Her ailment had seemed identical to that of the men, but she had been much more troubled and dismayed by it. I suppose, being a female, she was naturally more frightened and embarrassed when she began to rot at her extremities and under her arms and between her legs. However, she also began to complain, which the men had not, of itching all over her body. Even insideit, she said, which we took to be delirium. But Yissun and I gently undressed her and found, here and there, what looked like grains of rice stuck to her skin. When we tried to pick them off, we discovered that they were only the protruding ends—heads or tails, we could not tell—of long, thin worms that had burrowed deep into her flesh. We tugged, and they came out reluctantly, and kept coming, span after span, as we might have unspooled a web-thread from the spinneret of a spider’s body.

The poor woman wept and shrieked and weakly writhed during most of the time we were doing that. Each worm was no thicker than a string, but easily as long as my leg, greenish-white in color, slick to our touch, hard to grasp and resisting our pull, and there were many of them, and even the hardened Mongol Yissun and I could not help retching violently while we did that hand-over-hand hauling out of the worms and throwing them overboard. When we had done, the woman was no longer squirming, but lay still in death. Perhaps the worms had been coiled around organs inside her, and our pulling had disarranged those parts and thereby killed her. But I am disposed to believe that she died from the sheer horror of the experience. Anyway, to spare her any further miseries—because we had heard that the funeral practices of the Mien were barbaric—we rowed ashore at a deserted spot, and buried her deep, well out of reach of the ghariyals or any other jungle predators.

2

I was glad to see the Orlok Bayan again. I was even glad to see his teeth. Their garish glare of porcelain and gold was far more sightly than the snaggled and blackened teeth of the Mien I had been seeing all the way down the Irawadi. Bayan was somewhat older than my father, and he had lost some hair and added some girth since our campaign together, but he was still as leathery and supple as his own old armor. He was also, at the moment, slightly drunk.

“By Tengri, Marco, but youhave put on great beauty since I saw you last!” He bawled that at me, but he was ogling Hui-sheng at my side. When I introduced her, she smiled a little nervously at him, for Bayan was on the throne of the King of Ava, in the throne room of the palace of Pagan, but he was not looking very kinglike. He was half-lying asprawl on the throne, guzzling from a jeweled cup, and his eyes were vividly bloodshot.

“Found the king’s wine cellar,” he said. “No kumis or arkhi, but something called choum-choum. Made of rice, they tell me, but I think it is really compounded of earthquake and avalanche. Hui, Marco! Remember our avalanche? Here, have some.” He snapped his fingers, and a barefoot, bare-chested servant hurried to pour me a cup.

“What has become of the king, then?” I asked.

“Threw away his throne, his people’s respect, his name and his life,” said Bayan, smacking his lips. “He was King Narasinha-pati until he fled. Now his former subjects all call him contemptuously Tayok-pyemin, which means the King Who Ran Away. By comparison, they almost like having us here. The king fled west as we approached, over to Akyab, the port city on the Bay of Bangala. We thought he would escape by ship, but he just stayed there. Eating and calling for more and more food. He ate himself to death. A singular way to go.”

“That sounds like a Mien,” I said disgustedly.

“Yes, it does. But he was not a Mien. The royal family was of Bangali stock, originally from India. That is why we thought he would escape to there. Anyway, Ava is now ours, and I am Acting Wang of Ava until Kubilai sends a son or something to be my permanent replacement. If you see the Khakhan before I do, tell him to send somebody of frosty blood who can endure this infernal climate. And tell him to hurry. My sardars are now fighting over east, in Muang Thai, and I want to join them.”

Hui-sheng and I were given a grand suite in the palace, together with some of the late royal family’s exceptionally obsequious servants. I asked Yissun to take one of our many bedrooms and stay nearby as my interpreter. Hui-sheng, being now bereft of a personal maid, chose a new one from the staff given us, a girl of seventeen, of the race sometimes called Shan and sometimes Thai. Her name was Arun, or Dawn, and she was almost as comely of face as was her new mistress.

In our bathing chamber, which was as big and as well-equipped as a Persian hammam, the maid helped Hui-sheng and me, together, to bathe several times over, until we felt clean of our encrustation of jungle, and then helped us dress. For me, there was just a length of brocade silk to be wrapped around me, skirt fashion. Hui-sheng’s costume was much the same, except that it wrapped high enough to cover her breasts. Arùn, without shyness, opened and rewrapped her own single garment several times, not to show us that it was all she wore, but to show us how to wrap ours so they would stay on. Nevertheless, I took the opportunity to admire the girl’s body, which was as fair as her name, and Hui-sheng made a face at me when she noticed, and I grinned and Arùn giggled. We were given no shoes or even slippers; everyone in the palace went barefoot, except the heavy-booted Bayan, and I later put on boots only when I went outdoors. Arùn did bring one other item of dress; earrings for both of us. But, since our ears were not bored for them, we could not wear them.

When Hui-sheng had, with Arùn’s help, fetchingly arranged her hair and fixed flowers in it, we went downstairs again, to the palace’s dining hall, where Bayan had commanded a welcoming feast for us. We were not much accustomed to eating at midday, which it then was, but I was looking forward to some decent food after our hard rations on the voyage, and I was a trifle dismayed to see what was set before us—black meat and purple rice.

“By Tengri,” I growled to Bayan. “I knew the Mien blacked their teeth, but I never noticed that they also blacked the food to go between their teeth.”

“Eat, Marco,” he said complacently. “The meat is chicken, and the chickens of Ava have not only black plumage, but black skin, black flesh, black everything except their eggs. Never mind how the bird looks, it is cooked in the milk of the India nut, and is delicious. The rice is only rice, but in this land it grows in gaudy colors—indigo, yellow, bright red. Today we have purple. It is good. Eat. Drink.” And with his own hand, he poured a brimming beaker of the rice liquor for Hui-sheng.

We did eat, and the meal was very good. In that country, even at the Pagan palace, there were no such things as nimble tongs or any other table implements. Eating was done with the fingers, which is how Bayan would have done it anyway. He sat taking alternately handfuls of the flamboyant food and great drafts of choum-choum—Hui-sheng and I only sipped at ours, for it was highly potent—while I told of our adventures on the Irawadi, and the considerable distaste I had developed for the inhabitants of Ava.

“In the river plain, you saw only the misbegotten Mien,” said Bayan. “But you might think more kindly even of them, if you had come through the hill country, and seen the real aboriginal natives of these lands. The Padaung, for instance. Their females start in childhood to wear a brass ring around the neck, and add another above that, and another and another, until in womanhood they have a brass-ringed neck as long as a camel’s. Or the Moi people. Theirwomen bore holes in their earlobes and put increasingly large ornaments in the holes, until the lobes are distended to hoops that can hold a platter. I saw one Moi woman with earlobes she had to put her arms through, to keep them out of her way.”

I assumed Bayan was only drunkenly babbling, but I listened respectfully. And I later realized, when I saw actual specimens of those barbarian tribes on the streets of Pagan itself, that he had been telling only sober truth.

“All those are country folk,” he went on. “The city dwellers are a better mixture. Some visiting aborigines and Mien, a few Indian immigrants, but mostly the more civilized and cultured people called Myama. They have long been the nobility and upper classes of Ava, and they are far superior to all the others. The Myama have even had the good sense not to take their inferior neighbors as servants or slaves. They have always gone afield and got Shan for those purposes, the Shan—or Thai, if you prefer—being notably more handsome and cleanly and intelligent than any of the lesser local races.”

“Yes, I have just now encountered one Thai,” I said, and added, since Hui-sheng could not hear and object, “a Thai girl who is indeed a superb creature.”

“It was on account of them that I came to Ava,” said Bayan. I already knew that, but I did not interrupt. “They areworthy people. People worth keeping. And too many of them had been deserting our dominions, fleeing to the nation they call Muang Thai, Land of the Free. The Khanate wishes them to remain Shan, not turn Thai. That is, not go free, but remain subjects of the Khanate.”

“I understand the Khanate’s view,” I said. “But if there really is a whole land full of such beautiful people, I should wish that it could go on existing.”

“Oh, it can go on existing,” said Bayan, “as long as it is ours. Let me but take the capital, a place called Chiang-Rai, and accept their king’s surrender, and I will not lay waste the rest of the country. That way it will be a permanent source of the finest slaves, to serve and to adorn the rest of the Khanate. Hui! But enough of politics.” He shoved aside his still-heaped plate and licked his lips most slaveringly and said, “Here comes our sweet to conclude our meal. The durian.”

That was another dubious surprise. The sweet looked to be a melon with a spikily armored rind, but, when the table steward cut it, I saw that it had large seeds inside, like chicken’s eggs, and the odor that erupted from it nearly made me shove back from the table.

“Yes, yes,” Bayan said testily. “Before you complain, I already know about the stink. But this is durian.”

“Does the word mean carrion? That is what it smells like.”

“It is the fruit of the durian tree. It has the most repellent smell of any fruit, and the most captivating taste. Ignore the stench and eat.”

Hui-sheng and I looked at each other, and she looked as distressed as I probably did. But the male must show courage before his female. I took up a slice of the cream-colored fruit and, trying not to inhale, took a bite of it. Bayan was right again. The durian had a taste unlike anything I ever ate, before or since. I can taste it yet, but how do I describe it? Like a custard made of cream and butter, and flavored with almonds—but with that taste came hints of other flavors, most unexpected: wine and cheese and even shallots. It was not sweet and juicy, like a hami melon, nor a tart refreshment, like a sharbat, but it partook of those qualities and—providing one could persevere past the rank odor of it—the durian was a most delightful novelty.

“Many people get addicted to the eating of durian,” said Bayan. He must have been one of them, for he was gorging on it, and talking with his mouth full. “They loathe the hideous climate of Champa, but they stay for the durian alone, because it grows nowhere except in this corner of the world.” And again he was right. Both Hui-sheng and I would become ardent enthusiasts of the fruit. “And it is more than refreshing and delicious,” he went on. “It incites and excites other appetites. There is a saying here in Ava: when the durian falls, the skirts go up.” That was true, too, as Hui-sheng and I would later prove.