Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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Текущая страница: 77 (всего у книги 78 страниц)

“Nastàsia, I will tell you an improving and edifying tale. About this time every year, in the Kithai and Manzi lands, the Han people celebrate what they call the Moon Cake Festa. It is a warm and loving family holiday, nothing grandiose. The families simply gather affectionately together and enjoy the eating of Moon Cakes. Those are small, round pastries, heavy with richness and very tasty. I will tell you how they are made, and perhaps you would oblige me by making some, and the Dona and the Damìne and I could pretend we are celebrating in the Han manner. You take nuts and dates and cinnamon and—”

And almost immediately I was out of the kitchen and careering about the house in search of Donata. I found her in her dressing chamber, doing needlework, and I bellowed:

“I have just been expelled from my own kitchen by my own cook!”

Donata, not looking up, said with mild reproof, “Have you been bothering Nata again?”

“Bothering her, indeed! Is she employed to serve us or is she not? The woman had the effrontery to complain that she is tired of hearing of the sumptuous viands I used to enjoy abroad, and she will hear not another word about them! Che braga! Is that any way for a domestic to speak to her own master?”

Donata clucked sympathetically. I stumped about the room for a bit, peevishly kicking things that got in my way. Then I resumed, and tragically:

“Our domestics, the Dogaressa, even my fellows on the Rialto, they all seem disinclined nowadays to learnanything. They wish only to stagnate, and not to be stirred or leavened out of their stagnation. Mind you, Donata, I do not much care about outsiders, but my own daughters!My own daughters heave sighs and drum their fingers and look out the window when I try to relate some improving and edifying tale from which they might derive great benefit. Are you by any chance encouraging this disrespect for the patriarch of the family? I think it is reprehensible. I begin to feel like that prophet of whom Jesus spoke—the one who was notwithout honor, save in his own country and in his own house.”

Donata sat smiling through my tirade, and imperturbably plying her needle, and when I was out of breath she said, “The girls are young. Young folk often find us older folk tiresome.”

I roved about the room some more, until my wheezing abated. Then I said, “Old. Yes. Behold us dismal old folk. At least I can claim that I got old in the ordinary way, through the accumulation of years. But you did not have to, Donata.”

“Everybody gets old,” she said placidly.

“You are just about exactly the same age now, Donata, as I was on our wedding day. Was I old then?”

“You were in your prime of life. Stalwart and handsome. But women age differently than men do.”

“Not if they do not wish to. You only desired to hasten past the childbearing years. And you need not have done. I told you long ago that I knew simple things that would prevent—”

“Things not fit to be mentioned by a Christian tongue, or heard by Christian ears. I do not wish to hear them now, any more than I did then.”

“If you had listened then,” I said accusingly, “you would not now be an Autumn Fan.”

“A what?” she said, looking up at me for the first time.

“It is a very descriptive term the Han have. An Autumn Fan means a woman past her years of appeal and attractiveness. You see, in the autumn the air is cool and there is no necessityfor a fan. It becomes an object without use or purpose or reason for existence. Just so, a woman who has ceased to be womanly, as you deliberately did, solely to avoid having more children—”

“All these years,” she interrupted, but in a very soft voice. “All these years, have you thought that was why?”

I stopped, with my mouth still open. She laid down her needlework on her black bombazine lap, and folded her yellowed hands atop it, and fixed me with the faded eyes that had once been bright blue, and said:

“I ceased being a woman when I could no longer deceive myself. When I wearied of pretending to myself that you loved me.”

I blinked in bewilderment and disbelief, and had to grope for my voice. “Donata, was I ever anything but tender and caring? Did I fail you in any way? Was I ever less than a good husband?”

“There. Even now you do not speak the word.”

“I thought it was implicit. I am sorry. Very well, then. I did love you.”

“There was something or someone you loved more, and always have. At our closest, Marco, we were never close. I could look into your face and see only distance, far distance. Was it farness of miles or of years? Was it another woman? God forgive me for believing this, but … was it not my mother?”

“Donata, she and I were children.”

“Children who are parted forget each other when they are grown. But you mistook me for her when we first met. On our wedding night, I was still wondering if I might not be just a substitute. I was a virgin, yes, and innocent. All I knew to expect was what I had been told by older confidantes, and you made it much better than what I had expected it to be. Nevertheless, I was not oblivious and obtuse, as one of our empty-headed daughters might be. In our cleaving together, Marco, there seemed to be … something … not quite right. That first time and every time afterward.”

Justifiably affronted, I said stiffly, “You never made complaint.”

“No,” she said, looking pensive. “And that was part of the seeming wrongness: that I didenjoy it—always—and somehow felt I should not. I cannot explain it to you, any more than I could explain it to myself. All I ever could think was: it must be that I am enjoying what should rightly have been my mother’s.”

“How ridiculous. Whatever in your mother I was fond of, I have found also in you. And more. You have been much more to me, Donata —and much more dear to me—than she ever was.”

Donata moved her hand across her face, as if brushing away a cobweb that had fallen there. “If it was not she, if it was not some other woman, then it must have been the sheer distance that I felt always between us.”

“Come, my dear! I have scarcely been out of your sight since our wedding day, and never out of your reach.”

“Not in your physical person, no. But yes, in the parts of you I could not see or reach. You have been ever in love with distance. You never really came home at all. It was unfair of you, to ask a woman to vie for your love with a rival she never could best. The distance. The far horizons.”

“You exacted a promise about those far horizons. I made the promise. I kept to it.”

“Yes. In your physical person, you kept to it. You never went away again. But did you ever once talk or think of anything but journeying?”

“Gèsu! Who is being unfair now, Donata? For nearly twenty years I have been as passive and compliant as that zerbino by the door yonder. I gave you possession of me, and the saying of where I should be and what I should do. Are you now complaining that I gave you no authority over my memory, my thoughts, my sleeping or waking dreams?”

“No, I am not complaining.”

“That does not exactly answer the question I asked.”

“You have left a few unanswered yourself, Marco, but I shall not pursue them.” She finally took her mourning eyes off me, and picked up her needlework again. “After all, what are we arguing about? None of it matters anymore.”

Again I was stopped with my mouth open and words unsaid—words unsaid by both of us, I imagine. I took another ruminative turn or two about the room.

“You are right,” I said at last, and sighed. “We are old. We are past passion. Past striving and past strife. Past the beauties of danger and the dangers of beauty. Whatever we did right, whatever we did wrong, none of it matters any more.”

She sighed also, and bent again to her sewing. I stood for a while in thought, watching her across the room. She sat in a shaft of September afternoon sunlight, where she could see best to work. The sun did not much enliven her sober attire, and her face was downcast, but the light did play in her hair. There was a time when that sunshine would have made her tresses gleam as golden bright as summer grain. Now her bowed head had more the sweetly melancholy glow of grain in the sheaf, a quiet, drowsy dun color, rimed with the first frost of autumn.

“September,” I mused, not realizing that I said it aloud.

“What?”

“Nothing, my dear.” I crossed the room to her and bent and, not amorously but only in a fond fatherly sort of way, kissed the top of her dear head. “What are you working on?”

“Parechio. Trifles of apparel for the wedding, for the luna di miele. No harm in getting started on them well ahead of time.”

“Fantina is a fortunate girl, to have such a thoughtful mother.”

Donata looked up and gave me a wan, shy smile. “You know, Marco … I was just thinking. That promise you made—it has been well kept, but it is near its expiration. I mean—Fantina about to be married and gone, Bellela betrothed, Morata nearly full grown. If you did still yearn to begone somewhere …”

“You are right again. I had not been counting, but I amvery nearly at liberty again, am I not?”

“I freely give you leave. But I would miss you. Whatever I said before, I would miss you dreadfully. Still, I keep my promises, too.”

“You do, yes. And now you mention it, I might just give the matter some thought. After Fantina’s wedding, I could go abroad for—oh, no more than a short journey, to be back in time for Bellela’s wedding. Maybe go only as far as Constantinople, see old Cuzìn Nico. Yes, I might do that. As soon as my back is better, anyway.”

“Your back is ailing you again? Oh, my dear.”

“Niente, niente. A twinge now and then, no more. Nothing to fret about. Why, my dear girl, one time in Persia, and again in Kurdistan, I had to get on a horse—no, the first time it was a camel—and ride despite having had my head near broken by the cudgels of brigands. I may have told you of those occurrences, and the—”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Well. I do thank you for the suggestion, Donata. Journeying again. I will indeed give it some thought.”

I went into the next room, which was my working chamber for when I brought home work to do, and she must have heard me rummaging about, for she called through the door:

“If you are looking for any of your maps, Marco, I think you have them all stored at the Compagnia fondaco.”

“No, no. Merely getting some paper and a quill. I thought I would finish this latest letter to Rustichello.”

“Why do you not do it in the garden? It is a tranquil and pleasant afternoon. You should be outside enjoying it. There will not be many more such days before winter.”

As I started downstairs, she said, “The young men are coming to dinner tonight. Zanino and Marco. That is why Nata was so busy in the kitchen, and probably why she spoke rudely to you. Since we will be having guests, can we make a small pact? Not to bring any of our quarreling to the table?”

“No more quarreling, Donata, not tonight or ever. I am heartily sorry for whatever cause for quarrel I ever gave. As you say, let us tranquilly enjoy the remaining days. All that went before—none of it matters any more.”

So I brought my writing materials out here to the little canalside courtyard we call our garden. It is planted now with chrysanthemums, the flower of Manzi, from seeds I brought from there, and the gold and fire and bronze colors make a gallant show in the mellow September sun. The occasional gòndola going by on the canal steers close here, so its occupants can admire my exotic blossoms, for most of the other gardens and window boxes in Venice contain summer flowers that have gone brown and limp and sad by this time of year. I sat myself down on this bench—slowly and carefully, not to rouse the twinge in my lower back—and I wrote down the conversation just concluded, and now for some time I have only sat here, thinking.

There is a word, asolare, that was first minted here in Venice but has now, I believe, been appropriated into every language of the Italian peninsula. It is a good and useful word, asolare—it means to sit in the sun and do absolutely nothing—all that in one word. I would not have thought it could ever in my whole life apply to me. For most of my life, God knows, it did not. But now, as I think back—over those busy years, the ceaseless journeying, the eventful miles and li and farsakhs, the friends and enemies and loved ones who journeyed too for a while and then were lost along the way—of all those things, I remember now a rule my father taught me long ago, when I first strode out as a journeyer. He said, “If ever you are lost in a wilderness, Marco, go always downhill. Always downhill, and eventually you will come to water, and where there is water there will also be provender and shelter and companionship. It may be a long way, but go always downhill and you will come at last to some place safe and warm and secure.”

I have come a long, long way, and here is the foot of the hill at last, and here am I: an old man sunning himself in the last beams of an afternoon late in a waning month of the season of the falling leaf.

Once, when I rode with the Mongol army, I noticed a war horse galloping along in one of the columns, neatly keeping gait and place with the troops, handsomely caparisoned in leather body armor, with sword and lance in scabbard—but the horse’s saddle was empty. The Orlok Bayan told me, “That was the steed of a good warrior named Jangar. It bore him into many battles in which he fought bravely, and into his last battle, in which he perished. Jangar’s horse will continue to ride with us, fully armed, as long as its heart calls it to battle.”

The Mongols knew well that even a horse would prefer to fall in combat, or run until its heart failed, than be retired to lush pasture and uselessness and the idle waiting, waiting, waiting.

I think back on everything I have chronicled here, and everything that was written in the earlier book, and I wonder if I might not have put it all into just seven small words: “I went away and I came back.” But no, that would not be quite true. It is never the same man who comes home, whether he be returning from a humdrum day’s labor at his counting house, or returning after many years in the far places, the long ways, the blue distances, in lands where magic is no mystery but an everyday occurrence, in cities fit to have poems made about them:

Heaven is far from me and you,

But here for us are Hang and Su!

For a while when I came home—before I was relegated to a commonplace, and ignored—I was derided as a liar and a braggart and a fableor. But those who derided me were wrong. I came back with not nearly so many lies as I took with me when I went away. I departed Venice shining-eyed with expectation of finding those Cockaigne-dream lands described by the earlier Crusaders and the biographers of Alexander and all the other mythmakers—expecting unicorns and dragons and the legendary king-saint Prete Zuàne and fantastic wizards and mystical religions of enviable wisdom. I found them, too, and if I came back to tell that not all of them were what legend has made us believe, was not the truth about them just as wonderful?

Sentimental people speak of heartbreak, but those people are wrong, too. No heart ever really breaks. I know it well. When my heart leans eastward, as it does so often, it bends most poignantly, but it does not break.

Up there in Donata’s chamber, I let her believe that she was pleasantly surprising me with the news that my long bondage to Home was finally over. I pretended I had not for years been thinking, “Shall I go now?” and each time deciding, “No, not now”—deferring to my responsibilities, to my promise to stay, to my aging wife and my three unexceptional daughters—every time saying to myself, “I will wait for a more propitious occasion to take my leave.” Up there in Donata’s chamber, I pretended also to receive her news gladly, that now I couldgo. And, just to appear properly grateful for her having volunteered that news, I pretended also that yes, I mightnow go again a-journeying. I know I will not. I was deceiving her when I implied that, but it was only a small deception of her, and I meant it kindly, and she will not be displeased when she realizes that I was deceiving her. But I cannot deceive myself. I waited too long, I am now too old, the time has come too late.

Old Bayan was still a fighting man at about the age I am now. And, at about this same age, my father and even my sleepwalking uncle made the long and rigorous return journey from Khanbalik to Venice. Old as I am, I am no more derelict than they were. Perhaps even my backache would benefit from being jolted by a long saddle ride. I do not believe it to be physical debility that dissuades me now from journeying again. Rather, I have the melancholy suspicion that I have seen all the best and worst and most interesting there wasto see, and wherever I might go now would prove a disappointment by comparison.

Of course, if I could have the least hope that on some street in some city in Kithai or Manzi, I might astonishingly meet again a beautiful woman—as here in Venice I met Donata—who would remind me irresistibly of yet another beautiful woman long gone … Ah, for that chance I would journey, on hands and knees if necessary, to the ends of the earth. But that is an impossibility. And however much a new-met woman might resemble my remembered one, it would not be she.

So I go no more. Io me asolo.I sit in the last sunlight, here on the last slope of my life’s long hill, and I do absolutely nothing … except remember, for I have much to remember. As I long ago remarked at someone else’s graveside, I possess a treasure trove of memories with which to enliven eternity. I can enjoy those mementos through all the dying afternoons like this one, and then through the endless dead night underground.

But I also said once, maybe more than once, that I should like to live forever. And a lovely lady once told me that I would never get old. Well, thanks to you, Luigi, both those marvelous things may come to pass. Whether the fictional and disguised Marco Polo of your new work will be well received, I cannot predict, but the earlier book which you and I compiled together seems to have made its place secure in the libraries of many countries, and appears likely long to endure. In those pages I was not old, and in them I will go on living as long as the pages are read. I am grateful to you for that, Luigi.

Now the sun is setting, and the golden light fades, and the flowers of Manzi begin to fold their petals, and the blue mist rises from the canal, as blue as reminiscence, and now I would go to an old man’s sleep, a young man’s dreams. I bid you farewell, Rustichello of Pisa, and I subscribe myself

MARCO POLO OF VENICE AND THE WORLD, HIS YIN:

set down this 20th day

of September in the

Year of Our Lord1319,

by the Han count4017,

the Year of the Ram.

FORGE BOOKS BY GARY JENNINGS

Aztec

Aztec Autumn

Aztec Blood

Aztec Rage

The Journeyer

Visit Gary Jennings at www.garyjennings.net.

Praise for The Journeyer

“Astonishing and titillating.”

– Chicago Tribune

“Fabulous … Sumptuous and exceedingly bawdy.”

– The Washington Post

“Pound for pound, The Journeyeris a classic.”

–Gene Lyons, Newsweek

“Perfect entertainment.”

– The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Employing both great sweep and meticulous detail, Gary Jennings has produced an impressively learned gem of the astounding and the titillating.”

– Chicago Tribune Book World

“Relentlessly gripping.”

– Publishers Weekly

“Remarkable … Extraordinary … Re-creates a whole lost civilization.”

– The Miami Herald

AFTERWORD

There are in existence today only a very few

relics of the journeyer Marco Polo. But one

thing he brought back from his journeys is in

the Céramique Chinoise collection of the Louvre.

It is a small incense burner of white porcelain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gary Jennings led a paradoxically picaresque life. On one hand, he was a man of acknowledged intellect and erudition. His novels were international bestsellers, praised around the world for their stylish prose, lively wit, and adventurously bawdy spirit. They were also massive—often topping 500,000 words—and widely acclaimed for the years of research he put into each one, both in libraries and in the field.

Where the erudition came from, however, was something of a mystery.

Born in the little city of Buena Vista, Virginia, the son of Glen E. and Vaughnye Bayes Jennings, nothing in his upbringing suggested a belletristic future. The story was his birth occurred on the second floor of a movie theater that his parents owned. The theater burned down—and so it went.

The family moved to New Jersey in the early ’40s and he graduated from Eastside High School (of Lean on Mefame) in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended the Art Students League in Manhattan, but from that point all formal education ceased. Jennings was completely self-educated.

Responding to an ad in a New York newspaper at age seventeen, he was hired as an office boy in an advertising firm. It was a steady climb up the ladder in advertising; he thought he might use his artistic talent, but ended up as an account executive.

After a break to serve in the Korean War, where he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal—a decoration rarely given to soldier-reporters—and a personal citation by South Korean President Syngman Rhee for his efforts on behalf of war orphans, he returned briefly to advertising. It was during this period that he met Bill W

The desire to write was so great that he decided to cut the strings and write full time. New York was not an affordable place and he had always wanted to go to Mexico … so he did. He left everything and moved to San Miguel de Allende. There he continued his freelance writing, wrote ten children’s books, edited Gent and Dudemagazine, and wrote two novels.

During his twelve-year stint in Mexico, Gary became fascinated with the Aztecs. He learned Spanish, haunted archaeological digs, and immersed himself in the Aztec history and culture. There he wrote Aztec,his breakthrough novel. He wrote about the Aztec world with vivid intimacy, with an unprecedented authenticity, and with literary grace. He brought something more to that story, something that would inform all four of his subsequent novels: an exotic, often erotic wit, based on characters possessed by an irrepressible Rabelaisian lust for life, stylish charm, and zany joie de vivre. His men and women were eccentric, roguish, and unabashedly bawdy. Jennings enlivened their adventures with an energetic prose, an electrifying power, and a narrative drive that many believed unique to historical fiction.

After leaving Mexico, he stayed briefly in Texas, then in Marin County, California, and finally back home to the Shenandoah Valley in Buena Vista, Virginia. He stayed there until the mid ’90s and then returned to New Jersey to be near his oldest friends.

Gary Jennings literally roamed the world in the course of researching The Journeyer,for which he faithfully duplicated the travels of his hero Marco Polo. He did the same in the process of researching Spangle,during which he traveled with a circus troupe. He went back to Europe to continue his research and finished Raptor,a book on the Goths. Demand for more of Aztecfinally convinced him to write Aztec Autumnand to prepare the material for then-unnamed books on the Aztecs.

During 1998 and 1999 Gary collaborated with a composer and lyricist and wrote a musical play based on the life of Joe Hill, a union organizer his father had met in Paterson, New Jersey. He also compiled research for a book set amid the hanging gardens of Babylon and was putting together a book of his short stories.

Gary died on Friday the 13th of February 1999, passing quietly while watching late-night television. He had had a dinner party planned for the next evening with his agent, his doctor, and his two best friends. He is greatly missed by friends and fans alike.