Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) (2 page)

There was that much more urgency for his departure, that the Khan now lay dying. The twelve barons of the Shieng were jealous of his influence over their leader. While the Khan lived, their spite would be kept in check. When the Khan died…

“If we leave so soon, then I must return home at once,” Marco said at last. “There is much to be done.” His smile was rueful. “Shu Lin will be furious to be given so little time to pack.”

Bayan did not smile back. “Alas…”

Marco stiffened. “There is a problem?”

Bayan placed his cup on the low table with exact precision, and delivered his next statement in a manner that showed that he knew just how unwelcome the words would be. “Our master the Great Khan has said that the beautiful Shu Lin and your equally lovely daughter, Shu Ming, must await your return here in Cambaluc.”

“What!” Marco found himself on his feet without remembering how he got there.

Bayan smoothed the air with both palms. “Gently, my friend, gently. Sit. Sit.”

After a tense moment Marco subsided to his pillows, his mind in turmoil. “But he gave her to me. She was a gift from the Great Khan, to me personally, Marco Polo, his most valued emissary. Or so he said.” He could not quite keep the bitterness from his voice.

“Our master the Great Khan does not go back on his given word,” Bayan said.

“But he holds my wife and my daughter hostage against my return!”

Again, Bayan smoothed the air. Again he said, “Gently, my friend, and lower your voice, I beg you. The eyes and ears of our master the Great Khan are everywhere, even here.” He settled his hands on his knees and leaned forward again. “Commend Shu Lin and Shu Ming into the care of someone you trust. Escort the Princess Kokachin to her betrothed. When enough time has passed that our master the Great Khan’s attention has turned elsewhere, I will send her to you.”

“And if he dies in the meantime?”

“Gently, my friend, I beg you, gently. She is only a woman, and with you gone will have no status, and therefore offer no threat to anyone at court.”

“She is safer with me gone, you mean.”

“Yes.” The soft syllable was implacable.

Marco sat in a leaden silence filled with despair.

Bayan leaned forward to put a hand on Marco’s shoulder. “Think,” he said, giving the other man a hard shake. “You must leave, you, your father and your uncle, for your own safety, for the sake of your very lives. Our master the Great Khan knows this as surely as do we ourselves, and he has found this way to make use of you for the last time. But you have been his friends for twenty years, and our master the Great Khan’s heart aches at your parting. This is his way of ensuring himself that you come back to him.”

Their eyes met. This was Marco’s last departure from the court of the Great Khan, and both men knew it.

“How will I tell her?” Marco said heavily.

Bayan sat back. “Her father was one of the twelve barons of Shieng. She will understand.”

She had. There were tears, but tears only of sorrow at their parting, and none of anger or remonstration. She did not blame him for his decision to leave his wife and daughter behind. Indeed, she said, as Bayan had, “If the Great Khan is as ill as Bayan says, it will be safer for us if you are gone when he dies.” She had smiled up at him with wet but resolute eyes. “If Bayan says he will send us to you, then he will send us to you. We will be parted for only a short time. Have courage, my love.”

That night in their bed he gathered into his arms and buried his face in her dark, fragrant hair. Here was wealth beyond measure, the highest status, unlimited privilege. Here was work he could do, and do well. Here was Shu Lin, beautiful and loving and loyal beyond words, and Shu Ming, three years old, as intelligent and healthy a child as any father could wish.

But here also was a once-strong and visionary ruler rendered timid and withdrawn by age, weary of spirit, limbs swollen with the gout that came from a diet of meat and sweets washed down with koumiss. He must leave, and he must leave soon. His father and his uncle were impatient to be away, and both of them had remonstrated with him over his reluctance to leave Shu Lin behind. The thought flashed through his mind that they would be glad not to have to explain her presence at Marco’s side to their family in Venice.

“You have all the courage for both of us, it seems,” he said.

Three-year-old Shu Ming was harder to convince, and his last sight of her was sobbing in her mother’s arms. Wu Hai, Marco’s partner in business and in many journeys over the years, stood at Wei Lin’s side, square, solemn, solid. Wu Hai, one of the most successful businessmen from Cambaluc to Kinsai, was a man of worth and respectability. He had the added advantage of being well known to Shu Lin and Shu Ming.

“I give you my word,” Wu Hai had said with a gravity befitting one undertaking a sacred oath, “your wife and your daughter will be no less in my house than members of my own blood.”

Marco looked long upon the faces of his wife and child, and did not turn away until the firm hand of his uncle Maffeo pressed hard upon his shoulder.

The three Polos went out beneath the wooden arch that was the entrance of the only home Marco had known for the last twenty years. The sound of his daughter softly weeping followed him into the street.

He never saw wife, nor daughter, nor home again.

KUBLAI KHAN DIED
before Marco reached Venice, even before the Polos managed at last to deliver Princess Kokachin safely to her bridegroom. As the lady’s consistently bad fortune would have it, he was also dead, murdered before ever she reached the kingdom of the Levant.

In Cambaluc, Kublai Khan’s grandson, Temur, took the throne after months of uncertainty, followed by a struggle for power that did little to reinforce the stability of the Mongol realm. Trade went forward, of course, because nothing stopped trade, and Wu Hai returned from a trip to Kinsai shortly after Temur came to power.

Full of plans to open a new route to the pearl merchants of Cipangu, it was, shamefully, a full day before he noticed that Shu Lin and Shu Ming were missing. It took another day and making good on a threat to have his majordomo stripped to the waist and whipped before the assembled members of the family before he could discover where they were. He went straight to Bayan, the new emperor’s chief minister.

By then, Shu Lin was dead.

Bayan did Wu Hai the courtesy of summoning him to his house to deliver the news in person. “Almost before the Great Khan breathed his last, the Mandarins and the Mongols were at each other’s throats. Both factions were determined to remove any obstacles to their acquisition of power, as indeed was Temur Khan. Any favorites of the old Khan were suspect, and subject to immediate…removal.”

“I understand,” Wu Hai said, rigid with suppressed fury and guilt. “Marco, his father and his uncle were beyond their reach. His wife and child were not.”

Bayan cleared his throat and dropped his eyes. “It may be that there was an informer who directed attention their way.”

Wu Hai stood motionless, absorbing this. What Bayan was too tactful to say was that very probably someone in Wu Hai’s own household had sold Shu Lin and Shu Ming in exchange for favor at the new court. His first wife had never liked Wu Hai’s association with the foreign traders who brought him the goods he sold, that had made his fortune, that had provided the substantial roof over her head, the silks on her back and the dainties on her table.

“They were thrown into the cells below the palace,” Bayan said. “From what I can discover, Shu Lin sold herself to the guards in exchange for Shu Ming’s safety.”

There was a brief, charged silence as both men remembered the delicate features and graceful form of the dead woman, and both flinched away from images of what she must have endured before her death.

There was shame in Bayan’s face at his failure to protect his friend’s wife and child. He had gravely underestimated the lengths to which desperate courtiers would go to curry favor with the new khan, and he admitted it now before a man who had also failed in his duty to a friend.

In a subdued voice, Wu Hai said, “And Shu Ming?”

Bayan’s face lightened. “Alive. The doctors say she has suffered no harm. No physical harm.” Bayan nodded at the open door of his study, and Wu Hai went through into the garden, where once again the plum trees were in bloom.

Shu Ming sat with her back to one of the trees, surrounded by fallen petals, a tiny figure in white silk embroidered with more plum blossoms. Of course, he thought, Bayan’s people would have dressed her in mourning. He stopped some distance away, so that she would not be frightened.

It was unfortunate that she looked more like her father than her mother, long-limbed, hair an odd color somewhere between gold plate and turned earth, eyes an even odder color, somewhere between gray and blue, and, most condemning, round in shape, untilted, foldless. Her foreignness hit one like a blow, he thought ruefully. It would be all too easy to pick her out of any household in Everything Under the Heavens, and given the provincial and xenophobic nature of the native population, she would always be a target simply by virtue of breathing in and breathing out.

And now, her mother dead, her father gone beyond the horizon, she had no status in the community, no rights, no power. Her father had left them both well provided for, and Wu Hai had secured those funds, had, he thought bitterly, taken better care of their funds than he had of their persons. But money would not be not enough to buy her acceptance in Cambaluc.

The tiny figure had not moved, sitting cross-legged, her hands laying loosely in her lap, her eyes fixed on the middle distance. Her hair had been ruthlessly shorn, no doubt to rid her of the lice that infested every prison, and the cropped head made the slender stem of her neck look even more fragile rising up from the folds of her white tunic. There was almost no flesh remaining on her body. Her skin was translucent, her cheekbones prominent beneath it. Her tiny hands looked like paper over sticks.

He cleared his throat gently.

She turned her head to look at him, and he saw with a pang that she seemed somehow much older.

He bowed. “You see before you one Wu Hai, your father’s most unworthy friend. Do you remember me?”

She inclined her head, her expression grave. “Of course I do, uncle,” she said, giving him the correct honorific with the precisely correct emphasis and intonation. Again like her father, he thought, she had a facility for any language, her tongue adapting readily from Mongol to Mandarin.

“I am sorry I was away from home for so long,” he said.

“My mother is dead, uncle,” she said.

“To our loss and great sorrow,” he said.

“And my father is gone.”

“This, too, I know,” he said.

“What will you do with her?” Bayan said before they left.

Wu Hai looked down at Shu Ming’s tearstained face, asleep on his shoulder. “I have a son,” he said.

“Ah,” Bayan said, a thoughtful hand stroking his mustaches. “Have you given any thought to what your family will say?”

“I have no other family,” Wu Hai said.

Bayan said no more.