“What was that?”
“It was done to an arsonist who had burned down the house of an enemy. He failed to get the enemy, who had gone on a journey, but burned to death the wife and children. So I decreed a punishment to fit the crime. I directed the Fondler to pack the man’s nostrils and mouth with huo-yao powder, and seal him tightly with wax. Then, before he could suffocate or strangle, the wicks were ignited and his head was blown to pieces.”
“While we are on the subject of meet punishments, Wei-ni”—we were by this time informally using first names—“what do you predict the Khakhan will inflict on you and me, for indigence in office? We have not got very far with our strategies for tax imposition. I do not believe Kubilai will accept rainy weather as an excuse.”
“Marco, why weary ourselves with the making of plans that cannot be put into practice?” he said lazily. “And today is not rainy. Let us just sit here and enjoy the sun and the breeze and the tranquil sight of your lovely lady gathering flowers from the garden.”
“Wei-ni, this is a rich city,” I persisted. “The only marketplace under roof I ever saw, and ten more market squares outdoors. All of them teeming—except when it rains, anyway. Pleasure pavilions on the lake islands. Prosperous families of fanmakers. Thriving brothels. Not a single one of them yet paying a single tsien to the new government’s treasury. And if Hang-zho is so wealthy, what must the rest of Manzi be like? Are you asking me to sit still and let
no one
in the nation
ever
pay a head tax or a land tax or a trade tax or a—?”
“Marco, I can only tell you—as both I and the Wang have told you repeatedly—every last tax record maintained by the Sung regime disappeared
with
the Sung regime. Perhaps the old Empress ordered them destroyed, out of female malice. More likely her subjects invaded the halls of records and the Cheng archives, the moment she left for Kahn-balik to surrender her crown, and
they
destroyed the records. It is understandable. It is expectable. It happens in every newly conquered place, before the conquerors march in, so that—”
“Yes, yes, I have accepted that as a fact. But I am not interested in knowing who paid how much to the late Sung’s tax officers! What do I care about a lot of old ledgers?”
“Because without them—look.” He leaned forward and held three fingers in front of my face. “You have three possible courses of action. Either you go yourself into every single market stall, every inn on every island, every whore’s working cubicle—”
“Which is impossible.”
“—or you have an army of men to do it for you.”
“Which you have declared impractical.”
“Yes. But, just for argument, say that you go to a market stall where a man is peddling mutton. You demand the Khan’s share of the value of that mutton. He says, ‘But Kuan, I am not the owner of this stall. Speak to the master yonder.’ You accost the other man and he says, ‘I am master here, yes, but I only manage this stall for its owner, who lives in retirement in Su-zho.’”
“I would refuse to believe either of them.”
“But what do you do? Wring money from one? From both? From whom you would get only a dribble. And perhaps overlook the real owner—perhaps the purveyor of all the mutton in Manzi—who really is luxuriating beyond your grasp in Su-zho. Also, do you go through the same fuss at every market stall at every tax time?”
“Vakh! I would never get out of the one market!”
“But if you had the old ledgers, you would
know
who was obligated and where to find him and how much he paid last time around. So there is your third course of action, and the only practical one: compile new records. Even before you begin dunning, you must have a list of every going business and shop and whorehouse and property and plot of land.
And
the names of all their owners and proprietors and heads of household.
And
an estimate of what their holdings are worth and what their annual profits amount to and—”
“Gramo mi! That alone would take my lifetime, Wei-ni. And meanwhile I am collecting nothing!”
“Well, there you are.” He sat indolently back again. “Enjoy the day and the view of the eye-soothing Hui-sheng. Salve your conscience with this consideration. The Sung dynasty had existed here for three hundred and twenty years before its recent fall. It had had that long to collect and codify its records and make its taxation methods workable. You cannot expect to do the same thing overnight.”
“No, I cannot. But the Khan Kubilai can expect just that. What do I do?”
“Nothing, since anything you did do would be futile. Do you hear that cuckoo in the tree yonder? ‘Cu-cu … cu-cu …’ We Han like to think that the cuckoo is saying ‘pu-ju ku-ei.’ That means ‘why not go home?’”
“Thank you, Wei-ni. I expect I will go home, someday.
All
the way home. But I will not go, as we Venetians say, with my bagpipes turned inside their sack.”
There was some while of peaceful silence, except for the cuckoo’s reiterated advice. At last Fung resumed:
“Are you happy here in Hang-zho?”
“Exceptionally so.”
“Then be happy. Try to regard your situation like this. It may be a long and pleasant time before the Khakhan even remembers he sent you here. When he does, you may still evade his inquisition for a long and pleasant time. When he finally does demand an accounting, he may accept your explanation of your delinquency. If he does not, then he may or may not put you to death. If he does, your worries are all over. If he does not, but only has you broken by the chou-da scourge, well, you can live out your life as a crippled beggar. The market stallkeepers will be kind and let you have a begging station in the market square—
because
you never harried and hounded them for taxes, do you see?”
I said rather sourly, “The Wang called you an eminent jurist, Wei-ni. Is that a sample of your jurisprudence?”
“No, Marco. That is Tao.”
Some while later, after he had departed for his own dwelling, I said again, “What do I do?”
I said it again in the garden, but now it was the cool of the early evening, and the cuckoo had taken its own advice and gone home, too, and I was sitting with Hui-sheng after our dinner. I had related to her all that Fung and I had said about my predicament, and now appealed for her advice.
She sat pensive for a time, then signaled, “Wait,” and got up and went to the house kitchen. She came back with a bag of dry beans and indicated that I was to sit with her on the ground among a bed of flowers. In a bare patch of earth there, she traced with her slim forefinger the figure of a square. Then she traced a line down the center of that and another across it, to divide the square into four smaller ones. Inside one of those she scratched a single little line, in the next two lines, in the next three, and in the last a sort of squiggle, then looked up at me. I recognized the marks as Han numerals, so I nodded and said, “Four little boxes, numbered one, two, three and four.”
While I wondered what this had to do with my current and pressing and frustrating problems, Hui-sheng took out of the bag one bean, showed it to me and placed it on box number three. Then, without looking, she reached into the bag, took out a casual handful of beans and spread them beside the square. Very rapidly, she flicked out four beans from that spread, and four more, shoving them to one side, and kept on separating out four beans at a time from that spread. When they had all, by fours, been moved apart, there remained two beans over. She pointed to those two, pointed to the empty number-two box drawn on the ground, snatched up the bean from the box numbered three, added it to the ones she still had, grinned impishly at me, and made a gesture signifying “too bad.”
“I understand,” I said. “I wagered on box number three, but number two won, so I lost my bean. I am desolated.”
She scooped all the beans back into the bag, took one out, ostentatiously put it on a number for me again—this time number four. She started to reach into the bag again, but stopped, and motioned for me to do that. I understood: the game was totally fair, the counting beans were grabbed up at random. I took a considerable handful from the bag and spread them beside her. She rapidly flicked them aside again, four at a flick, and this time they happened to be divisible by four. There were none left to one side at the finish.
“Aha,” I said. “That means my number four wins.
What
do I win?”
She held up four fingers, pointed to my wager, added to it three beans more, and shoved them all toward me.
“If I lose, I lose my bean. If my numbered box is the winner, I get my bean back fourfold.” I made a face of toleration. “It is a simple game, a childish game, no more complex than the old mariners’ game of venturina. But if you are suggesting that we play at it for a while—very well, my dear, let us play. I assume you are trying to convey something more than boredom.”
She gave me an ample stock of beans to wager with, and indicated that I could risk as many as I liked, and on as many boxes as I chose. So I piled ten beans in each of them, all four boxes, to see what would happen. With an impatient look at me, and without even delving into her bag to ascertain the winning number, she simply gave me forty beans from it, then scooped up the forty on the ground. I realized that, by such a system of play, I could do no more than stay even. So I began trying varieties of play—leaving one box empty, piling different numbers of beans on the other boxes, and so on. The game became a puzzle in arithmetical terms. Sometimes I would win a whole handful of beans, and Hui-sheng would retain only a few. Sometimes the favor of chance went the other way: I would heavily augment her supply and diminish my own.
I perceived that, if a man were seriously playing this game, he could, by one lucky win, come out of it much richer in beans—
if
he got up with his winnings, and went away, and could refuse the temptation to try again. But there was always the urge, especially when one was ahead, to try for more yet. I could also imagine, if one player were vying with three others, plus the banker with the bean bag, it could get absorbing, challenging, tantalizing. But, as well as I could gauge the probabilities, the banker would be getting richer all the time, and any winning player would be enriching himself mainly at the expense of the other three.
I gestured for Hui-sheng’s attention. She raised her eyes from the playing ground, and I pointed to myself, to the game, to my money purse, indicating: “If a man were playing for money instead of beans, this could be an expensive sport.”
She smiled, and her eyes danced, and she nodded emphatically: “That is what I was trying to convey.” And she swept an arm to indicate all of Hang-zho—or maybe all of Manzi—completing the sweep by pointing to the room in our house that I and my scribe used for our working quarters.
I stared at her eagerly glowing little face, then at the beans on the ground. “Are you suggesting this as a
substitute
for tax collecting?”
Emphatic nodding: “Yes.” And a spreading of hands: “Why not?”
What a ridiculous idea, was my first thought, but then I reflected. I had seen Han men risking their money on the zhi-pai cards, on the ma-jiang tiles, even on the feng-zheng flying toys—and doing it avidly, feverishly, madly. Could they possibly be enticed into a madness for this simpleminded game? And with me—or rather, the imperial treasury—holding the bank?
“Ben trovato!” I muttered. “The Khakhan said it himself: involuntary benevolence!” I sprang up and raised Hui-sheng from the flower bed and embraced her enthusiastically. “You may have provided my succor and salvation. Tell me, did you learn this game as a child?”
Yes, she had. Some years ago—after a Mongol band of marauders torched her village and slew all the adults, and took her and the other children as slaves, and she was chosen to be raised as a lon-gya of concubines, and a shaman did the cutting that made her and the whole world silent—the old woman who tended her convalescence had kindly taught her that game, because it was one that could be played without words spoken or heard. Hui-sheng thought she had been about six years old at the time.
I tightened my embrace of her.
WITHIN three years, I was accounted the richest man in Manzi. Of course, I really was not, because I scrupulously and punctiliously sent on all my profits to the imperial treasury in Khanbalik, by trustworthy Mongol carriers with heavily armed outriders. Over the years, they transported a fortune in paper money and coins, and, for all I know, they still are transporting more.
Hui-sheng and I between us decided on the name for the game—Hua Dou Yin-hang, which means roughly “Break the Bean Bank”—and it was a success from the very start. The Magistrate Fung, though at first incredulous, was soon enchanted with the idea, and convened a special session of his Cheng just to put the seal of legality on my venture and issue to me letters of patent and entitlement—all embossed with the Manzi chrysanthemum—so that no others could copy the idea and set up in competition to me. The Wang Agayachi, though at first dubious of the propriety of my venture—“Who ever heard of a
government
sponsoring a game of chance?”—soon was praising it, and me, and declaring that I had made Manzi the most lucrative of all the Khanate’s acquired lands. To every accolade, I said modestly and truthfully, “It was not my doing, but that of my intelligent and talented lady. I am only the harvester. Hui-sheng is the gardener with the golden touch.”
She and I commenced the venture with an investment so trivial and meager that it would have shamed a fishmonger outfitting a poor stall in the marketplace. Our equipment consisted of nothing but a table and a tablecloth. Hui-sheng procured a piece of brilliant vermilion red cloth—the Han color signifying good fortune—and embroidered on it in black the quartered square, and in gold the four numbers inside the boxes, and we spread that cloth over a stone table in our garden, and we sent all our servants out to cry along the streets and canals and the riverfront: “Come one, come all venturesome souls! Wager a tsien and win a liang! Come and Break the Bean Bank! Make your dreams come true and your ancestors raise their hands in wonderment! Quick fortune awaits at the establishment of Polo and Echo! Come one and all!”
They came. Perhaps some people came just to steal a close look at me, the demon-haired Ferenghi. Perhaps some came out of actual avarice to win an easy fortune, but most seemed merely curious to see what we were offering, and some simply idled in on their way to somewhere else. But they came. And, although some jested and jeered—“A game for children!”—all made at least one play at it. And, although they tossed their tsien or two onto the red cloth in front of Hui-sheng as if they were only humoring a pretty child, they waited to see if they had won or lost. And, although many then just laughed good-humoredly and left the garden, some got intrigued and stayed to play again. And again. And, because only four could play at once, there was some mild wrangling and pushing among them, and those who could not play stayed to watch enthralled. And by the end of the day, when we declared the game over, it was quite a crowd our servants ushered out of the garden. Some of the players went away with more money than they had brought, and went rejoicing that they had found “an unguarded money vault,” and vowed to keep coming back and plundering it. And some went away rather lighter in the purse than when they had come, and they went berating themselves for having been bested by “such a juvenile sport,” and vowed to come back for retaliation on the Bean Bank table.
So that night Hui-sheng embroidered another cloth, and our servants nearly ruptured themselves manhandling another stone table into the garden. And the next day, instead of just standing about to keep order while Hui-sheng played banker, I took the other table. I was not so swift at the play as she, and did not collect as much money, but we both were hard worked all the day and fatigued by the end of it. Most of the winners of the day before had come back again—and the losers, as well—and more people besides, who had heard of this unheard-of new establishment in Hang-zho.
Well, I need hardly go on. We never again had to send our servants out crying in public, “Come all!” The house of Polo and Echo had overnight become a fixture, and a popular one. We taught the servants—the brighter ones—how to act as bankers, so Hui-sheng and I could take a rest now and then. It was not long before Hui-sheng had to make more of the black-gold-and-red tablecloths, and we purchased all the stone tables in the stock of a neighbor mason, and we set the servants at them as permanent bankers. Curiously enough, our aged crone who always got so gleeful at the smell of lemon turned out to be the best of our apprentice bankers, as swift and accurate as Hui-sheng herself.
I suppose I did not fully realize what a
grand
success we had made of our venture until one day the sky drizzled rain, and no one fled from the garden, and still more patrons arrived, having come through the rain, and they all went on playing all day, oblivious to the wet! No man of the Han would previously have let himself get rained on, even for the sake of visiting Hang-zho’s most legendary courtesan. When I realized that we had contrived a diversion more compelling than sex, I went out and about the city and took hire of other disused gardens and empty plots, and instructed our neighbor stonemason to start chiseling more tables for us in a hurry.
Our patronage came from all levels of Hang-zho society—rich nobles retired from the old regime, prosperous and oily-looking merchants, harassed-looking tradesmen, starved-looking porters and palanquin carriers, smelly fishermen and sweaty boatmen—Han, Mongols, a scattering of Muslims, even some men I took to be native Jews. The few fluttery and twittery players who looked at first to be women turned out to be wearing copper bracelets. I do not recall a genuine woman ever coming to our establishment, except to look on with supercilious amusement, as I have seen the visitors do in a House of Delusion. The Han women simply had no wagering instinct, but with the Han men it was more of a passion than drinking to excess or exercising their wee masculine organs.
The men of lower classes, who came desperately hoping to improve their lot, wagered usually only the little center-punched tsien coins that were the currency of the poor. Men of the middle classes usually risked flying money, but of small face-value (and often tattered paper). The already rich men who came, thinking they could Break the Bean Bank by heavy siege or long attrition, would thump down large wads of the more valuable notes of flying money. But a man, whether he wagered a single tsien or a heap of liang, had the same chance of winning when the banker’s counting beans were flicked aside, four by four, to disclose the winning box number. What exactly the chance of anyone’s making a fortune
was,
I never even troubled to calculate. All I know is that about the same number of patrons went home richer as went home poorer, but it was their own money they had exchanged, and an appreciable portion of it had remained with our Bean Bank. My scribe and I spent much of every night sorting the paper money into sheaves of the same face-values, and threading the little coins into strings of hundreds and skeins of thousands.
Eventually, of course, the business got too big and complex for me and Hui-sheng to be personally involved at all. After we had established many Bean Banks all over Hang-zho, we did the same in Su-zho, and then in other cities, and within a few years there was not a single least village in Manzi that did not have one in operation. We employed only tested and trusted men and women to act as the bankers of them, and my Adjutant Fung, for his contribution, put into every establishment a sworn officer of the law to act as general overseer and auditor of accounts. I promoted my scribe to be my manager of the entire wide-flung operation, and thereafter I had nothing to do with the business except to keep tally of the receipts from all over the nation, pay expenses out of that amount, and send on the considerable residue—the eminently considerable residue—to Khanbalik.
I took nothing of the profits for myself. Here in Hang-zho, as in Khanbalik, Hui-sheng and I had an elegant residence and plenty of servants and we dined from an opulent table. All of that was provided to us by the Wang Agayachi—or rather, by his government, which, since it shared in the imperial revenue, was largely supported by our Bean Banks. For indulgence in any additional luxuries or follies I might desire for myself and Hui-sheng, I had my income from my father’s Compagnia Polo, still thriving and now sending zafràn and other commodities for trade here in Manzi. So, from the Bean Banks’ receipts, I regularly deducted only enough to pay the rentals and maintenance of the banks’ gardens and buildings, the wages of the bankers and overseers and couriers, and the ludicrously small costs of equipment (nothing much beyond tables and tablecloths and supplies of dried beans). What went every month to the treasury was, as I have said, a fortune. And, as I have also said, it is probably still a continuing stream.
Kubilai had cautioned me not to bleed every drop from the veins of his Manzi subjects. It might seem that I was contravening his orders and doing precisely that. But I was not. Most players ventured at our Bean Banks the money they had already earned and hoarded and could afford to risk. If they lost it, they were impelled to work harder and earn some more. Even those who injudiciously impoverished themselves at our tables did not simply slump into hopeless idleness and beggary, as they would have done if they had lost their all to a tax collector. The Bean Banks offered always a hope of recovering one’s losses—a tax collector never lets
anything
be retrieved—so even the very bankrupts had reason to work their way up again from nothing toward a prosperity that would enable them to return to our tables. I am happy to say that our system did not—as the old tax systems had done—force anyone to the desperate expedient of borrowing at usurious terms and getting into the dire clutches of deep debt. But I take no credit for that; it was thanks to the Khakhan’s strictures against the Muslims; there simply were no longer any usurers to borrow from. So in sum, as well as I could see, our Bean Banks—far from bleeding Manzi—gave it new drive and industry and productiveness. They benefited all concerned, from the Khanate as a whole, to the working population at large (not to forget the many people who found steady employment
in
our banks), and so on down to the poorest peasant in the farthest corner of Manzi, to whom the lure of easy fortune gave at least an aspiration.
Kubilai had threatened that he would let me know promptly if he was dissatisfied with my performance as his treasury’s agent in Hang-zho. Of course, he never had reason to do any such thing. Quite to the contrary, he eventually sent the highest possible dignitary, the Crown Prince and Vice-Regent Chingkim, to convey to me his heartiest regards and congratulations on the exceptional job I was doing.
“Anyway, that is what he told me to tell you,” said Chingkim, in his usual lazily humorous way. “In truth, I think my Royal Father wanted me to spy about and see if you were actually leading bandits in plundering the whole countryside.”
“No need to plunder,” I said airily. “Why bother to rob what people are eager to bestow?”
“Yes, you have done well. The Finance Minister Lin-ngan tells me that this Manzi is pouring more wealth into the Khanate even than my cousin Abagha’s Persia. Oh, speaking of family, Kukachin and the children also send their greetings to you and Hui-sheng. And so does your own estimable father Nicolò. He said to let you know that your uncle Mafìo’s condition has improved enough that he has learned several new songs from his lady attendant.”
Chingkim, instead of putting up at his half-brother Agayachi’s palace, had done me and Hui-sheng the high honor of lodging with us during his visit. Since she and I had long ago delegated the management of our Bean Banks to our hirelings, we were now nobles of unlimited leisure, so we were able to devote all our time and attention to entertaining our royal guest. This day, the three of us, without any servants in attendance, were enjoying a merenda in the open country. Hui-sheng had with her own hands prepared a basket of food and drink, and we had got horses from the karwansarai where we kept them, and we had ridden out of Hang-zho along that Paved Avenue Which Winds a Long Way Between Gigantic Trees, Eccètera, and, well away from the city, we had spread a cloth and dined under those trees, while Chingkim told me of other things going on here and there in the world.
“We are now waging war in Champa,” he said, as idly as a non-Mongol might remark, “We are building a lotus pond in our back garden.”
“So I gathered,” I said. “I have seen the troops moving overland, and transports of men and horses coming down the Great Canal. I take it that your Royal Father, balked of expanding eastward to Jihpen-kwe, has determined to expand southward instead.”
“Actually it came about rather fortuitously,” he said. “The Yi people of Yun-nan have accepted our sovereignty there. But there is a lesser race in Yun-nan, a people called the Shan. Unwilling to be ruled by us, they have been emigrating southward into Champa in great numbers. So my half-brother Hukoji, the Wang of Yun-nan, sent an embassy into Champa, to suggest to the King of Ava that he might obligingly turn those refugees around and send them back to us, where they belong. However, our ambassadors had not been warned that all persons, when calling on the King of Ava, are expected to remove their shoes, and they did not, and he was insulted, and he ordered his guards, ‘Remove their feet instead!’ So, of course, having our ambassadors mutilated was an insult to us, and ample incentive for the Khanate to declare war on Ava. Your old friend Bayan is on the march again.”
“Ava?” I inquired. “Is that another name for Champa?”