Kaidu shook himself, as if awakening from a reverie, and said, “A tiger can be lenient as well as patient. I have already said so. I shall therefore let you all proceed in peace. I will even give you an escort against the hazards of the road. And you, priest, for all I care, you may convert cousin Kubilai and his entire court to your enfeebling religion. I hope you do. I wish you success.”
“One nod of the head,” my father exclaimed, “is heard farther than a thunderclap. You have done a good thing, Lord Kaidu, and its echoes will long resound.”
“Just one thing,” said the Ilkhan, again using a tone of severity. “I am told by my Lady Ilkhatun, who is a Christian and should know, that Christian priests maintain a vow of poverty, and possess nothing of material value. But I am also informed that you men travel with horses heavy-laden with treasure.”
My father threw my uncle a look of annoyance, and said, “Some baubles, Lord Kaidu. They belong to no priest, but are destined for your cousin Kubilai. They are tokens of tribute from the Shah of Persia and the Sultan of India Aryana.”
“The Sultan is my liege subject,” said Kaidu. “He has no right to give away what belongs to me. And the Shah is a subject of my cousin the Ilkhan Abagha, who is no friend to me. Whatever he sends is contraband, subject to confiscation. Do you understand me, uu?”
“But, Lord Kaidu, we have promised to deliver—”
“A broken promise is no more than a broken pot. The potter can always make more. Have no concern for your promises, Ferenghi. Just bring your packhorses at this hour tomorrow, here to my yurtu, and let me see which of the baubles catch my fancy. I may let you keep some few of them. Do you understand, uu?”
“Lord Kaidu—”
“Uu! Do you understand?”
“Yes, Lord Kaidu.”
“Since you understand, then obey!” He abruptly stood up, signaling the end of the audience.
We bowed our way out of the great yurtu, and collected Nostril from where he waited outside, and we started back through the rain and the mud underfoot, this time unaccompanied, and my uncle said to my father:
“I think we did rather well, Nico, in concert there. Especially adroit of you to remember that Ling story. I never heard it before.”
“Neither did I,” my father said drily. “But surely the Han have some such instructive tale, among the many they do have.”
I opened my mouth for the first time. “Something else you said, Father, gave me an idea. I will meet you back at the inn.”
I parted from them, to go and call on my Mongol hosts of the day before. I requested an introduction to one of their armorers, and got it, and asked the man at the forge if I might borrow for a day one of his yet-unhammered sheets of metal. He graciously found for me a piece of copper that was long and broad, but thin, so it wobbled and rippled and thrummed as I carried it to the karwansarai. My father and uncle paid no attention as I carried it into our room and leaned it against the wall, for they were again arguing.
“All the fault of that cassock,” said my father. “Your being an impoverished priest gave Kaidu the notion of impoverishing us.”
“Nonsense, Nico,” said my uncle. “He would have found some other excuse, if that had not occurred to him. What we must do is offer him freely something from our hoard, and hope he will ignore the rest.”
“Well … ,” said my father, thinking. “Suppose we give him our cods of musk. At least they are ours to give.”
“Oh, come, Nico! To that sweaty barbarian? Musk is for making fine perfume. You might as well give Kaidu a powder puff, for all the use he would have of it.”
They kept on like that, but I stopped listening, for I had my own idea, and I went to explain to Nostril the part he would play in it.
The next day, a day of only drizzling rain, Nostril loaded two of the three packhorses with our cargo of valuables—we of course always kept them safe inside our chambers whenever we lodged in a karwansarai—and also roped my sheet of metal onto one of the horses, and led them for us to the Mongol bok. There, when we entered the Ilkhan’s yurtu, he stayed outside to unload the goods, and Kaidu’s guardsmen began carrying them in and stripped off their protective wrappers.
“Hui!” Kaidu exclaimed, as he started to inspect the various objects. “These engraved golden platters are superb! A gift from the Shah Zaman, you said, uu?”
“Yes,” my father said coldly, and my uncle added, in a melancholy voice, “A boy named Aziz once strapped them on his feet to cross a quicksand,” and I took out a kerchief and loudly blew my nose.
There came from outside a low, mumbling, bumbling mutter of sound. The Ilkhan looked up, surprised, saying, “Was that thunder, uu? I thought there was only a sprinkle of rain … .”
“I beg to inform the Great Lord Kaidu,” said one of his guardsmen, bowing low, “that the day is gray and wet, but there are no thunderclouds to be seen.”
“Curious,” Kaidu muttered, and put down the golden dishes. He rummaged among the many other things accumulating in the tent and, finding a particularly elegant ruby necklace, again exclaimed, “Hui!” He held it up to admire it. “The Ilkhatun will thank you personally for this.”
“Thank the Sultan Kutb-ud-Din,” said my father.
I blew my nose into my kerchief. The rippling rumble of thunder came again from outside, and somewhat louder now. The Ilkhan started so that he dropped the string of rubies, and his mouth closed and opened soundlessly—but framing a word I could read from his lips—and then said aloud, “There it is again! But thunder without thunderclouds … uu … ?”
When a third item caught his greedy eye, a bolt of fine Kashmir cloth, I barely gave him time to cry “Hui!” before I blew my nose, and the thunder gave a menacing grumble, and he jerked his hand away as if the cloth had burned him, and again he mouthed the word, and my father and uncle gave me an odd look.
“Pardon, Lord Kaidu,” I said. “I think this thunder weather has given me a head cold.”
“You are pardoned,” he said offhandedly. “Aha! And this, is this one of those famous Persian qali carpets, uu?”
Nose blow. Veritable clamor of thunder. His hand again jerked away and his lips convulsively made the word, and he glanced fearfully skyward. Then he looked around at us, his slit eyes almost opened to roundness, and he said:
“I was but toying with you!”
“My lord?” inquired Uncle Mafio, whose own lips were twitching now.
“Toying! Jesting! Teasing you!” Kaidu said, almost pleadingly. “A tiger sometimes toys with his quarry, when he is not hungry. And I am not hungry! Not for tawdry acquisitions. I am Kaidu, and I own countless mou of land and innumerable li of the Silk Road and more cities than I have hairs and more subject people than a gobi has pebbles. Did you really think I lack for rubies and gold dishes and Persian qali, uu?” He feigned a hearty laugh, “Ah, ha, ha, ha!” even bending double to pound his meaty fists on his massive knees. “But I had you worried, did I not, uu? You took my toying in earnest.”
“Yes, you truly fooled us, Lord Kaidu,” said my uncle, managing to subdue his own incipient merriment.
“And now the thunder has ceased,” said the Ilkhan, listening. “Guards! Wrap up all these things again and reload them on the horses of these elder brothers.”
“Why, thank you, Lord Kaidu,” said my father, but his twinkling eyes were on me.
“And here, here is my cousin’s letter of ukaz,” said the Ilkhan, pressing it into my uncle’s hand. “I return it to you, priest. Take yourself and your religion and these paltry baubles to Kubilai. Perhaps he is a collector of such trinkets, but Kaidu is not. Kaidu does not take, he gives! Two of the best warriors of my personal pavilion guard will attend you to your karwansarai, and they will ride with you whenever you are ready to continue your journey eastward … .”
I slipped out of the yurtu as the guardsmen began to carry out the rejected goods, and slipped around to the back side of it, where Nostril stood holding the metal sheet by one edge and waiting to flap it again whenever he heard me blow my nose. I gave him the signal employed throughout the East to mean “purpose accomplished”—showing him my fist with upraised thumb—took the piece of copper from him and trotted across the bok to return it to the armorer, and got back to the Ilkhan’s yurtu by the time the horses were reloaded.
Kaidu stood in the entrance of his pavilion, waving and shouting, “A good horse and a wide plain to you!” until we were out of earshot.
Then my uncle said, in Venetian, not to be overheard by the two Mongol escorts leading our horses and theirs, “Verily, we have all done well in concert. Nico, you only invented a good story. Marco invented a thunder god!” and he flung his arms about my shoulders and Nostril’s, and gave us both a hearty squeeze.
WE had now come so far around the world, and into lands so very little known, that our Kitab was no longer of the slightest use to us. Clearly, the mapmaker al-Idrisi had never ventured into these regions, and apparently never had met anyone who had, from whom he could ask even hearsay information. His maps rounded off the eastern edge of Asia much too shortly and abruptly at the great ocean called the Sea of Kithai. Thus they gave the false impression that Kashgar was at no enormous distance from our destination, Kubilai’s capital city of Khanbalik, which itself lies well inland of that ocean. But, as my father and uncle warned me, and as I wearily verified for myself, Kashgar and Khanbalik in fact are a whole half a continent apart—half of a continent immeasurably bigger than al-Idrisi had imagined it to be. We journeyers had almost exactly as far yet to go
as we had already come
from Suvediye away back on the Levant shore of the Mediterranean.
Distance is distance, no matter whether it is calculated in the number of human footsteps or the number of days on horseback required to get over it. Nevertheless, here in Kithai, any distance always
sounded
longer, because here it was counted not in farsakhs but in li. The farsakh, comprising about two and a half of our Western miles, was invented by Persians and Arabs who, having always been far travelers, are accustomed to think in expansive terms of measurement. But the li, which is only about one-third of a mile, was invented by the Han, and they are for the most part homebodies. The common Han peasant in his lifetime probably never ventures more than a few li away from the farm village where he was born. So I suppose, to his mind, a third of a mile is a far distance. Anyway, when we Polos left Kashgar, I was still accustomed to calculating in farsakhs, so it did not much dismay me to say to myself that we had only some eight or nine hundred of them to go to Khanbalik. But when I gradually got used to calculating in li, the number of them was appalling: some six thousand seven hundred from Kashgar to Khanbalik. If I had not previously appreciated the vastness of the Mongol Empire, I surely did now, as I contemplated the vastness of just its central nation of Kithai.
There were two ceremonies attendant on our departure from Kashgar. Our Mongol escorts insisted that our horses—now numbering six mounts and three pack animals—must be treated to a certain ritual for protection against the “azghun” of the trail. Azghun means “desert voices,” and I gathered that those were some sort of goblins which infest the wilderness. So the warriors brought from their bok a man called a shamàn—what they would describe as a priest and we would describe as a sorcerer. The wild-eyed and paint-daubed shaman, who looked rather like a goblin himself, mumbled some incantations and poured some drops of blood on the heads of our horses and pronounced them protected. He offered to do the same for us unbelievers, but we politely declined on the ground that we had our own accompanying priest.
The other ceremony was the settling of our bill with the landlord of the karwansarai, and that involved more time and fuss than the sorcery had. My father and uncle did not simply accept and pay the innkeeper’s account, but haggled with him over every single item. And the bill did include every single item of our stay—the space we had occupied in the inn and our beasts had occupied in the stable, the quantity of food eaten by ourselves and grain eaten by our horses, the amounts of water we and they had swallowed, and the cha leaves steeped in ours, the kara fuel that had been burned for our comfort, the amount of lamplight we had enjoyed and the measures of oil required for that—everything but the air we had breathed. As the discussion heated up, it was joined by the inn’s cook, or Governor of the Kettle, as he styled himself, and the man who had served our meals, or the Steward of the Table, and they two began vociferously adding up the number of paces they had walked and the weights they had carried and the amounts of efficiency and sweat and genius they had expended in our behalf … .
But I soon realized that this was not a contest of larceny on the landlord’s part versus outrage on ours. It was merely an expected formality—another custom derived from the complicated comportment of the Han people—a ceremony that is so enjoyed by both creditor and debtor that they can string it out to hours of eloquent argument, mutual abuse and reconciliation, claim and denial, refusal and compromise, until eventually they agree to agree, and the account is paid, and they emerge better friends than they were before. When we finally rode away from the inn, the landlord, the Kettle Governor, the Table Steward and all the other servants stood at the door, waving and calling after us the Han farewell: “Man zou,” which means, “Leave us only if you must.”
The Silk Road forks into two as it goes eastward from Kashgar. This is because there is a desert directly to the east of the city, a dry, peeling, curling desert, like a plain of shattered yellow pottery, a desert as big as a nation, and just the name of it gives good reason to avoid it, for its name is Takla Makan, meaning “once in, never out.” So a traveler on the Silk Road can choose the branch which loops northeasterly around that desert or the one looping southeast of it, which is the one we took. The road led us from one to the next of a chain of habitable oases and small farm villages, about a day’s journey apart. Always off to our left were the lion-tawny sands of the Takla Makan and, to our right, the snow-topped Kun-lun mountain range, beyond which, to the south, lies the high land of To-Bhot.
Although we were skirting clear of the desert, along its pleasantly verdant and well-watered rimlands, this was high summertime, so we had to endure a lot of desert weather that edged over from it. The only really tolerable days were those on which a wind blew down from the snowy mountains. Most frequently the days were windless, but not still, for on those days the nearness of the smoldering desert made the air about us seem to tremble. The sun might have been a blunt instrument, a brass bludgeon, beating on the air so that it rang shrill with heat. And when occasionally there came a wind from the desert, it brought the desert with it. The Takla Makan then stood on end—making moving towers of pale-yellow dust, and those towers gradually turned brown, getting darker and heavier until they toppled over onto us, turning high noon to an oppressive dusk, seething viciously and stinging the skin like a beating with twig brooms.
That dun-colored dust of the lion-colored Takla Makan is known everywhere in Kithai, even by untraveled people who have no least suspicion of the desert’s existence. The dust rustles through the streets of Khanbalik, thousands of li away, and powders the flowers in the gardens of Xan-du, farther yet, and scums the lake waters of Hang-zho, farther yet, and is cursed by the tidy housekeepers of every other Kithai city I ever was in. And once, when I sailed in a ship far upon the Sea of Kithai, not just out of touch but out of sight of the shore, I found that same dust sifting down upon the deck. A visitor to Kithai might later lose his memory of everything else he saw and experienced there, but he will forever feel the pale dun dust settling on him, never letting him forget that once he walked that lion-colored land.
The buran, as the Mongols call a dust storm of the Takla Makan, has a curious effect which I never encountered in any such storm in any other desert. While a buran was buffeting us, and for a long while after it had blown on past, it somehow made the hair of our heads stand fantastically on end, and the hairs of our beards bristle like quills, and our clothes crackle as if they had turned to stiff paper, and if we chanced to touch another person we saw a snapping spark and felt a small jolt like that from cat fur briskly rubbed.
Also, the buran’s passing, like the passing of a celestial broom, would leave the night air immaculately clean and clear. The stars came out in multitudes untellable, infinitely more of them than I ever saw elsewhere, every tiniest one as bright as a gem and the familiar bigger stars so big that they looked globular, like little moons. Meanwhile, the actual moon up there, even if it was in the phase we would ordinarily call “new”—only a fragile fingernail crescent of it lighted—was nevertheless visible in its whole roundness, a bronze full moon cradled in the new moon’s silver arms.
And on such a night, if we looked out over the Takla Makan from our camping or lodging place, we could see even stranger lights, blue ones, bobbing and dipping and twinkling over the surface of the desert, sometimes one or two, sometimes whole bevies of them. They might have been lamps or candles carried about by persons in a distant karwan camp out there, but we knew they were not. They were too blue to be flames of fire, and they winked on and off too abruptly to have been kindled by any human agency, and their presence, like that of the day’s buran, made our hair and beards stir uneasily. Besides all that, it was well-known that no human beings ever traveled or camped in the Takla Makan. Not living human beings. Not willingly.
The first time we saw the lights, I inquired of our escorts what they might be. The Mongol named Ussu said, in a hushed voice, “The beads of Heaven, Ferenghi.”
“But what makes them?”
The one named Donduk said curtly, “Be silent and listen, Ferenghi.”
I did, and, even as far from the desert as we were standing, I heard faint sighs and sobs and soughings, as if small night winds were fitfully blowing. But there was no wind.
“The azghun, Ferenghi,” Ussu explained. “The beads and the voices always come together.”
“Many an inexperienced traveler,” added Donduk, in a supercilious way, “has seen the lights and heard the cries, and thought them to be a fellow traveler in trouble, and gone seeking to help, and been lured by them away, not ever to be seen again. They are the azghun, the desert voices, and the mysterious beads of Heaven. Hence the desert’s name—once in, never out.”
I wish I could claim that I divined the cause of those manifestations, or at least a better explanation of them than wicked goblins, but I did not. I knew that the azghun and the lights occurred only after the passing of a buran, and a buran was only a mighty mass of dry sand blowing about. I wondered, did that friction have something in common with the rubbing of a cat’s fur? But out there in the desert, the sand grains had nothing to rub against except each other … .
So, baffled by that mystery, I applied my mind to a smaller but more accessible one. Why did Ussu and Donduk, though they knew all our names and had no trouble saying them, always address us Polos indiscriminately as Ferenghi? Ussu spoke the word amiably enough; he seemed to enjoy traveling with us, as a change from boring garrison duty back at Kaidu’s bok. But Donduk spoke the word distastefully, seeming to regard this journey as a nursemaid attention to us unworthy persons. I rather liked Ussu, and did not like Donduk, but they always were together, so I asked them both: why Ferenghi?
“Because you
are
Ferenghi,” said Ussu, looking puzzled, as if I had asked a witless question.
“But you also call my father Ferenghi. And my uncle.”
“He and he is Ferenghi also,” said Ussu.
“But you call Nostril Nostril. Is that because he is a slave?”
“No,” said Donduk scornfully. “Because he is not Ferenghi.”
“Elder Brothers,” I persisted. “I am trying to find out what Ferenghi means.”
“Ferenghi means only Ferenghi,” snapped Donduk, and threw up his hands in disgust, and so did I.
But that mystery I finally
did
figure out: Ferenghi was only their pronunciation of Frank. Their people must first have heard Westerners call themselves Franks eight centuries ago, in the time of the Frankish Empire, when some of the Mongols’ own ancestors, then called Bulgars and Hiung-nu, or Huns, invaded the West and gave their names to Bulgaria and Hungary. Ever since then, apparently, the Mongols have called any white Westerner a Ferenghi, no matter his real nationality. Well, it was no more inaccurate than the calling of all Mongols Mongols, though they were really of many different origins.
Ussu and Donduk told me, for instance, how their Mongol cousins the Kirghiz had come into existence. The name derived from the Mongol words kirk kiz, they said, meaning “forty virgins,” because sometime in the remote past there had existed in some remote place that many virgin females, unlikely though it might seem to us moderns, and all forty of them had got impregnated by the foam blown from an enchanted lake, and from the resultant miraculous mass birth had descended all the people now called Kirghiz. That was interesting, but I found more interesting another thing Ussu and Donduk told me about the Kirghiz. They lived in the perpetually frozen Sibir, far north of Kithai, and perforce had invented two ingenious methods of getting about those harsh lands. They would strap to the bottom of their boots bits of highly polished bone, on which they could glide far and fast upon the ice of frozen waters. Or they would similarly strap on long boards like barrel staves, to skim far and fast over the snowy wastes.
The very next farm village on our way was populated by yet another breed of Mongols. Some of the communities on that stretch of the Silk Road were peopled by Uighurs, those nationalities “allied” to the Mongols, and others were peopled by Han folk, and Ussu and Donduk had not made any comment about them. But when we came to this particular village, they told us the people were Kalmuk Mongols, and they spat the name, thus: “Kalmuk! Vakh!”—
vakh
being a Mongol noise to register sheer disgust, and the Kalmuk were disgusting, right enough. They were the filthiest human creatures I ever saw outside of India. To depict just one aspect of their filthiness, let me say this: not only did they never wash their bodies, they never even took off their clothes, day or night. When a Kalmuk’s outer garment got too worn to be serviceable, he or she did not discard it, but simply donned a new one over it, and continued wearing layers upon layers of ragged clothes until the undermost gradually rotted and shredded away from underneath, like a sort of ghastly scurf of the crotch. I will not attempt to say how they smelled.