“This is the Cheng, the Hall of Justice, and this is the hour of the Khakhan’s dispensing judgment to plaintiffs and supplicants and miscreants. If you will but attend until that is concluded, my Lords Polo, he wishes to make his greetings immediately afterward.”
The frail old man, with no apparent effort, swung open the ponderous doors—they must have been cleverly counterpoised and on well-oiled hinges—and bowed us inside. He followed us in and closed the door behind us, and remained standing with us to provide helpful interpretations of what was going on in the hall.
The Cheng was a tremendous and lofty chamber, fully as big as an indoor courtyard, its ceiling held up by carved and gilded columns, its walls paneled with red leather, but its floor space empty of furniture. At the far end was a raised platform and on that a substantial thronelike chair, flanked by rows of lower and less elegantly upholstered chairs. There were dignitaries occupying all those seats, and in the shadows behind the dais were other figures standing and moving about. Between us and the platform knelt a great crowd of petitioners, enough to fill the chamber from wall to wall, most of them in coarse peasant dress but others in noble raiment.
Even from the distance at which we stood, I knew the man seated centrally on the dais. I would have known him even if he had been shabbily clothed and crammed ignominiously among the ranks of commoners on the chamber floor. The Khan Kubilai needed not his elevated throne nor his gold-threaded, fur-trimmed silk robes to proclaim himself; his sovereignty was implicit in the upright way he sat, as if he still were astride a battle charger, and in the strength of his craggy face and in the forcefulness of his voice, though he spoke only infrequently and in low tones. The men in the chairs to either side of him were almost as well dressed, but their manner made evident that they were subordinates. Our guide Lin-ngan, pointing discreetly and murmuring quietly, explained who they all were.
“One is the official called Suo-ke, which means the Tongue. Four are the Khakhan’s secretary scribes who record on scrolls the proceedings here. Eight are ministers of the Khakhan, two each of four ascending degrees. Behind the dais, those running about are relays of clerks who fetch documents from the Cheng archives, when any are needed for reference.”
The one called Tongue of the Cheng was continuously occupied, leaning down from the platform to hear a petitioner, then turning to converse with one or another of the ministers. And those eight ministers also were continuously busy, consulting with the Tongue, bidding clerks bring them documents, peering into those papers and scrolls, consulting among themselves and occasionally with the Khakhan. But the four secretaries seemed only now and then to bestir themselves to write anything on their papers. I commented that it seemed odd: the lordly ministers of the Cheng working harder than the mere secretaries.
“Yes,” said Master Lin-ngan. “The scribes do not trouble to write down anything of these proceedings except the words spoken by the Khan Kubilai himself. Everything else is but preliminary discussion, for the Khakhan’s words sum up and distill and supersede all other words spoken.”
Such a vast room with so many people in it might have been cacophonous and echoing, but the crowd was quiet and orderly, like a congregation in church. Only one person at a time went up to the dais, and he spoke only to the official called the Tongue, and in a murmur so respectful or fearful that we in the back of the room could hear nothing that passed until, after all the deliberations, the Tongue announced the judgment for all to know.
Lin-ngan said, “During the Cheng, no one but the Tongue ever addresses the Khan Kubilai directly, nor ever is directly addressed by him. A supplicant or prosecutor puts his case to the Tongue—who, incidentally, is so called because he is fluent in all the languages of the realm. The Tongue then puts the case to one of the two ministers of least degree. If that official deems it a subject of sufficient importance, he will refer it upward. At whatever level, and after whatever precedents are consulted, an adjudication is suggested and told to the Tongue, who then tells it to the Khakhan. He may give assent, or make some slight change in the ruling, or controvert it completely. Then the Tongue pronounces aloud that final decree to the persons concerned and to all within hearing —damages to be paid to a plaintiff, or to be exacted from a defendant, or a punishment laid on, or sometimes a dismissal of the whole affair—and the case is closed forever.”
I perceived that this Cheng of Khanbalik was not like the Daiwan of Baghdad, where every case had been a matter for discussion and mutual agreement among the Shah and his wazir and an assortment of officious Muslim imams and muftis. Here, the cases might be argued first among the ministers, but every single verdict was finally at the sole discretion of the Khan Kubilai, and his pronouncement was not to be disputed or appealed. I also perceived that his verdicts were sometimes witty or whimsical, but sometimes appalling in their cruel inventiveness.
Old Lin-ngan was at that moment saying, “The farmer who just petitioned the Cheng is a delegate sent by a whole district of farmers in the province of Ho-nan. He brings word that the rice fields have been chewed clean by a plague of locusts. A famine is on the land and the farm families are starving. The delegate asks relief for the people of Ho-nan and inquires what might be done. Regard, the ministers have discussed the problem and referred it to the Khakhan, and now the Tongue will deliver the Khakhan’s decree.”
The Tongue did, in a bellow of Han that I could not understand, but Lin-ngan translated:
“The Khan Kubilai speaks thus. With all that rice inside them, the locusts should be delicious. The families of Ho-nan have the Khakhan’s permission to eat the locusts. The Khan Kubilai has spoken.”
“By God,” muttered Uncle Mafio, “the old tyrant is just as flippantly imperious as I had remembered him.”
“Honey in his mouth and a dagger at his belt,” my father said admiringly.
The next case was that of a provincial notary named Xen-ning, responsible for recording deeds of land transfer and testaments of bequest and such things. He was accused, and found guilty, of having falsified his ledgers for his own aggrandizement, and the Tongue proclaimed and Lin-ngan translated the sentence accorded him:
“The Khan Kubilai speaks thus. You have lived all your life by words, Notary Xen-ning. Henceforth you shall live on them. You are to be imprisoned in a solitary cell, and at every mealtime you will be served pieces of paper inscribed ‘meat’ and ‘rice’ and ‘cha.’ Those will be your food and drink for as long as you can survive on them. The Khan Kubilai has spoken.”
“Truly,” said my father, “he has a tongue of scissors.”
The next and last case that morning was the matter of a woman taken in adultery. It would have been a thing too trivial for the Cheng’s consideration, said old Lin-ngan, except that she was a Mongol woman, and wife to a Mongol functionary of the Khanate, a certain Lord Amursama; therefore her crime was more heinous than if she had been a mere Han. Her outraged husband had stabbed her lover to death at the moment of discovery, said Lin-ngan, meaning that the miscreant had died too mercifully quickly and without the torment he deserved. So now the husband was petitioning the Cheng to decide a more salutary fate for his unfaithful wife. The cuckold’s petition was duly granted, and I trust it satisfied him. Lin-ngan translated:
“The Khan Kubilai speaks thus. The guilty Lady Amursama will be delivered to the Fondler—”
“The Fondler?” I exclaimed, and I laughed. “I thought she had just been delivered
from
one of those.”
“The Fondler,” the old man said stiffly, “is our name for the Court Executioner.”
“In Venice we more realistically call him the Meatmaker.”
“It so happens that in the Han language the term for physical torture, dong-xing, and the term for sexual arousal, dong-qing, are, as you have just heard, very similar in pronunciation.”
“Gèsu,” I muttered.
“I resume,” said Lin-ngan. “The wife will be delivered to the Fondler, accompanied by her betrayed husband. In the presence of the Fondler, and if necessary employing his assistance, the husband will with his teeth and fingernails tear out his wife’s pudendal sphincter, and with that he will strangle her to death. The Khan Kubilai has spoken.”
Neither my father nor my uncle saw fit to comment on that decree, but I did. I scoffed knowingly:
“Vakh! This is pure show. The Khakhan is well aware that we are present. He is only making such eccentric judgments to impress and confound us. Just as the Ilkhan Kaidu did when he spat in his guardsman’s mouth.”
My father and the Mathematician Lin-ngan gave me looks askance, and my uncle growled, “Brash upstart! Do you really think that the Khan of All Khans would exert himself to impress any human being alive? Least of all, some unimportant wretches from an inconsiderable cranny of the world far beyond his domains?”
I made no reply, but neither did I put on a contrite look, being sure that my disparaging opinion would eventually be confirmed. But it never was. Uncle Mafio was right, of course, and I was wrong, and I would soon know how foolishly I had misread the Khakhan’s temperament.
But at that moment the Cheng was emptying. The huddled ruck of petitioners humped to their feet and shuffled out through the door by which we had entered, and the presiding justices at the dais, all except the Khakhan, disappeared through some doorway at that end of the hall. When there was no one left between him and us except his ring of guards, Lin-ngan said, “The Khakhan beckons. Let us approach.”
Following the Mathematician’s example, we all knelt to make the ko-tou obeisance to the Khakhan. But before we had folded far enough to put our foreheads to the floor, he said in a boomingly hearty voice:
“Rise! Stand! Old friends, welcome back to Kithai!”
He spoke in Mongol, and I never afterwards heard him speak anything else, so I do not know if he was acquainted with Trade Farsi or any others of the multifarious languages employed in his realm, and I never heard anyone else address him in anything but his native Mongol. He did not embrace my father or uncle in the fashion of Venetian friends meeting, but he did clap each of them on the shoulder with a big, heavily beringed hand.
“It is good to see you again, Brothers Polo. How fared you in the journeying, uu? Is this the first of my priests, uu? How young he looks, for a sage cleric!”
“No, Sire,” said my father. “This is my son Marco, also now an experienced journeyer. He, like us, puts himself at the service of the Khakhan.”
“Then welcome is he, as well,” said Kubilai, nodding amiably to me. “But the priests, friend Nicolò, do they follow behind you, uu?”
My father and uncle explained apologetically, but not abjectly, that we had failed to bring the requested one hundred missionary priests—or any priests at all—because they had had the misfortune to return home during the papal interregnum and the consequent disarray of the Church hierarchy. (They did not mention the two faint-hearted Friars Preachers who had come no farther than the Levant.) While they explained, I took the opportunity to look closely at this most powerful monarch in the world.
The Khan of All Khans was then just short of his sixtieth birthday, an age which in the West would have counted him an ancient, but he was still a hale and sturdy specimen of mature manhood. For a crown, he wore a simple gold morion helmet, like an inverted soup bowl, with nape and jugular lappets depending from its back and sides. His hair, what I could see of it under the morion, was gray but still thick. His full mustache and his beard, which was close-trimmed in the style worn by shipwrights, were more pepper than salt. His eyes were rather round, for a Mongol, and bright with intelligence. His ruddy complexion was weathered but not wrinkled, as if his face had been carved from well-seasoned walnut. His nose was his only unhandsome feature, it being short like those of all Mongols, but also bulbous and quite red. His garments were all of splendid silks, thickly brocaded with figures and patterns, and they covered a figure that was stout but nowise suety. On his feet were soft boots of a peculiar leather; I learned later that they were made from the skin of a certain fish, which is alleged to allay the pains of gout, the only affliction I ever heard the Khakhan complain of.
“Well,” he said, when my father and uncle had finished, “perhaps your Church of Rome shows a cunning wisdom in keeping close its mysteries.”
I was still holding my newly formed opinion that the Khan Kubilai was like any other mortal—as evidenced by his posturings for our benefit during the proceedings of the Cheng—and now he seemed to validate that opinion, for he went on talking, as chattily as any ordinary man making idle conversation with friends.
“Yes, your Church may be right not to send missionaries here. When it comes to religion, I often think that none is better than too much. We already have Nestorian Christians, and they are ubiquitous and vociferous, to the point of pestilence. Even my old mother, the Dowager Khatun Sorghaktani, who long ago converted to that faith, is still so besotted with it that she harangues me and every other pagan she meets. Our courtiers are lately desperate to avoid meeting her in the corridors. Such fanaticism defeats its own aims. So, yes, I believe your Roman Christian Church may well attract more converts if it pretends to stand aloof from the herd. That is the way of the Jews, you know. Thus the few pagans who do get accepted into Judaism can feel flattered and honored by the fact.”