“May Allah bless you, good master and friend Marco,” she said, with a smile as bright as the tears in her eyes.
I called for Buyantu and Biliktu, and told them to see the visitor to the door. They accompanied her ungraciously, with frowning brows and curled lips, so, when they returned, I spoke to them severely.
“Your superiority of manner is less than mannerly, and it ill becomes you, my dears. I know you to be of only twenty-two-karat valuation. The lady you have so grudgingly attended is, in my estimation, of a perfect twenty-four. Now, Buyantu, you go and present my compliments to the Lady Chao Ku-an, and say that Marco Polo requests an appointment to call upon her.”
When she left, and Biliktu flounced off to sulk in some other room, I went and took one more disappointed look at my jar full of huo-yao sludge. Clearly, those fifty liang of the flaming powder were now ruined beyond salvage. So I set the jar aside, picked up the remaining basket and contemplated the contents of that. After a while, I began very carefully to pick out from the mixture some grains of the saltpeter. When I had a dozen or so of the white specks, I lightly moistened the end of an ivory fan handle. I picked up the saltpeter with that, and idly held it in the flame of a nearby candle. The grains instantly melted into a glaze on the ivory. I gave that some thought. The Firemaster had been right about wetting the powder, and he had warned me not to try baking it. But suppose I set a pot of the huo-yao on a low fire, not very hot, so that its integral saltpeter
melted
and thereby held the whole together … ? My meditations were interrupted by the return of Buyantu, reporting that the Lady Chao would see me that very moment.
I went, and I introduced myself, “Marco Polo, my lady,” and I made a proper ko-tou.
“My lord husband has spoken of you,” she said, indicating that I should rise by giving me a playful nudge with a bare foot. Her hands were occupied in playing with an ivory ball, as her husband had done, for the suppling of the fingers.
As I stood, she went on, “I wondered when you would deign to call upon this lowly female courtier.” Her voice was as musical as wind chimes, but seemed somehow just as devoid of any human agency in the making of that music. “Would you wish to discuss my titular office, or my real work? Or my pastimes in between?”
That last was said with a leer. Lady Chao evidently and correctly assumed that, like everyone else, I had heard of her gluttonous appetite for men. I will confess that I was briefly tempted to join her cupboard of morsels. She was about my own age and would have been fetchingly beautiful if she had not had her eyebrows plucked entirely off and her delicate features coated with a dead-white powder. I was, as always, curious to discover what was beneath the rich silk robes—in this case, especially, because I had not yet lain with a woman of the Han race. But I restrained my curiosity and said:
“None of those today, my lady, if you please. I come on a different—”
“Ah, a bashful one,” she said, and changed her leer to a simper. “Let us begin, then, by talking of
your
favorite pastimes.”
“On some other occasion, perhaps, Lady Chao. I would speak today of your female slave named Mar-Janah.”
“Aiya!” she exclaimed, which is the Han equivalent of “vakh!” She sat abruptly upright on her couch, and she frowned—and a frown is very unpleasant to look at when it is done without eyebrows—and she snapped, “You find that Turki wench more appealing than I am?”
“Why, no, my lady,” I lied. “Having been nobly born in my native land, I would never—there or here—even consider admiring any but a woman of perfect pedigree, such as yourself.” I tactfully did not point out that she was only nobility and Mar-janah was royalty.
But she seemed mollified. “That is well said.” She leaned voluptuously back again. “On the other hand, I have sometimes discovered that a grimy and sweaty soldier can be appealing … .”
She trailed off, as if inviting comment, but I did not care to be drawn into a contest of comparing our experiences of perversity. So I attempted to continue, “Regarding the slave—”
“The slave, the slave …” She sighed, and pouted, and petulantly tossed and caught the ivory ball. “For a moment there, you were well spoken, as a gallant should be when calling on a lady. But you prefer to talk of slaves.”
I reminded myself that any business with a Han ought to be approached roundabout, only after long exchanges of trivialities. So I said gallantly, “I would much rather talk of my Lady Chao, and her surpassing beauty.”
“That is better.”
“I am a little surprised that, with such a choice model so conveniently at hand, the Master Chao has not made many paintings of her.”
“He has,” she said, and smirked.
“I regret that he showed me none.”
“He would not if he could, and he cannot. They are in the possession of the various other lords who were portrayed in the same pictures. And those lords are not likely to show them to you, either.”
I did not have to ponder on that remark to realize what it meant. I would defer making judgment on Master Chao—whether I felt sympathy for his predicament or disgust for his pliant complicity in it—but I knew that I did not much like his young lady, and I would be glad to quit her company. So I made no further attempt at small talk.
“I beg that my lady will forgive my persistence in the subject of the slave, but I seek to right a wrong of long duration. I entreat the Lady Chao’s permission for her slave Mar-Janah to marry.”
“Aiya!” she exclaimed again, and loudly. “That aging slut is pregnant!”
“No, no.”
Unhearing, she went on, while her nonexistent eyebrows writhed. “But that does not obligate you! No man weds a slave just because he has impregnated her.”
“I did not!”
“The embarrassment is slight, and easily disposed of. I will call her in and kick her in the belly. Concern yourself no further.”
“My concern is not—”
“It is, however, a matter for speculation.” Her little red tongue came out and licked her little red lips. “The physicians all pronounced that woman barren. You must be exceptionally potent.”
“Lady Chao, the woman is
not
pregnant and it is not I who would marry her!”
“What?” For the first time, her face lost all expression.
“It is a man slave of my own who has been long enamored of your Mar-Janah. I merely entreat your concurrence in my permission for them to wed and live together.”
She stared at me. Ever since I had come in, the young lady had been assuming one expression after another—of invitation, of coyness, of petulance—and now I saw why she had kept her features so much in motion. That white face, without some conscious contortion, was as empty as a sheet of unwritten paper. I wondered: would the rest of her body be as unexciting? Were Han women all blanks that only sporadically assumed human semblance? I was almost grateful when she put on a look of annoyance and said:
“That Turki woman is my dresser and applier of cosmetics. Not even my lord husband infringes on her time. I do not see why I should share her with a husband of her own.”
“Then perhaps you would sell her outright? I can pay a sum that will purchase an excellent replacement.”
“Are you now trying to insult me? Do you imply that I cannot afford to give away a slave, if I so choose?”
She bounded up from the couch and, her little bare feet twinkling, her robes and ribbons and tassels and perfumed powder swirling in her wake, she left the room. I stood and wondered if I had been summarily dismissed or if she had gone for a guardsman to take me in charge. The young woman was as exasperatingly changeable as her inconstant face. In just our brief conversation, she had managed to accuse me in quick succession of being bashful, presumptuous, salacious, meddlesome, gullible and finally offensive. I was not surprised that such a woman required an endless supply of lovers; she probably forgot each one in the moment that he slunk from her bed.
But she came tripping into the room again, unaccompanied, and flung at me a piece of paper. I snatched and caught it before it drifted to the floor. I could not read the Mongol writing on it, but she told me what it was, saying contemptuously:
“Title to the slave Mar-Janah. I give it to you. The Turki is yours to do with as you please.” In its fickle way, her face went from contempt to a seductive smile. “And so am I. Do what you will—to render me proper thanks.”
I might have had to, and I could probably have nerved myself to do it, if she had commanded it earlier. But she had incautiously given me the paper now, before setting a price on it. So I folded it into my purse, and bowed, and said with all the floweriness I could muster:
“Your humble supplicant does indeed most fervently thank the gracious Lady Chao Ku-an. And, I am sure, so will the lowly slaves likewise honor and bless your name, as soon as I inform them of your bountiful goodness, which I shall this minute go and do. Until we meet again, then, noble lady—”
“What?” she screeched, like a wind chime being blown to pieces. “You would simply turn and walk away?”
I was inclined to say no, that I would run if it were not undignified. However, having told her I was well born, I maintained my courteous manner and bowed repeatedly as I backed toward the door, murmuring things like “most benevolent” and “undying gratitude.”
Her paper face was now a palimpsest written over with disbelief, shock and outrage, all at once. She was holding the ivory ball as if about to throw it at me. “Many men have regretted my sending them away,” she said menacingly, through clenched teeth. “You will be the first to regret having gone away unbidden.”
I had bowed my way out into the corridor by then, but I heard her shriek a few words as I turned to flee for my own chambers.
“And I promise! That you will! Regret it!”
I have to say that it was not any sudden access of rectitude that made me run from the Lady Chao’s proffered embrace, nor any concern I felt for her husband’s sensibilities, nor any fear of compromising consequences that might ensue. It seemed likelier that consequences would ensue from my not having ravished her. No, it was none of those things, and it was not even the general repugnance she inspired in me. To be perfectly honest, I had been mainly repelled by her feet. I must explain about that, because many other Han women had the same sort of feet.
They were called “lotus points,” and the incredibly tiny shoes for them were called “lotus cups.” Not until later did I learn that the Lady Chao—apart from her other immodesties which I easily recognized—had been lascivious beyond the bounds of harlotry just in letting me see her feet bare of their lotus cups. The lotus points of a woman were deemed by the Han her most intimate parts, to be kept more carefully covered than even the pink parts between her legs.
It seems that, many years ago, there lived a Han court dancer who could dance on her toes, and that posture—her seeming to be balanced on points—excited every man who saw her dance. So other women, ever since, had enviously been trying to emulate that fabled seductress. Her contemporary sister dancers must have tried various ways to diminish their already woman-sized feet, and not too successfully, for the women of later days went further. By the time I came to Khanbalik, there were many Han women who had had their feet compressed by their mothers from their infancy, and had grown up thus crippled, and were carrying on the gruesome tradition by binding their own daughters’ feet.
What a mother would do was take her girl-child’s foot and double it under, the toes as near to the heel as possible, and tie it so, until it stayed that way, and then double it even more tightly, and tie it so. By the time a girl reached womanhood, she could wear lotus cups that were literally no bigger than drinking cups. Naked, those feet looked like the claws of a small bird just yanked from its grip on a twig perch. A lotus-pointed woman had to walk with mincing, precarious steps, and only seldom walked at all, because that gait was regarded by the Han as other people would regard a woman’s most flagrantly provocative gesture. Just to say certain words—feet or toes or lotus points or walking—in reference to a woman, or in the presence of a decent woman, would cause as many gasps as shouting “pota!” in a Venetian drawing room.
I grant that the lotus crippling of a Han woman constituted a less cruel mutilation than the Muslim practice of snipping off the butterfly from between the petals of her lotus higher up her body. Nevertheless, I winced at sight of such feet, even when they were modestly shod, for the lotus-cup shoes resembled the leather pods with which some beggars cover the stumps of their amputations. My detestation of the lotus points made me something of a curiosity among the Han. All the Han men with whom I became acquainted thought me odd—or maybe impotent, or even depraved—when I averted my eyes from a lotus-pointed woman. They frankly confessed that they got aroused by the glimpse of a woman’s nether extremities, as I might by a glimpse of her breast. They proudly averred that their little virile organs actually came erect whenever they heard an unmentionable word like “feet,” or even when they let their minds imagine those unrevealable parts of a female person.
At any rate, the Lady Chao that afternoon had so dampened my natural ardors that, when Buyantu undressed me at bedtime, and insinuated into the act some suggestive fondling, I asked to be excused. So she and Biliktu lay down together on my bed and I merely sat drinking arkhi and looking on, while the naked girls played with each other and with a su-yang. That was a kind of mushroom native to Kithai, shaped exactly like a man’s organ, even to having a reticulation of veins about it, but somewhat smaller in length and girth. However, as Buyantu demonstrated, when she gently slid it in and out of her sister a few times, and Biliktu’s yin juices began to flow, the su-yang somehow absorbed those juices and got bigger and firmer. When it had attained a quite prodigious size, the twins had themselves a joyous time, using that phallocrypt on each other in various and ingenious ways. It was a sight that should have been as rousing to me as feet to a Han man, but I only smiled on them tolerantly and, when they had exhausted each other, I lay down between their warm, moist bodies and went to sleep.