“You are sending me to war, Sire?” I said, not quite sure that I was eager to go. “I have had no experience of war.”
“Then you should have. Every man should engage in at least one war in his lifetime—else how can he say that he has savored all the experiences which life offers a man?”
“I was not thinking of life, Sire, so much as death.” And I laughed, but not with much merriment.
“Every man dies,” Kubilai said, rather stiffly. “Some deaths are at least less ignominious than others. Would you prefer to die like a clerk, dwindling and wilting into the boneyard of a secured old age?”
“I am not afraid, Sire. But what if the war drags on for a long time? Or never is won?”
Even more stiffly, he said, “It is better to fight in a losing cause than to have to confess to your grandchildren that you never fought at all. Vakh!”
Prince Chingkim spoke up. “I can assure you, Royal Father, that this Marco Polo would never dodge any confrontation imaginable. He is, however, at the moment a trifle shaken by a recent calamity.” He went on to tell Kubilai about the accidental—he stressed accidental—devastation of my menage.
“Ah, so you are bereft of women servants and the services of women,” the Khakhan said sympathetically. “Well, you will be traveling too rapidly on the road to Yun-nan to have need of servants, and you will be too fatigued each night to yearn for anything more than sleep. When you get there, of course, you will do your share of the pillage and rape. Take slaves to serve you, take women to service you. Behave like a Mongol born.”
“Yes, Sire,” I said submissively.
He leaned back and sighed, as if he missed the good old days, and murmured in reminiscence:
“My esteemed grandfather Chinghiz, it is said, was born clutching a clot of blood in his tiny fist, from which the shaman foretold for him a sanguinary career. He lived up to the prophecy. And I can still remember him telling us, his grandsons, ‘Boys, a man can have no greater pleasure than to slay his enemies, and then, besmeared and reeking with their blood, to rape their chaste wives and virgin daughters. There is no more delightful sensation than to spurt your jing-ye into a woman or a girl-child who is weeping and struggling and loathing you and cursing you.’ So spake Chinghiz Khan, the Immortal of Mongols.”
“I will bear it in mind, Sire.”
He sat forward again and said, “No doubt you have arrangements to make before your departure. But make them as expeditiously as possible. I have already sent advance riders to ready your route. If, on’your way along it, you can sketch for me maps of that route—as you and your uncles did of the Silk Road—I shall be grateful and your reward will be handsome. Also, if in your travels you should catch up to the fugitive Minister Pao, I give you leave to slay him, and your reward for that would also be handsome. Now go and prepare for the journey. I will have fast horses and a trustworthy escort ready when you are.”
Well, I thought, as I went to my chambers, this would at least put me out of reach of my court adversaries—the Wali Achmad, the Lady Chao, the Fondler Ping, whoever else that whisperer might have been. Better to fall in open warfare than to someone sneaking up behind me.
The Court Architect was in my suite, making measurements and muttering to himself and snapping orders to a team of workmen, who were commencing the replacement of the vanished walls and roof. Happily, I had kept most of my personal possessions and valuables in my bedroom, which had been unravaged. Nostril was in there, burning incense to clear the air. I bade him lay out a traveling wardrobe for me and to make a light pack of other necessities. Then I gathered up all the journal notes I had written and accumulated since leaving Venice, and carried them to my father’s chambers.
He looked a little surprised when I dropped the pile on a table beside him, for it was an unprepossessing mound of smudged and wrinkled and mildewed papers of all different sizes.
“I would be obliged, Father, if you would send these to Uncle Marco, the next time you entrust some shipment of goods to the Silk Road horse post, and ask him to send them on to Venice for safekeeping by Maregna Fiordelisa. The notes may be of interest to some future cosmographer, if he can decipher them and arrange them in order. I had intended to do that myself—someday—but I am bidden to a mission from which I may not return.”
“Indeed? What mission?”
I told him, and with dramatic somberness, so I was taken aback when he said, “I envy you, doing something I have never done. You should appreciate the opportunity Kubilai is giving you. Da novèlo tuto xe belo. Not many white men have watched the Mongols make war—and lived to remember it.”
“I only hope I do,” I said. “But survival is not my sole consideration. There are other things I had rather be doing. And I am sure that there are more profitable things I could be doing.”
“Now, now, Marco. To a good hunger there is no bad bread.”
“Are you suggesting, Father, that I should
enjoy
wasting my time in a war?”
He said reprovingly, “It is true that you were trained for trade, and you come from a merchant lineage. But you must not look at everything with a tradesman’s eye, always asking yourself, ‘What is this good for? What is this worth?’ Leave that grubby philosophy to the tradesmen who never step beyond their shop doors. You have ventured out to the farthest edge of the world. It would be a pity if you take home only profit, and not at least a little of poetry.”
“That reminds me,” I said. “I turned a profit yesterday. May I borrow one of your maidservants for an errand?”
I sent her to fetch from the slave quarters the Turki woman called Mar-Janah, formerly the possession of the Lady Chao Ku-an.
“Mar-Janah?” my father repeated, as the servant departed. “And a Turki … ?”
“Yes, you know of her,” I said. “We have spoken of her before.” And I told him the whole story, of which he had so long ago heard only a part of the beginning.
“What a wondrously intricate web!” he exclaimed. “And to have been at last unraveled! God does not always pay His debts just on Sundays.” Then, as I had done on first seeing her, he widened his eyes when the lovely woman came smiling into the chamber, and I introduced him to her.
“My Mistress Chao did not seem pleased about it,” she said shyly to me, “but she tells me that I am now your property, Master Marco.”
“Only briefly,” I said, taking the paper of title from my purse and holding it out to her. “You are your own property again, as you should be, and I will hear you call no one Master any more.”
With a tremulous hand she accepted the paper, and with her other hand she brushed tears from her long eyelashes, and she seemed to have trouble finding words to speak.
“Now,” I went on, “I doubt not that the Princess Mar-Janah of Cappadocia could take her pick of men from this court or any other. But if Your Highness still has her heart set on Nost—on Ali Babar, he awaits you in my chambers down the hall.”
She started to kneel in ko-tou, but I caught her hands, raised her, turned her to the door, said, “Go to him,” and she went.
My father approvingly followed her with his gaze, then asked me, “You will not wish to take Nostril with you to Yun-nan?”
“No. He has waited twenty years or more for that woman. Let them be married as soon as can be. Will you tend to those arrangements, Father?”
“Yes. And I will give Nostril his own certificate of title as a wedding present. I mean Ali Babar. I suppose we ought to accustom ourselves to addressing him more respectfully, now that he will be a freeman and consort to a princess.”
“Before he is entirely free, I had better go and make sure he has packed for me properly. So I will say goodbye now, Father, in case I do not see you or Uncle Mafio before I leave.”
“Goodbye, Marco, and let me take back what I said before. I was wrong. You may
never
make a proper tradesman. You just now gave away a valuable slave for no payment at all.”
“But, Father, I got her free of payment.”
“What better way to turn a clear profit? Yet you did not. You did not even set her free with fanfare and fine words and noble gesticulations, letting her kiss and slobber over your hands, while a numerous audience applauded your liberality and a palace scribe recorded the scene for posterity.”
Mistaking the tenor of his words, I said in some exasperation, “To quote one of your own adages, Father: one minute you are lighting torches and the next you are counting candle wicks.”
“It is poor business to give things away, and worse business to get not even praise for doing so. Clearly you know the value of nothing—except perhaps a human being or two. I despair of you as a tradesman. I have hope of you as a poet. Goodbye, Marco, my son, and come back safe.”
I got to see Mar-Janah one more time. The next morning, she and Nostril-now-Ali came to wish me “salaam aleikum” before my departure, and to thank me again for having helped to bring them together. They had risen early, to make sure of catching me—and evidently had got up from a shared bed, for they were disheveled and sleepy-eyed. But they were also smiling and blithesome, and, when they tried to describe to me their rapturous reunion, they were quite rapturously and absurdly inarticulate.
He began, “It was almost as if—”
“No, it
was
as if—” said she.
“Yes, it was
indeed
as if—” he said. “All the twenty years since we last knew each other—it was as if they, well—”
“Come, come,” I said, laughing at the foolish locutions. “Neither of you used to be such an inept teller of tales.”
Mar-Janah laughed too, and finally said what was meant: “The twenty intervening years might never have been.”
“She still thinks me handsome!” exclaimed Nostril. “And she is more beautiful than ever!”
“We are as giddy as two youngsters in first love,” she said.
“I am happy for you,” I said. Though they were both perhaps forty-five years old, and though I still could not help feeling that a love affair between persons nearly old enough to be my parents was a quaint and risible thing, I added, “I wish you joy forever, young lovers.”
I went then to call on the Khakhan, to collect his letter for the Orlok Bayan—and found that he already had visitors: the Court Firemaster, whom I had seen only the day before, the Court Astronomer and the Court Goldsmith, whom I had not seen for quite some time. They all three looked curiously bloodshot, but their red eyes gleamed with something like excitement.
Kubilai said, “These gentlemen courtiers wish you to carry to Yun-nan something of theirs also.”
“We have been up all night, Marco,” said the Firemaster Shi. “Now that you have devised a way to make the flaming powder transportable, we are eager to see it employed in combat. I have spent the night wetting quantities of it and drying it into cakes and then pulverizing it into pellets.”
“Et voila, I have been making new containers for it,” said the Goldsmith Boucher, displaying a shiny brass ball, about the size of his head. “Master Shi told us how you destroyed half the palace with just a stoneware pot.”
“It was not half the palace,” I protested. “It was only—”
“Qu’importe?” he said impatiently. “If a mere lidded pot could do that, we reckoned that an even stouter confinement of the powder should make it trebly powerful. We decided on brass.”
“And I worked out, by comparison with the planetary orbs,” said the Astronomer Jamal-ud-Din, “that a globular container would be best. It can be most accurately and farthest thrown by hand or by catapult, or can even be rolled among the enemy, and its shape—inshallah!—will most effectually disperse its destructive forces in all directions.”
“So I made balls like this, in sections of two hemispheres,” said Master Boucher. “Master Shi filled them with the powder pellets, and then I brazed them together. Nothing but their internal force will ever break them apart. But when it does—les diables sont déchaînés!”
“You and the Orlok Bayan,” said Master Shi, “will be the first to put the huo-yao to practical use in field warfare. We made a dozen of the balls. Take them with you and let Bayan use them as he will, and they ought to work without fail.”
“So it sounds,” I said. “But how do the warriors ignite them?”
“You see this string like a wick sticking out? It was inserted before the halves were brazed together. It is actually of cotton twisted around a core of the huo-yao itself. Only touch a spark to it—a smoldering stick of incense will serve—and it will give a long count of ten before the spark reaches the charge inside.”
“Then they cannot discharge accidentally? I am disinclined to devastate some innocent karwansarai before I even get there.”
“No fear,” said Master Shi. “Just please do not let any women play with them.” He added drily, “It is not for nothing that my people’s morning thanksgiving prayer contains the words ‘Blessed art Thou, 0 Lord our God, Who hath not made me a woman.’”
“Is that a fact?” said the Master Jamal, sounding interested. “Our Quran says likewise, in the fourth sura: ‘Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which Allah has gifted the one above the other.’”