The Journeyer (80 page)

Read The Journeyer Online

Authors: Gary Jennings

I decided the old men must be lightheaded from lack of sleep, to be starting a discussion of the demerits of women, so I cut it short by saying, “I will gladly take the things, then, if the Khan Kubilai is in favor.”
The Khakhan made a gesture of assent, and the three courtiers hurried off to load the dozen balls onto my train’s pack horses. When they had gone, Kubilai said to me:
“Here is the letter to Bayan, sealed and chained for carrying safely about your neck, under your clothes. Here also is my yellow-paper letter of authority, as you have seen your uncles carry. But you should not often have to show it, for I am giving you also this more visible pai-tzu. You have only to wear it on your chest or hung on your saddle, and at sight of it anyone in this realm will do you ko-tou and accord you every hospitality and service.”
The pai-tzu was a tablet or plaque, as broad as my hand and nearly as long as my forearm, made of ivory with an inset silver ring for hanging it by, and inlaid gold lettering, in the Mongol alphabet, instructing all men to welcome and obey me, under pain of the Khakhan’s displeasure.
“Also,” Kubilai went on, “since you may have to sign vouchers of expenses, or messages, or other documents, I had the Court Yinmaster engrave this personal yin for you.”
It was a small block of smooth stone, a soft gray in color with blood-red veinings through it, about an inch square and a finger-length long, rounded at one end for comfortable holding in the hand. The squared-off front end of it was intricately incised, and Kubilai showed me how to stamp that end on an inked pad of cloth and then onto any paper that required my signature. I never would have recognized the imprint it made—as
being
my signature, I mean—but it looked nicely impressive, and I commented admiringly on the fineness of the work.
“It is a good yin, and it will last forever,” said the Khakhan. “I had the Yinmaster Liu Shen-dao make it of the marble which the Han call chicken-blood stone. As to the fineness of the engraving, that Master Liu is so expert that he can inscribe an entire prayer on a single human hair.”
And so I left Khanbalik for Yun-nan, carrying, besides my own pack and clothes and other necessities, the twelve brass balls of flaming powder, the sealed letter to the Orlok Bayan, my own letter of authority and the confirming pai-tzu plaque—and my very own personal yin, with which I could leave my name stamped, if I chose, all across Kithai. This is what my name looks like, in the Han characters, for I still have the little stone yin:
 
I was not sure, when I set out to war, how long I would last. But, as the Khan Kubilai had said, my yin could last forever, and so might my name.
 
 
IT was a long journey from Khanbalik to the Orlok Bayan’s site of operations, nearly as many li as from Khanbalik to Kashgar, but my two escorts and I rode light and fast. We carried only essential traveling gear—no food or cookware or bedding—and the heaviest items, the powder-charged brass balls, were divided among our three extra horses. Those were also fleet steeds, not the usual trudging pack animals, so all six horses were capable of proceeding at the Mongols’ war-march pace of canter and walk and canter. Whenever any horse began to show signs of wearying, we had only to pause at the nearest of the Road Minister’s horse posts and demand six fresh ones.
I had not known what Kubilai had meant when he said that he had already sent advance riders to “ready the route.” But I learned that that was an arrangement made whenever the Khakhan or any of his important emissaries made a long cross-country journey. Those riders went ahead to announce the journeyer’s imminent approach, and every Wang of every province, every prefect of every prefecture, even the elders of every least village, were expected to prepare for the passing-through. So there were always comfortable beds waiting in the best possible accommodations, good cooks waiting to prepare the best available fare, even new wells dug if necessary to supply sweet water in arid regions. That is why we were enabled to carry only the lightest of packs. Every night, too, there were women supplied for our enjoyment, but, as Kubilai had also said, I was too fatigued and saddle sore to make use of them. Instead, I spent each night’s short interval between table and bed in scribbling down on paper what details and landmarks I had noticed during that day’s travel.
We rode in a southwestering arc from Khanbalik, and I cannot remember how many villages, towns and cities we passed through or spent a night in, but only two of them were of estimable size. One was Xian, which the War Minister Chao had pointed out to me on his great map and told me had once been the capital city of the First Emperor of these lands. Xian had dwindled considerably in the centuries since, and, though still a busy and prosperous crossroads city, possessed none of the finery of an imperial capital. The other big city was Cheng-du—in what was called the Red Basin country, because the earth there is not yellow, as in most of the rest of Kithai. Cheng-du was the capital city of the province called Si-chuan, and its Wang inhabited a palace city-within-a-city almost as grand as that of Khanbalik. The Wang Mangalai, another of Kubilai’s sons, would gladly have had me stay a long time as his honored guest, and I was much tempted to rest there for a least a while. But, mindful of my mission, I made my excuses, and of course Mangalai accepted them, and I spent only a single night in his company.
From Cheng-du, my escorts and I turned directly west—into the mountainous border country where the Kithai province of Si-chuan and the Sung province of Yun-nan and the land of To-Bhot all mingled together—and our pace slowed as we began a long climb that soon became a steep climb. The mountains were not so sky-reaching as, for instance, the Pai-Mir of High Tartary. These had much more forest growth on them and no snow, and even in deep winter, I was told, the snow never clung to them for long, except on their very tops. But these mountains, if less high than others I had seen, were much more vertical in their general configuration. Except for the wooded slopes, they were mostly monstrous slabs set on end, separated by narrow, deep, dark ravines. But at least they were solid mountains; we did not have to dodge any avalanches, and I did not ever hear any of them booming roundabout. The country was called by its inhabitants the Land of the Four Rivers, those four streams being locally named the N’mai, the Nu, the Lan-kang and the Jin-sha. But those waters, said the natives, broadened and deepened as they flowed out of the mountains, to become the four greatest rivers of that part of the world, better known by their downstream names of Irawadi, Sal-win, Me-kong and Yang-tze. The first three of those, when they got beyond Yun-nan Province, ran southward or southeastward into the tropical lands called Champa. The fourth would become that Yang-tze of which I have earlier spoken—the Tremendous River—which runs eastward clear to the Sea of Kithai.
But I and my escorts were crossing those rivers far upstream of where they became only four—in the highlands where the rivers began as a multitude of tributary streams. There were so many that they did not all have names, but none was contemptible on that account. Every single stream was a rushing white water which, through the ages, had worn its own individual channel through the mountains, and every single channel was a slab-sided gorge that might have been cleft by the downward slash of some jinni’s giant shimshir sword. The only way along and across those precipitous gashes in the mountains was by way of what the local people proudly called their Pillar Road.
Calling it a road at all was a considerable exaggeration, but it did stand on pillars—or, more accurately, corbels—logs driven and wedged into cracks and crannies in the cliffsides, and planks laid across them, and layers of earth and straw piled on. It could better have been called the Shelf Road. Or even better, the Blind Road, because I traveled most of it with my eyes shut, trusting in the surefootedness and imperturbability of my horse, and hoping it was shod with the never-slip shoes made of the “Marco’s sheep” horn. To open my eyes and look up, down, ahead, behind or sideways made me equally giddy. Glancing upward or downward gave much the same sight: two walls of gray rock converging with distance to a narrow, bright, green-edged crack—up there the sky between two fringes of trees, down yonder the water that looked like a moss-lined brook, but was really a rushing river between two belts of forest. Ahead or behind was the vertiginous view of the Pillar Road shelf that looked too fragile to bear its own weight, never mind a horse and rider, or a train of them. Looking to one side, I would see the cliff that brushed my stirrup and seemed to threaten to give me a sudden shove. Looking the other way, I would see the farther cliff, which appeared to stand so close that I was tempted to reach out and touch it—and to lean was to risk toppling from my saddle and falling forever.
The only thing more dizzying than following the Pillar Road along the cliffsides was the crossing from one side of a gorge to the other, on what the mountain folk, without exaggeration, called the Limp Bridges. Those were made of planks and thick ropes of twisted cane strips, and they swayed in the winds that blew ceaselessly through the mountains, and they swayed worse when a man stepped out onto them, and they swayed even worse when he led his horse out behind him, and during those crossings I think even the horses shut their eyes.
Though Kubilai’s advance riders had made sure that all the mountain inhabitants expected the arrival of me and my escorts, and we got the best hospitality those people could give us, it was not exactly of royal quality. Only occasionally did we come to a place in the mountains flat and habitable enough to support even a meager village of woodcutters’ huts. More often we spent the night in a cliff niche where the road was built wide enough for travelers going in opposite directions to edge past each other. At those places there was a group of rough men stationed, waiting to receive us, having erected a yak-hair tent for us to sleep in, and having brought some meat or killed a mountain sheep or goat to cook for us over an open camp fire.
I well remember the first time we stopped in such a place, when the day was just darkening to dusk. The three mountain men awaiting us made salutations and ko-tou and—since we could not converse; they knew no Mongol, and spoke some tongue which was not even Han—they immediately set about making our evening meal. They built up a good fire, and spitted some cutlets of musk deer over it, and hung a pot of water to heat. I noticed that the men had made the fire of wooden branches—which must have required much labor of clambering up and down the steep ravine sides to collect—but also had a small pile of pieces of zhu-gan cane lying beside it. The dusk had deepened to full darkness by the time the food was ready, and, while two of the men served us, the other tossed one of those bits of cane onto the fire.
The deer meat was better than the usual mountain fare of mutton or goat, but the accompaniments were ghastly. The meat was handed to me in a hunk, for me to hold while I tore at it with my teeth. The only implement provided me was a shallow wooden bowl, into which one of the servers poured hot green cha. But I had taken only a couple of sips before the other server politely took it from me, to add to it. He held a platter of yak butter, all stuck about with hairs and lint and road dust, and grooved by the fingers of those who had dug at it previously, and with his own black fingernails raked off a lump and dropped it into my cha to melt. The dirty yak butter would have been repellent enough, but then he opened a filthy cloth sack and poured into the cha bowl something that looked like sawdust.
“Tsampa,” he said.
When I only peered at the mess with disgust and bewilderment, he demonstrated what was to be done with it. He stuck his grimy fingers into my bowl and worked the sawdust and butter together until it became a paste, then a doughy lump when it had absorbed all the cha in the bowl. Then, before I could move to prevent it, he pinched off a wad of that tepid, dirty dough and poked it into my mouth.
“Tsampa,” he said again, and chewed and swallowed as if to show me how.
I could now taste—apart from the bitter green cha and the rancid, cheesy yak butter—that the apparent sawdust was really barley meal. But I do not know if I would voluntarily have swallowed the wad, except that I was abruptly startled into doing so. The camp fire gave a sudden, tremendous
bang!
and threw up a constellation of sparks into the darkness—and I gulped my tsampa and leaped to my feet, and so did my two escorts, while the noise echoed and reechoed from all the mountains around. Two things went through my mind in that instant. One was the dreadful thought that one of the charged brass balls had somehow fallen into the fire. The other was a recollection of words once heard: “Expect me when you least expect me.”
But the mountain men were laughing at our surprise, and making gestures to calm us and explain what had happened. They held up one of the pieces of zhu-gan cane and pointed to the fire and jumped about and bared their teeth and growled. They made it clear enough. The mountains were full of tigers and wolves. To keep them off, it was their practice to toss into the camp fire every so often a joint of zhu-gan. The heat evidently made its inner juices seethe until the steam burst the cane apart—quite like a charge of the flaming powder—with that enormous noise. I had no doubt that it would keep predators at bay; it had made me swallow the awful stuff called tsampa.
Later on, I got so I could eat tsampa, never with enjoyment, but at least without violent repugnance. A man’s body requires other nourishment than meat and cha, and barley was the only domestic vegetable grown in those highlands. Tsampa was cheap and easily transportable and sustaining, if nothing else, and could be made a trifle more appetizing by the addition of sugar or salt or vinegar or the fermented bean sauce. I never got as fond of it as were the natives, who, after making the dough at mealtime, would tuck balls of the stuff inside their clothes and
wear
the tsampa all night and next day, so it got salted by their sweat, and they would pluck out a bit whenever they felt like having a snack.
I also got better acquainted with the zhu-gan cane. In Khanbalik, I had known it only as a graceful floral subject for painters like the Lady Chao and the Master of the Boneless Colors. But in these regions it was such a staple of life that I believe the people could not have existed without it. The zhu-gan grew wild, everywhere in the lowlands, from the Si-Chuan-Yun-nan border country southward throughout the tropics of Champa—where it was variously named in the various languages: banwu and mambu and other names—and everywhere it was used for many more purposes than frightening off tigers.
The zhu-gan would resemble any ordinary reed or cane, at least when it is young and only as thick as a finger, except that at intervals it has—very like a finger—nodes or knuckles along its length. Those mark little walls inside the cane, which interrupt its tubular length into separate compartments. For some uses—such as being thrown into a fire to burst—a single joint-length of the cane is employed, the wall intact at either end. For other purposes, the walls inside are punched through to make the cane a long tube. When the zhu-gan is no bigger around than a finger, it is easily cut with a knife. As it grows—and a single cane can get as tall and as big around as any tree—it must be laboriously sawed, for then it is almost as rigid as iron. But big or small, the zhu-gan is a beautiful plant, the cane part of it a golden color, the nodes sprouting withes with delicate green leaves at the ends; an immense clump of zhu-gan, all gold and green and catching the sun in its fronds, is a subject worthy of any painter.
In one of the few lowland places we crossed in that region, we came to a village built entirely of zhu-gan, and furnished with it, and totally dependent on it. The village, called Chieh-chieh, sat in a wide valley, through which ran one of the innumerable rivers of that country, and the whole valley bottom was thick with groves of the zhu-gan, and Chieh-chieh looked as if it too had grown there. Its houses were all made of the golden cane. Their walls were composed of arm-thick stalks of it, stood up side by side and lashed together; thicker lengths of zhu-gan were the posts and columns that held up roofs of split-cane segments laid over-and-underlapping like curved tiles. Inside each house, the furniture of tables and couches and floor mats was woven of slender strips peeled from the zhu-gan, as also were things like boxes, bird cages and baskets.

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