“You cannot, Lord Marco. She is my attendant.”
“I do not care, Setsen, if she is your Nestorian bishop. I would prefer that she attend elsewhere.”
“I cannot send her away and neither can you. She is here by order of the Court Procurer and the Lady Matron of Concubines.”
“I take precedence over matrons and procurers. I am here by order of the Khan of All Khans.”
Setsen looked hurt. “I thought you were here because you wanted to be.”
“Well, that, too,” I said, instantly contrite. “But I did not expect to have an audience to cheer my endeavors.”
“She will not cheer. She is a lon-gya. She will not say anything.”
“Perdiziòn! I do not care if she sings an inno imeneo, only she must do it somewhere else!”
“What is that?”
“A wedding song. A hymeneal hymn. It celebrates the—well, the breaking of the—that is to say, the defloration.”
“But that is exactly what she is here for, Lord Marco!”
“To
sing
?”
“No, no, as a witness. She will depart as soon as you—as soon as she sees the stain on the bedsheet. Then she goes to report to the Lady Matron that all is as it should be. You comprehend?”
“Protocol, yes. Vakh.”
I glanced over at the girl, who seemed to be occupied in studying the white convolutions of the incense burner, and paying no least heed to our squabble. I was glad I was not a real bridegroom, or the circumstances would have stopped my living up to my earlier braggery. However, since I was only a sort of surrogate bridegroom and since neither the bride nor the bride’s maid found the situation embarrassing, why should I find it inhibiting? So I proceeded to provide the evidence the slave was waiting to get, and Setsen amiably if inexpertly cooperated, and during those exertions, so far as I noticed, the slave paid no more attention than if we had been as inert as her incense burner. But, after some while, Setsen leaned out from the bed and shook the girl by the shoulder, and she got up and helped Setsen untangle the bedclothes, and they found the small red smear. The slave nodded and smiled brightly at us, bent and blew out the lamp and left the room and left us to any nonobligatory consummations we might care to make for ourselves.
Setsen left me at morning, and I joined the Khan and his courtiers for a day of hawking. Even Ali Babar came along, after I had assured him that falconry involved no such risks to the hunter as did the more strenuous veneries, like boar-sticking. We started much game that day, and the sport was good. Since the sharp-eyed falcons could see to wait on and stoop and strike well into the twilight, our whole company stayed out that night in the zhu-gan field palace. We returned to Xan-du the next day, with an abundance of game birds and hares for the kitchen pots, and that night, after a good dinner of venison, I received the second of Kubilai’s contributions to the improvement of the Mongol race.
However, she also was preceded by a slave bringing the white porcelain incense burner and, when I saw that it was the
same
pretty slave girl, I tried to convey to her my discomfiture at her having to attend
two
of these nuptial nights. But she only smiled winningly, and either failed or refused to comprehend me. So, when the Mongol maiden finally arrived and introduced herself as Jehol, I said:
“Forgive my unmanly agitation, Jehol, but I find it more than a little disquieting that the same monitor must twice oversee my nighttime doings.”
“Do not concern yourself with the lon-gya,” said Jehol indifferently. “She is only a slave girl of the lowly Min people of the Fu-kien Province.”
“Is she indeed?” I said, interested to hear that. “Of the Min, is she? Nevertheless, I do not care to have my successive performances compared—in their degree of prowess or stupration or efficacy or whatever other aspect.”
Jehol only laughed and said, “She will make no comparisons, neither here nor in the concubine quarters. She cannot do any such thing.”
By this time, with the slave girl’s assistance, Jehol had undressed to an extent that took my mind off other matters. So I said, “Well, if you do not care, I suppose I need not,” and the night proceeded as had the other one.
But, when came the night for the next Mongol maiden—her name was Yesukai—and she was preceded by that same Min slave girl bearing that same incense burner, I once more raised objections. Yesukai only shrugged and said:
“When we were at the palace in Khanbalik, we had a numerous complement of servants and slaves. But when the Lady Matron brought us out here to Xan-du for the season, we came with only a few domestics, and this slave is the only lon-gya among them. If we girls must make do with her, you must get used to her.”
“She may be admirably reticent about what goes on in this chamber,” I grumbled. “But I have ceased to fret that she may indiscreetly talk. Now I fear that, after many more such nights as this, she will start
laughing
.”
“She cannot laugh,” said Cheren, who was the next of the Mongol maidens to visit me. “No more than she can talk or hear. The slave is a lon-gya. You do not know the word? It means a deaf-mute.”
“Is that a fact?” I murmured, regarding the slave with more compassion than I had done. “No wonder she has never answered when I railed at her. All this time, I thought lon-gya was her name.”
“If she ever had a name, she cannot tell it,” said Toghon, who was the next of the Mongol maidens. “In the concubine quarters, we call her Hui-sheng. But that is only our feminine malice, when we make sport of her.”
“Hui-sheng,” I repeated. “What malice in that? It is a most mellifluous name.”
“It is a most unfitting name, for it means Echo,” said Devlet, the next of the Mongol maidens. “But no matter. She neither hears it nor answers to it.”
“A soundless Echo,” I said, and smiled. “An unfitting name, perhaps, but a pleasing paradox. Hui-sheng. Hui-sheng … .”
To Ayuka, the seventh or eighth of the Mongol maidens, I said, “Tell me, does your Lady Matron deliberately seek deaf-mute slaves for the duty of overseeing the nuptial nights?”
“She does not seek them. She makes them so from childhood. Incapable either of eavesdropping or of gossiping. They cannot gasp in surprise or disapproval if they see strange sights in the bedchamber, or afterward prattle of perverse things they have witnessed. If they do ever misbehave and must be beaten, they cannot scream.”
“Bruto barabào!
Makes
them so? How?”
“Actually, the Lady Matron has a shaman physician do the silencing operation,” said Merghus, who was the eighth or ninth of the Mongol maidens. “He puts a red-hot skewer down each ear and through the neck into the gullet. I cannot tell you exactly what is done, but look at Hui-sheng—you can see the tiny scar on her throat.”
I looked, and it was so. But I saw more than that when I gazed upon Hui-sheng, for Kubilai had spoken truly when he said that the girls of the Min were unsurpassably beautiful. At least this one was. Being a slave, she wore not the blank white-powdered face of the other women native to these lands, nor the elaborate stiff hairdos of her Mongol mistresses. Her pale-peach skin was her own, and her hair was but simply piled in soft billows on her head. Except for the little crescent scar on her throat, she bore not a blemish, which was not true of the noble maidens she attended. They, having grown up mostly outdoors, in rude living conditions, among horses and such, had many nicks and pocks and abrasions marring even the more intimate areas of their flesh.
Hui-sheng was at that moment seated in the most graceful and endearing posture a woman can ever unconsciously assume. Quite unaware of anyone’s regard, she was fixing a flower in her soft black hair. Her left hand held the pink blossom above her left ear, and she had her right hand arched over her head to assist in the arranging. That particular placement of the head and hands and arms and upper torso makes of any woman, clothed or naked, a poem of curves and gentle angles—her face turned a little downward and to one side, her arms framing it in harmonious composition, her neck line flowing smoothly to the bosom, her breasts sweetly uplifted by the raised arms. In that posture even an old woman looks young, a fat one looks lithe, a gaunt one looks sleek, and a beautiful woman is never more beautiful.
I remember also noticing that Hui-sheng had, in front of each ear, a fluff of very fine black hair growing as far down as her jaw line, and another feathery floss growing down the back of her neck into her collar. They were winsome details, and they made me wonder if a Min woman might be exceptionally furry in more private places. The Mongol maidens, I might mention, all had in their most private places those peculiarly Mongol “little warmers” of smooth, flat hair like small swatches of cat pelt. But, if I have uncharacteristically said little else about their charms, or about my nights of frolicking with them, it is owing to no sudden access of modesty or reserve on my part; it is only that I do not too well remember those girls. I have even forgotten now whether I was visited by an even dozen of them, or eleven, or thirteen, or some other number.
Oh, they were handsome, enjoyable, competent, satisfying, but they were that and no more. I recall them as just a succession of fleeting incidents, a different one each night. My consciousness was more impressed by the small, unobtrusive, silent Echo—and not simply for the reason that she was present every night, but because she outshone all the Mongol maidens together. Had she not been a distracting influence, I probably would not have found them so forgettable. They were, after all, the pick of Mongol womanhood, of twenty-four-karat quality, eminently well suited to their function of bed partnership. But, even while I enjoyed the sight of them being undressed by the lon-gya slave, I could not help observing how unnecessarily over-sized they seemed alongside the diminutive, dainty Hui-sheng, and how coarse of complexion and physiognomy, alongside her peach-blossom skin and exquisite features. Even their breasts, which in other circumstances I would have adored as beautifully voluptuous, I thought somehow too aggressively mammalian, compared to the almost childlike slimness and fragility of Hui-sheng’s body.
In honesty, I will say that the Mongol maidens must have found me not their ideal, either, and they must have been less than overjoyed to be mating with me. They had been recruited, and had survived a rigorous system of selection, to be bedded with the Khan of All Khans. He was an old man, and perhaps also not the dream man of a young woman, but he was the Khakhan. It must have been a considerable disappointment for them to be allotted to a foreigner instead—a Ferenghi, a nobody—and worse yet, to be commanded not to take the fern-seed precaution before lying with me. They were, presumably, of twenty-four-karat fecundity, meaning that they had to expect impregnation by me, and the consequent bearing not of noble Mongol descendants of the Chinghiz line, but of half-breed bastards, who were bound to be regarded askance by the rest of the Kithai population, if not actively despised.
I had doubts of my own about the wisdom of Kubilai’s having set me and the concubines to this conjoining. It was not that I felt myself either superior or inferior to them, for I was aware that they and I and all other folk in the world are of the same single human race. I had been taught that from my earliest years, and I had in my travels seen ample evidence of it. (Two small examples: all men everywhere, except sometimes the holy and the hermit, are ever ready to get drunk; all women everywhere, when they run, run as if their knees are hobbled together.) Clearly, all people are descendants of the same original Adam and Eve, but it is just as clear that the progeny have diverged widely in the generations since the expulsion from Eden.
Kubilai called me a Ferenghi, and he meant no offense by it, but the word lumped me into a mistakenly undifferentiated mass. I knew that we Venetians were quite distinct from the Slavs and Sicilians and all others of the Western nationalities. While I could not perceive as much variety among the numerous Mongol tribes, I knew that every person took pride in his own, and regarded it as the foremost breed of Mongols, even while asserting that all Mongols were the foremost of mankind.
In my travels, I did not always conceive an affection for every new people I met, but I did find them all of interest—and the interest was in their differences. Different skin colors, different customs, foods, speech, superstitions, entertainments, even interestingly different deficiencies and ignorances and stupidities. Some while after this time at Xan-du, I would visit the city of Hang-zho, and I would see that it, like Venice, was a city all of canals. But in every other respect, Hang-zho was not at all like Venice, and it was the variances, not the similarities, that made the place lovely in my eyes. So is Venice still lovely and dear to me, but it would cease to be if it were not unique. In my opinion, a world of cities and places and views all alike would be the dullest world imaginable, and I feel much the same way about the world’s peoples. If all of them—white and peach and brown and black and whatever other colors exist—were stirred together into a bland tan, every other of their jagged and craggy differences would flatten down into featurelessness. You can walk confidently across a tan sand desert because it is not fissured by any chasms, but neither does it have any high peaks worth looking at. I realized that my contribution to the blending of Ferenghi and Mongol bloodlines would be negligible. Still I was reluctant that people so distinct should be blended at all—by fiat, deliberately, not even by casual encounter—and thereby made in any degree less various, and therefore less interesting.