I was anxious to get back to Buyantu, worried that she might have got restless by now, and I would gladly have put off telling Ali Babar the sad news. But I could not leave him wringing his hands in the Purgatory of not knowing, so I went to my old chambers, where he was waiting. In a pretense of cheerfulness, he made a sweeping gesture and said:
“All restored and refurnished and redecorated. But no one thought to assign you new servants, it seems. So I will stay tonight, in case you should need … .” His voice faltered. “Oh, Marco, you look stricken. Is it what I fear it is?”
“Alas, yes, old comrade. She is dead.”
Tears started in his eyes, and he whispered, “Tanha … hamishè … .”
“I know no easier way to tell it. I am sorry. But she is free of captivity and free of pain.” Let him, at least for now, think that she had had an easy death. “I will tell you, another time, the how and the why of it, for it was an assassination, and unnecessary. It was done only to hurt you and me, and you and I will avenge it. But tonight, Ali, do not question me and do not stay. You will wish to go and grieve by yourself, and I have many things to do—to set our vengeance in train.”
I turned and went out abruptly, for if he had asked me anything I could not have lied to him. But just the telling of that much had made me more angry and determined and bloodthirsty than before, so, instead of going directly to the Echo Pavilion for Buyantu, I went first to the chambers of the Minister Achmad.
I was briefly impeded by his sentries and servants. They protested that the Wali had endured a hectic day of making preparations for the Khakhan’s return and the reception of the Dowager Empress, that he was much fatigued and had gone already to bed, and that they dared not announce a visitor. But I snarled at them—“Do not announce me! Admit me!”—so ferociously that they moved out of my way, muttering fearfully, “On your head be it, then, Master Polo,” and I slammed unannounced and ungentlemanly through the door of the Arab’s private apartments.
I was immediately reminded of Buyantu’s words about Achmad’s “eccentric fancies” and similar words spoken by the artist Master Chao long before. As I burst into the bedroom, I surprised a very large woman already there, and she whisked out through another door. I got only a glimpse of her, voluptuously gowned in filmy, flimsy, fluttering robes the color of the flower called lilak. But I had to assume that she was the same tall and robust woman I had seen in these chambers before. This particular one of Achmad’s fancies, I thought, seemed to have lasted for some while; but then I gave it no more thought. I confronted the man who lay in the vast, lilak-sheeted bed, propped against lilak-colored pillows. He regarded me calmly, his black stone-chip eyes not flinching from the storm he must have seen in my face.
“I trust you are comfortable,” I said, through clenched teeth. “Enjoy your swinishness. You will not for long.”
“It is not mannerly to speak of swine to a Muslim, pork eater. You are also addressing the Chief Minister of this realm. Have a care how you do it.”
“I am addressing a disgraced and deposed and dead man.”
“No, no,” he said, with a smile that was not a pleasant smile. “You may be Kubilai’s current great favorite, Folo—even invited to share his concubines, I hear—but he will never let you lop off his good right hand.”
I considered that remark, and said, “You know, I should never have thought myself a very important personage in Kithai—certainly not any rival to you, or any danger to you—were it not that you have so plainly thought me so. And now you mention the Mongol maidens I enjoyed. Are you resentful that
you
never have? Or that you never
could?
Was that the latest corrosive to eat at your good sense?”
“Haramzadè!
You
important? A rival? A danger? I have only to touch this bedside gong and my men will mince you in an instant. Tomorrow morning, I should have only to explain to Kubilai that you had spoken to me as you have just done. He would make no least fuss or comment, and your existence would be forgotten as readily as the ending of it.”
“Why do you not do that, then? Why have you never done that? You said you would make me regret my having once flouted your express command—but why do so by attrition? Why have you only furtively and indolently made threats and menaces, while destroying instead the innocent folk around me?”
“It amused me to do so—Hell is what hurts worst—and I can do as I please.”
“Can you? Until now, perhaps. Not any more.”
“Oh, I think so. For my next amusement, I think I will make public some paintings the Master Chao did for me. The very name of Folo will be a laughingstock throughout the Khanate. Ridicule hurts worst of all.” Before I could demand to know what he was talking about, he had gone on to another subject. “Are you really aware, Marco Folo, of who this Wali is that you presume to challenge? It was many years ago that I started serving as an adviser to the Princess Jamui of the Kungurat tribe of the Mongols. When the Khan Kubilai made her his first wife, and she therefore became the Khatun Jamui, I accompanied her to this court. I have served Kubilai and the Khanate ever since, in many capacities. Most recently, for many years, in this next-highest office of all. Do you really think you could topple an edifice of such firm foundation?”
Again I considered, and said, “It may surprise you, Wali, but I believe you. I believe that you have been dedicated in your service. I will probably never know why, at this late date, you have let an unworthy jealousy corrupt you into malversation.”
“So say you. In all my career, I have done nothing wrong.”
“Nothing wrong? Shall I enumerate? I do not think you conspired to put the Yi named Pao in a ministerial office. I do not think you even knew of his subversive presence. But you most certainly connived in his escape when he was revealed. I call that treasonous. You have misused another courtier’s yin to your private purpose, and I call that malfeasance of office, if nothing worse. You have most foully murdered the Lady Chao and the woman Mar-Janah—one a noble, one a worthy subject of the Khan—all for no reason but to afflict me. You have done
nothing wrong?”
“Wrong must be proven,” he said, in a voice as stony as his eyes. “Wrong is an abstract word of no independent existence. Wrong is, like evil, only a matter of other people’s judgment. If a man do a deed and none call it wrong, then he did no wrong.”
“You did, Arab. Many wrongs. And so they will be adjudged.”
“Take murder now … ,” he went on, as if I had not interrupted. “You have imputed to me murder. However, if some woman named Mar-Janah is truly dead, and wrongfully, there is a reputable witness to her last hours. He can testify that the Wali Achmad never once laid eyes on the woman, let alone murderous hands. That witness can testify that the woman Mar-Janah died from a knife wound administered by a certain Marco Folo.” He turned on me a gaze of arch and mocking good humor. “Why, Marco Folo, how you do look! Is that a look of astonishment or guilt or shame at being found out? Did you suppose I have been tucked abed here all the night? I have been going about, cleaning up after you. I was only just now able to lay my weary self down to rest, and in you come, to annoy me yet further.”
But I was not discomfited by his sarcasm. I simply shook my head and said, “I will freely confess the knife wound, when we are on trial in the Hall of Justice.”
“This will never get to the Cheng. I have just told you that a wrong must be proven. But, before that, the wrongdoer must be accused. Could you do such a reckless and profitless thing? Would you really dare to lay charges against the Chief Minister of the Khanate? The word of an upstart Ferenghi against the reputation of the longest-serving and highest-ranking courtier of the court?”
“It will not be only my word.”
“There is no other to speak against me.”
“There is the woman Buyantu, my former maidservant.”
“Are you sure you wish to bring that up? Would it be wise? She also died by your doing. The whole court knows that, and so will every justice of the Cheng.”
“You know different, damn you. She spoke to me this very evening, and told me everything. She waits for me now on the Kara Hill.”
“There is no one on the Kara Hill.”
“This once, you are mistaken,” I said. “There is Buyantu.” And I may even have smiled smugly at him.
“There is no one on the Kara Hill. Go and see. It is true that earlier this evening I sent a servant up there. I disremember her name, and now I cannot even recollect on what errand I sent her. But when she did not return after a time, I went to look for her. Most considerate of me, to do that personally, but Allah bids us be considerate of our underlings. Had I found her, it might have been she who told me you had gone running to visit the Fondler. However, I regret to report that I did not find her. Nor will you. Go and see.”
“You murdering monster! Have you slain yet another—?”
“Had I found her,” he went on implacably, “she might also have told me that you refused her exactly that consideration. But Allah bids us be more considerate than you heartless Christians. So—”
“Dio me varda!”
He dropped the mocking tone and snapped, “I begin to tire of this jousting. Let me say just one thing more. I foresee that it will raise some eyebrows, Folo, if you start claiming publicly to have heard disembodied voices in the Echo Pavilion, especially if you insist that you have heard the voice of a person known by all to be long defunct, and she a person slain in a misadventure of which you were the cause. The most charitable interpretation of your babblings will be that you are woefully demented by grief and guilt arising from that incident. Anything else you may babble—such as accusations against important and well-esteemed courtiers—will be similarly regarded.”
I could only stand there and seethe at him, impotently.
“Mind you,” he went on, “your pitiable affliction may redound to the public good, after all. In civilized Islam, we have institutions called Houses of Delusion, for the safe confinement of those persons possessed by the demon of insanity. I have long pressed Kubilai to establish the same hereabout, but he stubbornly maintains that no such demon infests these more wholesome regions. Your obviously troubled mind and troublesome behavior may convince him otherwise. In which event, I shall order the commencement of construction of Kithai’s first House of Delusion, and I leave you to guess the identity of its first occupant.”
“You—you—!” I might have lunged across the lilak bed at him, but he was stretching a hand toward the bedside gong.
“Now, I have told you to go and look and satisfy yourself that there is no one on the Kara Hill—no one anywhere to substantiate your demented imaginings. I suggest you go. There or somewhere. But go!”
What could I do but go? I went, miserably disheartened, and I plodded hopelessly up the Kara Hill to the Echo Pavilion once more, though knowing it would be as the Arab had said, barren of people, and it was. There was no least trace of Buyantu’s ever having been there, or ever having been anything but dead. I came with dragging steps down the hill again, even more dejected and demolished, “with my bagpipes turned inside their sack,” as the old Venetian phrase—and my father—would express it.
The sardonic thought of my father put me in mind of him and, having now no other destination, I trudged off to his chambers to pay a homecoming call. Maybe he would have some sage advice for me. But one of his maidservants answered to my scratch at the portal, and told me that her Master Polo was out of the city—still or again, I did not ask which. So I moped on farther along the corridor to Uncle Mafìo’s suite. The maidservant there told me that yes, her Master Polo was in residence, but that he did not always spend the night in his chambers, and sometimes, not to disturb his servants unnecessarily, he came and went by a back door he had had cut in a rear wall of the suite.
“So I never know, at night, whether he is in his bedroom or not,” she said, with a slightly sad smile. “And I would not intrude upon him.”
I remembered that Uncle Mafìo had once claimed to have “given pleasure” to this servant woman, and I had been glad for him. Perhaps it had been only a brief foray into normal sexuality, and he had since found it unsatisfactory, and desisted, and that was why she looked a little sad, and why she would not “intrude upon him.”
“But you are his family, no intruder,” she said, bowing me in the door. “You may go and see for yourself.”
I went through the rooms to his bedchamber, and it was dark and the bed was unoccupied. He was not there. My homecoming, I thought wryly, was not exactly being greeted with open arms and shouts of joy, not by anybody. In the lamplight spilling in from the main room, I began feeling about for a piece of paper and something to write with, to leave a note saying at least that I was back in residence. When I groped in the drawer of a cabinet, my fingernails snagged in some curiously filmy and flimsy cloth goods. Wondering, I held them up in the half-light; they seemed hardly garments sturdy enough for a man’s wear. So I went back to the main room and brought a lamp, and held them up again. They were indisputably feminine gowns, but of voluminous size. I thought: Dear God, is he nowadays disporting himself with some female giant? Was that why the maidservant seemed sad: because he had discarded her for something grotesque and perverse? Well, at least it was female … .