“Listen for yourselves,” they said, and I and the corporal of the guard pressed our ears to the panels.
After an interval, the corporal said wonderingly to me, “I never heard anything like it.”
I had, but it had been a long time ago. In the anderun of the palace of Baghdad, I had once watched through a peephole as a young girl inmate seduced an ugly, hairy simiazza ape. The sounds I now heard through this door were much like the sounds I had heard then—the girl’s murmured endearments and encouragements, the ape’s puzzled gibbering, his grunts and her moans of consummation, all mingled with little yips and squeaks of pain, because the ape, in clumsily satisfying her, had also clumsily given her many small bites and scratches.
I said nothing of that to the corporal, saying only, “I suggest that you have your men clear all these servants away from here, away to their quarters. We must arrest the Minister Achmad, but we need not humiliate him before his staff. Get rid of his guards, too. We have enough of our own.”
“We go in, then?” asked the corporal, as that was being done. “Even if he is indisposed?”
“We go in. Whatever is happening in there, the Khakhan wants that man and wants him now. Yes, force the door.”
I had ordered the onlookers removed, not because I was concerned for Achmad’s feelings, but for my own, since I expected to find my uncle conspicuously present in there. To my considerable relief, he was not, and the Arab was in no condition to care about humiliation.
He lay naked on the bed, his scrawny and sweaty brown body squirming in a welter of his own secretions. The bedclothes today were of pale-green silk, but much slimed and crusted with white and also with pink, for it appeared that, after many emissions, Achmad’s later ones had been streaky with blood. He was still uttering the gibberish noises, though only in a muffled voice, for he had in his mouth one of those su-yang mushroom phallocrypts, moisture-bloated to such a bigness that it stretched his lips and cheeks. There was another pretend-organ protruding from his backside, but that was made of fine green jade. At his front, his own true organ was invisible inside something that looked like a Mongol warrior’s wintertime fur hat, and with both hands he was frantically jerking it back and forth to fricate himself. His agate eyes were wide open, but their stoniness looked blurred, as if by moss, and, whatever he was seeing, it was not us.
I gestured to the guards. A couple of them bent over the Arab and began plucking the various devices off him and out of him. When the su-yang was withdrawn from his sucking mouth, his whimpered utterances got louder, but were still only senseless noises. When the jade cylinder was yanked out of him, he moaned lasciviously and his body briefly convulsed. When the furry thing was taken off him, he feebly continued moving his hands, though they had not much left to play with down there, for he was rubbed raw and bloody and small. The corporal of the guard turned the hatlike object over and over, curiously examining it, and I observed that it was hairy only in part, but then I averted my eyes, as a quantity of white substance and stringy blood oozed out of it.
“By Tengri!” growled the corporal to himself. “Lips?” Then he flung it down and said loathingly, “Do you know what that is?”
“No,” I said. “And I do not wish to know. Stand the creature on his feet. Throw cold water on him. Wipe him down. Get some clothes on him.”
As those things were done to him, Achmad seemed to revive to some degree. At first he was utterly limp, and the guards attending him had to hold him upright. But gradually, after much wobbling and teetering, he was able to stand alone. And, after several drenchings with cold water, he began to make comprehensible words of his whimpers, though they were still disjointed.
“We were both dewy children … ,” he said, as if repeating some poetry that only he could hear. “We fitted well together … .”
“Oh, shut up,” grunted the grizzled soldier who was swabbing the sweat and scum off him.
“Then I grew up, but she stayed small … with only tiny apertures … and she cried … .”
“Shut up,” grunted the other leathery veteran who was trying to get an aba onto him.
“Then she became a stag … and I a doe … and it was I who cried … .”
The corporal snapped, “You have been told to be silent!”
“Let him talk and clear his head,” I said indulgently. “He will have need of it.”
“Then we were butterflies … embracing inside a fragrant flower blossom … .” His rolling eyes momentarily steadied on me, and he said quite distinctly, “Folo!” But the eyes’ stone hardness was still mossed over, and so were his other faculties, for he added only a mumble: “Make that name a laughingstock … .”
“You may try,” I said indifferently. “I am commanded to speak to you thus: Go with these guards, dead man, for Kubilai the Khan of All Khans would hear your last words.” I motioned one more time and said, “Take him away.”
I had let Achmad continue babbling just to prevent the guards’ noticing another sound I had heard in that room—a faint but persistent and musical sort of noise. As the guards left with their prisoner, I stayed behind to investigate the source of that sound. It did not come from anywhere in the room itself, nor from outside either of the room’s two doors, but from behind some one of the walls. I listened closely and traced it to one particularly garish Persian qali hanging opposite the bed, and I swept that aside. The wall behind it looked solid, but I had only to lean on it and a section of the paneling swung inward like a door, giving on a dark stone passage, and I could make out now what the noise was. It was a strange sound to be hearing in a secret corridor in the Mongol palace of Khanbalik, for it was an old Venetian song being sung. And it was most exceedingly strange in these circumstances, for it was a simple song in praise of Virtue—something notably lacking in the Wali Achmad and his vicinity and everything to do with him. Mafìo Polo was singing, in a low quaver:
La virtù te da grazia anca se molto
Vechio ti fussi e te dà nobil forme … .
I reached back into the bedroom for a lamp to light my way, and went into the darkness and swung the secret door shut behind me, trusting that the qali would fall and cover it. I found Mafìo sitting on the cold, damp stone floor, not far along the passage. He was again costumed in the ghastly “large woman” raiment—this time all in pale green —and he looked even more dazed and deranged than the Arab had done. But at least he was not smeared or caked with blood or any other body fluids. Evidently, whatever part he had played in the love-philter orgy, it had not been a very active one. He showed no recognition of me, but he made no resistance when I took him by the arm and stood him up and began walking him farther along the passage. He only went on singing quietly:
La virtù te fa belo anca deforme,
La virtù te fa vivo anca sepolto.
Though I had never been in that secret walkway before, I was well enough acquainted with the palace to have a general idea of where the passage’s twists and turns were taking us. The whole way, Mafìo went on murmurously singing the virtues of Virtue. We passed numerous other closed doors in the wall, but I took us a considerable distance before choosing one door to open just a crack and peep out.
It gave on a small garden not far from the palace wing where we were quartered. I tried to hush Mafìo as I drew him outdoors, but to no avail. He was abiding in some other world, and would have taken no notice if I had dragged him through the garden’s lotus pond. However, by good fortune, there was no one about, and I think no one at all saw us as I hurried him the rest of the way to his chambers. But there, since I did not know how to find
his
back door, I had to take him in through the usual one, and we were met there by the same woman servant who had admitted me the night before. I was somewhat surprised but much pleased when she evinced no shock or horror at seeing her master and onetime paramour so grotesquely attired. She only looked sad again, and pitying, as he crooned to her:
La virtù è un cavedàl che sempre è rico,
Che no patisse mai rùzene o tarlo … .
“Your master is taken ill,” I told the woman, that being the only explanation I could think of—and it was true enough.
“I will attend him,” she said, with calm compassion. “Do not worry.”
… Che sempre cresse e no se pol robarlo,
E mai no rende el possessòr mendico.
I gladly left him in her care. And I might as well tell, here, that it was in her tender and solicitous care that Mafìo remained long afterward, for he never recovered his reason.
It had already been quite an arduous day, and the one before had been even worse, and I had passed a sleepless night between. So I dragged myself to my own chambers, to rest and myself enjoy some solicitude from my servants and pretty Hui-sheng, while I kept Ali Babar company and watched him drink himself unconscious of his own misery.
I never saw Achmad again. He was accused and tried and judged and convicted and sentenced, all in that same day, and I will tell of it just as quickly. I have no wish to dwell on the subject, because it happened that, even in winning my vengeance, I had to suffer one more loss.
In all the long time since then, I have felt no least remorse for having destroyed Achmad-az-Fenaket through the agency of a forged letter, nor for its having implicated him in a crime which was never committed. He was guilty of enough other crimes and vices. Indeed, the false letter might easily have failed in its purpose, but for the Arab’s truly perverted nature, which had led him to indulge in the love philter with Mafìo. From that experiment in hallucination, he emerged with his shrewd mind addled and his sharp wits blunted and his serpent tongue knotted. Perhaps he had been less severely impaired by the experience than had my uncle—the Arab at least briefly recognized me afterward, and Mafìo did not, ever again—and perhaps Achmad would have recovered after a time, but he did not get that time.
When he was dragged before the irate Khakhan that day and confronted with the really flimsy evidence of his “treason,” he could readily have talked his way out of the predicament. All he had to do was invoke the privilege of office and request an adjournment of the Cheng until an embassy could be sent to the Ilkhan Kaidu, the other of the alleged triumvirate of conspirators. Kubilai and the justices could hardly have refused to wait and hear what word Kaidu might send back. But Achmad never asked for that or for anything else, according to those who were present. He was unprepared to defend himself at all, they said, they not being aware that he was
unable
to defend himself, incapable of it. They said he only gibbered and ranted and twitched, giving the unmistakable impression of a culprit felon deranged by his guilt and his having been apprehended and his dread of the penalty. Then and there, the assembled justices of the Cheng found against him, and the still outraged Kubilai did not overrule them. Achmad was adjudged guilty of treason, and the punishment for that was the Death of a Thousand.
The whole affair had blown up as suddenly as a summer storm, but it constituted the most serious and spectacular scandal in the memory of the oldest courtier. People talked of nothing else, and were avid to hear or to recount any least detail of news or rumor, and anyone who had a juicy tidbit to impart was a center of a crowd. The greatest celebrity accrued to the Fondler, who had been given the most illustrious Subject of his career, and Master Ping reveled in that celebrity. Contrary to his usual dark secrecy, he boasted openly that he was stocking his cavern dungeon with provender to last for a hundred days, and that he was dismissing all his assistants and clerks on holiday—even his Blotters and Retrievers—so that he could give this distinguished Subject his undivided and
unshared
attention.
I went to call on Kubilai. By then, he had calmed somewhat and resigned himself to the defection and loss of his Chief Minister, and he no longer looked at me the way ancient kings used to look at the bearers of ill tidings. I told him, without going into unnecessary detail, that Achmad had been responsible for the inexcusable murder of Ali Babar’s blameless wife. I asked, and got, the Khakhan’s permission for Ali to attend the execution of his wife’s executioner. The Fondler Ping was aghast at this, of course, but he could not countermand the permission, and he did not even dare make any loud complaint, lest a closer look be given to his own willing part in Mar-Janah’s murder.
So, on the appointed day, I went with Ali to the underground cavern, and bade him be manfully stalwart as he witnessed the piecemeal reduction of our mutual enemy. Ali looked pale—he had never had stomach for bloodshed—but he looked determined, even while he said his salaams and farewells to me as solemnly as if he himself were going to the Death of a Thousand. Then he and the Master Ping, who was still grumbling at this unwelcome intrusion, went through the iron-studded door to where Achmad was already dangling and waiting, and closed the door behind them. I came away with only one regret at the time: that the Arab, from what I had heard, was still numb and bemazed. If it was true, as Achmad had once told me, that Hell is what hurts worst, then I regretted that he might not feel the hurts as keenly as I would have wished.