“Not exactly. Champa refers to that whole tropical land, the country of jungles and elephants and tigers and heat and humidity. The people down there are of—who knows?—ten or twenty separate races, and almost every one has its own midget kingdom, and every kingdom has various names, depending on who is speaking of it. Ava, for example, is also known as Myama and Burma and Mien. The Shan people fleeing from our Yun-nan are seeking refuge in a kingdom that earlier Shan emigrants established in Champa a long time ago. It is variously known as Sayam and Muang Thai and Sukhothai. There are other kingdoms down there—Annam and Cham and Layas and Khmer and Kambuja—and maybe many more.” Again offhandedly, he said, “While we are taking Ava, we may well take two or three of the others.”
Like a proper merchant, I remarked, “It would save our paying the exorbitant prices they demand for their spices and woods and elephants and rubies.”
“I had intended,” said Chingkim, “to proceed southward from here and follow Bayan’s route of march and have a look for myself at those tropical lands. But I really do not feel up to making such a rigorous journey. I shall simply rest here for a while with you and Hui-sheng, and then return to Kithai.” He sighed and said, a little wistfully, “I am sorry not to be going there. My Royal Father is getting old, and it cannot be too long before I must succeed him as Khakhan. I should have liked to do a lot more traveling before I got permanently stabled in Khanbalik.”
Such an air of lassitude and resignation was not usual to the Prince Chingkim, and now I took notice that he was indeed looking rather worn and weary. A little later, when he and I walked a way into the wood to make water in private, I noticed something else, and commented lightly on it:
“At some inn on the road hither, you must have dined on that slimy red vegetable called dai-huang. You did not eat it at our table, for I do not care for it.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “And neither have I taken a fall from any horse lately, which might account for my pissing pink like this. But I have been doing it for some time. The Court Physician has been treating me for it—in the Han manner, by sticking pins in my feet and burning little heaps of moxa fluff up and down my spine. I keep telling the idiot old Hakim Gansui that I do not piss through my feet or—” He stopped and looked up into the trees. “Listen, Marco. A cuckoo. Do you know what the Han believe the cuckoo is saying?”
Chingkim did go home, as the cuckoo advised, but not until he had spent a month or so enjoying our company and the restful ambience of Hang-zho. I am glad he had that month of simple pleasure, far from the cares of office and state, for when he went home, he went to a much more distant home than Khanbalik. It was not long before the couriers came galloping to Hang-zho, on horses blanketed in purple and white, to tell the Wang Agayachi to drape his city in those Han and Mongol colors of mourning, for his brother Chingkim had arrived home only to die.
As it happened, our city had no more than finished the term of mourning for the Crown Prince, and started to take down the crape bunting, than the couriers came again, with orders to leave it hanging. Now it was in mourning for the Ilkhan Abagha of Persia, who had died also—and also not in battle, but of some illness. The loss of a nephew was of course not so terrible a tragedy to Kubilai as the loss of his son Chingkim, and it did not cause the same widespread murmurs of speculation about future succession. Abagha had left a full-grown son, Arghun, who immediately assumed the Ilkhanate of Persia—and even married one of his late father’s Persian wives, to further secure his claim to that throne. But Chingkim’s son Temur, the next heir apparent to the whole Mongol Empire, was still under-age. Kubilai was well along in years, as Chingkim had remarked. The people worried that, if he were soon to die, the Khanate might be much riven and convulsed by claimants older than Temur, the many uncles and cousins and such, eager to oust him and make the Khanate theirs.
But, for the time being, we suffered nothing worse than grief from Chingkim’s untimely demise. Kubilai did not let his sorrow distract him from the affairs of state, and I did not let mine interfere with my regular transmittal of Manzi’s tribute to the treasury. Kubilai continued to prosecute the war against Ava, and even extended the Orlok Bayan’s mission —as Chingkim had predicted—to seize, as well, any of Ava’s neighbor nations in Champa that might be ripe for conquest.
It made me restless, to know that so much was happening in the world outside, while I simply lolled in luxury in Hang-zho. My restlessness was irrational, of course. Look at all I had. I was quite an esteemed personage in Hang-zho. No one even looked askance at my kwei-colored hair any more when I walked the streets. I had many friends, and I was ever so comfortable, and I was blissfully content with my loving and lovely consort. Hui-sheng and I might have lived—as is said of the lovers at the concluding page of a roman courtois—happily ever after, just as we were. I possessed everything that any rational man could desire. All those most precious things were mine then, at that high moment, that skyline crest of my lifetime. Furthermore, I was no longer the reckless stripling I once had been, with only tomorrows stretching out before me. There were a lot of yesterdays behind me now. I was past thirty years of age, and I found an occasional gray hair among the demon-colored, and I might sensibly have been giving thought to making the downhill slope of my life a soft and easy glide.
Nevertheless, I was restless, and the restlessness inexorably became dissatisfaction with myself. I had done well in Manzi, yes, but was I to bask in the reflected glow of that for the remainder of my days? Once the great thing had been accomplished, it was no great thing merely to perpetuate it. That required no more than my stamping my yin signature on papers of receipt and dispatch, and waving my couriers off to Khanbalik once a month. I was no better than a roadside postmaster of the horse relay stations. I decided I had for too long now enjoyed too much of
having;
I wanted something to
want.
I flinched at the vision of myself growing old in Hang-zho, like a vegetable Han patriarch, and having nothing to take pride in except my survival to old age.
“You will never get old, Marco,” Hui-sheng told me when I broached the subject. She looked affectionately amused, but sincere, as she conveyed that pronouncement.
“Old or not,” I said, “I think we have luxuriated in Hang-zho long enough. Let us move on.”
She concurred: “Let us move on.”
“Where would you like to go, my dearest?”
Simply: “Wherever you go.”
SO my next northbound courier took a message from me to the Khakhan, respectfully requesting that I be relieved of my long-since accomplished mission and my Kuan title and my coral hat button; that I be given permission to return to Khanbalik, where I could cast about for some new venture to occupy me. The courier returned with Kubilai’s amiable acquiescence, and it took me and Hui-sheng not long to make ready to depart from Hang-zho. Our native servants and slaves all wept and agonized and fell about in frequent ko-tou, but we assuaged their bereavement by making gifts to them of many things we decided not to take with us. I made other parting gifts—and rich ones—to the Wang Agayachi and my Adjutant Fung Wei-ni and my manager-scribe and other worthies who had been our friends.
“The cuckoo calls,” they all said sadly, one after another, as they toasted us with their wine goblets at the countless farewell banquets and balls given in our honor.
Our slaves packed into bales and crates our personal belongings and our wardrobes and our many Hang-zho acquisitions—furnishings, painted scrolls, porcelains, ivories, jades, jewelry and such—that we were taking with us. Taking also the Mongol maid we had brought from Khanbalik, and Hui-sheng’s white mare (now somewhat silvery about the muzzle), we went aboard a sizable canal barge. Only one of our possessions would Hui-sheng not let be crated and stowed in the hold: she herself carried her white porcelain incense burner.
During our residence, the Great Canal had been completed all the way to Hang-zho’s riverside. But because we had already covered the canal route before, following it on our way south, we had decided to take a very different way home. We stayed on the barge only as far as the port of Zhen-jiang, where the Great Canal met the Yang-tze River. There, for the first time (for either me or Hui-sheng), we boarded a gigantic oceangoing chuan, and sailed down the Tremendous River and out into the boundless Sea of Kithai and northward up the coast.
That chuan made the good ship
Doge Anafesto,
the galeazza in which I had crossed the Mediterranean, seem like a gòndola or a san-pan. The chuan—I cannot call it by name, because it purposely had no name, so it could not be cursed by rival shipowners, who might persuade the gods to send it contrary winds or other misfortune—had
five masts
, each like a tree. From them depended sails as big as some towns’ market squares, made of slats of the zhu-gan cane, and employed as I have described elsewhere. The bigness of the chuan’s duck-shaped hull was in proportion to its sky-scraping upper works. On the deck and in the passenger quarters below were more than one hundred cabins, each comfortably adequate for six persons. That is to say, the ship could carry more than six hundred passengers
in addition to
its crew, which totaled fully four hundred men, of several different races and languages. (There were only a few passengers on this short trip. Besides Hui-sheng, myself and the maid, there were some traveling merchants, some minor government officials, and a number of other ships’ captains, idle between voyages, aboard just for a seaman’s holiday.) In the chuan’s holds was loaded a variety of goods, seeming enough to stock a city. But, simply for a measure of the holds’ capacity, I would say the ship could have carried two thousand Venetian butts.
I have said “holds” advisedly, instead of hold, because every chuan was ingeniously built with bulkheads dividing the hull’s interior into numerous compartments, end to end, and they were tarred watertight, so that if the chuan should strike a reef or otherwise hole itself below the waterline, only that one compartment would flood, while the others stayed dry and kept the ship afloat. However, it would have required a sharp and solid reef to hole that chuan. Its entire hull was triply planked, actually built three times over, one shell enveloping another. The Han captain, who spoke Mongol, took great pride in showing me how the innermost hull had its planking set vertically, from keel to deck, and the next was planked at an angle diagonal to that, and the outermost was laid in horizontal strakes, stem to stern.
“Solid as rock,” he boasted, slamming his fist into a bulwark and producing a sound as of a rock hit with a mallet. “Good Champa teakwood, held with good iron spikes.”
“We do not have teakwood in the West where I come from,” I said, almost apologetically. “Our shipbuilders rely on oak. But we do use iron spikes.”
“Foolish Ferenghi shipbuilders!” he roared, with a mighty laugh. “Have they not yet realized that oak wood exudes an acid which corrodes the iron? Teak, on the other hand, contains an essential oil which preserves iron!”
So I had once again been presented with an example of ingenious Eastern artistry that made my native West seem backward. Somewhat spitefully, I hoped for an example of Eastern simplemindedness to balance the scales, and I expected I would encounter one before the voyage was over—and I thought I had when one day, well out of sight of the safe shore, we sailed into a rather nasty thunderstorm. There was wind and rain and lightning, and the sea got choppy, and the ship’s masts and yards got all laced with flickering blue Santermo’s fire, and I heard the captain shouting to his crew, in various languages:
“Prepare the chuan for sacrifice!”
It seemed a shockingly unnecessary early surrender, when the chuan’s ponderous bulk was barely rocking to the storm. I was only a “sweet-water seaman”—as real Venetian mariners derisively say—and such are supposed to be overly apprehensive of danger on the sea. But I saw no danger here that called for more than a simple shortening of sail. Certainly this was not the fierce storm that merited the dread name of tai-feng. However, I was seaman enough to know better than to volunteer advice to the captain, or to show any contempt of his apparently over-extreme agitation.
I am glad I did not. For, as I started glumly below to prepare my womenfolk to abandon ship, I met two seamen coming not fearfully but gaily up the companionway, carrying with care a ship made all of paper, a toy ship, a miniature replica of ours.
“The chuan for sacrifice,” the captain told me, quite unperturbed, as he tossed it over the side. “It deceives the sea gods. When they see it dissolve in the water, they think they have sunk our real ship. So they let the storm abate instead of making it more troublesome.”
It was just one more reminder to me that even when the Han did something simpleminded, they did it ingeniously. Whether or not the paper-ship sacrifice had any effect, the storm did soon abate, and a few days later we made landfall at Qin-huang-dao, which was the coast city nearest Khanbalik. From there we proceeded overland, with a small train of carts carrying our goods.
When we got to the palace, Hui-sheng and I naturally went first to make ko-tou to the Khakhan. At his royal chambers, I noticed that the elderly stewards and women servants formerly in attendance seemed to have been replaced by some half a dozen young page boys. They were all much of an age, and all handsome, and all had uncommonly light hair and eyes, rather like those tribesmen in India Aryana who had claimed to be descended from Alexander’s soldiers. I vaguely wondered if Kubilai, in his old age, was developing a perverse affection for pretty boys, but then I gave it no further mind. The Khakhan greeted us most warmly, and he and I exchanged mutual condolences on the loss of his son and my friend, Chingkim. Then he said:
“I must congratulate you again, Marco, on the splendid success you made of your mission to Manzi. I believe you did not take a single tsien of the tribute for yourself during all these years? No, I thought not. It was my own fault. I neglected to tell you, before you left here, that a tax collector customarily gets no wage, but earns his keep by taking a twentieth part of what he collects. It makes him work more diligently. I have no complaint, however, about the diligence of your own work. Therefore, if you will call upon the Minister Lin-ngan, you will find that he has, all this while, been putting aside your share, and it is a respectable amount.”
“Respectable!” I gasped. “Why, Sire, it must amount to a fortune! I cannot accept it. I was not working for gain, but for my Lord Khakhan.”
“All the more reason why you deserve it, then.” I opened my mouth again, but he said sternly, “I will hear no dispute about it. However, if you would care to demonstrate your gratitude, you might take on one more charge.”
“Anything, Sire!” I said, still gasping at the magnitude of the surprise.
“My son and your friend Chingkim wished most earnestly to see the jungles of Champa, and he never got there. I have messages for the Orlok Bayan, currently campaigning in the land of Ava. They are only routine communications, nothing urgent, but they would give you reason to make the journey which Chingkim did not. And your going as surrogate for him might be a consolation to his spirit. Will you go?”
“Without hesitation or delay, Sire. Is there anything else I can do for you down there? Dragons I might slay? Captive princesses I could rescue?” I was only halfway being facetious. He had just made me a wealthy man.
He chuckled appreciatively, but a little sadly. “Bring me back some small memento. Something that a fond son might have brought home to his aged father.”
I promised I would seek for something unique, something never before seen in Khanbalik, and Hui-sheng and I took our departure. We went next to greet my father, who embraced us both, and wept a little for joy, until I stopped his tears by telling him of the great beneficence just bestowed on me by the Khakhan.
“Mefè!” he exclaimed. “That is no hard bone to gnaw! I always thought of myself as a good businessman, but I swear, Marco, you could sell sunshine in August, as they say on the Rialto.”
“It was all Hui-sheng’s doing,” I said, giving her an affectionate squeeze.
“Well … ,” said my father thoughtfully. “This … on top of what the Compagnia has already sent home by way of the Silk Road … Marco, it may be time we started thinking of going home ourselves.”
“What?” I said, startled. “Why, Father, you have always had another saying. To the right sort of man, the whole world is home. As long as we continue to prosper here—”
“Better an egg today than a chicken tomorrow.”
“But our prospects all are still rosy. We are still in the Khakhan’s high regard. The whole empire is at its richest, ripe for our exploitation. Uncle Mafìo is being well attended, and—”
“Mafìo is four years old again, so he cares not where he is. But I am touching sixty, and Kubilai is at least ten years older.”
“You look nowhere near senility, Father. True, the Khakhan shows his age—and some despondency—but what of that?”
“Have you thought what our position would be if he should die suddenly? Just
because
he favors us, others resent us. Only furtively now, but they are likely to manifest that resentment when his protecting hand falls away. The very rabbits dance at the funeral of a lion. Also, there will be a resurgence of the Muslim factions he suppressed, and they love us not at all. I hardly need mention the likelihood of even worse troubles —upheavals from here to the Levant—if there should be a war of succession. But I am increasingly glad that I have all these years been sending our profits west to your Uncle Marco in Constantinople. I shall do the same with this new fortune of yours. However, anything else we shall have accrued at the moment of Kubilai’s death is bound to be sequestered here.”
“Can we really gnash our teeth if that happens, Father, considering all the wealth we have already taken out of Kithai and Manzi?”
He shook his head somberly. “What good our fortune waiting in the West, if we are marooned here? If we are dead here? Suppose, of all the claimants to the Khanate succession, it should be Kaidu who won!”
“Verily, we should be at hazard,” I said. “But need we abandon ship right now, so to speak, when there is not yet any cloud in the sky?” With some amusement, I realized that, as usual in my father’s presence, I was beginning to talk like him, in parables and metaphors.
“The hardest step is the one across the threshold,” he said. “However, if your reluctance signifies a concern for your sweet lady here, I hope you do not think I am suggesting her abandonment. Sacro, no! Of course you will bring her with you. She may be a curiosity in Venice, for a little while, but she will be a beloved one. Da novèlo xe tuto belo. You would not be the first to come home with a foreign wife. I recall, there was a ship’s captain, one of the Doria, who brought home a Turki wife when he retired from the sea. Tall as a campanile, she was … .”
“I take Hui-sheng everywhere,” I said, and smiled at her. “I should be lost without her. I will be taking her on this journey to Champa. We will not even stop to unpack the household goods we brought from Manzi. And I have
always
intended to take her home to Venice. But, Father, you are not recommending, I trust, that we slip away this very day?”
“Oh, no. Only that we make plans. Be ready to go. Keep one eye on the frying pan and the other on the cat. It would take me some time, in any event, to close or dispose of the kashi works—to tidy up many other loose ends.”
“There should be ample time. Kubilai looks old, but not moribund. If he has the vivacity, as I suspect, to be playing with boys, he is not apt to drop dead as suddenly as Chingkim did. Let me comply with this latest mission he has set me, and when I return …”