The Journeyer

  We came at last to one of many identical narrow-fronted buildings, this one with a shop at the street level, and my father gave a glad cry—“Nostra compagnia!”—at seeing still a light within. He flung the door open and ushered me and Mafìo inside. A white-bearded man was bent over an open ledger at a table piled with many ledgers, writing in the light of a candle at his elbow. He looked up and growled:

  “Gèsu, spuzzolenti sardòni!”

  They were the first Venetian words I had heard from anyone except Nicolò and Mafìo Polo in twenty-three years. And thus—as “stinking anchovies”—we were greeted by my Uncle Marco Polo.

  But then, marveling, he recognized his brothers—“Xestu, Nico? Mafìo? Tati!”—and he bounded up most spryly from his chair, and the company clerks at counting tables roundabout looked on in wonder at our flurry of abrazzi and backslappings and handshakings and laughs and tears and exclamations.

  “Sangue de Bacco!” he bellowed. “Che bon vento? But you have both gone gray, my Tati!”

  “And you have gone white, Tato!” my father bellowed back.

  “And what took you so long? Your last consignment brought your letter that you were on your way. But that was nearly three years ago!”

  “Ah, Marco, do not ask! We have had the wind at our front the whole way.”

  “E cussì? But I expected you on jeweled elephants—I Re Magi, coming out of the East in a triumphal parade, with Nubian slaves beating drums. And here you creep in from a foggy night, smelling like the crotch of a Sirkeci whore!”

  “From shallow waters, insignificant fish. We come penniless, marooned, derelict. We are castaways washed up on your doorstep. But we will talk of that later. Here, you have never yet met your namesake nephew.”

  “Neodo Marco! Arcistupendonazzìsimo!” So I got a hearty embrace too, and a benvegnùo, and my back pounded. “But our tonazzo Tato Mafio, usually so loud. Why so silent?”

  “He has been ill,” said my father. “We will also talk of that. But come! For two months we have been eating nothing but anchovies, and—”

  “And they have given you a powerful thirst! Say no more!” He turned to his clerks and bellowed for them to go home, and not to come in to work the next day. They all stood and gave us a rousing cheer—whether for our safe return or for their getting an unexpected holiday, I do not know—and we went out again into the fog.

  Uncle Marco took us to his villa on the Marmara seaside, where we spent our first night, and the subsequent week or more, in swilling down good wines and rich viands—none of which was fish—and being bathed and scrubbed and rubbed in my uncle’s private hammam—here called a humoun—and sleeping long hours in luxurious beds, and being waited on, hand and foot, by his numerous house servants. Meanwhile, Uncle Marco sent a special courier vessel hastening to Venice to apprise Dona Fiordelisa of our safe arrival here.

  When I felt rested and well-fed enough, and looked and smelled presentable, I was introduced to Uncle Marco’s son and daughter, Nicolò and Maroca. They were both about my own age, but Cousin Maroca was still a spinster, and kept giving me looks half speculative, half suggestive. I was not interested in responding; I was much more interested in sitting with my father and Uncle Marco as we bent our attention on the books of the Compagnia Polo. They quickly reassured us that we were anything but penniless. We were more than respectably wealthy.

  Some of the shipments of goods and valuables my father had entrusted to the Mongol horse post had failed to make it the whole way along the Silk Road, but that was only to have been expected; what was more remarkable was that so many had got through to Constantinople. And here Uncle Marco had variously banked and invested and traded most shrewdly with those goods, and by his advice Dona Fiordelisa in Venice had been able to do the same. So by now our Compagnia Polo ranked with the mercantile houses of Spinola of Genoa and Carrara of Padua and Dandolo of Venice as a prima di tuto in the world of commerce. I was especially pleased that, among the consignments which had arrived intact, were those which had contained all the maps my father and Uncle Mafìo and I had made, and all the notes I had jotted down in all those years. Since the Shoe Brigand at Tunceli had not relieved me of my journal notes scribbled since leaving Khanbalik, I now possessed at least a fragmentary record of every one of my journeys.

  We stayed on at the villa until spring, so I had time to get well acquainted with Constantinople. And that made for an easy transition between our long sojourn in the East and our return to the West, for Constantinople itself was a blend of both those ends of the earth. It was Eastern of architecture and bazàr markets and variegated races and complexions and costumes and languages and such. But its guazzabuglio of nationalities included some twenty thousand Venetians, about a tenth as many as in Venice itself, and the city had many other similarities to Venice—including its being overrun with cats. Most of the Venetians resided and did business in the Phanar quarter of the city allotted to them, and across the Golden Horn, in the so-called New City, about an equal number of Genoans occupied the Galata quarter.

  The exigencies of commerce necessitated daily transactions between Venetians and Genoans. Nothing would ever stop them doing business. But they did their mutual dealings very coolly, at arm’s length, so to speak, and were not mingling sociably or friendlily, because back home —as so often before—their native republics were again at war. I mention that because I was later to have some minor involvement in it. But I will not describe all the aspects of Constantinople, or dwell on our stay there, for it was really only a recuperative and resting place in our journey, and our hearts were already in Venice, and we were eager to follow them there.

  So it was that, on a blue and gold May morning, twenty-four years after we had left La Città Serenissima, our galeazza tied up at the dock of our company warehouse, and my father and Uncle Mafìo and I walked down the plank and stepped again upon the cobblestones of the Riva Ca’ de Dio, in the Year of Our Lord one thousand two hundred ninety-five, or, as it would have been counted in Kithai, the Year of the Ram, three thousand nine hundred ninety-three.

  5

  THE story of the Prodigal Son notwithstanding, I maintain that there is nothing like coming home successful to make the homecoming warm and tumultuous and welcoming. Of course, Dona Fiordelisa would have welcomed us happily, however we had arrived. But if we had slunk into Venice the way we had done at Constantinople, I wager we would have been contemptuously received by our merchant confratelli and the citizenry at large, and they would have cared nothing for the greater fact that we had made such journeys and seen such things as none other of them had ever done. However, since we did come home rich and well-dressed and walking tall, we were greeted like champions, like victors, like heroes.

  For weeks after our arrival, there came so many people calling at the Ca’ Polo that we hardly had time of our own to get reacquainted with Dona Lisa and other relatives and friends and neighbors, or to catch up on family news, or to learn the names of all our new servants and slaves and company workers. The old maggiordomo Attilio had died during our absence, and the old chief clerk Isidoro Priuli—and also our aged parish priest, Pare Nunziata—while other house servants, slaves and working men had departed our employ or been dismissed or been freed or been sold, and we had to meet and get to know their successors.

  The converging crowds of visitors included some whom we knew from years past, but many others were total strangers. Some came just to fawn on us newly rich arrichisti and seek some advantage from us, the men bringing schemes and projects and soliciting our investment, the women bringing nubile daughters to present for my delectation. Others came with the obvious and venal hope of prying from us information and maps and advice that would enable them to emulate us. Some few came to say sincere congratulations on our safe return, many came to ask inane questions like, “How does it feel to be back?”

  To me, at least, it felt good. It was good to walk about the dear old city and glory in the perpetually changing, lapping, liquid mirror li
ght of Venice, so different from the infernal blaze of deserts and the harsh glare of mountain heights and the abrupt white sun and black shade of Eastern bazàrs. It was good to stroll through the piazza and hear all about me the softly inflected cantilena speech of Venice, so different from the rapid jabber of Eastern throngs. It was good to see that Venice was much as I had remembered it. The piazza campanile had been built somewhat taller, some few old buildings had been torn down and new ones put in their places, the interior of San Marco had been adorned with many new mosaics. But nothing was jarringly changed, and that was good.

  And still the callers kept coming to the Ca’ Polo. Some of them were agreeable to receive, some were nuisances, some were crass annoyances, and one of them, a fellow merchant, came to cast a pall on our homecoming. He told us, “Word has just arrived from the East, by way of my factor in Cyprus. The Great Khan is dead.” When we pressed for details, we determined that the Khakhan must have died about the time we were making our way through Kurdistan. Well, it was saddening news, but not unexpected: he had been then seventy-eight years old, and simply had succumbed to the ravages of time. Some while later, we got further news: that his death had not precipitated any wars of succession; his grandson Temur had without opposition been elevated to the throne.

  There had been changes of sovereignty here in the West, too, while we had been away. That Doge Tiepolo who banished me from Venice had died, and the scufieta was now worn by a Piero Gradenigo. Also long dead was His Holiness Pope Gregory X, whom we had known in Acre as the Archdeacon Visconti, and there had been a number of other Popes of Rome since then. Also, that city of Acre had fallen to the Saracens, so the Kingdom of Jerusalem was no more, and the whole of the Levant was now held by the Muslims—and appears likely to be theirs forever. Since I had been in Acre to witness briefly that eighth Crusade being desultorily directed by Edward of England, I think I can say that, among all the other things I saw during my journeyings, I saw the very last of the Crusades.

  Now my father and stepmother—possibly impelled to the idea by the visitors thronging our Ca’ Polo, or perhaps thinking we ought to start living up to our new prosperity, or perhaps deciding that we could now at last afford to live like the Ene Aca nobility we Polos always had been—began talking of building a new and grander Casa Polo. So to the streams of visitors were now added architects and stonemasons and other aspiring artisans, all eagerly bringing with them sketches and proposals and suggestions that would have had us building something to rival the Doge’s palazzo. That reminded me of something, and I reminded my father:

  “We have not yet made our courtesy call upon the Doge Gradenigo. I realize that the moment we give official notice of our being in residence in Venice again, we subject ourselves to inquisition by the Dogana tax collectors. They will no doubt find some trinket among all our imports over the years on which Zio Marco failed to pay some trifling duty, and they will insist on wringing every possible bagatìn out of us. Nevertheless, we cannot postpone forever the paying of our respects to our Doge.”

  So we made formal request for a formal audience, and on the appointed day we took Zio Mafìo with us, and when, as custom dictates, we made gifts to the Doge, we presented some in Mafìo’s name as well as ours. I have forgotten what he and my father presented, but I gave to Gradenigo one of the gold and ivory pai-tzu plaques we had carried as emissaries of the Khan of All Khans, and also the three-bladed squeeze knife which had served me so well so often in the East. I showed the Doge how cleverly it worked, and he played with it for a while, and asked me to tell him about the occasions of my employment of the knife, and I did, in brief.

  Then he put some polite questions to my father, relevant mainly to East-West trade affairs, and Venice’s prospects for an increase of that traffic. Then he expressed his delight that we—and through us, Venice—had prospered so richly by our sojourn abroad. Then, as expected, he said he hoped we would satisfy the Dogana that the proper share of all our successful enterprises had been duly paid into the coffers of the Republic. We said, as expected, that we looked forward to the tax collectors’ scrutiny of our Compagnia’s unfaultable books of account. Then we stood up, expecting to be dismissed. But the Doge raised one of his heavily beringed hands and said:

  “Just one thing more, Messeri. Perhaps it has escaped your recollection, Messer Marco—I know you have had many other things on your mind—but there is the minor matter of your banishment from Venice.”

  I stared at him, dumbfounded. Surely he was not going to resurrect that old charge against a now most respectable and esteemed (and heavily tax-paying) citizen. With an air of offended hauteur I said, “I assumed, So Serenità, that the statute of enforcement had expired with the Doge Tiepolo.”

  “Oh, of course I am not obliged to respect the judgments made and sentences imposed by my predecessor. But I too like to keep my books unfaultable. And there is that little blot upon the pages of the archives of the Signori della Notte.”

  I smiled, thinking I understood now, and said, “Perhaps a suitable fine would pay for the blot’s erasure.”

  “I was thinking rather of an expiation in accordance with the old Roman lege de tagiòn.”

  I was again dumbfounded. “An eye for an eye? Surely the books show that I was never guilty of the killing of that citizen.”

  “No, no, of course you were not. Nevertheless, that sad affair involved a passage at arms. I thought you might atone by engaging in another. Say, in our current war with our old enemy Genoa.”

  “So Serenità, war is a game for young men. I am forty years old, which is somewhat over-age for wielding a sword, and—”

  Snick! He squeezed the knife and made its inner blade dart forth.

  “By your own account, you wielded this one not too many years since. Messer Marco, I am not suggesting that you lead a frontal assault on Genoa. Only that you make a token appearance of military service. And I am not being despotic or spiteful or capricious. I am thinking of the future of Venice and the house of Polo. That house has now been raised among the foremost of our city. After your father, you will be the head of it, and your sons after you. If, as seems likely, the house of Polo keeps its commanding position through the generations, I believe the family arms should be totally senza macchia. Wipe off the blot now, lest it embarrass and trouble all your posterity. It is easily accomplished. I have only to write against that page: ‘Marco Polo, Ene Aca, loyally served the Republic in her war against Genoa.’”

  My father nodded his agreement and contributed, “What is well closed is well kept.”

  “If I must,” I said with a sigh. I had thought my war service was all behind me. However, I must confess, I thought it perhaps would look fine in the family history: that Marco Polo in his lifetime fought both with the Golden Horde and with the War Fleet of Venice. “What would you have me do, So Serenità?”

  “Serve only as a gentleman at arms. Say, in supernumerary command of a supply ship. Make one sally with the fleet, out to sea and back to port, and then you retire—with new distinction and with old honor preserved.”

  Well, that is how, when a squadra of the Venetian fleet sailed out some months later under Almirante Dandolo, I came to be aboard the galeazza Doge Particiaco, which was actually only the victualler vessel to the squadra. I bore the courtesy rank of Sopracomito, meaning that I had approximately the same function I had had on the chuan that carried the Lady Kukachin—to look commanding and warlike and knowledgeable, and to stay out of the way of the Comito, the real master of the vessel, and the mariners who took his orders.

  I do not aver that I could have done any better if I had been in command—of the galeazza or of the whole squadra—but I could hardly have done any worse. We sailed down the Adriatic and, near the island of Kurcola off the Dalmatia coast, we encountered a squadra of Genoan ships, flying the ensign of their great Almiranet Doria, and he demonstrated to us why he was called great. Our squadra, we could see from a distance, outnumbered the Genoans, so our Almirante Dan
dolo commanded that we surge forward in immediate attack. And Doria let our ships close with and disable some nine or ten of his, a deliberate sacrifice, just so our squadra would be enticed inextricably in amongst his own. And then, out of nowhere—or rather, out from behind the island of Peljesac, where they had been concealed—came ten or fifteen more fleet Genoan warships. The two-day battle cost many slain or wounded on both sides, but the victory was Doria’s, for by sunset of the second day, the Genoans had taken our entire squadra and some seven thousand Venetian seamen prize of war, and I was one of them.

  The Doge Particiaco, like all the other Venetian galleys, was sailed —still by its prize crew, but under command of a captor Genoan Comito —around the foot of Italy and up through the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian seas to Genoa. From the water, that looked no bad city in which to be interned: its palazzi like layered cakes of alternate black and white marble stacked up the slopes from the harbor. But when we were marched ashore, we found Genoa to be sadly inferior to Venice: all cramped streets and alleys and meager little piazze, and very dirty, not having canals to flush away its effluents.

  I do not know where the ordinary seamen and rowers and archers and balestrieri and such were imprisoned, but, if tradition was observed, they no doubt sat out the war in misery and deprivation and squalor. The officers and gentlemen at arms like myself were considerably better treated, and put only under house arrest in the abandoned and run-down palazzo of some defunct religious order, in the Piazza of the Five Lanterns. The building was very little furnished, and very cold and dank—I have suffered worsening twinges of backache in chill weather ever since —but our jailers were courteous and they fed us adequately, and we were allowed to give money to the visiting Prisoners’ Friends of the Brotherhood of Justice, to buy for us any extra comforts and refinements we might wish. All in all, it was a more tolerable confinement than I had once endured in the Vulcano prison of my own native Venice. However, our captors told us that they were breaking with tradition in one respect. They would not allow the ransoming of prisoners by their families back home. They said they had learned that it was no profit to profit from ransom payments, only to have to face the same officers again, a little while later, across some other contested piece of water. So we would stay in internment until this war was concluded.