1
TO my surprise, when we entered Khanbalik—that is to say, when we came in the twilight of a fading day to the place where the dusty road became a broad, paved, clean avenue leading into the city—our little train was met by a considerable reception party.
First there was waiting a band of Mongol foot soldiers wearing dress armor of highly polished metal and gleaming oiled leathers. They did not step out to impede our way, as Kaidu’s road guards at Kashgar had done. With unanimous precision, they presented their glittering lances at a slant of salute, then formed a hollow square about our train and marched with us along the avenue, between crowds of the city’s everyday inhabitants, who paused in their occupations to ogle us curiously.
The next waiting greeters were a number of distinguished-looking, elderly gentlemen—some Mongols, some Han, some evidently Arab and Persian—wearing long silk robes of various vivid colors, each man attended by a servant holding over him a fringed canopy on a tall pole. The elders strode out to march on our either flank, their servants scurrying to keep the canopies in place over them, and all smiled at us and made sedate gestures of welcome and called in their several languages: “Mendu! Ying-jie! Salaam!”—though those words were quickly drowned out by a troop of musicians joining the procession with an unearthly screech and clangor of horns and cymbals. My father and uncle smiled and nodded and bowed from their saddles, appearing to have expected this extravagant reception, but Nostril and Ussu and Donduk looked as astonished as I was.
Ussu said to me, over the noise, “Of course, your party has been watched all along the road, as is every traveler, and post riders will have kept the Khanbalik authorities informed of your approach. No one arrives at the City of the Khan unobserved.”
“But,” said Donduk, in a newly respectful voice, “usually it is only the city’s Wang who keeps account of visitors’ comings and goings. You Ferenghi”—he pronounced the word benignly for a change—“seem to be known to the very palace, and warmly awaited, and exceptionally welcome. Those elders marching alongside, I believe they are courtiers of the Khakhan himself.”
I was looking from side to side of the avenue, eager to get some idea of the city’s appearance, but suddenly the view was obscured and my attention diverted elsewhere. There came a noise like a crack of thunder and a light like a lightning flash, not high in the sky but frighteningly close overhead. It made me start and made my horse shy, so violently that I lost my stirrups. I curbed the animal before he could bolt, and held him to a skittish dance, while the terrific noise banged again and again, each time with a flare of light. I saw that all our other horses had also shied, and all our party were occupied in keeping them under control. I would have expected every one of the city folk in the avenue to be running for cover, but all seemed not only composed but actually to be enjoying the tumult and the brightening of the dusk. My father and uncle and the two Mongols were equally tranquil; they even grinned broadly as they sawed on the reins of the plunging horses. It seemed that the flicker and the racket were a bewilderment only to me and to Nostril —I could see his eyeballs protruding whitely from his head as he looked wildly about for the source of the commotion.
It came from the curly-eaved rooftops along both sides of the avenue. Blobs of bright light, like great sparks—or more like the desert’s mysterious “beads of Heaven”—went lofting upward from those roofs and arcing into the air overhead. Directly above us, they burst asunder, making that ear-clapping thump of sound, and became whole constellations of different-colored sprinkles and streaks and splinters of light that drifted down and dwindled and died before they reached the street pavement, leaving a trail of sharp-smelling blue smoke. So many were going up from the roofs and bursting at such close intervals that their flares made an almost constant glow, abolishing the natural twilight, and their bangs concerted in such a roar that our accompanying band was inaudible. The musicians, trudging unconcerned through the clouds of blue smoke, appeared to be only pantomiming the play of their instruments. Though also inaudible, the crowds of city folk along each side of our line of march seemed, from their jumpings and arm wavings and wagging mouths, to be cheering exuberantly at every new burst and blast.
It may be that my own eyes were bulging at sight of that strange and unaccountable flying fire. For, when we had proceeded farther along the avenue, and the smoke and the artificial lightning storm were behind us, Ussu again brought his horse close beside mine and spoke loudly to be heard above the again rambunctious band music:
“You never saw such a show before, Ferenghi? It is a toy devised by the childish Han people. They call it huo-shu yin-hua—fiery trees and sparkling flowers.”
I shook my head and said, “Toy, indeed!” but managed to smile as if I too had enjoyed it. Then I resumed my glancing about to see what the fabled city of Khanbalik looked like.
I will speak later of that. For now, let me just say that the city, which I suppose had suffered much ruination in the Mongols’ taking of it, sometime before I was born, had ever since been in the process of rebuilding from the ground up. These many years later, it was still being added to and refined and embellished and made as grand as the capital of the world’s greatest empire rightly ought to be. The broad avenue led us and our procession of troops and elders and musicians straight on for quite a long way, between the fronts of handsome buildings, until it ended at a towering, south-facing gateway in a wall that was almost as high and thick and impressive as the best-built stretches of the Great Wall out in the countryside.
We went through that gateway and we were in one of the courtyards of the Khakhan’s palace. But palace is a word not comprehensive enough. That was more than a palace; it was a fair-sized city within the city; and it also was still a-building. The courtyard was full of the wagons and carts and draft animals of stonemasons and carpenters and plasterers and gilders and such, and the conveyances of farmers and tradesmen purveying provender and necessities to the inhabitants of the palace city, and the mounts and carriages and porter-borne palanquins of other visitors come on other business from near and far.
From the group of courtiers who had accompanied us through the city, one stepped forward, a quite old and fragile-appearing Han, saying in Farsi, “I shall summon servants, my lords.” He only gently clapped his pallid, papery hands, but somehow that imperceptible command carried through the confusion of the courtyard and he was instantly obeyed. Out of somewhere came half a dozen stable grooms, and he instructed them to take charge of our mounts and packhorses, also to lead Ussu and Donduk and Nostril to quarters in the palace guard barracks. He clapped his hands almost soundlessly again, and three female servants just as magically appeared.
“These maids will attend you, my lords,” he said to my father and uncle and me. “You will lodge temporarily in the pavilion of honored guests. I will come on the morrow and conduct you to the Khakhan, who is most eager to greet you, and at that time doubtless he will appoint more permanent quarters for you.”
The three women bowed four times before us in the abjectly humble Han salute called the ko-tou, which is a prostration so low that the bowing forehead actually is supposed to knock the ground. Then the women smilingly beckoned and, with curiously birdlike, tripping little steps, led us across the courtyard, and the crowd made way before us. We went another considerable distance through the twilit palace city—along galleries and through cloisters and across other open courtyards and down corridors and over terraces—until the women again did the ko-tou at the guest pavilion. It had a seemingly blank wall of translucent oiled paper in frames of wood filigree, but the women easily opened it by sliding two panels apart and aside, and bowed us in. Our chambers were three bedrooms and a sitting room, en suite, lavishly decorated and ornamented, with an ornate brazier already alight—burning clean charcoal, not animal dung or the smoky kara coals. One of the women began turning down our beds—real beds, high standing and piled higher with downy quilts and pillows—while another set water to heat on the b
razier for our baths and the third began bringing in trays of already hot food from some kitchen somewhere.
We fell first on the food, almost snatching and stabbing with our nimble-tong sticks, for we were hungry and it was fine fare: bits of steamed shoat in a garlic sauce, pickled mustard greens cooked with broad beans, the familiar miàn pasta, a porridge very like our Venetian chestnut-meal polenta, a cha flavored with almonds and, for the sweet, red-candied little crabapples impaled on twigs for ease of eating. Then, in our separate rooms, we bathed all over—or got bathed, I should say. My father and uncle seemed to accept those ministrations as indifferently as if the young women had been male rubbers in a hammam. But it was the first time I had been so served by a female since the long-ago days of Zia Zulià, and I felt both embarrassment and titillation.
To distract myself, I watched the maid instead of what she was doing to me. She was a young woman of the Han, perhaps a little older than I, but at that time I knew not how to gauge the age of such alien beings. She was far better dressed than any Western servant would have been, but also was much more meek and docile and solicitous than any Western servant.
She had face and hands of ivory tint, an upswept mass of blue-black hair, barely perceptible eyebrows, no apparent eyelashes, and eyes also invisible because their opening was so narrow and she kept them always downcast. She had rosebud lips, red and dewy-looking, but a nose almost nonexistent. (I was beginning to resign myself to never seeing a shapely Verona-style nose in these lands.) Her ivory face was at the moment marred by a smudge on her forehead, from her ko-tou in the courtyard. However, a small imperfection in a woman can sometimes be a most appealing feature. I began to wish very much that I could see what the rest of the young woman looked like, under her many layers of brocade —stole and robe and gown and sashes and ties and other furbelows.
I was tempted to suggest that, as soon as she had me clean all over, she might serve me in other ways. But I did not. I could not speak her language, and the necessary gestures of suggestion might have been taken as more offensive than inviting. Also, I did not know how liberal or how strict the local conventions might be in regard to such things. So I decided prudence was called for, and, when she finished my bath and made the ko-tou, I let her depart. The hour was still early, but the day had been a tiring one. My combined fatigue of traveling, excitement at having finally arrived, and languor induced by the bath put me immediately to sleep. I dreamed that I was undressing the Han maidservant like a toy doll, layer by layer, and when the last garment was peeled away she suddenly became that other toy: that bursting, blazing display called fiery trees and sparkling flowers.
In the morning, the same three women brought trays of food which they served upon our laps while we still lay in bed, and, while we broke our fast, prepared hot water to give us each another bath. I endured it without complaint, though I did think that two all-over bathings in the course of a single day was rather excessive. Then Nostril came, leading some of the stable hands carrying our travel packs. So, after the baths, we donned the finest and least worn clothes we owned. Those were our dashing Persian costumes—tulbands on our heads, embroidered waistcoats over loose shirts with tight cuffs, kamarbands around our middles, and ample pai-jamah tucked into well-cut boots. Our three maids giggled, and nervously put their hands over their mouths, as Han women always do when they laugh, but they hastened to indicate that they were tittering in admiration of our handsomeness.
Then arrived our elderly Han guide of the evening before—this time he introduced himself: Lin-ngan, the Court Mathematician—and led us from the pavilion. Now, in full morning light, I could better appreciate our surroundings, as we went along arcades and colonnades and through vine-trellised bowers and along porticoes overhung by curly-edged roof eaves and along terraces that overlooked flower-filled gardens and over high-arched bridges that spanned lotus ponds and little streams in which golden fish swam. In every place and passage we saw servants, most of them Han, male and female, richly garbed but timorously hastening on their errands, and many Mongol guardsmen in dress uniforms, standing rigid as statues but holding weapons which they looked ready to use, and we saw the occasional strolling noble or elder or courtier, as dignified and sumptuously robed and important-appearing as our guide Lin-ngan, with whom they exchanged ceremonious nods in passing.
All the unwalled passages open to the air had intricately carved and fretted balustrades and exquisitely sculptured pillars and hanging, tinkling wind chimes and silk tassels swishing like horses’ tails. All the enclosed passages where the sun did not enter were lighted by tinted Muscovy-glass lanterns like soft-colored moons, and they glowed with a lovely diffuse light, because every such passage was misted by the fragrant smoke of burning incense. And all the passages, open or enclosed, were decorated with standing objects of art: elegant marble sundials and lacquered screens and figured gongs and images of lions and horses and dragons and other animals which I could not recognize, and great urns of bronze and vases of porcelain and jade, overflowing with cut flowers.
We crossed again the gateside courtyard by which we had entered on the previous evening, and it was again or still thronged with saddle horses and pack asses and camels and carts and wagons and palanquins and people. Among that press, I happened to see two Han men just dismounting from mules and, though they were but two faces in an innumerable crowd, I had a vague sense of having seen those men before. After leading us some way farther, old Lin-ngan brought us finally to a south-facing pair of immense doors, chased and gilded and lacquered in many colors, doors so massive in size and so weighty with metal studs and bosses that they might have been intended to keep giants out—or in. Pausing with his wisp of a hand on one of the formidable wrought-dragon handles, Lin-ngan said in his whisper of a voice:
“This is the Cheng, the Hall of Justice, and this is the hour of the Khakhan’s dispensing judgment to plaintiffs and supplicants and miscreants. If you will but attend until that is concluded, my Lords Polo, he wishes to make his greetings immediately afterward.”
The frail old man, with no apparent effort, swung open the ponderous doors—they must have been cleverly counterpoised and on well-oiled hinges—and bowed us inside. He followed us in and closed the door behind us, and remained standing with us to provide helpful interpretations of what was going on in the hall.
The Cheng was a tremendous and lofty chamber, fully as big as an indoor courtyard, its ceiling held up by carved and gilded columns, its walls paneled with red leather, but its floor space empty of furniture. At the far end was a raised platform and on that a substantial thronelike chair, flanked by rows of lower and less elegantly upholstered chairs. There were dignitaries occupying all those seats, and in the shadows behind the dais were other figures standing and moving about. Between us and the platform knelt a great crowd of petitioners, enough to fill the chamber from wall to wall, most of them in coarse peasant dress but others in noble raiment.
Even from the distance at which we stood, I knew the man seated centrally on the dais. I would have known him even if he had been shabbily clothed and crammed ignominiously among the ranks of commoners on the chamber floor. The Khan Kubilai needed not his elevated throne nor his gold-threaded, fur-trimmed silk robes to proclaim himself; his sovereignty was implicit in the upright way he sat, as if he still were astride a battle charger, and in the strength of his craggy face and in the forcefulness of his voice, though he spoke only infrequently and in low tones. The men in the chairs to either side of him were almost as well dressed, but their manner made evident that they were subordinates. Our guide Lin-ngan, pointing discreetly and murmuring quietly, explained who they all were.
“One is the official called Suo-ke, which means the Tongue. Four are the Khakhan’s secretary scribes who record on scrolls the proceedings here. Eight are ministers of the Khakhan, two each of four ascending degrees. Behind the dais, those running about are relays of clerks who fetch documents from the Cheng archives, when any are needed for referenc
e.”
The one called Tongue of the Cheng was continuously occupied, leaning down from the platform to hear a petitioner, then turning to converse with one or another of the ministers. And those eight ministers also were continuously busy, consulting with the Tongue, bidding clerks bring them documents, peering into those papers and scrolls, consulting among themselves and occasionally with the Khakhan. But the four secretaries seemed only now and then to bestir themselves to write anything on their papers. I commented that it seemed odd: the lordly ministers of the Cheng working harder than the mere secretaries.
“Yes,” said Master Lin-ngan. “The scribes do not trouble to write down anything of these proceedings except the words spoken by the Khan Kubilai himself. Everything else is but preliminary discussion, for the Khakhan’s words sum up and distill and supersede all other words spoken.”
Such a vast room with so many people in it might have been cacophonous and echoing, but the crowd was quiet and orderly, like a congregation in church. Only one person at a time went up to the dais, and he spoke only to the official called the Tongue, and in a murmur so respectful or fearful that we in the back of the room could hear nothing that passed until, after all the deliberations, the Tongue announced the judgment for all to know.
Lin-ngan said, “During the Cheng, no one but the Tongue ever addresses the Khan Kubilai directly, nor ever is directly addressed by him. A supplicant or prosecutor puts his case to the Tongue—who, incidentally, is so called because he is fluent in all the languages of the realm. The Tongue then puts the case to one of the two ministers of least degree. If that official deems it a subject of sufficient importance, he will refer it upward. At whatever level, and after whatever precedents are consulted, an adjudication is suggested and told to the Tongue, who then tells it to the Khakhan. He may give assent, or make some slight change in the ruling, or controvert it completely. Then the Tongue pronounces aloud that final decree to the persons concerned and to all within hearing —damages to be paid to a plaintiff, or to be exacted from a defendant, or a punishment laid on, or sometimes a dismissal of the whole affair—and the case is closed forever.”