I perceived that this Cheng of Khanbalik was not like the Daiwan of Baghdad, where every case had been a matter for discussion and mutual agreement among the Shah and his wazir and an assortment of officious Muslim imams and muftis. Here, the cases might be argued first among the ministers, but every single verdict was finally at the sole discretion of the Khan Kubilai, and his pronouncement was not to be disputed or appealed. I also perceived that his verdicts were sometimes witty or whimsical, but sometimes appalling in their cruel inventiveness.
Old Lin-ngan was at that moment saying, “The farmer who just petitioned the Cheng is a delegate sent by a whole district of farmers in the province of Ho-nan. He brings word that the rice fields have been chewed clean by a plague of locusts. A famine is on the land and the farm families are starving. The delegate asks relief for the people of Ho-nan and inquires what might be done. Regard, the ministers have discussed the problem and referred it to the Khakhan, and now the Tongue will deliver the Khakhan’s decree.”
The Tongue did, in a bellow of Han that I could not understand, but Lin-ngan translated:
“The Khan Kubilai speaks thus. With all that rice inside them, the locusts should be delicious. The families of Ho-nan have the Khakhan’s permission to eat the locusts. The Khan Kubilai has spoken.”
“By God,” muttered Uncle Mafio, “the old tyrant is just as flippantly imperious as I had remembered him.”
“Honey in his mouth and a dagger at his belt,” my father said admiringly.
The next case was that of a provincial notary named Xen-ning, responsible for recording deeds of land transfer and testaments of bequest and such things. He was accused, and found guilty, of having falsified his ledgers for his own aggrandizement, and the Tongue proclaimed and Lin-ngan translated the sentence accorded him:
“The Khan Kubilai speaks thus. You have lived all your life by words, Notary Xen-ning. Henceforth you shall live on them. You are to be imprisoned in a solitary cell, and at every mealtime you will be served pieces of paper inscribed ‘meat’ and ‘rice’ and ‘cha.’ Those will be your food and drink for as long as you can survive on them. The Khan Kubilai has spoken.”
“Truly,” said my father, “he has a tongue of scissors.”
The next and last case that morning was the matter of a woman taken in adultery. It would have been a thing too trivial for the Cheng’s consideration, said old Lin-ngan, except that she was a Mongol woman, and wife to a Mongol functionary of the Khanate, a certain Lord Amursama; therefore her crime was more heinous than if she had been a mere Han. Her outraged husband had stabbed her lover to death at the moment of discovery, said Lin-ngan, meaning that the miscreant had died too mercifully quickly and without the torment he deserved. So now the husband was petitioning the Cheng to decide a more salutary fate for his unfaithful wife. The cuckold’s petition was duly granted, and I trust it satisfied him. Lin-ngan translated:
“The Khan Kubilai speaks thus. The guilty Lady Amursama will be delivered to the Fondler—”
“The Fondler?” I exclaimed, and I laughed. “I thought she had just been delivered from one of those.”
“The Fondler,” the old man said stiffly, “is our name for the Court Executioner.”
“In Venice we more realistically call him the Meatmaker.”
“It so happens that in the Han language the term for physical torture, dong-xing, and the term for sexual arousal, dong-qing, are, as you have just heard, very similar in pronunciation.”
“Gèsu,” I muttered.
“I resume,” said Lin-ngan. “The wife will be delivered to the Fondler, accompanied by her betrayed husband. In the presence of the Fondler, and if necessary employing his assistance, the husband will with his teeth and fingernails tear out his wife’s pudendal sphincter, and with that he will strangle her to death. The Khan Kubilai has spoken.”
Neither my father nor my uncle saw fit to comment on that decree, but I did. I scoffed knowingly:
“Vakh! This is pure show. The Khakhan is well aware that we are present. He is only making such eccentric judgments to impress and confound us. Just as the Ilkhan Kaidu did when he spat in his guardsman’s mouth.”
My father and the Mathematician Lin-ngan gave me looks askance, and my uncle growled, “Brash upstart! Do you really think that the Khan of All Khans would exert himself to impress any human being alive? Least of all, some unimportant wretches from an inconsiderable cranny of the world far beyond his domains?”
I made no reply, but neither did I put on a contrite look, being sure that my disparaging opinion would eventually be confirmed. But it never was. Uncle Mafio was right, of course, and I was wrong, and I would soon know how foolishly I had misread the Khakhan’s temperament.
But at that moment the Cheng was emptying. The huddled ruck of petitioners humped to their feet and shuffled out through the door by which we had entered, and the presiding justices at the dais, all except the Khakhan, disappeared through some doorway at that end of the hall. When there was no one left between him and us except his ring of guards, Lin-ngan said, “The Khakhan beckons. Let us approach.”
Following the Mathematician’s example, we all knelt to make the ko-tou obeisance to the Khakhan. But before we had folded far enough to put our foreheads to the floor, he said in a boomingly hearty voice:
“Rise! Stand! Old friends, welcome back to Kithai!”
He spoke in Mongol, and I never afterwards heard him speak anything else, so I do not know if he was acquainted with Trade Farsi or any others of the multifarious languages employed in his realm, and I never heard anyone else address him in anything but his native Mongol. He did not embrace my father or uncle in the fashion of Venetian friends meeting, but he did clap each of them on the shoulder with a big, heavily beringed hand.
“It is good to see you again, Brothers Polo. How fared you in the journeying, uu? Is this the first of my priests, uu? How young he looks, for a sage cleric!”
“No, Sire,” said my father. “This is my son Marco, also now an experienced journeyer. He, like us, puts himself at the service of the Khakhan.”
“Then welcome is he, as well,” said Kubilai, nodding amiably to me. “But the priests, friend Nicolò, do they follow behind you, uu?”
My father and uncle explained apologetically, but not abjectly, that we had failed to bring the requested one hundred missionary priests—or any priests at all—because they had had the misfortune to return home during the papal interregnum and the consequent disarray of the Church hierarchy. (They did not mention the two faint-hearted Friars Preachers who had come no farther than the Levant.) While they explained, I took the opportunity to look closely at this most powerful monarch in the world.
The Khan of All Khans was then just short of his sixtieth birthday, an age which in the West would have counted him an ancient, but he was still a hale and sturdy specimen of mature manhood. For a crown, he wore a simple gold morion helmet, like an inverted soup bowl, with nape and jugular lappets depending from its back and sides. His hair, what I could see of it under the morion, was gray but still thick. His full mustache and his beard, which was close-trimmed in the style worn by shipwrights, were more pepper than salt. His eyes were rather round, for a Mongol, and bright with intelligence. His ruddy complexion was weathered but not wrinkled, as if his face had been carved from well-seasoned walnut. His nose was his only unhandsome feature, it being short like those of all Mongols, but also bulbous and quite red. His garments were all of splendid silks, thickly brocaded with figures and patterns, and they covered a figure that was stout but nowise suety. On his feet were soft boots of a peculiar leather; I learned later that they were made from the skin of a certain fish, which is alleged to allay the pains of gout, the only affliction I ever heard the Khakhan complain of.
“Well,” he said, when my father and uncle had finished, “perhaps your Church of Rome shows a cunning wisdom in keeping close its mysteries.”
I was still holding my newly formed opinion that the Khan Ku
bilai was like any other mortal—as evidenced by his posturings for our benefit during the proceedings of the Cheng—and now he seemed to validate that opinion, for he went on talking, as chattily as any ordinary man making idle conversation with friends.
“Yes, your Church may be right not to send missionaries here. When it comes to religion, I often think that none is better than too much. We already have Nestorian Christians, and they are ubiquitous and vociferous, to the point of pestilence. Even my old mother, the Dowager Khatun Sorghaktani, who long ago converted to that faith, is still so besotted with it that she harangues me and every other pagan she meets. Our courtiers are lately desperate to avoid meeting her in the corridors. Such fanaticism defeats its own aims. So, yes, I believe your Roman Christian Church may well attract more converts if it pretends to stand aloof from the herd. That is the way of the Jews, you know. Thus the few pagans who do get accepted into Judaism can feel flattered and honored by the fact.”
“Oh, please, Sire,” my father said anxiously. “Do not compare the True Faith with the heretic Nestorian sect. And do not equate it with the despised Judaism. Blame me and Mafio, if you will, for our error of timing. But at any and all other times, I sincerely assure you, the Church of Rome holds open its warm embrace to enfold all who desire salvation.”
The Khakhan said sharply, “Why, uu?”
That was my first experience of that particular one of Kubilai’s attributes, but I was often to remark it thereafter. The Khakhan could be as congenial and discursive and loquacious as an old woman, when it suited his mood and purpose. But when he wanted to know something, when he wanted an answer, when he sought a particle of information, he could suddenly emerge from the clouds of garrulity—his own or a whole roomful of other people’s—and swoop like a falcon to strike to the meat of a matter.
“Why?” echoed Uncle Mafio, taken aback. “Why does Christianity seek to save all mankind?”
“But we told you years ago, Sire,” said my father. “The faith which preaches love and which was founded on Jesus, the Christ and Savior, is the only hope of bringing about perpetual peace on earth, and plenty, and ease of body and mind and soul, and good will among men. And after life, an eternity of bliss in the Bosom of Our Lord.”
I thought my father had put the case for Christianity as well as any ordained cleric could have done. But the Khakhan only smiled sadly and sighed.
“I had hoped you would bring learned men of persuasive arguments, good Brothers Polo. Fond as I am of you, and much as I respect your own convictions, I fear that you—like my dowager mother and like every missionary I have ever met—offer only unsupported asseveration.”
Before my father or uncle could profess further, Kubilai launched into another of his periphrases:
“I do indeed remember your telling me how your Jesus came to earth, with His message and His promise. That was more than one thousand and two hundred years ago, you said. Well, I myself have lived long, and I have studied the histories of times before my own. In all ages, it seems, all sorts of religions have held out promises of worldwide peace and bounty and good health and brotherly love and pervading happiness—and some kind of Heaven hereafter. About the hereafter I know nothing. But of my own knowledge, most of the people on this earth, including those who pray and worship with sincerest faith and devotion, remain poor and sickly and unhappy and unfulfilled and in utter detestation of each other—even when they are not actively at war, which is seldom.”
My father opened his mouth, perhaps to comment on the incongruity of a Mongol deploring war, but the Khakhan went on:
“The Han people tell a legend about a bird called the jing-wei. Since the beginning of time, the jing-wei has been carrying pebbles in its beak, to fill in the limitless, bottomless Sea of Kithai and make solid land of it, and the jing-wei will continue that futile endeavor until the other end of time. So it must be, I think, with faiths and religions and devotions. You can hardly deny that your own Christian Church has been playing the jing-wei bird for twelve whole centuries now—forever futile, forever fatuously promising what it can never provide.”
“Never, Sire?” said my father. “Enough pebbles will fill a sea. Even the Sea of Kithai, in time.”
“Never, friend Nicolò,” the Khakhan said flatly. “Our learned cosmographers have proved that the world is more sea than land. There do not exist enough pebbles.”
“Facts cannot prevail against faith, Sire.”
“Nor against adamant folly, I fear. Well, well, enough of this. You are men in whom we placed our trust, and you have failed that trust in not fetching the priests requested. However, it is a custom here: never to dispraise men of good breeding in the presence of others.” He turned to the Mathematician, who had been listening to those exchanges with an expression of polite boredom. “Master Lin-ngan, will you kindly retire, uu? Leave me alone with these Masters Polo while I chastise them for their nonfeasance.”
I was startled and angry and a little uneasy. So that was why he had had us present in the Cheng to observe his capricious judgments—to have us already fearful and trembling even before we heard his judgment on us. Had we come all this weary way only for some frightful punishment? But he surprised me again. When Lin-ngan had gone, he chuckled and said:
“There. All the Han are notorious for their swift conveyance of gossip, and Lin-ngan is a true Han. The whole court already knew of your priestly mission, and now it will be told that our conversation concerned nothing else. Therefore, let us proceed to the nothing-else.”
Uncle Mafio said, smiling, “There are numerous nothing-elses to speak of, Sire. Which first?”
“I am told that your road brought you right into the hand of my cousin Kaidu, and that he closed his fist on you for a time.”
“A brief delay only, Sire,” said my father, and waved toward me. “Marco yonder most ingeniously aided us to elude him, but we will tell you of that another time. Kaidu wished to plunder the gifts we have brought you from your liege subjects the Shah of Persia and the Sultan of India Aryana. Your cousin might have confiscated everything, but for Marco.”
The Khakhan nodded again to me, only briefly, before he swung back to my father and uncle. “Kaidu took nothing from you, uu?”
“Nothing, Sire. At your command, we will have servants bring in and display for you the wealth of gold and jewels and finery—”
“Vakh!” the Khakhan interrupted. “Never mind the trinkets. What of the maps, uu? Besides the wretched priests, you promised to bring maps. Did you make them, uu? Did Kaidu filch them from you, uu? I would gladly have had him steal everything else but those!”
I was understandably bewildered by the several and rapid changes of topic under discussion. The Khakhan was not chastising us, but interrogating us, and on a matter until now unsuspected by me. I might have been sufficiently astonished to hear a man say vakh to a gift of trinkets that would purchase any duchy in Europe. But I was more astonished to learn that my father and uncle had all this time been engaged on a project more secret and important than just the procurement of missionaries.
“The maps are safe, Sire,” said my father. “It never occurred to Kaidu to think of any such things. And Mafio and I believe we have compiled the best maps yet done of the western and central regions of this continent—especially those regions held by the Ilkhan Kaidu.”
“Good … good … murmured Kubilai. “The maps drawn by the Han are unsurpassable, but they confine themselves to the Han lands. Those maps we captured from them in earlier years much aided the Mongol conquest of Kithai, and they will be of equal use as we march south against the Sung. But the Han have always ignored everything beyond their own borders as unworthy of consideration. If you have done your work well, then for the first time I have maps of the entire Silk Road into the farther reaches of my empire.”
Beaming with satisfaction, he looked about him and caught sight of me. Perhaps he took my vapid gawking for a look of stricken conscience, for he beamed even more broadly and sp
oke directly to me. “I have already promised, young Polo, never to use the maps in any Mongol campaign against the territory or the holdings of the Dogato of Venice.”
Then, turning again to my father and uncle, he said, “I will later arrange a private audience for us to sit together and examine the maps. In the meantime, a separate chamber and staff of servants have been appointed for each of you, conveniently close to my own in the main palace residence.” He added, rather as an afterthought, “Your nephew may reside in either suite, as you choose.”
(It is a curious thing, but for all Kubilai’s acuity in every other area of human knowledge and experience, he never, through all the years I knew him, bothered to remember of which elder Polo I was the son and of which the nephew.)
“For tonight,” he went on, “I have ordered a banquet of welcome, at which you will meet two other visitors newly come from the West, and we will all together discuss the vexing question of my insubordinate cousin Kaidu. Now Lin-ngan waits outside to escort you to your new quarters.”
We all began a ko-tou, and again—as he always would do—he bade us rise before we had prostrated ourselves very deeply, and he said, “Until tonight, friends Polo,” and we took our leave.
2
AS I say, that was my first realization that my father and uncle, in their assiduous making of maps, had been working at least partly for the Khan Kubilai—and this is the first time I have ever publicly revealed that fact. I did not mention it in the earlier chronicle of my travels and theirs, because at that time my father was still alive, and I hesitated to impute any suspicion that he might have served the Mongol Horde in ways inimical to our Christian West. However, as all men know, the Mongols never again have invaded or threatened the West. Our foremost enemies for many years have continued to be the Muslim Saracens, and the Mongols have frequently been our friendly allies against them.