The Journeyer

  He was looking keenly at me, as if to see whether I flinched from the prospect of hard work, so I made bold to say:

  “The Khakhan does me great honor if he asks only drudgery of me. So much greater the honor, Sire, if the drudgery is a preparation for some task of significance.”

  “Be not too eager to accede. Your uncles, I hear, are planning some trading enterprises. That should be easier work, and profitable, and probably more safe and secure than what I may require of you. So I give you permission to stay in association with your uncles, if you prefer.”

  “Thank you, Sire. But if I valued only safety and security I would not have left home.”

  “Ah, yes. It is truly said: He who would climb high must leave much behind.”

  Chingkim added, “It is also said: For a man of fortitude there are nowhere any walls, only avenues.”

  I decided I would ask my father if it was here in Kithai that he had got crammed so full of proverbs that he continually overflowed.

  “Let me say this, then, young Polo,” Kubilai went on. “I would not ask you to puzzle out for me how that earthquake engine performs its function—and that would be a difficult task enough—but I will ask of you something even harder. I wish you to learn as much as you can about the workings of my court and my government, which are infinitely more intricate than the insides of that mysterious urn.”

  “I am at your command, Sire.”

  “Come here to this window.” He led the way to it. Like those in my quarters, it was not of transparent glass, but of the shimmery, only translucent Muscovy glass, set in a much curlicued frame. He unlatched it, swung it open and said, “Look there.”

  We were looking down onto a considerable extent of the palace grounds which I had not yet visited, for this part was still under construction, only an expanse of yellow earth littered with piles of wall stones and paving stones and barrows and tools and gangs of sweating slaves and—

  “Amoredèi!” I exclaimed. “What are those gigantic beasts? Why do their horns grow so oddly?”

  “Foolish Ferenghi, those are not horns, those are the tusks from which come ivory. That animal, in the southern tropics where it comes from, is called a gajah. There is no Mongol word for it.”

  Chingkim supplied the Farsi word, “Fil,” and I knew that one.

  “Elephants!” I breathed, marveling. “Of course! I have seen a drawing of one, but the drawing cannot have been very good.”

  “Never mind the gajah,” said Kubilai. “Do you see what they are piling up?”

  “It looks like a great mountain of kara blocks, Sire.”

  “It is. The Court Architect is building for me an extensive park out there, and I instructed him to put a hill in it. I have also instructed him to plant much grass on it. Have you seen the grass in my other courtyards?”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “You remarked nothing distinctive about it?”

  “I fear not, Sire. It looked just like the same grass we have traveled through, for countless thousands of li.”

  “That is its distinction—that it is not an ornamental garden growth. It is the simple, ordinary, sweet grass of the great plains where I was born and grew up.”

  “I am sorry, Sire, but if I am supposed to draw some lesson from this …”

  “My cousin the Ilkhan Kaidu told you that I had degenerated to something less than a Mongol. In a sense, he was right.”

  “Sire!”

  “In a sense. I did get down from my horse to do the ruling of these domains. In doing so, I have found admirable many things of the cultured Han, and I have embraced them. I try to be more mannerly than uncouth, more diplomatic than demanding, more of an ordained emperor than an occupying warlord. In all those ways, I have changed from being a Mongol of Kaidu’s kind. But I do not forget or repudiate my origins, my warrior days, my Mongol blood. That hill says it all.”

  “I regret, Sire,” I said, “that the example still eludes my understanding.”

  He said to his son, “Explain it, Chingkim.”

  “You see, Marco, the hill will be a pleasure park, with terraces and walks and willowed waterfalls and comely pavilions cunningly set here and there. The whole thing will be an ornament to the palace grounds. In that, it is very Han, and reflects our admiration of Han art. But it will be more. The Architect could have mounded it of the local yellow earth, but my Royal Father commanded kara. The burnable rock will probably never be needed, but just in case this palace should ever come under siege, we will have there an unlimited supply of fuel. That is a warrior’s thinking. And the whole hill, roundabout the buildings and streams and flower beds, will be greened over by plains grass. A living reminder to us of our Mongol heritage.”

  “Ah!” I said. “Now it all is clear.”

  “The Han have a concise proverb,” said Kubilai. “Bai wen buru yi jian. To hear tell a hundred times is not as good as once seeing. You have seen. So now let me speak of another aspect of rulership.”

  We returned to our seats. In response to some inaudible summons, the maidservant glided in and refilled our goblets.

  The Khakhan resumed, “There are times when I, too-like you, Marco Polo—can taste the attitudes of other people. You have expressed your willingness to join my retinue, but I wonder if I taste in you a lingering trace of your disapprobation.”

  “Sire?” I said, quite jolted by his bluntness. “Who am I, Sire, to disapprove of the Khan of All Khans? Why, even for me to approve would be presumptuous.”

  He said, “I was informed of your visit to the Fondler’s cavern.” I must have cast an involuntary glance, for he went on, “I am aware that Chingkim was with you, but it was not he who told. I gather that you were dismayed by my treatment of Kaidu’s two men.”

  “I might have hoped, Sire, that their treatment had been a little less extreme.”

  “You do not tame a wolf by pulling one of his teeth.”

  “They had been my companions, Sire, and they did nothing lupine during that time.”

  “On arrival here, they were hospitably quartered with my own palace guards. A Mongol trooper is not ordinarily garrulous, but those two asked a great many and very searching questions of their barrackmates. My men answered only evasively, so those two would not have taken much intelligence home with them, anyway. You knew that I had sent spies into Kaidu’s lands. Did you think him incapable of doing the same?”

  “I did not know—” I gasped. “I did not think—”

  “As ruler of a far-spread empire, I must rule over a considerable diversity of peoples, and try to bear in mind their peculiarities. The Han are patient and devious, the Persians are couched lions and all other Muslims are rabid sheep, the Armeniyans are blustering grovelers, and so on. I may not always deal with all of them as I ought. But the Mongols I understand very well. There I must rule with an iron hand, for in them I rule an iron people.”

  “Yes, Sire,” I said weakly.

  “Have you reservations about my treatment of any others?”

  “Well,” I said, for it seemed he already knew, “I thought—that day in the Cheng—you dismissed those starving Ho-nan farmers rather brusquely.”

  Just as brusquely now, he said, “I do not help those in trouble who snivel for help. I prefer to reward those who survive the trouble. Any man who must be kept alive is generally not worth the keeping. When people are stricken with either a sudden calamity or a long siege of misfortune, the best and most worthwhile will survive. The remainder are dispensable.”

  “But were they asking for a favor, Sire, or only a fair chance?”

  “In my experience, when a runt piglet squeals for a fair chance at the teat, he really means a head start. Think about it.”

  I thought about it. My thoughts took me a long way back in time—to when I was a child, and was trying to help the survival of the boat children. The pinched, pretty face of little Doris came to my memory.

  I said, “Sire, when you speak of feckless, sniveling men and women, no one cou
ld disagree. But starving children?”

  “If they are the offspring of the dispensable, they too are dispensable. Realize this, Marco Polo. Children are the most easily and cheaply renewed resource in the world. Cut down a tree for timber; it takes nearly a lifetime to replace. Dig kara from the ground for burning; it is gone forever. But if a child is lost in a famine or flood, what is required for its replacement? A man and a woman and less than a year’s time. If the man and woman are the strong and capable who have defied the disaster, the better the replacement child is likely to be. Have you ever killed a man, Marco Polo?”

  I blinked and said, “Yes, Sire, I have.”

  “Good. A man better deserves the space he occupies on this earth if he has cleared that space for his occupancy. There is only so much space on this earth, only so much game to hunt and grass for pasturage and kara to burn and wood to build with. Before we Mongols took Kithai, there were one hundred million people living here, the Han and their related races. Now there are only half that many, according to my Han counselors, who are anxious for their countrymen to multiply again. If I will relax some of my strictures, they say, the population will soon again be what it was. They assure me that a single mou of land is sufficient to feed and support an entire Han family. To which I retort: would that family not feed better if it had two mou of land? Or three, or five? The family would be better nourished, healthier, probably happier. The sad fact is that the fifty or so million who perished in the years of conquest were mostly the best of the Han—the soldiers, the young and strong and vital. Should I now let them be replaced with mere indiscriminate spawning? No, I will not. I think the former rulers here liked to count heads only, and boast that they ruled great swarming numbers. I had rather boast that I rule a populace of quality, not quantity.”

  “You would be envied by many other rulers, Sire,” I murmured.

  “As to my manner of ruling them, let me say this. I am again unlike Kaidu in that I can recognize some limitations in us Mongols, and some superiorities in other nationalities. We Mongols excel in action, in ambition, in the dreaming of bold dreams and the making of grand plans—and in military affairs, most certainly. So for my ministers of overall administration I have mostly Mongols. But the Han know their own country and countrymen best, so I have recruited many Han for my ministries dealing with Kithai’s internal management. The Han are also incredibly adept in matters mathematical.”

  “Like the regulation of the thirty sexual postures,” said Chingkim, with a laugh.

  “However,” Kubilai went on, “the Han would naturally cheat me if I put them in charge of revenues. So for those offices I have Muslim Arabs and Persians, who are almost the equal of the Han when it comes to finances. I have let the Muslims establish what they call an Ortaq, a net of Muslim agents dispersed over all Kithai to supervise its trade and commerce. They are very good at exploiting the material resources of this land and the talents of its natives. So I let the Muslims do the squeezing and I take a specified share of the Ortaq’s profits. That is much easier for me than to levy a multitude of separate taxes on separate products and transactions. Vakh, I have enough trouble collecting the simple land and property taxes due me from the Han.”

  I asked, “Do not the natives chafe at having outlanders supervising them?”

  Chingkim said, “They have always had outlanders over them, Marco. The Han emperors long ago devised an admirable system. Every magistrate and tax collector, every provincial official of every sort, was always sent to serve somewhere other than his birthplace, to ensure that in his duties and dealings and gouges he would not favor his relatives. Also, he was never let to serve more than three years in any post before being moved on somewhere else. That was to ensure his not making close friends and cronies whom he might favor. So in any province, town or village, the natives always had outsiders governing. Probably they find our Muslim minions only a trifle more foreign.”

  I said, “Besides Arabs and Persians, I have seen men of other nationalities around the palace.”

  “Yes,” said the Khakhan. “For lesser officers of the court—the Winemaster, the Firemaster, the Goldsmith and such—I simply install the men who perform those functions most ably, whether they be Han, Muslims, Ferenghi, Jews, whatever.”

  “It all sounds most sensible and efficient, Sire.”

  “You are to ascertain whether that is so. You are to do it by exploring the chambers and halls and counting rooms from which the Khanate is administered. I have instructed Chingkim to introduce you to every official and courtier of every degree, and he will instruct them to speak freely to you of their offices and duties. You will be paid a liberal stipend, and I will set an hour each week when you will report to me. Thus I will judge how well you are learning and, more important, how well you are perceiving the taste of things.”

  “I will do my best, Sire,” I said, and Chingkim and I made the perfunctory ko-tou we were permitted, and we left the room.

  I had already determined that, with my first report to the Khakhan after my very first week of employment, I would make sure to astonish him—and I did. When I called upon him the next time, a week or so later, I said:

  “I will show you, Sire, how the earthquake engine works. You see—here—suspended down the throat of the vase is this heavy pendulum. It is daintily hung, but it does not move, no matter how much jumping or banging goes on in this room. Only if the whole great urn trembles, which is to say the whole ponderous weight of this palace building, then does that trembling make the pendulum seem to move. In reality, it hangs steady and still, and its apparent slight displacement is caused by the imperceptible quiver of its container. Thus, when a remote earthquake sends the least tremor through the earth and the palace and the floor and the vase, that tremor leans the pendulum’s pressure against one of these delicate linkages—you see, there are eight—and thereby loosens the hinged jaw of one of the dragons sufficiently that it lets go of its pearl.”

  “I see. Yes. Very clever, my Court Goldsmith. And you, too, Marco Polo. You apprehended that the haughty Khakhan would never demean himself to confess ignorance to a mere smith and plead for an explanation. So you did it in my stead. Your taste perception is still very good.”

  5.

  BUT those gratifying words came later. On the day Chingkim and I left his Royal Father’s presence, the Prince said cheerfully to me, “Well? Which high or lowly courtier would you like to interrogate first?” And when I requested audience with the Court Goldsmith, he said, “Curious choice, but very well. That gentleman is often in his noisy forge, which is no place for talking. I will see that he awaits us in his quieter studio workshop. I will call for you in an hour.”

  So I went then to the suite of my own father, to tell him of my new situation. I found him sitting and being fanned by one of his women servants. He waved toward an inner room and said, “Your Uncle Mafio is in yonder, closeted with some Han physicians we knew when we were here before. Having them appraise his physical condition.”

  I sat down to share the being fanned, and I told him all that had transpired during my interview with the Khan Kubilai, and asked if I had his parental permission to turn courtier instead of trader for a while.

  “By all means,” he said warmly. “And I congratulate you on having won the Khakhan’s esteem. Your new situation, far from depriving me and your uncle of your active partnership, should redound to our good. A very apt illustration of the old proverb: chi fa per sè fa per tre.”

  I echoed, “Do for myself and I will do for all three? Then you and Uncle Mafio plan to stay in Kithai for a time?”

  “Indeed, yes. We are traveling traders, but we have been traveling for long enough; now we are eager to start trading. We have already applied to the Finance Minister Achmad for the necessary licenses and franchises to deal with the Muslims’ Ortaq. In that and other matters, Mafio and I may benefit from having you now as a friend at court. Surely you did not think, Marco, that we came all this way to turn right around
.”

  “I thought your prime concern was to take back to Venice the maps of the Silk Road and start to spur the East—West trade in general.”

  “Ah, well, as to that, we believe our Compagnia Polo ought to enjoy first advantage of the Silk Road before we throw it open to competition. Also, we ought to set a good example, to fire enthusiasm in the West. So we will stay here while we earn an estimable fortune, and send it home as it accumulates. With those riches, your Maregna Fiordelisa can dazzle the stay-at-homes and whet their appetite. Then, when we finally do go home, we will freely proffer our maps and experience and advice to all our confratelli in Venice and Constantinople.”

  “A fair plan, Father. But is it not likely to take a long time—to work up to a fortune from a very meager beginning? You and Uncle Mafio have no trading capital except our cods of musk and whatever zafràn still remains.”

  “The most fortunate of all merchants in the legends of Venice, the Jew Nascimbene, set forth with nothing to his name but a cat he picked up from the street. The fable tells that he landed in a kingdom overrun with mice, and by hiring out his cat he founded his fortune.”

  “There may be plenty of mice here in Kithai, Father, but there are also plenty of cats. Not least among the cats, I think, are the Muslims of the Ortaq. From what I have heard, they may be voracious.”

  “Thank you, Marco. As the saying goes, a man warned is already armed. But we are not starting quite so small as did Nascimbene. In addition to our musk, Mafio and I have also the investment we left on deposit here during our earlier visit.”

  “Oh? I did not know.”

  “Quite literally on deposit—planted in the ground. You see, we brought crocus culms on that journey, too. Kubilai kindly granted us a tract of farmland in the province of Ho-pei, where the climate is benign, and a number of Han slaves and overseers, whom we instructed in the methods of cultivation. According to report, we have now a quite extensive crocus plantation and already a fair stock of zafràn pressed into bricks or dried into hay. That commodity being still a novelty throughout the East, and we having a monopoly—well!”