The Journeyer

  “Nostril,” I said, as kindly as I could be. “This woman may have come down in the world, but not—” I stopped myself. I could not say “as low down as you.” I began again, “She may be now a slave, but she was once a princess, and you said you were only a drover then. Also, from what I have heard, she is handsome, or she once was.”

  “She is,” he said, and added feebly, “So was I … once.”

  Exasperated anew by his persistence in that old fiction, I said, “Has she seen you lately? Look at yourself! There you stand, as graceless as a camel-bird, pot-bellied, pig-eyed, with your finger picking your one nose hole. Tell me truthfully, since you spied out her identity have you made yourself known to this Princess Mar-Janah? Did she recognize you? Did she flee in revulsion, or merely burst out laughing?”

  “No,” he said, hanging his head. “I have not introduced myself. I have only worshiped her from afar. I was hoping that you would first say some words to her … to prepare her … to make her desire to know me … .”

  At which, it was I who burst out laughing. “It needed but this! I have never heard such effrontery. Asking me to pimp between one slave and another. What am I to tell her, Nostril?” I put on a wheedling voice, as if I were addressing the princess: “So far as I know, Your Highness, your adoring suitor does not at this moment suffer any shameful disease of his amative parts.” Then I said sternly, “What could I possibly tell, without such lying as to imperil my immortal soul, that could possibly make any female—let alone a former princess—look favorably on such a creature as I know you to be?”

  With preposterous dignity for such a creature, he said, “If the master would have the goodness to listen for just a little, I would tell some of the history of this affair.”

  “Tell, then, but make haste. I have things to do.”

  “It began twenty years ago in the Cappadocian capital city of Erzincan. True, she was a Turki princess, the daughter of King Kilij, and I was only a Sindi drover of horses in his employ. Neither he nor she knew it, probably, since I was only one of many stable servants they would have seen, whenever they called for a mount or a carriage. But I saw her, and then as now I worshiped her dumbly from afar. Nothing would ever have come of it, of course. Except that Allah caused both her and me to fall among Arab bandits—”

  “Oh, Nostril, no!” I pleaded. “Not another account of your heroics. I have had my laugh for the day.”

  “I will not dwell on the abduction episode, master. Sufficient to say that the princess had cause to notice me, then, and she regarded me with melting eyes. But when we had escaped from the Arabs and returned to Erzincan, her father rewarded me with a higher position in his service, which sent me into the countryside at a considerable remove from the palace.”

  “That,” I murmured, “I believe.”

  “And unhappily I once more fell among marauders. Kurdi slave-takers, this time. I was borne away, and I never saw Cappadocia or the princess again. I kept an ear open for every rumor and gossip from that part of the world, and I never heard of her marrying, so I still had some small cause for hopefulness. But then I heard of the wholesale slaughter of that Seljuk royal family, and I supposed she had died with the rest. Who knows, if I had been still at the palace when that occurred, what might not—?”

  “Please, Nostril.”

  “Yes, master. Well, if Mar-Janah was dead, I cared no longer what became of me. I was a slave—the lowest form of life—so I would be the lowest form of life. I endured every kind of humiliation, and I did not care. I invited humiliation. I even began to humiliate myself. I wallowed in humiliation. I would be the worst thing in the world, because I had lost the best. I became a wretch degraded and contemptible. I did not care that it cost me my handsomeness and my self-respect and the respect of all other men. I would not even have cared if it had cost me my vital parts, but, for some reason, none of my many masters ever thought to make me a eunuch. So I was still a man, but, having no hope of love, I abandoned myself to lust. I took anyone or anything accessible to a slave—and not many but vile things are. Thus I was when you found me, Master Marco, and thus I continued to be.”

  “Until now,” I said. “Let me finish for you, Nostril. Now that long lost love has reentered your life. Now you are going to change.”

  He surprised me by saying, “No. No, master, too many men have too often said that. None but a fool would believe that, and my master is no fool. So I will say instead that I wish only to change back. Back to what I was before I became … this Nostril.”

  I looked long at him, and I considered long before I spoke.

  “None but a wicked master would refuse a man the chance at that much, and I am not wicked. Indeed, I should be interested to see what it was that you once were.” I was also a little interested to see the draggled sloven he had set his heart on. She had to be a pitiful drab, of course, after eight or nine years of slavery among the Mongols, whatever she had begun as. “Very well. You wish me to apprise this Mar-Janah that her onetime hero still exists. I will do that much. How do I do it?”

  “I shall simply pass the word in the slave quarters that the Master Marco wishes to speak with her. And then, if you could find it in your compassionate generosity to say—”

  “I will tell no lies for you, Nostril. I promise only to skirt the nastier truths, insofar as I can.”

  “It is all I could ask. May Allah ever bless—”

  “Now I have other things to think about. Do not have her come here until after the New Year doings are done with.”

  When he had gone, I sat down to gaze at the huo-yao I had brought, and occasionally I dabbled my fingers in it, and now and again I shook one of the baskets, to see for myself how readily the white grains of saltpeter separated from among the black specks of charcoal and the yellow sulphur, and sank out of sight. That day—and for many days afterward, because other things took precedence—I did not do anything else with the flaming powder.

  That night, when I went to bed, and only Buyantu joined me, I grumbled, “What is this indisposition Biliktu is suffering? I saw her only hours ago in these rooms, and she appeared perfectly healthy. But it must be more than a month now since she has slept in this bed with me or with us. Is she avoiding me? Have I somehow displeased her?”

  Buyantu made only a teasing reply: “Do you miss her? Am I not enough for you? After all, my sister and I are identical. Hold me and see.” She snuggled into my arms. “There. You cannot complain that you yearn for what you are this moment holding. But, if you like, I give you leave to pretend that I am Biliktu, and I challenge you to tell me in what respect I am not.”

  She was right. When, in the dark, I pretended that she was her sister, she very well could have been, and I could hardly claim that I was being deprived.

  10.

  IN Venice, we do not take much account of any new year’s coming. It is merely the first day of March, on which we begin the next year’s calendar, and it is no cause for celebration unless it chances to fall on the day of Carnevale. But in Kithai every New Year was regarded as portentous, and had to be fittingly welcomed. So it was the excuse for festivities that consumed an entire month, lapping over from the old year into the new one. Like our Christian movable holy days, the entire Kithai calendar depends on the moon, so its First Day of the First Moon can fall any time between mid-January and mid-February. The celebrations commenced on the seventh night of the old year’s Twelfth Moon, when families sat down to partake of the traditional Eight-Ingredient Pudding, then exchanged gifts among themselves, their neighbors and friends and relatives.

  From that time on, there seemed to be some kind of observance every day and night. On the twenty-third day of that Twelfth Moon, for example, everyone set up a clamor to wish “bon viazo” to their kitchen god Nagatai, as he ostensibly ascended to Heaven to make his report on the household of which he was overseer. Since he allegedly does not return to his place over the hearth until the eve of the New Year, the people all took advantage of his absen
ce to indulge in libertine feasting and drinking and gambling and other things they would be afraid or ashamed to do under Nagatai’s scrutiny.

  The final day of the old year was the most frenetic of the whole season, that being the last day on which debts were to be collected and accounts settled. Every street leading to a pawnshop was clogged with people pledging, for a pitiful few tsien, their valuables, furniture, even the clothes they wore. Every other street was similarly crowded and turmoiled by the creditors dashing about in search of their debtors and the debtors dashing about in desperate search of some means either to pay them or avoid them. Everybody was chasing somebody, and himself was being chased by somebody else. There was much vociferation and loud abuse and blows exchanged and even, as Nostril had told me, the occasional self-immolation of a debtor no longer able to hold up his head—or his face, as the Han say.

  As that last day of the old year turned into night and became the eve of the First Day of the First Moon, it turned also into a night-long display of Master Shi’s fiery trees and sparkling flowers, in wondrous variety, accompanied by parades and street dances and tumultuous noise and the music of chimes and gongs and trumpets. When the New Year day dawned, the interminable festivities were tempered by their only token touch of a Lenten abstention, that being the one day of the year when all were forbidden to eat meat. And on the subsequent five days, no one was allowed to throw away anything at all. Even for a scullion to throw out the kitchen’s waste water would risk throwing out the household’s good fortune for the next year. Apart from those two gestures of austerity, the celebrating went on unceasingly, right through the fifteenth day of the First Moon.

  The common people put up new pictures of all their old gods, ceremoniously pasting them over the tattered old ones that had hung for the past year on their house doors and walls. Every family that could afford it paid a scribe to compose for them a “spring couplet,” likewise to be pasted up somewhere. The streets perpetually teemed with acrobats, masquers, stiltwalkers, storytellers, wrestlers, jugglers, hoop twirlers, fire eaters, astrologers and fortune-tellers, purveyors of every sort of food and drink, even “dancing lions”—each consisting of two extremely agile men inside a costume of gilt plaster and red cloth, doing some unbelievable and most unleonine contortions.

  In their temples, the Han priests of every religion rather unreligiously presided over public games of chance. These were attended by multitudes of players—creditors squandering their new gains, I assumed, and debtors trying to recoup their losses—and, most of them being drunk and wagering heavily and playing ineptly, their contributions no doubt supported all the temples and priests for the entire year to come. One game was merely the familiar throwing of dice. Another, called ma-jiang, was played with little bone tiles. Another game was played with stiff paper cards called zhi-pai.

  (I myself later got intrigued by the intricacies of the zhi-pai and learned to play all the games—for there are innumerable gambling pastimes possible with a pack of seventy-eight cards divided into orders of hearts, bells, leaves and acorns, and they subdivided into cards of points and coats and emblems. But, since I brought back a pack of the cards to Venice, and they have been so much admired and copied and, now called tarocchi, are so well and widely known, I need not expatiate on the zhi-pai. )

  The weeks of celebration concluded with the Feast of Lanterns, on the fifteenth day of the First Moon. In addition to everything else that was still going on in the streets of Khanbalik, every family vied that night to see which could flaunt the most marvelously made lantern. They paraded with their creations, of paper or silk or translucent horn or Muscovy glass, in shapes of balls, cubes, fans, little temples, all illuminated by candles or wick lamps inside.

  Toward midnight occurred the romping through the streets of a wonderful dragon. More than forty paces long, it was constructed of silk stiffened with ribs of cane, the ribs outlined in little stuck-on candles, and was carried by some fifty men, of whom only their dancing feet were visible, shod with shoes made to look like great claws. The head of the dragon was of plaster and wood, gilded and enameled, with flaring gold-and-blue eyes, silver horns, a green floss beard under its chin, a red velvet tongue lolling from its fearsome mouth. The head alone was so big and heavy that it required four men to carry, and to make it lunge at the people in the streets and champ its jaws at them. The whole dragon pranced and undulated and curvetted most realistically as it wound up one street and down another. And finally, when the last late reveler went off to bed or fell drunkenly unconscious in the open, the weary dragon also slithered back to its lair, and the New Year had officially begun.

  The city folk of Khanbalik had enjoyed a whole month of freedom from their more usual occupations. But the work of public servants, like the work of farmers, does not abate just because the calendar declares a holiday. The palace courtiers and government ministers, except for occasional ventures outside to watch the people’s enjoyments, went right on working through the whole festive season. I continued making my calls upon one after another of them, and every week having my audience with the Khan Kubilai, that he might judge the progress of my education. At every visit, I tried either to impress or astonish him with whatever new things I had learned. Sometimes, of course, I had nothing to report but a trifle like, “Did you know, Sire, that the eunuch Court Astrologer keeps his cast-off equipment preserved in a jar?”

  To which he replied, with some asperity, “Yes. It is rumored that, in doing his predictions, the old fool consults those pickles oftener than he does the stars.”

  But usually we talked of weightier matters. In one of our meetings, sometime after that New Year season, and after I had spent the foregoing week interviewing the eight Justices of the Cheng, I made so bold as to discuss with the Khakhan the laws and statutes by which his domain was regulated. The mode of that conversation was as interesting as its content, because we talked outdoors and in singular circumstances.

  The Court Architect and his slaves and his elephants had, by then, finished piling up the Kara Hill, and had covered it with soft turf, and the Master Gardener and his men had planted its lawns and flowers and trees and shrubs. None of those things was yet flourishing, so the hill still was quite bald. But many of its architectural additions were already done, and they, being in the Han style, gave the hill color enough. The Khakhan and Prince Chingkim were that day inspecting the latest work completed, and they invited me to accompany them. The hill’s newest adornment was a round pavilion about ten paces across, an edifice that was all curlicues: swooping roof and convoluted pillars and filigreed balustrades, not a single straight line about it. It was encircled by a tiled terrace, as wide across as the pavilion’s diameter, and that was encircled by a solid wall about twice man-high, its entire inner and outer surface a mosaic of gems, enamels, gilt, tesserae of jade and porcelains.

  The pavilion was sufficiently striking to the eye, but it had one feature apparent only to the ear. I do not know if the Court Architect had planned it so, or if it came about merely fortuitously. Two or more persons could stand anywhere within that encircling wall, at any distance apart, and, speaking even in a whisper, be able to hear each other perfectly well. The place later became known to all as the Echo Pavilion, but I believe the Khakhan, the Prince and I were the first to amuse ourselves with its peculiar property. We conversed by standing at three points equidistant inside the wall, some eighty feet from each other, none of us able to see each other around the pavilion in the middle, but all speaking in normal tones, and we conversed as easily as if we had been seated about a table indoors.

  I said, “The Justices of the Cheng read to me Kithai’s current code of laws, Sire. I thought some of them severe. I remember one which commanded that, if a crime is committed, the magistrate of the prefecture must find and punish the guilty party—or himself suffer the punishment specified by law for that crime.”

  “What is so severe about that?” asked Kubilai’s voice. “It only ensures that no magistrate shi
rks his duty.”

  “But is it not likely, Sire, that an innocent person is often punished, simply because somebody must be?”

  “And so?” said Chingkim’s voice. “The crime is requited, and all people know that any crime always will be. So the law tends to make all people shun all crime.”

  “But I have noticed,” I said, “that the Han people, when left to themselves, seem adequately to rely on their traditions of good manners to guide their behavior in all things, from everyday matters to those of the greatest gravity. Take common courtesy, for example. If a carter were to be so rude as to ask directions of a passerby without politely getting down from his wagon, he would at the least be told a wrong direction, if not reviled for his bad behavior.”

  “Ah, but would that reform him?” asked Kubilai’s voice. “As a good whipping would do?”

  “He need not be reformed, Sire, because he would never do such an unmannerly thing in the first place. Take another example: simple honesty. If a man walking along the road discovers an object someone has lost, he will not appropriate it, but stand guard over it. He will relinquish that guard duty to the next comer, and he to the next. That object will be sedulously kept safe until its loser comes back looking for it.”

  “You are talking now of happenstance,” said the Khakhan’s voice. “You began with crimes and laws.”

  “Very well, Sire, consider an actual tort. If one man is wronged by another, he does not run to a magistrate and demand forced redress. Indeed, the Han have a proverb: advising the dead to avoid damnation and the living to avoid the law court. If a man of the Han disgraces himself, he will take his own life in expiation, as I have seen often happen during the past New Year. If another man does him a grievous wrong, and his conscience does not soon resolve the matter, the victim will go and hang himself outside the guilty man’s door. The disgrace thus conferred on the transgressor is considered far worse than any revenge that could have been inflicted.”