“Long,” I said sympathetically. “It has been a long time.”
“Then one day he sent for me. He said you were on your way back, and we must prepare a suitable surprise with which to welcome you home. He wrote out two papers, and had me heavily veil myself—even more of an invisible woman—and I delivered them. One I gave to your slave to give to you. If you have seen it, you know it was not signed. The other paper he did sign, but not with his own yin, and that one I delivered some while later to the Captain of the Palace Guard. It was an order to arrest the woman Mar-Janah and take her to the Fondler.”
“Amoredèi!” I exclaimed in horror. “But … but … the guardsmen do not arrest and the Fondler does not punish just on someone’s whim! What was Mar-Janah charged with? What did the paper say? And how did the vile Wali sign it, if not with his own name?”
While Buyantu had been telling of occurrences, her voice had had some spirit in it, if only the spirit of a venomous snake taking satisfaction in malevolent accomplishment. But when I began demanding details, the spirit went out of her, and her voice got leaden and lifeless.
She said, “When the Khan is away from the court, the Minister Achmad is Vice-Regent. He has access to all the yins of office. I suppose he can use whichever he pleases, and sign it to any paper. He used the yin of the Armorer of the Palace Guard, who was the Lady Chao Ku-an, who was the former owner of the slave Mar-Janah. The order charged that the slave was a runaway, passing as a freewoman of property. The guardsmen would not question the written word of their own Armorer, and the Fondler questions nobody but his victims.”
I was still sputtering in appalled bewilderment. “But … but … even the Lady Chao—she is no paragon of virtue, but even she would refute an untrue charge illicitly made in her name.”
Buyantu said dully, “The Lady Chao died very shortly thereafter.”
“Oh. Yes. I had forgotten.”
“She probably never knew of the misuse of her official yin. In any case, she did not halt the proceedings, and now she never will.”
“No. How very convenient for the Arab. Tell me, Buyantu. Did he ever confide to you why he was taking so much trouble, and involving so many people—or eliminating them—on my account?”
“He said only ‘Hell is what hurts worst,’ if that means anything to you. It does not to me. He said it again this evening, when he sent me again to follow you up here and whisper that threat once more.”
I said between my teeth, “I think it is time I spread some of that Hell around.” Then a chilling realization struck me, and I exclaimed, “Time! How much time? Buyantu—quick, tell me—what punishment would the Fondler inflict for Mar-Janah’s alleged crime?”
She said, with indifference, “A slave posing as a free subject? I do not really know, but—”
“If it is not too severe, we still have hope,” I breathed.
“—but the Minister Achmad said that such a crime is tantamount to treason against the state.”
“Oh, dear God!” I groaned. “The penalty for treason is the Death of a Thousand! How—how long ago was Mar-Janah taken?”
“Let me think,” she said languidly. “It was after your slave had gone to catch up to you and give you the unsigned message. So it has been … about two months … two and a half … .”
“Sixty days … seventy-five …” I tried to calculate, though my mind was in a ferment. “The Fondler once said he could stretch out that punishment, when he had the leisure and was in the mood, to near a hundred days. And a beautiful woman in his clutches ought to put him in a most leisurely mood. There might yet be time. I must run!”
“Wait!” said Buyantu, seizing my sleeve. Again there came a trace of life into her voice, though not very fittingly, for what she said was, “Do not go until you have slain me.”
“I will not slay you, Buyantu.”
“You must! I have been dead all this long time. Now kill me, so I can lie down at last.”
“I will not.”
“You would not be punished for it, since you could justify it. But you will not even be charged—for you are slaying an invisible woman, nonexistent, already attested dead. Come! You must feel the same rage that I felt when you slew my love. I have been long working to your hurt, and now I have helped to send your lady friend to the Fondler. You have every reason to slay me.”
“I have more reason to let you live—and atone. You will be my proof of Achmad’s involvement in these filthy doings. There is no time now to explain. I must run. But I need you, Buyantu. Will you just stay here until I return? I will be as quick as I can.”
She said wearily, “If I cannot lie in my grave, what matter where I am?”
“Only wait for me. Try to believe that you owe me that much. Will you?”
She sighed and sank down, her back bowed against the inner curve of the Moon Gate. “What matter? I will wait.”
I went down the hill in long bounds, asking myself whether I ought first accost the instigating Achmad or the perpetrating Fondler. Better hasten first to the Fondler, and hope I could stay his hand. But would he still be working at this late hour? As I scurried through the subterranean tunnels toward his cavern chambers, I groped in my purse and tried to count my money by feel. Most of it was paper, but there were some coins of good gold. The Fondler might be wearying of his enjoyment by now, and be cheaply bribable. As it turned out, he was still at his labors, and was surprisingly amenable to my appeal—but not from either boredom or avarice.
I had to do a lot of shouting and pounding of my fist on a table and shaking of it at the austere and aloof chief of the chambers clerks, but he finally unbent and went to interrupt his master at his work. The Fondler came mincing out through the iron-studded door, fastidiously wiping his hands on a silk cloth. Restraining my impulse to throttle him then and there, I upended my purse on the table between us, and poured out all its contents, and said breathlessly, “Master Ping, you hold a Subject woman named Mar-Janah. I have this moment learned that she was unjustly condemned to you. Does she still live? Can I request a temporary cessation of due process?”
His eyes glittered as he studied me. “I have a warrant for her execution,” he said. “Do you bring a revoking warrant?”
“No, but I will get one.”
“Ah. When you do, then … .”
“I ask only that the proceedings be suspended until I can do so. That is—if the woman still lives. Does she?”
“Of course she lives,” he said haughtily. “I am not a butcher.” He even laughed and shook his head, as if I had foolishly disparaged his professional skill.
“Then do me the honor, Master Ping, of accepting this token of my appreciation.” I indicated the litter of money on the table. “Will that requite your kindness?”
He only grunted a noncommittal “Humpf,” but began swiftly picking out the gold coins from the pile, without seeming to look at what he was doing. For the first time, I noticed that his fingers had nails incredibly long and curved, like talons.
I said anxiously, “I understand that the woman was sentenced to the Death of a Thousand.”
Contemptuously disregarding the paper money, he scooped the coins into his belt purse, and said, “No.”
“No?” I echoed, hopefully.
“The warrant specified the Death Beyond a Thousand.”
I was briefly stunned, and then afraid to ask for elucidation. I said, “Well, can that be suspended for a time? Until I can fetch a revocation order from the Khakhan?”
“It can,” he said, rather too readily. “If you are certain that that is what you want. Mind you, Lord Marco—that is your name? I thought I remembered you. I am honest in my transactions, Lord Marco. I do not sell goods sight unseen. You had best come and take a look at what you are buying. I will refund your—token of appreciation—if you ask it.”
He turned and tripped across the chamber to the iron-studded door, and held it open for me, and I followed him into the inner chamber, and—dear God—I wish I had
not.
However, in my desperate urgency to rescue Mar-Janah, I had neglected to bear in mind certain things. She, simply in being a beautiful female Subject, would have inspired the Fondler to inflict his most infernal tortures, and to drag them out as cruelly long as possible. But more than that. The warrant would have told him that Mar-Janah was the spouse of one Ali Babar, and it would have been an easy matter for Master Ping to discover that Ali was the onetime slave who had visited these very chambers, to the Fondler’s extreme disgust. (He had said in revulsion, “Who … is … this?”) And Ping would have remembered that that slave was my slave, and that I had been an even more obnoxious visitor. (I had, not knowing that he understood Farsi, called him “this simpering enjoyer of other people’s torments.”) So he would have had every excuse for exerting himself to the utmost in his attentions to the condemned Subject, who was wife to the lowly slave of Marco Polo, who had once so brashly insulted him. And now he had the very same Marco Polo before him, abjectly suppliant and pleading and cringing. The Fondler was not just willing, but fiendishly eager and proud, to show me the handiwork he had wrought—and to let me realize that it had resulted, in no small part, from my own foolhardy impertinence.
In the stone-walled, torch-lighted, blood-warmed, gore-spattered, nauseously reeking inner chamber, Master Ping and I stood side by side and looked at the room’s central object, red and shiny and dripping and ever so slightly steaming. Or rather, I looked at it, and he looked sideways at me, gloating and waiting for my comment. I said nothing for a while. I could not have done, for I was repeatedly swallowing, determined not to let him hear me retch or see me vomit. So, probably to goad me, he began pedantically to explain the scene before us:
“You realize, I trust, that the Fondling has been going on for some time now. Observe the basket, and in it the comparatively few papers still unpicked from it and unfolded. Only those eighty-seven papers are left, because I had this day got to the nine hundred and thirteenth of them. You may believe it or not, but just that single paper has occupied my entire afternoon, and kept me working this late into the evening. That was because, when I unfolded it, it was the third directive to the Subject’s ‘red jewel,’ which was somewhat hard to find in all that mess down there between the thigh stumps, and which of course had already received attention twice before. So it required all my skill and concentration to—”
I was able finally to interrupt him. I said harshly, “You told me this was Mar-Janah, and she was still living. This thing is not she, and it cannot conceivably be alive.”
“Yes, it is, and yes, it is. Furthermore, she is capable of staying alive, too, with proper treatment and care—if anyone were unkind enough to want her to. Step closer, Lord Marco, and see for yourself.”
I did. It was alive and it was Mar-Janah. At the top end of it, where must have been the head, there hung down, from what must have been the scalp, a single matted lock of hair not yet torn out by the roots, and it was long—a woman’s hair—and it was still discernibly ruddy-black in color, and curly—Mar-Janah’s hair. Also the thing made a noise. It could not have seen me, but it might dimly have heard my voice, through the remaining aperture where an ear had been, and perhaps even recognized my voice. The noise it made was only a faint bubbling blubber of sound, but it seemed feebly to say, “Marco?”
In a controlled and level voice—I would not have believed that I could manage that—I remarked to the Fondler, almost conversationally:
“Master Ping, you once described to me, in loving detail, the Death of a Thousand, which is what this seems to me to be. But you called this one by another name. What is the difference?”
“A trivial one. You could not be expected to notice. The Death of a Thousand, as you know, consists of the Subject’s being gradually reduced —by the cutting off of bits, and slicings and probings and gougings and so on—a process prolonged by intervals of rest, during which the Subject is given sustaining food and drink. The Death Beyond a Thousand is much the same, differing only in that the Subject is given nothing but the bits of herself to eat. And to drink, only the—what are you doing?”
I had taken out my belt knife and plunged it into the glistening red pulp that I took to be the remains of Mar-Janah’s breast, and I gave the haft the extra squeeze to ensure that all three blades stabbed deep. I could only hope that the thing was more certainly dead than before, but it did seem to slump a little more limply, and it did not make any more utterances. In that moment, I remembered how I had protested to Mar-Janah’s husband, a long time ago, that I could never knowingly kill a woman, and he had said casually, “You are young yet.”
Master Ping was speechlessly grinding his teeth at me, and glaring at me with furious eyes. But I coolly reached out and took from him the silk cloth with which he had wiped his hands. I used it to clean my knife, and rudely tossed it back at him as I closed up the knife and returned it to my belt sheath.
He sneered hatefully and said, “An utter waste of the most refined finishing touches yet to come. And I was going to accord you the privilege of looking on. What a waste!” He replaced the sneer with a mocking smile. “Still, an understandable impulse, I daresay, for a layman and a barbarian. And you had, after all, paid for her.”
“I have not done paying for her, Master Ping,” I said, and shoved past him and went out.
2
I was anxious to get back to Buyantu, worried that she might have got restless by now, and I would gladly have put off telling Ali Babar the sad news. But I could not leave him wringing his hands in the Purgatory of not knowing, so I went to my old chambers, where he was waiting. In a pretense of cheerfulness, he made a sweeping gesture and said:
“All restored and refurnished and redecorated. But no one thought to assign you new servants, it seems. So I will stay tonight, in case you should need … .” His voice faltered. “Oh, Marco, you look stricken. Is it what I fear it is?”
“Alas, yes, old comrade. She is dead.”
Tears started in his eyes, and he whispered, “Tanha … hamishè … .”
“I know no easier way to tell it. I am sorry. But she is free of captivity and free of pain.” Let him, at least for now, think that she had had an easy death. “I will tell you, another time, the how and the why of it, for it was an assassination, and unnecessary. It was done only to hurt you and me, and you and I will avenge it. But tonight, Ali, do not question me and do not stay. You will wish to go and grieve by yourself, and I have many things to do—to set our vengeance in train.”
I turned and went out abruptly, for if he had asked me anything I could not have lied to him. But just the telling of that much had made me more angry and determined and bloodthirsty than before, so, instead of going directly to the Echo Pavilion for Buyantu, I went first to the chambers of the Minister Achmad.
I was briefly impeded by his sentries and servants. They protested that the Wali had endured a hectic day of making preparations for the Khakhan’s return and the reception of the Dowager Empress, that he was much fatigued and had gone already to bed, and that they dared not announce a visitor. But I snarled at them—“Do not announce me! Admit me!”—so ferociously that they moved out of my way, muttering fearfully, “On your head be it, then, Master Polo,” and I slammed unannounced and ungentlemanly through the door of the Arab’s private apartments.
I was immediately reminded of Buyantu’s words about Achmad’s “eccentric fancies” and similar words spoken by the artist Master Chao long before. As I burst into the bedroom, I surprised a very large woman already there, and she whisked out through another door. I got only a glimpse of her, voluptuously gowned in filmy, flimsy, fluttering robes the color of the flower called lilak. But I had to assume that she was the same tall and robust woman I had seen in these chambers before. This particular one of Achmad’s fancies, I thought, seemed to have lasted for some while; but then I gave it no more thought. I confronted the man who lay in the vast, lilak-sheeted bed, propped against lilak-colored pillows. He regard
ed me calmly, his black stone-chip eyes not flinching from the storm he must have seen in my face.
“I trust you are comfortable,” I said, through clenched teeth. “Enjoy your swinishness. You will not for long.”
“It is not mannerly to speak of swine to a Muslim, pork eater. You are also addressing the Chief Minister of this realm. Have a care how you do it.”
“I am addressing a disgraced and deposed and dead man.”
“No, no,” he said, with a smile that was not a pleasant smile. “You may be Kubilai’s current great favorite, Folo—even invited to share his concubines, I hear—but he will never let you lop off his good right hand.”
I considered that remark, and said, “You know, I should never have thought myself a very important personage in Kithai—certainly not any rival to you, or any danger to you—were it not that you have so plainly thought me so. And now you mention the Mongol maidens I enjoyed. Are you resentful that you never have? Or that you never could? Was that the latest corrosive to eat at your good sense?”
“Haramzadè! You important? A rival? A danger? I have only to touch this bedside gong and my men will mince you in an instant. Tomorrow morning, I should have only to explain to Kubilai that you had spoken to me as you have just done. He would make no least fuss or comment, and your existence would be forgotten as readily as the ending of it.”
“Why do you not do that, then? Why have you never done that? You said you would make me regret my having once flouted your express command—but why do so by attrition? Why have you only furtively and indolently made threats and menaces, while destroying instead the innocent folk around me?”
“It amused me to do so—Hell is what hurts worst—and I can do as I please.”
“Can you? Until now, perhaps. Not any more.”
“Oh, I think so. For my next amusement, I think I will make public some paintings the Master Chao did for me. The very name of Folo will be a laughingstock throughout the Khanate. Ridicule hurts worst of all.” Before I could demand to know what he was talking about, he had gone on to another subject. “Are you really aware, Marco Folo, of who this Wali is that you presume to challenge? It was many years ago that I started serving as an adviser to the Princess Jamui of the Kungurat tribe of the Mongols. When the Khan Kubilai made her his first wife, and she therefore became the Khatun Jamui, I accompanied her to this court. I have served Kubilai and the Khanate ever since, in many capacities. Most recently, for many years, in this next-highest office of all. Do you really think you could topple an edifice of such firm foundation?”