The Journeyer

  Kubilai advised me once, when the subject came up, “Marco, do not break the plate. So long as you have not yet taken a First Wife, you will find pliant and conciliatory every man with whom you have to deal, in matters of commerce or treaty negotiation or whatever. He will seek your good regard and he will not obstruct your good fortune, because he will be nursing the secret hope of making his daughter or niece your First Wife and mother of your principal heir.” That advice might well have made me hasten immediately to break a plate with Hui-sheng, for I scorned ever to order my life according to the dictates of “good business.” But Hui-sheng pointed out, with some vigor, that as my wife she would have to observe some traditions—at least those enjoining wifely subordination—and so could not any longer ride joyously at my side, but, if she was allowed to go anywhere at all, would have to travel in a closed palanquin, and she could not any longer assist me in my working conferences with other men, and tradition would forbid her to—

  “Enough, enough!” I said, laughing at her agitation. I caught and stopped her flickering fingers, and promised that nothing would make me marry her, ever.

  So we remained lovers only, which may be the very best sort of marriage there could be. I did not treat her as a wife, an inferior, but accorded her—and insisted that all others accord her—full equality with myself. (That may not have been so liberal of me as it sounds, since I well recognized her many points of superiority, and so perhaps did some cognitive others.) But I did treat her as a wife, a most noble wife, in regaling her with gifts of jewelry and jade and ivory, and the richest and most becoming garments for her to wear, and, for her personal mount, a superb white mare of the Khan’s own “dragon horses.” Only one husbandly rule did I lay down: she was never to mask her beauty with cosmetics, in the Khanbalik fashion. She complied, and so her peach-bloom complexion was never slathered rice-white, her rose-wine lips were not discolored or redrawn with garish paint, her feathery brows were not plucked bald. That made her unfashionable, and so radiantly lovely that all other women cursed the fashion, and their own slavishness to it. I did allow Hui-sheng to dress her hair as she liked, since she never did it any way I did not like, and I bought her jeweled combs and hair-spoons for it.

  Of jewels and gold and jade and such, she eventually owned a trove that a Khatun might envy, but she always treasured one thing most of all. So did I, really, though I often pretended to consider it trash and urged her to throw it away. It was a thing I had not given her, but one of the pathetically few belongings she had brought when she first came to me: that plain and inelegant white porcelain incense burner. She lovingly bore it everywhere we journeyed and, in palace or karwansarai or yurtu or on open camp ground, Hui-sheng made sure that the sweet scent of warm clover after a gentle rain was the accompaniment of all our nights.

  All our nights …

  We were lovers only, never wedded man and wife. Nevertheless, I will invoke the privacy of the marriage bed and decline to relate the particulars of what she and I did there. In recalling others of my intimate relationships, I have spoken without reserve, but I prefer to keep some things private to me and Hui-sheng.

  I will make only some general observations on the subject of anatomy. That will not violate the privacy of Hui-sheng, and would not cause her any blushes, for she often maintained that she was physically no different from any other female of the Min, and that those women were no different from the Han or any other race native to Kithai and Manzi. I beg to differ with her. The Khan Kubilai himself had once observed that the Min women were above all others in beauty, and Hui-sheng was outstanding even among the Min. But when she insisted, with modest and self-deprecatory gestures, that she was only ordinary of features and figure, I sensibly made no demur—for the most beautiful woman is the woman who does not realize she is.

  And Hui-sheng was beautiful all over. That would adequately describe her, but I must go into some detail, to correct a few misapprehensions I myself had earlier entertained. I have mentioned the fine floss of hair that grew in front of her ears and at her nape, and I said then that I wondered if it implied an abundant hairiness in other places on her body. I could not have been more mistaken in that expectation. Hui-sheng was totally hairless on her legs and arms, under her arms, even on her artichoke. She was as clean and silkily smooth in that place as had been the child Doris of my youth. I did not mind that at all—an organ so accessible permits of various close attentions that a furred one does not—but I made mild inquiry. Was the hairlessness peculiar to her, or did she perhaps use a mumum to achieve it? She replied that no women of the Min (or the Han or the Yi or other such races) had hair on their bodies, or, if they did, had but the merest trace.

  Her whole body was similarly childlike. Her hips were narrow and her buttocks small, just right for cupping in my hands. Her breasts were also small, but perfectly shaped and distinctly separate. I had long ago conceived a private belief that women with large nipples and a considerable dark halo around them were far more sexually responsive than women with small and pale ones. Hui-sheng’s nipples were minute by comparison with other women’s, but not when regarded in proportion to her porcelain-cup breasts. They were neither dark nor pale, but bright, as pink as her lips. And they indicated no lack of responsiveness, because Hui-sheng’s breasts, unlike those of larger women which are ticklish only at the extremity, were marvelously sensitive over their whole hemispheres. I had but to caress them anywhere, and their “small stars” pouted out as perkily as little tongues there. The same below. Perhaps because of the hairlessness, her lower belly and adjacent thighs were sensitive all over. Caress her anywhere there, and from her maidenly modest cleft would slowly emerge her pink and pretty “butterfly between the petals,” the more appreciable and enticing for its not being concealed within any tuft.

  I never knew, and refrained from ever asking, whether Hui-sheng had been a virgin when she first came to me. One reason that I never knew was that she was so perpetually virginal, which I will explain in a moment. Another reason was that—as she told me—women of those races never came to marriage with a maidenhead. They were accustomed to being bathed in infancy, and later bathing themselves, several times a day, and not only on the outside but—with dainty fluids made of flower juices—inside as well. Their fastidiousness went far beyond that of even the most civilized, refined, high-born Venetian ladies (at least until I later dictated that the custom be adopted by the women of my own Venetian family). One result of that scrupulous cleanliness was that a young girl’s maidenhead got gradually, painlessly dilated and folded away to nonexistence. So she came to her nuptial bed with no fear of the first penetration, and no least twinge of hurt when it happened. And, in consequence, those races of Kithai and Manzi made no such fuss as other peoples do, about the sheet-stain certification of defloration.

  While I am speaking of other peoples, let me remark that men of the Muslim countries treasure a certain belief. They believe that, when they die and go to the Heaven they call Djennet, they will disport themselves throughout eternity with whole anderuns of heavenly women called haura, who have, among their many other talents, the ability continually to renew their virginity. Buddhist men believe the same about the Devatas women they will enjoy in their heavenly Pure Land between lives. I do not know whether any such supernatural females exist in any afterlife, but I can testify that the Min women right here on earth possessed that wondrous quality of never getting slack and flaccid in their parts. Or at least Hui-sheng did.

  Her opening was not just childishly small on the outside—the shyest and dearest dimple—but inside as well, most thrillingly tight and close-clasping. Yet it was mature, too, in that it was somehow delicately muscular all up along its inside length, so that it imparted not a constant squeeze but a repetitive rippling sensation from one end to the other. Aside from the other delicious effects produced by her smallness, my every entering of Hui-sheng was like a first time. She was haura and Devatas: perpetually virginal.

  Some of her
anatomical uniqueness I recognized on our very first night in bed together, and even before we coupled. I should also say of that first coupling that it occurred not from my taking of Hui-sheng, but from her giving herself to me. I had resolutely kept my resolve not to urge or press her, and instead had courted her with all the genteel gallantries and flourishes of a trovatore minstrel demonstrating his affection for a lady high above his humble station. During that time, I ignored all other women and every other sort of distraction, and spent every possible moment with Hui-sheng or nearby, and she slept in my chambers, but we slept always apart. What attraction or attention of mine finally won her, I do not know, but I know when it happened. It was the day she showed me, in the jug-flute pavilion, how to feel music as well as hear it. And that night, for the first time in my chambers, she brought the incense burner and set it alight beside my bed, and got into the bed with me, and—let me put it this way—she allowed me again to feel music as well as hear it and see it and taste it (and smell it, too, in that sweet incense aroma of warm clover after gentle rain).

  There was yet another smell and taste perceptible in my making love to Hui-sheng. That first night, before we began, she inquired timidly whether I would desire children. Yes, truly I would have, from one as precious as she—but, because she was precious to me, I would not subject her to the horrors of childbirth—so I said a definite no. She looked a trifle downcast at that, but immediately took precautions against the eventuality. She went and got a very small lemon, and peeled it to the white and cut it in half. I expressed some disbelief that anything as simple and common as a lemon could do something as difficult as preventing conception. She smiled assurance and showed me how it was employed. In fact, she gave me the piece of lemon and let me do the applying. (In fact, she let me do that every night we slept together, ever after. ) She lay back and spread her legs, baring the creased little peach-hued purse down there, and I gently parted its cleft and eased the bit of lemon inside. That was when I first realized how very small and virginally tight she was, a snug fit even for my one finger, as it carefully, tremulously, worked the lemon up along the warm channel to the firm, smooth nub of her womb, where the lemon almost eagerly and lovingly cupped over it.

  As I withdrew my hand, Hui-sheng smiled again—perhaps at the expression on my flushed face, or my breathlessness—and perhaps she mistook my excitement for concern, because she hastened to assure me that the lemon cap was a sure and certain preventive of accidents. She said it was provably superior to any other means, such as the Mongol women’s fern seed, or the Bho women’s insertion of a jagged nugget of rock salt, or the witless Hindu women’s puffing of wood smoke inside themselves, or the Champa women’s making their men clamp onto their organ a little hat of tortoise-shell. Most of those methods I had never heard of, and I cannot comment on the practicality of them. But I later had proof of the lemon’s efficacy in that respect. And I also discovered, that same night, that it was a much more pleasing method than most, because it added a fresh, tart, bright scent and taste to Hui-sheng’s already impeccably clean and fragrant parts and their emanations and essences … .

  But there. I said I would not dwell on the particulars of our bedtime enjoyments.

  2

  WHEN we departed for Hang-zho, our karwan train consisted of four horses and ten or twelve asses. One horse was Hui-sheng’s own high-stepping white mare; the other three, not quite so handsome, were for me and two armed Mongol escorts. The asses carried all our traveling packs, a Han scribe (to interpret and write for me), one of my Mongol maidservants (brought along to attend Hui-sheng), two nondescript male slaves to do the camping chores and any other hard labor.

  I had another of Kubilai’s gold-inscribed ivory plaques hanging at my saddle horn, but not until we were on the road did I open the documents of authority he had given me. They were of course written in Han, for the convenience of the Manzi officials to whom I would be showing them, so I ordered my scribe to tell me what they said. He reported, in tones of some awe, that I had been appointed an agent of the imperial treasury, and accorded the rank of Kuan, meaning that all the magistrates and prefects and other governing officers, everyone except the Wang overlord, would be required to obey me. The scribe added, as a point of information, “Master Polo—I mean Kuan Polo—you will be entitled to wear the coral button.” He said it as if that would be the greatest honor of all, but it was not until later that I found out what that meant.

  It was an easy, leisurely, pleasant and mostly level ride southward from Khanbalik through the province of Chih-li—the Great Plain of Kithai—which was one vast farmland from horizon to horizon, except that it was crazily fenced into minuscule family holdings of just a mou or two apiece. Since no two adjoining farm families seemed to agree on the ideal crop for the land and the season, one plot would be of wheat, the next of millet, the next of clover or garden truck or something else. So that whole nation of greenery actually comprised a checkering and speckling of every different hue and tint and shade of green. After Chih-li came the province of Shan-dong, where the farms gave way to groves of mulberry trees, the leaves of which are sustenance for silkworms. It was from Shan-dong that came the heavy, nubbed, much-prized silk fabric also called shan-dong.

  One thing I noticed on all the main roads in this southern region of Kithai: they were posted at intervals with informative signboards. I could not read the Han writing, but my scribe translated them for me. There would be a column erected at the roadside, with a board sticking out from it each way, and on one might be painted: “To the North to Gai-ri, nineteen li,” and on the other: “To the South to Zhen-ning, twenty-eight li.” So a traveler always knew where he was, and where he was going, and where (if he had forgotten) he had just come from. The signposts were especially informative at crossroads, where a whole thicket of them would list every city and town in every direction from there. I made a note of that very helpful Han contrivance, thinking it could well be recommended for adoption in all the rest of the Khanate—and, for that matter, all over Europe—where there were no such things.

  Most of the way southward through Kithai, we were either riding close beside the Great Canal, or within sight of it, and it teemed with water traffic, so, whenever we were any distance from it, we had the odd view of boats and ships apparently sailing seas of grain fields and navigating among orchard trees. That canal was inspired, or made necessary, by the fact that the Huang or Yellow River had so often changed its channel. Within recorded history, the eastern length of the river had whipped back and forth across the land like a snapped rope—though of course not so rapidly. In one century or another, it had emptied into the Sea of Kithai way up north of the Shan-dong Peninsula, just a couple of hundred li south of Khanbalik. Some centuries later, its immense and serpentine length had wriggled down the map to flow into the sea far south of the Shan-dong Peninsula, fully a thousand li distant from its earlier outlet. To envision that, try to imagine a river flowing through France and at one time spilling into the Bay of Biscay at the English port of Bordeaux, then squirming across that whole breadth of Europe to empty into the Mediterranean at the Republic of Marseilles. And the Yellow River, at other times in history, had pushed out to the Sea of Kithai at various shore points intermediate between those northernmost and southernmost reaches.

  The river’s inconstancy had left many lesser streams and isolated lakes and ponds all across the lands where it used to run. Some of the earlier ruling dynasties cunningly took advantage of that, to dig a canal interconnecting and incorporating the existent waters and make a navigable waterway running roughly north and south, inland of the sea. I believe it was, until recently, only a desultory and fragmentary canal, connecting just two or three towns in each stretch. But Kubilai, or rather his Chief of Digging the Great Canal, with armies of conscript labor, had done more trenching and dredging, and done it better. So the canal was now broad and deep and permanent, its banks neatly beveled and faced with stone, with locks and hoisting engines provided wh
erever it had to vault intervening highlands. It enabled vessels of every size, from san-pan scows to seagoing chuan ships, to sail or row or be towed all the way from Khanbalik to the southern border of Kithai, where the delta of the other great river, the Yang-tze, fanned out into the Sea of Kithai. And now that Kubilai’s realm extended south of the Yang-tze, the Great Canal was being pushed clear to Manzi’s capital city of Hang-zho. It was a modern-day accomplishment nearly as grand and sightly and awesome as the ancient Great Wall—and far more useful to mankind.

  When our little karwan train was ferried across the Yang-tze, the Tremendous River, it was like crossing a dun-colored sea, so broad that we could barely distinguish the darker dun line on the far side that was the shore of Manzi. I had some difficulty in reminding myself that this was the water I had been able to throw a stone across, away to the west and upriver in Yun-nan and To-Bhot where it was called the Jin-sha.

  Until now, we had been traversing a country inhabited mostly by Han, but a country that had been for many years under Mongol domination. Now here, in what had until very recently been the Sung Empire, we were among Han peoples whose ways of life had not yet been in the least impressed or overlaid by the more robust and vigorous Mongol society. To be sure, Mongol patrols roamed hither and yon, to preserve order, and every community had a new headman who, though usually a Han, had been imported from Kithai and installed by the Mongols. But those had not had time to make any changes in what the country had been. Also, because Sung had surrendered to become Manzi without any struggle, the land had not been fought over or ravaged or blighted in any way. It was peaceful and prosperous and pleasing to the eye. So, from the moment of our landing on the Manzi shore, I began to take an even keener interest in our surroundings, eager to see what the Han were like in their natural state, so to speak.