Hang-zho was again like Venice in not allowing large animals into the center of the city. In Venice, a rider coming from Mestre on the mainland must tether his horse in a campo on the northwest side of the island, and go by gòndola the rest of the way. We, arriving at Hang-zho, left our mounts and pack asses at a karwansarai on the outskirts, and went leisurely on foot—the better to examine the place—through the streets and over the many bridges, our slaves carrying our necessary luggage. When we came to the Wang’s immense palace, we even had to leave our boots and shoes outside. The steward who met us at the main portal advised us that that was the Han custom, and gave us soft slippers to wear indoors.
The recently appointed Wang of Hang-zho was another of Kubilai’s sons, Agayachi, a little older than myself. He had been informed by an advance rider of our approach, and he greeted me most warmly, “Sain bina, sain urkek,” and Hui-sheng too, addressing her respectfully as “sain nai.” When she and I had bathed and changed into presentable attire, and sat down with Agayachi to a welcoming banquet, he seated me on his right and Hui-sheng at his left, not at a separate women’s table. Few people had given much notice to Hui-sheng in the days when she had been a slave, because, although she had been then no less comely, and had dressed as well as all court slaves were made to do, she had cultivated the slave’s demeanor of unobtrusiveness. Now, as my consort, she dressed as richly as any noblewoman, but it was her letting her radiant personality shine forth that made people notice her—and approvingly, and admiringly.
The table fare of Manzi was opulent and delicious, but somewhat different to what was popular in Kithai. The Han, for some reason, did not care for milk and milk products, of which their neighbor Mongols and Bho were so fond. So we had no butter or cheeses or kumis or arkhi, but there were enough novelties to make up for the lack. When the servants loaded my plate with something called Mao-tai Chicken, I expected to get drunk from it, but it was not spirituous, only delightfully delicate. The dining hall steward told me that the chicken was not cooked in that potent liquor, but killed with it. Giving a chicken a drink of mao-tai, he said, made it as limp as it would make a man, relaxing all its muscles, letting it die in bliss, so it cooked most tenderly.
There was a tart and briny dish of cabbage, shredded and fermented to softness, which I praised—and got myself laughed at—my table companions informing me that it was really a peasant food, and had first been concocted, ages ago, as a cheap and easily portable provender for the laborers who built the Great Wall. But another dish with a genuinely peasant-sounding name, Beggar’s Rice, was not likely ever to have been available to many peasants. It got the name, said the steward, because it had originated as a mere tossing together of kitchen scraps and oddments. However, at this palace table, it was like the most rich and various risotto that ever was. The rice was but a matrix for every kind of shellfish, and bits of pork and beef, and herbs and bean sprouts and zhu-gan shoots and other vegetable morsels, and the whole tinted yellow—with gardenia petals, not with zafràn; our Compagnia had not yet started selling in Manzi.
There were crisp, crunchy Spring Rolls of egg batter filled with steamed clover sprigs, and the little golden zu-jin fish fried whole and eaten in one bite, and the mian pasta prepared in various ways, and sweet cubes of chilled pea paste. The table also was laden with salvers of delicacies peculiar to the locality, and I took at least a taste of all of them—tasting first and then inquiring their identity, lest their names make me reluctant. They included ducks’ tongues in honey, cubes of snake and monkey meat in savory gravy, smoked sea slugs, pigeon eggs cooked with what looked like a sort of silvery pasta, which was really the tendons from the fins of sharks. For sweets, there were big, fragrant quinces, and golden pears the size of rukh’s eggs, and the incomparable hami melons, and a soft-frozen, fluffy confection made, said the steward, of “snow bubbles and apricot blossoms.” For drink there was amber-colored kao-liang wine, and rose wine the exact color of Hui-sheng’s lips, and Manzi’s most prized variety of cha, which was called Precious Thunder Cha.
After we had concluded the meal with the soup, a clear broth made from date plums, and after the soup cook had emerged from the kitchen for us all to applaud him, we repaired to another hall to discuss my business here. We were a group of a dozen or so, the Wang and his staff of lesser ministers, all of whom were Han, but only a few of them locals retained from the Sung administration; most had come from Kithai and so could converse in Mongol. All of them, including Agayachi, wore the floor-sweeping, straight-lined but elegantly embroidered Han robes, with ample sleeves for tucking the hands in and carrying things in. The first order of business was the Wang’s remarking to me that I was at liberty to wear any costume I pleased—I was then wearing, and had long been partial to, the Persian garb of neat tulband and blouse with tight sleeve cuffs, and a cape for outdoors—but he suggested that, for official meetings, I ought to replace the tulband with the Han hat, as worn by himself and his ministers.
That was a shallow, cylindrical thing like a pillbox, with a button on its top, and the button was the only indication of rank among all those in the room. There were, I learned, nine ranks of ministers, but all were dressed so finely and looked so distinguished that only by the discreet insignia of the buttons could they be told apart. Agayachi’s hat button was a single ruby. It was big enough to have been worth a fortune, and it betokened his being of the very highest rank possible here, a Wang, but it was much less conspicuous than, say, Kubilai’s gleaming gold morion or a Venetian Doge’s scufieta. I was entitled to a hat with a coral button, indicating the next-most rank, a Kuan, and Agayachi had such a hat all ready to present to me. The other ministers variously wore the buttons of descending rank: sapphire, turquoise, crystal, white shell, and so on, but it would be a while before I learned to sort them out at a glance. I unwound my tulband and perched the pillbox on my head, and all said I looked the very picture of a Kuan, all but one aged Han gentleman, who grumbled:
“You ought to be more fat.”
I asked why. Agayachi laughed and said:
“It is a Manzi belief that babies, dogs and government officials ought to be fat, or else they are assumed to be ill-tempered. But never mind, Marco. A fat official is assumed to be filching from the treasury and taking bribes. Any government official—fat, thin, ugly or handsome —is always an object of revilement.”
But the same old man grumbled, “Also, Kuan Polo, you ought to dye your hair black.”
Again I asked why, for his own hair was a dusty gray. He said:
“All Manzi loathes and fears the kwei—the evil demons—and all Manzi believes the kwei to have reddish fair hair, like yours.”
The Wang laughed again. “It is we Mongols who are to blame for that. My great-grandfather Chinghiz had an orlok named Subatai. He did many depredations in this part of the world, so he was the Mongol general most hated by the Han, and he had reddish fair hair. I do not know what the kwei were supposed to look like in earlier times, but ever since Subatai’s day, they have looked like him.”
Another man chuckled and said, “Keep your kwei hair and beard, Kuan Polo. Considering what you are here to do, it may help if you are feared and hated.” He spoke Mongol well enough, but it was obviously a newly acquired language for him. “As the Wang has remarked, all government officials are reviled. You can imagine that, of all officials, tax collectors are the most detested. And I hope you can imagine how a foreign tax collector, collecting for a conqueror government, is going to be regarded. I propose that we spread the word that you really are a kwei demon.”
I gave him a look of amusement. He was a plump, pleasant-faced Han of middle age, and he wore a wrought-gold button on his hat, identifying him as being of the seventh rank.
“The Magistrate Fung Wei-ni,” Agayachi introduced him. “A native of Hang-zho, an eminent jurist and a man much esteemed by the people for his fairness and acumen. We are fortunate that he has consented to keep the same magistracy he held under the Sung. And I a
m personally pleased, Marco, that he has agreed to serve as your adjutant and adviser while you are attached to this court.”
“I am also much pleased, Magistrate Fung,” I said, as he and I both made the sedate, hands-together bow that passes for a ko-tou between men of near equal rank. “I will be grateful for any assistance. In undertaking this mission of collecting taxes in Manzi, I am ignorant of two things only. I know nothing whatever about Manzi. And I know nothing whatever about tax collecting.”
“Well!” grunted the grumbly gray-haired man, this time grudgingly complimentary. “Well, frankness and a lack of self-importance are at least refreshingly new qualities in a tax collector. I doubt, however, that they will help you in your mission.”
“No,” said the Magistrate Fung. “No more than getting fat or blacking your hair, Kuan Polo. I will be frank, also. I see no way for you to extract taxes from Manzi for the Khanate, except by going yourself from door to door and demanding, or having a whole army of men to do it for you. And even at starvation wages, an army would cost more than you would collect.”
“In any case,” said Agayachi, “I have no army of men to delegate to you. But I have provided—for you and your lady—a fine house in a good quarter of the city, well staffed with domestics. When you are ready, my stewards will show you to the place.”
I thanked him and then said to my new adjutant, “If I cannot immediately start learning my job, perhaps I can start learning of my surroundings. Would you accompany us to our house, Magistrate Fung, and on the way show us something of Hang-zho?”
“With pleasure,” he said. “And I will show you first the single most spectacular sight of our city. This is the phase of the moon and—yes—the very hour is at hand for the appearance of the hai-xiao. Let us go at once.”
There was no clock of sand or water in the room, and not even a cat about, so I did not know how he could be so precise about the hour, or what the time had to do with seeing a hai-xiao, or what a hai-xiao was. But Hui-sheng and I made our good nights to the Wang and his staff, and we and our little company of scribe and slaves left the palace with the Magistrate Fung.
“We will take boat from here to your residence,” he said. “There is a royal barge waiting on the canal side of the palace. But first, let us walk up the promenade here, along the riverside.”
It was a fine night, balmy, softly lighted by a full moon, so we had a good view. From the palace, we went along a street that paralleled the river. It had a waist-high balustrade on that side, mainly constructed of some curiously shaped stones. They were circular, each with a hole in its center, and they were as big around as my encircled arms and as thick as my waist. They were too small to have been millstones, but too heavy to have been wheels. Whatever they had once been used for, they had been retired to serve here, set on edge, rim to rim, and the spaces between filled in with smaller stones, to make the balustrade a solid wall and flat on top. I looked over, and saw that the parapet fell away on the other side, a vertical wall of stone, some two house-stories’ distance to the river surface below.
I said, “I take it that the river rises considerably in flood season.”
“No,” said Fung. “The city is built high above the water on this side to allow for the hai-xiao. Fix your eyes yonder, eastward, toward the ocean.”
So he and I and Hui-sheng stood leaning against the parapet and gazed out toward the sea, across the flat, moonlit plain of delta sand that stretched featurelessly to the black horizon. Of course, there was no ocean to be seen; it was some two hundred li away beyond that shoal. Or it usually was. For now I began to hear, from that far distance, a murmur of sound, like a Mongol army on horseback galloping toward us. Hui-sheng tugged at my sleeve, which surprised me, for she could not have heard anything. But she indicated her other hand, which rested on the parapet, and she gave me a querying look. Hui-sheng, I realized, was again feeling the sound. However far away it was, I thought, it must be a veritable thunder to be vibrating a stone wall. I could only give her a shrug, no explanation. Fung evidently expected whatever was coming, and without misgivings.
He pointed again, and I saw a line of bright silver suddenly split the darkness of the horizon. Before I could ask what it was, it was close enough for me to make out: a line of sea foam, brilliant in the moonlight, coming toward us across the desert of sand, as rapidly as a line of charging, silver-armored horsemen. Behind it was the whole weight of the Sea of Kithai. As I have said, that shoal was fan-shaped—a hundred li broad out where it met the ocean, narrow here at the river mouth. So the inrushing sea came into the delta as a tumbling sheet of water and spume, but was rapidly constricted as it came, and compressed and piled up, and all its dark color was churned into white. The hai-xiao happened too quickly for me even to exclaim in astonishment. There, pounding toward us, was a wall of water as wide as the delta and as high as a house. But for its foamy glitter, it looked like the avalanche that had scoured across the Yun-nan valley, and rumbled very like it, too.
I glanced down at the river below us. Like a small animal emerging from its burrow and encountering a foam-muzzled rabid dog, it was flowing backward, recoiling, trying to vacate its invaded burrow mouth and retreat back toward the mountains it had come from. The next moment, that vast roaring wall of water surged by us, just below the level of the parapet, a welter and tumult of foam, and flecks of it spattered up upon us. I had been transfixed by the spectacle, but at least I had seen seawater before; I think Hui-sheng never had, so I turned to see if she was frightened. She was not. She was bright-eyed and smiling, and moon-glowing spindrift was in her hair like opals. To someone in a soundless world, I suppose, more than to the rest of us, it must be a delight to see splendid things, especially when they are so splendid as to be feelable. And even I had felt the stone balustrade beside us and the night all about us tremble under that impact. The rumbling, fizzing, sizzling sea continued to seethe past and upstream, the bright white of it getting streaked with black-green, and finally the black-green predominating, until it was all an unfoamed choppy sea occupying the whole river breadth beneath us.
When I could make myself heard, I said to Fung, “What in the name of all the gods is it?”
“Newcomers usually are impressed,” he said, as if he had done it all himself. “It is the hai-xiao. The tidal bore.”
“Tidal!” I exclaimed. “Impossible! Tides come and go with stately decorum.”
“The hai-xiao is not always so dramatic,” he conceded. “Only when the season and the moon and the time of day or night properly coincide. On those occasions, as you just saw, they bring the sea across those sands at the pace of a galloping horse—across two hundred li in no longer than it takes a man to eat a leisurely meal. The river boatmen learned, ages ago, to take advantage of it. They cast off from here at just the right moment, and the hai-xiao takes them upriver, hundreds of li, without their having to stroke an oar.”
I said politely, “Forgive my doubting you, Magistrate Fung. But I come from a sea city myself, and I have seen tides all my life. They move the sea perhaps an arm’s-reach up and down. This was a mountain of sea!”
He said politely, “Forgive my contradicting you, Kuan Polo. But I must presume that your native city is on a small sea.”
I said loftily, “I never thought of it as small. But yes, there are greater ones. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the limitless Ocean Sea Atlantic.”
“Ah. Well. So is this one a great sea. Beyond this coast there are islands. Many of them. To the north of east, for example, the islands called Jihpen-kwe, which compose the Empire of the Dwarfs. But go east far enough, and the islands thin out, become sparse, are left behind. And still goes on the Sea of Kithai. On and on.”
“Like our Ocean Sea,” I murmured. “No mariner has ever crossed it, or knows its end, or what lies there, or if it has an end.”
“Well, this one does,” said Fung, very matter of fact. “Or at least there is one record of its having been crossed. Hang-zho now is separated
from the ocean by that two-hundred-li delta. But you see these stones?” He indicated the rounds that constituted most of the balustrade. “They are anchors for mighty seagoing vessels, and the counterweights for those vessels’ boom ends. Or they were.”
“Then Hang-zho was once a seaport,” I said. “And it must have been a busy one. But a long time ago, or so I judge from the extent that the delta has silted over.”
“Yes. Nearly eight hundred years ago. There is in the city archives a journal written by a certain Hui-chen, a Buddhist trapa, and it is dated—by our count—in the year three thousand one hundred, or thereabout. It tells how he was aboard a seagoing chuan which had the misfortune to be blown from this coast by the tai-feng—the great storm—and kept on going eastward and at long last made landfall somewhere yonder. By the trapa’s estimate, a distance of more than twenty-one thousand li to there. Nothing but water all the way. And another twenty-one thousand li back again. But he did come back from wherever he went, for the journal exists.”
“Hui! Twenty-one thousand li! Why, that is as far as from here overland all the way back to Venice.” A thought came to me, and it was an excitingly beguiling one. “If there is land that far from here to the eastward across this sea, it must be my own continent of Europe! This continent of Kithai and Manzi must be the far side of our own Ocean Sea! Tell me, Magistrate, did the monk mention cities on the other side? Lisboa? Bordeaux?”
“No cities, no. He called the land Fu-sang, which means nothing more than the Place We Drifted To. The natives, he said, resembled Mongols or Bho rather than Han, but were even more barbaric, and spoke an uncouth tongue.”
“It must have been Iberia … or Morocco … ,” I said thoughtfully. “Both full of Muslim Moors even that long ago, I think. Did the monk say anything else of the place?”