The Journeyer

  “Very little. The natives were hostile, so it was only with hazard and difficulty that the mariners managed to restock the chuan with food and water. They cast off in a hurry, to come west again. The only other thing that seems to have impressed Hui-chen was the vegetation. He described the trees of Fu-sang as being very odd. He said they were not of wood and leafy branches, but of green flesh and wicked thorns.” Fung made a face of amused disbelief. “That signifies little. I think all holy men tend to see flesh and thorns everywhere.”

  “Hm. I do not know what kind of trees grow in Iberia or Morocco,” I muttered, unable to cease speculating. “But it is awesome even to think that—just possibly—one could sail from here to my homeland.”

  “Better not try it,” Fung said offhandedly. “Not many men since Hui-chen have encountered a tai-feng on the open sea and lived to tell of it. That storm rages frequently, between here and the Jihpen-kwe islands. The Khan Kubilai has twice now attempted to invade and conquer that empire, sending fleets of chuan full of warriors. The first time, he sent too few, and the dwarfs repulsed them. The last time, he sent hundreds of ships and nearly an entire tuk of men. But the tai-feng came up and ravaged the fleet, and that invasion failed also. I hear that the dwarfs, grateful to the storm, have named the tai-feng the kamikaze, which in their uncouth language means Divine Wind.”

  “However,” I said, still ruminating, “if the storm rages only between here and Jihpen-kwe, then—if Kubilai ever does take those islands—one might be able to sail safely eastward from there … .”

  But Kubilai never made another sortie against them, and never took those islands, and I never got to them, or any farther eastward. I was several times upon the Sea of Kithai, but never for long out of sight of the mainland. So I do not know whether that far-off Fu-sang was, as I suspected, the western shores of our known Europe, or if it was some new land, still undiscovered to this day. I am sorry for having failed, in that instance, to satisfy my curiosity. I should very much have liked to go there and see that place, and I never did.

  4

  HUI-SHENG and I and the Magistrate Fung and our servants stepped from the palace dock into an intricately carved teakwood san-pan, and sat under a stretched-silk canopy as ornate and curly-edged as any Han roof. A dozen oarsmen, naked to the waist and their bodies oiled so they gleamed in the moonlight, rowed us from there, along a winding canal route, to our new abode, and along the way Fung pointed out various things worth our notice.

  He said, “That short street you see going off on our left is the Lane of Sweet Breezes and Stroking Airs. In other words, the lane of the fanmakers. Hang-zho’s fans are prized throughout the land—this is where the folding fan was invented—some having as many as fifty sticks, and all being painted with the most exquisite pictures, often naughty ones. Nearly a hundred of our city’s families have been engaged in the making of fans for generations, father to son to grandson.”

  And he said, “That building on our right is the biggest in the city. Only eight stories high, so it is not our tallest, but it extends from street to street in one direction, and canal to canal in the other. It is Hang-zho’s permanent indoor marketplace, and I believe the only one in Manzi. In its hundred or more rooms are displayed for sale those wares too precious or too fragile to be outdoors in the weather of the open markets—fine furnishings, works of art, perishable goods, child slaves and the like.”

  And he said, “Here, where the canal has broadened out so expansively, this is called Xi Hu, the West Lake. You see the brightly lighted island in the middle? Even at this hour, there are barges and san-pans moored all around it. Some of the people may be visiting the temples on the island, but most are making merry. You hear the music? The inns there stay open all night long, dispensing food and drink and good cheer. Some of the inns are hospitable to all comers, others are for hire to wealthy families for their private celebrations and weddings and banquets.”

  And he said, “That street going off to our right, you will note, is hung all with lanterns of red silk over the doors, marking that as one of the streets of brothels. Hang-zho regulates its prostitutes most strictly, grading them into separate guilds, from grand courtesans down to riverboat drabs, and they are periodically examined to make sure they maintain good health and cleanliness.”

  I had so far been making only murmurs of acknowledgment and appreciation of Fung’s remarks, but when he touched on the matter of prostitutes, I said:

  “I noticed quite a number of them actually strolling the streets in daylight, something I never saw in any other city. Hang-zho seems quite tolerant of them.”

  “Ahem. Those abroad in daylight would have been the male prostitutes. A separate guild, but also regulated by statute. If you ever are solicited by a whore, and are inclined to use her, first examine her bracelets. If one among them is copper, she is not a female, however feminine her attire. That copper bracelet is dictated by the city—to prevent the male whores, poor wretches, from passing themselves off as what they are not.”

  Unpleasurably recollecting that I was the nephew of just such a wretch, I said, perhaps a little peevishly, “Hang-zho seems quite tolerant in many respects, and so do you.”

  He only said affably, “I am of the Tao. Each of us goes his own Way. A male lover of his own sex is, by choice, only what a eunuch is involuntarily. Both of them being a reproach to their ancestors, in not continuing their line, they require no additional rebuke from me. Now yonder, on our right, that high drum tower marks the center of the city, and is our tallest structure. It is manned day and night to drum the alarm of any fire. And Hang-zho does not depend on passersby and volunteers to quench any fires. There are one thousand men employed and paid to do nothing else but stand ready for that duty.”

  The barge eventually deposited us at the dock of our own house, just as if we had been in Venice, and the house was quite a palazzo. A sentry was posted on either side of the main portal, each man holding at attention a lance that had an ax blade as well as a point, and both the men were the biggest Han I had ever seen.

  “Yes, good robust specimens,” said Fung, when I admired them. “Each, I would say, easily sixteen hands tall.”

  “I think you are mistaken,” I said. “I myself am seventeen handspans high, and they are half a head taller than I.” I added jestingly, “If you are so inept at counting, I wonder if you are really suited to the arithmetical work of tax collecting.”

  “Oh, eminently so,” he said, in an equally cheerful way, “for I know the Han methods of counting. A man’s height is ordinarily reckoned to the top of his head, but a soldier’s is measured only to his shoulders.”

  “Cazza beta! Why?”

  “So they can be assigned in pairs to the carrying poles. Being foot soldiers, not horsemen, they are their own load bearers. But also it is taken for granted that a good and obedient soldier has no need for a mind, or a head to carry it in.”

  I shook my own head in admiring amazement, and apologized to the magistrate for having even mildly disparaged his knowledge. Then, when we had again exchanged our shoes for slippers, he accompanied me and Hui-sheng on a tour of the house. While servants in one room after another fell down in ko-tou to us, he pointed out this and that facility provided for our comfort and pleasure. The house even had its own garden, with a lotus pond in the middle and a flowering tree overhanging that. The gravel of the winding paths was not just raked smooth, but raked into graceful patterns. I was particularly taken by one ornament there: a carving of a large seated lion that guarded the doorway between house and garden. It was sculptured from a single immense piece of stone, but done so cleverly that the lion had a stone ball in its half-open mouth. The ball could, with a finger, be rolled back and forth in there, but could never be pried out from behind the lion’s teeth.

  I think I slightly impressed the Magistrate Fung with my eye for artwork when, admiring the painted scrolls on the walls of our bedroom, I remarked that those pictures of landscapes were done differently he
re than by the artists of Kithai. He gave me a sidewise look and said:

  “You are right, Kuan. The northern artists think of all mountains as resembling the rugged and craggy peaks of their Tian Shan range. The artists here in Sung—Manzi, I mean; excuse me—are better acquainted with the soft, lush, rounded, woman’s-breast mountains of our south.”

  He took his departure, declaring himself ready to be with me again at the instant of my summons, whenever I should feel like starting work. Then Hui-sheng and I strolled about the new residence by ourselves, dismissing one servant after another to their quarters, and getting acquainted with the place. We sat for a while in the moonlit garden while, with gestures, I apprised Hui-sheng of what details of the day’s various events and comments she might have failed to comprehend on her own. I concluded by conveying the general impression I had got: that no one seemed to hold very high hopes of my success as a tax gouger. She nodded her understanding of each of my explications and, in the tactful way of a Han wife, made no comment on my fitness for my work or my prospects in it. She asked only one question:

  “Will you be happy here, Marco?”

  Feeling a truly hai-xiao surge of affection for her, I gestured back, “I am happy—here!” making it plain that I meant “with you.”

  We allowed ourselves a holiday week or so to get settled into our new surroundings, and I learned quickly to leave all the multitudinous details of housekeeping to Hui-sheng’s supervision. As she had earlier done with the Mongol maid who came with us, she seemed easily to establish some imperceptible mode of communication with the new Han servants, and they leaped to obey her every whim, and usually did so to perfection. I was not so good a master as she was a mistress. For one thing, I could no more talk in Han than she could. But also I had been long accustomed to having Mongol servants, or servants trained by Mongols, and these of Manzi were different.

  I could recite a whole catalogue of differences, but I will mention just two. One was that, owing to the Han reverence for antiquity, a servant could never be dismissed or retired on the mere ground of his or her getting old, useless, senile, even immobile. And, as servants got older, they got cranky and crafty and impudent, but they could not be discharged for that, either, or even beaten. One of ours was an ancient crone whose only duty was to make up our bedroom each morning after we arose. Whenever she smelled the scent of lemon on me or Hui-sheng or the bedclothes, she would cackle and whinny most abominably, and I would have to grit my teeth and bear it.

  The other difference had to do with the weather, of all unlikely things. Mongols were indifferent to weather; they would go about their occupations in sunshine, rain, snow—probably in the chaos of a tai-feng, if they were ever to encounter one. And God knows, after all my journeying, I was as impervious to cold or heat or wet as any Mongol. But the Han of Manzi, for all their devotion to bathing at every opportunity, had a catlike aversion to rain. When it rained, nothing that involved going outdoors ever got done—and I do not mean just by servants; I mean by anybody.

  Agayachi’s ministers mostly resided in the same palace that he did, but those who lived elsewhere stayed at home when it rained. The marketplaces of the city, on rainy days, were vacant of both buyers and sellers. So was the vast indoor market, though it was under shelter, because people would have had to endure the rain to get there. Though I went about as I had always done, I had to do it on foot. There was not a palanquin to be found, nor even a canal boat. Though the boatmen spent all their lives on the water, most of the time soaked with water, they would not go out in the water that fell from the sky. Even the male prostitutes did not parade the streets.

  Even my so-called adjutant, the Magistrate Fung, had the same eccentricity. He would not come across the city to my house on rainy days, and would not even make his appointed judicial sittings at the Cheng. “Why bother? No litigants would be there.” He expressed sympathy at my annoyance over the many wasted wet days and evinced a mild amusement at his own and his countrymen’s peculiarity, but he never tried to cure himself of it. Once, when I had not seen him during a whole week of rain, and railed at him indignantly, “How am I supposed to get anything done, when I have only a fair-weather adjutant?” he sat down, got out a paper and brushes and ink block, and wrote for me a Han character.

  “That says ‘an urgent action not yet taken,’” he informed me. “But see: it is composed of two elements. This one says ‘stopped’ and this one ‘by rain.’ Clearly, a trait enshrined in our writing must be ingrained in our souls.”

  But on clement days, anyway, we sat in my garden and had many long talks about my mission and about his own magistracy. I was interested to hear some of the local laws and customs, but, as he explained them, I gathered that in his judicial practice he relied more on his people’s superstitions and his own arbitrary caprices.

  “For example, I have my bell which can tell a thief from an honest man. Suppose something has been stolen, and I have a whole array of suspects. I bid each of them reach through a curtain and touch the hidden bell, which will ring at the guilty man’s touch.”

  “And does it?” I asked skeptically.

  “Of course not. But it is smeared with ink-powder. Afterward, I examine the men’s hands. The man with clean hands is the thief, the one who feared to touch the bell.”

  I murmured, “Ingenious,” a word I found myself often uttering here in Manzi.

  “Oh, judgments are easy enough. It is the sentences and penalties that require ingenuity. Suppose I sentence that thief to wear the yoke in the jail yard. That is a heavy wooden collar, rather like the stone anchors, which gets locked around his neck, and he must sit in the jail yard while he wears it, to be jeered at by passersby. Suppose I judge that his crime merits his suffering that discomfort and humiliation for, say, two months. However, I know very well that he or his family will bribe the jailers, and they will only put him into the yoke at times when they know I will be passing in and out of the yard. Therefore, to make sure he is properly chastised, I sentence him to six months in the yoke.”

  “Do you,” I said hesitantly, “do you employ a Fondler for the more felonious culprits?”

  “Yes, indeed, and a very good one,” he said cheerfully. “My own son, in preparation for the study of law, is currently apprenticed to our Fondler. By way of teaching him the trade, the Master has had young Fung beating a pudding for some weeks now.”

  “What?”

  “There is a punishment called chou-da, which is to whip a felon with a zhu-gan cane split at the end into a many-thonged scourge. The object is to inflict the most terrible pain and rupture all the internal organs without causing visible mutilation. So, before he is permitted to wreak chou-da on a human, young Fung must learn to pulverize a pudding without breaking its surface.”

  “Gesu. I mean interesting.”

  “Well, there are punishments more popular with the crowds that come to look on—and some less so, of course. They depend on the severity of the crime. Simple branding on the face. A stay in the cage. The kneeling on sharp-linked chains. The medicine that bestows instant old age. Women especially like to watch that one inflicted on other women. Another one popular with the women is to see an adultress upended and poured full of boiling oil or molten lead. And there are the punishments with self-descriptive names: the Bridal Bed, the Affectionate Snake, the Monkey Sucking a Peach Dry. I must say modestly that I myself recently invented rather an interesting new one.”

  “What was that?”

  “It was done to an arsonist who had burned down the house of an enemy. He failed to get the enemy, who had gone on a journey, but burned to death the wife and children. So I decreed a punishment to fit the crime. I directed the Fondler to pack the man’s nostrils and mouth with huo-yao powder, and seal him tightly with wax. Then, before he could suffocate or strangle, the wicks were ignited and his head was blown to pieces.”

  “While we are on the subject of meet punishments, Wei-ni”—we were by this time informally using first names?
??“what do you predict the Khakhan will inflict on you and me, for indigence in office? We have not got very far with our strategies for tax imposition. I do not believe Kubilai will accept rainy weather as an excuse.”

  “Marco, why weary ourselves with the making of plans that cannot be put into practice?” he said lazily. “And today is not rainy. Let us just sit here and enjoy the sun and the breeze and the tranquil sight of your lovely lady gathering flowers from the garden.”

  “Wei-ni, this is a rich city,” I persisted. “The only marketplace under roof I ever saw, and ten more market squares outdoors. All of them teeming—except when it rains, anyway. Pleasure pavilions on the lake islands. Prosperous families of fanmakers. Thriving brothels. Not a single one of them yet paying a single tsien to the new government’s treasury. And if Hang-zho is so wealthy, what must the rest of Manzi be like? Are you asking me to sit still and let no one in the nation ever pay a head tax or a land tax or a trade tax or a—?”

  “Marco, I can only tell you—as both I and the Wang have told you repeatedly—every last tax record maintained by the Sung regime disappeared with the Sung regime. Perhaps the old Empress ordered them destroyed, out of female malice. More likely her subjects invaded the halls of records and the Cheng archives, the moment she left for Kahn-balik to surrender her crown, and they destroyed the records. It is understandable. It is expectable. It happens in every newly conquered place, before the conquerors march in, so that—”

  “Yes, yes, I have accepted that as a fact. But I am not interested in knowing who paid how much to the late Sung’s tax officers! What do I care about a lot of old ledgers?”

  “Because without them—look.” He leaned forward and held three fingers in front of my face. “You have three possible courses of action. Either you go yourself into every single market stall, every inn on every island, every whore’s working cubicle—”