Meanwhile, as my father and uncle all along intended, Venice and the rest of Europe have profited from increased trade with the East, a trade much facilitated by the copies of all our maps of the Silk Road which we Polos brought home from there. So I no longer see any need to maintain the slightly preposterous fiction that Nicolò and Mafìo Polo crossed and recrossed the whole extent of Asia simply to herd a flock of priests with them. And not in that other book, or ever, have I tried to keep secret the fact that I, Marco Polo, also became an agent and journeyer and observer and mapmaker for the Khan Kubilai. But I will here tell the beginning of my becoming so well regarded by the Khakhan that he entrusted me with such missions.
It was at that night’s welcoming banquet that I first attracted his notice. But it could have happened—and almost did—that Kubilai’s first attention to me might have been a command that I deliver myself to the Fondler, with my neck in my sphincter.
The banquet was laid in the largest hall of the main palace building, a hall which, one of the table servants boasted to me, would accommodate six thousand diners at a single seating. The high ceiling was held up on pillars that seemed made of solid gold, twisted and convoluted, inset with gems and jade. The walls were paneled alternately in rich carved woods and fine embossed leathers, and hung with Persian qali and Han scroll paintings and Mongol trophies of the hunt. Those included the mounted heads of snarling lions and spotted pards and great-horned artak (“Marco’s sheep”) and large bearlike creatures called da-mao-xiong, the mounted heads of which were startlingly snow-white except for black ears and black masks about the eyes.
The trophies were probably of the Khakhan’s own hunts, for he was famous for his love of the chase, and spent every spare day in forest or field. Even here in the banquet hall, his affection for that manliest of sports was evident, for the guests seated closest to him were his dearest hunting partners. On either arm of his thronelike chair was perched a hooded hunting falcon, and to each of the chair’s two front legs was tethered a hunting cat called a chita. The chita resembles a spotted pard, but is much smaller in size and proportionately much longer in the legs. It is different from all other cats in that it cannot climb a tree, and is even more different in that it will willingly chase and pull down game at its master’s bidding. Here, however, the chitas and the falcons sat quietly, now and then politely accepting tidbits which Kubilai fed to them with his own fingers.
There were not six thousand persons present on that particular night, so the hall was partitioned by screens of black and gold and red lacquer, to make a more intimate enclosure for rather fewer people. Still, there must have been close on two hundred of us, plus as many servants and a constantly changing crew of musicians and entertainers. That many people breathing and sweating, and the savory steams from the hot foods served, should have made even that huge hall rather warm on that late-summer night. But, although we were screened about and all the outer doors were shut, the hall had a cool breeze mysteriously blowing through it. Not until some while later did I learn by what ingeniously simple means that coolness was effected. But there were other mysteries in that dining hall which made me goggle and thrill and wonder, and for them I never did manage to find adequate explanation.
For example, in the middle of all the many tables stood a tall artificial tree, crafted of silver, its multiple limbs and branches and twigs hung with beaten-silver leaves that fluttered gently in the hall’s artificial breeze. Around the tree’s silver-barked trunk were coiled four golden serpents. Their tails were twined among the upper branches and their heads snaked downward to poise, open-mouthed, above four immense porcelain vases. The vases were molded in the shape of fantastic lions with their heads thrown back and their mouths also wide. There were some other artificial creatures in the room; on several tables, including the one at which we guest Polos sat, was a life-sized peacock made of gold, its tail feathers finely articulated and colored by inlaid enamels. Now, the mystery about those objects was this. When the Khan Kubilai called for drink—and only when he called aloud, not when anyone else did—those several animals of precious metals did wondrous things. I will tell what they did, though I scarcely expect to be believed.
“Kumis!” Kubilai would bellow, and one of the golden serpents coiled about the silver tree would suddenly gush from its mouth a flow of pearly liquid into the mouth of the lion vase set below. A servant would bring the vase to the Khakhan’s table and pour the beverage into his jewel-encrusted goblet and the goblets of other guests. They would sip and verify that it was indeed the mare’s-milk kumis, and they would all clap their hands in applause of that marvel, and immediately another marvelous thing would occur. The golden peacock on the table—and every golden peacock in the room—would likewise applaud, raising and beating its golden wings, erecting and fanning out its splendid tail.
“Arkhi!” the Khakhan would shout next, and the second serpent on the tree would disgorge its measure into the second lion vase, and a servant would bring the drink and we all would find it to be that finer and tastier grade of kumis called arkhi. And we would applaud and so would the peacocks. And those animated creatures, the liquor-spouting serpents and the exuberant birds, they worked, mind you, without any human agency. I several times went close to observe them, both while they were performing and while they were at rest, and I could find no wires or strings or levers that might have been manipulated from a distance.
“Mao-tai!” the Khakhan would shout next, and the whole activity would be repeated, from serpent spout to lion vase to peacock fanning. The liquor dispensed by the third serpent, mao-tai, was new to me: a yellowish, slightly syrupy beverage of a tingling flavor. The Mongol diner at my elbow cautioned me to beware of its potency, which he demonstrated. He took a tiny porcelain cup of the liquor and applied to it the flame of one of the table candles. The mao-tai caught fire with a sizzling blue flame and burned like naft oil for a good five minutes before it was consumed. I understand that mao-tai is a Han concoction somehow expressed from common millet, but it is an uncommon beverage—as fiery a fuel to the belly and the brain as it is to any open flame.
“Pu-tao!” was the fourth command the Khakhan shouted to the serpent tree; the word pu-tao means grape wine. But to the consternation of all us guests, nothing happened. The fourth serpent simply hung there, sullenly dry, and we sat gaping, almost fearful, wondering what had gone wrong. The Khakhan, though, sat grinning with secret glee, enjoying the air of suspense, until he demonstrated the last and most magical magic of the apparatus. Not until he shouted “Pu-tao!” and then added a shout of either “hong!” or “bai!” would the fourth serpent begin to gush, and according to Kubilai’s command it would dispense red (hong) or white (bai) wine, at which we guests erupted in a storm of cheers and applause, and the golden peacocks beat their wings and fanned their tails so wildly that they shed flakes of golden feathers.
The banquet guests that night, except for the visitors being welcomed, comprised the highest lords and ministers and courtiers of the Khanate, plus some women whom I took to be their wives. The lords were a mixture of nationalities and complexions: Arabs and Persians as well as Mongols and Han. But of course the women present were the non-Muslim Mongol and Han wives; if the Arabs and Persians had wives, they were not permitted to dine in mixed company. All the men were finely garbed in brocaded silks, some wearing robes, as did the Khakhan and other Mongols and the native Han, some wearing their silks in the form of Persian pai-jamah and tulband, and others wearing their silks as Arab aba and kaffiyah.
But the women were even more gorgeously arrayed. The Han ladies all had powdered their already ivory faces to the whiteness of snow, and wore their blue-black hair in voluminous piles and swirls atop their heads, pinned up there by long jeweled implements they called hair-spoons. The Mongol ladies were of slightly darker complexion, a sort of fawn color, and I was much interested to see that these women, unlike their plains-dwelling nomad sisters, were not coarsened to leather by sun and wind, nor were
they bulkily muscular of body. Their coiffures were even more complex than that of the Han women. Their hair, ruddy-black instead of blue-black, was braided onto a framework to make it swoop in a wide crescent at either side of the head, rather like sheep horns, and those crescents were festooned with dangling brilliants. Also, though they wore the same simple, flowing gowns as the Han women, the Mongol ladies added to the shoulders of them some curious high fillets of padded silk that stood up like fins.
At the Khakhan’s table with him sat members of his immediate family. Five or six of his twelve legitimate sons were ranged at his right. On his left sat his first and chief wife, the Khatun Jamui, then his aged mother, the Dowager Khatun Sorghaktani, then his three other wives. (Kubilai had also a considerable and constantly varying consort of concubines, all younger than his wives. The current contingent sat at a separate table. By his concubines, Kubalai had another twenty-five sons, and God knows how many legitimate and bastard daughters besides, from all his women. )
The whole dining area was divided so that the male guests occupied the tables to Kubilai’s right and the females those to his left. Closest to the Khakhan’s table, within easy speaking distance, was the table appointed for us Polos, and with us was seated a Mongol dignitary to converse with us, interpret for us when necessary, explain to us the unfamiliar dishes and drinks served, and so on. He was a fairly young man—exactly ten years older than myself, it turned out—who introduced himself as Chingkim, saying he held the office of Wang of Khanbalik, which was to say the Chief City Officer or Magistrate. That office being equivalent to a European city’s mayor—or podestà, in the Venetian term—I gathered that we Polos were entitled to only a minor functionary as our table companion.
The Khakhan more formally introduced us to others of his lords and ministers seated at nearby tables. I will not attempt to list them all, for they included so many persons of so many different degrees of authority, and so many bore titles which I had never heard in any other court, or ever even heard of—the Master of the Black-Ink Arts (nothing but the Court Poet), the Master of the Mastiffs, Hawks and Chitas (the Khakhan’s Chief Huntsman), the Master of the Boneless Colors (nothing but the Court Artist), the Chief of Secretaries and Scribes, the Archivist of Marvels and Wonders, the Recorder of Things Strange. But I will mention by name some lords who seemed to me curiously out of place in a supposedly Mongol court—for example, Lin-ngan, whom we already knew, was one of the supposedly conquered Han, but held the fairly important post of Court Mathematician.
The young man Chingkim appeared to hold the grandest title assigned by Kubilai to any of his fellow Mongols, and Chingkim claimed to be only a mere city Wang. By contrast, the Khakhan’s Chief Minister, whose office was called by the Han title of Jing-siang, was neither a conqueror Mongol nor a subject Han. He was an Arab named Achmad-az-Fenaket, and he himself preferred to be called by the Arab title signifying his office, which is Wali. By whatever honorific he was addressed—Jing-siang or Chief Minister or Wali—Achmad was the second most powerful man in the entire Mongol hierarchy, subordinate only to the Khakhan himself, for he also held the office of Vice-Regent, meaning that he literally ruled the empire whenever Kubilai was out hunting or making war or otherwise occupied, and Achmad also held the office of Finance Minister, meaning that at all times he controlled the purse strings of the empire.
It seemed equally odd to me that the Mongol Empire’s Minister of War—war being the activity in which the Mongols most excelled and exulted—was not a Mongol but a Han gentleman named Chao Meng-fu. The Court Astronomer was a Persian named Jamal-ud-Din, a native of far-off Isfahan. The Court Physician was a Byzantine, a native of even farther-off Constantinople, the Hakim Gansui. The palace staff included other persons, not present at that banquet, of even more surprising alien origins, and I would eventually come to know them all.
The Khakhan had promised that we Polos would that night meet “two other visitors newly come from the West,” and they were present, seated at a table within speaking distance of his table and ours. They were not Westerners, but Han, and I recognized them as the two men I had seen dismounting from mules in the palace courtyard on the evening of our arrival, and I still had the feeling that I had seen them somewhere else even before that.
The tables at which we all sat were surfaced with a pinkish-lavender inlay of what looked to me like precious stones. And so they were, said our tablemate Chingkim:
“Amethyst,” he told me. “We Mongols have learned much from the Han. And the Han physicians have concluded that tables made of purple amethyst prevent drunkenness in those who sit drinking at them.”
I thought that interesting, but I should also have been interested to see how much drunker the company might have got without the countering influence of the amethyst. Kubilai was not alone in bellowing for kumis and arkhi and mao-tai and pu-tao, and ingesting quantities of all those beverages. Even of the resident Arabs and Persians, the only one who stayed Muslimly sedate and sober all night was the Wali Achmad. And the guzzling was not confined to the male guests; the female Mongols put away their share, too, and gradually got quite raucous and bawdy. The Han females kept to wine only, and only infrequent sips of it, and maintained their ladylike propriety.
But the company did not get drunk immediately, or all at once. The banquet began at what is in Kithai known as the Hour of the Cock, and the first guests did not stagger from the hall or slide insensible under the amethyst tables until well into the Hour of the Tiger, which is to say that the feasting and talking and laughing and entertainment lasted from early evening until just before dawn the next morning, and the general inebriation was not too evident until the tenth or eleventh hour of that twelve-hour festa.
“Onyx,” said Chingkim to me, and he pointed at the open area of the floor around the drink-pouring serpent tree, where at the moment two monstrously stout and sweatily naked Turki wrestlers were trying to dismember each other for our amusement. “The Han physicians have concluded that the black onyx stone imparts strength to those in contact with it. So the wrestling floor is paved with onyx to enliven the combatants.”
After the two Turki had crippled each other to the company’s satisfaction, we were regaled by a troupe of Uzbek girl singers, wearing gold-embroidered gowns of ruby red and emerald green and sapphire blue. The girls had rather pretty but exceptionally flat faces, as if their features were only painted on the fronts of their heads. They screeched for us some incomprehensible and interminable Uzbek ballads, in voices like ungreased wheels on a runaway wagon. Then some Samoyed musicians performed pieces of similar cacophony on an assortment of instruments —hand drums and finger cymbals and pipes resembling our fagotto and dulzaina.
Then there came Han jugglers who were far more entertaining, since they performed in silence as well as with incredible dexterity. It was astounding to see the tricks they could do with swords and rope loops and blazing torches, and how many such objects they could keep flying or spinning or suspended in the air at one time. But I really thought I could no longer trust my eyes when the jugglers began tossing into the air and to one another wine cups full of wine, and never spilling a drop! In the intervals between those performances, there wandered about the hall a tulhulos, which is a Mongol minstrel, sawing on a sort of three-stringed viella and dolefully wailing chronicles of battles and victories and heroes past.
Meanwhile, we all ate. And how we ate! We ate from paper-thin porcelain plates and bowls and platters, some softly colored in brown and cream colors, others blue with plum-color mottlings. I did not know then but later was told that those porcelains, called Chi-zho and Jen ware, were Han works of art, worthy of being treasured in collections, and not even the emperors of the Han would have dreamed of employing them for mere tableware. But, just as Kubilai had appropriated those art objects for his guests’ convenience, so had he acquired for his palace kitchens the foremost cooks of all Kithai, and those, more than the Chi-zho and Jen porcelain, were loudly appreciated by us guests. A
s we were served with each new course of the meal, and sampled it, the whole room would breathe “Hui!” and “Hao!” in approval, and the cook responsible for that particular dish would emerge from the kitchens and smile and ko-tou, and we would applaud him by clicking together our nimble tongs, making a cricket crepitation. I might remark that we guests were supplied with eating tongs of intricately carved ivory, but those used by Kubilai—so I was told by Chingkim—were made from the forearm bones of a gibbon ape, because such tongs will turn black if they touch poisoned food.
Our tablemate also explained each dish that came to our table, because almost every one was of Han origin and had a Han name that was most intriguing but gave no hint of the dish’s content, and I could not always determine what it was I was eating and applauding. Of course, at the start of the feasting, when the first dish was announced as Milk and Roses, I had no trouble seeing that those were simply white grapes and pink grapes. (A meal in the Han style goes contrary to ours; it begins with fruits and nuts and ends with a soup.) But when I was presented with a dish called Snow Babies, Chingkim had to explain that it was made of bean curd and the cooked flesh of frogs’ legs. And the dish called Red-Beaked Green Parrot with Gold-Trimmed Jade was a sort of multicolored custard containing the boiled and pulverized leaves of a Persian plant called aspanakh, creamed mushrooms and the petals of various flowers.
When the servants set before me One-Hundred-Year Eggs, I nearly declined them, for they were only hens’ and ducks’ eggs, hard-boiled, but the whites of them were a ghastly green and the yolks were black, and they smelled a hundred years old. However, Chingkim assured me that they were really only pickled, and only for sixty days, so I ate them and found them tasty. There were stranger things—the meat of bear paws, and fish lips, and a broth made of the saliva with which a certain bird glues its nest together, and pigeons’ feet in jelly, and a blob of substance called go-ba, which is a fungus that grows on ricestalks—but I valiantly partook of them all. There were also more recognizable foods—the miàn pasta in numerous shapes and sauces, dumplings stuffed and steamed, the familiar aubergine in an unfamiliar fish gravy.
The Journeyer Page 59
