Chingkim emptied his goblet and handed it, without looking, over his shoulder, where Biliktu-or-Buyantu took it and scurried off.
“Each year,” he resumed, “as the maidens are delivered to the various Ilkhans and Wangs in the various lands and provinces, those men examine the girls and assay them like so much gold bullion. Depending on the quality of a maiden’s facial features and bodily proportions and complexion and hair and voice and grace of gait and so on, she is rated at fourteen karats—or sixteen or eighteen, as the case may be, and so on up. Only those above sixteen karats are sent on here to Khanbalik, and only those assayed at the fineness of pure unalloyed gold, twenty-four karats, have any hope of getting near the great Khakhan.”
Though Chingkim could not have heard my maid’s silent approach, he put up his hand and she arrived just in time to place the refilled goblet in his grasp. He appeared not at all surprised to receive it—as if he had naturally assumed it would be there—and he gulped from it and went on:
“Even those comparatively few maidens of twenty-four karats must first live for a while with older women here in the palace. The old women inspect them even more closely, especially their behavior in the nighttime. Do the girls snore in their sleep, or toss restlessly in the bed? Are their eyes bright and their breath sweet when they awaken in the morning? Then, on the old women’s recommendations, my father will take a few of the girls as his concubines for the next year, others to be his maidservants. The rest of them he apportions out, according to their karat grade, to his lords and ministers and court favorites, according to their rank. Congratulate yourself, Marco, that you suddenly rank high enough to merit these twenty-two-karat virgins.”
He paused, and laughed again. “I do not quite know why you do—unless it is your propensity for reviling your betters as Kalmuks and bastards. I hope all the other courtiers do not start imitating your style of address, and expect to emulate your rise to favor.”
I cleared my throat and said, “You mentioned that the girls come from all lands. Had you any particular reason for selecting Mongols for me?”
“Again, my father’s instructions. You already speak our tongue very well, but he desires that you achieve impeccable fluency. And it is a known fact that pillow talk is the best and quickest way to learn a language. Why do you ask? Would you have preferred some other breed of women?”
“No, no,” I said hastily. “The Mongol is one breed of woman I have not yet had an opportunity to—er—assay. I look forward to the experience. I am honored, Chingkim.”
He shrugged. “They are twenty-two karat. Near perfect.” He sipped again at his drink, then leaned toward me to say seriously, speaking now in Farsi, that the maids might not eavesdrop, “There are many lords here, Marco, and older ones, and very high-ranking ones, who have never yet received better than a sixteen-karat regard from the Khan Kubilai. I suggest you keep that in mind. Any palace community is an anthill teeming with intrigues and plots and conspiracies, even at the level of page boys and kitchen scullions. It will rankle many in this court, that a young man like you is not consigned to that grub-ant level of pages and scullions. You are a newcomer and a Ferenghi, which would make you suspect enough, but abruptly and incomprehensibly you have been exalted. Overnight, you have become an interloper, a target for envy and spite. Believe me, Marco. No one else would give you this friendly warning, but I do, because I am the only one who can. Second only to my father, I am the one man in the entire Khanate who need not be fearful and jealous of his position. Everyone else must be—and so must see you as a threat. Be always on your guard.”
“I believe you, Chingkim, and I thank you. Can you suggest any way I might make myself less of a target?”
“A Mongol horseman takes care never to ride on the skyline of the hills, but always a little way below the crest.”
I sat and considered that advice. Just then, there came a scratching noise from the hall door, and one of the maids glided away to answer it. I could not quite determine how I might stay off the skyline while resident inside a palace, unless perhaps I went about in a permanent posture of ko-tou. The maid came back into the room.
“Master Marco, it is a caller who gives his name as Sindbad, and urgently entreats audience.”
“What?” I said, preoccupied with skylines. “I am acquainted with no person named Sindbad.”
Chingkim looked at me and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, “Already come the enemies?”
Then I shook my head and got it to working again, and said, “Oh, of course I know the man. Bid him come in.”
He did, and rushed straight to me, looking distraught, wringing his hands, his eyes and central orifice wildly dilated. Without ko-tou or salaam, he bleated in Farsi, “By the seven voyages of my namesake, Master Marco, but this is a terrible place!”
I held up a hand to stop his saying something as indiscreet as I had several times done lately, and turned to say to Chingkim in the same language, “Allow me, Royal Highness, to introduce my slave Nostril.”
“Nostril?” Chingkim murmured wonderingly.
Taking my hint, Nostril made a perfect ko-tou to the Prince and then to me, and said meekly, “Master Marco, I would beg a boon.”
“You may speak in the Prince’s presence. He is a friend. But why are you going about under an assumed name?”
“I have been seeking you everywhere, master. I used all my names, a different one to every person I asked. I thought it prudent, since I go in fear for my life.”
“Why? What have you done?”
“Nothing, master! I swear it! I have been so well behaved for so long that Hell itches with impatience. I am spotless as a new-dropped lamb. But so were Ussu and Donduk. Master, I beg that you rescue me from that sty called a barrack. Let me come and lodge in your quarters. I ask not even a pallet. I will lay me down across your threshold like a watchdog. For the sake of all the times I saved your life, Master Marco, now save mine!”
“What? I do not recall your ever saving my life.”
Chingkim looked amused and Nostril looked befuddled.
“Did I not? Some earlier master, perhaps. Well, if I have not, it was only for lack of opportunity. However, if and when some such dread opportunity occurs, it is best that I be near at hand and—”
I interrupted, “What about Ussu and Donduk?”
“That is what has terrified me, master. The frightful fate of Ussu and Donduk. They did nothing wrong, did they? Only escorted us from Kashgar to here, did they not, and performed capably in that duty?” He did not wait for a reply, but babbled on. “This morning a squad of guards came and manacled Donduk and dragged him away. Ussu and I, certain that some terrible mistake had been made, inquired around the barracks, and were told that Donduk was being questioned. After a while of worrying, we inquired again, and were told that Donduk had not satisfactorily answered the questions, so he was at that moment being buried.”
“Amoredèi!” I cried. “He is dead?”
“One hopes so, master; otherwise an even more terrible mistake has been made. Then, master, after a while the guards came again and manacled Ussu and dragged him away. After another while of wringing my hands, I inquired again about the two of them, and I was rudely told to inquire no more about matters of torture. Well, Donduk had been taken and slain and buried, and Ussu had been taken, and who else was there to torture but me? So I fled the barrack to come looking for you and—”
“Hush,” I said. I turned to look a query at Chingkim.
He said, “My father is anxious to know all he can learn about his eternally restive cousin Kaidu. It was you who mentioned to him last night that your escorts were men of Kaidu’s personal guard. No doubt my father assumes them to be well informed about their master—about any possible insurrection Kaidu may be planning.” He paused and looked down into his goblet and said, “It is the Fondler who does the questioning.”
“The Fondler?” Nostril murmured wonderingly.
I pondered, which hurt my head, and
after a moment said to Chingkim, “It would be obtrusive of me to interfere in Mongol affairs that involve Mongols only. But I do feel in a measure responsible … .”
Chingkim drained his cup and stood. “Let us go and see the Fondler.”
I would much rather have stayed in my new quarters all day, and nursed my head, and got acquainted with the twins Buyantu and Biliktu, but I went, and made Nostril come with us.
We went a long way, through enclosed passages and open areas and more passages, and then down some stairs that led underground, and then another long way through subterranean workshops full of busy artisans, and through storage cellars and lumber rooms and wine cellars. When Chingkim was leading us through a series of torch-lit but unpeopled chambers, their rock walls damp with slime and mottled with fungus, he paused to say in an undertone to Nostril, though surely meaning the advice for me, too:
“Do not again use the word torture, slave. The Fondler is a sensitive man. He resents and recoils from such rough terms. Even when a matter of importance necessitates his plucking out a person’s eyeballs and putting hot coals in the sockets, it is never torture. Call it questioning, call it caressing, call it tickling—call it anything but torture—lest someday it is required that you be fondled by the Fondler and he remembers your disrespect of his profession.”
Nostril only gulped loudly, but I said, “I understand. In Christian dungeons the practice is formally known as the Asking of the Question Extraordinaire.”
Chingkim finally led us into a room that, except for its torch light and beslimed rock walls, might have been a counting room in a prosperous mercantile establishment. It was full of counting desks at which stood clerks busy with ledgers and documents and abachi and the petty routine of any well-run institution. This might be a human abattoir, but it was an orderly abattoir.
“The Fondler and all his staff are Han,” Chingkim said to me aside. “They are so much better at these things than we.”
Evidently even the Crown Prince did not demand entry straightaway into the Fondler’s domain. We all waited until one of the Han clerks, the tall and austerely expressionless chief of those clerks, deigned to approach us. He and the Prince spoke for a time in the Han language, then Chingkim translated to me:
“The man called Donduk was first questioned, and with propriety, but declined to betray anything he knew of his master Kaidu. So then he was questioned extraordinarily, as you put it, to the limits of the Fondler’s ingenuity. But he remained obdurate and so—as is my father’s standing order in such cases—he was relinquished to the Death of a Thousand. Then the man Ussu was brought in. He also has resisted both the questioning and the questioning extraordinary, and will also be accorded the Death of a Thousand. They deserve it, of course, being traitors to their ultimate ruler, my father. But”—he said this with some pride—“they are loyal to their Ilkhan, and they are stubborn and they are brave. They are true Mongols.”
I said, “Pray, what is the Death of a Thousand? A thousand what?”
Chingkim said, again in an undertone, “Marco, call it the death of a thousand caresses, a thousand cruelties, a thousand endearments, what matter? Given a thousand of anything, a man will die. The name only signifies a death long drawn out.”
He was plainly urging that I not pursue the matter, but I did. I said, “I never held any affection for Donduk. Ussu, though, was a more congenial companion on the long trail. I should like to know how his long trail ends.”
Chingkim made a face, but he turned to speak again to the chief clerk. The man looked surprised and doubtful, but he went out of the room by an iron-studded door.
“Only my father or I could even contemplate doing this,” muttered Chingkim. “And even I must convey to the Fondler most fulsome compliments and abject apology for interrupting him when he is actually engaged in his work.”
I expected the chief clerk to come back bringing a monstrous, shaggy brute of a man, broad of shoulder, brawny of arm, beetling of brow, black-garbed like the Meatmaker of Venice or all in Hellfire-red like the executioner of the Baghdad Daiwan. But if the chief clerk had looked the picture of a clerk, the man who returned with him was the very essence of clerkness. He was gray-haired and pale and frail, fussy and fidgety of manner, prissily dressed in mauve silks. He tripped across the room with small, precise steps, and he looked at us, despite his diminutive Han nose, very much de haut en bas. He was a man born to be a clerk. Surely, I thought, he cannot be other than that. But he spoke in the Mongol tongue, and said:
“I am Ping, the Fondler. What wish you of me?” His voice was tight, with the barely controlled and not at all concealed indignation that is the natural speech of a clerk interrupted in his clerking.
“I am Chingkim, the Crown Prince. I should like you, Master Ping, to explain to this honored guest of mine the manner of giving the Death of a Thousand.”
The creature sniffed clerkishly. “I am not accustomed to requests of that indelicate nature, and I do not grant them. Also, the only honored guests here are my own.”
Chingkim perhaps stood in awe of the Fondler’s title of office, but he himself was entitled Prince. More than that, he was a Mongol being affronted by a mere Han. He drew himself up tall and rigid, and snarled:
“You are a public servant and we are the public! You are a civil servant and you will be civil! I am your Prince and you have arrogantly neglected to make ko-tou! Do so at once!”
The Fondler Ping flinched back as if we had pelted him with some of his own hot coals, and obediently fell down and did the ko-tou. All the other clerks in the chamber peered awestricken over their counting desks at what must have been a first-ever occurrence. Chingkim smoldered down at the prostrate man for some moments before bidding him to rise. When Ping did, he was suddenly all conciliation and solicitude, as is the way of clerks when someone has the temerity to bark at them. He fawned on Chingkim and expressed himself willing, nay, avid to fulfill the Prince’s every least whim.
Chingkim said grumpily, “Just tell the Lord Marco here how the Death of a Thousand is administered.”
“With pleasure,” said the Fondler. He turned on me the same benign smile he had bestowed on Chingkim, and spoke in the same unctuous voice, but his eyes on me were snake cold and malevolent.
“Lord Marco,” he began. (Actually he said Lahd Mah-ko, in the Han manner, but I eventually got so used to not hearing r’s when a Han spoke that I will henceforth forbear from remarking on the fact.)
“Lord Marco, it is named the Death of a Thousand because it requires one thousand small pieces of silk paper, folded and tossed haphazard in a basket. Each paper bears a word or two, no more than three, signifying some part of the human body. Navel or right elbow or upper lip or left middle toe or whatever. Of course, there are not one thousand parts to the human body—at any rate, not one thousand capable of feeling sensation, like a fingertip, say, or being caused cessation of function, like a kidney. To be precise, there are, by the traditional Fondler’s Count, only three hundred and thirty-six such parts. So the inscribed papers are almost all in triplicate. That is to say, three hundred and thirty-two parts of the body are thrice written on separate papers, making a total of nine hundred and ninety-six. Are you following this, Lord Marco?”
“Yes, Master Ping.”
“Then you will have noted that there are four parts of the body not inscribed thrice on the papers. Those four are written only once apiece, on the four papers remaining of the thousand. I will later explain why—if you have not guessed by then. Very well, we have one thousand inscribed and folded little papers. Every time a man or woman is sentenced to the Death of a Thousand, before I commence my attentions to the Subject, I have my assistants newly mix and toss and tumble those papers in the basket. I do that mainly to reduce the likelihood of repetition in the Fondling, which might be unnecessarily distressing to the Subject or boring to me.”
He really was a clerk at heart, I thought, with his finicking numbers and his calling the victim the Subje
ct and his lofty condescension to my interest in the matter. But I was not fool enough to say so. Instead, I remarked respectfully:
“Excuse me, Master Ping. But all of this—this writing and folding and tossing of papers—what has this to do with death?”
“Death? It has to do with dying!” he said sharply, as if I had strayed into irrelevance. Flicking a sly glance sideways at Prince Chingkim, he said, “Any crude barbarian can kill a Subject. But artfully to lead and guide and beckon and cajole a man or woman through the dying—ah, for that, the Fondler!”
“I see,” I said. “Please do go on.”
“After having been purged and evacuated, to avert unseemly accidents, the Subject is securely but not uncomfortably tied erect between two posts, so that I can easily do the Fondling at his or her front or back or side, as required. My work tray has three hundred and thirty-six compartments, each neatly labeled with the name of a bodily part, and in each reposes one or several instruments exquisitely designed to be used on that certain part. Depending on whether the part is of flesh or sinew or muscle or membrane or sac or gristle, the implements may be knives of certain shapes, or awls, probes, needles, tweezers, scrapers. The instruments are newly whetted and polished, and my assistants are ready —my Blotters of Fluids and Retrievers of Pieces. I commence by doing the traditional Fondler’s Meditations. Thereby I attune myself not only to the Subject’s fears, which are usually apparent, but also to his inmost apprehensions and deepest levels of response. The artful Fondler is the man who can very nearly feel the same sensations as his Subject. According to legend, the most perfect of all Fondlers was a long-ago woman, who could so closely attune herself that she would actually cry out and writhe and weep in unison with her Subject, and even plead with herself for mercy.”
The Journeyer Page 61
