I turned. It was the Court Firemaster, who no doubt had come at a run because he had known the distinctive noise of his own product.
“I was trying an experiment in al-kimia, Master Shi,” I said, contrite. “The girls were instructed to keep the fire very low, but they must have—”
“I told you,” he said through his teeth. “The flaming powder is not a thing to play with.”
“No one can tell Marco Polo anything,” said Prince Chingkim, who, as Wang of Khanbalik, had come apparently to see what havoc had been visited upon his city. He added drily, “Marco Polo must be shown.”
“I would rather not have been shown this,” I mumbled.
“Then do not look, master,” said Nostril. “For here come the Court Funeralmaster and his assistants, to gather the mortal remains.”
The fire had been damped down, by now, to wisps of smoke and occasional little sizzles of steam. The spectators and the water-carrying servants all went away, for people naturally disliked to linger in the vicinity of the funeral preparers. I remained, out of respect for the departed, and so did Nostril, to keep me company, and so did Chingkim, in his capacity as Wang, to see that all was properly concluded, and so did the Master Shi, out of a professional desire to examine the wreckage and make notes for future reference in his work.
The purple-garbed Funeralmaster and his purple-garbed men, although they must have been accustomed to seeing death in many forms, clearly found this job distasteful. They took a look about, then went away, to return with some black leather containers and wooden spatulas and cloth mops. With those objects, and with expressions of revulsion, they went through my rooms and the garden area outside, scraping and swabbing and depositing the results in the containers. When finally they were done, we other four went in and examined the ruins, but only cursorily, for the smell was dreadful. It was a stink compounded of smoke, char, cooked meat and—though it is ungallant to say of the beautiful young departed—the stench of excrement, for I had given the girls no opportunity that morning to make their toilet.
“To have done all this damage,” said the Firemaster, as we were glumly poking about in the main room, “the huo-yao must have been tightly confined at the moment it ignited.”
“It was in a securely lidded stoneware pot, Master Shi,” I said. “I would have thought no spark could have got near it.”
“The pot itself only had to get hot enough,” he said, with a glower at me. “And a stoneware pot? More explosive potential than an Indian nut or a heavy zhu-gan cane. And if the women were huddled over it at the time …”
I moved away from him, not wanting to hear any more about the poor girls. In a corner, to my surprise, I found one undestroyed thing in that destroyed room. It was only a porcelain vase, but it was entire, unbroken, except for some chips lost from its rim. When I looked into it, I saw why it had survived. It was the vase into which I had poured the first measure of huo-yao, and then poured in water. The powder had dried to a solid cake that nearly filled the vase, and so had made it impervious to damage.
“Look at this, Master Shi,” I said, taking it to show to him. “The huo-yao can be a preservative as well as a destroyer.”
“So you first tried wetting it,” he said, looking into the vase. “I could have told you that it would dry solid and useless like that. As a matter of fact, I believe I did tell you. Ayn davàr, but the Prince is right. You cannot be told anything by anybody … .”
I had stopped listening, and went away from him again, for a dim recollection was stirring in my mind. I took the vase out into the garden, and pried up a stone from a whitewashed ring of them around a flower bed, and used it for a hammer to shatter the porcelain. When all the fragments fell away, I had a heavy, gray, vase-shaped lump of the solid-caked powder. I regarded it, and the dim memory came clearer in my mind. What I remembered was the making of that foodstuff the Mongols called grut. I remembered how the Mongol women of the plains would spread milk curd in the sun, and let that dry to a hard cake, then crumble it into pellets of grut, which would keep indefinitely without spoiling, until someone wished to make an emergency meal of it. I took up my stone again, and hammered on the lump of huo-yao until a few pellets, the size and appearance of mouse droppings, crumbled off from it. I regarded them, then went once again to the Firemaster and said diffidently:
“Master Shi, would you look at these and tell me if I am wrong—”
“Probably,” he said, with a contemptuous snort. “They are mouse turds.”
“They are pellets broken from that lump of huo-yao. It appears to me that these pellets hold in firm suspension the correct proportions of the three separate powders. And, being now dry, they should ignite just as if—”
“Yom mekhayeh!” he exclaimed huskily, in what I took to be the Ivrit language. Very, very slowly and tenderly, he picked the pellets from my palm, and held them in his, and bent to peer closely at them, and again huskily exclaimed, in what I recognized as Han, several other words like “hao-jia-huo,” which is an expression of amazement, and “jiao-hao,” which is an expression of delight, and “chan-juan,” which is a term usually employed to praise a beautiful woman.
He suddenly began dashing about the ruined room, until he found a splinter of wood still smoldering. He blew that into a glow, and ran out into the garden. Chingkim and I followed him, the Prince saying, “What now?” and “Not again!” as the Firemaster touched the ember to the pellets and they went off with a bright flare and fizz, just as if they had been in their original finely powdered form.
“Yom mekhayeh!” Master Shi breathed once more, and then turned to me and, wide-eyed, murmured, “Bar mazel!” and then turned to Prince Chingkim and said in Han, “Mu bu jian jie.”
“An old proverb,” Chingkim told me. “The eye cannot see its own lashes. I gather that you have discovered something new about the flaming powder that is new even to the experienced Firemaster.”
“It was just an idea that came to me,” I said modestly.
Master Shi stood looking at me, still saucer-eyed, and shaking his head, and muttering words like “khakhem” and “khalutz.” Then again he addressed Chingkim :
“My Prince, I do not know if you were contemplating a prosecution of this incautious Ferenghi for the damage and casualties he has caused. But the Mishna tells us that a thinking bastard, even, is more highly to be regarded than a high priest who preaches by rote. I suggest that this one has accomplished something worth more than any number of women servants and bits of palace.”
“I do not know what the Mishna is, Master Shi,” grumbled the Prince, “but I will convey your sentiments to my Royal Father.” He turned to me. “I will convey you, too, Marco. He had already sent me looking for you when I heard the thunder of your—accomplishment. I am glad I do not have to carry you to him in a spoon. Come along.”
“Marco,” said the Khakhan without preamble, “I must send a messenger to the Orlok Bayan in Yun-nan, to apprise him of the latest developments here, and I think you have earned the honor of being that messenger. A missive is now being written for you to take to him. It explains about the Minister Pao and suggests some measures that Bayan may take, now that the Yi are deprived of their secret ally in our midst. Give Bayan my letter, then attend upon him until the war is won, and then you will have the honor of bringing me the word that Yun-nan at last is ours.”
“You are sending me to war, Sire?” I said, not quite sure that I was eager to go. “I have had no experience of war.”
“Then you should have. Every man should engage in at least one war in his lifetime—else how can he say that he has savored all the experiences which life offers a man?”
“I was not thinking of life, Sire, so much as death.” And I laughed, but not with much merriment.
“Every man dies,” Kubilai said, rather stiffly. “Some deaths are at least less ignominious than others. Would you prefer to die like a clerk, dwindling and wilting into the boneyard of a secured old age?”
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��I am not afraid, Sire. But what if the war drags on for a long time? Or never is won?”
Even more stiffly, he said, “It is better to fight in a losing cause than to have to confess to your grandchildren that you never fought at all. Vakh!”
Prince Chingkim spoke up. “I can assure you, Royal Father, that this Marco Polo would never dodge any confrontation imaginable. He is, however, at the moment a trifle shaken by a recent calamity.” He went on to tell Kubilai about the accidental—he stressed accidental—devastation of my menage.
“Ah, so you are bereft of women servants and the services of women,” the Khakhan said sympathetically. “Well, you will be traveling too rapidly on the road to Yun-nan to have need of servants, and you will be too fatigued each night to yearn for anything more than sleep. When you get there, of course, you will do your share of the pillage and rape. Take slaves to serve you, take women to service you. Behave like a Mongol born.”
“Yes, Sire,” I said submissively.
He leaned back and sighed, as if he missed the good old days, and murmured in reminiscence:
“My esteemed grandfather Chinghiz, it is said, was born clutching a clot of blood in his tiny fist, from which the shaman foretold for him a sanguinary career. He lived up to the prophecy. And I can still remember him telling us, his grandsons, ‘Boys, a man can have no greater pleasure than to slay his enemies, and then, besmeared and reeking with their blood, to rape their chaste wives and virgin daughters. There is no more delightful sensation than to spurt your jing-ye into a woman or a girl-child who is weeping and struggling and loathing you and cursing you.’ So spake Chinghiz Khan, the Immortal of Mongols.”
“I will bear it in mind, Sire.”
He sat forward again and said, “No doubt you have arrangements to make before your departure. But make them as expeditiously as possible. I have already sent advance riders to ready your route. If, on’your way along it, you can sketch for me maps of that route—as you and your uncles did of the Silk Road—I shall be grateful and your reward will be handsome. Also, if in your travels you should catch up to the fugitive Minister Pao, I give you leave to slay him, and your reward for that would also be handsome. Now go and prepare for the journey. I will have fast horses and a trustworthy escort ready when you are.”
Well, I thought, as I went to my chambers, this would at least put me out of reach of my court adversaries—the Wali Achmad, the Lady Chao, the Fondler Ping, whoever else that whisperer might have been. Better to fall in open warfare than to someone sneaking up behind me.
The Court Architect was in my suite, making measurements and muttering to himself and snapping orders to a team of workmen, who were commencing the replacement of the vanished walls and roof. Happily, I had kept most of my personal possessions and valuables in my bedroom, which had been unravaged. Nostril was in there, burning incense to clear the air. I bade him lay out a traveling wardrobe for me and to make a light pack of other necessities. Then I gathered up all the journal notes I had written and accumulated since leaving Venice, and carried them to my father’s chambers.
He looked a little surprised when I dropped the pile on a table beside him, for it was an unprepossessing mound of smudged and wrinkled and mildewed papers of all different sizes.
“I would be obliged, Father, if you would send these to Uncle Marco, the next time you entrust some shipment of goods to the Silk Road horse post, and ask him to send them on to Venice for safekeeping by Maregna Fiordelisa. The notes may be of interest to some future cosmographer, if he can decipher them and arrange them in order. I had intended to do that myself—someday—but I am bidden to a mission from which I may not return.”
“Indeed? What mission?”
I told him, and with dramatic somberness, so I was taken aback when he said, “I envy you, doing something I have never done. You should appreciate the opportunity Kubilai is giving you. Da novèlo tuto xe belo. Not many white men have watched the Mongols make war—and lived to remember it.”
“I only hope I do,” I said. “But survival is not my sole consideration. There are other things I had rather be doing. And I am sure that there are more profitable things I could be doing.”
“Now, now, Marco. To a good hunger there is no bad bread.”
“Are you suggesting, Father, that I should enjoy wasting my time in a war?”
He said reprovingly, “It is true that you were trained for trade, and you come from a merchant lineage. But you must not look at everything with a tradesman’s eye, always asking yourself, ‘What is this good for? What is this worth?’ Leave that grubby philosophy to the tradesmen who never step beyond their shop doors. You have ventured out to the farthest edge of the world. It would be a pity if you take home only profit, and not at least a little of poetry.”
“That reminds me,” I said. “I turned a profit yesterday. May I borrow one of your maidservants for an errand?”
I sent her to fetch from the slave quarters the Turki woman called Mar-Janah, formerly the possession of the Lady Chao Ku-an.
“Mar-Janah?” my father repeated, as the servant departed. “And a Turki … ?”
“Yes, you know of her,” I said. “We have spoken of her before.” And I told him the whole story, of which he had so long ago heard only a part of the beginning.
“What a wondrously intricate web!” he exclaimed. “And to have been at last unraveled! God does not always pay His debts just on Sundays.” Then, as I had done on first seeing her, he widened his eyes when the lovely woman came smiling into the chamber, and I introduced him to her.
“My Mistress Chao did not seem pleased about it,” she said shyly to me, “but she tells me that I am now your property, Master Marco.”
“Only briefly,” I said, taking the paper of title from my purse and holding it out to her. “You are your own property again, as you should be, and I will hear you call no one Master any more.”
With a tremulous hand she accepted the paper, and with her other hand she brushed tears from her long eyelashes, and she seemed to have trouble finding words to speak.
“Now,” I went on, “I doubt not that the Princess Mar-Janah of Cappadocia could take her pick of men from this court or any other. But if Your Highness still has her heart set on Nost—on Ali Babar, he awaits you in my chambers down the hall.”
She started to kneel in ko-tou, but I caught her hands, raised her, turned her to the door, said, “Go to him,” and she went.
My father approvingly followed her with his gaze, then asked me, “You will not wish to take Nostril with you to Yun-nan?”
“No. He has waited twenty years or more for that woman. Let them be married as soon as can be. Will you tend to those arrangements, Father?”
“Yes. And I will give Nostril his own certificate of title as a wedding present. I mean Ali Babar. I suppose we ought to accustom ourselves to addressing him more respectfully, now that he will be a freeman and consort to a princess.”
“Before he is entirely free, I had better go and make sure he has packed for me properly. So I will say goodbye now, Father, in case I do not see you or Uncle Mafio before I leave.”
“Goodbye, Marco, and let me take back what I said before. I was wrong. You may never make a proper tradesman. You just now gave away a valuable slave for no payment at all.”
“But, Father, I got her free of payment.”
“What better way to turn a clear profit? Yet you did not. You did not even set her free with fanfare and fine words and noble gesticulations, letting her kiss and slobber over your hands, while a numerous audience applauded your liberality and a palace scribe recorded the scene for posterity.”
Mistaking the tenor of his words, I said in some exasperation, “To quote one of your own adages, Father: one minute you are lighting torches and the next you are counting candle wicks.”
“It is poor business to give things away, and worse business to get not even praise for doing so. Clearly you know the value of nothing—except perhaps a human being or two.
I despair of you as a tradesman. I have hope of you as a poet. Goodbye, Marco, my son, and come back safe.”
I got to see Mar-Janah one more time. The next morning, she and Nostril-now-Ali came to wish me “salaam aleikum” before my departure, and to thank me again for having helped to bring them together. They had risen early, to make sure of catching me—and evidently had got up from a shared bed, for they were disheveled and sleepy-eyed. But they were also smiling and blithesome, and, when they tried to describe to me their rapturous reunion, they were quite rapturously and absurdly inarticulate.
He began, “It was almost as if—”
“No, it was as if—” said she.
“Yes, it was indeed as if—” he said. “All the twenty years since we last knew each other—it was as if they, well—”
“Come, come,” I said, laughing at the foolish locutions. “Neither of you used to be such an inept teller of tales.”
Mar-Janah laughed too, and finally said what was meant: “The twenty intervening years might never have been.”
“She still thinks me handsome!” exclaimed Nostril. “And she is more beautiful than ever!”
“We are as giddy as two youngsters in first love,” she said.
“I am happy for you,” I said. Though they were both perhaps forty-five years old, and though I still could not help feeling that a love affair between persons nearly old enough to be my parents was a quaint and risible thing, I added, “I wish you joy forever, young lovers.”
I went then to call on the Khakhan, to collect his letter for the Orlok Bayan—and found that he already had visitors: the Court Firemaster, whom I had seen only the day before, the Court Astronomer and the Court Goldsmith, whom I had not seen for quite some time. They all three looked curiously bloodshot, but their red eyes gleamed with something like excitement.
Kubilai said, “These gentlemen courtiers wish you to carry to Yun-nan something of theirs also.”
“We have been up all night, Marco,” said the Firemaster Shi. “Now that you have devised a way to make the flaming powder transportable, we are eager to see it employed in combat. I have spent the night wetting quantities of it and drying it into cakes and then pulverizing it into pellets.”
The Journeyer Page 76
