The Journeyer

by Gary Jennings

  He could add nothing more, and I truly could not think of any females who might be nursing a grudge against me, what with the Lady Chao and the twins Buyantu and Biliktu all dead. If the veiled woman had been someone else’s agent, I had no idea whose. So I said no more about the matter, and tore up the vexing letter, and we continued on our journey, reaching Xan-du without anything dreadful happening to us, of either unexpected or expectable nature.

  Xan-du was just one of four or five subsidiary palaces that the Khakhan maintained in places outside Khanbalik, but it was the most sumptuous of those. In the Da-ma-qing Mountains, he had had an extensive hunting park laid out, and stocked with all manner of game, and staffed with expert huntsmen and gamekeepers and beaters, who lived there the year around, in villages on the park’s outskirts. In the center of the park stood a marble palace of goodly size, containing the usual halls for gathering and dining and entertaining and holding court, plus ample quarters for any number of the royal family and their courtiers and guests, and for all the numerous servants and slaves they would require, and for all the musicians and mountebanks brought along to enliven the nighttime hours. Every room, down to the smallest bedchamber, was decorated with wall paintings done by the Master Chao and other court artists, depicting scenes of the chase and the course and the hunt, and all marvelously done. Outside the main palace building were grand stables for the mounts and the pack animals—elephants as well as horses and mules—and mews for the Khan’s hawks and falcons, and kennels for his dogs and chita cats, and all those buildings were as finely built and adorned and as spotlessly clean as the palace itself.

  The Khakhan had also at Xan-du a sort of portable palace. It was like a tremendous yurtu pavilion, only so very tremendous that it could not have been constructed of cloth or felt. It was mostly made of the zhu-gan cane and palm leaves, and was supported on wooden columns carved and painted and gilded to seem dragons, and was held together by an ingenious webbing of silk ropes. Although of great size, it could be taken apart and carried about and put up again as easily as a yurtu. So it was continually being moved about the Xan-du parkland and the surrounding countryside—a train of elephants was reserved for the task of transporting its components—to wherever the Khakhan and his company chose to hunt on any day.

  Every time Kubilai went out to hunt, he did it in consummate style. He and his guests would depart from the marble palace in a numerous and colorful and glittering train. Sometimes the Khan rode on one of his “dragon steeds”—the milk-white horses specially bred for him in Persia—and sometimes in the little house called a hauda, rocking atop an elephant’s high shoulders, and at other times in a lavishly ornamented, two-wheeled chariot, drawn by either horses or elephants. When he went on horseback, he always carried one of the sleek chita cats draped elegantly across the horse’s withers in front of his saddle, and would loose it whenever some small animal started up in his path. The chita could run down anything that moves, and would always dutifully fetch its catch back to the train, but, since a chita always mangled its prey considerably, a huntsman would toss that game into a separate bag and later mince it for feed for the birds in the palace mews. When Kubilai rode out in a hauda or his chariot, he always had two or more of his milk-white gerfalcons perched on its rim and would start them at sight of small game running or flying.

  Behind the Khakhan’s chariot or steed or elephant would come the train of his company, all lords and ladies and distinguished guests mounted only a little less royally than the Khan himself, and all—depending on the game to be sought that day—carrying hooded hawks on their gauntleted wrists, or accompanied by servants carrying their lances or bows or leading on leash their chase dogs. Out ahead of the train, earlier in the day, would have gone the many beaters, to form up in three sides of a vast square and, at the proper time, to start flushing the game—stags or boars or otters or whatever—out the fourth side of the square, toward the approaching hunters.

  Whenever Kubilai’s train passed through or by one of the villages situated around his parkland, all the families of women and children living there would run outdoors to cry “Hail!” They also kept welcome fires always burning, in case the Khan should come that way, and would cast into the flames spices and incense to perfume the air as the Khakhan went by. At midday, the hunting party would repair to the zhu-gan palace, always set up at a convenient place, for food and drink and soft music and a brief nap before going afield again in the afternoon. And when the day’s hunt was done, depending on how tired they all might be, or how far from the main palace, they would either return there or stop the night in the zhu-gan palace, for it had copious room and comfortable bedding.

  I and Ali and our four Mongols reached Xan-du in the middle of a morning, and were told by a steward where to find the Khakhan’s portable palace, and arrived there at midday, when the whole party was lolling over its meal. Several people recognized me and hailed me, including Kubilai. I introduced Ali Babar to him as “a citizen of Khanbalik, Sire, one of your rich merchant princes,” and Kubilai received him cordially, not having noticed Ali in my company in the days when he had been the lowly slave Nostril. Then I started to say, “I bring from Yunnan both good and bad news, Sire—” but he held up his hand to stop me.

  “Nothing,” he said firmly. “Nothing is important enough to interrupt a good hunt. Hold your news until we return to the Xan-du palace this evening. Now, are you hungry?” He clapped for a servant to bring food. “Are you fatigued? Would you rather precede us to the palace and rest while you wait, or would you take a lance with us? We have been starting some admirably big and vicious boar hogs.”

  “Why, thank you, Sire. I should like to join the hunt. But I have little experience with a lance. Can boar be killed with bow and arrow?”

  “Anything can be killed with anything, including bare hands. And those you may have to use, to finish a boar.” He turned and called, “Hui! Mahawat, make ready an elephant for Marco Polo!”

  It was my first ride aboard an elephant, and it was most pleasant, infinitely more so than riding a camel, and very different from riding a horse. The hauda was made like a basket, of woven zhu-gan strips, with a little bench on which I sat beside the elephant driver, who is properly called a mahawat. The hauda had high sides to protect us from flicking tree branches, and a roof canopy over us, but was open in the front, so the mahawat could direct the elephant by prodding it with a stick, and so I could let fly my arrows. At first I was a little dizzied by my great height above the ground, but I soon got used to that. And when the animal first stepped out on the march through the park, I did not immediately realize that it was walking rather faster than a horse or camel does. Also, when it came time to chase a fleeing boar, it took me a while to realize that the elephant, for all its immense bulk, was running as fast as a galloping horse.

  The mahawat took great pride in his great charges, and bragged about them, and I found his bragging informative. Only cow elephants, he told me, were used as working beasts. The bulls being not very amenable to training, only a few of those were kept in any domestic herd, as company for the cows. The elephants all wore bells, big chunky things carved of wood, that sounded with a hollow thunking noise instead of a jangle. The mahawat said that if I ever heard a clanging metal bell, I had better move in a hurry, because metal bells were hung only on elephants that had misbehaved and so could not any longer be trusted—in other words, those elephants most resembling people: usually a cow maddened, like any human mother, by the loss of a calf, or a bull gone grumpy and mean and irascible with age, like any old man.

  An elephant, said the mahawat, was more intelligent than a dog, and more obedient than a horse, and more adept with its trunk and tusks than a monkey with its paws, and could be taught to do many things both useful and entertaining. In the timber forests, two elephants could work a saw between them to cut down a tree, then pick up and stack the giant logs or drag them to a log road, with the attendance of only a single human logger to select the trees
to be cut. As a beast of burden, the elephant was incomparable to any others—being able to carry as much of a load as three strong oxen, and carry it for a distance of thirty to forty li in an ordinary working day, or more than fifty li in an emergency. The elephant was not at all shy of water, as a camel is, for it is a good swimmer, and a camel cannot swim at all.

  I do not know if an elephant could have negotiated a precarious trail like the Pillar Road, but that animal carried us swiftly and surely across a variety of Da-ma-qing terrain. Since my elephant was just one in a line of them, the Khan’s and several others ahead of me, my mahawat did not have to do much directing. But when he wished the elephant to turn, he merely had to touch one or the other of the door-sized ears. When we were traveling among trees, the animal would, unbidden, use its trunk to move aside any impeding limbs, and the more whippy branches it would even break off to ensure that they did not swipe back at us riders. It went sometimes between trees that looked too close together to allow passage, and did that so sinuously and smoothly as not to scrape the belts that held our hauda on its shoulders. When we came to the wet clay bank of a small stream, the elephant, almost as playfully as a child, put its four tree-trunk feet close together and slid down the slope to the water’s edge. At that place, the river was laid with stepping stones for crossing. Before venturing out onto them, the elephant first gently tested its weight on one, and sounded with its trunk the depth of the water roundabout. Then, seeming satisfied, it stepped out onto the stones and from one to the next, never hesitating, but treading as delicately and precisely as a fat man who has drunk a drop too much.

  If the elephant has one unlovely trait, it is one that is common to all creatures, but is amplified to a prodigious degree by the animal’s size. That is to say that the elephant I rode frequently and appallingly broke wind. Other animals do that—camels, horses, even human beings, God knows—but no other animal in God’s Creation can do it so thunderously and odoriferously as an elephant, which produces a noxious miasma almost as visible as it is audible. With heroic effort, I pretended not to notice those lapses of manners. But I did make some small complaint of another trait: the elephant several times coiled its trunk back over its head and sneezed in my face—so windily as to rock me on my seat, and so wetly that I was soon damp all over. When I voiced my vexation at the sneezing, the mahawat said loftily:

  “Elephants do not sneeze. The cow is just blowing your aroma away from her.”

  “Gèsu,” I muttered. “My aroma is bothering her?”

  “It is only that you are a stranger, and she is unaccustomed to you. When she gets to know you, she will put up with your smell and will moderate her behavior.”

  “I rejoice to hear it.”

  So we rollicked along, rhythmically swaying in the high hauda, and the mahawat told me other things. Down in the jungles of Champa, he said, where the elephants came from, there were such things as white elephants.

  “Not really white, of course, like the Khakhan’s snow-white horses and hawks. But a paler gray than ordinary. And because they are rare, like albinos among humans, they are held to be sacred. They are often employed for revenge against an enemy.”

  “Sacred,” I repeated, “but instruments of revenge? I do not understand.”

  He explained. When a white elephant was caught, it was always presented to the local king, because only a king could afford to keep one. Being sacred, the elephant could never be put to labor, but had to be pampered with a fine stable and dedicated attendants and a princely diet, and its only function was to march in religious processions, when it had to be festooned with gold-threaded blankets and jeweled chains and baubles and such. That was a burdensome expense even for a king. However, said the mahawat, suppose a king got displeased with some one of his lords, or feared his rivalry, or simply took a dislike to him … .

  “In the old days,” he said, “a king would have sent him poisoned sweetmeats, so that the recipient would die when he ate them—or a beautiful slave girl poisoned in her pink places, so that the noble would die after he lay with her. But those stratagems are now too well-known. So the king nowadays simply sends the noble a white elephant. He cannot refuse a sacred gift. He can make no profit from it. But he has the ruinous expense of maintaining it in proper style, so he is soon bankrupted and broken—if he waits to be. Most commit suicide on first receiving the white elephant.”

  I refused to believe such a story, and accused the mahawat of inventing it. But then he told me something else unbelievable—that he could calculate for me the exact height of any elephant without even seeing it—and when at the close of the day we got down from ours, he demonstrated that ability, and even I could do it. So, being forced to believe him about that, I ceased scoffing at his white elephant story. Anyway, the measurement is done thus. You simply find an elephant’s track and pick out the print of one of its forefeet and measure the circumference of that. Everyone knows that a perfectly proportioned woman has a waist exactly twice the circumference of her neck, and her neck twice that of her wrist. Just so, the elephant’s height at the shoulder is exactly twice the circumference of its forefoot.

  When we heard the beaters hooting and thrashing up ahead of us, I nocked an arrow to my bowstring. And when a spiny black shape shouldered its way through a thicket and snorted at us, and clashed its yellow tusks as if it would challenge those of my elephant, I let fly the arrow. I hit the boar; I could hear the thwock and see the puff of dust go up from the coarse-haired hide. I believe he would have gone down on the instant if I had chosen one of the heavy, broad-headed arrows. But I had expected it to be a long shot, and it had been, so I had used one of the narrow-headed, long-range arrows. It pierced the boar clean and deep, but only made him turn and run.

  Without waiting for the goad, my elephant ran after him, following as closely on his jinks and curvettings as a trained boar-hound, while I and the mahawat bounced about in the jouncing hauda. It was impossible for me to nock another arrow, let alone shoot it and hope to hit anything. But the wounded boar soon realized that it was fleeing into the line of beaters. It skidded awkwardly to a stop in a dry creek bed, and turned at bay, and lowered its long head, its red eyes blinking angrily above and behind the four upcurved tusks. My elephant also slid to a halt, which must have made a humorous sight to see, if I had been elsewhere looking on. But the mahawat and I were pitched out of the hauda’s open front to sprawl atop the elephant’s great head, and would have gone on falling, if we had not been clutching at each other and the beast’s big ears and the straps holding the hauda and anything else in reach.

  When the elephant again curled her trunk backward over her head, I confusedly wished she had thought of something better to do than sneeze-but it turned out that she had. She curled the trunk around my waist and, as if I had been no weightier than a dry leaf, lifted me off her head, twirled me in midair and set me down on my feet—between her and the enraged, pawing, snorting boar. I did not know whether the elephant maliciously intended that I, the new-smelling stranger, should suffer the brunt of the boar’s charge, or whether she was trained to do that in order to give a hunter a second shot at the quarry. But if she thought she was being helpful, she was mistaken, for she had put me down without my bow and arrows, still up in the hauda. I could have turned to see whether the little eyes among her wrinkles were bright with mischief or solemn with concern—elephants’ eyes are as expressive as women’s—but I dared not turn my back to the wounded boar.

  From where I now stood, it looked bigger than a barnyard brood sow, and inexpressibly more savage. It stood with its black snout close to the ground, above it the four wicked tusks curling up and out, above them the blazing red eyes, the tufty ears twitching and, behind them, the powerful black shoulders hunching for a lunge. I threw my hand to my belt knife, yanked it out and in front of me, and flung myself headlong toward the boar in the same moment that it charged. Had I waited a breath longer, I should have moved too late. I fell atop the boar’s long snout and hig
h-humped back, but the beast did not jerk its tusks upward into my groin, for it died too quickly. My knife went through the hide and deep into flesh, and I squeezed its handle in the instant of thrust, so that I struck with all three blades at once. The boar’s dying plunge carried me with it for some way, then its legs crumpled and we came down in a heap.

  I scrambled up quickly, fearful that the animal might still have one last convulsion left in it. When it only lay still and bled, I plucked out my knife and then the arrow, and wiped them clean on the quill-like black hairs. Closing the trusty squeeze-knife and putting it back into its sheath, I mentally sent another thank-you into the far away and long ago. Then I turned and gave a not-so-thankful look at the elephant and the mahawat. He sat up there gawking with awe and perhaps some admiration. But the elephant only stood rocking gently from foot to foot, her eye regarding me with self-complacent feminine composure, as if to say, “There. You did it just as I expected you to,” which no doubt was the offhand remark made by the liberated princess to San Zorzi after he slew her dragon captor.

  2

  BACK at the Xan-du palace, Kubilai took me walking with him in the gardens while we waited for the cooks to prepare a dinner of the boars—my own trophy and the several others brought in by other hunters of the party (who had speared theirs from the more usual and safer distances). The afternoon was waning into twilight as the Khakhan and I stood on an inverted bridge and looked out over an artificial lake of some size. That lake was fed by a small waterfall, and the bridge was built in front of it, not arching over it, but in the form of a letter U, with stairs going down from one bank and upward to the other, so that at the middle of the bridge one stood at the foaming foot of the little cascade.

  I admired it for a time, then turned to look at the lake, while Kubilai perused the letter from the Orlok Bayan, which I had given him to read before the light was gone. It was a lovely and peaceful autumn evening. There were flaming sunset clouds high in the sky above the lake, and then a patch of clear ice-blue sky between them and the black serration of the farther lakeside’s treetops, which looked as flat as if they had been cut from black paper and pasted there. The mirror-smooth lake reflected only the black trees and the clear blue of the lower sky, except where a few ornamental ducks were leisurely paddling across it. They rumpled the water behind them just enough that it reflected there the high sunset clouds, so each duck was trailing a long wedge of warm flame across the ice-blue surface.