The Journeyer

by Gary Jennings

  “So Ukuruji is dead,” sighed Kubilai, folding the paper. “But a great victory has been accomplished, and all of Yun-nan will soon capitulate.” (Neither the Khan nor I could have known it at that moment, but the Yi had by then already laid down their arms, and another messenger was riding hard from Yun-nan-fu to bring the news.) “Bayan says that you can tell me the details, Marco. Did my son die well?”

  I told him all the how and where and when of it—our employment of the Bho as an expendable mock army, the laudable efficacy of the brass balls, the dwindling of the battle into two final skirmishes, man against man, one of which I had survived, the other which Ukuruji had not, and I concluded with the capture and execution of the treacherous Pao Nei-ho. I had meant to show Kubilai the yin seal of the Minister Pao, but I realized as I spoke that I had left it in my saddlebags, which were now in my palace chamber, so I did not mention it, and of course the Khakhan demanded no such proof.

  I added, perhaps a little wistfully, “I must apologize, Sire, that I neglected to follow the noble precepts of your grandfather Chinghiz.”

  “Uu?”

  “I left Yun-nan at once, Sire, to bring you the news. So I took no opportunity to ravish any chaste Yi wives or virgin Yi daughters.”

  He chuckled and said, “Ah, well. Too bad you had to forgo the handsome Yi women. But when we have taken the Sung Empire, perhaps you will have occasion to travel to the Fu-kien Province there. The females of the Min people of Fu-kien are so gloriously beautiful, it is said, that parents will not send a daughter out of the house even to fetch water or cut firewood, for fear that she will be abducted by slave hunters or the emperor’s concubine collectors.”

  “I shall look forward to my first meeting with a Min girl, then.”

  “Meanwhile, it appears that your prowess in other aspects of warfare would have pleased the warrior Khan Chinghiz.” He indicated the letter. “Bayan here gives you much of the credit for the Yun-nan victory. You evidently impressed him. He even makes the brash suggestion that I might console myself for the loss of Ukuruji by making you an honorary son of mine.”

  “I am flattered, Sire. But please to reflect that the Orlok wrote that while he was flushed with triumphal enthusiasm. I am sure he meant no disrespect.”

  “And I still have a sufficiency of sons,” said the Khan, as if he were reminding himself, not me. “On the son Chingkim, of course, I long ago settled the mantle of heir apparent. Also—you would not yet have heard this, Marco—Chingkim’s young wife Kukachin has recently been delivered of a son, my premier grandson, so the continued succession of our line is assured. They have named him Temur.” He went on, as if he had forgotten my presence, “Ukuruji most earnestly desired to become Wang of Yun-nan. A pity he died. He would have been a capable viceroy for a newly conquered province. I think now … I will award that Wang-dom to his half-brother Hukoji …” Then he turned abruptly to me again. “Bayan’s suggestion that I insinuate a Ferenghi into the Mongol royal dynasty is unthinkable. However, I agree with him that such good blood as yours should not be ignored. It might profitably be infused into the lesser Mongol nobility. There is precedent, after all. My late brother, the Ilkhan Hulagu of Persia, during his conquest of that empire, was so impressed by the valor of the foemen of Hormuz that he put them to stud with all his camp-following females, and I believe that the get was worthwhile.”

  “Yes, I heard that bit of history, Sire, while I was in Persia.”

  “Well, then. You have no wife, I know that. Are you bound or vowed to any other woman or women at present?”

  “Why … no, Sire,” I said, suddenly apprehensive that he was thinking of marrying me off to some spinster Mongol lady or minor princess of his choosing. I was not yearning to be married, and certainly not to una gata nel saco.

  “And if you neglected to take advantage of the Yi women, you must by now be aching for an outlet for your ardors.”

  “Well … yes, Sire. But I can myself seek—”

  He waved me to silence and nodded decisively. “Very well. Shortly before I brought the court from Khanbalik, there arrived this year’s accumulation of presentation maidens. I brought here to Xan-du some two score of them whom I have not yet covered. Among them are about a dozen choice Mongol girls. They may not be up to the Min standard of beauty, but they are all of twenty-four-karat quality, as you will see. I will send them to your chambers, one a night, first bidding them not to employ any fern seed, that they may readily be impregnated. You will do me and the Mongol Khanate the favor of servicing them.”

  “A dozen, Sire?” I said, with some incredulity.

  “Surely you do not demur. The last command I gave you was that you go to war. A command to go to bed—with a succession of prime Mongol virgins—is rather more eagerly to be obeyed, is it not?”

  “Oh, assuredly, Sire.”

  “Be it done, then. And I shall expect a good crop of healthy Mongol-Ferenghi hybrids. Now, Marco, let us wend our way back to the palace. Chingkim must be apprised of his half-brother’s death so that, as Wang of Khanbalik, he can order his city draped in purple mourning. Meanwhile, the Firemaster and the Goldsmith are in a fever to hear exactly how you utilized their brass-ball invention. Come.”

  The dining hall of the Xan-du palace was an imposing chamber, hung with painted scrolls and stuffed animal-head trophies of the hunt, but dominated by a sculpture of fine green jade. It was a single, solid piece of jade that must have weighed five tons, and God knows what it was worth in gold or flying money. It was carved into the semblance of a mountain very like those I had helped destroy in Yun-nan—complete with cliffs and crags and forests of trees and winding steep paths like the Pillar Road, being toilsomely climbed by little carved peasants and porters and horse carts.

  The boar meat made a tasty meal, and I ate it sitting at the high table with the Khan, the Prince Chingkim, the Goldsmith Boucher and the Firemaster Shi. I tendered Chingkim my condolences on his brother’s demise and my congratulations on his son’s birth. The other two courtiers alternated between plying me with intense questions about the successful working of the huo-yao balls and fulsomely praising me and each other for having invented a true invention, one that would be imitated throughout the world, and would endure down the ages, changing the whole face of war, and making forever famous the names Shi and Polo and Boucher.

  “For shame!” I chided. “You said yourself, Master Shi, that the flaming powder was invented by some unknown Han.”

  “Peu de chose!” cried Boucher. “It was nothing but a toy until its full potential was realized by a wily Venetian, a renegade Jew and a brilliant young Frenchman!”

  “Gan-bei!” cried old Shi. “L’chaim!” as he toasted us all with a goblet of mao-tai, and then downed it in a gulp. Boucher emulated him, but I took only a sip of mine. Let my fellow immortals get drunk; I would not, for I expected later to have need of my faculties.

  Some Uighur musicians played during the meal—mercifully softly —and after it we were entertained by jugglers and funambulists and then a company performing a play which, for all its foreignness, I found familiar. A Han storyteller droned and yammered and bellowed the tale, and the conversations occurring in it, while his associates worked the strings of marionettes acting out the various roles. I could not understand a word, but found it perfectly comprehensible, because the Han characters—Aged Cuckold and Comic Physician and Sneering Villain and Bumbling Sage and Lovelorn Maiden and Valiant Hero and so on—were so recognizably similar to those of any Venetian puppet show: our fuddled Pantaleone and inept physician Dotòr Balanzòn and rascal Pulcinella and dim-witted lawyer Dotòr da Nulla and coquette Colombina and dashing Trovatore and so on. But Kubilai seemed not much to enjoy the show, grumbling to us near him, “Why use puppets to portray people? Why not have people portray people?” (And obediently, in after years, all the player companies did exactly that: dispensed with the narrator and the marionettes, and presented human players each speaking his or her own part in the story.)
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  Most of the court was still loudly making merry when I retired to my chambers. But evidently Kubilai had given his instructions some while earlier, for I had just got into bed and not yet blown out the bedside lamp when there was a scratching at my door and a young woman came in, bearing what looked like a small white chest.

  “Sain bina, sain nai,” I said politely, but she made no response, and when she came into the lamplight I saw that she was not a Mongol, but a Han or one of the related races.

  She was obviously just a maid preparing for the entry of her lady, for now I discerned that the white object she carried was only an incense burner. I hoped that her lady would prove to be as comely and as exquisitely delicate as the servant. She set down the burner near my bed, a lidded porcelain box, shaped like a jewel chest and embossed with intricate raised designs. Then she took up my lamp, shyly smiling a silent request for permission and, when I nodded, used the lamp’s flame to set smoldering a stick of incense, lifted the burner’s lid and carefully placed the incense inside. I took note that it was the purple tsan-xi-jang, which is the very finest incense, compounded of aromatic herbs, musk and gold dust, to give a room not a heavy, spicy, closed-in smell, but the scent of summer fields. The servant girl sank down to sit meek and silent beside my bed, her eyes discreetly lowered, while the fragrant and calming perfume permeated my room. It did not calm me quite enough; I felt almost as nervous as if I had been really a bridegroom. So I tried to make small talk with the maid, but either she was well trained to imperturbability or was totally ignorant of Mongol, for she never even raised her eyes. Finally there was another scratching at the door, and her lady came proudly in. I was pleased to see that she was handsome—exceptionally so, for a Mongol—if not so tiny and dainty and porcelain-lovely as her servant.

  I said again in Mongol, “Good meeting, good woman,” and this one murmured back, “Sain bina, sain urkek.”

  “Come! Do not call me brother,” I said, with a shaky laugh.

  “It is the accepted salutation.”

  “Well, at least try not to think of me as a brother.”

  And she and I continued to make such small talk—very small talk, indeed, quite inane—as the maid helped her unpeel and get out of her considerable nuptial finery. I introduced myself, and she responded, in a sort of cascade of words, that she was called Setsen, and she was of the Mongol tribe called Kerait, and she was a Nestorian Christian, all the Kerait having been converted, in a bunch, by some long-ago wandering Nestorian bishop, and she had never set foot outside her nameless village in the far-northern fur-trapping country of Tannu-Tuva until she was selected for concubinage and transported to a trading town called Urga, where, to her surprise and delight, the provincial Wang had graded her at twenty-four karats and sent her on south to Khanbalik. Also, she said, she had never before laid eyes on a Ferenghi, and excuse her impudence, but were my hair and beard really naturally pale of color or had they simply gone gray with age? I told Setsen that I was not a great deal older than she, and still far from senile, as she ought to have descried from my rising excitement while I watched her disrobe. I would offer further evidence of my youthful vigor, I promised, as soon as the maidservant quitted the room. However, that girl, after tucking her naked lady in beside me, sank down again beside the bed as if to stay there, and did not even put out the light. So the subsequent conversation between me and Setsen got worse than inane, it got ridiculous.

  I said, “You may dismiss your servant.”

  She said, “The lon-gya is not a servant. She is a slave.”

  “Whatever. You may dismiss her.”

  “She is commanded to attend my qing-du chu-kai—my defloration.”

  “I undo the command.”

  “You cannot, Lord Marco. She is my attendant.”

  “I do not care, Setsen, if she is your Nestorian bishop. I would prefer that she attend elsewhere.”

  “I cannot send her away and neither can you. She is here by order of the Court Procurer and the Lady Matron of Concubines.”

  “I take precedence over matrons and procurers. I am here by order of the Khan of All Khans.”

  Setsen looked hurt. “I thought you were here because you wanted to be.”

  “Well, that, too,” I said, instantly contrite. “But I did not expect to have an audience to cheer my endeavors.”

  “She will not cheer. She is a lon-gya. She will not say anything.”

  “Perdiziòn! I do not care if she sings an inno imeneo, only she must do it somewhere else!”

  “What is that?”

  “A wedding song. A hymeneal hymn. It celebrates the—well, the breaking of the—that is to say, the defloration.”

  “But that is exactly what she is here for, Lord Marco!”

  “To sing?”

  “No, no, as a witness. She will depart as soon as you—as soon as she sees the stain on the bedsheet. Then she goes to report to the Lady Matron that all is as it should be. You comprehend?”

  “Protocol, yes. Vakh.”

  I glanced over at the girl, who seemed to be occupied in studying the white convolutions of the incense burner, and paying no least heed to our squabble. I was glad I was not a real bridegroom, or the circumstances would have stopped my living up to my earlier braggery. However, since I was only a sort of surrogate bridegroom and since neither the bride nor the bride’s maid found the situation embarrassing, why should I find it inhibiting? So I proceeded to provide the evidence the slave was waiting to get, and Setsen amiably if inexpertly cooperated, and during those exertions, so far as I noticed, the slave paid no more attention than if we had been as inert as her incense burner. But, after some while, Setsen leaned out from the bed and shook the girl by the shoulder, and she got up and helped Setsen untangle the bedclothes, and they found the small red smear. The slave nodded and smiled brightly at us, bent and blew out the lamp and left the room and left us to any nonobligatory consummations we might care to make for ourselves.

  Setsen left me at morning, and I joined the Khan and his courtiers for a day of hawking. Even Ali Babar came along, after I had assured him that falconry involved no such risks to the hunter as did the more strenuous veneries, like boar-sticking. We started much game that day, and the sport was good. Since the sharp-eyed falcons could see to wait on and stoop and strike well into the twilight, our whole company stayed out that night in the zhu-gan field palace. We returned to Xan-du the next day, with an abundance of game birds and hares for the kitchen pots, and that night, after a good dinner of venison, I received the second of Kubilai’s contributions to the improvement of the Mongol race.

  However, she also was preceded by a slave bringing the white porcelain incense burner and, when I saw that it was the same pretty slave girl, I tried to convey to her my discomfiture at her having to attend two of these nuptial nights. But she only smiled winningly, and either failed or refused to comprehend me. So, when the Mongol maiden finally arrived and introduced herself as Jehol, I said:

  “Forgive my unmanly agitation, Jehol, but I find it more than a little disquieting that the same monitor must twice oversee my nighttime doings.”

  “Do not concern yourself with the lon-gya,” said Jehol indifferently. “She is only a slave girl of the lowly Min people of the Fu-kien Province.”

  “Is she indeed?” I said, interested to hear that. “Of the Min, is she? Nevertheless, I do not care to have my successive performances compared—in their degree of prowess or stupration or efficacy or whatever other aspect.”

  Jehol only laughed and said, “She will make no comparisons, neither here nor in the concubine quarters. She cannot do any such thing.”

  By this time, with the slave girl’s assistance, Jehol had undressed to an extent that took my mind off other matters. So I said, “Well, if you do not care, I suppose I need not,” and the night proceeded as had the other one.

  But, when came the night for the next Mongol maiden—her name was Yesukai—and she was preceded by that same Min slave girl beari
ng that same incense burner, I once more raised objections. Yesukai only shrugged and said:

  “When we were at the palace in Khanbalik, we had a numerous complement of servants and slaves. But when the Lady Matron brought us out here to Xan-du for the season, we came with only a few domestics, and this slave is the only lon-gya among them. If we girls must make do with her, you must get used to her.”

  “She may be admirably reticent about what goes on in this chamber,” I grumbled. “But I have ceased to fret that she may indiscreetly talk. Now I fear that, after many more such nights as this, she will start laughing.”

  “She cannot laugh,” said Cheren, who was the next of the Mongol maidens to visit me. “No more than she can talk or hear. The slave is a lon-gya. You do not know the word? It means a deaf-mute.”

  “Is that a fact?” I murmured, regarding the slave with more compassion than I had done. “No wonder she has never answered when I railed at her. All this time, I thought lon-gya was her name.”

  “If she ever had a name, she cannot tell it,” said Toghon, who was the next of the Mongol maidens. “In the concubine quarters, we call her Hui-sheng. But that is only our feminine malice, when we make sport of her.”

  “Hui-sheng,” I repeated. “What malice in that? It is a most mellifluous name.”

  “It is a most unfitting name, for it means Echo,” said Devlet, the next of the Mongol maidens. “But no matter. She neither hears it nor answers to it.”