The Journeyer

by Gary Jennings

  “I must congratulate you again, Marco, on the splendid success you made of your mission to Manzi. I believe you did not take a single tsien of the tribute for yourself during all these years? No, I thought not. It was my own fault. I neglected to tell you, before you left here, that a tax collector customarily gets no wage, but earns his keep by taking a twentieth part of what he collects. It makes him work more diligently. I have no complaint, however, about the diligence of your own work. Therefore, if you will call upon the Minister Lin-ngan, you will find that he has, all this while, been putting aside your share, and it is a respectable amount.”

  “Respectable!” I gasped. “Why, Sire, it must amount to a fortune! I cannot accept it. I was not working for gain, but for my Lord Khakhan.”

  “All the more reason why you deserve it, then.” I opened my mouth again, but he said sternly, “I will hear no dispute about it. However, if you would care to demonstrate your gratitude, you might take on one more charge.”

  “Anything, Sire!” I said, still gasping at the magnitude of the surprise.

  “My son and your friend Chingkim wished most earnestly to see the jungles of Champa, and he never got there. I have messages for the Orlok Bayan, currently campaigning in the land of Ava. They are only routine communications, nothing urgent, but they would give you reason to make the journey which Chingkim did not. And your going as surrogate for him might be a consolation to his spirit. Will you go?”

  “Without hesitation or delay, Sire. Is there anything else I can do for you down there? Dragons I might slay? Captive princesses I could rescue?” I was only halfway being facetious. He had just made me a wealthy man.

  He chuckled appreciatively, but a little sadly. “Bring me back some small memento. Something that a fond son might have brought home to his aged father.”

  I promised I would seek for something unique, something never before seen in Khanbalik, and Hui-sheng and I took our departure. We went next to greet my father, who embraced us both, and wept a little for joy, until I stopped his tears by telling him of the great beneficence just bestowed on me by the Khakhan.

  “Mefè!” he exclaimed. “That is no hard bone to gnaw! I always thought of myself as a good businessman, but I swear, Marco, you could sell sunshine in August, as they say on the Rialto.”

  “It was all Hui-sheng’s doing,” I said, giving her an affectionate squeeze.

  “Well … ,” said my father thoughtfully. “This … on top of what the Compagnia has already sent home by way of the Silk Road … Marco, it may be time we started thinking of going home ourselves.”

  “What?” I said, startled. “Why, Father, you have always had another saying. To the right sort of man, the whole world is home. As long as we continue to prosper here—”

  “Better an egg today than a chicken tomorrow.”

  “But our prospects all are still rosy. We are still in the Khakhan’s high regard. The whole empire is at its richest, ripe for our exploitation. Uncle Mafìo is being well attended, and—”

  “Mafìo is four years old again, so he cares not where he is. But I am touching sixty, and Kubilai is at least ten years older.”

  “You look nowhere near senility, Father. True, the Khakhan shows his age—and some despondency—but what of that?”

  “Have you thought what our position would be if he should die suddenly? Just because he favors us, others resent us. Only furtively now, but they are likely to manifest that resentment when his protecting hand falls away. The very rabbits dance at the funeral of a lion. Also, there will be a resurgence of the Muslim factions he suppressed, and they love us not at all. I hardly need mention the likelihood of even worse troubles —upheavals from here to the Levant—if there should be a war of succession. But I am increasingly glad that I have all these years been sending our profits west to your Uncle Marco in Constantinople. I shall do the same with this new fortune of yours. However, anything else we shall have accrued at the moment of Kubilai’s death is bound to be sequestered here.”

  “Can we really gnash our teeth if that happens, Father, considering all the wealth we have already taken out of Kithai and Manzi?”

  He shook his head somberly. “What good our fortune waiting in the West, if we are marooned here? If we are dead here? Suppose, of all the claimants to the Khanate succession, it should be Kaidu who won!”

  “Verily, we should be at hazard,” I said. “But need we abandon ship right now, so to speak, when there is not yet any cloud in the sky?” With some amusement, I realized that, as usual in my father’s presence, I was beginning to talk like him, in parables and metaphors.

  “The hardest step is the one across the threshold,” he said. “However, if your reluctance signifies a concern for your sweet lady here, I hope you do not think I am suggesting her abandonment. Sacro, no! Of course you will bring her with you. She may be a curiosity in Venice, for a little while, but she will be a beloved one. Da novèlo xe tuto belo. You would not be the first to come home with a foreign wife. I recall, there was a ship’s captain, one of the Doria, who brought home a Turki wife when he retired from the sea. Tall as a campanile, she was … .”

  “I take Hui-sheng everywhere,” I said, and smiled at her. “I should be lost without her. I will be taking her on this journey to Champa. We will not even stop to unpack the household goods we brought from Manzi. And I have always intended to take her home to Venice. But, Father, you are not recommending, I trust, that we slip away this very day?”

  “Oh, no. Only that we make plans. Be ready to go. Keep one eye on the frying pan and the other on the cat. It would take me some time, in any event, to close or dispose of the kashi works—to tidy up many other loose ends.”

  “There should be ample time. Kubilai looks old, but not moribund. If he has the vivacity, as I suspect, to be playing with boys, he is not apt to drop dead as suddenly as Chingkim did. Let me comply with this latest mission he has set me, and when I return …”

  He said portentously, “No one, Marco, can foretell the day.”

  I almost snapped an exasperated reply. But it was impossible for me to feel exasperation at him, or share his morbidity, or work myself into a mood of apprehension. I was a new-made wealthy man, and a happy one, and about to go journeying into new country, and with my dearest companion at my side. I merely clapped an assuring hand on my father’s shoulder and said, not with resignation but with genuine jollity, “Let come the day! Sto mondo xe fato tondo!”

  CHAMPA

  1

  IT was again the Orlok Bayan I was off to find, and this time he was much farther away, but this time I had no need to get to him in a hurry. So I again arranged that Hui-sheng and I travel with attendants and supplies—her Mongol maid, two slaves for any necessary camping chores, Mongol escorts for protection, and a string of pack animals. But I also laid out each day’s march so that we traveled not arduously, and frequently got fresh mounts at the horse posts, and arrived each night at some decent karwansarai or some sizable town or even some provincial palace. In all, we had to cover about seven thousand li of every kind of terrain—plains, farmlands, mountains—but by doing it slowly and leisurely, we managed to sleep comfortably every night while we traversed more than five thousand of those long li. Going southwest from Khanbalik, we were, for much of the way, following the same course I had previously taken to Yun-nan, and so we stopped in many places I had stayed before—the cities of Xian and Cheng-du, for example—and only when we got beyond Cheng-du were we in territory I had not seen before.

  From Cheng-du we did not, as I had had to do before, turn west into the highlands of To-Bhot. We continued southwest, directly into the province of Yun-nan, and to its capital, Yun-nan-fu, the last big city on our route, where we were royally received and entertained by the Wang Hukoji. I had one private reason for being eager to see Yun-nan-fu, but it was a reason I did not mention to Hui-sheng. When I had been last in these regions, I had finished my part in the Yun-nan war and taken myself out of it before Bayan besi
eged the capital city, not availing myself of his invitation to be among the privileged first looters and rapers. Having forgone that opportunity to “behave like a Mongol born,” I now looked about me with a special interest—to see what I had missed —and I took notice that the Yi women were indeed handsome, as reported. No doubt I would have enjoyed disporting myself with Yun-nan-fu’s “chaste wives and virgin daughters,” and no doubt would have believed I was enjoying some of the most comely women in the East. But I had since had the great good fortune to discover Hui-sheng, so now the Yi women looked to me distinctly inferior, and far less desirable than she was, and I felt no deprivation at never having had any of them.

  From Yun-nan-fu onward, bearing ever southwest, we were traveling what had been called, from ancient times, the Tribute Road. It was so named, I learned, because the several nations of Champa had, since earliest history, at one time or another all been vassal states of the powerful Han dynasties to the north—the Sung and its predecessors—and that road had been tramped hard and smooth by the traffic of elephant trains bearing to those masters Champa’s tribute of everything from rice to rubies, slave girls to exotic apes.

  From the last mountains of Yun-nan, the Tribute Road brought us down into the nation of Ava at a river plain and a place called Bhamo, which was only a chain of rather primitively constructed forts. They were also apparently ineffectual forts, for Bayan’s invaders had easily overwhelmed their defending force’s, and taken Bhamo and gone on past. We were received by a captain commanding the few Mongols left to garrison the place, and he informed us that the war was already concluded, the King of Ava in hiding somewhere, and Bayan now celebrating his victory in the capital city of Pagan, a long way downriver. The captain suggested that we could get there more comfortably and quickly by river barge, and gave us one, and Mongol crewmen for it, and a Mongol yeoman scribe named Yissun, who knew the Mien language of the country.

  So we left our other attendants there at Bhamo, and Hui-sheng and her maid and I had a slow river voyage for the last thousand li or more of our journey. That river was the Irawadi, which had begun as a tumbling torrent called the N’mai, away up in the Land of the Four Rivers, high in To-Bhot. Down in this flatter country, the river was as broad as the Yang-tze, and flowed sedately southward in great swooping bends. It was full of so much silt, perhaps carried all the way down from To-Bhot, that its water was nearly viscous, like a thin glue, and unpleasantly tepid. It was a sickly tan color across its immense sunlit breadth, and brown in the deep shade on both extremes, where an almost unbroken forest of giant trees overhung the distant banks.

  Even the enormous width and endless length of the Irawadi River must have looked, to the numberless birds flying overhead, like a mere insignificant gap meandering through the greenery that covered the land. Ava was almost entirely overgrown with what we would call jungle, and the jungle natives called the Dong Nat, or Forest of the Demons. The local nat, I gathered, were similar to the kwei of the north: demons of varying degrees of badness, from mischief to real evil, and usually invisible but capable of assuming any form, including the human. I privately imagined that the nat seldom put on corporeality, because in the dense tangle of that Dong jungle there was scarcely room for them to do so. Beyond the muddy riverbanks, there was no ground to be seen, only a welter of ferns and weeds and vines and flowering shrubs and thickets of zhu-gan cane. Out of that confusion towered the trees, rank on rank, shouldering and elbowing each other. At their tops, their crowns of leaves merged together high in the air to make a veritable thatch over the whole land, a thatch so thick that it was equally impervious to rainstorm and sunlight. It seemed permeable only by the creatures that lived up there, for the treetops continuously rustled and shook to the coming and going of gaudy birds and the leaps and swings of chattering monkeys.

  Each evening, when our barge steered for the shore to make camp—unless we happened on a clearing with a cane-built Mien village in it—Yissun and the boatmen would have to get out first and, each wielding a broad, heavy blade called a dah, hack out a place sufficient for us to spread our bedrolls and lay our fire. I always had the impression that, on the next day, we would have got only around the next bend downstream before the rank, greedy, fervid jungle closed over the little dimple we had made in it. That was not an unlikely notion. Whenever we camped near a grove of zhu-gan cane, we could hear it crackling, even when there was not a breath of wind; that was the sound of it growing.

  Yissun told me that sometimes the fast-growing, very hard cane would rub against a soft-wooded jungle tree, and the heat of friction would start a blaze and—damp and sticky though the vegetation always was—it could blaze up and burn for hundreds of li in all directions. Only those inhabitants and denizens able to reach the river would survive the terrible fire, and they would likely fall victim to the ghariyals which always converged on any scene of disaster. The ghariyal was a tremendous and horrible river serpent which I took to be related to the dragon family. It had a knobby body as big as a cask, eyes like upstanding saucers, dragon jaws and tail, but no wings. The ghariyals were everywhere along the riverbanks, usually lurking in the mud like logs with glaring eyeballs, but they never molested us. Evidently they subsisted mostly on the monkeys which, in their antics, frequently fell shrieking into the river.

  We were not molested by any of the other jungle creatures, either, although Yissun and the Mien villagers along the way warned us that the Dong Nat was the habitat of worse things than the nat and the ghariyal. Fifty different kinds of venomous snakes, they said, and tigers and pards and wild dogs and boars and elephants, and the wild ox called the seladang. I remarked lightly that I should not care to meet a wild ox; the domestic kind I saw in the villages looked vicious enough. It was as big as a yak, a sort of blue-gray in color, with flat horns swooping in a crescent backward from its brow. Like the serpent ghariyal, it liked to lie wallowing in a mudhole, with only its snout and eyes above the surface, and when the huge beast lumbered loose from the mud, there was a noise like huo-yao exploding.

  “That animal is only the karbau,” Yissun said indifferently. “No more dangerous than a cow. The little children herd them. But a seladang stands higher at the shoulder than the top of your head, and even the tigers and elephants move out of its way when it walks through the jungle.”

  We could always tell from afar when we were approaching a riverside village, because it always had what looked like a cloud of rusty-black smoke hovering over it. That was actually a canopy of crows—called by the Mien “the feathered weeds”—raucously rejoicing over the village’s rich litter of garbage. Besides the crows overhead and the swill underfoot, every village had also a span or two of the karbau draft oxen, and some scrawny black-feathered chickens running about, and a lot of those pigs with long bodies that sagged in the middle and dragged in the swill, and an incredible lot of naked children that very much resembled the pigs. Every village had also a span or two of tame cow elephants. That was because the jungle Mien’s only trade and craft was the taking of timber and other tree products out of this wilderness, and the elephants did most of the work.

  The jungle trees were not all ugly and useless, like the riverside draggles of mangrove, or pretty and useless, like the one called the peacock’s tail, a solid mass of flame-colored flowers. Some gave edible fruits and nuts, and others were hung with pepper vines, and the one called chaulmugra gave a sap which is the only medicine known for leprosy. Others yielded good hardwood lumber—the black abnus, the speckled kinam, the golden saka which, when the wood has seasoned to a rich, mottled brown, is known as teak. I might record that teakwood looks much more handsome in the form of a ship’s decking and planking than it does in its natural state. The teak trees were tall and as straight as ledger lines, but dingy gray of bark, with only scraggly branches and sparse and untidy leaves.

  I might also remark that the Mien people were no adornment to the landscape, either. They were ugly, squat and dumpy, most of the men being a good two handspa
ns shorter than myself, and the women a hand or so shorter than that. Even in their daily toil, as I said, the men put most of the labor onto their elephants, and at all other times the men were idle slovens and the women limp slatterns. In Ava’s tropical climate, they had no real need of clothes, but they could have contrived some costume more comely than they had done. Both sexes wore woven-fiber hats like large mushroom tops, but were otherwise bare from the waist up and the knees down, wearing a drab cloth wrapped around them like a skirt. The women, indifferent to their flapping dugs, did add one article for modesty’s sake. Each wore a sash with long ends, weighted with beads and hanging front and rear, so that it dangled to screen her private parts when she sat in a squat, which was her customary position. Both sexes would put cloth sleeves on their calves when they had to wade in the river, as protection against the leeches. But they always went barefoot, their feet having got so horny-hard that they were proof against any irritant. As I recall, I saw just two men in that whole region who owned shoes. They wore them slung on a string around their neck, for preservation of such rarities.

  The men of the Mien were unlovely enough as they stood, but they had devised a means of making themselves even more so. They smirched their skin with colored pictures and patterns. I do not mean paint, but a coloring pricked into and under the skin, and ineradicable ever after. It was done with a sharp sliver of zhu-gan and the soot from burned sesame oil. The soot was black, but put under the skin it showed as blue dots and lines. There were so-called artists in that craft, who traveled from village to village, and were welcome everywhere, for a Mien man would be considered effeminate if he were not decorated like a qali carpet. The pricking was begun in boyhood and, with time off for rest between the painful sessions, was continued until he was latticed with blue patterns from knees to waist. Then, if he was really vain, and could afford the artist’s further ministrations, a man would have other designs done, in some kind of red pigment, in among the blue, and was considered handsome indeed.