The Journeyer

by Gary Jennings

  That ugliness was reserved to the males, but they generously let the females share in another one: the unsightly habit of constantly chewing. Indeed, I believe the jungle Mien did their forestry work only so they could afford to purchase another tree product—a chewable one—that they could not grow, but had to import. It was the nut of a tree called the areca, which was found only in seacoast regions. The Mien bought those nuts, boiled them, sliced them and let them dry black in the sun. Whenever they felt like having a treat—which was all the time—they would take a slice of the areca nut, dab a little lime on it, roll it in a leaf of a vine called the betel, pop that wad into the mouth and chew it—or rather, chew a constant succession of wads—the whole day long. It was to the Mien what the cud is to cows: their only diversion, their only enjoyment, the only activity they engaged in that was not absolutely necessary to existence. A village full of Mien men, women and children was not pretty. It was not made prettier by the sight of all of them champing their jaws up and down and about.

  Even that was not the extremity of their deliberate self-defilement. The chewing of a wad of areca and betel had the further effect of making the chewer’s saliva bright red. Since a Mien child began chewing as soon as it was off the teat, it grew up to have gums and lips as red as open sores, and teeth as dark and corrugated as teak bark. Just as the Mien accounted handsome a man who elaborated on his already awful body colors, they accounted beautiful a woman who put a coat of lacquer on her already teak-bark teeth and thereby colored them absolutely dead black. The first time a Mien beauty gave me a smile all tar-black and ulcer-red, I reeled backward in revulsion. When I recovered, I asked Yissun the motive for that ghastly disfigurement. He asked the woman, and relayed to me her haughty response:

  “Why, white teeth are for dogs and monkeys!”

  Speaking of whiteness, I would have expected those people to show some surprise or even fright at my approach—since I must have been the first white man ever seen in the Ava nation. But they evinced no emotion whatever. I might have been one of the less fearsome nat, and an inept one, which had chosen to appear in a defectively colorless human-body disguise. But neither did the Mien show any resentment, fear or loathing of Yissun and our boatmen, though they were all aware that the Mongols had recently conquered their country. When I remarked on their lackadaisical attitude, they only shrugged and repeated—and Yissun translated—what I took to be a Mien peasant proverb:

  “When the karbau fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.”

  And when I inquired if they were not dismayed because their king had fled into hiding, they only shrugged and repeated what they said was a traditional peasant prayer: “Spare us the five evils,” and then enumerated the five: “Flood, fire, thieves, enemies and kings.”

  When I inquired of one village’s headman, who seemed a degree more intelligent than the village’s karbau oxen, what he could tell me of the history of his Mien people, this is what Yissun relayed to me:

  “Ame, U Polo! Our great people once had a splendid history and a glorious heritage. It was all written down in books, in our poetic Mien language. But there came a great famine, and the books were boiled and sauced and eaten, so now we remember nothing of our history and know nothing of writing.”

  He did not elucidate further, and neither can I, except to explain that “amè!” was the Mien’s favorite exclamation and expletive and profanity (though it meant nothing but “mother”) and “U Polo” was their way of addressing me respectfully. They entitled me “U” and Huisheng “Daw,” which was their equivalent of saying Messere e Madona Polo. As for the story of the history books’ having been “sauced and eaten,” I can verify at least this much. The Mien did have a sauce that was their favorite food—they used it as often as they uttered “amè!”—and it was a stinking, revolting, absolutely nauseous liquid condiment which they expressed from fermented fish. The sauce was called nuoc-mam, and they slathered it on their rice, their pork and chicken, their vegetables, on everything they ate. Since nuoc-mam made everything taste ghastlily like itself, and since the Mien would eat any ghastlily thing if it had nouc-mam poured on it, I did not for a moment disbelieve that they could have “sauced and eaten” all their historical archives.

  We came one evening to a village where the inhabitants were, most unnaturally, not being phlegmatic and idle, but were leaping about in great excitement. They were all women and children, so I bade Yissun inquire what was happening and where all the men had gone to.

  “They say the men have caught a badak-gajah—a unicorn—and should shortly be fetching it in.”

  Well, that news excited even me. As far away as Venice, unicorns were known by repute, and some people believed in their existence, and others regarded them as mythical creatures, but all thought fondly and admiringly of the idea of unicorns. In Kithai and Manzi, I had known many men—usually those well along in years—to ingest a medicine made of powdered “horn of unicorn,” as an enhancer of virility. The medicine was scarce and only seldom available, and prodigiously costly, so that gave some evidence that unicorns really existed, and were as rare as the legends said they were.

  On the other hand, the legends told in Venice and Kithai alike, and the pictures artists drew, depicted the unicorn as a beautiful, graceful, horse- or deerlike animal with a long, sharp, twisted, single golden horn springing from its forehead. Somehow I had doubts that this Ava unicorn could be the same. For one thing, it was hard to conceive of such a dreamlike creature living in these nightmarish jungles, and letting itself be caught by the dullard Mien. For another, that local name, badak-gajah, translated only as “an animal as big as an elephant,” which did not sound right at all.

  “Ask them, Yissun, if they take the unicorn by setting out a virgin maiden to entice it to capture.”

  He asked, and I could see the blank looks with which that query was received, and several of the women murmured “amè!” so I was not surprised when he reported that no, they had never had opportunity to try that method.

  “Ah,” I said. “The unicorns are that scarce, are they?”

  “The virgins are that scarce.”

  “Well, let us see how they do take the creature. Can someone show us where it is now?”

  A little naked boy, running almost energetically ahead of us, led me and Hui-sheng and Yissun there, to a mud flat near the river. Unaccountably, a vast pile of rubbish was burning furiously in the very middle of the mud, and all the village men, exhibiting none of their usual torpor, were actually dancing around the fire. There was no sign of any unicorn, or any other animal, caught or not. Yissun asked about and reported to me:

  “The badak-gajah, like the karbau ox and the ghariyal serpent, likes to sleep in the coolness of the mud. These men, early this dawn, found one here asleep, only its horn and nostrils visible above the surface. They took it in their usual manner. Moving quietly, they piled over the spot reeds and cane and dry grass, and set it afire. The beast awoke, of course, but could not wallow loose of the mud before the fire began to crust it, and the smoke quickly rendered the unicorn unconscious.”

  I exclaimed, “What a dreadful way to treat an animal of so many pretty legends! So then they made it captive, I suppose. Where is it?”

  “Not captive. It is still under there. In the mud under the fire. Baking.”

  “What?” I cried. “They are baking the unicorn?”

  “These people are Buddhists, and Buddhism forbids their hunting and killing any wild animal. But their religion cannot hold them to account if the animal simply suffocates and then cooks, all by itself. They then can eat it without committing any sacrilege.”

  “Eat a unicorn? I cannot conceive of a worse sacrilege!”

  However, when the sacrilege was finally concluded, and the middle of the mud flat had baked to pottery hardness, and the Mien chipped it apart and revealed the cooked animal, I saw that it was not a unicorn—anyway, not the unicorn of legend. The only thing it had in common with the stories and the pictu
res was its single horn. But that grew not from its forehead, it grew out of an ugly long snout. The rest of the animal was just as ugly and, though nowhere near as big as an elephant, at least as big as a karbau. It did not resemble a horse or a deer, or my image of a unicorn, or anything else I had ever seen. It had a leathery skin that was all in plates and folds, rather like cuirbouilli armor. Its feet were vaguely elephantine in shape, but its ears were only little tufts, and the long snout had an overhanging upper lip, but no trunk.

  The whole animal had been cooked quite black by the mud baking, so I could not say what its original color was. But the single horn had never been golden. In fact, as I could see when the Mien carefully sawed it off the animal’s casklike head, it was not really made of horn substance at all, nor of ivory, like a tusk. It seemed merely a compaction of long hairs all grown in a hard, heavy clump that rose to a blunt point. But the Mien assured me, with much exuberance at their good fortune, that this really was the source of the “horn of unicorn” virility enhancer, and they would receive much payment for it—by which I daresay they meant an ample exchange in areca nuts.

  Their headman took possession of the precious horn, and the others began to skin off the heavy hide and cut up the carcass and bear the steaming portions back to the village. One of the men handed to me and Hui-sheng and Yissun each a piece of the meat—straight from the oven, so to speak—and we all found it tasty, though somewhat stringily fibrous. We looked forward to sharing the Mien’s evening meal, but we returned to the village to find that every last morsel of the unicorn meat had been drenched in the reeking nuoc-mam sauce. So we declined to join in, and instead that night ate some fish our boatmen had caught from the river.

  Although the Mien claimed to be Buddhists, the only remotely religious behavior we saw for a long time was their fearful and fretful concern about the surrounding nat demons. The Mien addressed their children, whatever their names, as “Worm” and “Pig,” so the nat would deem them beneath notice. Although there was plenty of oil locally available—oil of fish and sesame and even naft oil seeping from the jungle ground in places—the Mien would never grease their elephants’ harness or their cart and barrow wheels. They said the squeaking kept the nat away. In one village, where I saw that the women had to carry water from a distant spring, I suggested building a conduit of split zhu-gan cane to bring the water right into the village. “Amè!” cried the villagers; that would bring the spring’s resident “water nat” too dangerously close to human habitation. The first time the Mien saw Hui-sheng light her incense burner in our camp at bedtime, they muttered “amè!” and got Yissun to tell us that they never employed incense or perfumes—as if we needed to be told that—for fear sweet smells might attract the nat.

  However, as our company got farther down the Irawadi, into more populous country, we began to find in many villages a mud-brick temple. It was called a p’hra, and it was circular, shaped like a large hand bell with its mouth on the ground and its steeple-handle sticking up in the air, and in each p’hra lived a Buddhist lama, here called a pongyi. Each was shaven-headed and yellow-robed, each was disapproving of this world and his fellow Mien and life in general, and was morosely impatient to get out of Ava and on to Nirvana. But I met one who was at least convivial enough to converse with Yissun and me. That pongyi proved to be so educated that he could even write, and he showed me how the Mien writing was done. He could not add anything to the tale I had heard—that the Mien’s earlier history had ended in their bellies—but he did know that writing had been nonexistent in Ava until less than two hundred years ago, when the nation’s then King Kyansitha, all by himself, invented an alphabet.

  “The good king was careful,” he said, “not to make any of the letters angular in shape.” He drew them for us with a finger in the dusty yard of his p’hra. “Our people have nothing to write on but leaves, and only sticks to scratch on them with, and angular characters might tear the leaves. So, you see, all the letters are rounded and easy-flowing.”

  “Cazza beta!” I blurted. “Even the language is lazy!”

  Until now, I had been blaming the Mien people’s lassitude and slovenliness on the Ava climate, which God knows was oppressive and enervating. But the friendly pongyi volunteered the real and astonishing and terrible truth about the Mien. They had taken that name, he said, when they first came to Champa and settled this country that was now the Ava nation—and that had happened, he said, only about four hundred years ago.

  “Who were they originally?” I asked. “Where did they come from?”

  He said, “From To-Bhot.”

  Well, that explained the Mien! They were really nothing but a displaced overflow of To-Bhot’s wretched Bho. And if the Bho could be lethargic of both intellect and energy, up in the bracing clean air of their native highlands, it was no wonder that, down here in the vigor-sapping hot low country, they should have degenerated even further—to where their only willful exertion was a bovine chewing and their most strenuous profanity was a milk-mild “mother!” and even their king’s writing was limp.

  In all charity, I have to say that not much ambition and vitality can rightly be expected of any people who live in a tropical climate and jungle conditions. It must take all their will just to exist at all. I myself was not usually a sluggard, but in Ava I felt always drained of strength and purpose, and even my usually pert and lively Hui-sheng got quite languid in her movements. I had known heat in other places, but never such a damp, heavy, dragging-down heat as I felt in Ava. I might as well have wrung a blanket in hot water, then flung it over my head so that I had both to wear it and try to breathe through it.

  The cloacal climate would have been affliction enough, but it bred various other torments, chief among them the jungle vermin. During the daytimes, our barge went downriver in a thick accompanying cloud of mosquitoes. We could reach out and catch them by handfuls, and their massed buzzing was as loud as the snores of the ghariyal serpents on the mudbanks, and their biting was so continuous that it eventually and blessedly induced a sort of numb indifference. When any of our men stepped into the river shallows while beaching the barge at evening, he stepped out again with his legs and garments striped black and red, the black being long, slimy, clinging leeches that had fastened to him, right through the fabric of his clothes, sucking so avidly that they drooled streaks of his blood. Then, on land, we might be attacked either by enormous red ants or by darting oxflies, either insect’s bite so painful that, we were told, they could drive even elephants to mad rampage. Nighttime brought little respite, because all the ground was infested with a breed of fleas so tiny they could hardly be seen and never be caught, but whose bite raised an enormous welt. Hui-sheng’s incense smoke gave us some relief from the night-flying insects, and we did not care how many nat it might attract.

  I do not know whether it was because of the heat, the humidity or the insects, or all those miseries, but many people in that jungle suffered from illnesses that seemed never to conclude either in death or recovery. (The people of Yun-nan referred to the whole of Champa as “the Valley of Fever.”) Two of our sturdy Mongol boatmen fell to one of those maladies, or maybe several, and Yissun and I had to take over their chores. The men’s gums bled almost as red as those of a Mien cud-chewer, and much of their hair fell out. Under their arms and between their legs the skin began to rot, getting green and crumbly, like cheese going bad. Some kind of fungus attacked their fingers and toes, so that their fingernails and toenails got soft and moist and painful, and often bled.

  Yissun and I asked a Mien village headman for advice from his own experience, and he told us to rub pepper into the men’s sores. When I protested that that was bound to cause excruciating pain, he said, “Amè, of course, U Polo. But it will hurt the disease nat even worse, and the demon may depart.”

  Our Mongols bore that treatment stoically enough, but so did the nat, and the men stayed ill and prostrate all the way downriver. At least they, and we other men, did not contract another jun
gle affliction I heard about. Numerous Mien men confided dolefully to us that they suffered from it, and always would. They called it koro, and they described its very terrible effect: a sudden and dramatic and irreversible shrinking of the virile organ, a retraction of it up into the body. I did not inquire for further details, but I could not help wondering if the jungle koro was related to the fly-borne kala-azar that had commenced my Uncle Mafìo’s pathetic dissolution.

  For a time, Yissun and Hui-sheng and her Mongol maid and I took turns tending our two sick men. From our experience and observation so far, we had got the impression that the jungle’s diseases troubled only the male sex, and Yissun and I were not much inclined to worry about ourselves. But when the maidservant also started to show signs of illness, I made Hui-sheng leave off her nursing, and confine herself to the farthest end of the barge, and sleep well apart from the rest of us at night. Meanwhile, our best efforts did not improve the condition of the two men. They were still ill and flaccid and gaunt when we finally reached Pagan, and they had to be carried ashore to be put in the care of their army’s shamàn-physicians. I do not know what became of them after that, but at least they survived to get that far. Hui-sheng’s maid did not.

  Her ailment had seemed identical to that of the men, but she had been much more troubled and dismayed by it. I suppose, being a female, she was naturally more frightened and embarrassed when she began to rot at her extremities and under her arms and between her legs. However, she also began to complain, which the men had not, of itching all over her body. Even inside it, she said, which we took to be delirium. But Yissun and I gently undressed her and found, here and there, what looked like grains of rice stuck to her skin. When we tried to pick them off, we discovered that they were only the protruding ends—heads or tails, we could not tell—of long, thin worms that had burrowed deep into her flesh. We tugged, and they came out reluctantly, and kept coming, span after span, as we might have unspooled a web-thread from the spinneret of a spider’s body.