Kubilai went on, “I thank you for your report, Marco. You have done well, as always. I should be an ungrateful lord were I to refuse any favor in my granting. Make your request, then.”
He knew what I was going to ask. Nevertheless, I did not care to ask it baldly and abruptly: “Give me leave to leave you.” So I began in the Han manner, with circumlocution.
“A long time ago, Sire, I had occasion to say, ‘I could never slay a woman.’ And when I said that, a slave of mine, a man wiser than I realized, said, ‘You are young yet.’ I could not then have believed it, but I have recently been the cause of the dying of the woman most dear to me in all the world. And I am no longer young. I am a man of middle age, well along in my fourth decade. That death has caused me much hurt and, like a wounded elephant, I should like to limp away to the seclusion of my home ground, there to recover from my wound or to languish of it. I ask your permission, Sire—and I hope your blessing—for the departure from your court of myself and my father and my uncle. If I am no longer young, they are already old, and their dying should also be done at home.”
“And I am older yet,” said Kubilai, with a sigh. “The scroll depicting my life has been wound much farther from the one hand to the other. And every turn of the scroll’s rods reveals a picture with fewer friends standing about me. Someday, Marco, you will envy your lost lady. She died in the summer of her life, not having to see all that was flowery and green about her turn brown and dwindle and blow away like autumn leaves.” He shivered as if he felt already the gusts of winter. “I shall be sorry to see my friends Polo depart, but I should be ill repaying your family’s long service and companionship if I whined for its continuance. Have you yet made any travel arrangements?”
“Of course not, Sire. Not without your permission.”
“You have it, certainly. But now I should like to ask a favor. One last mission for you, which you can perform on your way, and it will make easier your way.”
“You have only to command it, Sire.”
“I would ask if you and Nicolò and Mafìo could deliver a certain valuable and delicate cargo to my grandnephew Arghun in Persia. When Arghun succeeded to that Ilkhanate, he took a Persian wife as a politic gesture to his subjects. He doubtless has other wives, as well, but now he wishes to have for his premier wife and Ilkhatun a woman of pure Mongol blood and upbringing. So he sent envoys to ask me to procure such a bride for him, and I have chosen a lady named Kukachin.”
“The widow of your son Chingkim, Sire?”
“No, no. She has the same name, but she is no relation, and you have never met her. A young maiden straight from the plains, from the tribe called Bayaut. I have provided for her an ample dowry and the usual rich bridal furnishings and a retinue of servants and maids, and she is ready to journey to Persia to meet her pledged husband. However, to send her overland would mean her having to traverse the territories of the Ilkhan Kaidu. That dastardly cousin of mine is as unruly as ever, and you know how inimical he always has been to his cousins who hold the Ilkhanate of Persia. I would not put it past Kaidu to capture the Lady Kukachin on her way and hold her—either to demand a ransom payment from Arghun or just to enjoy the spitefulness of the deed.”
“You wish us to escort her through that unsafe territory?”
“No. I had rather she avoided it altogether. My notion is to send her the whole way by sea. However, all my ships’ captains are of the Han, and vakh!—the Han mariners performed so disappointingly during our attempted invasions of Jihpen-kwe that I hesitate to trust them with this mission. But you and your uncles are also of a seafaring people. You are familiar with the open sea and with the handling of ships.”
“True, Sire, but we have never actually sailed one.”
“Oh, the Han can do that well enough. I should ask you only to be in command. To keep a stern eye on the Han captains, so they do not run off with the lady, or sell her to pirates, or lose her along the way. And you would keep an eye on the course, so the captains do not sail the whole fleet off the edge of the world.”
“Yes, we could see to those things, Sire.”
“You would again carry my pai-tzu, and have unquestioned and unlimited authority, both on the sea and at every landfall you may have to make. It would mean comfortable traveling for you, from here to Persia, in good shipboard accommodations, with good food and good servants all the way. Especially it would mean easy travel for the invalid Mafìo, and attendants to care for him. You would be met in Persia by a train sent to fetch the Lady Kukachin, and you would be well and comfortably transported to wherever Arghun is currently making his capital. And surely he would see that you have good transport from there onward. So, Marco, that is the mission. Would you confer with your uncles and consider undertaking it?”
“Why, Sire, I am certain that I can speak now for all of us. We would not only be honored to do it, and eager, we are obligated to you for making the journey so easy for us.”
And so, while the bridal fleet was being assembled and provisioned, my father did the final clearing up of some loose ends of our Compagnia’s business, and I attended to some loose ends of my own affairs. I dictated to Kubilai’s court scribes a letter to be enclosed with the next official dispatch the Khakhan sent to the Wang Bayan in Ava. I sent warm greetings and regards and farewells to my old friend, and then suggested that, since the nation of Muong Thai was to be left free and uninvaded, I would take it as a personal favor if Bayan would see to it that the little Pagan maidservant Arùn was given her liberty and conveyed safely to that land of her own people.
Then, from the last Kithai gains of the Compagnia Polo, which my father had converted into portable goods for us to carry home, I took my share—a parcel of fine rubies—and carried it only as far as the chambers of the Finance Minister Lin-ngan. He was the first Khanbalik courtier I had met, and the first to whom I now said my goodbyes in person. I gave him the parcel of gems and asked him to use their value to make payment of a bequest to the Khakhan’s page boys, as each of them reached manhood, so they would have a start when they set out to seek their own fortunes.
Then I went about the palace, saying my farewells to other people. Some of my calls were for duty’s sake: on such dignitaries as the Hakim Gansui and the Khatun Jamui, Kubilai’s aged premier wife. And some of my calls were less formal, but still brief: on the Court Astronomer and the Court Architect. And one call I made—on the Palace Engineer Wei —was just to thank him for having constructed that garden pavilion in which Hui-sheng had enjoyed the warbling water-piped music. And one call I made—on the Minister of History—was just to tell him:
“Now you can write in your archives another trifle. In the Year of the Dragon, by the Han count the year three thousand nine hundred ninety, the foreigner Po-lo Mah-ko finally left the City of the Khan to return to his native Wei-ni-si.”
He smiled, remembering our one conversation so long ago, and said, “Do I record that Khanbalik was made better by his presence here?”
“That is for Khanbalik to say, Minister.”
“No, that is for history to say. But here—see—” He took up a brush, wetted his ink block and wrote, on a paper already crowded with writing, a vertical line of characters. Among them I recognized the character that was on my yin seal. “There. The trifle is mentioned. Come back in a hundred years, Polo, or in a thousand, and see if this trifle is still remembered.”
Others of my farewell visits were more warm and lingering. In fact, three of them—my calls on the Court Firemaster Shi Ix-me and the Court Goldsmith Pierre Boucher and especially my call on Chao Meng-fu, War Minister, Court Artist, once fellow conspirator—each lasted long into the night and concluded only when we were too drunk to drink more.
When word came that the ships were ready and waiting for us at the port of Quan-zho, my father and I led Uncle Mafìo to the Khakhan’s chambers for our introduction to our lady charge. Kubilai first presented to us the three envoys who had come to procure her for the Ilkhan Arghun—their
names were Uladai, Koja and Apushka—and then the Lady Kukachin, who was a girl of seventeen, as pretty as any Mongol female I had ever seen, dressed in finery designed to dazzle all Persia. But the young lady was not haughty and imperious, as might have been expected in a noblewoman on her way to become an Ilkhatun, heading an entourage of nearly six hundred, counting all her servants, maids, noble courtiers-to-be and escorting soldiers. As befitted a girl so suddenly promoted from a plains tribe—where probably her entire court had consisted of a horse herd—Kukachin was forthright and natural and pleasant of manner.
“Elder Brothers Polo,” she said to us, “it is with the utmost trust and confidence that I put myself in the keeping of such renowned journeyers.”
She and the leading nobles of her company and the three envoys from Persia and we three Polos and most of the Khanbalik court all sat down with Kubilai to a farewell banquet in the same vast chamber where we had enjoyed our welcoming banquet so long before. It was a sumptuous feast, and even Uncle Mafìo appeared to enjoy it—he being fed by his constant and faithful woman servant, who would remain with him as far as Persia—and the night was riotous with many and varied entertainments (Uncle Mafìo at one point rising to sing to the Khakhan a verse or two of his well-worn “Virtue” song) and everyone got exceedingly drunk on the liquors which the gold-and-silver serpent tree still dispensed on call. Before we got quite unconscious, my father and I and Kubilai made our mutual leavetakings, a process as lengthy and emotional and replete with embraces and fulsome toasts and speeches as a Venetian wedding.
But Kubilai also managed one private short colloquy with me. “Although I have known your uncles longer, Marco, I have known you best, and I shall be sorriest for your going. Hui, I remember, the first words you ever spoke to me were insulting.” He laughed in recollection. “That was not wise of you, but it was brave of you, and it was right of you to speak so. Ever since then, I have relied much on your words, and I shall be the poorer for hearing no more of them. I will hope that you may come this way again. I will not be here to greet you. But you would be doing me a service still, if you befriended and served my grandson Temur with the same dedication and loyalty you have shown to me.” He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder.
I said, “It will always be my proudest boast, Sire, and my only claim to having lived a useful life, that once, for a while, I served the Khan of All Khans.”
“Who knows?” he said jovially. “The Khan Kubilai may be remembered only because he had for good adviser a man named Marco Polo.” He gave my shoulder a companionable shake. “Vakh! Enough of sentiment. Let us drink and get drunk! And then”—he raised to me a jeweled beaker brimming with arkhi—“a good horse and a wide plain to you, good friend.”
“Good friend,” I dared to echo, raising my goblet, “a good horse and a wide plain to you.”
And the next morning, with heavy heads and not entirely light hearts, we took our departure. Just getting that populous train out of Khanbalik was a tactical problem very nearly on the order of the Orlok Bayan’s moving his tuk of warriors about in the Ba-Tang valley—and this was a herd consisting mostly of civilians not trained in military discipline. So, the first day, we did not get farther than the next village to the south, where we were received with cheers and thrown flowers and hosannahs and incense and bursts of the fiery trees. We did not make much better progress on the succeeding days, either, because of course every least village and town wanted to display its enthusiasm. Even after we got our company accustomed to forming up and moving out each morning, the train was so immense—my father and I and the three envoys, like most of the servants and all the escort troops, mounted on horses; the Lady Kukachin and her women and my Uncle Mafìo riding in horse-borne palanquins; a number of Khanbalik nobles riding elephant haudas; plus all the pack animals and drovers necessary for the luggage of six hundred persons—that we made a procession sometimes stretching the entire length of the road between the community where we had just spent the night and the next one we were bound for. Our final destination, the port of Quan-zho, was much farther south than I had ever been in Manzi—very far south of Hang-zho, my onetime city of residence—so the journey took an unconscionably long time. But it was an enjoyable journey because, for a change, the column was not of soldiers going to war, and we were welcome everywhere we arrived.
2
AT last we got to Quan-zho, and some of our escorting troops and nobles and the pack train turned back for Khanbalik, and the rest of us filed on board the great chuan ships, and at the next tide we put out into the Sea of Kithai. We made a water-borne procession even more imposing than our land parade had been, for Kubilai had provided an entire fleet: fourteen of the massive four-masted vessels, each crewed by some two hundred mariners. We had apportioned our company among them, my father and uncle and I and the envoy Uladai aboard the one carrying the Lady Kukachin and most of her women. The chuan vessels were good and solid, of the triple-planked construction, and our cabins were luxuriously furnished, and I think every one of us passengers had four or five servants from the lady’s entourage to wait upon us, in addition to the sea stewards and cooks and cabin boys also seeing to our comfort. The Khakhan had promised good accommodations and service and food, and I will give just one instance to illustrate how the ships lived up to that promise. On each of the fourteen vessels there was one seaman detailed to a single job throughout the voyage: he kept forever paddling and stirring the water in a deck tank the size of a lotus pool, in which swam freshwater fish for our tables.
My father and I had little to do in the way of command or supervision. The captains of the fourteen vessels had been sufficiently impressed and awed, to see us white men striding magisterially aboard with the Khakhan’s pai-tzu tablets slung on our chests, that they were commendably sedulous and punctilious in all their responsibilities. As for making sure that the fleet did not wander about, I would from time to time stand conspicuously on deck at night, eyeing the horizon through the kamàl I had kept ever since Suvediye. Though that little wooden frame told me nothing except that we were bearing constantly south, it always brought our ship’s captain scurrying to assure me that we were unswervingly keeping proper course.
The only complaint we passengers might have voiced was about the slowness of our progress, but that was caused by our captains’ devotion to their duty and our comfort. The Khakhan had chosen the ponderous chuan vessels especially to ensure for the Lady Kukachin a safe and smooth voyage, and the very stability of the big ships made them exceedingly slow in the water, and the necessity for all fourteen to stay together imposed even more slowness. Also, whenever the weather looked at all threatening, the captains would steer for a sheltered cove. So, instead of making a straight southward run across the open sea, the fleet followed the far longer westering arc of the coastline. Also, though the ships were lavishly provisioned with food and other supplies for fully two years’ sailing, they could not carry enough drinking water for more than a month or so. To replenish those supplies, we had to put in at intervals, and those were lengthier stops than the occasional shelterings. Just the heaving-to and anchoring of such a numerous fleet of such leviathan ships occupied most of a day. Then the rowing back and forth of barrels in the ships’ boats took another three or four days, and the weighing of anchor and setting sail again took yet another day. So every watering stop cost us about a week’s progress. After leaving Quan-zho, I remember, we stopped for water at a great island off Manzi, called Hainan, and at a harbor village on the coast of Annam in Champa, called Gai-dinh-thanh, and at an island as big as a continent, called Kalimantan. In all, we were three months making just the southward leg of our voyage down the coast of Asia before we could turn westward in the direction of Persia.
“I have watched you, Elder Brother Marco,” said the Lady Kukachin, coming up to me on deck one night, “standing here from time to time, manipulating a little wooden device. Is that some Ferenghi instrument of navigation?”
I went and fetched it,
and explained to her its function.
“It might be a device unknown to my pledged husband,” she said. “And I might gain favor in his eyes if I introduced him to it. Would you show me how to employ it?”
“With pleasure, my lady. You hold it at arm’s length, like this, toward the North Star—” I stopped, appalled.
“What is the matter?”
“The North Star has vanished!”
It was true. That star had, every night lately, been lower toward the horizon. But I had not sought it for several nights, and now I was aghast to see that it had sunk entirely out of view. The star which I had been able to see almost every night of my life, the steadfast beacon which throughout history had guided all journeyers on land and sea, had totally gone from the sky. That was frightening—to see the one constant, immutable, fixed thing in the universe disappear. We might really have sailed over some farthest edge of the world, and fallen into some unknown abyss.
I frankly confess that it made me uneasy. But, for the sake of Kukachin’s confidence in me, I tried to dissemble my anxiety as I summoned the ship’s captain to us. In as steady a voice as possible, I inquired what had become of the star, and how he could keep a course or know his position without that fixed point of reference.
“We are now below the bulge of the world’s waist,” he said, “where the star is simply not visible. We must rely on other references.”
He sent a cabin boy running to the ship’s bridge to bring him back a chart, and he unrolled it for me and Kukachin. It was not a depiction of the local coasts and landmarks, but of the night sky: nothing but painted dots of different sizes indicating stars of different luminosities. The captain pointed upward, showing us the four brightest stars in the sky—positioned as if marking the arms of a Christian cross—and then pointed to their four dots on the paper. I recognized that the chart was an accurate representation of those unfamiliar skies, and the captain assured us that it was sufficient for him to steer by.
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