Mark shivered. What if that’s what’s happened to Dad?
“How did they escape?” Mark asked.
“They didn’t,” said Hornaday. “The chief decided to take them to his cousin, Kublai Khan, conqueror of all China, emperor of the East. He figured Kublai would give him more for a pair of European slaves than he’d ever get for the captives’ clothing and kit.
Marco’s father and uncle ended up in Mongolia at Kublai’s summer palace. They were the first Europeans he ever met—‘Colored-Eye People,’ he called them. Mongol eyes are black.
“Kublai was curious about Europe, so he sent them home with gifts for the doge—the Venetians’ ruler—and a letter to the pope asking for a hundred teachers.”
Mark’s breathing was still ragged, but right now he wasn’t thinking about how he felt.
“Did his father send letters home about what the East was like?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” the doctor replied. “There wasn’t any mail in those days. Maybe he tried to send back word with one of the caravans heading west, but I don’t think Marco heard from him until he got back to Venice.”
“Did he miss his dad?” Mark asked.
“I guess at first,” the doctor said, “but as the years went by he must have come to think he was an orphan. It must mean something that he doesn’t say much about him in The Travels.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Mark said. “Did he read books about China while his dad was away?”
The doctor shook his head. “Marco lived before people in the West knew about printing,” he said. “In his time books were handwritten on specially prepared sheepskins called parchment. They were so valuable they were kept on chains in the libraries. But I don’t think Marco was a reader. Not many people were back then. Maybe he could read the merchants’ manuals, but not much beyond that. How about you,” Doc asked, “are you a reader?”
“Some,” Mark said.
Hornaday rubbed the dog’s ears.
“So nobody at home in Marco’s time knew what China was really like?” Mark asked.
“The pope and the doge probably had some idea,” Hornaday said, “but what they knew was really limited. Until Marco described it, few people in the West had any idea of China’s immensity and variety of life. You know the story of the three blind men describing the elephant?” the doctor asked.
“Sure,” said Mark. “One guy says it’s like a long hose, the next guy says it’s like the trunk of a tree, the third guy says it’s like the side of a hairy ship.”
“Right,” said Hornaday. “Well, the returning missionaries and merchants were like those blind men, bringing back reports about the tiny parts they’d visited, totally ignorant of the whole.”
Mark pushed himself back up on an elbow. “So you think until his father got back and told him about it, Marco didn’t know anything about where he’d been?”
The doctor raised his eyebrows.
“He was fifteen when his father returned. By then I think he knew a lot.”
“How? Who taught him?” Mark asked.
“He’d studied in the school of the street.”
“What’s that?”
As Hornaday drew the creaking chair up close, Boss twitched his tags.
“In any town that’s where you’ll find the best gossip, the biggest lies, and the truest truths,” the doctor said. “Marco’s Venice was a special place. Its school of the street was like no other in the world. Venice in those days was Europe’s main port for goods from North Africa and the East. Every day the long black galleys arrived from Alexandria, Constantinople, Trebizond, and Acre, loaded with rare merchandise, slaves, sailors, and soldiers.
“Outside her taverns and alongside her docks and warehouses, old sailors lounged along with released slaves, worn-out pirates, and broken-down soldiers ending their days in sun-warmed corners. They’d traveled, they had tales, and Marco, being a boy, had ears. I think they taught him.”
“How come he wasn’t in regular school?”
Hornaday shook his head. “You’re reading his book. Do you picture him sitting at a desk?”
Mark thought and then shook his head. “No….”
“Me neither,” said the doctor. “I see him slipping away to listen to men who knew things his teachers, the doge’s spies, and the pope’s missionaries had no idea of. Maybe the men of the street could tell him something about where his father was. That’s what he was after: news of his father.”
Just like me, Mark thought.
The doctor half closed his eyes as if he were squinting at something far away.
“I see Marco squatting in the warm sun, listening as an old man grows young telling what he’s seen and heard, teaching an eager-faced boy the Ladino names of things he’d need on the Silk Road, telling him how to make his way in strange eastern places.”
“What’s Ladino?” Mark asked.
“One of the traders’ languages,” the doctor replied. “It’s a blend of Spanish and Hebrew. It was a code that only a few people knew, so the traders could exchange secrets with each other without being understood by spies, servants, and ears behind the tent flaps.”
Hornaday yawned.
“Imagine yourself as Marco, bored and curious, hanging around footloose on the docks, wondering where your father is. Close your eyes; maybe you’ll meet his street teacher.”
Pretty soon the doctor closed his own eyes. His breathing grew deep and steady with an occasional snore.
Mark fit the Chinese pillow under his head. Once he warmed it and moved it around a little, he began to get used to it. He closed his eyes. It wasn’t very long before he saw a boy sitting on a broken crate beside a stranger on a stone-paved quay. The stranger’s eyes were milky, almost unseeing. He was the color of old wood. There was the slap and smell of dark green seawater. The stranger shook open a large square of white cloth and wiped his watering eyes, then his face. There was the scent of oranges.
The boy had a sack of dried fruit. He held it out to the stranger, brushing the man’s hands with it.
“Frutta,” the boy said.
The man reached, then took.
“Grazie,” the stranger rumbled. “You share with a beggar?” he asked, staring hard at the boy. His voice was hoarse, his accent strange.
“No, sir,” the boy replied. “I take you for a traveler. Maybe you can tell me where my father is.”
“He is a sailor, merchant, soldier, what?”
“A merchant. A trader.”
The man nodded, pressing his large lips together. “And he set out for?”
“I don’t know. The last we heard he was leaving Constantinople,” said the boy.
“To come home?” the stranger asked.
“To go east,” the boy answered.
“Ah,” said the stranger as he dug in the sack. He didn’t say anything more.
“Who are you?” the boy asked finally.
“A weary, almost blind old man,” the stranger answered. “I have nothing for you. Why do you bother with me?”
“For what you can tell me,” the boy said.
For a long moment the dark man rocked silently from side to side like the sea marker in the channel beyond.
“Call me Mustafa,” he said at last. “My name in my tribe is too long for you to remember. My people were Arabs of the desert, tent dwellers in the black tents of my tribe. We kept sheep and goats. When I was your age, a band of Tartars swooped out of a dry fog they’d conjured up with a devilish trick and captured my family. I was sold with our animals to a Silk Road caravan boss to help manage the beasts. At night by the fires I heard stories. Then I traveled the eastern road myself.
“The way of it is this,” Mustafa continued. “To go where your father has gone, you must sail through pirate waters to where the desert begins. Once there you will head northeast, following the sunrising and the way of the Greek Wind. You will cross the broad plains and sand wastes where tribes of bandits like the men who captured me wait for you. They are thick-faced, t
hose ones, with squashed noses and squat bodies. They will kill for a taste of butter or a pinch of salt.
“You will trust no one, least of all the oasis men, for woe to the man that fainting or lingering falls into their hands. They will cut his throat for his purse. On the desert all look through their fingers and take nothing for the way it first appears.”
“Ooh!” exclaimed the boy, his eyes wide.
“You are surprised?” asked the old Arab. “Listen, boy, men on the desert are wolves to each other. So what if they are hyenas to strangers? Distress of that place edges all men’s spirits. They are reckless in the desert, cruel, greedy for anything of life. They have no souls. The heat, the cold, the burning light of that place kills all soul.
“Bribing or escaping those who would make a slave of you, you will go up mountains so steep that your horse must drag you as you hang on his tail. Then you will cross the unmarked desert where there is no water and as many die of cold as of heat.
“Now I teach you how to behave before the ruler of the East,” the man said.
“Do you think I’ll go there someday?” the boy asked.
The old Arab whispered, “Already you are on your way, boy. Listen,” he rasped, “when you meet the great Kublai Khan, you will act like the proud European you are. You may bow a little, but you must not perform the Oriental greeting of submission, the forehead-to-floor kowtow.”
“Why not?”
“To surprise him. Do the unexpected. You must keep him unsure of what you are, your place in your tribe. Perhaps you are a prince? Do not show too much respect. Act bold as if you expect respect from him!
“It is said, boy, that in all the lands that Mongols rule not a dog might bark without his leave—but you, you must be different.
“If you put your neck down like one of his common subjects, the Oriental prince will step on it! Better you hold your head up. At worst he cuts it off; at best he takes you for what you are: fearless. Every day risk all. Hold nothing back and you may survive. Gather small gifts as you go: he is a child for presents. Glass beads from this place are as jewels to those people.
“Go now. Stand tall and think well of yourself. It will show. Act proud and even the emperor of the East will think the better of you. What he wants most to know is how the princes of Europe maintain their dignity. You will show him.”
Mustafa paused and spat out an apricot pit.
He looked hard at the boy through his bleared eyes. “Not all who set out on the Road of Silk return,” he said.
He closed his eyes and sagged back against the mooring post.
After a pause the boy asked, “Will I see you again?”
“Inshallah—if it is the will of Allah,” whispered the old Arab. “For now, farewell.”
6
BOSS SPEAKS UP
The room was quiet save for the sound of the doctor’s deep breathing and occasional snores.
Then Boss rattled his tags.
Mark jerked up and looked around.
“Okay if I come up?” the dog whispered. “It’s cold down here.”
The dog was wagging his tail. Dried out, it was a big black plume.
Mark gasped.
“Boss?” he whispered. “You … you talk?”
The dog grumped and nodded.
“Up?” he asked again.
Mark patted the covers.
Boss glided up. Mark put his arm around him, curling his fingers in the dog’s deep fur. It felt good. He liked the smell. It didn’t make him sneeze.
“I wasn’t really cold,” Boss rumbled as he snuggled close. “I just said that so you’d let me up. My breed is from Tibet. It’s cold there in the mountains, and we sleep outside, which is why my coat is so heavy. It sheds wet too. Except when I fall in the canal.”
“Ooh!” Mark exclaimed, hugging the dog as if to save him. “Do you fall in a lot?”
“Once,” Boss said with a shudder. “That was enough.
“It was a couple of years ago. I was a puppy. I stumbled getting off a pitching boat and got crushed between it and the dock. My master fished me out of the water, but I was a mess, leg broken, bleeding all over. He figured I was as good as dead, so he chucked me onto a passing garbage scow.
“Hornaday saw it happen. He flagged the scow, jumped aboard, waded through all the slime and stink, and picked me up. Filthy and bleeding as I was, he carried me close against his body.
“He took me to his office, laid me out on the table, and gave me a shot. I went numb. He washed me with doctor soap. It smells like chemicals. One sniff of it now and it all comes back. He painted my cuts with medicine so bitter I gave up trying to lick it off when the cuts started itching.
“It wasn’t until he started to stitch my cuts that I noticed his hands. He got hurt in Iraq trying to doctor a teacher at a girls’ school when an unexploded bomb went off. He has to hold his right hand with his left to steady it.
“To cast my leg he made splints from kindling wood, snapping them to size on the table edge. The snaps sounded like when my leg broke.
“He put both hands on my chest. They were warm and dry, but they twitched. ‘Easy now,’ he said, looking me in the eye. ‘Don’t move.’ His eyes are the color of chocolate, steady as dogs’ eyes. His sweat has a sweet, strange smell. It’s the medicine he takes for his twitch that makes him smell the way he does, but I didn’t learn that until later.
“He began pulling and twisting my leg to line up the ends of bone. It didn’t hurt, but I could feel the ends grinding together. It was like when you get dirt in your food and you chew it—you get this sandy grating sound in your head.”
“Oh man,” Mark groaned.
Boss grunted. “It was bad, all right. Doc said he should shave my leg before he taped it so the hair wouldn’t pull when the break healed and he’d have to pull off the splints and everything, but he didn’t have clippers, so he taped right over the hair.
“When he finished, my leg looked like a wrapped ham. When the break healed and he unwrapped me, it was like you stuck a piece of duct tape on your arm and then ripped it off—get it?”
Mark winced. “Yeah.”
“The hair never did grow back right,” Boss said, sticking out a motley-looking leg. The hair was wispy like the back of an old man’s head.
“Doc told me I was lucky the bone had snapped clean,” the dog said as he snuggled up against the boy again. “He said if it had been crushed, he would have had to put me down.”
“Oh no!” Mark exclaimed so loudly he and Boss both looked to see if he’d awakened the doctor.
Suddenly the dog’s blunt nose began twitching. “Have you got food up here?”
“Food?” the boy asked.
“Yes,” said Boss, snuffling around. “I smell food.”
“In my backpack at the foot of the bed—I’ve got some leftover frittata from breakfast. You want it?”
“Sure! I follow my mother’s rule: Never pass up anything that smells good.”
Mark reached into the backpack. He’d left it unzipped.
The napkin was empty. Not even a crumb.
“That’s funny …,” he said.
“No, it isn’t,” Boss growled. “It’s the rats. Turn your back, they steal.”
“Rats up here?” Mark shuddered.
“They’re everywhere,” Boss whispered as he slipped lightly off the bed. “You find people, you’ll find rats.”
The dog nosed around.
“Let’s see where they’re getting in.
“Yup,” he grunted. “There it is. See that crack there in the corner? That’s his door. I’ll bet his people have been working this place since Marco’s time.”
Mark got out of bed and looked at the crack.
“It’s too small for a rat,” he whispered.
“Uh-uh,” muttered the dog. “Lemme tell you, to get at food rats can squeeze down like you wouldn’t believe.”
Boss squatted down in front of the crack. “Rat?” he called softly. “Rat?
Come out.”
There was a rustling, but no one came out.
“Never mind,” said Boss. “He’s embarrassed. Bring more frittata tomorrow, you’ll meet him.”
“I don’t want to meet him. I want to put down poison.”
“No,” said Boss. “You don’t want to do that. Rats have to live too.”
“He’ll bite me while I’m sleeping.”
“I never heard that. You ever see anyone bit by a rat?”
“No …,” Mark said slowly.
“Me neither,” said Boss. “Anyway, I heard you and Doc talking about Marco Polo. I know a lot about him.”
“You?” exclaimed Mark.
“Hey,” said Boss, sitting up and puffing out his chest, “a lot of what the doctor knows he got from me. My line goes back to the dog Marco met when he got sick in the mountains on his way to meet the great Kublai.”
“The big black dog he returned to Venice with?” Mark said.
“That’s my ancestor,” said Boss. “His dog saved his life the night he came home, but that was years and years after Marco sat on the dock with Mustafa. You met Mustafa, right?” the dog asked.
Mark hesitated, then nodded.
“You want to know about Marco Polo?” Boss asked.
Mark nodded quickly and got beneath the covers again.
“I can tell you about him,” Boss said, nodding his big head. “I got it from my great-great way back. He was with Marco for nearly everything that happened from the time the boy got sick in the mountains to his going to Kublai, his travels in China, and finally his trip back to Venice. He was along for all of it.
“And listen,” said Boss in his deepest whisper, “if my forebear hadn’t been with Marco the night they got back to Venice, you’d never have heard of Marco Polo, and neither would anybody else. So if you want to know about him, the place to start is the night of his homecoming.”
Mark made a doubtful face.
Boss stiffened.
“Do you think I’m making it up?” he huffed.
“No, no,” Mark whispered.
“The story was passed down to me,” Boss said importantly. “Dogs have history just like people. We know. We remember. We don’t start fresh, generation after generation, dumb as the first jackal that hung around a caveman hoping for a bone.
Looking for Marco Polo Page 4
