Almost four years ago I had laid eyes on Miranda for the first time. When I looked toward her now, she raised her veil so I could see her face as plainly as the dim light allowed. “This is what you’ve lost,” the act told me, a strange, proud act which like so many proud things, was deeply sad. It’s what I’ll win back, my heart’s surge answered. But I was always the braggart. . . .
I came and sat beside her, wonder-stricken. She waited while I gazed upon every aspect of beauty now revealed, and yearning wracked my heart and lust stormed my brain. Then she spoke quietly in the Venetian tongue.
“As I feared and warned you, you’ve been brought low.”
“That’s true.”
“I sent for you to give you another warning.”
“I’ll thank you for it, and it may be I’ll heed it better than the other.”
“You don’t matter to my master any more, and as long as that’s true, he’ll not harm you. So be careful what you do that might make you count with him again.”
“Are you speaking for my profit, your own, or your master’s?”
“I’m duty-bound to speak for my master’s profit when it conflicts with yours or mine; but I don’t think it does in this case. If he’d kill you, he’d commit a most awful sin and have to make terrible atonement. I know him better now, and there’s not the slightest doubt that you’re his son.”
“Perhaps he knows you, at last, and the water of giving you to the Khan is already over the dam.”
“Well, it isn’t.”
The twisting went out of my throat and the roughness from my voice.
“Do you want him to give you to the Khan? When I asked you that before, you said you were so deeply enslaved that his will was yours.”
“I’ve thought it over since then and have decided I want him to give me to the Khan for his good and mine too. He doesn’t need me like you needed me. He’s already a giant in strength—his great ambitions are sure to be fulfilled. But that fulfillment will come quicker if he becomes the Khan’s favorite. For what is a suit of fire-walkers’ garments—even a fireproof mineral woven into cloth—compared to me?”
“There must be a hundred great beauties hoping to be queens of the Khan who feel the same.”
“I didn’t send for you to quarrel with. I saw that you are desperate and in danger of making some fatal mistake. Remember, he can kill you now with impunity—except for punishments from beyond the earth—for any story he tells, the judges will believe, you being a confessed thief. He could have had you killed in Suchow, but he’s always torn between getting rid of you entirely and bringing you to heel. One’s easy and the other’s hard, and he likes hardship. Also, he was never able to bring your mother to heel, and that would make it a double satisfaction.”
“Truly, you know him better than you did, and you talk plainer.”
“I’m no longer an English child who fell in love with a Venetian bravo. But your gods made you save me from the desert—to punish you, I think, for casting your pearl away—and so I’m telling you the truth.”
I did not boast again. I looked her in the eyes and said, “I know it.”
“I’d like to tell you something else, and have asked permission of my saints, but whether they’ve granted it I don’t know.”
“What have they to do with it?”
“I promised them I would be a dutiful slave. To tell you this, perhaps I must break my vow. But I would be doing good, I think, while to remain silent would be doing harm.”
“It’s a hard choice that you’ll have to make yourself.”
“I thought of asking those three priests to help me decide, but look at them!” Just now they were singing Vexilla Regis Prodeunt at the top of their voices.
“Miranda, we’re a long way from home.”
“If I tell you, will you go?”
“Yes.”
“At once, not asking any questions?”
“Yes.”
“Baram was very kind to me and is a good, just man. I don’t want you to brood over his ingratitude to you and perhaps, if you get a chance, strike back at him. He didn’t know the truth about your going out to look for us that night—I didn’t know it at the time—but I’ve found it out since from an old camp tender who erects our pavilion. Baram believed that you went out on Nicolo’s orders and he was looking for us at the same time. If he had known that you went of your own will and at your own risk, against Nicolo’s advice and wishes, and that we all would have died except for you, he would have given you his most precious possession as a reward.”
“Instead he gave it to Nicolo?”
“Yes.”
“So Fate—I don’t want to say God—gave me a second chance to have you, but the chance went wrong?”
“It was partly your own fault, Marco. You should have looked for me in the caravan instead of going to your tent. You should have found me and claimed me. You might have known you’d be given another chance if you wanted it enough.”
“How could I know it?”
“At least you could have kept trying instead of giving up.”
“Maybe it’s written that after I’m punished enough, I can still have you.”
“I think if you did, you would only sell me again.”
“Miranda, how did Baram come to make that mistake?”
“Nicolo saw me and wanted me and lied. By keeping you away from Baram, he ran no great risk of his finding out the truth; anyway, he’s a bold man who takes risks. This one won.”
“Yes, it did. It won more greatly than I once could dream.” Made in this half-heathen church on this wintry day, here was my profession of faith.
“If you believe that at last, it’s too late.”
“You said I ought to keep on trying——”
“I take it back. But you’ll try something, and whatever it is, I don’t want you to be brought down to defeat and possibly death by treachery.”
That last word stopped my breath. I wondered if she were using the wrong word—that she meant something much less, such as trickery. Perhaps because of the drunken priests’ caterwauling, I had misunderstood her.
“Did you say . . . treachery?”
“Yes, and that’s the main reason I had you come here. You promised me you wouldn’t ask me any questions, but I don’t think you need to. I’m doing right when I say this. There’s no longer any doubt in my mind—I was confused before between letter and spirit.”
“When you say . . . what?”
“Don’t trust any more of your secrets to Zurficar the Turki-Tatar, whom you call Pietro.”
3
Mustapha Dey had once told me for the love of Allah not to hang upon his words as though they were a life line thrown to me on a sinking ship. It seemed that my ship was sinking now in a calm, cold, wine-dark sea of doom, and there was no life line thrown to me, no words in its stead, no Mustapha to fill the breach, no Allah to turn to at last. My spirit was as withered as all my laurels, I was bankrupt of hope as of pride, and every wind blew cold.
Instinct warned I must not act, speak, or make any irrevocable decision until again, if I ever could, I gained firm ground. I must peer out and keep guard like a rat in its hole, but must not myself be seen. And I dared not dull my mind with potions or enflame it with passions lest these injunctions fail.
This was not life, only its shadow. At least the man walking in the dust, keeping these rules like a slave, did not seem me, Marco Polo, bold, crafty, licentious, vindictive, willful, a man of deeds, a son of Venice. I had a bleak feeling of being depersonalized. It was as though I had dropped out of my identity when I had lost my way. I felt little, and perhaps my strongest feeling was in the form of an intimation of early, peaceful death. All my faiths had already died, it seemed—faith in Miranda’s innocence and even in her beauty, faith in the greatness of Mustapha, for had he not believed in me? And even faith in my mother’s trust to me, as sworn by her delegate on earth. So I could no longer be certain that I was Nicolo’s son. I no longer believed in it as I had believed in the uniqueness and the immortality of my soul. My resemblance to him might be extreme prenatal influence. Or was it a trick of the Devil to lay me by the heels?