Throughout the caravan’s fortnight stay in Kanchow and down the long road to Yungchang, I made no real effort to realize myself and shake off the waking dream. It seemed I was too stunned to know what had hit me. But perhaps my inertia was some sort of natural protection. Vulnerable in the extreme, perhaps I was trying, not intelligently but instinctively, to stay out of trouble.
At Yungchang the merchants bought musk and yak wool from the Koko Nor. The mountain breeze with its smells of spring was like a tonic to me, and I found myself tempted to give a gold bezant for the favor of a damsel of the town, white-skinned with rosy cheeks and raven-black hair, who dropped me a flower from a roof top. Miserliness made me refrain, but I had been pleasantly surprised to find myself once more a man in at least one respect, and instinctively I began to seek other signs. Still guarding every action and word, I set my thoughts free. When they had larked it awhile they were refreshed enough to undertake a hard problem.
Ever since the trial I had avoided Pietro, at first to save him loss of face and possibly from the contagion of misfortune, lately because I could not play the necessary part. During our stay at Yungchang, I dared to drink rice wine with him, and on our taking the road I sometimes walked beside him. I noticed that he took not the slightest interest in my general conversation—the hare was no longer worth the skinning—but if I said anything worth telling Nicolo, he became all ears, plus cold, glittering eyes. No doubt he loved the man as might a captured wolf.
We came to the summer capital of the subject king of Kansu at the foot of the Ala Shan. This was an immense castle on a splendid terrace, the main palace surrounded by armories and pleasure domes. Paying tribute to Kublai Khan, the king was permitted much of his former magnificence and the trappings, although not the scepter, of power; he dwelt in a luxury undreamed by Western potentates, with lackeys and eunuchs without end, a harem of five hundred chosen beauties from all over Asia, game parks, hawks and hounds, and, for his parades, a thousand snow-white camels from the famous stud of Ningshia. Before his surrender he had boasted too of five thousand pitch-black yaks, larger than the common kind and very fierce, but since they were ridden by crossbowmen in guarding the passes into his realm, giving Kublai no little trouble before he could break through, they had been taken away from him. In their place he had been given an equal number of white fallow deer.
The greater part of these pets had escaped or died, and the walled park where he had kept them had fallen into neglect. Few passed through the tumble-down gates, and one barren hill-top stayed completely forsaken for an odd reason. Here lay a colossus of perhaps greater dimension than any other in the world. It was called the Dead Buddha and had once stood here as the titulary deity of the land, towering over the king’s palace and visible—so legend had it—for a hundred miles. No swan, raven, elephant, or serpent was old enough to remember its raising; it was already ancient when Shih Huang Ti built the Great Wall ere Caesar conquered England. But within the memory of living man the ground under one side had sunk and the enormous idol leaned slowly over until it fell.
Its peculiar interest to me was that the vast form, probably built up slowly of clay, shimmered in the sunlight as though covered with gold leaf. So when the full moon covered the whole countryside with silver leaf, the hours that the malign influence of death was most high and the scene most forsaken, I had Sheba follow me there with a pair of scrapers. I thought likely we could scrape off enough gold before moonset to fatten my purse a little; in any case I hoped to practice some necromancy, which means to foresee the future through communion with the dead. Mustapha told me how he had visited the Great Sphinx under the midnight moon in the solitude of the Egyptian desert. He had asked her about the meaning of life and the mystery of the human soul, and some enlightenment had been given him. I did not seek answers to such vasty riddles, but I would like to know if some thinking I had done was straight, and if the path I had taken lately was the right path. There was nothing to stop Sheba, whose heart was Eve’s and whose wisdom was as the serpent’s, from acting as the oracle of the dead god.
My first study was of how the mighty had fallen. But as though the hand of the Devil had half-caught him in the Devil’s way, the god did not smash, and the only damage was a rift across the back of the head, strangely comparable to a fractured skull. His hand that had been lifted and open in some solemn admonition now thrust skyward as in a last spasm fixed by rigor mortis. His toes turned up. Between his feet was an animal of some kind, apparently a cat, tail down and legs in the air.
We paced the length of his corpse—fifty of my long strides. The other hand that pressed against the ground was fifteen feet long, and the foot a good twenty. When we climbed to his forehead to look into his face, we could not stand high enough to see it well; and the curl of the lips that had doubtless represented a blissful smile suggested the awful grin often seen on the faces of cadavers. The eyes were half closed, and their rims, never covered with gold leaf, had bleached white. I could lie along the slope of the nose, and if I had won Miranda instead of lost her, she and I could have made love on the broad of his chin. It was just what we would have done, if she were here with me instead of her bondwoman. It would have been the perfect act of defiance of the ravages of Time, the answer to Death.
I was wondering how many ingots of gold had been beaten eggshell thin to illumine the vast form. The chest was forty feet broad and thirty thick, the swollen belly a third again as gross, and the wall of the well-molded, deep-sunken navel had taken at least six square feet of gold leaf. But the god-makers of long ago had saved much yellow stuff, and labor as well, by substituting drapery for manly loins. If their motive was modesty instead of economy, I doubted if the god would like it any better.
I had once seen the complete skin, carefully flayed, of a tall man, and had judged its area in square feet to be his height multiplied by half his height. By this figuring, some ten thousand square feet of gold leaf had been used to adorn the god. But now he needed it no more than Mangu Khan the three hundred maidens of perfect beauty who had been buried with him.
But when I applied a scraper to the region of his belly, I found the leaf not eggshell thin but almost as intangible as sunlight. When I had scraped clean a square-foot patch, I had collected a teaspoonful of yellow dust as light as fool’s gold. It seemed likely that the leaf had been removed by other desecrators, and a gilt paint applied in its stead.
But my heart was light and my head strangely clear and my companion’s eyes intensely alive. It was as though I had been lost in the desert, but had come upon an ancient landmark, and with her help I could find my way back to the road that led to the Court of Kublai Khan.
“Sheba, when I told Zurficar, whom I call Pietro, of my desire to obtain a suit of the fire-walkers’ garments, I thought he was loyal to me,” I said. “But it may be he was loyal to Nicolo.”
“Is the moon shining upon us, or may it be the sun?”
“How can you be so sure?”
“My Lady Linda became sure on the night of the trial, but she didn’t tell me so, lest I tell you, and you strike in revenge while your wits were out and be whipped to death. She had surmised he was a spy on the fourth day out of Shakow, when Nicolo learned of your visiting her. The old gibbaleen who erects her pavilion told her that Nicolo and the Turki-Tatar had many meetings. But she didn’t know you’d put your trust in him.”