“Are the people allowed anywhere in the park except in those precincts?” Nicolo asked in his clear, far-carrying voice.
“No, and the region of the chasm is forbidden to his foresters and keepers. It’s said he wishes to keep that part as Nature made it.” More than that was said, to judge from the beadle’s face; but he quickly veered from the subject. “When the Khan holds durbar, the people may come into the inner grounds through the lower gate and hang around the doors and balconies of the great hall. Indeed, they’d be allowed to enter if they could find room. The Khan holds by the ancient law of the Mongol that his meanest subject may have access to his imperial person, along with the right of petition.”
“I can’t remember any of the common sort attending the great durbar in Peking.”
“They aren’t forbidden to do so, after the great folk and their attendants have taken their places. Moreover, if they have petitions, they can raise their hands. But sometimes the Khan is busied with other matters, in which case he doesn’t point his scepter at the petitioner. It is a risk that few of his meaner subjects care to run.”
“What happens in that case?”
“He is taken out and strangled.”
Nicolo did not answer but turned with a charmed expression to sniff at a gentle breeze coming up with the sun. It had blown across the park and had gathered up the incense of flowering trees. I could not recall a more exquisite perfume. As Nicolo savored it, seated atop his great gray stallion, a passer-by would have thought him a very king.
CHAPTER 11
THE CHASM
When wild-riding couriers and exhausted runners brought news that the Khan’s train had been sighted over the hill, I gathered with a large number of the common sort on the precincts reserved for us in the park. After awhile there came a glimmer as from a rising sun in a little niche in a wooded crest where the road ran. An involuntary utterance, one of the strangest I had ever heard, rose from our crowd. I could best describe it as a prolonged grunt of happy wonder.
Knowing what to look for, as did the others, my sharp eyes were among the first to focus on the Khan’s equipage. He journeyed in a howdah at least twenty feet square and borne by not one elephant but four, all of them tuskers exactly ten feet tall, perfectly trained, and marching two by two. As it caught the sunlight it began to show reddish in hue, since the outside was covered with tiger skins. The interior was known to be lined with beaten gold, and the roof could be thrown open at the Khan’s wish.
Although we did not see them, three thousand of his personal bodyguard of nine thousand were riding out and ahead of the equipage on both sides of the road, but not setting foot in the road itself lest they raise dust. Behind the Khan marched a file of about twenty elephants, all richly caparisoned and bearing howdahs bright with inlay and lacquer and shining in the sun. In these rode one or more of the Khan’s four queens, and members of his family, with favorite attendants and outriders. Next in order were not his barons and courtiers, but fully a thousand horses white as speckless snow, semidivine beasts to the Tatar mind, bred for the Khan alone, and their like forbidden to any of his subjects. Occasionally he rode one of the stallions; the mares supplied milk and karvas, the Tatars’ mainstay and their ceremonial drink, to his kinsmen, wives, and concubines.
Behind these beautiful beasts came a mile-long file of carts bearing favorite hounds and hawks with their keepers, at least a hundred fierce eagles used in killing deer, and, which I had heard but could hardly believe, a score of hunting tigers, each in the company of a small dog to smell out game for it when the game took cover.[25] These gorgeous beasts were not caged, merely kept in leash, and either rode in the carts or paced beside them in charge of their trainers. Other carts contained wolves for coursing wild cattle and heavy stags, and fully a hundred hunting leopards rode on horses, each in charge of a groom.
By the time all these had emerged into plain sight, the Khan’s equipage was not far from the eastern gate of the park, a great portal magnificently adorned and used only by him and his immediate family. As his equipage turned into its approach, we saw two gerfalcons rise from the opening in the roof of the car; obviously, they had been cast to hawk at a passing flock of cranes. This pair were the finest in all the royal mews of many thousand or they would not be riding with the Khan; quite possibly they were the best on earth. Perhaps that was why I took no joy in watching them tower and stoop. Their quarry had been doomed when the Khan’s eye first fell on them. That fall had been as crushing as a giant tree falling on their nests.
The Khan’s car passed through the sacred gate of the park and into the palace grounds. The file of elephants followed, while his immediate bodyguard of three thousand fell into close ranks and entered an adjacent gate. Led now by the drove of white horses, each with its groom, his train made their way through the south gate, then each section went its own way like the divisions of a well-trained army coming into camp. Behind the hawk and tiger carts, and the leashed wolves and the mounted leopards, marched another file of elephants, not as tall or as richly caparisoned as the first, but fully ten times as many. The men and women in the open howdahs were obviously great folk of the Court; I suspected that the curtained ones bore favorite concubines. And from these to the niche in the hills, as far as eye could see, rode company after company of horsemen. Some were richly dressed and evidently minor officials of the Court. Whole companies wore the same apparel, representing various services to the Khan—falconers, cooks, costumers, physicians, jongleurs and acrobats, vintners, tailors, jewelers, goldsmiths and silversmiths, and, in regiments of nine hundred riding ten abreast, his bodyguardsmen not today on duty.
These streamed from the ridge top to the various gates of the park and the city for more than two hours. So we spectators almost laughed at a mere hundred dog-handlers, each dressed in blue and holding two giant mastiffs on leash. We had better not laugh. We had better remember that Xanadu was not one of the Khan’s great hunting seats, where hawks and hounds, falcons and beaters and watchers, were numbered in thousands. In Xanadu the Khan kept cool, hunting only an hour or two each day. In other respects, his Court here was only a skeleton Court. For instance, in Peking the ménages of his four queens, each occupying a separate palace, numbered forty thousand in eunuchs, handmaidens, and slaves.
Behind the dogs, there walked barefoot in the dust a hundred men in rags. Indeed they were as tattered and dirty as the troops of beggars that many a Christian king hires on feast days to receive his alms and prove his charity. But no great baron, who sometimes played chess with the Khan, smirked with such pride as these matted-haired beasts. They called themselves the Khan’s astrologers. Actually they constituted the most powerful body of necromancers, sorcerers, and seers in all the world. They were the pick of all Asia and every one was a master of some diabolic art.
They brought up the rear of the imperial procession. The host of men and beasts coming into view in the dust clouds was made up of drovers, baggage wallahs, herds of cattle and sheep, and loaded camels without end. Only a few of us gapers stayed to watch them pass; the greater number of us sought good lookouts for a sight less magnificent but more heart-lifting and lucky. In the cool of the evening on the day of his arrival it was the custom of the Khan to ride out into the park, to see how the game had flourished in his absence, and to take a few head to start the season well. On the croup of his steed would ride a hunting leopard or perhaps a huge eagle, whom he would loose at a fallow deer. The open glades might give a glimpse of him as he raced behind the spotted cat or under the nine-barbed harpy. It might come to pass they would watch the very kill.