Even more stiffly, he said, “It is better to fight in a losing cause than to have to confess to your grandchildren that you never fought at all. Vakh!”
Prince Chingkim spoke up. “I can assure you, Royal Father, that this Marco Polo would never dodge any confrontation imaginable. He is, however, at the moment a trifle shaken by a recent calamity.” He went on to tell Kubilai about the accidental—he stressed accidental—devastation of my menage.
“Ah, so you are bereft of women servants and the services of women,” the Khakhan said sympathetically. “Well, you will be traveling too rapidly on the road to Yun-nan to have need of servants, and you will be too fatigued each night to yearn for anything more than sleep. When you get there, of course, you will do your share of the pillage and rape. Take slaves to serve you, take women to service you. Behave like a Mongol born.”
“Yes, Sire,” I said submissively.
He leaned back and sighed, as if he missed the good old days, and murmured in reminiscence:
“My esteemed grandfather Chinghiz, it is said, was born clutching a clot of blood in his tiny fist, from which the shaman foretold for him a sanguinary career. He lived up to the prophecy. And I can still remember him telling us, his grandsons, ‘Boys, a man can have no greater pleasure than to slay his enemies, and then, besmeared and reeking with their blood, to rape their chaste wives and virgin daughters. There is no more delightful sensation than to spurt your jing-ye into a woman or a girl-child who is weeping and struggling and loathing you and cursing you.’ So spake Chinghiz Khan, the Immortal of Mongols.”
“I will bear it in mind, Sire.”
He sat forward again and said, “No doubt you have arrangements to make before your departure. But make them as expeditiously as possible. I have already sent advance riders to ready your route. If, on’your way along it, you can sketch for me maps of that route—as you and your uncles did of the Silk Road—I shall be grateful and your reward will be handsome. Also, if in your travels you should catch up to the fugitive Minister Pao, I give you leave to slay him, and your reward for that would also be handsome. Now go and prepare for the journey. I will have fast horses and a trustworthy escort ready when you are.”
Well, I thought, as I went to my chambers, this would at least put me out of reach of my court adversaries—the Wali Achmad, the Lady Chao, the Fondler Ping, whoever else that whisperer might have been. Better to fall in open warfare than to someone sneaking up behind me.
The Court Architect was in my suite, making measurements and muttering to himself and snapping orders to a team of workmen, who were commencing the replacement of the vanished walls and roof. Happily, I had kept most of my personal possessions and valuables in my bedroom, which had been unravaged. Nostril was in there, burning incense to clear the air. I bade him lay out a traveling wardrobe for me and to make a light pack of other necessities. Then I gathered up all the journal notes I had written and accumulated since leaving Venice, and carried them to my father’s chambers.
He looked a little surprised when I dropped the pile on a table beside him, for it was an unprepossessing mound of smudged and wrinkled and mildewed papers of all different sizes.
“I would be obliged, Father, if you would send these to Uncle Marco, the next time you entrust some shipment of goods to the Silk Road horse post, and ask him to send them on to Venice for safekeeping by Maregna Fiordelisa. The notes may be of interest to some future cosmographer, if he can decipher them and arrange them in order. I had intended to do that myself—someday—but I am bidden to a mission from which I may not return.”
“Indeed? What mission?”
I told him, and with dramatic somberness, so I was taken aback when he said, “I envy you, doing something I have never done. You should appreciate the opportunity Kubilai is giving you. Da novèlo tuto xe belo. Not many white men have watched the Mongols make war—and lived to remember it.”
“I only hope I do,” I said. “But survival is not my sole consideration. There are other things I had rather be doing. And I am sure that there are more profitable things I could be doing.”
“Now, now, Marco. To a good hunger there is no bad bread.”
“Are you suggesting, Father, that I should enjoy wasting my time in a war?”
He said reprovingly, “It is true that you were trained for trade, and you come from a merchant lineage. But you must not look at everything with a tradesman’s eye, always asking yourself, ‘What is this good for? What is this worth?’ Leave that grubby philosophy to the tradesmen who never step beyond their shop doors. You have ventured out to the farthest edge of the world. It would be a pity if you take home only profit, and not at least a little of poetry.”
“That reminds me,” I said. “I turned a profit yesterday. May I borrow one of your maidservants for an errand?”
I sent her to fetch from the slave quarters the Turki woman called Mar-Janah, formerly the possession of the Lady Chao Ku-an.
“Mar-Janah?” my father repeated, as the servant departed. “And a Turki … ?”
“Yes, you know of her,” I said. “We have spoken of her before.” And I told him the whole story, of which he had so long ago heard only a part of the beginning.
“What a wondrously intricate web!” he exclaimed. “And to have been at last unraveled! God does not always pay His debts just on Sundays.” Then, as I had done on first seeing her, he widened his eyes when the lovely woman came smiling into the chamber, and I introduced him to her.
“My Mistress Chao did not seem pleased about it,” she said shyly to me, “but she tells me that I am now your property, Master Marco.”
“Only briefly,” I said, taking the paper of title from my purse and holding it out to her. “You are your own property again, as you should be, and I will hear you call no one Master any more.”
With a tremulous hand she accepted the paper, and with her other hand she brushed tears from her long eyelashes, and she seemed to have trouble finding words to speak.
“Now,” I went on, “I doubt not that the Princess Mar-Janah of Cappadocia could take her pick of men from this court or any other. But if Your Highness still has her heart set on Nost—on Ali Babar, he awaits you in my chambers down the hall.”
She started to kneel in ko-tou, but I caught her hands, raised her, turned her to the door, said, “Go to him,” and she went.
My father approvingly followed her with his gaze, then asked me, “You will not wish to take Nostril with you to Yun-nan?”
“No. He has waited twenty years or more for that woman. Let them be married as soon as can be. Will you tend to those arrangements, Father?”
“Yes. And I will give Nostril his own certificate of title as a wedding present. I mean Ali Babar. I suppose we ought to accustom ourselves to addressing him more respectfully, now that he will be a freeman and consort to a princess.”
“Before he is entirely free, I had better go and make sure he has packed for me properly. So I will say goodbye now, Father, in case I do not see you or Uncle Mafio before I leave.”
“Goodbye, Marco, and let me take back what I said before. I was wrong. You may never make a proper tradesman. You just now gave away a valuable slave for no payment at all.”
“But, Father, I got her free of payment.”
“What better way to turn a clear profit? Yet you did not. You did not even set her free with fanfare and fine words and noble gesticulations, letting her kiss and slobber over your hands, while a numerous audience applauded your liberality and a palace scribe recorded the scene for posterity.”
Mistaking the tenor of his words, I said in some exasperation, “To quote one of your own adages, Father: one minute you are lighting torches and the next you are counting candle wicks.”