“The woman who gave you this for me. Surely you would have recognized her, even veiled, if she had been the Lady Chao Ku-an … .”
“Yes, and she was not. Which reminds me: the Lady Chao is dead. I only heard of it myself a day or two ago, from a courier riding the horse-post route. It happened since I left Khanbalik. An unfortunate accident. According to the courier, it is believed that the lady must have been chasing from her chambers some lover who had displeased her, and in running after him—you know she had the lotus feet—she tripped on the staircase and fell headlong.”
“I regret to hear it,” I said, though I really did not. One more off my list of suspect whisperers. “But about the letter, Ali. Was the lady who brought it perhaps a very large lady?” I was remembering the extraordinary female I had briefly seen in the chambers of the Vice-Regent Achmad.
Ali thought about it, and said, “She may have been taller than I am, but most people are. No, I would not say she was notably large.”
“You said she did not speak. It suggests that you would have known her by her voice, does it not?”
He shrugged. “How do I answer that? Since she did not, I did not. Does the letter contain bad news, Marco, or some other cause for despondency?”
“I could better decide that if I knew where it came from.”
“All I can tell you is that your advance riders arrived in the city on a day some days ago, heralding your imminent return, and—”
“Wait. Did they announce anything else?”
“Not really. When people asked how went the war in Yun-nan, the two would say nothing—except that you were bringing the official word —but their swaggering implied that the word would be of some Mongol victory. Anyway, it was in the night of that day that the veiled lady came to me with that missive for you. So, with Mar-Janah’s blessing, when the two men left again the next morning to ride back to you, I rode with them.”
He could add nothing more, and I truly could not think of any females who might be nursing a grudge against me, what with the Lady Chao and the twins Buyantu and Biliktu all dead. If the veiled woman had been someone else’s agent, I had no idea whose. So I said no more about the matter, and tore up the vexing letter, and we continued on our journey, reaching Xan-du without anything dreadful happening to us, of either unexpected or expectable nature.
Xan-du was just one of four or five subsidiary palaces that the Khakhan maintained in places outside Khanbalik, but it was the most sumptuous of those. In the Da-ma-qing Mountains, he had had an extensive hunting park laid out, and stocked with all manner of game, and staffed with expert huntsmen and gamekeepers and beaters, who lived there the year around, in villages on the park’s outskirts. In the center of the park stood a marble palace of goodly size, containing the usual halls for gathering and dining and entertaining and holding court, plus ample quarters for any number of the royal family and their courtiers and guests, and for all the numerous servants and slaves they would require, and for all the musicians and mountebanks brought along to enliven the nighttime hours. Every room, down to the smallest bedchamber, was decorated with wall paintings done by the Master Chao and other court artists, depicting scenes of the chase and the course and the hunt, and all marvelously done. Outside the main palace building were grand stables for the mounts and the pack animals—elephants as well as horses and mules—and mews for the Khan’s hawks and falcons, and kennels for his dogs and chita cats, and all those buildings were as finely built and adorned and as spotlessly clean as the palace itself.
The Khakhan had also at Xan-du a sort of portable palace. It was like a tremendous yurtu pavilion, only so very tremendous that it could not have been constructed of cloth or felt. It was mostly made of the zhu-gan cane and palm leaves, and was supported on wooden columns carved and painted and gilded to seem dragons, and was held together by an ingenious webbing of silk ropes. Although of great size, it could be taken apart and carried about and put up again as easily as a yurtu. So it was continually being moved about the Xan-du parkland and the surrounding countryside—a train of elephants was reserved for the task of transporting its components—to wherever the Khakhan and his company chose to hunt on any day.
Every time Kubilai went out to hunt, he did it in consummate style. He and his guests would depart from the marble palace in a numerous and colorful and glittering train. Sometimes the Khan rode on one of his “dragon steeds”—the milk-white horses specially bred for him in Persia—and sometimes in the little house called a hauda, rocking atop an elephant’s high shoulders, and at other times in a lavishly ornamented, two-wheeled chariot, drawn by either horses or elephants. When he went on horseback, he always carried one of the sleek chita cats draped elegantly across the horse’s withers in front of his saddle, and would loose it whenever some small animal started up in his path. The chita could run down anything that moves, and would always dutifully fetch its catch back to the train, but, since a chita always mangled its prey considerably, a huntsman would toss that game into a separate bag and later mince it for feed for the birds in the palace mews. When Kubilai rode out in a hauda or his chariot, he always had two or more of his milk-white gerfalcons perched on its rim and would start them at sight of small game running or flying.
Behind the Khakhan’s chariot or steed or elephant would come the train of his company, all lords and ladies and distinguished guests mounted only a little less royally than the Khan himself, and all—depending on the game to be sought that day—carrying hooded hawks on their gauntleted wrists, or accompanied by servants carrying their lances or bows or leading on leash their chase dogs. Out ahead of the train, earlier in the day, would have gone the many beaters, to form up in three sides of a vast square and, at the proper time, to start flushing the game—stags or boars or otters or whatever—out the fourth side of the square, toward the approaching hunters.
Whenever Kubilai’s train passed through or by one of the villages situated around his parkland, all the families of women and children living there would run outdoors to cry “Hail!” They also kept welcome fires always burning, in case the Khan should come that way, and would cast into the flames spices and incense to perfume the air as the Khakhan went by. At midday, the hunting party would repair to the zhu-gan palace, always set up at a convenient place, for food and drink and soft music and a brief nap before going afield again in the afternoon. And when the day’s hunt was done, depending on how tired they all might be, or how far from the main palace, they would either return there or stop the night in the zhu-gan palace, for it had copious room and comfortable bedding.
I and Ali and our four Mongols reached Xan-du in the middle of a morning, and were told by a steward where to find the Khakhan’s portable palace, and arrived there at midday, when the whole party was lolling over its meal. Several people recognized me and hailed me, including Kubilai. I introduced Ali Babar to him as “a citizen of Khanbalik, Sire, one of your rich merchant princes,” and Kubilai received him cordially, not having noticed Ali in my company in the days when he had been the lowly slave Nostril. Then I started to say, “I bring from Yunnan both good and bad news, Sire—” but he held up his hand to stop me.
“Nothing,” he said firmly. “Nothing is important enough to interrupt a good hunt. Hold your news until we return to the Xan-du palace this evening. Now, are you hungry?” He clapped for a servant to bring food. “Are you fatigued? Would you rather precede us to the palace and rest while you wait, or would you take a lance with us? We have been starting some admirably big and vicious boar hogs.”