“Hui-sheng,” I repeated. “What malice in that? It is a most mellifluous name.”
“It is a most unfitting name, for it means Echo,” said Devlet, the next of the Mongol maidens. “But no matter. She neither hears it nor answers to it.”
“A soundless Echo,” I said, and smiled. “An unfitting name, perhaps, but a pleasing paradox. Hui-sheng. Hui-sheng … .”
To Ayuka, the seventh or eighth of the Mongol maidens, I said, “Tell me, does your Lady Matron deliberately seek deaf-mute slaves for the duty of overseeing the nuptial nights?”
“She does not seek them. She makes them so from childhood. Incapable either of eavesdropping or of gossiping. They cannot gasp in surprise or disapproval if they see strange sights in the bedchamber, or afterward prattle of perverse things they have witnessed. If they do ever misbehave and must be beaten, they cannot scream.”
“Bruto barabào! Makes them so? How?”
“Actually, the Lady Matron has a shaman physician do the silencing operation,” said Merghus, who was the eighth or ninth of the Mongol maidens. “He puts a red-hot skewer down each ear and through the neck into the gullet. I cannot tell you exactly what is done, but look at Hui-sheng—you can see the tiny scar on her throat.”
I looked, and it was so. But I saw more than that when I gazed upon Hui-sheng, for Kubilai had spoken truly when he said that the girls of the Min were unsurpassably beautiful. At least this one was. Being a slave, she wore not the blank white-powdered face of the other women native to these lands, nor the elaborate stiff hairdos of her Mongol mistresses. Her pale-peach skin was her own, and her hair was but simply piled in soft billows on her head. Except for the little crescent scar on her throat, she bore not a blemish, which was not true of the noble maidens she attended. They, having grown up mostly outdoors, in rude living conditions, among horses and such, had many nicks and pocks and abrasions marring even the more intimate areas of their flesh.
Hui-sheng was at that moment seated in the most graceful and endearing posture a woman can ever unconsciously assume. Quite unaware of anyone’s regard, she was fixing a flower in her soft black hair. Her left hand held the pink blossom above her left ear, and she had her right hand arched over her head to assist in the arranging. That particular placement of the head and hands and arms and upper torso makes of any woman, clothed or naked, a poem of curves and gentle angles—her face turned a little downward and to one side, her arms framing it in harmonious composition, her neck line flowing smoothly to the bosom, her breasts sweetly uplifted by the raised arms. In that posture even an old woman looks young, a fat one looks lithe, a gaunt one looks sleek, and a beautiful woman is never more beautiful.
I remember also noticing that Hui-sheng had, in front of each ear, a fluff of very fine black hair growing as far down as her jaw line, and another feathery floss growing down the back of her neck into her collar. They were winsome details, and they made me wonder if a Min woman might be exceptionally furry in more private places. The Mongol maidens, I might mention, all had in their most private places those peculiarly Mongol “little warmers” of smooth, flat hair like small swatches of cat pelt. But, if I have uncharacteristically said little else about their charms, or about my nights of frolicking with them, it is owing to no sudden access of modesty or reserve on my part; it is only that I do not too well remember those girls. I have even forgotten now whether I was visited by an even dozen of them, or eleven, or thirteen, or some other number.
Oh, they were handsome, enjoyable, competent, satisfying, but they were that and no more. I recall them as just a succession of fleeting incidents, a different one each night. My consciousness was more impressed by the small, unobtrusive, silent Echo—and not simply for the reason that she was present every night, but because she outshone all the Mongol maidens together. Had she not been a distracting influence, I probably would not have found them so forgettable. They were, after all, the pick of Mongol womanhood, of twenty-four-karat quality, eminently well suited to their function of bed partnership. But, even while I enjoyed the sight of them being undressed by the lon-gya slave, I could not help observing how unnecessarily over-sized they seemed alongside the diminutive, dainty Hui-sheng, and how coarse of complexion and physiognomy, alongside her peach-blossom skin and exquisite features. Even their breasts, which in other circumstances I would have adored as beautifully voluptuous, I thought somehow too aggressively mammalian, compared to the almost childlike slimness and fragility of Hui-sheng’s body.
In honesty, I will say that the Mongol maidens must have found me not their ideal, either, and they must have been less than overjoyed to be mating with me. They had been recruited, and had survived a rigorous system of selection, to be bedded with the Khan of All Khans. He was an old man, and perhaps also not the dream man of a young woman, but he was the Khakhan. It must have been a considerable disappointment for them to be allotted to a foreigner instead—a Ferenghi, a nobody—and worse yet, to be commanded not to take the fern-seed precaution before lying with me. They were, presumably, of twenty-four-karat fecundity, meaning that they had to expect impregnation by me, and the consequent bearing not of noble Mongol descendants of the Chinghiz line, but of half-breed bastards, who were bound to be regarded askance by the rest of the Kithai population, if not actively despised.
I had doubts of my own about the wisdom of Kubilai’s having set me and the concubines to this conjoining. It was not that I felt myself either superior or inferior to them, for I was aware that they and I and all other folk in the world are of the same single human race. I had been taught that from my earliest years, and I had in my travels seen ample evidence of it. (Two small examples: all men everywhere, except sometimes the holy and the hermit, are ever ready to get drunk; all women everywhere, when they run, run as if their knees are hobbled together.) Clearly, all people are descendants of the same original Adam and Eve, but it is just as clear that the progeny have diverged widely in the generations since the expulsion from Eden.
Kubilai called me a Ferenghi, and he meant no offense by it, but the word lumped me into a mistakenly undifferentiated mass. I knew that we Venetians were quite distinct from the Slavs and Sicilians and all others of the Western nationalities. While I could not perceive as much variety among the numerous Mongol tribes, I knew that every person took pride in his own, and regarded it as the foremost breed of Mongols, even while asserting that all Mongols were the foremost of mankind.
In my travels, I did not always conceive an affection for every new people I met, but I did find them all of interest—and the interest was in their differences. Different skin colors, different customs, foods, speech, superstitions, entertainments, even interestingly different deficiencies and ignorances and stupidities. Some while after this time at Xan-du, I would visit the city of Hang-zho, and I would see that it, like Venice, was a city all of canals. But in every other respect, Hang-zho was not at all like Venice, and it was the variances, not the similarities, that made the place lovely in my eyes. So is Venice still lovely and dear to me, but it would cease to be if it were not unique. In my opinion, a world of cities and places and views all alike would be the dullest world imaginable, and I feel much the same way about the world’s peoples. If all of them—white and peach and brown and black and whatever other colors exist—were stirred together into a bland tan, every other of their jagged and craggy differences would flatten down into featurelessness. You can walk confidently across a tan sand desert because it is not fissured by any chasms, but neither does it have any high peaks worth looking at. I realized that my contribution to the blending of Ferenghi and Mongol bloodlines would be negligible. Still I was reluctant that people so distinct should be blended at all—by fiat, deliberately, not even by casual encounter—and thereby made in any degree less various, and therefore less interesting.