He was not even polite, moreover, and I hoped my father would tell him so. But he said only, “You are the highest ranking Christian churchman in the Holy Land. The Pope’s legate.”
“There is no Pope,” Visconti retorted. “And until an apostolic authority is chosen, who am I to delegate a hundred priests to go into the far unknown, at the whim of a heathen barbarian?”
“Come now, Teo,” said the Prince again. “I think we have in our entourage more chaplains than we have fighting men. Surely we can spare some of them, for a good purpose.”
“If it is a good purpose, Your Grace,” said the Archdeacon, scowling. “Remember, these are Venetians proposing it. And this is not the first such proposal. Some twenty-five years ago, the Mongols made a similar overture, and directly to Rome. One of their Khans, one named Kuyuk, a cousin to this Kubilai, sent a letter to Pope Innocent asking—no, demanding—that His Holiness and all the monarchs of the West come to him, in a body, to render homage and submission. Naturally he was ignored. But that is the kind of invitation the Mongols proffer, and when it comes by the agency of a Venetian …”
“Despise our provenance, if you will,” said my father, still equably. “If there were no fault in the world, there could be no pardon. But please, Your Reverence, do not despise this opportunity. The Khakhan Kubilai asks nothing but that your priests come and preach their religion. I have here the missive written by the Khan’s scribe at the Khan’s dictation. Does Your Reverence read Farsi?”
“No,” said Visconti, adding a snort of exasperation. “It will require an interpreter.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Very well. Let us retire to another room while it is read to me. No need to waste the time of Their Graces.”
So he and my father adjourned for their conference. Prince Edward and Princess Eleanor, as if to make up for the Archdeacon’s bad manners, stayed long enough to make some conversation with me and Uncle Mafìo. The Princess asked me :
“Do you read Farsi, young Marco?”
“No, my Lady—Your Royal Highness. That language is written in the Arabic alphabet, the fish-worm writing, and I cannot make sense of it.”
“Whether you read it or not,” said the Prince, “you had better learn to speak Farsi, if you are going eastward with your father. Farsi is the common trade tongue of all of Asia, just as French is in the Mediterranean lands.”
The Princess asked my uncle, “Where do you go from here, Monsieur Polo?”
“If we get the priests we want, Your Royal Highness, we will lead them to the court of the Khakhan Kubilai. Which means we must somehow make our way past the Saracens inland.”
“Oh, you should get the priests,” said Prince Edward. “You could probably have nuns, too, if you want them. Teo will be glad to rid himself of all of them, for they are the cause of his ill humor. You must not let his behavior dismay you. Teo is from Piacenza, so you can hardly be surprised by his attitude toward Venice. He is also a godly and pious old gentleman, staunch in his disapproval of sin. So, even in the best of humors, he is a trial to us mere mortals.”
I said impertinently, “I was hoping that my father would talk back to him, just as ill-humoredly.”
“Your father may be wiser than you are,” said Princess Eleanor. “The rumor is that Teobaldo may be the next Pope.”
“What?” I blurted, so surprised that I forgot to use her due address. “But he just said that he is not even a priest!”
“Also he is a very old man,” she said. “But that seems to be his chief qualification. The Conclave is at a standstill because, as usual, every faction has its own favorite candidate. The laity are growing clamorous; they demand a Pope. Visconti would be at least acceptable to them, and to the cardinals as well. So, if the Conclave remains much longer at impasse, it is expected to choose Teo because he is old. Thus there will be a Pope at Rome, but not for too long. Just long enough for the various factions to do their secret maneuvers and machinations and settle which favorite will don the beehive tiara when our Visconti dies under it.”
Prince Edward said mischievously, “Teo will die in a hurry, of an apoplexy, if he finds Rome to be anything like Liege or Acre—or Venice.”
My uncle said, smiling, “Babylonian, you mean?”
“Yes. That is why I think you will get the priests you want. Visconti may make a show of grumbling, but he will not grieve at seeing these Acre priests go far, far away from him. All the monastic orders are in residence here to serve the needs of the fighting men, of course, but they have taken a rather liberal view of that duty. In addition to their hospital ministrations and spiritual solacements, they are providing some services that would dismay the saintly founders of their orders. You can imagine which of the men’s needs the Carmelitas and Clarissas are taking care of, and most lucratively, too. Meanwhile, the monks and friars are getting rich by trading illicitly with the natives, even peddling the provisions and medical supplies donated to their monasteries by the good-hearted Christians back in Europe. Meanwhile, also, the priests are selling indulgences and trafficking in absurd superstitions. Have you seen one of these?”
He took out a slip of scarlet paper and handed it to Uncle Mafìo, who unfolded it and read aloud:
“‘Bless, O God, sanctify this paper that it may frustrate the work of the Devil. He who upon his person carries this paper writ with Holy Word shall be free from the visitation of Satan.’”
“There is a ready market for such daubs, among men going into battle,” the Prince said drily. “Men of both sides, since Satan is the adversary of Muslims as well as Christians. The priests will also, for a price—for an English groat or an Arabian dinar—treat a wound with holy water. Any man’s wound, and no matter if it is the gash of a sword or a sore of the venereal pox. The latter is the more frequent.”
“Be glad you will soon get out of Acre,” sighed the Princess. “Would that we could.”
Uncle Mafìo thanked them for our audience, and he and I took our leave. He told me he was going back to the khane, for he wished to learn more about the availability of the mumum ointment. I set out merely to wander about the city, in hope of hearing some Farsi words and memorizing them, as Prince Edward had recommended. As it happened, I learned some that the Prince might not have approved of.
I fell in with three native boys of about my own age, whose names were Ibrahim, Daud and Naser. They did not have much grasp of French, but we managed to communicate—boys always will—in this case with gestures and facial expressions. We roamed together through the streets, and I would point to this or that object and speak the name by which I knew it, in French or Venetian, and then ask, “Farsi?” and they would tell me its name in that language, sometimes having to consult among themselves as to what that name was. Thus I learned that a merchant or a trader or a vendor is called a khaja, and all young boys are ashbal or “lion cubs,” and all young girls are zaharat or “little flowers,” and a pistachio nut is a fistuk, and a camel is a shutur, and so on: Farsi words that would be useful anywhere in my Eastern journeying. It was later that I learned the others.
We passed a shop where an Arab khaja offered writing materials for sale, including fine parchments and even finer vellums, and also papers of various qualities, from the flimsy Indian rice-made to the Khorasan flax-made to the expensive Moorish kind called cloth parchment because it is so smooth and elegant. I chose what I could afford, a medium grade but sturdy, and had the khaja cut it into small pieces that I could easily carry or pack. I also bought some rubric chalks to write with when I had no time to prepare pen and ink. And I began then to set down my first lexicon of unfamiliar words. Later, I would begin to make note of the names of places I passed through and people I met, and then incidents which occurred, and in time my papers came to constitute a log of all my travels and adventures.