“Oh, please, Sire,” my father said anxiously. “Do not compare the True Faith with the heretic Nestorian sect. And do not equate it with the despised Judaism. Blame me and Mafio, if you will, for our error of timing. But at any and all other times, I sincerely assure you, the Church of Rome holds open its warm embrace to enfold all who desire salvation.”
The Khakhan said sharply, “Why, uu?”
That was my first experience of that particular one of Kubilai’s attributes, but I was often to remark it thereafter. The Khakhan could be as congenial and discursive and loquacious as an old woman, when it suited his mood and purpose. But when he wanted to know something, when he wanted an answer, when he sought a particle of information, he could suddenly emerge from the clouds of garrulity—his own or a whole roomful of other people’s—and swoop like a falcon to strike to the meat of a matter.
“Why?” echoed Uncle Mafio, taken aback. “Why does Christianity seek to save all mankind?”
“But we told you years ago, Sire,” said my father. “The faith which preaches love and which was founded on Jesus, the Christ and Savior, is the only hope of bringing about perpetual peace on earth, and plenty, and ease of body and mind and soul, and good will among men. And after life, an eternity of bliss in the Bosom of Our Lord.”
I thought my father had put the case for Christianity as well as any ordained cleric could have done. But the Khakhan only smiled sadly and sighed.
“I had hoped you would bring learned men of persuasive arguments, good Brothers Polo. Fond as I am of you, and much as I respect your own convictions, I fear that you—like my dowager mother and like every missionary I have ever met—offer only unsupported asseveration.”
Before my father or uncle could profess further, Kubilai launched into another of his periphrases:
“I do indeed remember your telling me how your Jesus came to earth, with His message and His promise. That was more than one thousand and two hundred years ago, you said. Well, I myself have lived long, and I have studied the histories of times before my own. In all ages, it seems, all sorts of religions have held out promises of worldwide peace and bounty and good health and brotherly love and pervading happiness—and some kind of Heaven hereafter. About the hereafter I know nothing. But of my own knowledge, most of the people on this earth, including those who pray and worship with sincerest faith and devotion, remain poor and sickly and unhappy and unfulfilled and in utter detestation of each other—even when they are not actively at war, which is seldom.”
My father opened his mouth, perhaps to comment on the incongruity of a Mongol deploring war, but the Khakhan went on:
“The Han people tell a legend about a bird called the jing-wei. Since the beginning of time, the jing-wei has been carrying pebbles in its beak, to fill in the limitless, bottomless Sea of Kithai and make solid land of it, and the jing-wei will continue that futile endeavor until the other end of time. So it must be, I think, with faiths and religions and devotions. You can hardly deny that your own Christian Church has been playing the jing-wei bird for twelve whole centuries now—forever futile, forever fatuously promising what it can never provide.”
“Never, Sire?” said my father. “Enough pebbles
will
fill a sea. Even the Sea of Kithai, in time.”
“Never, friend Nicolò,” the Khakhan said flatly. “Our learned cosmographers have proved that the world is more sea than land. There do not exist enough pebbles.”
“Facts cannot prevail against faith, Sire.”
“Nor against adamant folly, I fear. Well, well, enough of this. You are men in whom we placed our trust, and you have failed that trust in not fetching the priests requested. However, it is a custom here: never to dispraise men of good breeding in the presence of others.” He turned to the Mathematician, who had been listening to those exchanges with an expression of polite boredom. “Master Lin-ngan, will you kindly retire, uu? Leave me alone with these Masters Polo while I chastise them for their nonfeasance.”
I was startled and angry and a little uneasy. So that was why he had had us present in the Cheng to observe his capricious judgments—to have us already fearful and trembling even before we heard his judgment on us. Had we come all this weary way only for some frightful punishment? But he surprised me again. When Lin-ngan had gone, he chuckled and said:
“There. All the Han are notorious for their swift conveyance of gossip, and Lin-ngan is a true Han. The whole court already knew of your priestly mission, and now it will be told that our conversation concerned nothing else. Therefore, let us proceed to the nothing-else.”
Uncle Mafio said, smiling, “There are numerous nothing-elses to speak of, Sire. Which first?”
“I am told that your road brought you right into the hand of my cousin Kaidu, and that he closed his fist on you for a time.”
“A brief delay only, Sire,” said my father, and waved toward me. “Marco yonder most ingeniously aided us to elude him, but we will tell you of that another time. Kaidu wished to plunder the gifts we have brought you from your liege subjects the Shah of Persia and the Sultan of India Aryana. Your cousin might have confiscated everything, but for Marco.”
The Khakhan nodded again to me, only briefly, before he swung back to my father and uncle. “Kaidu took nothing from you, uu?”
“Nothing, Sire. At your command, we will have servants bring in and display for you the wealth of gold and jewels and finery—”
“Vakh!” the Khakhan interrupted. “Never mind the trinkets. What of the maps, uu? Besides the wretched priests, you promised to bring maps. Did you make them, uu? Did Kaidu filch them from you, uu? I would gladly have had him steal everything else but those!”
I was understandably bewildered by the several and rapid changes of topic under discussion. The Khakhan was not chastising us, but interrogating us, and on a matter until now unsuspected by me. I might have been sufficiently astonished to hear a man say
vakh
to a gift of trinkets that would purchase any duchy in Europe. But I was more astonished to learn that my father and uncle had all this time been engaged on a project more secret and important than just the procurement of missionaries.
“The maps are safe, Sire,” said my father. “It never occurred to Kaidu to think of any such things. And Mafio and I believe we have compiled the best maps yet done of the western and central regions of this continent—especially those regions held by the Ilkhan Kaidu.”
“Good … good … murmured Kubilai. “The maps drawn by the Han are unsurpassable, but they confine themselves to the Han lands. Those maps we captured from them in earlier years much aided the Mongol conquest of Kithai, and they will be of equal use as we march south against the Sung. But the Han have always ignored everything beyond their own borders as unworthy of consideration. If you have done your work well, then for the first time I have maps of the entire Silk Road into the farther reaches of my empire.”
Beaming with satisfaction, he looked about him and caught sight of me. Perhaps he took my vapid gawking for a look of stricken conscience, for he beamed even more broadly and spoke directly to me. “I have already promised, young Polo, never to use the maps in any Mongol campaign against the territory or the holdings of the Dogato of Venice.”
Then, turning again to my father and uncle, he said, “I will later arrange a private audience for us to sit together and examine the maps. In the meantime, a separate chamber and staff of servants have been appointed for each of you, conveniently close to my own in the main palace residence.” He added, rather as an afterthought, “Your nephew may reside in either suite, as you choose.”
(It is a curious thing, but for all Kubilai’s acuity in every other area of human knowledge and experience, he never, through all the years I knew him, bothered to remember of which elder Polo I was the son and of which the nephew.)
“For tonight,” he went on, “I have ordered a banquet of welcome, at which you will meet two other visitors newly come from the West, and we will all together discuss the vexing question of my insubordinate cousin Kaidu. Now Lin-ngan waits outside to escort you to your new quarters.”
We all began a ko-tou, and again—as he always would do—he bade us rise before we had prostrated ourselves very deeply, and he said, “Until tonight, friends Polo,” and we took our leave.
AS I say, that was my first realization that my father and uncle, in their assiduous making of maps, had been working at least partly for the Khan Kubilai—and this is the first time I have ever publicly revealed that fact. I did not mention it in the earlier chronicle of my travels and theirs, because at that time my father was still alive, and I hesitated to impute any suspicion that he might have served the Mongol Horde in ways inimical to our Christian West. However, as all men know, the Mongols never again have invaded or threatened the West. Our foremost enemies for many years have continued to be the Muslim Saracens, and the Mongols have frequently been our friendly allies against them.
Meanwhile, as my father and uncle all along intended, Venice and the rest of Europe have profited from increased trade with the East, a trade much facilitated by the copies of all our maps of the Silk Road which we Polos brought home from there. So I no longer see any need to maintain the slightly preposterous fiction that Nicolò and Mafìo Polo crossed and recrossed the whole extent of Asia simply to herd a flock of priests with them. And not in that other book, or ever, have I tried to keep secret the fact that I, Marco Polo, also became an agent and journeyer and observer and mapmaker for the Khan Kubilai. But I will here tell the beginning of my becoming so well regarded by the Khakhan that he entrusted me with such missions.
It was at that night’s welcoming banquet that I first attracted his notice. But it could have happened—and almost did—that Kubilai’s first attention to me might have been a command that I deliver myself to the Fondler, with my neck in my sphincter.
The banquet was laid in the largest hall of the main palace building, a hall which, one of the table servants boasted to me, would accommodate six thousand diners at a single seating. The high ceiling was held up on pillars that seemed made of solid gold, twisted and convoluted, inset with gems and jade. The walls were paneled alternately in rich carved woods and fine embossed leathers, and hung with Persian qali and Han scroll paintings and Mongol trophies of the hunt. Those included the mounted heads of snarling lions and spotted pards and great-horned artak (“Marco’s sheep”) and large bearlike creatures called da-mao-xiong, the mounted heads of which were startlingly snow-white except for black ears and black masks about the eyes.
The trophies were probably of the Khakhan’s own hunts, for he was famous for his love of the chase, and spent every spare day in forest or field. Even here in the banquet hall, his affection for that manliest of sports was evident, for the guests seated closest to him were his dearest hunting partners. On either arm of his thronelike chair was perched a hooded hunting falcon, and to each of the chair’s two front legs was tethered a hunting cat called a chita. The chita resembles a spotted pard, but is much smaller in size and proportionately much longer in the legs. It is different from all other cats in that it cannot climb a tree, and is even more different in that it will willingly chase and pull down game at its master’s bidding. Here, however, the chitas and the falcons sat quietly, now and then politely accepting tidbits which Kubilai fed to them with his own fingers.
There were not six thousand persons present on that particular night, so the hall was partitioned by screens of black and gold and red lacquer, to make a more intimate enclosure for rather fewer people. Still, there must have been close on two hundred of us, plus as many servants and a constantly changing crew of musicians and entertainers. That many people breathing and sweating, and the savory steams from the hot foods served, should have made even that huge hall rather warm on that late-summer night. But, although we were screened about and all the outer doors were shut, the hall had a cool breeze mysteriously blowing through it. Not until some while later did I learn by what ingeniously simple means that coolness was effected. But there were other mysteries in that dining hall which made me goggle and thrill and wonder, and for them I never did manage to find adequate explanation.
For example, in the middle of all the many tables stood a tall artificial tree, crafted of silver, its multiple limbs and branches and twigs hung with beaten-silver leaves that fluttered gently in the hall’s artificial breeze. Around the tree’s silver-barked trunk were coiled four golden serpents. Their tails were twined among the upper branches and their heads snaked downward to poise, open-mouthed, above four immense porcelain vases. The vases were molded in the shape of fantastic lions with their heads thrown back and their mouths also wide. There were some other artificial creatures in the room; on several tables, including the one at which we guest Polos sat, was a life-sized peacock made of gold, its tail feathers finely articulated and colored by inlaid enamels. Now, the mystery about those objects was this. When the Khan Kubilai called for drink—and only when
he
called aloud, not when anyone else did—those several animals of precious metals did wondrous things. I will tell what they did, though I scarcely expect to be believed.
“Kumis!” Kubilai would bellow, and one of the golden serpents coiled about the silver tree would suddenly gush from its mouth a flow of pearly liquid into the mouth of the lion vase set below. A servant would bring the vase to the Khakhan’s table and pour the beverage into his jewel-encrusted goblet and the goblets of other guests. They would sip and verify that it was indeed the mare’s-milk kumis, and they would all clap their hands in applause of that marvel, and immediately another marvelous thing would occur. The golden peacock on the table—and every golden peacock in the room—would likewise applaud, raising and beating its golden wings, erecting and fanning out its splendid tail.
“Arkhi!” the Khakhan would shout next, and the second serpent on the tree would disgorge its measure into the second lion vase, and a servant would bring the drink and we all would find it to be that finer and tastier grade of kumis called arkhi. And we would applaud and so would the peacocks. And those animated creatures, the liquor-spouting serpents and the exuberant birds, they worked, mind you, without any human agency. I several times went close to observe them, both while they were performing and while they were at rest, and I could find no wires or strings or levers that might have been manipulated from a distance.
“Mao-tai!” the Khakhan would shout next, and the whole activity would be repeated, from serpent spout to lion vase to peacock fanning. The liquor dispensed by the third serpent, mao-tai, was new to me: a yellowish, slightly syrupy beverage of a tingling flavor. The Mongol diner at my elbow cautioned me to beware of its potency, which he demonstrated. He took a tiny porcelain cup of the liquor and applied to it the flame of one of the table candles. The mao-tai caught fire with a sizzling blue flame and burned like naft oil for a good five minutes before it was consumed. I understand that mao-tai is a Han concoction somehow expressed from common millet, but it is an uncommon beverage—as fiery a fuel to the belly and the brain as it is to any open flame.
“Pu-tao!” was the fourth command the Khakhan shouted to the serpent tree; the word pu-tao means grape wine. But to the consternation of all us guests,
nothing happened.
The fourth serpent simply hung there, sullenly dry, and we sat gaping, almost fearful, wondering what had gone wrong. The Khakhan, though, sat grinning with secret glee, enjoying the air of suspense, until he demonstrated the last and most magical magic of the apparatus. Not until he shouted “Pu-tao!” and then added a shout of either “hong!” or “bai!” would the fourth serpent begin to gush, and according to Kubilai’s command it would dispense red (hong) or white (bai) wine, at which we guests erupted in a storm of cheers and applause, and the golden peacocks beat their wings and fanned their tails so wildly that they shed flakes of golden feathers.
The banquet guests that night, except for the visitors being welcomed, comprised the highest lords and ministers and courtiers of the Khanate, plus some women whom I took to be their wives. The lords were a mixture of nationalities and complexions: Arabs and Persians as well as Mongols and Han. But of course the women present were the non-Muslim Mongol and Han wives; if the Arabs and Persians had wives, they were not permitted to dine in mixed company. All the men were finely garbed in brocaded silks, some wearing robes, as did the Khakhan and other Mongols and the native Han, some wearing their silks in the form of Persian pai-jamah and tulband, and others wearing their silks as Arab aba and kaffiyah.
But the women were even more gorgeously arrayed. The Han ladies all had powdered their already ivory faces to the whiteness of snow, and wore their blue-black hair in voluminous piles and swirls atop their heads, pinned up there by long jeweled implements they called hair-spoons. The Mongol ladies were of slightly darker complexion, a sort of fawn color, and I was much interested to see that these women, unlike their plains-dwelling nomad sisters, were not coarsened to leather by sun and wind, nor were they bulkily muscular of body. Their coiffures were even more complex than that of the Han women. Their hair, ruddy-black instead of blue-black, was braided onto a framework to make it swoop in a wide crescent at either side of the head, rather like sheep horns, and those crescents were festooned with dangling brilliants. Also, though they wore the same simple, flowing gowns as the Han women, the Mongol ladies added to the shoulders of them some curious high fillets of padded silk that stood up like fins.
At the Khakhan’s table with him sat members of his immediate family. Five or six of his twelve legitimate sons were ranged at his right. On his left sat his first and chief wife, the Khatun Jamui, then his aged mother, the Dowager Khatun Sorghaktani, then his three other wives. (Kubilai had also a considerable and constantly varying consort of concubines, all younger than his wives. The current contingent sat at a separate table. By his concubines, Kubalai had another twenty-five sons, and God knows how many legitimate and bastard daughters besides, from all his women. )
The whole dining area was divided so that the male guests occupied the tables to Kubilai’s right and the females those to his left. Closest to the Khakhan’s table, within easy speaking distance, was the table appointed for us Polos, and with us was seated a Mongol dignitary to converse with us, interpret for us when necessary, explain to us the unfamiliar dishes and drinks served, and so on. He was a fairly young man—exactly ten years older than myself, it turned out—who introduced himself as Chingkim, saying he held the office of Wang of Khanbalik, which was to say the Chief City Officer or Magistrate. That office being equivalent to a European city’s mayor—or podestà, in the Venetian term—I gathered that we Polos were entitled to only a minor functionary as our table companion.
The Khakhan more formally introduced us to others of his lords and ministers seated at nearby tables. I will not attempt to list them all, for they included so many persons of so many different degrees of authority, and so many bore titles which I had never heard in any other court, or ever even heard
of
—the Master of the Black-Ink Arts (nothing but the Court Poet), the Master of the Mastiffs, Hawks and Chitas (the Khakhan’s Chief Huntsman), the Master of the Boneless Colors (nothing but the Court Artist), the Chief of Secretaries and Scribes, the Archivist of Marvels and Wonders, the Recorder of Things Strange. But I
will
mention by name some lords who seemed to me curiously out of place in a supposedly Mongol court—for example, Lin-ngan, whom we already knew, was one of the supposedly conquered Han, but held the fairly important post of Court Mathematician.
The young man Chingkim appeared to hold the grandest title assigned by Kubilai to any of his fellow Mongols, and Chingkim claimed to be only a mere city Wang. By contrast, the Khakhan’s Chief Minister, whose office was called by the Han title of Jing-siang, was neither a conqueror Mongol nor a subject Han. He was an Arab named Achmad-az-Fenaket, and he himself preferred to be called by the Arab title signifying his office, which is Wali. By whatever honorific he was addressed—Jing-siang or Chief Minister or Wali—Achmad was the second most powerful man in the entire Mongol hierarchy, subordinate only to the Khakhan himself, for he also held the office of Vice-Regent, meaning that he literally ruled the empire whenever Kubilai was out hunting or making war or otherwise occupied, and Achmad also held the office of Finance Minister, meaning that at all times he controlled the purse strings of the empire.
It seemed equally odd to me that the Mongol Empire’s Minister of War—war being the activity in which the Mongols most excelled and exulted—was
not
a Mongol but a Han gentleman named Chao Meng-fu. The Court Astronomer was a Persian named Jamal-ud-Din, a native of far-off Isfahan. The Court Physician was a Byzantine, a native of even farther-off Constantinople, the Hakim Gansui. The palace staff included other persons, not present at that banquet, of even more surprising alien origins, and I would eventually come to know them all.
The Khakhan had promised that we Polos would that night meet “two other visitors newly come from the West,” and they were present, seated at a table within speaking distance of his table and ours. They were not Westerners, but Han, and I recognized them as the two men I had seen dismounting from mules in the palace courtyard on the evening of our arrival, and I still had the feeling that I had seen them somewhere else even before that.
The tables at which we all sat were surfaced with a pinkish-lavender inlay of what looked to me like precious stones. And so they were, said our tablemate Chingkim: