Kubilai laughed. “I had intended to converse politely for a while in the Han manner, rambling only indirectly to the subject at hand. But my rude Mongol son comes straight to the point.”
“I have already made a vow to myself, Sire,” I said, “that I will henceforth be careful of my too ready tongue and too abrupt opinions.”
He considered that. “Well, yes, you might be more respectfully circumspect in your choice of words before you blurt them out. But I shall want your opinions. It is for those that I would have you become fluent and precise in our language. Marco, look yonder. Do you know what that thing is?”
He indicated an object in the center of the room. It was a giant bronze urn, standing some eight feet high and about half that in diameter. It was richly engraved, and on the outside of it clung eight lithe and elegant bronze dragons, their tails curled at the top rim of the urn, their heads downward near its base. Each one held in its toothed jaws an immense and perfect pearl. There were eight bronze toads squatting around the urn’s pedestal, one under each dragon, its mouth gaping as if eager to snatch the pearl above.
“It is an impressive work of art, Sire,” I said, “but I have no idea of its function.”
“That is an earthquake engine.”
“Sire?”
“This land of Kithai is now and again shaken by earth tremors. Whenever one occurs, that engine informs me of it. The thing was designed and cast by my clever Court Goldsmith, and only he fully understands the workings of it. But somehow an earthquake, even if it is so far away from Khanbalik that none of us here can feel it, makes the jaws of one of the dragons to open, and he drops his pearl into the maw of the toad beneath. Tremors of other sorts have no effect. I have stamped and jumped and danced all about that urn—and I am no butterfly—but it ignores me.”
I saw in my mind the majestic Great Khan of All Khans bouncing about the chamber like an inquisitive boy, his rich robes billowing and his beard wagging and his helmet-crown askew, and probably all his ministers goggling. But I remembered my vow, and I did not smile.
He said, “According to which pearl drops, I know the direction where the earth shook. I cannot know how distant it was, or how devastating, but I can dispatch a troop at the gallop in that direction, and eventually they will bring me word of the damage and casualties incurred.”
“A miraculous contrivance, Sire.”
“I could wish that my human informants were as succinct and reliable in reporting the occurrences in my domains. You heard those Han spies of mine, that night at the banquet, rattling off numbers and items and tabulations, and telling me nothing.”
“The Han are infatuated with numbers,” said Chingkim. “The five constant virtues. The five great relationships. The thirty positions of the sex act, and the six ways of penetration and the nine modes of movement. They even regulate their politeness. I understand they have three hundred rules of ceremony and three
“Meanwhile, Marco,” said Kubilai, “my other informants—my Muslim and even Mongol officials—they tend to leave out of their reports any fact they think I might find inconvenient or distressing. I have a large realm to administer, but I cannot personally be everywhere at once. As a wise Han counselor once said: you can conquer on horseback, but to rule you must get down from the horse. So I depend heavily on reports from afar, and they too often contain everything but the necessary.”
“Like those spies,” Chingkim put in. “Send them to the kitchen to see about tonight’s dinner soup, and they would report its quantity and density and ingredients and coloration and aroma and the volume of steam it throws off. They would report everything except whether it tastes good or not.”
Kubilai nodded. “What struck me at the banquet, Marco—and my son agrees—is that you appear to have a talent for discerning the taste of things. After those spies had talked interminably, you said only a few words. True, they were not very tactful words, but they told me the taste of the soup brewing in Sin-kiang. I should like to verify that seeming talent of yours, in order to make further use of it.”
I said, “You wish me to be a spy, Sire?”
“No. A spy must blend into the locality, and a Ferenghi could hardly do that anywhere in my domains. Besides, I would never ask a decent man to take up the trade of sneak and tattler. No, I have other missions in mind. But to undertake them you must first learn many things besides fluency of language. They will not be easy things. They will demand much time and effort.”
He was looking keenly at me, as if to see whether I flinched from the prospect of hard work, so I made bold to say:
“The Khakhan does me great honor if he asks only drudgery of me. So much greater the honor, Sire, if the drudgery is a preparation for some task of significance.”
“Be not too eager to accede. Your uncles, I hear, are planning some trading enterprises. That should be easier work, and profitable, and probably more safe and secure than what I may require of you. So I give you permission to stay in association with your uncles, if you prefer.”
“Thank you, Sire. But if I valued only safety and security I would not have left home.”
“Ah, yes. It is truly said: He who would climb high must leave much behind.”
Chingkim added, “It is also said: For a man of fortitude there are nowhere any walls, only avenues.”
I decided I would ask my father if it was here in Kithai that he had got crammed so full of proverbs that he continually overflowed.
“Let me say this, then, young Polo,” Kubilai went on. “I would not ask you to puzzle out for me how that earthquake engine performs its function—and that would be a difficult task enough—but I will ask of you something even harder. I wish you to learn as much as you can about the workings of my court and my government, which are infinitely more intricate than the insides of that mysterious urn.”
“I am at your command, Sire.”
“Come here to this window.” He led the way to it. Like those in my quarters, it was not of transparent glass, but of the shimmery, only translucent Muscovy glass, set in a much curlicued frame. He unlatched it, swung it open and said, “Look there.”
We were looking down onto a considerable extent of the palace grounds which I had not yet visited, for this part was still under construction, only an expanse of yellow earth littered with piles of wall stones and paving stones and barrows and tools and gangs of sweating slaves and—
“Amoredei!” I exclaimed. “What are those gigantic beasts? Why do their horns grow so oddly?”
“Foolish Ferenghi, those are not horns, those are the tusks from which come ivory. That animal, in the southern tropics where it comes from, is called a gajah. There is no Mongol word for it.”
Chingkim supplied the Farsi word, “Fil,” and I knew that one.
“Elephants!” I breathed, marveling. “Of course! I have seen a drawing of one, but the drawing cannot have been very good.”
“Never mind the gajah,” said Kubilai. “Do you see what they are piling up?”
“It looks like a great mountain of kara blocks, Sire.”
“It is. The Court Architect is building for me an extensive park out there, and I instructed him to put a hill in it. I have also instructed him to plant much grass on it. Have you seen the grass in my other courtyards?”
“Yes, Sire.”
“You remarked nothing distinctive about it?”
“I fear not, Sire. It looked just like the same grass we have traveled through, for countless thousands of li.”
“That is its distinction—that it is not an ornamental garden growth. It is the simple, ordinary, sweet grass of the great plains where I was born and grew up.”
“I am sorry, Sire, but if I am supposed to draw some lesson from this …”
“My cousin the Ilkhan Kaidu told you that I had degenerated to something less than a Mongol. In a sense, he was right.”
“Sire!”
“In a sense. I did get down from my horse to do the ruling of these domains. In doing so, I have found admirable many things of the cultured Han, and I have embraced them. I try to be more mannerly than uncouth, more diplomatic than demanding, more of an ordained emperor than an occupying warlord. In all those ways, I have changed from being a Mongol of Kaidu’s kind. But I do not forget or repudiate my origins, my warrior days, my
