Mongol blood. That hill says it all.”
“I regret, Sire,” I said, “that the example still eludes my understanding.”
He said to his son, “Explain it, Chingkim.”
“You see, Marco, the hill will be a pleasure park, with terraces and walks and willowed waterfalls and comely pavilions cunningly set here and there. The whole thing will be an ornament to the palace grounds. In that, it is very Han, and reflects our admiration of Han art. But it will be more. The Architect could have mounded it of the local yellow earth, but my Royal Father commanded kara. The burnable rock will probably never be needed, but just in case this palace should ever come under siege, we will have there an unlimited supply of fuel. That is a warrior’s thinking. And the whole hill, roundabout the buildings and streams and flower beds, will be greened over by plains grass. A living reminder to us of our Mongol heritage.”
“Ah!” I said. “Now it all is clear.”
“The Han have a concise proverb,” said Kubilai. “Bai wen buru yi jian. To hear tell a hundred times is not as good as once seeing. You have seen. So now let me speak of another aspect of rulership.”
We returned to our seats. In response to some inaudible summons, the maidservant glided in and refilled our goblets.
The Khakhan resumed, “There are times when I, too-like you, Marco Polo—can taste the attitudes of other people. You have expressed your willingness to join my retinue, but I wonder if I taste in you a lingering trace of your disapprobation.”
“Sire?” I said, quite jolted by his bluntness. “Who am I, Sire, to disapprove of the Khan of All Khans? Why, even for me to approve would be presumptuous.”
He said, “I was informed of your visit to the Fondler’s cavern.” I must have cast an involuntary glance, for he went on, “I am aware that Chingkim was with you, but it was not he who told. I gather that you were dismayed by my treatment of Kaidu’s two men.”
“I might have hoped, Sire, that their treatment had been a little less extreme.”
“You do not tame a wolf by pulling one of his teeth.”
“They had been my companions, Sire, and they did nothing lupine during that time.”
“On arrival here, they were hospitably quartered with my own palace guards. A Mongol trooper is not ordinarily garrulous, but those two asked a great many and very searching questions of their barrackmates. My men answered only evasively, so those two would not have taken much intelligence home with them, anyway. You knew that I had sent spies into Kaidu’s lands. Did you think him incapable of doing the same?”
“I did not know—” I gasped. “I did not think—”
“As ruler of a far-spread empire, I must rule over a considerable diversity of peoples, and try to bear in mind their peculiarities. The Han are patient and devious, the Persians are couched lions and all other Muslims are rabid sheep, the Armeniyans are blustering grovelers, and so on. I may not always deal with all of them as I ought. But the Mongols I understand very well. There I must rule with an iron hand, for in them I rule an iron people.”
“Yes, Sire,” I said weakly.
“Have you reservations about my treatment of any others?”
“Well,” I said, for it seemed he already knew, “I thought—that day in the Cheng—you dismissed those starving Ho-nan farmers rather brusquely.”
Just as brusquely now, he said, “I do not help those in trouble who snivel for help. I prefer to reward those who survive the trouble. Any man who must be kept alive is generally not worth the keeping. When people are stricken with either a sudden calamity or a long siege of misfortune, the best and most worthwhile will survive. The remainder are dispensable.”
“But were they asking for a favor, Sire, or only a fair chance?”
“In my experience, when a runt piglet squeals for a fair chance at the teat, he really means a head start. Think about it.”
I thought about it. My thoughts took me a long way back in time—to when I was a child, and was trying to help the survival of the boat children. The pinched, pretty face of little Doris came to my memory.
I said, “Sire, when you speak of feckless, sniveling men and women, no one could disagree. But starving children?”
“If they are the offspring of the dispensable, they too are dispensable. Realize this, Marco Polo. Children are the most easily and cheaply renewed resource in the world. Cut down a tree for timber; it takes nearly a lifetime to replace. Dig kara from the ground for burning; it is gone forever. But if a child is lost in a famine or flood, what is required for its replacement? A man and a woman and less than a year’s time. If the man and woman are the strong and capable who have defied the disaster, the better the replacement child is likely to be. Have you ever killed a man, Marco Polo?”
I blinked and said, “Yes, Sire, I have.”
“Good. A man better deserves the space he occupies on this earth if he has cleared that space for his occupancy. There is only so much space on this earth, only so much game to hunt and grass for pasturage and kara to burn and wood to build with. Before we Mongols took Kithai, there were one hundred million people living here, the Han and their related races. Now there are only half that many, according to my Han counselors, who are anxious for their countrymen to multiply again. If I will relax some of my strictures, they say, the population will soon again be what it was. They assure me that a single mou of land is sufficient to feed and support an entire Han family. To which I retort: would that family not feed better if it had two mou of land? Or three, or five? The family would be better nourished, healthier, probably happier. The sad fact is that the fifty or so million who perished in the years of conquest were mostly the best of the Han—the soldiers, the young and strong and vital. Should I now let them be replaced with mere indiscriminate
“You would be envied by many other rulers, Sire,” I murmured.
“As to my manner of ruling them, let me say this. I am again unlike Kaidu in that I can recognize some limitations in us Mongols, and some superiorities in other nationalities. We Mongols excel in action, in ambition, in the dreaming of bold dreams and the making of grand plans—and in military affairs, most certainly. So for my ministers of overall administration I have mostly Mongols. But the Han know their own country and countrymen best, so I have recruited many Han for my ministries dealing with Kithai’s internal management. The Han are also incredibly adept in matters mathematical.”
“Like the regulation of the thirty sexual postures,” said Chingkim, with a laugh.
“However,” Kubilai went on, “the Han would naturally cheat me if I put them in charge of revenues. So for those offices I have Muslim Arabs and Persians, who are almost the equal of the Han when it comes to finances. I have let the Muslims establish what they call an Ortaq, a net of Muslim agents dispersed over all Kithai to supervise its trade and commerce. They are very good at exploiting the material resources of this land and the talents of its natives. So I let the Muslims do the squeezing and I take a specified share of the Ortaq’s profits. That is much easier for me than to levy a multitude of separate taxes on separate products and transactions. Vakh, I have enough trouble collecting the simple land and property taxes due me from the Han.”
I asked, “Do not the natives chafe at having outlanders supervising them?”
Chingkim said, “They have always had outlanders over them, Marco. The Han emperors long ago devised an admirable system. Every magistrate and tax collector, every provincial official of every sort, was always sent to serve somewhere other than his birthplace, to ensure that in his duties and dealings and gouges he would not favor his relatives. Also, he was never let to serve more than three years in any post before being moved on somewhere else. That was to ensure his not making close friends and cronies whom he might favor. So in any province, town or village, the natives always had outsiders governing. Probably they find our Muslim minions only a trifle more foreign.”
I said, “Besides Arabs and Persians, I have seen men of other nationalities around the palace.”
“Yes,” said the Khakhan. “For lesser officers of the court—the Winemaster, the Firemaster, the Goldsmith and such—I simply install the men who perform those functions most ably, whether they be Han, Muslims, Ferenghi, Jews, whatever.”
“It all sounds most sensible and efficient, Sire.”
