I had stopped listening, and went away from him again, for a dim recollection was stirring in my mind. I took the vase out into the garden, and pried up a stone from a whitewashed ring of them around a flower bed, and used it for a hammer to shatter the porcelain. When all the fragments fell away, I had a heavy, gray, vase-shaped lump of the solid-caked powder. I regarded it, and the dim memory came clearer in my mind. What I remembered was the making of that foodstuff the Mongols called grut. I remembered how the Mongol women of the plains would spread milk curd in the sun, and let that dry to a hard cake, then crumble it into pellets of grut, which would keep indefinitely without spoiling, until someone wished to make an emergency meal of it. I took up my stone again, and hammered on the lump of huo-yao until a few pellets, the size and appearance of mouse droppings, crumbled off from it. I regarded them, then went once again to the Firemaster and said diffidently:
“Master Shi, would you look at these and tell me if I am wrong—”
“Probably,” he said, with a contemptuous snort. “They are mouse turds.”
“They are pellets broken from that lump of huo-yao. It appears to me that these pellets hold in firm suspension the correct proportions of the three separate powders. And, being now dry, they should ignite just as if—”
“Yom mekhayeh!” he exclaimed huskily, in what I took to be the Ivrit language. Very, very slowly and tenderly, he picked the pellets from my palm, and held them in his, and bent to peer closely at them, and again huskily exclaimed, in what I recognized as Han, several other words like “hao-jia-huo,” which is an expression of amazement, and “jiao-hao,” which is an expression of delight, and “chan-juan,” which is a term usually employed to praise a beautiful woman.
He suddenly began dashing about the ruined room, until he found a splinter of wood still smoldering. He blew that into a glow, and ran out into the garden. Chingkim and I followed him, the Prince saying, “What now?” and “
“Yom mekhayeh!” Master Shi breathed once more, and then turned to me and, wide-eyed, murmured, “Bar mazel!” and then turned to Prince Chingkim and said in Han, “Mu bu jian jie.”
“An old proverb,” Chingkim told me. “The eye cannot see its own lashes. I gather that you have discovered something new about the flaming powder that is new even to the experienced Firemaster.”
“It was just an idea that came to me,” I said modestly.
Master Shi stood looking at me, still saucer-eyed, and shaking his head, and muttering words like “khakhem” and “khalutz.” Then again he addressed Chingkim :
“My Prince, I do not know if you were contemplating a prosecution of this incautious Ferenghi for the damage and casualties he has caused. But the Mishna tells us that a thinking bastard, even, is more highly to be regarded than a high priest who preaches by rote. I suggest that this one has accomplished something worth more than any number of women servants and bits of palace.”
“I do not know what the Mishna is, Master Shi,” grumbled the Prince, “but I will convey your sentiments to my Royal Father.” He turned to me. “I will convey you, too, Marco. He had already sent me looking for you when I heard the thunder of your—accomplishment. I am glad I do not have to carry you to him in a spoon. Come along.”
“Marco,” said the Khakhan without preamble, “I must send a messenger to the Orlok Bayan in Yun-nan, to apprise him of the latest developments here, and I think you have earned the honor of being that messenger. A missive is now being written for you to take to him. It explains about the Minister Pao and suggests some measures that Bayan may take, now that the Yi are deprived of their secret ally in our midst. Give Bayan my letter, then attend upon him until the war is won, and then you will have the honor of bringing me the word that Yun-nan at last is ours.”
“You are sending me to war, Sire?” I said, not quite sure that I was eager to go. “I have had no experience of war.”
“Then you should have. Every man should engage in at least one war in his lifetime—else how can he say that he has savored all the experiences which life offers a man?”
“I was not thinking of life, Sire, so much as death.” And I laughed, but not with much merriment.
“Every man dies,” Kubilai said, rather stiffly. “Some deaths are at least less ignominious than others. Would you prefer to die like a clerk, dwindling and wilting into the boneyard of a secured old age?”
“I am not afraid, Sire. But what if the war drags on for a long time? Or never is won?”
Even more stiffly, he said, “It is better to fight in a losing cause than to have to confess to your grandchildren that you never fought at all. Vakh!”
Prince Chingkim spoke up. “I can assure you, Royal Father, that this Marco Polo would never dodge any confrontation imaginable. He is, however, at the moment a trifle shaken by a recent calamity.” He went on to tell Kubilai about the accidental—he stressed accidental—devastation of my menage.
“Ah, so you are bereft of women servants and the services of women,” the Khakhan said sympathetically. “Well, you will be traveling too rapidly on the road to Yun-nan to have need of servants, and you will be too fatigued each night to yearn for anything more than sleep. When you get there, of course, you will do your share of the pillage and rape. Take slaves to serve you, take women to service you. Behave like a Mongol born.”
“Yes, Sire,” I said submissively.
He leaned back and sighed, as if he missed the good old days, and murmured in reminiscence:
“My esteemed grandfather Chinghiz, it is said, was born clutching a clot of blood in his tiny fist, from which the shaman foretold for him a sanguinary career. He lived up to the prophecy. And I can still remember him telling us, his grandsons, ‘Boys, a man can have no greater pleasure than to slay his enemies, and then, besmeared and reeking with their blood, to rape their chaste wives and virgin daughters. There is no more delightful sensation than to spurt your jing-ye into a woman or a girl-child who is weeping and struggling and loathing you and cursing you.’ So spake Chinghiz Khan, the Immortal of Mongols.”
“I will bear it in mind, Sire.”
He sat forward again and said, “No doubt you have arrangements to make before your departure. But make them as expeditiously as possible. I have already sent advance riders to ready your route. If, on’your way along it, you can sketch for me maps of that route—as you and your uncles did of the Silk Road—I shall be grateful and your reward will be handsome. Also, if in your travels you should catch up to the fugitive Minister Pao, I give you leave to slay him, and your reward for that would also be handsome. Now go and prepare for the journey. I will have fast horses and a trustworthy escort ready when you are.”
Well, I thought, as I went to my chambers, this would at least put me out of reach of my court adversaries— the Wali Achmad, the Lady Chao, the Fondler Ping, whoever else that whisperer might have been. Better to fall in open warfare than to someone sneaking up behind me.
The Court Architect was in my suite, making measurements and muttering to himself and snapping orders to a team of workmen, who were commencing the replacement of the vanished walls and roof. Happily, I had kept most of my personal possessions and valuables in my bedroom, which had been unravaged. Nostril was in there, burning incense to clear the air. I bade him lay out a traveling wardrobe for me and to make a light pack of other necessities. Then I gathered up all the journal notes I had written and accumulated since leaving Venice, and carried them to my father’s chambers.
He looked a little surprised when I dropped the pile on a table beside him, for it was an unprepossessing mound of smudged and wrinkled and mildewed papers of all different sizes.
“I would be obliged, Father, if you would send these to Uncle Marco, the next time you entrust some shipment of goods to the Silk Road horse post, and ask him to send them on to Venice for safekeeping by Maregna Fiordelisa. The notes may be of interest to some future cosmographer, if he can decipher them and arrange them in order. I had intended to do that myself—someday—but I am bidden to a mission from which I may not return.”
“Indeed? What mission?”
I told him, and with dramatic somberness, so I was taken aback when he said, “I envy you, doing something I have never done. You should appreciate the opportunity Kubilai is giving you. Da novelo tuto xe belo. Not many white men have watched the Mongols make war—and lived to remember it.”
“I only hope I do,” I said. “But survival is not my sole consideration. There are other things I had rather be doing. And I am sure that there are more profitable things I could be doing.”
“Now, now, Marco. To a good hunger there is no bad bread.”
“Are you suggesting, Father, that I should
