I refused to believe such a story, and accused the mahawat of inventing it. But then he told me something else unbelievable—that he could calculate for me the exact height of any elephant without even seeing it—and when at the close of the day we got down from ours, he demonstrated that ability, and even I could do it. So, being forced to believe him about that, I ceased scoffing at his white elephant story. Anyway, the measurement is done thus. You simply find an elephant’s track and pick out the print of one of its forefeet and measure the circumference of that. Everyone knows that a perfectly proportioned woman has a waist exactly twice the circumference of her neck, and her neck twice that of her wrist. Just so, the elephant’s height at the shoulder is exactly twice the circumference of its forefoot.
When we heard the beaters hooting and thrashing up ahead of us, I nocked an arrow to my bowstring. And when a spiny black shape shouldered its way through a thicket and snorted at us, and clashed its yellow tusks as if it would challenge those of my elephant, I let fly the arrow. I hit the boar; I could hear the
Without waiting for the goad, my elephant ran after him, following as closely on his jinks and curvettings as a trained boar-hound, while I and the mahawat bounced about in the jouncing hauda. It was impossible for me to nock another arrow, let alone shoot it and hope to hit anything. But the wounded boar soon realized that it was fleeing into the line of beaters. It skidded awkwardly to a stop in a dry creek bed, and turned at bay, and lowered its long head, its red eyes blinking angrily above and behind the four upcurved tusks. My elephant also slid to a halt, which must have made a humorous sight to see, if I had been elsewhere looking on. But the mahawat and I were pitched out of the hauda’s open front to sprawl atop the elephant’s great head, and would have gone on falling, if we had not been clutching at each other and the beast’s big ears and the straps holding the hauda and anything else in reach.
When the elephant again curled her trunk backward over her head, I confusedly wished she had thought of something better to do than sneeze-but it turned out that she had. She curled the trunk around my waist and, as if I had been no weightier than a dry leaf, lifted me off her head, twirled me in midair and set me down on my feet— between her and the enraged, pawing, snorting boar. I did not know whether the elephant maliciously intended that I, the new-smelling stranger, should suffer the brunt of the boar’s charge, or whether she was trained to do that in order to give a hunter a second shot at the quarry. But if she thought she was being helpful, she was mistaken, for she had put me down without my bow and arrows, still up in the hauda. I could have turned to see whether the little eyes among her wrinkles were bright with mischief or solemn with concern—elephants’ eyes are as expressive as women’s—but I dared not turn my back to the wounded boar.
From where I now stood, it looked bigger than a barnyard brood sow, and inexpressibly more savage. It stood with its black snout close to the ground, above it the four wicked tusks curling up and out, above them the blazing red eyes, the tufty ears twitching and, behind them, the powerful black shoulders hunching for a lunge. I threw my hand to my belt knife, yanked it out and in front of me, and flung myself headlong toward the boar in the same moment that it charged. Had I waited a breath longer, I should have moved too late. I fell atop the boar’s long snout and high-humped back, but the beast did not jerk its tusks upward into my groin, for it died too quickly. My knife went through the hide and deep into flesh, and I squeezed its handle in the instant of thrust, so that I struck with all three blades at once. The boar’s dying plunge carried me with it for some way, then its legs crumpled and we came down in a heap.
I scrambled up quickly, fearful that the animal might still have one last convulsion left in it. When it only lay still and bled, I plucked out my knife and then the arrow, and wiped them clean on the quill-like black hairs. Closing the trusty squeeze-knife and putting it back into its sheath, I mentally sent another thank-you into the far away and long ago. Then I turned and gave a not-so-thankful look at the elephant and the mahawat. He sat up there gawking with awe and perhaps some admiration. But the elephant only stood rocking gently from foot to foot, her eye regarding me with self-complacent feminine composure, as if to say, “There. You did it just as I expected you to,” which no doubt was the offhand remark made by the liberated princess to San Zorzi after he slew her dragon captor.
2
BACK at the Xan-du palace, Kubilai took me walking with him in the gardens while we waited for the cooks to prepare a dinner of the boars—my own trophy and the several others brought in by other hunters of the party (who had speared theirs from the more usual and safer distances). The afternoon was waning into twilight as the Khakhan and I stood on an inverted bridge and looked out over an artificial lake of some size. That lake was fed by a small waterfall, and the bridge was built in front of it, not arching over it, but in the form of a letter U, with stairs going down from one bank and upward to the other, so that at the middle of the bridge one stood at the foaming foot of the little cascade.
I admired it for a time, then turned to look at the lake, while Kubilai perused the letter from the Orlok Bayan, which I had given him to read before the light was gone. It was a lovely and peaceful autumn evening. There were flaming sunset clouds high in the sky above the lake, and then a patch of clear ice-blue sky between them and the black serration of the farther lakeside’s treetops, which looked as flat as if they had been cut from black paper and pasted there. The mirror-smooth lake reflected only the black trees and the clear blue of the lower sky, except where a few ornamental ducks were leisurely paddling across it. They rumpled the water behind them just enough that it reflected there the high sunset clouds, so each duck was trailing a long wedge of warm flame across the ice-blue surface.
“So Ukuruji is dead,” sighed Kubilai, folding the paper. “But a great victory has been accomplished, and all of Yun-nan will soon capitulate.” (Neither the Khan nor I could have known it at that moment, but the Yi had by then already laid down their arms, and another messenger was riding hard from Yun-nan-fu to bring the news.) “Bayan says that you can tell me the details, Marco. Did my son die well?”
I told him all the how and where and when of it—our employment of the Bho as an expendable mock army, the laudable efficacy of the brass balls, the dwindling of the battle into two final skirmishes, man against man, one of which I had survived, the other which Ukuruji had not, and I concluded with the capture and execution of the treacherous Pao Nei-ho. I had meant to show Kubilai the yin seal of the Minister Pao, but I realized as I spoke that I had left it in my saddlebags, which were now in my palace chamber, so I did not mention it, and of course the Khakhan demanded no such proof.
I added, perhaps a little wistfully, “I must apologize, Sire, that I neglected to follow the noble precepts of your grandfather Chinghiz.”
“Uu?”
“I left Yun-nan at once, Sire, to bring you the news. So I took no opportunity to ravish any chaste Yi wives or virgin Yi daughters.”
He chuckled and said, “Ah, well. Too bad you had to forgo the handsome Yi women. But when we have taken the Sung Empire, perhaps you will have occasion to travel to the Fu-kien Province there. The females of the Min people of Fu-kien are so gloriously beautiful, it is said, that parents will not send a daughter out of the house even to fetch water or cut firewood, for fear that she will be abducted by slave hunters or the emperor’s concubine collectors.”
“I shall look forward to my first meeting with a Min girl, then.”
“Meanwhile, it appears that your prowess in other aspects of warfare would have pleased the warrior Khan Chinghiz.” He indicated the letter. “Bayan here gives you much of the credit for the Yun-nan victory. You evidently impressed him. He even makes the brash suggestion that I might console myself for the loss of Ukuruji by making you an honorary son of mine.”
“I am flattered, Sire. But please to reflect that the Orlok wrote that while he was flushed with triumphal enthusiasm. I am sure he meant no disrespect.”
“And I still have a sufficiency of sons,” said the Khan, as if he were reminding himself, not me. “On the son Chingkim, of course, I long ago settled the mantle of heir apparent. Also—you would not yet have heard this, Marco—Chingkim’s young wife Kukachin has recently been delivered of a son, my premier grandson, so the continued succession of our line is assured. They have named him Temur.” He went on, as if he had forgotten my presence, “Ukuruji most earnestly desired to become Wang of Yun-nan. A pity he died. He would have been a
