capable viceroy for a newly conquered province. I think now … I will award that Wang-dom to his half-brother Hukoji …” Then he turned abruptly to me again. “Bayan’s suggestion that I insinuate a Ferenghi into the Mongol royal dynasty is unthinkable. However, I agree with him that such good blood as yours should not be ignored. It might profitably be infused into the lesser Mongol nobility. There is precedent, after all. My late brother, the Ilkhan Hulagu of Persia, during his conquest of that empire, was so impressed by the valor of the foemen of Hormuz that he put them to stud with all his camp-following females, and I believe that the get was worthwhile.”
“Yes, I heard that bit of history, Sire, while I was in Persia.”
“Well, then. You have no wife, I know that. Are you bound or vowed to any other woman or women at present?”
“Why … no, Sire,” I said, suddenly apprehensive that he was thinking of marrying me off to some spinster Mongol lady or minor princess of his choosing. I was not yearning to be married, and certainly not to una gata nel saco.
“And if you neglected to take advantage of the Yi women, you must by now be aching for an outlet for your ardors.”
“Well … yes, Sire. But I can myself seek—”
He waved me to silence and nodded decisively. “Very well. Shortly before I brought the court from Khanbalik, there arrived this year’s accumulation of presentation maidens. I brought here to Xan-du some two score of them whom I have not yet covered. Among them are about a dozen choice Mongol girls. They may not be up to the Min standard of beauty, but they are all of twenty-four-karat quality, as you will see. I will send them to your chambers, one a night, first bidding them not to employ any fern seed, that they may readily be impregnated. You will do me and the Mongol Khanate the favor of servicing them.”
“A dozen, Sire?” I said, with some incredulity.
“Surely you do not demur. The last command I gave you was that you go to war. A command to go to bed— with a succession of prime Mongol virgins—is rather more eagerly to be obeyed, is it not?”
“Oh, assuredly, Sire.”
“Be it done, then. And I shall expect a good crop of healthy Mongol-Ferenghi hybrids. Now, Marco, let us wend our way back to the palace. Chingkim must be apprised of his half-brother’s death so that, as Wang of Khanbalik, he can order his city draped in purple mourning. Meanwhile, the Firemaster and the Goldsmith are in a fever to hear exactly how you utilized their brass-ball invention. Come.”
The dining hall of the Xan-du palace was an imposing chamber, hung with painted scrolls and stuffed animal-head trophies of the hunt, but dominated by a sculpture of fine green jade. It was a single, solid piece of jade that must have weighed five tons, and God knows what it was worth in gold or flying money. It was carved into the semblance of a mountain very like those I had helped destroy in Yun-nan—complete with cliffs and crags and forests of trees and winding steep paths like the Pillar Road, being toilsomely climbed by little carved peasants and porters and horse carts.
The boar meat made a tasty meal, and I ate it sitting at the high table with the Khan, the Prince Chingkim, the Goldsmith Boucher and the Firemaster Shi. I tendered Chingkim my condolences on his brother’s demise and my congratulations on his son’s birth. The other two courtiers alternated between plying me with intense questions about the successful working of the huo-yao balls and fulsomely praising me and each other for having invented a true invention, one that would be imitated throughout the world, and would endure down the ages, changing the whole face of war, and making forever famous the names Shi and Polo and Boucher.
“For shame!” I chided. “You said yourself, Master Shi, that the flaming powder was invented by some unknown Han.”
“Peu de chose!” cried Boucher. “It was nothing but a toy until its full potential was realized by a wily Venetian, a renegade Jew and a brilliant young Frenchman!”
“Gan-bei!” cried old Shi. “L’chaim!” as he toasted us all with a goblet of mao-tai, and then downed it in a gulp. Boucher emulated him, but I took only a sip of mine. Let my fellow immortals get drunk; I would not, for I expected later to have need of my faculties.
Some Uighur musicians played during the meal—mercifully softly —and after it we were entertained by jugglers and funambulists and then a company performing a play which, for all its foreignness, I found familiar. A Han storyteller droned and yammered and bellowed the tale, and the conversations occurring in it, while his associates worked the strings of marionettes acting out the various roles. I could not understand a word, but found it perfectly comprehensible, because the Han characters—Aged Cuckold and Comic Physician and Sneering Villain and Bumbling Sage and Lovelorn Maiden and Valiant Hero and so on—were so recognizably similar to those of any Venetian puppet show: our fuddled Pantaleone and inept physician Dotor Balanzon and rascal Pulcinella and dim- witted lawyer Dotor da Nulla and coquette Colombina and dashing Trovatore and so on. But Kubilai seemed not much to enjoy the show, grumbling to us near him, “Why use puppets to portray people? Why not have people portray people?” (And obediently, in after years, all the player companies did exactly that: dispensed with the narrator and the marionettes, and presented human players each speaking his or her own part in the story.)
Most of the court was still loudly making merry when I retired to my chambers. But evidently Kubilai had given his instructions some while earlier, for I had just got into bed and not yet blown out the bedside lamp when there was a scratching at my door and a young woman came in, bearing what looked like a small white chest.
“Sain bina, sain nai,” I said politely, but she made no response, and when she came into the lamplight I saw that she was not a Mongol, but a Han or one of the related races.
She was obviously just a maid preparing for the entry of her lady, for now I discerned that the white object she carried was only an incense burner. I hoped that her lady would prove to be as comely and as exquisitely delicate as the servant. She set down the burner near my bed, a lidded porcelain box, shaped like a jewel chest and embossed with intricate raised designs. Then she took up my lamp, shyly smiling a silent request for permission and, when I nodded, used the lamp’s flame to set smoldering a stick of incense, lifted the burner’s lid and carefully placed the incense inside. I took note that it was the purple tsan-xi-jang, which is the very finest incense, compounded of aromatic herbs, musk and gold dust, to give a room not a heavy, spicy, closed-in smell, but the scent of summer fields. The servant girl sank down to sit meek and silent beside my bed, her eyes discreetly lowered, while the fragrant and calming perfume permeated my room. It did not calm me quite enough; I felt almost as nervous as if I had been really a bridegroom. So I tried to make small talk with the maid, but either she was well trained to imperturbability or was totally ignorant of Mongol, for she never even raised her eyes. Finally there was another scratching at the door, and her lady came proudly in. I was pleased to see that she
I said again in Mongol, “Good meeting, good woman,” and this one murmured back, “Sain bina, sain urkek.”
“Come! Do not call me brother,” I said, with a shaky laugh.
“It is the accepted salutation.”
“Well, at least try not to think of me as a brother.”
And she and I continued to make such small talk—very small talk, indeed, quite inane—as the maid helped her unpeel and get out of her considerable nuptial finery. I introduced myself, and she responded, in a sort of cascade of words, that she was called Setsen, and she was of the Mongol tribe called Kerait, and she was a Nestorian Christian, all the Kerait having been converted, in a bunch, by some long-ago wandering Nestorian bishop, and she had never set foot outside her nameless village in the far-northern fur-trapping country of Tannu-Tuva until she was selected for concubinage and transported to a trading town called Urga, where, to her surprise and delight, the provincial Wang had graded her at twenty-four karats and sent her on south to Khanbalik. Also, she said, she had never before laid eyes on a Ferenghi, and excuse her impudence, but were my hair and beard really naturally pale of color or had they simply gone gray with age? I told Setsen that I was not a great deal older than she, and still far from senile, as she ought to have descried from my rising excitement while I watched her disrobe. I would offer further evidence of my youthful vigor, I promised, as soon as the maidservant quitted the room. However, that girl, after tucking her naked lady in beside me, sank down again beside the bed as if to stay there, and did not even put out the light. So the subsequent conversation between me and Setsen got worse than inane, it got ridiculous.
I said, “You may dismiss your servant.”
She said, “The lon-gya is not a servant. She is a slave.”
