The Journeyer

knows, about the Wali Achmad’s “eccentric tastes,” and I had long known of my uncle’s desperate clutchings, like those of a man adrift on an outgoing tide, at one crumbling anchorage after another. Just tonight, Buyantu had looked puzzled when I mentioned Achmad’s “large woman,” and then she had said evasively, “If that person had a woman’s name … .” She had known, and she had probably decided, with female cunning, to save the knowledge for bargaining with, later on. The Arab had more forthrightly threatened, “I will make public some paintings …” and I should have remembered then the kind of pictures the Master Chao was forced to paint in private. “The very name of Polo will be a laughingstock … .”

“Gesu, Uncle Mafio …” I whispered, with pity, revulsion and disillusionment. He said nothing, but he had the good grace to look now ashamed instead of angry at being discovered. I slowly shook my head, and considered several things I might say, and at last said:

“You once preached to me, uncle, and most persuasively, on the profitable uses of evil. How it is only the boldly evil person who triumphs in this world. Have you followed your own preachings, Uncle Mafio? Is this”—I gestured at his squalid disguise, his whole aspect of degradation—“is this the triumph it won for you?”

“Marco,” he said defensively, and in a husky voice. “There are many kinds of love. Not all of them are nice. But no kind of love is to be despised.”

“Love!” I said, making of it a dirty word.

“Lust, lechery … last resort … call it what you will,” he said bleakly. “Achmad and I are of an age. And both of us, feeling much apart from other people … outcasts … uncommon … .”

“Aberrant, I would call it. And I would think you both of an age to subdue your more egregious urges.”

“To retire to the chimney corner, you mean!” he flared, angry again. “To sit quiet there and decay, and gum our gruel and nurse our rheumatics. Do you think, because you are younger, that you have a monopoly on passion and longing? Do I look decrepit to you?”

“You look indecent!” I shouted back at him. He quailed and covered his horrible face with his hands. “At least the Arab does not parade his perversions in gossamer and ribbons. If he did, I should only laugh. When you do it, I weep.”

He almost did, too. Anyway, he began sniffling pitifully. He sank down on a bench and whimpered, “If you are fortunate enough to enjoy whole banquets of love, do not ridicule those of us who must make do with the leavings and droppings from the table.”

“Love again, is it?” I said, with a scathing laugh. “Look, uncle, I grant that I am the last man qualified to lecture on bedroom morality and propriety. But have you no sense of discrimination? Surely you know how vile and wicked that man Achmad is, outside the bedroom.”

“Oh, I know, I know.” He flapped his hands like a woman in distress, and gave a sort of womanish squirm. It was ghastly to see. And it was ghastly to hear him gibber, like a woman agitated beyond coherence, “Achmad is not the best of men. Moody. Fearsome temper. Unpredictable. Not admirable in all his behavior, public or private. I have realized that, yes.”

“And did nothing?”

“Can the wife of a drunkard stop him drinking? What could I do?”

“You could have ceased whatever it is that you have been doing.”

“What? Loving? Can the wife of a drunkard cease loving him just because he is a drunkard?”

“She can refuse submission to his embrace. Or whatever you two—never mind. Please do not try to tell me. I do not want even to imagine it.”

“Marco, be reasonable,” he whined. “Would you give up a lover, a loving mistress, simply because others found her unlovable?”

“Per dio, I hope I would, uncle, if her unlovable characteristics included a penchant for cold-blooded murder.”

He appeared not to hear that, or veered away from it. “All other considerations aside, nephew, Achmad is the Chief Minister, and the Finance Minister, hence he is head of the mercantile Ortaq, and on his permission has depended our success as traders here in Kithai.”

“Was that permission contingent on your crawling like a worm? Demeaning and debasing yourself? Dressing up like the world’s largest and least beautiful whore? Having to flit through back halls and back doors in that ridiculous garb? Uncle, I will not excuse depravity as good business.”

“No, no!” he said, squirming some more. “Oh, it was far more than that to me! I swear it, though I can hardly expect you to understand.”

“Sacro, I do not. If it were only the casual experiment in curiosity, yes, I have done some such things myself. But I know how long you have persisted in this folly. How could you?”

“He wanted me to. And after a time, even degradation becomes habitual.”

“You never felt the least impulse to break the habit?”

“He would not let me.”

“Not let you! Oh, uncle!”

“He is a … wicked man, perhaps … but a masterful one.”

“So were you, once. Caro Gesu, how far you have fallen. However, since you spoke of this as a business affair—tell me, I must know—has my father been aware of this development? This entanglement?”

“No. Not this one. Not this time. No one knows, except you. And I wish you would put it out of your mind.”

“Be sure I will,” I said acidly, “when I am dead. I trust you know that Achmad is bent on my destruction. Have you known it all this time?”

“No, I have not, Marco. That, too, I swear.”

Then, in the manner of a woman—who, in any conversation, is always eager to turn it down some avenue where she can run without check or hindrance or contradiction—he began to prattle most fluently:

“I know it now, yes, because tonight when you came there and I fled from the room, I put my ear to the door. But only once before was I in his chambers when you and he had words, and that time I took mannerly pains not to overhear. He never otherwise disclosed to me the full extent of his animosity toward you, or the clandestine moves he was making to harm you. Oh, I did know—I confess this much—that he was no friend of yours. He often made disparaging remarks to me about ‘that pestiferous nephew of yours,’ and sometimes facetious references to ‘that pretty nephew of yours,’ and sometimes, when we were every close, he would even say ‘that provocative nephew of ours.’ And lately, after a messenger from Xan-du confided to him that Kubilai had rewarded your war service by letting you play stud to a string of Mongol mares, Achmad began speaking of you as ‘our wayward warrior nephew’ and ‘our misguided voluptuary nephew.’ And recently, in our most intimate moments, when we were … when he was … well, he would do it uncommonly hard and deep, as if to hurt, and he would moan, ‘Take that, nephew, and that!’ And at the surge, he would almost shriek, saying—”

He stopped, for I had clapped my hands over my ears. Sounds can sicken, as well as sights. And I felt nearly as nauseated as I had felt earlier, when I had to look upon the flayed and limbless meat that had been Mar- Janah.

“But no,” he said, when I would listen again, “I did not know until tonight how much he really hates you. How he has been impelled by that passion to do so many dreadful things—and how he still seeks to discredit and destroy you. Of course, I knew him to be a passionate man … .” And the nausea rose in me again, as he once more lapsed into broken sniveling. “But to threaten to use even me … the paintings of us … .”

I barked harshly at him, “Well, then? It was some while ago that you heard those threats. What have you been doing since? Did you linger in his company—I devoutly hope—to kill the son of a bitch shaqal ?”

“Kill my—kill the Chief Minister of the Khanate? Come, come, Marco. You had as much opportunity as I, and more reason, but you did not. Would you have your poor old uncle do the deed instead, and doom him to the fondling of the Fondler?”

“Adrio de vu! I have known you to kill before, and without such womanly compunction. In this instance, you would have had at least more chance than I to escape undetected. I presume Achmad has a back door for sneaking through, as you do.”

“Whatever else he is, Marco, he is the Chief Minister of this realm. Can you imagine the hue and cry? Can you believe that his slayer would go undiscovered? How long would it have been before I was revealed, not only as his