The Journeyer

Once, in the early days when we were still inventing our language, we were idling away an afternoon in one of those garden pavilions where the Palace Engineer had so miraculously piped water to play jug flutes positioned under the eaves. I awkwardly managed to convey to Hui-sheng how those things worked, though I assumed she had not the least idea what music was, and I waved my hands about in time to that murmurous warbling. She nodded brightly, and I supposed she was pretending to comprehend, to please me. But then she caught one of my hands and put it against one of the carved side columns, and held it there, and signed for me to be very, very still. Perplexed but fondly amused, I did so, and after a moment I realized, with vast amazement, that I was feeling the very, very faintest vibration—from the jug flute overhead, down through the wood and so to my touch. My silent Echo had shown me an echo in silence, indeed. She was capable of appreciating and even enjoying the rhythms of that unhearable music—perhaps even better than I could, hearing it—so delicate were her hands and her skin.

Those extraordinary faculties of hers were of incalculable value to me in my travels and my work and my dealings with others. That was especially true in Manzi, where I was naturally regarded with distrust as an emissary of the conquerors, and where I had to do business with resentful former overlords and grasping merchant chiefs and reluctant hirelings. Just as Hui-sheng could discern a flower invisible to others, so could she often discern a person’s unvoiced thoughts and feelings and motives and intentions. She could reveal them to me, too— sometimes in private, sometimes while that very person sat talking with me—and on many occasions that gave me a notable advantage over other folk. But even more often, I had an advantage in her merely being at my side. The men of Manzi, nobles and commoners alike, were unused to women sitting in on masculine conferences. If mine had been an ordinary woman—plain, voluble, strident—they would have disdained me as an uncouth barbarian or a henpecked capon. But Hui-sheng was such a charming and attractive adornment to any gathering (and so blessedly silent) that every man put on his most courtly manners, and spoke most chivalrously, and postured and almost pranced for her admiration, and many times—I know for a fact—deferred to my demands or acceded to my instructions or gave me the better of a bargain, just to earn Hui-sheng’s look of approbation.

She was my fellow journeyer, and she adopted a costume that enabled her to ride a horse astride, and she rode always beside me. She was my capable companion, my trusted confidante and, in everything but title, my wife. I would have been ready at any time for us to have “broken the plate,” as the Mongols called it (because their ceremony of wedding, performed by a shaman-priest, culminated in the ceremonial smashing of a piece of fine porcelain). But Hui-sheng, again unlike the commonalty of women, attached no importance to tradition or formality or superstition or ritual. She and I made what vows we wished to make, and made them in private, and that sufficed us both, and she was happy to forgo any public trumpeting and trumpery exhibition.

Kubilai advised me once, when the subject came up, “Marco, do not break the plate. So long as you have not yet taken a First Wife, you will find pliant and conciliatory every man with whom you have to deal, in matters of commerce or treaty negotiation or whatever. He will seek your good regard and he will not obstruct your good fortune, because he will be nursing the secret hope of making his daughter or niece your First Wife and mother of your principal heir.” That advice might well have made me hasten immediately to break a plate with Hui-sheng, for I scorned ever to order my life according to the dictates of “good business.” But Hui-sheng pointed out, with some vigor, that as my wife she would have to observe some traditions—at least those enjoining wifely subordination—and so could not any longer ride joyously at my side, but, if she was allowed to go anywhere at all, would have to travel in a closed palanquin, and she could not any longer assist me in my working conferences with other men, and tradition would forbid her to—

“Enough, enough!” I said, laughing at her agitation. I caught and stopped her flickering fingers, and promised that nothing would make me marry her, ever.

So we remained lovers only, which may be the very best sort of marriage there could be. I did not treat her as a wife, an inferior, but accorded her—and insisted that all others accord her—full equality with myself. (That may not have been so liberal of me as it sounds, since I well recognized her many points of superiority, and so perhaps did some cognitive others.) But I did treat her as a wife, a most noble wife, in regaling her with gifts of jewelry and jade and ivory, and the richest and most becoming garments for her to wear, and, for her personal mount, a superb white mare of the Khan’s own “dragon horses.” Only one husbandly rule did I lay down: she was never to mask her beauty with cosmetics, in the Khanbalik fashion. She complied, and so her peach-bloom complexion was never slathered rice-white, her rose-wine lips were not discolored or redrawn with garish paint, her feathery brows were not plucked bald. That made her unfashionable, and so radiantly lovely that all other women cursed the fashion, and their own slavishness to it. I did allow Hui-sheng to dress her hair as she liked, since she never did it any way I did not like, and I bought her jeweled combs and hair-spoons for it.

Of jewels and gold and jade and such, she eventually owned a trove that a Khatun might envy, but she always treasured one thing most of all. So did I, really, though I often pretended to consider it trash and urged her to throw it away. It was a thing I had not given her, but one of the pathetically few belongings she had brought when she first came to me: that plain and inelegant white porcelain incense burner. She lovingly bore it everywhere we journeyed and, in palace or karwansarai or yurtu or on open camp ground, Hui-sheng made sure that the sweet scent of warm clover after a gentle rain was the accompaniment of all our nights.

All our nights …

We were lovers only, never wedded man and wife. Nevertheless, I will invoke the privacy of the marriage bed and decline to relate the particulars of what she and I did there. In recalling others of my intimate relationships, I have spoken without reserve, but I prefer to keep some things private to me and Hui-sheng.

I will make only some general observations on the subject of anatomy. That will not violate the privacy of Hui-sheng, and would not cause her any blushes, for she often maintained that she was physically no different from any other female of the Min, and that those women were no different from the Han or any other race native to Kithai and Manzi. I beg to differ with her. The Khan Kubilai himself had once observed that the Min women were above all others in beauty, and Hui-sheng was outstanding even among the Min. But when she insisted, with modest and self-deprecatory gestures, that she was only ordinary of features and figure, I sensibly made no demur—for the most beautiful woman is the woman who does not realize she is.

And Hui-sheng was beautiful all over. That would adequately describe her, but I must go into some detail, to correct a few misapprehensions I myself had earlier entertained. I have mentioned the fine floss of hair that grew in front of her ears and at her nape, and I said then that I wondered if it implied an abundant hairiness in other places on her body. I could not have been more mistaken in that expectation. Hui-sheng was totally hairless on her legs and arms, under her arms, even on her artichoke. She was as clean and silkily smooth in that place as had been the child Doris of my youth. I did not mind that at all—an organ so accessible permits of various close attentions that a furred one does not—but I made mild inquiry. Was the hairlessness peculiar to her, or did she perhaps use a mumum to achieve it? She replied that no women of the Min (or the Han or the Yi or other such races) had hair on their bodies, or, if they did, had but the merest trace.

Her whole body was similarly childlike. Her hips were narrow and her buttocks small, just right for cupping in my hands. Her breasts were also small, but perfectly shaped and distinctly separate. I had long ago conceived a private belief that women with large nipples and a considerable dark halo around them were far more sexually responsive than women with small and pale ones. Hui-sheng’s nipples were minute by comparison with other women’s, but not when regarded in proportion to her porcelain-cup breasts. They were neither dark nor pale, but bright, as pink as her lips. And they indicated no lack of responsiveness, because Hui-sheng’s breasts, unlike those of larger women which are ticklish only at the extremity, were marvelously sensitive over their whole hemispheres. I had but to caress them anywhere, and their “small stars” pouted out as perkily as little tongues there. The same below. Perhaps because of the hairlessness, her lower belly and adjacent thighs were sensitive all over. Caress her anywhere there, and from her maidenly modest cleft would slowly emerge her pink and pretty “butterfly between the petals,” the more appreciable and enticing for its not being concealed within any tuft.

I never knew, and refrained from ever asking, whether Hui-sheng had been a virgin when she first came to me. One reason that I never knew was that she was so perpetually virginal, which I will explain in a moment. Another reason was that—as she told me—women of those races never came to marriage with a maidenhead. They were accustomed to being bathed in infancy, and later bathing themselves, several times a day, and not only on the outside but—with dainty fluids made of flower juices—inside as well. Their fastidiousness went far beyond that of even the most civilized, refined, high-born Venetian ladies (at least until I later dictated that the custom be adopted by the women of my own Venetian family). One result of that scrupulous cleanliness was that a young girl’s maidenhead got gradually, painlessly dilated and folded away to nonexistence. So she came to