The Journeyer

The Wang laughed again. “It is we Mongols who are to blame for that. My great-grandfather Chinghiz had an orlok named Subatai. He did many depredations in this part of the world, so he was the Mongol general most hated by the Han, and he had reddish fair hair. I do not know what the kwei were supposed to look like in earlier times, but ever since Subatai’s day, they have looked like him.”

Another man chuckled and said, “Keep your kwei hair and beard, Kuan Polo. Considering what you are here to do, it may help if you are feared and hated.” He spoke Mongol well enough, but it was obviously a newly acquired language for him. “As the Wang has remarked, all government officials are reviled. You can imagine that, of all officials, tax collectors are the most detested. And I hope you can imagine how a foreign tax collector, collecting for a conqueror government, is going to be regarded. I propose that we spread the word that you really are a kwei demon.”

I gave him a look of amusement. He was a plump, pleasant-faced Han of middle age, and he wore a wrought-gold button on his hat, identifying him as being of the seventh rank.

“The Magistrate Fung Wei-ni,” Agayachi introduced him. “A native of Hang-zho, an eminent jurist and a man much esteemed by the people for his fairness and acumen. We are fortunate that he has consented to keep the same magistracy he held under the Sung. And I am personally pleased, Marco, that he has agreed to serve as your adjutant and adviser while you are attached to this court.”

“I am also much pleased, Magistrate Fung,” I said, as he and I both made the sedate, hands-together bow that passes for a ko-tou between men of near equal rank. “I will be grateful for any assistance. In undertaking this mission of collecting taxes in Manzi, I am ignorant of two things only. I know nothing whatever about Manzi. And I know nothing whatever about tax collecting.”

“Well!” grunted the grumbly gray-haired man, this time grudgingly complimentary. “Well, frankness and a lack of self-importance are at least refreshingly new qualities in a tax collector. I doubt, however, that they will help you in your mission.”

“No,” said the Magistrate Fung. “No more than getting fat or blacking your hair, Kuan Polo. I will be frank, also. I see no way for you to extract taxes from Manzi for the Khanate, except by going yourself from door to door and demanding, or having a whole army of men to do it for you. And even at starvation wages, an army would cost more than you would collect.”

“In any case,” said Agayachi, “I have no army of men to delegate to you. But I have provided—for you and your lady—a fine house in a good quarter of the city, well staffed with domestics. When you are ready, my stewards will show you to the place.”

I thanked him and then said to my new adjutant, “If I cannot immediately start learning my job, perhaps I can start learning of my surroundings. Would you accompany us to our house, Magistrate Fung, and on the way show us something of Hang-zho?”

“With pleasure,” he said. “And I will show you first the single most spectacular sight of our city. This is the phase of the moon and—yes—the very hour is at hand for the appearance of the hai-xiao. Let us go at once.”

There was no clock of sand or water in the room, and not even a cat about, so I did not know how he could be so precise about the hour, or what the time had to do with seeing a hai-xiao, or what a hai-xiao was. But Hui-sheng and I made our good nights to the Wang and his staff, and we and our little company of scribe and slaves left the palace with the Magistrate Fung.

“We will take boat from here to your residence,” he said. “There is a royal barge waiting on the canal side of the palace. But first, let us walk up the promenade here, along the riverside.”

It was a fine night, balmy, softly lighted by a full moon, so we had a good view. From the palace, we went along a street that paralleled the river. It had a waist-high balustrade on that side, mainly constructed of some curiously shaped stones. They were circular, each with a hole in its center, and they were as big around as my encircled arms and as thick as my waist. They were too small to have been millstones, but too heavy to have been wheels. Whatever they had once been used for, they had been retired to serve here, set on edge, rim to rim, and the spaces between filled in with smaller stones, to make the balustrade a solid wall and flat on top. I looked over, and saw that the parapet fell away on the other side, a vertical wall of stone, some two house-stories’ distance to the river surface below.

I said, “I take it that the river rises considerably in flood season.”

“No,” said Fung. “The city is built high above the water on this side to allow for the hai-xiao. Fix your eyes yonder, eastward, toward the ocean.”

So he and I and Hui-sheng stood leaning against the parapet and gazed out toward the sea, across the flat, moonlit plain of delta sand that stretched featurelessly to the black horizon. Of course, there was no ocean to be seen; it was some two hundred li away beyond that shoal. Or it usually was. For now I began to hear, from that far distance, a murmur of sound, like a Mongol army on horseback galloping toward us. Hui-sheng tugged at my sleeve, which surprised me, for she could not have heard anything. But she indicated her other hand, which rested on the parapet, and she gave me a querying look. Hui-sheng, I realized, was again feeling the sound. However far away it was, I thought, it must be a veritable thunder to be vibrating a stone wall. I could only give her a shrug, no explanation. Fung evidently expected whatever was coming, and without misgivings.

He pointed again, and I saw a line of bright silver suddenly split the darkness of the horizon. Before I could ask what it was, it was close enough for me to make out: a line of sea foam, brilliant in the moonlight, coming toward us across the desert of sand, as rapidly as a line of charging, silver-armored horsemen. Behind it was the whole weight of the Sea of Kithai. As I have said, that shoal was fan-shaped—a hundred li broad out where it met the ocean, narrow here at the river mouth. So the inrushing sea came into the delta as a tumbling sheet of water and spume, but was rapidly constricted as it came, and compressed and piled up, and all its dark color was churned into white. The hai-xiao happened too quickly for me even to exclaim in astonishment. There, pounding toward us, was a wall of water as wide as the delta and as high as a house. But for its foamy glitter, it looked like the avalanche that had scoured across the Yun-nan valley, and rumbled very like it, too.

I glanced down at the river below us. Like a small animal emerging from its burrow and encountering a foam-muzzled rabid dog, it was flowing backward, recoiling, trying to vacate its invaded burrow mouth and retreat back toward the mountains it had come from. The next moment, that vast roaring wall of water surged by us, just below the level of the parapet, a welter and tumult of foam, and flecks of it spattered up upon us. I had been transfixed by the spectacle, but at least I had seen seawater before; I think Hui-sheng never had, so I turned to see if she was frightened. She was not. She was bright-eyed and smiling, and moon-glowing spindrift was in her hair like opals. To someone in a soundless world, I suppose, more than to the rest of us, it must be a delight to see splendid things, especially when they are so splendid as to be feelable. And even I had felt the stone balustrade beside us and the night all about us tremble under that impact. The rumbling, fizzing, sizzling sea continued to seethe past and upstream, the bright white of it getting streaked with black-green, and finally the black-green predominating, until it was all an unfoamed choppy sea occupying the whole river breadth beneath us.

When I could make myself heard, I said to Fung, “What in the name of all the gods is it?”

“Newcomers usually are impressed,” he said, as if he had done it all himself. “It is the hai-xiao. The tidal bore.”

“Tidal!” I exclaimed. “Impossible! Tides come and go with stately decorum.”

“The hai-xiao is not always so dramatic,” he conceded. “Only when the season and the moon and the time of day or night properly coincide. On those occasions, as you just saw, they bring the sea across those sands at the pace of a galloping horse—across two hundred li in no longer than it takes a man to eat a leisurely meal. The river boatmen learned, ages ago, to take advantage of it. They cast off from here at just the right moment, and the hai- xiao takes them upriver, hundreds of li, without their having to stroke an oar.”

I said politely, “Forgive my doubting you, Magistrate Fung. But I come from a sea city myself, and I have seen tides all my life. They move the sea perhaps an arm’s-reach up and down. This was a mountain of sea!”

He said politely, “Forgive my contradicting you, Kuan Polo. But I must presume that your native city is on a small sea.”

I said loftily, “I never thought of it as small. But yes, there are greater ones. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the limitless Ocean Sea Atlantic.”

“Ah. Well. So is this one a great sea. Beyond this coast there are islands. Many of them. To the north of east, for example, the islands called Jihpen-kwe, which compose the Empire of the Dwarfs. But go east far enough, and