The Journeyer

Such an air of lassitude and resignation was not usual to the Prince Chingkim, and now I took notice that he was indeed looking rather worn and weary. A little later, when he and I walked a way into the wood to make water in private, I noticed something else, and commented lightly on it:

“At some inn on the road hither, you must have dined on that slimy red vegetable called dai-huang. You did not eat it at our table, for I do not care for it.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “And neither have I taken a fall from any horse lately, which might account for my pissing pink like this. But I have been doing it for some time. The Court Physician has been treating me for it—in the Han manner, by sticking pins in my feet and burning little heaps of moxa fluff up and down my spine. I keep telling the idiot old Hakim Gansui that I do not piss through my feet or—” He stopped and looked up into the trees. “Listen, Marco. A cuckoo. Do you know what the Han believe the cuckoo is saying?”

Chingkim did go home, as the cuckoo advised, but not until he had spent a month or so enjoying our company and the restful ambience of Hang-zho. I am glad he had that month of simple pleasure, far from the cares of office and state, for when he went home, he went to a much more distant home than Khanbalik. It was not long before the couriers came galloping to Hang-zho, on horses blanketed in purple and white, to tell the Wang Agayachi to drape his city in those Han and Mongol colors of mourning, for his brother Chingkim had arrived home only to die.

As it happened, our city had no more than finished the term of mourning for the Crown Prince, and started to take down the crape bunting, than the couriers came again, with orders to leave it hanging. Now it was in mourning for the Ilkhan Abagha of Persia, who had died also—and also not in battle, but of some illness. The loss of a nephew was of course not so terrible a tragedy to Kubilai as the loss of his son Chingkim, and it did not cause the same widespread murmurs of speculation about future succession. Abagha had left a full-grown son, Arghun, who immediately assumed the Ilkhanate of Persia—and even married one of his late father’s Persian wives, to further secure his claim to that throne. But Chingkim’s son Temur, the next heir apparent to the whole Mongol Empire, was still under-age. Kubilai was well along in years, as Chingkim had remarked. The people worried that, if he were soon to die, the Khanate might be much riven and convulsed by claimants older than Temur, the many uncles and cousins and such, eager to oust him and make the Khanate theirs.

But, for the time being, we suffered nothing worse than grief from Chingkim’s untimely demise. Kubilai did not let his sorrow distract him from the affairs of state, and I did not let mine interfere with my regular transmittal of Manzi’s tribute to the treasury. Kubilai continued to prosecute the war against Ava, and even extended the Orlok Bayan’s mission —as Chingkim had predicted—to seize, as well, any of Ava’s neighbor nations in Champa that might be ripe for conquest.

It made me restless, to know that so much was happening in the world outside, while I simply lolled in luxury in Hang-zho. My restlessness was irrational, of course. Look at all I had. I was quite an esteemed personage in Hang-zho. No one even looked askance at my kwei-colored hair any more when I walked the streets. I had many friends, and I was ever so comfortable, and I was blissfully content with my loving and lovely consort. Hui-sheng and I might have lived—as is said of the lovers at the concluding page of a roman courtois—happily ever after, just as we were. I possessed everything that any rational man could desire. All those most precious things were mine then, at that high moment, that skyline crest of my lifetime. Furthermore, I was no longer the reckless stripling I once had been, with only tomorrows stretching out before me. There were a lot of yesterdays behind me now. I was past thirty years of age, and I found an occasional gray hair among the demon-colored, and I might sensibly have been giving thought to making the downhill slope of my life a soft and easy glide.

Nevertheless, I was restless, and the restlessness inexorably became dissatisfaction with myself. I had done well in Manzi, yes, but was I to bask in the reflected glow of that for the remainder of my days? Once the great thing had been accomplished, it was no great thing merely to perpetuate it. That required no more than my stamping my yin signature on papers of receipt and dispatch, and waving my couriers off to Khanbalik once a month. I was no better than a roadside postmaster of the horse relay stations. I decided I had for too long now enjoyed too much of having; I wanted something to want. I flinched at the vision of myself growing old in Hang-zho, like a vegetable Han patriarch, and having nothing to take pride in except my survival to old age.

“You will never get old, Marco,” Hui-sheng told me when I broached the subject. She looked affectionately amused, but sincere, as she conveyed that pronouncement.

“Old or not,” I said, “I think we have luxuriated in Hang-zho long enough. Let us move on.”

She concurred: “Let us move on.”

“Where would you like to go, my dearest?”

Simply: “Wherever you go.”

6

SO my next northbound courier took a message from me to the Khakhan, respectfully requesting that I be relieved of my long-since accomplished mission and my Kuan title and my coral hat button; that I be given permission to return to Khanbalik, where I could cast about for some new venture to occupy me. The courier returned with Kubilai’s amiable acquiescence, and it took me and Hui-sheng not long to make ready to depart from Hang-zho. Our native servants and slaves all wept and agonized and fell about in frequent ko-tou, but we assuaged their bereavement by making gifts to them of many things we decided not to take with us. I made other parting gifts—and rich ones—to the Wang Agayachi and my Adjutant Fung Wei-ni and my manager-scribe and other worthies who had been our friends.

“The cuckoo calls,” they all said sadly, one after another, as they toasted us with their wine goblets at the countless farewell banquets and balls given in our honor.

Our slaves packed into bales and crates our personal belongings and our wardrobes and our many Hang-zho acquisitions—furnishings, painted scrolls, porcelains, ivories, jades, jewelry and such—that we were taking with us. Taking also the Mongol maid we had brought from Khanbalik, and Hui-sheng’s white mare (now somewhat silvery about the muzzle), we went aboard a sizable canal barge. Only one of our possessions would Hui-sheng not let be crated and stowed in the hold: she herself carried her white porcelain incense burner.

During our residence, the Great Canal had been completed all the way to Hang-zho’s riverside. But because we had already covered the canal route before, following it on our way south, we had decided to take a very different way home. We stayed on the barge only as far as the port of Zhen-jiang, where the Great Canal met the Yang-tze River. There, for the first time (for either me or Hui-sheng), we boarded a gigantic oceangoing chuan, and sailed down the Tremendous River and out into the boundless Sea of Kithai and northward up the coast.

That chuan made the good ship Doge Anafesto, the galeazza in which I had crossed the Mediterranean, seem like a gondola or a san-pan. The chuan—I cannot call it by name, because it purposely had no name, so it could not be cursed by rival shipowners, who might persuade the gods to send it contrary winds or other misfortune—had five masts, each like a tree. From them depended sails as big as some towns’ market squares, made of slats of the zhu-gan cane, and employed as I have described elsewhere. The bigness of the chuan’s duck-shaped hull was in proportion to its sky-scraping upper works. On the deck and in the passenger quarters below were more than one hundred cabins, each comfortably adequate for six persons. That is to say, the ship could carry more than six hundred passengers in addition to its crew, which totaled fully four hundred men, of several different races and languages. (There were only a few passengers on this short trip. Besides Hui-sheng, myself and the maid, there were some traveling merchants, some minor government officials, and a number of other ships’ captains, idle between voyages, aboard just for a seaman’s holiday.) In the chuan’s holds was loaded a variety of goods, seeming enough to stock a city. But, simply for a measure of the holds’ capacity, I would say the ship could have carried two thousand Venetian butts.

I have said “holds” advisedly, instead of hold, because every chuan was ingeniously built with bulkheads dividing the hull’s interior into numerous compartments, end to end, and they were tarred watertight, so that if the chuan should strike a reef or otherwise hole itself below the waterline, only that one compartment would flood, while the others stayed dry and kept the ship afloat. However, it would have required a sharp and solid reef to hole that chuan. Its entire hull was triply planked, actually built three times over, one shell enveloping another. The Han captain, who spoke Mongol, took great pride in showing me how the innermost hull had its planking set vertically, from keel to deck, and the next was planked at an angle diagonal to that, and the outermost was laid in horizontal strakes, stem to stern.