It would take me some time, in any event, to close or dispose of the kashi works—to tidy up many other loose ends.”
“There should be ample time. Kubilai looks old, but not moribund. If he has the vivacity, as I suspect, to be playing with boys, he is not apt to drop dead as suddenly as Chingkim did. Let me comply with this latest mission he has set me, and when I return …”
He said portentously, “No one, Marco, can foretell the day.”
I almost snapped an exasperated reply. But it was impossible for me to feel exasperation at him, or share his morbidity, or work myself into a mood of apprehension. I was a new-made wealthy man, and a happy one, and about to go journeying into new country, and with my dearest companion at my side. I merely clapped an assuring hand on my father’s shoulder and said, not with resignation but with genuine jollity, “Let come the day! Sto mondo xe fato tondo!”
CHAMPA
1
IT was again the Orlok Bayan I was off to find, and this time he was much farther away, but this time I had no need to get to him in a hurry. So I again arranged that Hui-sheng and I travel with attendants and supplies—her Mongol maid, two slaves for any necessary camping chores, Mongol escorts for protection, and a string of pack animals. But I also laid out each day’s march so that we traveled not arduously, and frequently got fresh mounts at the horse posts, and arrived each night at some decent karwansarai or some sizable town or even some provincial palace. In all, we had to cover about seven thousand li of every kind of terrain—plains, farmlands, mountains—but by doing it slowly and leisurely, we managed to sleep comfortably every night while we traversed more than five thousand of those long li. Going southwest from Khanbalik, we were, for much of the way, following the same course I had previously taken to Yun-nan, and so we stopped in many places I had stayed before—the cities of Xian and Cheng-du, for example—and only when we got beyond Cheng-du were we in territory I had not seen before.
From Cheng-du we did not, as I had had to do before, turn west into the highlands of To-Bhot. We continued southwest, directly into the province of Yun-nan, and to its capital, Yun-nan-fu, the last big city on our route, where we were royally received and entertained by the Wang Hukoji. I had one private reason for being eager to see Yun- nan-fu, but it was a reason I did not mention to Hui-sheng. When I had been last in these regions, I had finished my part in the Yun-nan war and taken myself out of it before Bayan besieged the capital city, not availing myself of his invitation to be among the privileged first looters and rapers. Having forgone that opportunity to “behave like a Mongol born,” I now looked about me with a special interest—to see what I had missed —and I took notice that the Yi women were indeed handsome, as reported. No doubt I would have enjoyed disporting myself with Yun-nan-fu’s “chaste wives and virgin daughters,” and no doubt would have believed I was enjoying some of the most comely women in the East. But I had since had the great good fortune to discover Hui-sheng, so now the Yi women looked to me distinctly inferior, and far less desirable than she was, and I felt no deprivation at never having had any of them.
From Yun-nan-fu onward, bearing ever southwest, we were traveling what had been called, from ancient times, the Tribute Road. It was so named, I learned, because the several nations of Champa had, since earliest history, at one time or another all been vassal states of the powerful Han dynasties to the north—the Sung and its predecessors—and that road had been tramped hard and smooth by the traffic of elephant trains bearing to those masters Champa’s tribute of everything from rice to rubies, slave girls to exotic apes.
From the last mountains of Yun-nan, the Tribute Road brought us down into the nation of Ava at a river plain and a place called Bhamo, which was only a chain of rather primitively constructed forts. They were also apparently ineffectual forts, for Bayan’s invaders had easily overwhelmed their defending force’s, and taken Bhamo and gone on past. We were received by a captain commanding the few Mongols left to garrison the place, and he informed us that the war was already concluded, the King of Ava in hiding somewhere, and Bayan now celebrating his victory in the capital city of Pagan, a long way downriver. The captain suggested that we could get there more comfortably and quickly by river barge, and gave us one, and Mongol crewmen for it, and a Mongol yeoman scribe named Yissun, who knew the Mien language of the country.
So we left our other attendants there at Bhamo, and Hui-sheng and her maid and I had a slow river voyage for the last thousand li or more of our journey. That river was the Irawadi, which had begun as a tumbling torrent called the N’mai, away up in the Land of the Four Rivers, high in To-Bhot. Down in this flatter country, the river was as broad as the Yang-tze, and flowed sedately southward in great swooping bends. It was full of so much silt, perhaps carried all the way down from To-Bhot, that its water was nearly viscous, like a thin glue, and unpleasantly tepid. It was a sickly tan color across its immense sunlit breadth, and brown in the deep shade on both extremes, where an almost unbroken forest of giant trees overhung the distant banks.
Even the enormous width and endless length of the Irawadi River must have looked, to the numberless birds flying overhead, like a mere insignificant gap meandering through the greenery that covered the land. Ava was almost entirely overgrown with what we would call jungle, and the jungle natives called the Dong Nat, or Forest of the Demons. The local nat, I gathered, were similar to the kwei of the north: demons of varying degrees of badness, from mischief to real evil, and usually invisible but capable of assuming any form, including the human. I privately imagined that the nat seldom put on corporeality, because in the dense tangle of that Dong jungle there was scarcely
Each evening, when our barge steered for the shore to make camp—unless we happened on a clearing with a cane-built Mien village in it—Yissun and the boatmen would have to get out first and, each wielding a broad, heavy blade called a dah, hack out a place sufficient for us to spread our bedrolls and lay our fire. I always had the impression that, on the next day, we would have got only around the next bend downstream before the rank, greedy, fervid jungle closed over the little dimple we had made in it. That was not an unlikely notion. Whenever we camped near a grove of zhu-gan cane, we could hear it crackling, even when there was not a breath of wind; that was the sound of it
Yissun told me that sometimes the fast-growing, very hard cane would rub against a soft-wooded jungle tree, and the heat of friction would start a blaze and—damp and sticky though the vegetation always was—it could blaze up and burn for hundreds of li in all directions. Only those inhabitants and denizens able to reach the river would survive the terrible fire, and they would likely fall victim to the ghariyals which always converged on any scene of disaster. The ghariyal was a tremendous and horrible river serpent which I took to be related to the dragon family. It had a knobby body as big as a cask, eyes like upstanding saucers, dragon jaws and tail, but no wings. The ghariyals were everywhere along the riverbanks, usually lurking in the mud like logs with glaring eyeballs, but they never molested us. Evidently they subsisted mostly on the monkeys which, in their antics, frequently fell shrieking into the river.
We were not molested by any of the other jungle creatures, either, although Yissun and the Mien villagers along the way warned us that the Dong Nat was the habitat of worse things than the nat and the ghariyal. Fifty different kinds of venomous snakes, they said, and tigers and pards and wild dogs and boars and elephants, and the wild ox called the seladang. I remarked lightly that I should not care to meet a wild ox; the domestic kind I saw in the villages looked vicious enough. It was as big as a yak, a sort of blue-gray in color, with flat horns swooping in a crescent backward from its brow. Like the serpent ghariyal, it liked to lie wallowing in a mudhole, with only its snout and eyes above the surface, and when the huge beast lumbered loose from the mud, there was a noise like huo-yao exploding.
“That animal is only the karbau,” Yissun said indifferently. “No more dangerous than a cow. The little children herd them. But a seladang stands higher at the shoulder than the top of your head, and even the tigers and
