The Journeyer

many people in that jungle suffered from illnesses that seemed never to conclude either in death or recovery. (The people of Yun-nan referred to the whole of Champa as “the Valley of Fever.”) Two of our sturdy Mongol boatmen fell to one of those maladies, or maybe several, and Yissun and I had to take over their chores. The men’s gums bled almost as red as those of a Mien cud-chewer, and much of their hair fell out. Under their arms and between their legs the skin began to rot, getting green and crumbly, like cheese going bad. Some kind of fungus attacked their fingers and toes, so that their fingernails and toenails got soft and moist and painful, and often bled.

Yissun and I asked a Mien village headman for advice from his own experience, and he told us to rub pepper into the men’s sores. When I protested that that was bound to cause excruciating pain, he said, “Ame, of course, U Polo. But it will hurt the disease nat even worse, and the demon may depart.”

Our Mongols bore that treatment stoically enough, but so did the nat, and the men stayed ill and prostrate all the way downriver. At least they, and we other men, did not contract another jungle affliction I heard about. Numerous Mien men confided dolefully to us that they suffered from it, and always would. They called it koro, and they described its very terrible effect: a sudden and dramatic and irreversible shrinking of the virile organ, a retraction of it up into the body. I did not inquire for further details, but I could not help wondering if the jungle koro was related to the fly-borne kala-azar that had commenced my Uncle Mafio’s pathetic dissolution.

For a time, Yissun and Hui-sheng and her Mongol maid and I took turns tending our two sick men. From our experience and observation so far, we had got the impression that the jungle’s diseases troubled only the male sex, and Yissun and I were not much inclined to worry about ourselves. But when the maidservant also started to show signs of illness, I made Hui-sheng leave off her nursing, and confine herself to the farthest end of the barge, and sleep well apart from the rest of us at night. Meanwhile, our best efforts did not improve the condition of the two men. They were still ill and flaccid and gaunt when we finally reached Pagan, and they had to be carried ashore to be put in the care of their army’s shaman-physicians. I do not know what became of them after that, but at least they survived to get that far. Hui-sheng’s maid did not.

Her ailment had seemed identical to that of the men, but she had been much more troubled and dismayed by it. I suppose, being a female, she was naturally more frightened and embarrassed when she began to rot at her extremities and under her arms and between her legs. However, she also began to complain, which the men had not, of itching all over her body. Even inside it, she said, which we took to be delirium. But Yissun and I gently undressed her and found, here and there, what looked like grains of rice stuck to her skin. When we tried to pick them off, we discovered that they were only the protruding ends—heads or tails, we could not tell—of long, thin worms that had burrowed deep into her flesh. We tugged, and they came out reluctantly, and kept coming, span after span, as we might have unspooled a web-thread from the spinneret of a spider’s body.

The poor woman wept and shrieked and weakly writhed during most of the time we were doing that. Each worm was no thicker than a string, but easily as long as my leg, greenish-white in color, slick to our touch, hard to grasp and resisting our pull, and there were many of them, and even the hardened Mongol Yissun and I could not help retching violently while we did that hand-over-hand hauling out of the worms and throwing them overboard. When we had done, the woman was no longer squirming, but lay still in death. Perhaps the worms had been coiled around organs inside her, and our pulling had disarranged those parts and thereby killed her. But I am disposed to believe that she died from the sheer horror of the experience. Anyway, to spare her any further miseries—because we had heard that the funeral practices of the Mien were barbaric—we rowed ashore at a deserted spot, and buried her deep, well out of reach of the ghariyals or any other jungle predators.

2

I was glad to see the Orlok Bayan again. I was even glad to see his teeth. Their garish glare of porcelain and gold was far more sightly than the snaggled and blackened teeth of the Mien I had been seeing all the way down the Irawadi. Bayan was somewhat older than my father, and he had lost some hair and added some girth since our campaign together, but he was still as leathery and supple as his own old armor. He was also, at the moment, slightly drunk.

“By Tengri, Marco, but you have put on great beauty since I saw you last!” He bawled that at me, but he was ogling Hui-sheng at my side. When I introduced her, she smiled a little nervously at him, for Bayan was on the throne of the King of Ava, in the throne room of the palace of Pagan, but he was not looking very kinglike. He was half-lying asprawl on the throne, guzzling from a jeweled cup, and his eyes were vividly bloodshot.

“Found the king’s wine cellar,” he said. “No kumis or arkhi, but something called choum-choum. Made of rice, they tell me, but I think it is really compounded of earthquake and avalanche. Hui, Marco! Remember our avalanche? Here, have some.” He snapped his fingers, and a barefoot, bare-chested servant hurried to pour me a cup.

“What has become of the king, then?” I asked.

“Threw away his throne, his people’s respect, his name and his life,” said Bayan, smacking his lips. “He was King Narasinha-pati until he fled. Now his former subjects all call him contemptuously Tayok-pyemin, which means the King Who Ran Away. By comparison, they almost like having us here. The king fled west as we approached, over to Akyab, the port city on the Bay of Bangala. We thought he would escape by ship, but he just stayed there. Eating and calling for more and more food. He ate himself to death. A singular way to go.”

“That sounds like a Mien,” I said disgustedly.

“Yes, it does. But he was not a Mien. The royal family was of Bangali stock, originally from India. That is why we thought he would escape to there. Anyway, Ava is now ours, and I am Acting Wang of Ava until Kubilai sends a son or something to be my permanent replacement. If you see the Khakhan before I do, tell him to send somebody of frosty blood who can endure this infernal climate. And tell him to hurry. My sardars are now fighting over east, in Muang Thai, and I want to join them.”

Hui-sheng and I were given a grand suite in the palace, together with some of the late royal family’s exceptionally obsequious servants. I asked Yissun to take one of our many bedrooms and stay nearby as my interpreter. Hui-sheng, being now bereft of a personal maid, chose a new one from the staff given us, a girl of seventeen, of the race sometimes called Shan and sometimes Thai. Her name was Arun, or Dawn, and she was almost as comely of face as was her new mistress.

In our bathing chamber, which was as big and as well-equipped as a Persian hammam, the maid helped Hui- sheng and me, together, to bathe several times over, until we felt clean of our encrustation of jungle, and then helped us dress. For me, there was just a length of brocade silk to be wrapped around me, skirt fashion. Hui- sheng’s costume was much the same, except that it wrapped high enough to cover her breasts. Arun, without shyness, opened and rewrapped her own single garment several times, not to show us that it was all she wore, but to show us how to wrap ours so they would stay on. Nevertheless, I took the opportunity to admire the girl’s body, which was as fair as her name, and Hui-sheng made a face at me when she noticed, and I grinned and Arun giggled. We were given no shoes or even slippers; everyone in the palace went barefoot, except the heavy-booted Bayan, and I later put on boots only when I went outdoors. Arun did bring one other item of dress; earrings for both of us. But, since our ears were not bored for them, we could not wear them.

When Hui-sheng had, with Arun’s help, fetchingly arranged her hair and fixed flowers in it, we went downstairs again, to the palace’s dining hall, where Bayan had commanded a welcoming feast for us. We were not much accustomed to eating at midday, which it then was, but I was looking forward to some decent food after our hard rations on the voyage, and I was a trifle dismayed to see what was set before us—black meat and purple rice.

“By Tengri,” I growled to Bayan. “I knew the Mien blacked their teeth, but I never noticed that they also blacked the food to go between their teeth.”

“Eat, Marco,” he said complacently. “The meat is chicken, and the chickens of Ava have not only black plumage, but black skin, black flesh, black everything except their eggs. Never mind how the bird looks, it is cooked in the milk of the India nut, and is delicious. The rice is only rice, but in this land it grows in gaudy colors—indigo, yellow, bright red. Today we have purple. It is good. Eat. Drink.” And with his own hand, he poured a brimming beaker of the rice liquor for Hui-sheng.

We did eat, and the meal was very good. In that country, even at the Pagan palace, there were no such things as nimble tongs or any other table implements. Eating was done with the fingers, which is how Bayan would have done it anyway. He sat taking alternately handfuls of the flamboyant food and great drafts of choum-choum— Hui-sheng and I only sipped at ours, for it was highly potent—while I told of our adventures on the Irawadi, and the