“Lord, I am committed. I hope You see that. This Marco Polo must once have done something right, and the proverb instructs us that one mitzva deserves another.”
From under the work table, he picked up two tightly woven cane baskets and thrust them into my arms. “Here, estimable fool. In each, fifty liang measures of huo-yao. Do as you will, and l’chaim to you. I hope the next I hear of Marco Polo is not his thunderous departure from this world.”
I took the baskets back to my apartment, intending to start my essay at al-kimia straight away. But I found Nostril again waiting for me, so I asked if he had brought any information.
“Precious little, master. Only a salacious small item about the Court Astrologer, if you are interested. It seems he is a eunuch, and for fifty years he has kept his spare parts pickled in a jar that stands beside his bed. He intends to have them buried with him, so that he will go entire to the afterworld.”
“That is all?” I said, wanting to get to work.
“Elsewhere, all is preparation for the New Year. Every courtyard is strewn with dry straw, so that any approaching evil kwei spirits will be frightened off by the crackling noise when they tread on it. The Han women are all cooking the Eight-Ingredient Pudding, which is a holiday treat, and the men are making the many lanterns to light the festivities, and the children are making little paper windmills. It is said that some families spend their entire year’s savings on this celebration. But not everybody is exhilarated; a good many of the Han are committing suicide.”
“Whatever for?”
“It is their custom that all outstanding debts be settled at this season. The creditors are going about knocking on doors, and many a desperate debtor is hanging himself—to save his face, as the Han say—from the shame of not being able to pay. Meanwhile, the Mongol folk, who do not care much about face, are smearing molasses on the faces of their kitchen gods.”
“What?”
“They have the quaint belief that the idol they keep over the kitchen hearth, the house god Nagatai, ascends to Heaven at this time to report their year’s behavior to the great god Tengri. So they feed molasses to Nagatai in the quaint belief that thus his lips are sealed, and he cannot tattle anything detrimental.”
“Quaint, yes,” I said. Biliktu came into the room just then and took the baskets from me. I motioned for her to set them on a table. “Anything else, Nostril?”
He wrung his hands. “Only that I have fallen in love.”
“Oh?” I said, immersed in my own thoughts. “With what?”
“Master, do not mock me. With a woman, what else?”
“What else? To my own knowledge, you have previously had congress with a Baghdad pony, with a young man of Kashan, with a Sindi baby of indeterminate sex—”
He wrung his hands some more. “Please, master, do not tell her.”
“Tell whom?”
“The Princess Mar-Janah.”
“Oh, yes. That one. So you have now fixed your regard on a princess, have you? Well, I give you credit for craving wide variety. And I will not tell her. Why should I tell her anything at all?”
“Because I would beg a boon, Master Marco. I would ask you to speak to her in my behalf. To tell her of my virtues and uprightness.”
“Upright? Virtuous? You? Por Dio, I have never even been sure that you are human!”
“Please, master. You see, there are certain palace rules regarding the marriage of slaves to one another—”
“Marriage!” I gasped. “You are contemplating marriage?”
“It is true, as the Prophet declares, that women are all stones,” he said meditatively. “But some are millstones hung about our neck, and some are gemstones hung about our heart.”
“Nostril,” I said, as kindly as I could be. “This woman may have come down in the world, but not—” I stopped myself. I could not say “as low down as you.” I began again, “She may be now a slave, but she was once a princess, and you said you were only a drover then. Also, from what I have heard, she is handsome, or she once was.”
“She is,” he said, and added feebly, “So was I … once.”
Exasperated anew by his persistence in that old fiction, I said, “Has she seen you lately? Look at yourself! There you stand, as graceless as a camel-bird, pot-bellied, pig-eyed, with your finger picking your one nose hole. Tell me truthfully, since you spied out her identity have you made yourself known to this Princess Mar-Janah? Did she recognize you? Did she flee in revulsion, or merely burst out laughing?”
“No,” he said, hanging his head. “I have not introduced myself. I have only worshiped her from afar. I was hoping that you would first say some words to her … to prepare her … to make her desire to know me … .”
At which, it was I who burst out laughing. “It needed but this! I have never heard such effrontery. Asking me to pimp between one slave and another. What am I to tell her, Nostril?” I put on a wheedling voice, as if I were addressing the princess: “So far as I know, Your Highness, your adoring suitor does not at this moment suffer any shameful disease of his amative parts.” Then I said sternly, “What could I possibly tell, without such lying as to imperil my immortal soul, that could possibly make any female—let alone a former princess—look favorably on such a creature as I know you to be?”
With preposterous dignity for such a creature, he said, “If the master would have the goodness to listen for just a little, I would tell some of the history of this affair.”
“Tell, then, but make haste. I have things to do.”
“It began twenty years ago in the Cappadocian capital city of Erzincan. True, she was a Turki princess, the daughter of King Kilij, and I was only a Sindi drover of horses in his employ. Neither he nor she knew it, probably, since I was only one of many stable servants they would have seen, whenever they called for a mount or a carriage. But I saw her, and then as now I worshiped her dumbly from afar. Nothing would ever have come of it, of course. Except that Allah caused both her and me to fall among Arab bandits—”
“Oh, Nostril, no!” I pleaded. “Not another account of your heroics. I have had my laugh for the day.”
“I will not dwell on the abduction episode, master. Sufficient to say that the princess had cause to notice me, then, and she regarded me with melting eyes. But when we had escaped from the Arabs and returned to Erzincan, her father rewarded me with a higher position in his service, which sent me into the countryside at a considerable remove from the palace.”
“That,” I murmured, “I believe.”
“And unhappily I once more fell among marauders. Kurdi slave-takers, this time. I was borne away, and I never saw Cappadocia or the princess again. I kept an ear open for every rumor and gossip from that part of the world, and I never heard of her marrying, so I still had some small cause for hopefulness. But then I heard of the wholesale slaughter of that Seljuk royal family, and I supposed she had died with the rest. Who knows, if I had been still at the palace when that occurred, what might not—?”
“Please, Nostril.”
“Yes, master. Well, if Mar-Janah was dead, I cared no longer what became of me. I was a slave—the lowest form of life—so I would be the lowest form of life. I endured every kind of humiliation, and I did not care. I invited humiliation. I even began to humiliate myself. I wallowed in humiliation. I would be the worst thing in the world, because I had lost the best. I became a wretch degraded and contemptible. I did not care that it cost me my handsomeness and my self-respect and the respect of all other men. I would not even have cared if it had cost me my vital parts, but, for some reason, none of my many masters ever thought to make me a eunuch. So I was still a man, but, having no hope of love, I abandoned myself to lust. I took anyone or anything accessible to a slave—and not many but vile things are. Thus I was when you found me, Master Marco, and thus I continued to be.”