“Until now,” I said. “Let me finish for you, Nostril. Now that long lost love has reentered your life. Now you are going to change.”

He surprised me by saying, “No. No, master, too many men have too often said that. None but a fool would believe that, and my master is no fool. So I will say instead that I wish only to change back. Back to what I was before I became … this Nostril.”

I looked long at him, and I considered long before I spoke.

“None but a wicked master would refuse a man the chance at that much, and I am not wicked. Indeed, I should be interested to see what it was that you once were.” I was also a little interested to see the draggled sloven he had set his heart on. She had to be a pitiful drab, of course, after eight or nine years of slavery among the Mongols, whatever she had begun as. “Very well. You wish me to apprise this Mar-Janah that her onetime hero still exists. I will do that much. How do I do it?”

“I shall simply pass the word in the slave quarters that the Master Marco wishes to speak with her. And then, if you could find it in your compassionate generosity to say—”

“I will tell no lies for you, Nostril. I promise only to skirt the nastier truths, insofar as I can.”

“It is all I could ask. May Allah ever bless—”

“Now I have other things to think about. Do not have her come here until after the New Year doings are done with.”

When he had gone, I sat down to gaze at the huo-yao I had brought, and occasionally I dabbled my fingers in it, and now and again I shook one of the baskets, to see for myself how readily the white grains of saltpeter separated from among the black specks of charcoal and the yellow sulphur, and sank out of sight. That day—and for many days afterward, because other things took precedence—I did not do anything else with the flaming powder.

That night, when I went to bed, and only Buyantu joined me, I grumbled, “What is this indisposition Biliktu is suffering? I saw her only hours ago in these rooms, and she appeared perfectly healthy. But it must be more than a month now since she has slept in this bed with me or with us. Is she avoiding me? Have I somehow displeased her?”

Buyantu made only a teasing reply: “Do you miss her? Am I not enough for you? After all, my sister and I are identical. Hold me and see.” She snuggled into my arms. “There. You cannot complain that you yearn for what you are this moment holding. But, if you like, I give you leave to pretend that I am Biliktu, and I challenge you to tell me in what respect I am not.”

She was right. When, in the dark, I pretended that she was her sister, she very well could have been, and I could hardly claim that I was being deprived.

10.

IN Venice, we do not take much account of any new year’s coming. It is merely the first day of March, on which we begin the next year’s calendar, and it is no cause for celebration unless it chances to fall on the day of Carnevale. But in Kithai every New Year was regarded as portentous, and had to be fittingly welcomed. So it was the excuse for festivities that consumed an entire month, lapping over from the old year into the new one. Like our Christian movable holy days, the entire Kithai calendar depends on the moon, so its First Day of the First Moon can fall any time between mid-January and mid-February. The celebrations commenced on the seventh night of the old year’s Twelfth Moon, when families sat down to partake of the traditional Eight-Ingredient Pudding, then exchanged gifts among themselves, their neighbors and friends and relatives.

From that time on, there seemed to be some kind of observance every day and night. On the twenty-third day of that Twelfth Moon, for example, everyone set up a clamor to wish “bon viazo” to their kitchen god Nagatai, as he ostensibly ascended to Heaven to make his report on the household of which he was overseer. Since he allegedly does not return to his place over the hearth until the eve of the New Year, the people all took advantage of his absence to indulge in libertine feasting and drinking and gambling and other things they would be afraid or ashamed to do under Nagatai’s scrutiny.

The final day of the old year was the most frenetic of the whole season, that being the last day on which debts were to be collected and accounts settled. Every street leading to a pawnshop was clogged with people pledging, for a pitiful few tsien, their valuables, furniture, even the clothes they wore. Every other street was similarly crowded and turmoiled by the creditors dashing about in search of their debtors and the debtors dashing about in desperate search of some means either to pay them or avoid them. Everybody was chasing somebody, and himself was being chased by somebody else. There was much vociferation and loud abuse and blows exchanged and even, as Nostril had told me, the occasional self-immolation of a debtor no longer able to hold up his head—or his face, as the Han say.

As that last day of the old year turned into night and became the eve of the First Day of the First Moon, it turned also into a night-long display of Master Shi’s fiery trees and sparkling flowers, in wondrous variety, accompanied by parades and street dances and tumultuous noise and the music of chimes and gongs and trumpets. When the New Year day dawned, the interminable festivities were tempered by their only token touch of a Lenten abstention, that being the one day of the year when all were forbidden to eat meat. And on the subsequent five days, no one was allowed to throw away anything at all. Even for a scullion to throw out the kitchen’s waste water would risk throwing out the household’s good fortune for the next year. Apart from those two gestures of austerity, the celebrating went on unceasingly, right through the fifteenth day of the First Moon.

The common people put up new pictures of all their old gods, ceremoniously pasting them over the tattered old ones that had hung for the past year on their house doors and walls. Every family that could afford it paid a scribe to compose for them a “spring couplet,” likewise to be pasted up somewhere. The streets perpetually teemed with acrobats, masquers, stiltwalkers, storytellers, wrestlers, jugglers, hoop twirlers, fire eaters, astrologers and fortune-tellers, purveyors of every sort of food and drink, even “dancing lions”—each consisting of two extremely agile men inside a costume of gilt plaster and red cloth, doing some unbelievable and most unleonine contortions.

In their temples, the Han priests of every religion rather unreligiously presided over public games of chance. These were attended by multitudes of players—creditors squandering their new gains, I assumed, and debtors trying to recoup their losses—and, most of them being drunk and wagering heavily and playing ineptly, their contributions no doubt supported all the temples and priests for the entire year to come. One game was merely the familiar throwing of dice. Another, called ma-jiang, was played with little bone tiles. Another game was played with stiff paper cards called zhi-pai.

(I myself later got intrigued by the intricacies of the zhi-pai and learned to play all the games—for there are innumerable gambling pastimes possible with a pack of seventy-eight cards divided into orders of hearts, bells, leaves and acorns, and they subdivided into cards of points and coats and emblems. But, since I brought back a pack of the cards to Venice, and they have been so much admired and copied and, now called tarocchi, are so well and widely known, I need not expatiate on the zhi-pai. )

The weeks of celebration concluded with the Feast of Lanterns, on the fifteenth day of the First Moon. In addition to everything else that was still going on in the streets of Khanbalik, every family vied that night to see which could flaunt the most marvelously made lantern. They paraded with their creations, of paper or silk or translucent horn or Muscovy glass, in shapes of balls, cubes, fans, little temples, all illuminated by candles or wick lamps inside.