When I entered the sumptuously appointed sanctum of the Chief Minister, the Vice-Regent, the Finance Minister, he did not rise or salute me. Instead, unlike the Khan of All Khans, he obviously expected me to make ko-tou, and waited for me to do it, and when I stood up again he did not offer me a seat. The Wali Achmad looked like any other Arab—hawk—beak nose, stiff black beard, dark and grainy complexion—except that he was cleaner than most Arabs I had seen in Arab lands, he having adopted the Kithai custom of frequent bathing. Also, he had the coldest eyes I ever saw in an Arab or any other Easterner. Brown eyes are usually as warm as qahwah, but his looked more like chips of the Mukha agate stone. He wore Arab aba and kaffiyah, but not of flimsy cotton; of silks colored like a rainbow.
“Your wages, Folo,” he said ungraciously, and shoved across his table no purse of money, but an untidy pile of slips of paper.
I picked them up and examined them. The slips were all alike: made of dark and durable mulberry paper, decorated on both sides with complex designs and a multitude of words both in Han characters and Mongol alphabet, done in black ink, over which a large and intricate seal mark had been added in red ink. I did not say thank you. I had taken an instant, instinctive dislike to the man, and was quite prepared to suspect chicanery. So I said:
“Excuse me, Wali Achmad, but am I being paid in pagheri?”
“I do not know,” he said languidly. “What does the word mean?”
“Pagherì are papers promising to repay a loan, or to pay in the future some pledge made. They are a convenience of the commerce of Venice.”
“Then I suppose you could call these pagherì, for they are also a convenience, being the legal tender of this realm. We took over the system from the Han, who call it ‘flying money.’ Each of those papers you hold is worth a liang of silver.”
I pushed the little pile back across the table toward him. “If it please the Wali, then, I should prefer to take the silver.”
“You have the equivalent,” he snapped. “That much silver would make your purse drag the floor. It is the beauty of the flying money that large sums, even immense sums, can be exchanged or transported without weight or bulk. Or hidden away in your mattress, if you are a miser. Also, when you pay for a purchase, the merchant need not every time weigh the currency and verify its metal’s purity.”
“You mean,” I said, unconvinced, “I could go into the market and buy a bowl of mian to eat and the vendor would accept one of these pieces of paper in payment?”
“Bismillah! He would give you his whole market-stall for it. Probably his wife and children as well. I told you: each of those is worth a whole liang. A liang is one thousand tsien, and for one tsien you could buy twenty or thirty bowls of mian. If you have need of small change—here.” He took from a drawer several packets of smaller sized papers. “How do you want it? Notes of half a liang each? A hundred tsien? What?”
Marveling, I said, “The flying money is made in all denominations? And the common folk accept them like real money?”
“It is real money, unbeliever! Cannot you read? Those words on the paper attest its realness. They proclaim its face value, and appended are the signatures of all the Khakhan’s numerous officers and bursars and clerks of the imperial treasury. My own name is among them. And over all is stamped in red ink a much bigger yin—the great seal of Kubilai himself. Those are guarantees that at any time the paper can be exchanged for its face amount in actual silver from the treasury stores. Thus the paper is as real as the silver it represents.”
“But if,” I persisted, “someday someone should wish to redeem one of these papers, and it were repudiated …?”
Achmad said drily, “If the time ever comes when the Khakhan’s yin evokes disrespect, you will have many more urgent things to worry about than your wages. We all will.”
Still examining the flying money, I mused aloud, “Nevertheless, I should think it would be less trouble for the treasury simply to issue the bits of silver. I mean, if there are sheaves of these little papers circulating throughout the realm, and if every official must write his name on every last one—”
“We do not write our names over and over again,” said Achmad, beginning to sound very annoyed. “We write them only once, and from that signature the palace Master Yinmaker makes a yin, which is a backward-written word like an engraved seal, and can be inked and stamped on paper innumerable times. Surely even you uncivilized Venetians are familiar with seals.”
“Yes, Wali Achmad.”
“Very well. For the making of a piece of money, all the necessary separate yin for words and characters and letters are arranged and locked together into a form of the proper size. The form is repeatedly inked and the papers pressed onto it one by one. It is a process the Han call zi-shu-ju, which means something like ‘the gathered writing.’”
I nodded. “Our Western monks will often cut a backward block of wood for the big initial letter of a manuscript, and impress several pages with it, for the several Friars Illuminators to color and elaborate in their individual styles, before proceeding to write the rest of the page by hand.”
Achmad shook his head. “In the gathered writing the impression need not be limited to the initial letter, and no hand writing need be done at all. By the molding in terra-cotta of many identical yin of every character in the Han language—and now having yin of every letter of the Mongol alphabet—this zi-shu-ju can combine any number of yin into any number of words. Thus can be composed whole pages of writing, and those combined into whole books. Zi-shu-ju can produce them in great quantities, every copy alike, far more quickly and perfectly than any scribes can indite by hand. If provided with yin of the Arabic alphabet and of the Roman alphabet, the process could produce books in any known language, equally easily and abundantly and cheaply.”
“Say you so?” I murmured. “Why, Wali, that is an invention more to be admired even than the advantages of the flying money.”
“You are right, Folo. I perceived that myself, the first time I saw one of the gathered-writing books. I thought of sending some of the Han experts westward to teach the doing of the zi-shu-ju in my native Arabia. But fortunately I learned in time that the zi-shu-ju forms are inked with brushes made of the bristles of swine. So it would be unthinkable to suggest the process to the nations of holy Islam.”
“Yes, I can see that. Well, I thank you, Wali Achmad, both for the instruction and for the wages.” I began to put the papers away in my belt purse.
“Allow me,” he said casually, “to proffer one or two other bits of instruction. There are some places you cannot spend the flying money. The Fondler, for example, will take bribes only in solid gold. But I think you already knew that.”
Taking care to make my face expressionless, I raised my eyes from my purse to his cold agate gaze. I wondered how much else he knew about my doings, and obligingly he told me:
“I would not dream of suggesting that you disobey the Khakhan. He did instruct you to make inquiries. But I will suggest that you confine your inquiries to the upper stories of the palace. Not down in Master Fing’s dungeons. Not even in the servants’ quarters.”
So he knew that I had put an ear belowstairs. But did he know why? Did he know that I was interested in the Minister of Lesser Races, and, if he did, why should he care? Or did he fear that I might hear something damaging to Achmad the Chief Minister? I kept my face expressionless and waited.
“Cellar dungeons are unhealthy places,” he went on, as indifferently as if he were warning me against rheumatic damp. “But tortures can happen aboveground as well, and far worse ones than anything the Fondler inflicts.”