3

MY companions, I saw when I located and rejoined them, had also encountered a vengeful enemy in the fog, but had not fared so well as I. They were grouped around two figures stretched on the ground, and Bayan whirled with his sword in his hand as I approached.

“Ah, Polo,” he said, relaxing as he recognized me, though I must have been bloody all over. “Looks as if you met one, too—and dispatched him. Good man. This one was insanely fierce.” He pointed his blade at one of the supine figures, a Yi warrior, much hacked about and obviously dead. “It took three of us to slay him, and not before he had got one of us.” He indicated the other figure.

I exclaimed, “A tragedy! Ukuruji has been hurt!” The young Wang was lying with his face screwed up in pain, and his own two hands clutched around his neck. I cried, “He seems to be strangling!” and bent to loosen his hands and examine the injury to his throat. But when I raised the clenched hands, his head came along in their grasp. It had been completely severed from his body. I grunted and recoiled, then stood looking sadly down at him, and murmured, “How terrible. Ukuruji was a good fellow.”

“He was a Mongol,” said one of the officers. “Next to killing, dying is what Mongols do best. It is nothing to weep over.”

“No,” I agreed. “He was eager to help win Yun-nan, and he did.”

“He will not govern it, unfortunately,” said the Orlok. “But his last sight was of our total victory. That is no bad moment to die.”

I asked, “You regard Yun-nan as ours, then?”

“Oh, there will be other contested valleys. And cities and towns to take. We have not annihilated every last one of the foe. But the Yi will be demoralized by this crushing defeat, and will be putting up only token resistance. Yes, I can safely say that Yun-nan is ours. That means we will next be battering at the back door of the Sung, and the whole empire must fall very soon. That is the word you will take back to Kubilai.”

“I wish I were taking him the good news unalloyed with bad. It cost him a son.”

One of the officers said, “Kubilai has many other sons. He may even adopt you, Ferenghi, after what you did for him here. Behold, the dust is settling. You can see what you accomplished with your ingenious brass engines.”

We all turned from contemplating Ukuruji’s body, and looked down the valley. The dust was finally sifting out of the air and laying itself like a soft, gentle, age-yellowed shroud on the tormented and tumbled landscape. The mountain slopes on both sides, which earlier in the morning had been thickly forested, now had trees and greenery only fringing the edges of their open wounds—great gouged-out gullies and gorges of raw brown earth and new-broken rock. There was just enough foliage left on the mountains that they looked like matronly women who had been stripped and violated, and now were clutching to themselves the vestiges of their finery. Down in the valley, some few living people were picking their way through the last shreds of dust fog, across the jumble of rubble and rocks and tree limbs and upended tree roots. They had apparently espied us, gathered at this clear end of the valley, and decided this was the place to regroup.

They kept plodding and hobbling up to us during the rest of that day, singly and in little groups. Most of them, as I have said, were Bho and Yi survivors of the devastation—with no idea how they had lived through it—some injured or crippled, but some entirely unscathed. Most of the Yi, even the unhurt ones, had lost all will to fight, and approached us with the resignation of prisoners of war. Some of them might have come running and frothing and swinging steel, as two of them already had done, but they came in custody of Mongol warriors who had disarmed them on the way. The Mongols were the volunteers who had accompanied the mock army as musicians and rear guards. Since they had been at the leading and trailing ends of the march, hence at the farther ends of the camp, and had had foreknowledge of our plans, they had had the best chance to run out of the way of the avalanches. Though they were only a score or two in number, those men were loud with congratulations on the success of our stratagem, and with self-congratulation on their own escape from it.

Even more to be congratulated—and I made sure to give each of them a comradely embrace—were the Mongol engineers. They were the last survivors to join us, for they had to come all the way down the ravaged mountain slopes. They arrived looking justifiably proud of what they had done, but looking also rather stunned, some of them because they had been standing close to the concussion when their engines ignited, but some because of the sheer awesomeness of what had then occurred. But I told every one of them, and sincerely, “I could not have done the positioning better myself!” and took his name, to praise him personally to the Khakhan. I must remark, though, that I collected only eleven names. Twelve men had gone up into the mountains, and twelve balls had done what they were supposed to do, but we never learned what happened to the man who did not return.

It was the middle of the night when Captain Toba returned, in company with the leading columns of the authentic Mongol army, but I was still awake at that hour and glad to see them. Some of the blood with which I was caked was my own, and some of it was still flowing, for I had not emerged entirely undamaged from my private contest with the Yi. That warrior had given me some cuts on the hands and forearms, which I had hardly noticed at the time, but by now were quite painful. The first thing the army troops did was to erect a small yurtu for a hospital tent, and Bayan made sure that I was the first casualty attended by the shaman physician-priest-sorcerers.

They cleaned my cuts and anointed them with vegetable salves and bandaged them, which would have sufficed me. But then they had to engage in some sorcery to divine whether I might have sustained internal injuries not visible. The chief shaman set upright before me a knotted bunch of dried herbs that he called the chutgur, or “demon of fevers,” and read aloud to it from a book of incantations, while all the lesser physicians made an infernal noise with little bells and drums and sheep’shorn trumpets. Then the head shaman tossed a sheep’s shoulder bone onto the brazier burning in the middle of the tent and, when it had charred black, raked it out and peered at it to read the cracks the heat had produced. He finally adjudged me to be internally intact, which I could have told him with a lot less fuss, and let me leave the hospital. The next casualty brought in was the Wang Ukuruji, to be sewn back together and made presentable for his funeral the next day.

Outside the yurtu, the darkness of the night had been considerably abolished by the light of many tremendous camp fires. Around them, the troops were doing their stamping, leaping, pounding victory dances, and yelling “Ha!” and “Hui!” and liberally sloshing all onlookers with arkhi and kumis from the cups they held while they danced. They were all rapidly getting quite drunk.

I found Bayan and a couple of the just-arrived sardars, still fairly sober, waiting to present me with a gift. On the army’s march south from Ba-Tang, they told me, its advance scouts had routinely swept every town and village and isolated building, to rout out any suspicious persons who might be Yi soldiers passing as civilians to get behind the Mongol lines as spies or agents of random destruction. And, in a run-down karwansarai on a back road, they had found a man who could not give a satisfactory account of himself. They produced him for me, with the air of giving me a great prize, but he looked no such thing. He was just another dirty, smelly Bho trapa with his head shaven and his face clotted with that medicinal brown plant-sap.