The boar meat made a tasty meal, and I ate it sitting at the high table with the Khan, the Prince Chingkim, the Goldsmith Boucher and the Firemaster Shi. I tendered Chingkim my condolences on his brother’s demise and my congratulations on his son’s birth. The other two courtiers alternated between plying me with intense questions about the successful working of the huo-yao balls and fulsomely praising me and each other for having invented a true invention, one that would be imitated throughout the world, and would endure down the ages, changing the whole face of war, and making forever famous the names Shi and Polo and Boucher.
“For shame!” I chided. “You said yourself, Master Shi, that the flaming powder was invented by some unknown Han.”
“Peu de chose!” cried Boucher. “It was nothing but a toy until its full potential was realized by a wily Venetian, a renegade Jew and a brilliant young Frenchman!”
“Gan-bei!” cried old Shi. “L’chaim!” as he toasted us all with a goblet of mao-tai, and then downed it in a gulp. Boucher emulated him, but I took only a sip of mine. Let my fellow immortals get drunk; I would not, for I expected later to have need of my faculties.
Some Uighur musicians played during the meal—mercifully softly —and after it we were entertained by jugglers and funambulists and then a company performing a play which, for all its foreignness, I found familiar. A Han storyteller droned and yammered and bellowed the tale, and the conversations occurring in it, while his associates worked the strings of marionettes acting out the various roles. I could not understand a word, but found it perfectly comprehensible, because the Han characters—Aged Cuckold and Comic Physician and Sneering Villain and Bumbling Sage and Lovelorn Maiden and Valiant Hero and so on—were so recognizably similar to those of any Venetian puppet show: our fuddled Pantaleone and inept physician Dotòr Balanzòn and rascal Pulcinella and dim-witted lawyer Dotòr da Nulla and coquette Colombina and dashing Trovatore and so on. But Kubilai seemed not much to enjoy the show, grumbling to us near him, “Why use puppets to portray people? Why not have people portray people?” (And obediently, in after years, all the player companies did exactly that: dispensed with the narrator and the marionettes, and presented human players each speaking his or her own part in the story.)
Most of the court was still loudly making merry when I retired to my chambers. But evidently Kubilai had given his instructions some while earlier, for I had just got into bed and not yet blown out the bedside lamp when there was a scratching at my door and a young woman came in, bearing what looked like a small white chest.
“Sain bina, sain nai,” I said politely, but she made no response, and when she came into the lamplight I saw that she was not a Mongol, but a Han or one of the related races.
She was obviously just a maid preparing for the entry of her lady, for now I discerned that the white object she carried was only an incense burner. I hoped that her lady would prove to be as comely and as exquisitely delicate as the servant. She set down the burner near my bed, a lidded porcelain box, shaped like a jewel chest and embossed with intricate raised designs. Then she took up my lamp, shyly smiling a silent request for permission and, when I nodded, used the lamp’s flame to set smoldering a stick of incense, lifted the burner’s lid and carefully placed the incense inside. I took note that it was the purple tsan-xi-jang, which is the very finest incense, compounded of aromatic herbs, musk and gold dust, to give a room not a heavy, spicy, closed-in smell, but the scent of summer fields. The servant girl sank down to sit meek and silent beside my bed, her eyes discreetly lowered, while the fragrant and calming perfume permeated my room. It did not calm me quite enough; I felt almost as nervous as if I had been really a bridegroom. So I tried to make small talk with the maid, but either she was well trained to imperturbability or was totally ignorant of Mongol, for she never even raised her eyes. Finally there was another scratching at the door, and her lady came proudly in. I was pleased to see that she was handsome—exceptionally so, for a Mongol—if not so tiny and dainty and porcelain-lovely as her servant.
I said again in Mongol, “Good meeting, good woman,” and this one murmured back, “Sain bina, sain urkek.”
“Come! Do not call me brother,” I said, with a shaky laugh.
“It is the accepted salutation.”
“Well, at least try not to think of me as a brother.”
And she and I continued to make such small talk—very small talk, indeed, quite inane—as the maid helped her unpeel and get out of her considerable nuptial finery. I introduced myself, and she responded, in a sort of cascade of words, that she was called Setsen, and she was of the Mongol tribe called Kerait, and she was a Nestorian Christian, all the Kerait having been converted, in a bunch, by some long-ago wandering Nestorian bishop, and she had never set foot outside her nameless village in the far-northern fur-trapping country of Tannu-Tuva until she was selected for concubinage and transported to a trading town called Urga, where, to her surprise and delight, the provincial Wang had graded her at twenty-four karats and sent her on south to Khanbalik. Also, she said, she had never before laid eyes on a Ferenghi, and excuse her impudence, but were my hair and beard really naturally pale of color or had they simply gone gray with age? I told Setsen that I was not a great deal older than she, and still far from senile, as she ought to have descried from my rising excitement while I watched her disrobe. I would offer further evidence of my youthful vigor, I promised, as soon as the maidservant quitted the room. However, that girl, after tucking her naked lady in beside me, sank down again beside the bed as if to stay there, and did not even put out the light. So the subsequent conversation between me and Setsen got worse than inane, it got ridiculous.
I said, “You may dismiss your servant.”
She said, “The lon-gya is not a servant. She is a slave.”
“Whatever. You may dismiss her.”
“She is commanded to attend my qing-du chu-kai—my defloration.”
“I undo the command.”
“You cannot, Lord Marco. She is my attendant.”
“I do not care, Setsen, if she is your Nestorian bishop. I would prefer that she attend elsewhere.”
“I cannot send her away and neither can you. She is here by order of the Court Procurer and the Lady Matron of Concubines.”
“I take precedence over matrons and procurers. I am here by order of the Khan of All Khans.”
Setsen looked hurt. “I thought you were here because you wanted to be.”
“Well, that, too,” I said, instantly contrite. “But I did not expect to have an audience to cheer my endeavors.”
“She will not cheer. She is a lon-gya. She will not say anything.”
“Perdiziòn! I do not care if she sings an inno imeneo, only she must do it somewhere else!”
“What is that?”
“A wedding song. A hymeneal hymn. It celebrates the—well, the breaking of the—that is to say, the defloration.”
“But that is exactly what she is here for, Lord Marco!”
“To sing?”
“No, no, as a witness. She will depart as soon as you—as soon as she sees the stain on the bedsheet. Then she goes to report to the Lady Matron that all is as it should be. You comprehend?”
“Protocol, yes. Vakh.”
I glanced over at the girl, who seemed to be occupied in studying the white convolutions of the incense burner, and paying no least heed to our squabble. I was glad I was not a real bridegroom, or the circumstances would have stopped my living up to my earlier braggery. However, since I was only a sort of surrogate bridegroom and since neither the bride nor the bride’s maid found the situation embarrassing, why should I find it inhibiting? So I proceeded to provide the evidence the slave was waiting to get, and Setsen amiably if inexpertly cooperated, and during those exertions, so far as I noticed, the slave paid no more attention than if we had been as inert as her incense burner. But, after some while, Setsen leaned out from the bed and shook the girl by the shoulder, and she got up and helped Setsen untangle the bedclothes, and they found the small red smear. The slave nodded and smiled brightly at us, bent and blew out the lamp and left the room and left us to any nonobligatory consummations we might care to make for ourselves.