Setsen left me at morning, and I joined the Khan and his courtiers for a day of hawking. Even Ali Babar came along, after I had assured him that falconry involved no such risks to the hunter as did the more strenuous veneries, like boar-sticking. We started much game that day, and the sport was good. Since the sharp-eyed falcons could see to wait on and stoop and strike well into the twilight, our whole company stayed out that night in the zhu-gan field palace. We returned to Xan-du the next day, with an abundance of game birds and hares for the kitchen pots, and that night, after a good dinner of venison, I received the second of Kubilai’s contributions to the improvement of the Mongol race.
However, she also was preceded by a slave bringing the white porcelain incense burner and, when I saw that it was the same pretty slave girl, I tried to convey to her my discomfiture at her having to attend two of these nuptial nights. But she only smiled winningly, and either failed or refused to comprehend me. So, when the Mongol maiden finally arrived and introduced herself as Jehol, I said:
“Forgive my unmanly agitation, Jehol, but I find it more than a little disquieting that the same monitor must twice oversee my nighttime doings.”
“Do not concern yourself with the lon-gya,” said Jehol indifferently. “She is only a slave girl of the lowly Min people of the Fu-kien Province.”
“Is she indeed?” I said, interested to hear that. “Of the Min, is she? Nevertheless, I do not care to have my successive performances compared—in their degree of prowess or stupration or efficacy or whatever other aspect.”
Jehol only laughed and said, “She will make no comparisons, neither here nor in the concubine quarters. She cannot do any such thing.”
By this time, with the slave girl’s assistance, Jehol had undressed to an extent that took my mind off other matters. So I said, “Well, if you do not care, I suppose I need not,” and the night proceeded as had the other one.
But, when came the night for the next Mongol maiden—her name was Yesukai—and she was preceded by that same Min slave girl bearing that same incense burner, I once more raised objections. Yesukai only shrugged and said:
“When we were at the palace in Khanbalik, we had a numerous complement of servants and slaves. But when the Lady Matron brought us out here to Xan-du for the season, we came with only a few domestics, and this slave is the only lon-gya among them. If we girls must make do with her, you must get used to her.”
“She may be admirably reticent about what goes on in this chamber,” I grumbled. “But I have ceased to fret that she may indiscreetly talk. Now I fear that, after many more such nights as this, she will start laughing.”
“She cannot laugh,” said Cheren, who was the next of the Mongol maidens to visit me. “No more than she can talk or hear. The slave is a lon-gya. You do not know the word? It means a deaf-mute.”
“Is that a fact?” I murmured, regarding the slave with more compassion than I had done. “No wonder she has never answered when I railed at her. All this time, I thought lon-gya was her name.”
“If she ever had a name, she cannot tell it,” said Toghon, who was the next of the Mongol maidens. “In the concubine quarters, we call her Hui-sheng. But that is only our feminine malice, when we make sport of her.”
“Hui-sheng,” I repeated. “What malice in that? It is a most mellifluous name.”
“It is a most unfitting name, for it means Echo,” said Devlet, the next of the Mongol maidens. “But no matter. She neither hears it nor answers to it.”
“A soundless Echo,” I said, and smiled. “An unfitting name, perhaps, but a pleasing paradox. Hui-sheng. Hui-sheng … .”
To Ayuka, the seventh or eighth of the Mongol maidens, I said, “Tell me, does your Lady Matron deliberately seek deaf-mute slaves for the duty of overseeing the nuptial nights?”
“She does not seek them. She makes them so from childhood. Incapable either of eavesdropping or of gossiping. They cannot gasp in surprise or disapproval if they see strange sights in the bedchamber, or afterward prattle of perverse things they have witnessed. If they do ever misbehave and must be beaten, they cannot scream.”
“Bruto barabào! Makes them so? How?”
“Actually, the Lady Matron has a shaman physician do the silencing operation,” said Merghus, who was the eighth or ninth of the Mongol maidens. “He puts a red-hot skewer down each ear and through the neck into the gullet. I cannot tell you exactly what is done, but look at Hui-sheng—you can see the tiny scar on her throat.”
I looked, and it was so. But I saw more than that when I gazed upon Hui-sheng, for Kubilai had spoken truly when he said that the girls of the Min were unsurpassably beautiful. At least this one was. Being a slave, she wore not the blank white-powdered face of the other women native to these lands, nor the elaborate stiff hairdos of her Mongol mistresses. Her pale-peach skin was her own, and her hair was but simply piled in soft billows on her head. Except for the little crescent scar on her throat, she bore not a blemish, which was not true of the noble maidens she attended. They, having grown up mostly outdoors, in rude living conditions, among horses and such, had many nicks and pocks and abrasions marring even the more intimate areas of their flesh.
Hui-sheng was at that moment seated in the most graceful and endearing posture a woman can ever unconsciously assume. Quite unaware of anyone’s regard, she was fixing a flower in her soft black hair. Her left hand held the pink blossom above her left ear, and she had her right hand arched over her head to assist in the arranging. That particular placement of the head and hands and arms and upper torso makes of any woman, clothed or naked, a poem of curves and gentle angles—her face turned a little downward and to one side, her arms framing it in harmonious composition, her neck line flowing smoothly to the bosom, her breasts sweetly uplifted by the raised arms. In that posture even an old woman looks young, a fat one looks lithe, a gaunt one looks sleek, and a beautiful woman is never more beautiful.
I remember also noticing that Hui-sheng had, in front of each ear, a fluff of very fine black hair growing as far down as her jaw line, and another feathery floss growing down the back of her neck into her collar. They were winsome details, and they made me wonder if a Min woman might be exceptionally furry in more private places. The Mongol maidens, I might mention, all had in their most private places those peculiarly Mongol “little warmers” of smooth, flat hair like small swatches of cat pelt. But, if I have uncharacteristically said little else about their charms, or about my nights of frolicking with them, it is owing to no sudden access of modesty or reserve on my part; it is only that I do not too well remember those girls. I have even forgotten now whether I was visited by an even dozen of them, or eleven, or thirteen, or some other number.
Oh, they were handsome, enjoyable, competent, satisfying, but they were that and no more. I recall them as just a succession of fleeting incidents, a different one each night. My consciousness was more impressed by the small, unobtrusive, silent Echo—and not simply for the reason that she was present every night, but because she outshone all the Mongol maidens together. Had she not been a distracting influence, I probably would not have found them so forgettable. They were, after all, the pick of Mongol womanhood, of twenty-four-karat quality, eminently well suited to their function of bed partnership. But, even while I enjoyed the sight of them being undressed by the lon-gya slave, I could not help observing how unnecessarily over-sized they seemed alongside the diminutive, dainty Hui-sheng, and how coarse of complexion and physiognomy, alongside her peach-blossom skin and exquisite features. Even their breasts, which in other circumstances I would have adored as beautifully voluptuous, I thought somehow too aggressively mammalian, compared to the almost childlike slimness and fragility of Hui-sheng’s body.