In honesty, I will say that the Mongol maidens must have found me not their ideal, either, and they must have been less than overjoyed to be mating with me. They had been recruited, and had survived a rigorous system of selection, to be bedded with the Khan of All Khans. He was an old man, and perhaps also not the dream man of a young woman, but he was the Khakhan. It must have been a considerable disappointment for them to be allotted to a foreigner instead—a Ferenghi, a nobody—and worse yet, to be commanded not to take the fern-seed precaution before lying with me. They were, presumably, of twenty-four-karat fecundity, meaning that they had to expect impregnation by me, and the consequent bearing not of noble Mongol descendants of the Chinghiz line, but of half-breed bastards, who were bound to be regarded askance by the rest of the Kithai population, if not actively despised.
I had doubts of my own about the wisdom of Kubilai’s having set me and the concubines to this conjoining. It was not that I felt myself either superior or inferior to them, for I was aware that they and I and all other folk in the world are of the same single human race. I had been taught that from my earliest years, and I had in my travels seen ample evidence of it. (Two small examples: all men everywhere, except sometimes the holy and the hermit, are ever ready to get drunk; all women everywhere, when they run, run as if their knees are hobbled together.) Clearly, all people are descendants of the same original Adam and Eve, but it is just as clear that the progeny have diverged widely in the generations since the expulsion from Eden.
Kubilai called me a Ferenghi, and he meant no offense by it, but the word lumped me into a mistakenly undifferentiated mass. I knew that we Venetians were quite distinct from the Slavs and Sicilians and all others of the Western nationalities. While I could not perceive as much variety among the numerous Mongol tribes, I knew that every person took pride in his own, and regarded it as the foremost breed of Mongols, even while asserting that all Mongols were the foremost of mankind.
In my travels, I did not always conceive an affection for every new people I met, but I did find them all of interest—and the interest was in their differences. Different skin colors, different customs, foods, speech, superstitions, entertainments, even interestingly different deficiencies and ignorances and stupidities. Some while after this time at Xan-du, I would visit the city of Hang-zho, and I would see that it, like Venice, was a city all of canals. But in every other respect, Hang-zho was not at all like Venice, and it was the variances, not the similarities, that made the place lovely in my eyes. So is Venice still lovely and dear to me, but it would cease to be if it were not unique. In my opinion, a world of cities and places and views all alike would be the dullest world imaginable, and I feel much the same way about the world’s peoples. If all of them—white and peach and brown and black and whatever other colors exist—were stirred together into a bland tan, every other of their jagged and craggy differences would flatten down into featurelessness. You can walk confidently across a tan sand desert because it is not fissured by any chasms, but neither does it have any high peaks worth looking at. I realized that my contribution to the blending of Ferenghi and Mongol bloodlines would be negligible. Still I was reluctant that people so distinct should be blended at all—by fiat, deliberately, not even by casual encounter—and thereby made in any degree less various, and therefore less interesting.
I was first attracted to Hui-sheng at least partly by her differences from all other women I had so far known. To see that Min slave girl among her Mongol mistresses was like seeing a single spray of pink-ivory peach blossom in a vase of shaggy, spiky, brass- and copper- and bronze-colored chrysanthemums. However, she was beautiful not only in comparison with those less so. Like a peach blossom, she was comely all by herself, and she would have stood out even among a whole flowering peach orchard of her comely sisters of the Min. There were reasons for that. Hui-sheng lived in a perpetually silent world, so her eyes were full of dreaming even when she was wide awake. Yet her deprivation of speech and hearing was not a total handicap, nor even very noticeable to others—I myself had not realized, until I was told, that she was a deaf-mute—for she had evolved a liveliness of facial expression and a vocabulary of small gestures that communicated her thoughts and feelings without a sound but without any mistaking them. In time, I learned to read at a glance her every infinitesimal movement of qahwah-colored eyes, rose-wine lips, feathery brows, twinkling dimples, willow hands and frond fingers. But that was later.
Inasmuch as I had become enthralled of Hui-sheng under the worst possible circumstances—while she was seeing me shamelessly cavort with her dozen or so Mongol mistresses—I could hardly commence any courtship of her, without risking her derisive repulsion, until some time had passed and, I would hope, blurred her memory of those circumstances. I determined that I would delay a decent while before beginning any overtures, and in the meantime I would arrange to put some distance between her and those concubines, while not distancing her from me. To do those things, I needed the help of the Khakhan himself.
So, when I was sure there were no more Mongol maidens forthcoming, and when I knew Kubilai to be in a good mood—the messenger had recently arrived to tell him that Yun-nan was his and that Bayan was forging into the heartland of the Sung—I requested audience with him and was cordially received. I told him that I had accomplished my service to the maidens, and thanked him for giving me that opportunity to leave some trace of myself in the posterity of Kithai, and then said:
“I think, Sire, now that I have enjoyed this orgy of unrestrained pleasure, it might stand as the capstone to my bachelor career. That is to say, I believe I have attained to an age and maturity where I ought to cease the prodigal squandering of my ardors—the filly-chasing, as we call it in Venice, or the dipping of the ladle, as you say in these parts. I think it would be fitting for me now to contemplate a more settled conjugality, perhaps with an especially favored concubine, and I ask your permission, Sire—”
“Hui!” he exclaimed, with a smile of delight. “You were captivated by one of those twenty-four-karat damsels!”
“Oh, by all of them, Sire, it goes without saying. However, the one I would have for my keeping is the slave girl who attended them.”
He sat back and grunted, with rather less delight, “Uu?”
“She is a girl of the Min, and—”
“Aha!” he cried, smiling broadly again. “Tell me no more. That captivation I can appreciate!”
“—and I would ask your leave, Sire, to purchase the slave’s freedom, for she serves your Lady Matron of Concubines. Her name is Hui-sheng.”
He waved a hand and said, “She will be deeded to you as soon as we get back to Khanbalik. Then she will be your servant or slave or consort, whatever you and she may choose. She is my gift to you in return for your help in acquiring Manzi for me.”
“I thank you, Sire, most sincerely. And Hui-sheng will thank you, too. Are we returning soon to Khanbalik?”
“We will leave Xan-du tomorrow. Your companion Ali Babar has already been informed. He is probably in your chambers packing for you at this moment.”
“Is this an abrupt departure, Sire? Has something happened?”
He smiled more broadly than ever. “Did you not hear me mention the acquisition of Manzi? A messenger just rode up from the capital with the news.”
I gasped, “Sung has fallen!”
“The Chief Minister Achmad sent the word. A company of Han heralds rode into Khanbalik to announce the imminent arrival of the Sung’s Dowager Empress Xi-chi. She is coming herself to surrender that empire and the Imperial Yin and her own royal person. Achmad could receive her, of course, as my Vice-Regent, but I prefer to do that myself.”