“You murdering monster! Have you slain yet another—?”

“Had I found her,” he went on implacably, “she might also have told me that you refused her exactly that consideration. But Allah bids us be more considerate than you heartless Christians. So—”

“Dio me varda!”

He dropped the mocking tone and snapped, “I begin to tire of this jousting. Let me say just one thing more. I foresee that it will raise some eyebrows, Folo, if you start claiming publicly to have heard disembodied voices in the Echo Pavilion, especially if you insist that you have heard the voice of a person known by all to be long defunct, and she a person slain in a misadventure of which you were the cause. The most charitable interpretation of your babblings will be that you are woefully demented by grief and guilt arising from that incident. Anything else you may babble—such as accusations against important and well-esteemed courtiers—will be similarly regarded.”

I could only stand there and seethe at him, impotently.

“Mind you,” he went on, “your pitiable affliction may redound to the public good, after all. In civilized Islam, we have institutions called Houses of Delusion, for the safe confinement of those persons possessed by the demon of insanity. I have long pressed Kubilai to establish the same hereabout, but he stubbornly maintains that no such demon infests these more wholesome regions. Your obviously troubled mind and troublesome behavior may convince him otherwise. In which event, I shall order the commencement of construction of Kithai’s first House of Delusion, and I leave you to guess the identity of its first occupant.”

“You—you—!” I might have lunged across the lilak bed at him, but he was stretching a hand toward the bedside gong.

“Now, I have told you to go and look and satisfy yourself that there is no one on the Kara Hill—no one anywhere to substantiate your demented imaginings. I suggest you go. There or somewhere. But go!”

What could I do but go? I went, miserably disheartened, and I plodded hopelessly up the Kara Hill to the Echo Pavilion once more, though knowing it would be as the Arab had said, barren of people, and it was. There was no least trace of Buyantu’s ever having been there, or ever having been anything but dead. I came with dragging steps down the hill again, even more dejected and demolished, “with my bagpipes turned inside their sack,” as the old Venetian phrase—and my father—would express it.

The sardonic thought of my father put me in mind of him and, having now no other destination, I trudged off to his chambers to pay a homecoming call. Maybe he would have some sage advice for me. But one of his maidservants answered to my scratch at the portal, and told me that her Master Polo was out of the city—still or again, I did not ask which. So I moped on farther along the corridor to Uncle Mafìo’s suite. The maidservant there told me that yes, her Master Polo was in residence, but that he did not always spend the night in his chambers, and sometimes, not to disturb his servants unnecessarily, he came and went by a back door he had had cut in a rear wall of the suite.

“So I never know, at night, whether he is in his bedroom or not,” she said, with a slightly sad smile. “And I would not intrude upon him.”

I remembered that Uncle Mafìo had once claimed to have “given pleasure” to this servant woman, and I had been glad for him. Perhaps it had been only a brief foray into normal sexuality, and he had since found it unsatisfactory, and desisted, and that was why she looked a little sad, and why she would not “intrude upon him.”

“But you are his family, no intruder,” she said, bowing me in the door. “You may go and see for yourself.”

I went through the rooms to his bedchamber, and it was dark and the bed was unoccupied. He was not there. My homecoming, I thought wryly, was not exactly being greeted with open arms and shouts of joy, not by anybody. In the lamplight spilling in from the main room, I began feeling about for a piece of paper and something to write with, to leave a note saying at least that I was back in residence. When I groped in the drawer of a cabinet, my fingernails snagged in some curiously filmy and flimsy cloth goods. Wondering, I held them up in the half-light; they seemed hardly garments sturdy enough for a man’s wear. So I went back to the main room and brought a lamp, and held them up again. They were indisputably feminine gowns, but of voluminous size. I thought: Dear God, is he nowadays disporting himself with some female giant? Was that why the maidservant seemed sad: because he had discarded her for something grotesque and perverse? Well, at least it was female … .

But it was not. I lowered the robes to fold them away again, and there stood Uncle Mafìo, who had evidently that moment come sidling in through his new back door. He looked startled, embarrassed and angry, but that was not what I noticed first. What I saw immediately was that his beardless face was powdered blank white all over, even over his eyebrows and lips, and his eyes were darkened and lengthened with an application of al-kohl rimming the eyelids and extending out from them, and a little puckered rosebud mouth had been painted in the middle of where his wide mouth should have been, and his hair was elaborately skewered by hair-spoons, and he was dressed all in gossamer robes and wispy scarves and fluttering ribbons the color of the flower called lilak.

“Gesu …” I breathed, as my initial shock and horror gave way to realization—or as much of realization as I needed, and more than I wanted. Why had it not dawned on me long ago? I had heard from enough people, God knows, about the Wali Achmad’s “eccentric tastes,” and I had long known of my uncle’s desperate clutchings, like those of a man adrift on an outgoing tide, at one crumbling anchorage after another. Just tonight, Buyantu had looked puzzled when I mentioned Achmad’s “large woman,” and then she had said evasively, “If that person had a woman’s name … .” She had known, and she had probably decided, with female cunning, to save the knowledge for bargaining with, later on. The Arab had more forthrightly threatened, “I will make public some paintings …” and I should have remembered then the kind of pictures the Master Chao was forced to paint in private. “The very name of Polo will be a laughingstock … .”

“Gèsu, Uncle Mafìo …” I whispered, with pity, revulsion and disillusionment. He said nothing, but he had the good grace to look now ashamed instead of angry at being discovered. I slowly shook my head, and considered several things I might say, and at last said:

“You once preached to me, uncle, and most persuasively, on the profitable uses of evil. How it is only the boldly evil person who triumphs in this world. Have you followed your own preachings, Uncle Mafio? Is this”—I gestured at his squalid disguise, his whole aspect of degradation—“is this the triumph it won for you?”

“Marco,” he said defensively, and in a husky voice. “There are many kinds of love. Not all of them are nice. But no kind of love is to be despised.”

“Love!” I said, making of it a dirty word.

“Lust, lechery … last resort … call it what you will,” he said bleakly. “Achmad and I are of an age. And both of us, feeling much apart from other people … outcasts … uncommon … .”

“Aberrant, I would call it. And I would think you both of an age to subdue your more egregious urges.”

“To retire to the chimney corner, you mean!” he flared, angry again. “To sit quiet there and decay, and gum our gruel and nurse our rheumatics. Do you think, because you are younger, that you have a monopoly on passion and longing? Do I look decrepit to you?”

“You look indecent!” I shouted back at him. He quailed and covered his horrible face with his hands. “At least the Arab does not parade his perversions in gossamer and ribbons. If he did, I should only laugh. When you do it, I weep.”