Chao exclaimed delightedly, “By my ancestors, Polo, but you show certain ministerial talents yourself!”
“One talent I do not possess is an ability to write in the Han character. You do. There are others I could have applied to, but I took you to be no friend of the Arab Achmad.”
“Well, if all you say is true, he did relieve me of one burden. But I still groan under his lading of others. You are right: I would happily join in deposing that son of a turtle. Except, you overlook one detail. You are proposing a real conspiracy. If it fails, you and I have an early appointment with the Fondler. If it succeeds—even worse—you and I are in each other’s power forever after.”
“Master Chao, I desire only vengeance against the Arab. If I can hurt him in the least degree, I care not if it costs me my head—tomorrow or some years hence. Simply by proposing this action, I have already put myself in your power. I can offer you no other surety of my bona fides.”
“It is enough,” he said with decision, and got up from his work table. “In any case, this is so wondrously grand a jest that I could not refuse. Come here.” He led me into the next room, and whisked the cover off the tremendous map table. “Let us see. The Minister Pao was a Yi of Yun-nan, which was then under siege … .” We stood and looked at Yun-nan, which now was dotted with Bayan’s flags. “Suppose the Minister Pao was trying to aid his home province … and the Minister Achmad was hoping to dethrone the Khan Kubilai … . We need something to link those two ambitions … some third component … I have it! Kaidu!”
“But the Ilkhan Kaidu rules way over yonder in the northwest,” I said dubiously, pointing to the Sin-kiang Province. “Is he not rather remote to be involved in the conspiracy?”
“Come, come, Polo,” he chided me, but with high good humor. “In this sin of perpetrating a lie, I am incurring the wrath of my revered ancestors, and you are putting at peril your immortal soul. Would you go to Hell for a merely feeble and pusillanimous lie? Have you no artistry, man? No sweeping scope of vision? Let us make it a thundering lie, and a sin to scandalize all the gods!”
“It should at least be a believable lie.”
“Kubilai will believe anything of his barbarian cousin Kaidu. He loathes the man. And he knows Kaidu to be reckless and voracious enough to enter into any wildest scheme.”
“That is true enough.”
“So there we have it. I shall concoct a missive in which the Minister Pao privily discusses with the Jing-siang Achmad their mutual and secret and culpable conspiracy with the Ilkhan Kaidu. Those are the picture’s main outlines. Leave the details of its composition to a master artist.”
“Gladly,” I said. “God knows you paint believable pictures.”
“Now. How will you have come to be in possession of this highly volatile document?”
“I was one of the last to see the Minister Pao alive. I shall have discovered the paper while searching him. As I really did find the yin.”
“You never found the yin. Forget that altogether.”
“Very well.”
“You found on him only an old and much-creased paper. I shall make it a letter which, here in Khanbalik, Pao wrote to Achmad but had no chance to deliver, because he was forced to flee. So he simply and foolishly carried it with him. Yes. I shall rumple and dirty it a bit. How soon do you want this?”
“I should have given it to the Khan back when I first arrived at Xandu.”
“Never mind. You had no way of recognizing its significance. You have just now found it while unpacking your travel gear. Give it to Kubilai, saying most ingenuously, ‘Oh, by the way, Sire … .’ The very offhandedness will lend verisimilitude. But the sooner the better. Let me get right at it.”
He sat down to his work table again, and began busily to get out papers and brushes and ink blocks of red and black and other appurtenances of his art, saying meanwhile:
“You applied to the right man for your conspiracy, Polo, though I would wager much money that you do not even realize why. To you, no doubt, any two pages of Han characters look alike, so you are unaware that not every scribe can counterfeit another’s writing. I must now try to remember Pao’s hand, and practice until I can fluently imitate it. But that should not take me too long. Go now and leave me to it. I will have the paper in your hands as soon as I can.”
As I moved toward the door, he added, in a voice combining cheer and rue, “Do you know something else? This may be the crowning effort of my whole career, the masterpiece of my entire life.” And as I went out, he was saying, though still cheerfully enough, “Why could you not have conceived a work to which I could sign Chao Meng-fu? Curse you, Marco Polo.”
4
“IF all goes well,” I told Ali, “the Arab will be flung to the Fondler. And, if you like, I will petition permission for you to be present and help the Fondler put Achmad to the Death of a Thousand.”
“I should like to help put him to death,” mumbled Ali. “But help the hateful Fondler? You said it was he who did the actual ravagement of Mar-Janah.”
“That is true, and God knows he is hateful in the extreme. But in this case he was acting at the Arab’s bidding.”
I had returned to my chambers to find, as I had hoped, that the maidservants had plied Ali Babar with enough liquor to numb him somewhat. So, although he variously had gasped with horror, wailed with grief and moaned with regret, as I told him all the circumstances attendant on Mar-Janah’s demise, he had not indulged in the extravagant thrashing about and howling which most Muslims consider the only proper form of lamentation. Of course, I had not dwelt in detail on what last remnants I had found of Mar-Janah, or her last minutes of life.
“Yes,” said Ali, after a long, pensive silence. “If you can arrange it, Marco, I would like to be present at the Arab’s execution. Without Mar-Janah, I have not any other desires or anticipations to be realized. If only that wish is granted, it will suffice.”
“I shall see to it—if all does go well. You might sit there and beseech Allah that all does go well.”
Saying which, I got out of my own chair and knelt down on the floor again, to pick up and put away the litter of keepsakes. As I collected the various things—Arpad’s kamàl, the pack of zhi-pai cards, and so on—I got the curious impression that something was gone from among them. I sat back and wondered, what could that be? I was not missing the Minister Pao’s yin, for I had taken that away myself. But something was gone that had been there when I first emptied my packs. Suddenly I realized what it was.
“Ali,” I said. “Did you perhaps pick up something from among this mess while I was absent?”
“No, nothing,” he said, with an air of not even having noticed the litter on the floor, which in his stunned and preoccupied condition he probably had not.
I asked the two Mongol maids, and they denied having touched anything. I went and got Hui-sheng, who was in the bedroom putting her own few belongings carefully away in closets and drawers. I smiled at that; it indicated that she planned to stay, and for more than a brief while. I took her hand and drew her into the main room, and indicated the goods on the floor, and made questioning gestures. Evidently she comprehended, for she replied with a shake of her pretty head.
So only Mafio could have taken it. What was missing was the small clay phial at which he had exclaimed, “Is that not a memento of the charlatan Hakim Mimdad?”
It was. It was the love philter the Hakim had given me on the Roof of the World, the potent potion allegedly employed by the long-ago poet Majnun and his poetess Laila to enhance their making of love. Mafìo knew exactly what it was, and he knew it was unpredictably dangerous, for he had heard me berating Mimdad after my one horrible experience with the stuff, and he had seen me only warily accept from the Hakim a second little bottle to carry away with me. Now he had filched that phial. What could he want it for?