There came to me, with a jolt, some other words he had spoken this morning: “If necessary, I am prepared to prove my caring …” And when I jeered, “Go and get the Arab delirious with love!” he had said: “I can do that!”
Dio le varda! I must run and find him and stop him! God knows I had ample reason to be disillusioned and disgusted with Mafìo Polo, and not to care a bagatìn what became of him, but still … he was blood of my blood. And any self-pitying or self-glorifying act of self-sacrifice he might make now was futile and unnecessary, for I already had a trap in preparation for the damnable Arab Achmad. So I scrambled to my feet —causing Hui-sheng again to regard me with mild wonderment. But I got only as far as the door, for there stood the happily beaming Master Chao.
“It is accomplished,” he said. “And so is your vengeance, the moment you show this to Kubilai.”
He glanced past me and saw the others in the room, and tugged me by my sleeve out of their hearing down the corridor. He took out from some recess of his robes a folded, wrinkled, smudged paper that truly looked as if it had had a hard journey from Khanbalik to Yun-nan and back again. I opened it and gazed at what looked to me—as all Han documents looked to me—like a garden plot much tracked over by a flock of chickens.
“What does it say?”
“Everything necessary. Let us not take time for a translation. I hurried with it, and so must you. The Khan is right now on his way to the Hall of Justice, where he is about to declare the Cheng in session. Many matters of litigation have accumulated to await his judgment. He is conscientious about such things, even to the delaying of his acceptance of Sung’s surrender. But if you do not catch him before the Cheng convenes, he will be occupied there, and later in negotiations with the Sung Empress. It may be days before you can get to him again, and in that time Achmad could be busy to your detriment. Go quickly.”
“The moment I do this,” I said, “I am putting not just Achmad’s fate, but mine also, irrevocably in your hands, Master Chao.”
“And I mine, Polo, in yours. Go.”
I went, after running into my rooms again to gather up the other things I had for the Khakhan. And I did catch him, just as he and the lesser justices and the Tongue were taking their seats on the dais of the Cheng. He motioned amiably for me to approach the dais, and, when I gave him the items I had brought, he said, “There was no hurry about returning these things, Marco.”
“I had already kept them longer than I should have done, Sire. Here is the ivory pai-tzu plaque, and your yellow-paper letter of authority, and a paper the late Minister Pao was carrying at the time of his capture, and this note of mine, which lists those engineers who so capably positioned the huo-yao balls. Since I set down their names in Roman letters, Sire, perhaps you would listen as I read them. I hope I can pronounce them correctly, and that you can comprehend them, for you may wish to reward those men with some mark of—”
“Read, read,” he said indulgently.
I did so, while he idly laid aside the plaque and the letter he had given me to carry, and idly opened and glanced at the paper the Master Chao had forged. When he saw that it was written in Han, he idly handed it to the many-tongued Tongue, and went on listening to me. I was struggling to comprehend my own not clearly legible list of scrawls, reading aloud, “A man named Gegen, of the Kurai tribe … a man named Jassak, of the Merkit tribe … a man named Berdibeg, also of the Merkit—” when the Tongue suddenly leapt to his feet and, for all his grasp of many languages, gave a cry that was entirely inarticulate.
“Vakh!” exclaimed the Khakhan. “What ails you, man?”
“Sire!” the Tongue gasped excitedly. “This paper—a matter of the utmost importance! It must take precedence over all else! This paper—brought by that man yonder.”
“Marco?” Kubilai turned back to me. “You said it was taken from the late Minister Pao?” I said it was. He turned again to the Tongue. “Well?”
“You might prefer, Sire—” said the Tongue, looking pointedly at me, at the other justices and the guards. “You might prefer to clear the hall before I divulge the contents.”
“Divulge them,” growled the Khan, “and then I will decide if the hall is to be cleared.”
“As you command, Sire. Well, I can give you a word by word translation at your leisure. But suffice it now to say that this is a letter signed with the yin Pao Nei-ho. It hints—it implies—no, it bluntly reveals—a treacherous conspiracy between your cousin the Ilkhan Kaidu and—and one of your most trusted ministers.”
“Indeed?” said Kubilai frostily. “Then I think it best that no one leave this hall. Go on, Tongue.”
“In brief, Sire, it appears that the Minister Pao, whom we all now know to have been a Yi impostor here, hoped to avert the total devastation of his native Yun-nan. It appears that Pao had persuaded the Ilkhan Kaidu—or perhaps bribed him; money is mentioned—to march south and fling his forces upon the rear of ours then invading Yun-nan. It would have been an act of rebellion and civil war. In that event, it was expected that you yourself, Sire, would take the field. In your absence and the ensuing confusion, the—the Vice-Regent Achmad was to proclaim himself Khakhan—”
The assembled Cheng justices all cried “Vakh!” and “Shame!” and “Aiya!” and other expressions of horror.
“—upon which,” the Tongue resumed, “Yun-nan would declare its surrender and fealty to the new Khakhan Achmad, in return for an easy peace. Next, it seems also to have been agreed, the Yi would join with Kaidu in falling upon the Sung, and help to conquer that empire. And after all was done, Achmad and Kaidu would divide and rule the Khanate between them.”
There were more exclamations of “Vakh!” and “Aiya!” Kubilai had yet made no comment, but his face was like the black buran sandstorm rising over the desert. While the Tongue waited for some command, the ministers began passing the letter around among them.
“Is it truly Pao’s hand?” asked one.
“Yes,” said another. “He always wrote in the grass stroke, not the formal upright character.”
“And there, see?” said another. “To write money, he used the character for kauri-shell, which is currency among the Yi.”
Another asked, “What of the signature?”
“It looks to be genuinely his.”
“Send for the Yinmaster!”
“No one is to leave this room.”
But Kubilai heard and nodded, and a guard went running out. In the meantime, the ministers kept up a muted hubbub of argument and expostulation, and I heard one say solemnly, “It is too outrageous to be believed.”
“There is precedent,” said another. “Remember, some years ago, our Khanate acquired the land of Cappadocia by a similar ruse. A likewise trusted Chief Minister of the Seljuk Turki enlisted the covert aid of our Ilkhan Abagha of Persia to help him overthrow the rightful King Kilij. And, once the treachery was accomplished, the upstart allied Cappadocia to our Khanate.”
“Yes,” remarked another. “But happily there was a difference in those circumstances. Abagha conspired not for his own aggrandizement, but for the benefit of his Khakhan Kubilai and the whole Khanate.”
“Here comes the Yinmaster.”
Hurried along by the guardsman, old Master Yiu came shuffling into the Cheng. He was shown the paper, and had to squint at it only briefly before he pronounced:
“I cannot mistake my own work, my lords. That is indeed the yin I cut for the Minister of Lesser Races, Pao Nei-ho.”
“There!” said several of them, and “It is all true!” and “It is beyond question now!” and they all looked to Kubilai. He inhaled a great breath of air, and slowly sighed it out, and then said in a doomful voice, “Guards!” Those men snapped to rigid attention, and thumped their lances on the floor in unison. “Go and demand the presence here of the Chief Minister Achmad-az-Fenaket.” They thumped their lances again, and wheeled to march out, but Kubilai halted them for a moment and turned to me.