“Marco Polo, it seems that you have once again been of service to our Khanate—albeit inadvertently this time.” The words were commendatory enough, but, from the expression on his face, one would have thought I had tracked into the hall on my boots some dog dirt from the outdoors. “You may see it through to the close, Marco. Go with the guards and yourself utter to the Chief Minister the formal command: ‘Arise and come, dead man, for Kubilai the Khan of All Khans would hear your last words.’”

So I went, as instructed. But the Khakhan had not ordered me to return to the Cheng in company with the Arab, and, as it happened, I did not. I and my troop of guards arrived at Achmad’s chambers to find its outer doors unguarded and wide open. We went inside, and found his own sentries and all his servants gathered in attitudes of anxious listening and hand-wringing indecision outside his closed bedroom door. When they saw our arrival, the servants raised a clamor of greeting, and thanked Tengri and praised Allah that we had come, and it was some time before we could quiet them down and get a coherent account of what was going on.

The Wali Achmad, they said, had been in his bedchamber all day. That was not an uncommon occurrence, they said, because he often took work with him at night and continued, after awakening and breaking his fast, to deal with it while lying comfortably abed. But this day, there had begun to proceed from inside the bedroom some extraordinary noises and, after some understandable hesitation, a maidservant had pecked at the door to inquire if all was well. She had been answered by a voice recognizably the Wali’s, but in an unnaturally high and nervous tone, commanding, “Leave me be!” The unaccountable sounds had then resumed and continued: giggles rising to wild laughter, squeaks and sobs increasing to moans and groans, laughter again, and so on. The listeners —by then comprising Achmad’s whole staff clustered against the door—had been unable to decide whether the noises expressed pleasure or distress. In the course of what had now been some hours, they had frequently called out to their master and knocked on the door and tried to open it and peer in. But the door was fastened tight shut, and they were debating the propriety of breaking through it when fortunately we arrived and saved them having to decide.

“Listen for yourselves,” they said, and I and the corporal of the guard pressed our ears to the panels.

After an interval, the corporal said wonderingly to me, “I never heard anything like it.”

I had, but it had been a long time ago. In the anderun of the palace of Baghdad, I had once watched through a peephole as a young girl inmate seduced an ugly, hairy simiazza ape. The sounds I now heard through this door were much like the sounds I had heard then—the girl’s murmured endearments and encouragements, the ape’s puzzled gibbering, his grunts and her moans of consummation, all mingled with little yips and squeaks of pain, because the ape, in clumsily satisfying her, had also clumsily given her many small bites and scratches.

I said nothing of that to the corporal, saying only, “I suggest that you have your men clear all these servants away from here, away to their quarters. We must arrest the Minister Achmad, but we need not humiliate him before his staff. Get rid of his guards, too. We have enough of our own.”

“We go in, then?” asked the corporal, as that was being done. “Even if he is indisposed?”

“We go in. Whatever is happening in there, the Khakhan wants that man and wants him now. Yes, force the door.”

I had ordered the onlookers removed, not because I was concerned for Achmad’s feelings, but for my own, since I expected to find my uncle conspicuously present in there. To my considerable relief, he was not, and the Arab was in no condition to care about humiliation.

He lay naked on the bed, his scrawny and sweaty brown body squirming in a welter of his own secretions. The bedclothes today were of pale-green silk, but much slimed and crusted with white and also with pink, for it appeared that, after many emissions, Achmad’s later ones had been streaky with blood. He was still uttering the gibberish noises, though only in a muffled voice, for he had in his mouth one of those su-yang mushroom phallocrypts, moisture-bloated to such a bigness that it stretched his lips and cheeks. There was another pretend-organ protruding from his backside, but that was made of fine green jade. At his front, his own true organ was invisible inside something that looked like a Mongol warrior’s wintertime fur hat, and with both hands he was frantically jerking it back and forth to fricate himself. His agate eyes were wide open, but their stoniness looked blurred, as if by moss, and, whatever he was seeing, it was not us.

I gestured to the guards. A couple of them bent over the Arab and began plucking the various devices off him and out of him. When the su-yang was withdrawn from his sucking mouth, his whimpered utterances got louder, but were still only senseless noises. When the jade cylinder was yanked out of him, he moaned lasciviously and his body briefly convulsed. When the furry thing was taken off him, he feebly continued moving his hands, though they had not much left to play with down there, for he was rubbed raw and bloody and small. The corporal of the guard turned the hatlike object over and over, curiously examining it, and I observed that it was hairy only in part, but then I averted my eyes, as a quantity of white substance and stringy blood oozed out of it.

“By Tengri!” growled the corporal to himself. “Lips?” Then he flung it down and said loathingly, “Do you know what that is?”

“No,” I said. “And I do not wish to know. Stand the creature on his feet. Throw cold water on him. Wipe him down. Get some clothes on him.”

As those things were done to him, Achmad seemed to revive to some degree. At first he was utterly limp, and the guards attending him had to hold him upright. But gradually, after much wobbling and teetering, he was able to stand alone. And, after several drenchings with cold water, he began to make comprehensible words of his whimpers, though they were still disjointed.

“We were both dewy children … ,” he said, as if repeating some poetry that only he could hear. “We fitted well together … .”

“Oh, shut up,” grunted the grizzled soldier who was swabbing the sweat and scum off him.

“Then I grew up, but she stayed small … with only tiny apertures … and she cried … .”

“Shut up,” grunted the other leathery veteran who was trying to get an aba onto him.

“Then she became a stag … and I a doe … and it was I who cried … .”

The corporal snapped, “You have been told to be silent!”

“Let him talk and clear his head,” I said indulgently. “He will have need of it.”

“Then we were butterflies … embracing inside a fragrant flower blossom … .” His rolling eyes momentarily steadied on me, and he said quite distinctly, “Folo!” But the eyes’ stone hardness was still mossed over, and so were his other faculties, for he added only a mumble: “Make that name a laughingstock … .”

“You may try,” I said indifferently. “I am commanded to speak to you thus: Go with these guards, dead man, for Kubilai the Khan of All Khans would hear your last words.” I motioned one more time and said, “Take him away.”

I had let Achmad continue babbling just to prevent the guards’ noticing another sound I had heard in that room—a faint but persistent and musical sort of noise. As the guards left with their prisoner, I stayed behind to investigate the source of that sound. It did not come from anywhere in the room itself, nor from outside either of the room’s two doors, but from behind some one of the walls. I listened closely and traced it to one particularly garish Persian qali hanging opposite the bed, and I swept that aside. The wall behind it looked solid, but I had only to lean on it and a section of the paneling swung inward like a door, giving on a dark stone passage, and I could make out now what the noise was. It was a strange sound to be hearing in a secret corridor in the Mongol palace of Khanbalik, for it was an old Venetian song being sung. And it was most exceedingly strange in these circumstances, for it was a simple song in praise of Virtue—something notably lacking in the Wali Achmad and his vicinity and everything to do with him. Mafìo Polo was singing, in a low quaver: