“So they can be assigned in pairs to the carrying poles. Being foot soldiers, not horsemen, they are their own load bearers. But also it is taken for granted that a good and obedient soldier has no need for a mind, or a head to carry it in.”
I shook my own head in admiring amazement, and apologized to the magistrate for having even mildly disparaged his knowledge. Then, when we had again exchanged our shoes for slippers, he accompanied me and Hui-sheng on a tour of the house. While servants in one room after another fell down in ko-tou to us, he pointed out this and that facility provided for our comfort and pleasure. The house even had its own garden, with a lotus pond in the middle and a flowering tree overhanging that. The gravel of the winding paths was not just raked smooth, but raked into graceful patterns. I was particularly taken by one ornament there: a carving of a large seated lion that guarded the doorway between house and garden. It was sculptured from a single immense piece of stone, but done so cleverly that the lion had a stone ball in its half-open mouth. The ball could, with a finger, be rolled back and forth in there, but could never be pried out from behind the lion’s teeth.
I think I slightly impressed the Magistrate Fung with my eye for artwork when, admiring the painted scrolls on the walls of our bedroom, I remarked that those pictures of landscapes were done differently here than by the artists of Kithai. He gave me a sidewise look and said:
“You are right, Kuan. The northern artists think of all mountains as resembling the rugged and craggy peaks of their Tian Shan range. The artists here in Sung—Manzi, I mean; excuse me—are better acquainted with the soft, lush, rounded, woman’s-breast mountains of our south.”
He took his departure, declaring himself ready to be with me again at the instant of my summons, whenever I should feel like starting work. Then Hui-sheng and I strolled about the new residence by ourselves, dismissing one servant after another to their quarters, and getting acquainted with the place. We sat for a while in the moonlit garden while, with gestures, I apprised Hui-sheng of what details of the day’s various events and comments she might have failed to comprehend on her own. I concluded by conveying the general impression I had got: that no one seemed to hold very high hopes of my success as a tax gouger. She nodded her understanding of each of my explications and, in the tactful way of a Han wife, made no comment on my fitness for my work or my prospects in it. She asked only one question:
“Will you be happy here, Marco?”
Feeling a truly hai-xiao surge of affection for her, I gestured back, “I am happy—here!” making it plain that I meant “with you.”
We allowed ourselves a holiday week or so to get settled into our new surroundings, and I learned quickly to leave all the multitudinous details of housekeeping to Hui-sheng’s supervision. As she had earlier done with the Mongol maid who came with us, she seemed easily to establish some imperceptible mode of communication with the new Han servants, and they leaped to obey her every whim, and usually did so to perfection. I was not so good a master as she was a mistress. For one thing, I could no more talk in Han than she could. But also I had been long accustomed to having Mongol servants, or servants trained by Mongols, and these of Manzi were different.
I could recite a whole catalogue of differences, but I will mention just two. One was that, owing to the Han reverence for antiquity, a servant could never be dismissed or retired on the mere ground of his or her getting old, useless, senile, even immobile. And, as servants got older, they got cranky and crafty and impudent, but they could not be discharged for that, either, or even beaten. One of ours was an ancient crone whose only duty was to make up our bedroom each morning after we arose. Whenever she smelled the scent of lemon on me or Hui-sheng or the bedclothes, she would cackle and whinny most abominably, and I would have to grit my teeth and bear it.
The other difference had to do with the weather, of all unlikely things. Mongols were indifferent to weather; they would go about their occupations in sunshine, rain, snow—probably in the chaos of a tai-feng, if they were ever to encounter one. And God knows, after all my journeying, I was as impervious to cold or heat or wet as any Mongol. But the Han of Manzi, for all their devotion to bathing at every opportunity, had a catlike aversion to rain. When it rained, nothing that involved going outdoors ever got done—and I do not mean just by servants; I mean by anybody.
Agayachi’s ministers mostly resided in the same palace that he did, but those who lived elsewhere stayed at home when it rained. The marketplaces of the city, on rainy days, were vacant of both buyers and sellers. So was the vast indoor market, though it was under shelter, because people would have had to endure the rain to get there. Though I went about as I had always done, I had to do it on foot. There was not a palanquin to be found, nor even a canal boat. Though the boatmen spent all their lives on the water, most of the time soaked with water, they would not go out in the water that fell from the sky. Even the male prostitutes did not parade the streets.
Even my so-called adjutant, the Magistrate Fung, had the same eccentricity. He would not come across the city to my house on rainy days, and would not even make his appointed judicial sittings at the Cheng. “Why bother? No litigants would be there.” He expressed sympathy at my annoyance over the many wasted wet days and evinced a mild amusement at his own and his countrymen’s peculiarity, but he never tried to cure himself of it. Once, when I had not seen him during a whole week of rain, and railed at him indignantly, “How am I supposed to get anything done, when I have only a fair-weather adjutant?” he sat down, got out a paper and brushes and ink block, and wrote for me a Han character.
“That says ‘an urgent action not yet taken,’” he informed me. “But see: it is composed of two elements. This one says ‘stopped’ and this one ‘by rain.’ Clearly, a trait enshrined in our writing must be ingrained in our souls.”
But on clement days, anyway, we sat in my garden and had many long talks about my mission and about his own magistracy. I was interested to hear some of the local laws and customs, but, as he explained them, I gathered that in his judicial practice he relied more on his people’s superstitions and his own arbitrary caprices.
“For example, I have my bell which can tell a thief from an honest man. Suppose something has been stolen, and I have a whole array of suspects. I bid each of them reach through a curtain and touch the hidden bell, which will ring at the guilty man’s touch.”
“And does it?” I asked skeptically.
“Of course not. But it is smeared with ink-powder. Afterward, I examine the men’s hands. The man with clean hands is the thief, the one who feared to touch the bell.”
I murmured, “Ingenious,” a word I found myself often uttering here in Manzi.
“Oh, judgments are easy enough. It is the sentences and penalties that require ingenuity. Suppose I sentence that thief to wear the yoke in the jail yard. That is a heavy wooden collar, rather like the stone anchors, which gets locked around his neck, and he must sit in the jail yard while he wears it, to be jeered at by passersby. Suppose I judge that his crime merits his suffering that discomfort and humiliation for, say, two months. However, I know very well that he or his family will bribe the jailers, and they will only put him into the yoke at times when they know I will be passing in and out of the yard. Therefore, to make sure he is properly chastised, I sentence him to six months in the yoke.”
“Do you,” I said hesitantly, “do you employ a Fondler for the more felonious culprits?”