Nevertheless, I was restless, and the restlessness inexorably became dissatisfaction with myself. I had done well in Manzi, yes, but was I to bask in the reflected glow of that for the remainder of my days? Once the great thing had been accomplished, it was no great thing merely to perpetuate it. That required no more than my stamping my yin signature on papers of receipt and dispatch, and waving my couriers off to Khanbalik once a month. I was no better than a roadside postmaster of the horse relay stations. I decided I had for too long now enjoyed too much of having; I wanted something to want. I flinched at the vision of myself growing old in Hang-zho, like a vegetable Han patriarch, and having nothing to take pride in except my survival to old age.
“You will never get old, Marco,” Hui-sheng told me when I broached the subject. She looked affectionately amused, but sincere, as she conveyed that pronouncement.
“Old or not,” I said, “I think we have luxuriated in Hang-zho long enough. Let us move on.”
She concurred: “Let us move on.”
“Where would you like to go, my dearest?”
Simply: “Wherever you go.”
6
SO my next northbound courier took a message from me to the Khakhan, respectfully requesting that I be relieved of my long-since accomplished mission and my Kuan title and my coral hat button; that I be given permission to return to Khanbalik, where I could cast about for some new venture to occupy me. The courier returned with Kubilai’s amiable acquiescence, and it took me and Hui-sheng not long to make ready to depart from Hang-zho. Our native servants and slaves all wept and agonized and fell about in frequent ko-tou, but we assuaged their bereavement by making gifts to them of many things we decided not to take with us. I made other parting gifts—and rich ones—to the Wang Agayachi and my Adjutant Fung Wei-ni and my manager-scribe and other worthies who had been our friends.
“The cuckoo calls,” they all said sadly, one after another, as they toasted us with their wine goblets at the countless farewell banquets and balls given in our honor.
Our slaves packed into bales and crates our personal belongings and our wardrobes and our many Hang-zho acquisitions—furnishings, painted scrolls, porcelains, ivories, jades, jewelry and such—that we were taking with us. Taking also the Mongol maid we had brought from Khanbalik, and Hui-sheng’s white mare (now somewhat silvery about the muzzle), we went aboard a sizable canal barge. Only one of our possessions would Hui-sheng not let be crated and stowed in the hold: she herself carried her white porcelain incense burner.
During our residence, the Great Canal had been completed all the way to Hang-zho’s riverside. But because we had already covered the canal route before, following it on our way south, we had decided to take a very different way home. We stayed on the barge only as far as the port of Zhen-jiang, where the Great Canal met the Yang-tze River. There, for the first time (for either me or Hui-sheng), we boarded a gigantic oceangoing chuan, and sailed down the Tremendous River and out into the boundless Sea of Kithai and northward up the coast.
That chuan made the good ship Doge Anafesto, the galeazza in which I had crossed the Mediterranean, seem like a gòndola or a san-pan. The chuan—I cannot call it by name, because it purposely had no name, so it could not be cursed by rival shipowners, who might persuade the gods to send it contrary winds or other misfortune—had five masts, each like a tree. From them depended sails as big as some towns’ market squares, made of slats of the zhu-gan cane, and employed as I have described elsewhere. The bigness of the chuan’s duck-shaped hull was in proportion to its sky-scraping upper works. On the deck and in the passenger quarters below were more than one hundred cabins, each comfortably adequate for six persons. That is to say, the ship could carry more than six hundred passengers in addition to its crew, which totaled fully four hundred men, of several different races and languages. (There were only a few passengers on this short trip. Besides Hui-sheng, myself and the maid, there were some traveling merchants, some minor government officials, and a number of other ships’ captains, idle between voyages, aboard just for a seaman’s holiday.) In the chuan’s holds was loaded a variety of goods, seeming enough to stock a city. But, simply for a measure of the holds’ capacity, I would say the ship could have carried two thousand Venetian butts.
I have said “holds” advisedly, instead of hold, because every chuan was ingeniously built with bulkheads dividing the hull’s interior into numerous compartments, end to end, and they were tarred watertight, so that if the chuan should strike a reef or otherwise hole itself below the waterline, only that one compartment would flood, while the others stayed dry and kept the ship afloat. However, it would have required a sharp and solid reef to hole that chuan. Its entire hull was triply planked, actually built three times over, one shell enveloping another. The Han captain, who spoke Mongol, took great pride in showing me how the innermost hull had its planking set vertically, from keel to deck, and the next was planked at an angle diagonal to that, and the outermost was laid in horizontal strakes, stem to stern.
“Solid as rock,” he boasted, slamming his fist into a bulwark and producing a sound as of a rock hit with a mallet. “Good Champa teakwood, held with good iron spikes.”
“We do not have teakwood in the West where I come from,” I said, almost apologetically. “Our shipbuilders rely on oak. But we do use iron spikes.”
“Foolish Ferenghi shipbuilders!” he roared, with a mighty laugh. “Have they not yet realized that oak wood exudes an acid which corrodes the iron? Teak, on the other hand, contains an essential oil which preserves iron!”
So I had once again been presented with an example of ingenious Eastern artistry that made my native West seem backward. Somewhat spitefully, I hoped for an example of Eastern simplemindedness to balance the scales, and I expected I would encounter one before the voyage was over—and I thought I had when one day, well out of sight of the safe shore, we sailed into a rather nasty thunderstorm. There was wind and rain and lightning, and the sea got choppy, and the ship’s masts and yards got all laced with flickering blue Santermo’s fire, and I heard the captain shouting to his crew, in various languages:
“Prepare the chuan for sacrifice!”
It seemed a shockingly unnecessary early surrender, when the chuan’s ponderous bulk was barely rocking to the storm. I was only a “sweet-water seaman”—as real Venetian mariners derisively say—and such are supposed to be overly apprehensive of danger on the sea. But I saw no danger here that called for more than a simple shortening of sail. Certainly this was not the fierce storm that merited the dread name of tai-feng. However, I was seaman enough to know better than to volunteer advice to the captain, or to show any contempt of his apparently over-extreme agitation.
I am glad I did not. For, as I started glumly below to prepare my womenfolk to abandon ship, I met two seamen coming not fearfully but gaily up the companionway, carrying with care a ship made all of paper, a toy ship, a miniature replica of ours.
“The chuan for sacrifice,” the captain told me, quite unperturbed, as he tossed it over the side. “It deceives the sea gods. When they see it dissolve in the water, they think they have sunk our real ship. So they let the storm abate instead of making it more troublesome.”
It was just one more reminder to me that even when the Han did something simpleminded, they did it ingeniously. Whether or not the paper-ship sacrifice had any effect, the storm did soon abate, and a few days later we made landfall at Qin-huang-dao, which was the coast city nearest Khanbalik. From there we proceeded overland, with a small train of carts carrying our goods.