“By Tengri, Marco, but you have put on great beauty since I saw you last!” He bawled that at me, but he was ogling Hui-sheng at my side. When I introduced her, she smiled a little nervously at him, for Bayan was on the throne of the King of Ava, in the throne room of the palace of Pagan, but he was not looking very kinglike. He was half-lying asprawl on the throne, guzzling from a jeweled cup, and his eyes were vividly bloodshot.
“Found the king’s wine cellar,” he said. “No kumis or arkhi, but something called choum-choum. Made of rice, they tell me, but I think it is really compounded of earthquake and avalanche. Hui, Marco! Remember our avalanche? Here, have some.” He snapped his fingers, and a barefoot, bare-chested servant hurried to pour me a cup.
“What has become of the king, then?” I asked.
“Threw away his throne, his people’s respect, his name and his life,” said Bayan, smacking his lips. “He was King Narasinha-pati until he fled. Now his former subjects all call him contemptuously Tayok-pyemin, which means the King Who Ran Away. By comparison, they almost like having us here. The king fled west as we approached, over to Akyab, the port city on the Bay of Bangala. We thought he would escape by ship, but he just stayed there. Eating and calling for more and more food. He ate himself to death. A singular way to go.”
“That sounds like a Mien,” I said disgustedly.
“Yes, it does. But he was not a Mien. The royal family was of Bangali stock, originally from India. That is why we thought he would escape to there. Anyway, Ava is now ours, and I am Acting Wang of Ava until Kubilai sends a son or something to be my permanent replacement. If you see the Khakhan before I do, tell him to send somebody of frosty blood who can endure this infernal climate. And tell him to hurry. My sardars are now fighting over east, in Muang Thai, and I want to join them.”
Hui-sheng and I were given a grand suite in the palace, together with some of the late royal family’s exceptionally obsequious servants. I asked Yissun to take one of our many bedrooms and stay nearby as my interpreter. Hui-sheng, being now bereft of a personal maid, chose a new one from the staff given us, a girl of seventeen, of the race sometimes called Shan and sometimes Thai. Her name was Arun, or Dawn, and she was almost as comely of face as was her new mistress.
In our bathing chamber, which was as big and as well-equipped as a Persian hammam, the maid helped Hui-sheng and me, together, to bathe several times over, until we felt clean of our encrustation of jungle, and then helped us dress. For me, there was just a length of brocade silk to be wrapped around me, skirt fashion. Hui-sheng’s costume was much the same, except that it wrapped high enough to cover her breasts. Arùn, without shyness, opened and rewrapped her own single garment several times, not to show us that it was all she wore, but to show us how to wrap ours so they would stay on. Nevertheless, I took the opportunity to admire the girl’s body, which was as fair as her name, and Hui-sheng made a face at me when she noticed, and I grinned and Arùn giggled. We were given no shoes or even slippers; everyone in the palace went barefoot, except the heavy-booted Bayan, and I later put on boots only when I went outdoors. Arùn did bring one other item of dress; earrings for both of us. But, since our ears were not bored for them, we could not wear them.
When Hui-sheng had, with Arùn’s help, fetchingly arranged her hair and fixed flowers in it, we went downstairs again, to the palace’s dining hall, where Bayan had commanded a welcoming feast for us. We were not much accustomed to eating at midday, which it then was, but I was looking forward to some decent food after our hard rations on the voyage, and I was a trifle dismayed to see what was set before us—black meat and purple rice.
“By Tengri,” I growled to Bayan. “I knew the Mien blacked their teeth, but I never noticed that they also blacked the food to go between their teeth.”
“Eat, Marco,” he said complacently. “The meat is chicken, and the chickens of Ava have not only black plumage, but black skin, black flesh, black everything except their eggs. Never mind how the bird looks, it is cooked in the milk of the India nut, and is delicious. The rice is only rice, but in this land it grows in gaudy colors—indigo, yellow, bright red. Today we have purple. It is good. Eat. Drink.” And with his own hand, he poured a brimming beaker of the rice liquor for Hui-sheng.
We did eat, and the meal was very good. In that country, even at the Pagan palace, there were no such things as nimble tongs or any other table implements. Eating was done with the fingers, which is how Bayan would have done it anyway. He sat taking alternately handfuls of the flamboyant food and great drafts of choum-choum—Hui-sheng and I only sipped at ours, for it was highly potent—while I told of our adventures on the Irawadi, and the considerable distaste I had developed for the inhabitants of Ava.
“In the river plain, you saw only the misbegotten Mien,” said Bayan. “But you might think more kindly even of them, if you had come through the hill country, and seen the real aboriginal natives of these lands. The Padaung, for instance. Their females start in childhood to wear a brass ring around the neck, and add another above that, and another and another, until in womanhood they have a brass-ringed neck as long as a camel’s. Or the Moi people. Their women bore holes in their earlobes and put increasingly large ornaments in the holes, until the lobes are distended to hoops that can hold a platter. I saw one Moi woman with earlobes she had to put her arms through, to keep them out of her way.”
I assumed Bayan was only drunkenly babbling, but I listened respectfully. And I later realized, when I saw actual specimens of those barbarian tribes on the streets of Pagan itself, that he had been telling only sober truth.
“All those are country folk,” he went on. “The city dwellers are a better mixture. Some visiting aborigines and Mien, a few Indian immigrants, but mostly the more civilized and cultured people called Myama. They have long been the nobility and upper classes of Ava, and they are far superior to all the others. The Myama have even had the good sense not to take their inferior neighbors as servants or slaves. They have always gone afield and got Shan for those purposes, the Shan—or Thai, if you prefer—being notably more handsome and cleanly and intelligent than any of the lesser local races.”
“Yes, I have just now encountered one Thai,” I said, and added, since Hui-sheng could not hear and object, “a Thai girl who is indeed a superb creature.”
“It was on account of them that I came to Ava,” said Bayan. I already knew that, but I did not interrupt. “They are worthy people. People worth keeping. And too many of them had been deserting our dominions, fleeing to the nation they call Muang Thai, Land of the Free. The Khanate wishes them to remain Shan, not turn Thai. That is, not go free, but remain subjects of the Khanate.”
“I understand the Khanate’s view,” I said. “But if there really is a whole land full of such beautiful people, I should wish that it could go on existing.”
“Oh, it can go on existing,” said Bayan, “as long as it is ours. Let me but take the capital, a place called Chiang-Rai, and accept their king’s surrender, and I will not lay waste the rest of the country. That way it will be a permanent source of the finest slaves, to serve and to adorn the rest of the Khanate. Hui! But enough of politics.” He shoved aside his still-heaped plate and licked his lips most slaveringly and said, “Here comes our sweet to conclude our meal. The durian.”
That was another dubious surprise. The sweet looked to be a melon with a spikily armored rind, but, when the table steward cut it, I saw that it had large seeds inside, like chicken’s eggs, and the odor that erupted from it nearly made me shove back from the table.