So we made formal request for a formal audience, and on the appointed day we took Zio Mafìo with us, and when, as custom dictates, we made gifts to the Doge, we presented some in Mafìo’s name as well as ours. I have forgotten what he and my father presented, but I gave to Gradenigo one of the gold and ivory pai-tzu plaques we had carried as emissaries of the Khan of All Khans, and also the three-bladed squeeze knife which had served me so well so often in the East. I showed the Doge how cleverly it worked, and he played with it for a while, and asked me to tell him about the occasions of my employment of the knife, and I did, in brief.
Then he put some polite questions to my father, relevant mainly to East-West trade affairs, and Venice’s prospects for an increase of that traffic. Then he expressed his delight that we—and through us, Venice—had prospered so richly by our sojourn abroad. Then, as expected, he said he hoped we would satisfy the Dogana that the proper share of all our successful enterprises had been duly paid into the coffers of the Republic. We said, as expected, that we looked forward to the tax collectors’ scrutiny of our Compagnia’s unfaultable books of account. Then we stood up, expecting to be dismissed. But the Doge raised one of his heavily beringed hands and said:
“Just one thing more, Messeri. Perhaps it has escaped your recollection, Messer Marco—I know you have had many other things on your mind—but there is the minor matter of your banishment from Venice.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded. Surely he was not going to resurrect that old charge against a now most respectable and esteemed (and heavily tax-paying) citizen. With an air of offended hauteur I said, “I assumed, So Serenità, that the statute of enforcement had expired with the Doge Tiepolo.”
“Oh, of course I am not obliged to respect the judgments made and sentences imposed by my predecessor. But I too like to keep my books unfaultable. And there is that little blot upon the pages of the archives of the Signori della Notte.”
I smiled, thinking I understood now, and said, “Perhaps a suitable fine would pay for the blot’s erasure.”
“I was thinking rather of an expiation in accordance with the old Roman lege de tagiòn.”
I was again dumbfounded. “An eye for an eye? Surely the books show that I was never guilty of the killing of that citizen.”
“No, no, of course you were not. Nevertheless, that sad affair involved a passage at arms. I thought you might atone by engaging in another. Say, in our current war with our old enemy Genoa.”
“So Serenità, war is a game for young men. I am forty years old, which is somewhat over-age for wielding a sword, and—”
Snick! He squeezed the knife and made its inner blade dart forth.
“By your own account, you wielded this one not too many years since. Messer Marco, I am not suggesting that you lead a frontal assault on Genoa. Only that you make a token appearance of military service. And I am not being despotic or spiteful or capricious. I am thinking of the future of Venice and the house of Polo. That house has now been raised among the foremost of our city. After your father, you will be the head of it, and your sons after you. If, as seems likely, the house of Polo keeps its commanding position through the generations, I believe the family arms should be totally senza macchia. Wipe off the blot now, lest it embarrass and trouble all your posterity. It is easily accomplished. I have only to write against that page: ‘Marco Polo, Ene Aca, loyally served the Republic in her war against Genoa.’”
My father nodded his agreement and contributed, “What is well closed is well kept.”
“If I must,” I said with a sigh. I had thought my war service was all behind me. However, I must confess, I thought it perhaps would look fine in the family history: that Marco Polo in his lifetime fought both with the Golden Horde and with the War Fleet of Venice. “What would you have me do, So Serenità?”
“Serve only as a gentleman at arms. Say, in supernumerary command of a supply ship. Make one sally with the fleet, out to sea and back to port, and then you retire—with new distinction and with old honor preserved.”
Well, that is how, when a squadra of the Venetian fleet sailed out some months later under Almirante Dandolo, I came to be aboard the galeazza Doge Particiaco, which was actually only the victualler vessel to the squadra. I bore the courtesy rank of Sopracomito, meaning that I had approximately the same function I had had on the chuan that carried the Lady Kukachin—to look commanding and warlike and knowledgeable, and to stay out of the way of the Comito, the real master of the vessel, and the mariners who took his orders.
I do not aver that I could have done any better if I had been in command—of the galeazza or of the whole squadra—but I could hardly have done any worse. We sailed down the Adriatic and, near the island of Kurcola off the Dalmatia coast, we encountered a squadra of Genoan ships, flying the ensign of their great Almiranet Doria, and he demonstrated to us why he was called great. Our squadra, we could see from a distance, outnumbered the Genoans, so our Almirante Dandolo commanded that we surge forward in immediate attack. And Doria let our ships close with and disable some nine or ten of his, a deliberate sacrifice, just so our squadra would be enticed inextricably in amongst his own. And then, out of nowhere—or rather, out from behind the island of Peljesac, where they had been concealed—came ten or fifteen more fleet Genoan warships. The two-day battle cost many slain or wounded on both sides, but the victory was Doria’s, for by sunset of the second day, the Genoans had taken our entire squadra and some seven thousand Venetian seamen prize of war, and I was one of them.
The Doge Particiaco, like all the other Venetian galleys, was sailed —still by its prize crew, but under command of a captor Genoan Comito —around the foot of Italy and up through the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian seas to Genoa. From the water, that looked no bad city in which to be interned: its palazzi like layered cakes of alternate black and white marble stacked up the slopes from the harbor. But when we were marched ashore, we found Genoa to be sadly inferior to Venice: all cramped streets and alleys and meager little piazze, and very dirty, not having canals to flush away its effluents.
I do not know where the ordinary seamen and rowers and archers and balestrieri and such were imprisoned, but, if tradition was observed, they no doubt sat out the war in misery and deprivation and squalor. The officers and gentlemen at arms like myself were considerably better treated, and put only under house arrest in the abandoned and run-down palazzo of some defunct religious order, in the Piazza of the Five Lanterns. The building was very little furnished, and very cold and dank—I have suffered worsening twinges of backache in chill weather ever since —but our jailers were courteous and they fed us adequately, and we were allowed to give money to the visiting Prisoners’ Friends of the Brotherhood of Justice, to buy for us any extra comforts and refinements we might wish. All in all, it was a more tolerable confinement than I had once endured in the Vulcano prison of my own native Venice. However, our captors told us that they were breaking with tradition in one respect. They would not allow the ransoming of prisoners by their families back home. They said they had learned that it was no profit to profit from ransom payments, only to have to face the same officers again, a little while later, across some other contested piece of water. So we would stay in internment until this war was concluded.
Well, I had not lost my life by going to war, but it appeared that I was going to lose a substantial piece of it. I had carelessly squandered months and years before, making my way across interminable barren deserts or mountain snowfields, but at least I had been in the healthy open air during those journeys, and perhaps had learned something along the way. There was not much to be learned while languishing in prison. I had no Mordecai Cartafilo for cellmate this time.