La virtù te fa vivo anca sepolto.
Though I had never been in that secret walkway before, I was well enough acquainted with the palace to have a general idea of where the passage’s twists and turns were taking us. The whole way, Mafìo went on murmurously singing the virtues of Virtue. We passed numerous other closed doors in the wall, but I took us a considerable distance before choosing one door to open just a crack and peep out.
It gave on a small garden not far from the palace wing where we were quartered. I tried to hush Mafìo as I drew him outdoors, but to no avail. He was abiding in some other world, and would have taken no notice if I had dragged him through the garden’s lotus pond. However, by good fortune, there was no one about, and I think no one at all saw us as I hurried him the rest of the way to his chambers. But there, since I did not know how to find his back door, I had to take him in through the usual one, and we were met there by the same woman servant who had admitted me the night before. I was somewhat surprised but much pleased when she evinced no shock or horror at seeing her master and onetime paramour so grotesquely attired. She only looked sad again, and pitying, as he crooned to her:
La virtù è un cavedàl che sempre è rico,
Che no patisse mai rùzene o tarlo … .
“Your master is taken ill,” I told the woman, that being the only explanation I could think of—and it was true enough.
“I will attend him,” she said, with calm compassion. “Do not worry.”
… Che sempre cresse e no se pol robarlo,
E mai no rende el possessòr mendico.
I gladly left him in her care. And I might as well tell, here, that it was in her tender and solicitous care that Mafìo remained long afterward, for he never recovered his reason.
It had already been quite an arduous day, and the one before had been even worse, and I had passed a sleepless night between. So I dragged myself to my own chambers, to rest and myself enjoy some solicitude from my servants and pretty Hui-sheng, while I kept Ali Babar company and watched him drink himself unconscious of his own misery.
I never saw Achmad again. He was accused and tried and judged and convicted and sentenced, all in that same day, and I will tell of it just as quickly. I have no wish to dwell on the subject, because it happened that, even in winning my vengeance, I had to suffer one more loss.
In all the long time since then, I have felt no least remorse for having destroyed Achmad-az-Fenaket through the agency of a forged letter, nor for its having implicated him in a crime which was never committed. He was guilty of enough other crimes and vices. Indeed, the false letter might easily have failed in its purpose, but for the Arab’s truly perverted nature, which had led him to indulge in the love philter with Mafìo. From that experiment in hallucination, he emerged with his shrewd mind addled and his sharp wits blunted and his serpent tongue knotted. Perhaps he had been less severely impaired by the experience than had my uncle—the Arab at least briefly recognized me afterward, and Mafìo did not, ever again—and perhaps Achmad would have recovered after a time, but he did not get that time.
When he was dragged before the irate Khakhan that day and confronted with the really flimsy evidence of his “treason,” he could readily have talked his way out of the predicament. All he had to do was invoke the privilege of office and request an adjournment of the Cheng until an embassy could be sent to the Ilkhan Kaidu, the other of the alleged triumvirate of conspirators. Kubilai and the justices could hardly have refused to wait and hear what word Kaidu might send back. But Achmad never asked for that or for anything else, according to those who were present. He was unprepared to defend himself at all, they said, they not being aware that he was unable to defend himself, incapable of it. They said he only gibbered and ranted and twitched, giving the unmistakable impression of a culprit felon deranged by his guilt and his having been apprehended and his dread of the penalty. Then and there, the assembled justices of the Cheng found against him, and the still outraged Kubilai did not overrule them. Achmad was adjudged guilty of treason, and the punishment for that was the Death of a Thousand.
The whole affair had blown up as suddenly as a summer storm, but it constituted the most serious and spectacular scandal in the memory of the oldest courtier. People talked of nothing else, and were avid to hear or to recount any least detail of news or rumor, and anyone who had a juicy tidbit to impart was a center of a crowd. The greatest celebrity accrued to the Fondler, who had been given the most illustrious Subject of his career, and Master Ping reveled in that celebrity. Contrary to his usual dark secrecy, he boasted openly that he was stocking his cavern dungeon with provender to last for a hundred days, and that he was dismissing all his assistants and clerks on holiday—even his Blotters and Retrievers—so that he could give this distinguished Subject his undivided and unshared attention.
I went to call on Kubilai. By then, he had calmed somewhat and resigned himself to the defection and loss of his Chief Minister, and he no longer looked at me the way ancient kings used to look at the bearers of ill tidings. I told him, without going into unnecessary detail, that Achmad had been responsible for the inexcusable murder of Ali Babar’s blameless wife. I asked, and got, the Khakhan’s permission for Ali to attend the execution of his wife’s executioner. The Fondler Ping was aghast at this, of course, but he could not countermand the permission, and he did not even dare make any loud complaint, lest a closer look be given to his own willing part in Mar-Janah’s murder.
So, on the appointed day, I went with Ali to the underground cavern, and bade him be manfully stalwart as he witnessed the piecemeal reduction of our mutual enemy. Ali looked pale—he had never had stomach for bloodshed—but he looked determined, even while he said his salaams and farewells to me as solemnly as if he himself were going to the Death of a Thousand. Then he and the Master Ping, who was still grumbling at this unwelcome intrusion, went through the iron-studded door to where Achmad was already dangling and waiting, and closed the door behind them. I came away with only one regret at the time: that the Arab, from what I had heard, was still numb and bemazed. If it was true, as Achmad had once told me, that Hell is what hurts worst, then I regretted that he might not feel the hurts as keenly as I would have wished.
Since the Fondler had given notice that this Fondling might occupy a full hundred days, everyone naturally expected that it would. So not until the expiration of that time did his clerks and assistants return to congregate in the outer chamber and await their master’s triumphant emergence. When several more days passed, they began to fidget, but dared not intrude. Not until I sent one of my maidservants, seeking word of Ali Babar, was the chief clerk emboldened to open the iron-studded door a crack. He was met by a charnel-house stench that sent him reeling backward. Nothing else came out of the inner room, and no one could even peek in without fainting dead away. The Palace Engineer had to be sent for and asked to direct his artificial breezes through the underground tunnels. When the chambers had been blown clean enough to be bearable, the Fondler’s chief clerk ventured in and came out, looking stunned, to report what he had found.
There were three dead bodies, or the constituents and remains of three bodies. That of the ex-Wali Achmad was a mere shred, obviously having endured at least a Death of Nine Hundred and Ninety-nine. As well as could be ascertained, Ali Babar had watched that entire dissolution, had then seized and bound the Fondler, and proceeded to imitate, on his sacrosanct and inviolate person, the whole process of the Fondling. However, the chief clerk reported, it had not gone much beyond a Death of Perhaps One or Two Hundred. The supposition was that Ali had got too ill—from the miasma of Achmad’s decay and all the other accumulated gore and carnage and excrement—to persevere to the end. He had left the only partially dismembered Master Ping hanging to die at his leisure, and had taken up one of the longer knives and plunged it into his own breast, and died himself.