Then I went about the palace, saying my farewells to other people. Some of my calls were for duty’s sake: on such dignitaries as the Hakim Gansui and the Khatun Jamui, Kubilai’s aged premier wife. And some of my calls were less formal, but still brief: on the Court Astronomer and the Court Architect. And one call I made—on the Palace Engineer Wei —was just to thank him for having constructed that garden pavilion in which Hui-sheng had enjoyed the warbling water-piped music. And one call I made—on the Minister of History—was just to tell him:
“Now you can write in your archives another trifle. In the Year of the Dragon, by the Han count the year three thousand nine hundred ninety, the foreigner Po-lo Mah-ko finally left the City of the Khan to return to his native Wei-ni-si.”
He smiled, remembering our one conversation so long ago, and said, “Do I record that Khanbalik was made better by his presence here?”
“That is for Khanbalik to say, Minister.”
“No, that is for history to say. But here—see—” He took up a brush, wetted his ink block and wrote, on a paper already crowded with writing, a vertical line of characters. Among them I recognized the character that was on my yin seal. “There. The trifle is mentioned. Come back in a hundred years, Polo, or in a thousand, and see if this trifle is still remembered.”
Others of my farewell visits were more warm and lingering. In fact, three of them—my calls on the Court Firemaster Shi Ix-me and the Court Goldsmith Pierre Boucher and especially my call on Chao Meng-fu, War Minister, Court Artist, once fellow conspirator—each lasted long into the night and concluded only when we were too drunk to drink more.
When word came that the ships were ready and waiting for us at the port of Quan-zho, my father and I led Uncle Mafìo to the Khakhan’s chambers for our introduction to our lady charge. Kubilai first presented to us the three envoys who had come to procure her for the Ilkhan Arghun—their names were Uladai, Koja and Apushka—and then the Lady Kukachin, who was a girl of seventeen, as pretty as any Mongol female I had ever seen, dressed in finery designed to dazzle all Persia. But the young lady was not haughty and imperious, as might have been expected in a noblewoman on her way to become an Ilkhatun, heading an entourage of nearly six hundred, counting all her servants, maids, noble courtiers-to-be and escorting soldiers. As befitted a girl so suddenly promoted from a plains tribe—where probably her entire court had consisted of a horse herd—Kukachin was forthright and natural and pleasant of manner.
“Elder Brothers Polo,” she said to us, “it is with the utmost trust and confidence that I put myself in the keeping of such renowned journeyers.”
She and the leading nobles of her company and the three envoys from Persia and we three Polos and most of the Khanbalik court all sat down with Kubilai to a farewell banquet in the same vast chamber where we had enjoyed our welcoming banquet so long before. It was a sumptuous feast, and even Uncle Mafìo appeared to enjoy it—he being fed by his constant and faithful woman servant, who would remain with him as far as Persia—and the night was riotous with many and varied entertainments (Uncle Mafìo at one point rising to sing to the Khakhan a verse or two of his well-worn “Virtue” song) and everyone got exceedingly drunk on the liquors which the gold-and-silver serpent tree still dispensed on call. Before we got quite unconscious, my father and I and Kubilai made our mutual leavetakings, a process as lengthy and emotional and replete with embraces and fulsome toasts and speeches as a Venetian wedding.
But Kubilai also managed one private short colloquy with me. “Although I have known your uncles longer, Marco, I have known you best, and I shall be sorriest for your going. Hui, I remember, the first words you ever spoke to me were insulting.” He laughed in recollection. “That was not wise of you, but it was brave of you, and it was right of you to speak so. Ever since then, I have relied much on your words, and I shall be the poorer for hearing no more of them. I will hope that you may come this way again. I will not be here to greet you. But you would be doing me a service still, if you befriended and served my grandson Temur with the same dedication and loyalty you have shown to me.” He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder.
I said, “It will always be my proudest boast, Sire, and my only claim to having lived a useful life, that once, for a while, I served the Khan of All Khans.”
“Who knows?” he said jovially. “The Khan Kubilai may be remembered only because he had for good adviser a man named Marco Polo.” He gave my shoulder a companionable shake. “Vakh! Enough of sentiment. Let us drink and get drunk! And then”—he raised to me a jeweled beaker brimming with arkhi—“a good horse and a wide plain to you, good friend.”
“Good friend,” I dared to echo, raising my goblet, “a good horse and a wide plain to you.”
And the next morning, with heavy heads and not entirely light hearts, we took our departure. Just getting that populous train out of Khanbalik was a tactical problem very nearly on the order of the Orlok Bayan’s moving his tuk of warriors about in the Ba-Tang valley—and this was a herd consisting mostly of civilians not trained in military discipline. So, the first day, we did not get farther than the next village to the south, where we were received with cheers and thrown flowers and hosannahs and incense and bursts of the fiery trees. We did not make much better progress on the succeeding days, either, because of course every least village and town wanted to display its enthusiasm. Even after we got our company accustomed to forming up and moving out each morning, the train was so immense—my father and I and the three envoys, like most of the servants and all the escort troops, mounted on horses; the Lady Kukachin and her women and my Uncle Mafìo riding in horse-borne palanquins; a number of Khanbalik nobles riding elephant haudas; plus all the pack animals and drovers necessary for the luggage of six hundred persons—that we made a procession sometimes stretching the entire length of the road between the community where we had just spent the night and the next one we were bound for. Our final destination, the port of Quan-zho, was much farther south than I had ever been in Manzi—very far south of Hang-zho, my onetime city of residence—so the journey took an unconscionably long time. But it was an enjoyable journey because, for a change, the column was not of soldiers going to war, and we were welcome everywhere we arrived.
2
AT last we got to Quan-zho, and some of our escorting troops and nobles and the pack train turned back for Khanbalik, and the rest of us filed on board the great chuan ships, and at the next tide we put out into the Sea of Kithai. We made a water-borne procession even more imposing than our land parade had been, for Kubilai had provided an entire fleet: fourteen of the massive four-masted vessels, each crewed by some two hundred mariners. We had apportioned our company among them, my father and uncle and I and the envoy Uladai aboard the one carrying the Lady Kukachin and most of her women. The chuan vessels were good and solid, of the triple-planked construction, and our cabins were luxuriously furnished, and I think every one of us passengers had four or five servants from the lady’s entourage to wait upon us, in addition to the sea stewards and cooks and cabin boys also seeing to our comfort. The Khakhan had promised good accommodations and service and food, and I will give just one instance to illustrate how the ships lived up to that promise. On each of the fourteen vessels there was one seaman detailed to a single job throughout the voyage: he kept forever paddling and stirring the water in a deck tank the size of a lotus pool, in which swam freshwater fish for our tables.