“Of course not, Sire. Not without your permission.”
“You have it, certainly. But now I should like to ask a favor. One last mission for you, which you can perform on your way, and it will make easier your way.”
“You have only to command it, Sire.”
“I would ask if you and Nicolò and Mafìo could deliver a certain valuable and delicate cargo to my grandnephew Arghun in Persia. When Arghun succeeded to that Ilkhanate, he took a Persian wife as a politic gesture to his subjects. He doubtless has other wives, as well, but now he wishes to have for his premier wife and Ilkhatun a woman of pure Mongol blood and upbringing. So he sent envoys to ask me to procure such a bride for him, and I have chosen a lady named Kukachin.”
“The widow of your son Chingkim, Sire?”
“No, no. She has the same name, but she is no relation, and you have never met her. A young maiden straight from the plains, from the tribe called Bayaut. I have provided for her an ample dowry and the usual rich bridal furnishings and a retinue of servants and maids, and she is ready to journey to Persia to meet her pledged husband. However, to send her overland would mean her having to traverse the territories of the Ilkhan Kaidu. That dastardly cousin of mine is as unruly as ever, and you know how inimical he always has been to his cousins who hold the Ilkhanate of Persia. I would not put it past Kaidu to capture the Lady Kukachin on her way and hold her—either to demand a ransom payment from Arghun or just to enjoy the spitefulness of the deed.”
“You wish us to escort her through that unsafe territory?”
“No. I had rather she avoided it altogether. My notion is to send her the whole way by sea. However, all my ships’ captains are of the Han, and vakh!—the Han mariners performed so disappointingly during our attempted invasions of Jihpen-kwe that I hesitate to trust them with this mission. But you and your uncles are also of a seafaring people. You are familiar with the open sea and with the handling of ships.”
“True, Sire, but we have never actually sailedone.”
“Oh, the Han can do that well enough. I should ask you only to be in command. To keep a stern eye on the Han captains, so theydo not run off with the lady, or sell her to pirates, or lose her along the way. And you would keep an eye on the course, so the captains do not sail the whole fleet off the edge of the world.”
“Yes, we could see to those things, Sire.”
“You would again carry my pai-tzu, and have unquestioned and unlimited authority, both on the sea and at every landfall you may have to make. It would mean comfortable traveling for you, from here to Persia, in good shipboard accommodations, with good food and good servants all the way. Especially it would mean easy travel for the invalid Mafìo, and attendants to care for him. You would be met in Persia by a train sent to fetch the Lady Kukachin, and you would be well and comfortably transported to wherever Arghun is currently making his capital. And surely he would see that you have good transport from there onward. So, Marco, that is the mission. Would you confer with your uncles and consider undertaking it?”
“Why, Sire, I am certain that I can speak now for all of us. We would not only be honored to do it, and eager, we are obligated to you for making the journey so easy for us.”
And so, while the bridal fleet was being assembled and provisioned, my father did the final clearing up of some loose ends of our Compagnia’s business, and I attended to some loose ends of my own affairs. I dictated to Kubilai’s court scribes a letter to be enclosed with the next official dispatch the Khakhan sent to the Wang Bayan in Ava. I sent warm greetings and regards and farewells to my old friend, and then suggested that, since the nation of Muong Thai was to be left free and uninvaded, I would take it as a personal favor if Bayan would see to it that the little Pagan maidservant Arùn was given her liberty and conveyed safely to that land of her own people.
Then, from the last Kithai gains of the Compagnia Polo, which my father had converted into portable goods for us to carry home, I took my share—a parcel of fine rubies—and carried it only as far as the chambers of the Finance Minister Lin-ngan. He was the first Khanbalik courtier I had met, and the first to whom I now said my goodbyes in person. I gave him the parcel of gems and asked him to use their value to make payment of a bequest to the Khakhan’s page boys, as each of them reached manhood, so they would have a start when they set out to seek their own fortunes.
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.