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 freshwaterfish for our tables.
My father and I had little to do in the way of command or supervision. The captains of the fourteen vessels had been sufficiently impressed and awed, to see us white men striding magisterially aboard with the Khakhan’s pai-tzu tablets slung on our chests, that they were commendably sedulous and punctilious in all their responsibilities. As for making sure that the fleet did not wander about, I would from time to time stand conspicuously on deck at night, eyeing the horizon through the kamàl I had kept ever since Suvediye. Though that little wooden frame told me nothing except that we were bearing constantly south, it always brought our ship’s captain scurrying to assure me that we were unswervingly keeping proper course.
The only complaint we passengers might have voiced was about the slowness of our progress, but that was caused by our captains’ devotion to their duty and our comfort. The Khakhan had chosen the ponderous chuan vessels especially to ensure for the Lady Kukachin a safe and smooth voyage, and the very stability of the big ships made them exceedingly slow in the water, and the necessity for all fourteen to stay together imposed even more slowness. Also, whenever the weather looked at all threatening, the captains would steer for a sheltered cove. So, instead of making a straight southward run across the open sea, the fleet followed the far longer westering arc of the coastline. Also, though the ships were lavishly provisioned with food and other supplies for fully two years’ sailing, they could not carry enough drinking water for more than a month or so. To replenish those supplies, we had to put in at intervals, and those were lengthier stops than the occasional shelterings. Just the heaving-to and anchoring of such a numerous fleet of such leviathan ships occupied most of a day. Then the rowing back and forth of barrels in the ships’ boats took another three or four days, and the weighing of anchor and setting sail again took yet another day. So every watering stop cost us about a week’s progress. After leaving Quan-zho, I remember, we stopped for water at a great island off Manzi, called Hainan, and at a harbor village on the coast of Annam in Champa, called Gai-dinh-thanh, and at an island as big as a continent, called Kalimantan. In all, we were three months making just the southward leg of our voyage down the coast of Asia before we could turn westward in the direction of Persia.
“I have watched you, Elder Brother Marco,” said the Lady Kukachin, coming up to me on deck one night, “standing here from time to time, manipulating a little wooden device. Is that some Ferenghi instrument of navigation?”
I went and fetched it, and explained to her its function.
“It might be a device unknown to my pledged husband,” she said. “And I might gain favor in his eyes if I introduced him to it. Would you show me how to employ it?”
“With pleasure, my lady. You hold it at arm’s length, like this, toward the North Star—” I stopped, appalled.
“What is the matter?”
“The North Star has vanished!”
It was true. That star had, every night lately, been lower toward the horizon. But I had not sought it for several nights, and now I was aghast to see that it had sunk entirely out of view. The star which I had been able to see almost every night of my life, the steadfast beacon which throughout history had guided all journeyers on land and sea, had totally gone from the sky. That was frightening—to see the one constant, immutable, fixed thing in the universe disappear. We might really have sailed over some farthest edge of the world, and fallen into some unknown abyss.
I frankly confess that it made me uneasy. But, for the sake of Kukachin’s confidence in me, I tried to dissemble my anxiety as I summoned the ship’s captain to us. In as steady a voice as possible, I inquired what had become of the star, and how he could keep a course or know his position without that fixed point of reference.