“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 wouldlook 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 hadbeen 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 morefleet 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.
As well as I could ascertain, all my fellow prisoners were either dilettanti like myself—noblemen who had been only desultorily whiling away their military service obligation—or professional men of war. The dilettanti were devoid of conversation except whines and yearnings to get back to their feste and ballrooms and dancing partners. The officers at least had some war stories to tell. But each such story gets very like every other story after a telling or two, and the rest of their conversation had all to do with rank and promotions and seniority of service, and how unappreciated by their superiors they were. I gather that every military man in Christendom is undeservedly ranked at least two stripes below the grade he ought to have.
So, if I could learn nothing here in prison, perhaps I could instruct, or at least amuse. When the dull conversations threatened to get absolutely stultifying, I might venture a remark like:
“Speaking of stripes, Messeri, there is in the lands of Champa a beast called the tiger, which has stripes all over it. And curiously enough, no two tigers are striped exactly the same. The natives of Champa can recognize one tiger from another by the distinctive striping of its face. They call the beast Lord Tiger, and they say that by drinking a decoction made from the eyeballs of a dead one, you can always see My Lord Tiger before he sees you. Then, by the striping of his face, you can tell if he is a known man-eater or a harmless hunter of only lesser animals.”
Or, when one of our jailers brought us our tin supper dishes and the meal was as unsavory as usual, and we greeted him with our usual taunts, and he complained that we were a troublesome bunch, that he wished he had volunteered for duty elsewhere, I might suggest to him:
“Be glad, Genovese, you are not on duty in India. When the servants brought me dinner there, they had to enter the dining room crawling on their bellies and pushing the trays of food before them.”
At first, my unsolicited contributions to the barrack conversations were sometimes received with strange and wondering looks, as when, for instance, two foppish gentlemen might be discussing, in high-flown language, the comparative virtues and charms of their lady loves back home, and I might venture:
“Have you yet determined, Messeri, whether your maidens are winter or summer women?” I would be regarded blankly, so I would explain: “The men of the Han say that a woman whose intimate aperture is situated unusually near the front of her artichoke is most suitable for cold winter nights, because you and she must closely intertwine to effect penetration. But a woman whose orifice is situated farther back between her legs is better for summertime. She can sit on your lap in a cool and breezy outdoor pavilion, while you enter her from the rear.”
The two elegant gentlemen might then reel away in horror, but less dandified sorts would come congregating to hear more such revelations. And it was not long before, every time I opened my mouth, I would have more listeners than any expounder of ballroom manners or sea-war logistics, and they would listen raptly. Not only did my fellow Venetians cluster about me when I spun my tales, but also the Genoan warders and guards, and the visiting Brothers of Justice, and also Pisan and Corsican and Paduan prisoners taken by the Genoans in other wars and battles. And one day I was approached by one who said:
“Messer Marco, I am Luigi Rustichello, late of Pisa …”
And you introduced yourself as a scrivener, a fableor, a romancier, and you asked my permission to write down my stories in a book. So we sat down together and I told my tales to you, and, through the agency of the Brotherhood of Justice, I was enabled to send a request to Venice, and my father dispatched to Genoa my collection of notes and scraps and journals, which added to my recollection many things that I myself had forgotten. Thus our year of confinement passed not wearisomely but busily and productively. And when the war was finally over, and a new peace signed between Venice and Genoa, and we prisoners were released to go home, I could say that the year had not been a wasted time, as I had feared. Indeed, it may have been the most fruitful year of my entire life, in that I accomplished one thing that has lasted, and gives promise of lasting longer than I shall. I mean our book, Luigi, the Description of the World.Certainly, in the score or so of years that now have passed since we said goodbye outside that Genoa palazzo, I have accomplished nothing that gave me comparable satisfaction.