Daughter of Xanadu (19 page)

“Much better! Doesn’t our Latin friend learn quickly?” I looked around at my colleagues, hoping they had not noticed the attraction between us. The soldiers murmured assent. Suren’s face showed concern, but he did not stop me.

Marco stepped back, preparing to leave, and I turned to him again, addressing him so that others could hear. “I hope you’ll keep practicing with us, Messer Polo. You will not find it difficult if you practice every day. You may need these skills for defense.”

Marco nodded as if trying to sense the will of the men. I looked him straight in the eye and dared to give him my most charming smile, despite the onlookers. He seemed distrustful. He looked at Suren. “I do not wish to interfere with your training.”

Suren was too much a gentleman to deny him. “You are welcome to join us,” he said, though I suspected he felt otherwise. Marco bowed to us and went to his tent.

From then on, as we traveled, Marco joined our squad for a short time every afternoon for archery. His skills improved, though no one would ever mistake him for a Mongol archer. Each afternoon, I stood close to Marco, showing him how to hold the bow, showing him how to be a manly man any Mongol woman would admire.

Still, I did not talk to him alone. It was unseemly, and there was no need.

One afternoon, as I watched him miss the target arrow after arrow, I realized that I had been foolish. Marco did not
have the heart of a warrior. None of the soldiers could talk to me about distant lands and cultures as Marco did; none had much to teach me, except Abaji. Instead of appreciating Marco for what made him unique, I had tried to mold him into a Mongol man.

Suren, my loyal, lovable cousin, saw what I was doing and could not fathom it. One evening, after dinner, he took me aside.

“Elder Sister, have you noticed? The other soldiers accept you now. Don’t lose sight of your target. That foreigner may be dangerous.” My body tensed. “When you look at him, all the soldiers are watching your eyes. They can see it.”

“See what?”

“You know what I mean. You have worked too hard to become a soldier.”

Suren’s words hit their mark. I had been fooling myself into thinking I was being kind to Marco. In reality, I was feeding my attraction to him. I was playing with fire.

That night, I again willed myself not to think of Marco. But my reveries had gone too far. What would the hair on his arm feel like? Was his beard soft? Was his chest hard? Such thoughts were wrong. My heart and my mind battled against each other, neither one able to win decisively.

One night, Abaji told us the story of how Chinggis Khan’s two great generals, Subedei and Jebe, led the army westward around the Caspian Sea, using clever tactics to defeat the princes of Russia. Once they diverted a river and flooded a city. Often they would start a retreat and lure the enemy forces into a river valley surrounded by cliffs, only to block the enemy into the valley using a hidden rear guard of Mongol soldiers.

Marco’s face showed little emotion as he listened to General Abaji tell his stories. One night, though, when other men were not paying attention, he spoke. “When I was a boy,” he told Abaji, “everyone in Christendom feared the Mongol hordes. They were known for rape and murder and pillage.”

Abaji laughed. “How little you knew! We had only a few hundred thousand troops, yet we conquered lands with millions of inhabitants. Fear was our best tactic.”

“Surely some kingdoms resisted with great force?”

Abaji leaned forward, his face serious. “Every kingdom was given a choice: Cooperate, and we will spare you. Resist, and we will destroy you. Once people saw how fiercely we destroyed our enemies, they gave up without a fight.”

“So that is how so few men could conquer almost the entire world?”

“Ah. That is the miracle, isn’t it? Chinggis Khan and his commanders were the most brilliant military men in history. They hired local men to gather intelligence before entering each land. They sent the information back to headquarters quickly, using a highly organized system of horse riders. Mongol soldiers were well-trained archers, extremely disciplined. They used clever strategies to outwit much bigger armies. There has never been a leader like Chinggis Khan, and our army continues that tradition.”

When Abaji spoke, Marco seemed fascinated. Who would not be? The story of Chinggis Khan’s conquest of the world was the best ever told. Surely now Marco could understand why I had wanted to join this army, why the Great Khan deserved to rule the entire world. But remembering Marco’s preference for peace, I began to have doubts again.

All those afternoons in the sun in Xanadu had gradually reshaped my view of the world, polluting my Mongolian idealism as surely as a cow pollutes a streambed. Even if I had not watched Marco’s face during Abaji’s stories, I probably would have heard them with different ears. But with Marco’s foreign face before me as he tried hard to remain polite despite his distaste for our tactics, I was robbed of my central faith—faith in the absolute glory and wisdom of Chinggis Khan.

I began, despite myself, to look at all the familiar stories from the point of view of the vanquished, a dangerous angle of vision. I tried to resent Marco for opening my mind to this, but could not. Instead, I often found myself imagining his thoughts and feeling his emotions. It was as if an invisible rope linked us together.

Each night, when my thoughts became untethered from military discipline, I thought of Marco. My fingertips caressed the skin of my arms and belly as I remembered each moment he had touched me, on the shoulder, on the hand, on the back. At first I tried to banish such thoughts, but gradually I came to savor them. What harm was there in imagining something that could never happen? My nightly forbidden thoughts became ever more vivid.

E
ach morning, I reminded myself how lucky I was to be a soldier on a mission, traveling ever farther from all that was familiar. Perhaps it was my Mongol heritage, but in the open air, I felt taller, stronger, wiser. In my memory, the Emperor’s court became more closed-in and narrow. If only those people could get out and see how vast the sky was, and how the land stretched on and on. They would have a whole new sense of life.

Yet I also felt unsettled. I was a soldier at last, one of the few recruits chosen to go on this distant mission. I knew Abaji was watching me, to see how well I would withstand the rigors of travel and army life. This travel seemed easy. But I had doubts about my courage and preparedness. Was I tough enough for battle?

In North China under the Great Khan, the region known as Cathay, the Empire was at peace. The roads were wide, smooth, and well maintained, slightly raised and bordered by
drainage ditches and trees. Sturdy stone bridges crossed numerous streams and rivers. Excellent hostelries with clean rooms and passable food were located a day’s journey apart. The autumn weather was pleasantly cool, and the red leaves sparkled in the sunlight and sprinkled the hillsides with color. Traveling was much less taxing than daily military training. I could feel my muscles growing lazy. Once, I even envied the soldiers left behind in Khanbalik; they were improving their skills daily.

Every time our troops passed a small town, vendors crowded around, eager to sell us whatever we might need. In these towns, I saw for the first time the merchant in Marco. He always sought out the town’s marketplace. At dinner each night with Abaji, he would describe the unusual local products. He particularly praised the excellence of the silk cloth, gold thread, taffetas, and brocade. I had been raised to have disdain for merchants, who live off the labor of others. But gradually, I could see the appeal of his life.

After traveling through hilly country, we crossed a huge roaring river called the Caramoran, “Black River” in Mongolian. Chinese call it the Yellow River, because it carries silt from the yellowish soil of nearby hills. We loaded our horses and mules onto ferries, which took us across the wide river.

Eight days later, we arrived in Kenjanfu, the ancient capital of Cathay. Called by the Chinese the City of Eternal Peace, it had once been a great and fine capital, noble and rich, the most populous, cosmopolitan city in the world, home to powerful emperors for ten dynasties. A massive gray wall surrounded it, with four huge gates pointing toward the four cardinal directions. I wondered if it had been difficult to
conquer. Parts of the city wall were in disrepair, with bricks lying about. It had fallen three hundred years earlier.

It was common knowledge that the Cathayan empire had collapsed when its later emperors grew lazy, spending too much time with women. One famous Tang dynasty emperor had fallen in love with a great beauty, his concubine, and spent so much time dallying with her that he neglected his duties. His generals colluded to have the lady murdered so that the emperor could focus his attention on ruling. Not until after death could the two lovers reunite. It was one of Cathay’s greatest love stories, and it ended in tragedy. I could not think of any love stories that ended happily.

Shortly after we left the city, heading south, we entered a rugged mountainous region. Our caravan followed rivers, but many times the hills were so steep that the road had been hewed into the sides of cliffs, held up by poles. Everyone had to walk, leading horses and mules along the narrow road. Every time I heard a loose rock slip into the canyon, I turned to make sure Baatar had not lost his footing. I tried not to look at the roaring river below. One day it rained, and a servant boy slipped off the path to his death. I had longed for danger, but not this sort.

We heard stories of lions, bears, and lynxes in the surrounding forests. The road became a crevice between walls of red sandstone several hundred feet high. I looked up to the ragged ridges that cut into the sky, where I caught sight of an eagle. As we climbed higher, the air grew colder, requiring everyone to bundle up in fur-lined coats. When it rained, my coat felt twice as heavy and I had to wear it wet the next morning.

Despite the wild environment, we passed numerous towns and villages and even two cities where the valley widened into a small plain, in a land called Szechwan, or Four Rivers. The food was zesty, flavored heavily with hot peppers and garlic, which locals claimed would prevent illness. Between cities, we camped under the stars. While the scenery was stunning, the travel was wearisome; I was disheartened to hear it would take a month through such rugged terrain to reach the region of Carajan.

In Szechwan, we stocked up on all the food and provisions we would need. We were preparing for a journey through wild, uninhabited country and then through a mountainous region called Tibet, a friendly part of our Empire. Marco traded one of his silk carpets for salt, which Tibetans used as currency.

Before we reached Tibet, the land became even more rugged. This part of Szechwan, Abaji told us, had been sorely ravaged in the battles led by Khubilai Khan to control the area twenty years earlier. Abaji, who had served under Khubilai, told us many stories about the battles they had fought in this part of the empire.

One town, by a rushing river with mountains at its back, had been burned to the ground by Mongol troops. The crumbling bricks of the town’s wall still stood, but the houses inside were charred remains. We stopped to water our horses, and Abaji told us how the town leaders had resisted, feigning surrender at first but then surprising the Mongolian horsemen by attacking with arrows from hideouts on cliffs and blocking the way with boulders. I looked up and shivered, imagining a torrent of arrows coming from those cliffs. It had taken three days for the Mongol troops to break
through. When they did, they killed everyone in the town and burned it to the ground.

I noticed something half hidden behind a boulder and pointed to it. Abaji led the way, and several of us followed, including Marco. When we rounded the boulder, we saw that it was a stack of human bones and skulls, piled higher than the roof of a house. Most of them had been bleached in the sunlight and half rotted during the wet winters. Twenty years earlier, the stack must have been twice as high. Someone had placed all those bodies in one spot after the Mongol troops had left. Who? Wives or mothers?

The eyes in the skulls were empty holes, staring at us from the past, filling me with horror. I remembered that Marco had told me of seeing similar stacks of bleached bones many times during his journey from the West. But seeing them with my own eyes was far worse than hearing about them. Some were small, children’s bones. It seemed impossible that brave Mongol soldiers would kill so many. That the great Khubilai Khan, with his good humor and intellectual interests, could have ordered it. That fat, good-natured Abaji himself had helped carry out such atrocities.

“They resisted,” Abaji explained. “Now the land is at peace, and we can pass safely, without fear for our lives.”

I tasted bile in my throat and looked away. Marco closed his eyes and turned, walking away without looking back. Yet without such killings, we Mongols could not have established wise rule and peace in these wild places.

I had often imagined fighting in a battle between two armies, and I had dreamed of killing armed enemy soldiers by the dozen. But a village of ordinary people, including women and children? In resisting the Mongols, they had
merely been defending their homes. No wonder Marco wanted to prevent this from happening in Christendom.