The Journeyer - Jennings Gary - Страница 115

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“Then I recommend to you, Elder Brothers, the one that is reserved for passing travelers, the Inn of the Five Felicities. It is in the Lane of Perfumed Humanity. Anyone in Kashgar can direct—”

“We know where it is.”

“Then you will be so kind as to lodge there until the Ilkhan Kaidu requests the honor of your presence in his pavilion yurtu.” He stepped back, still holding the letter, and waved us on. “Now go in peace, Elder Brothers. A good journey to you.”

When we had ridden out of the sentry’s hearing, Uncle Mafio grumbled, “Merda with a piecrust on it! Of all the Mongol armies, we ride into Kaidu’s.”

“Yes,” said my father. “To have come all this way through his lands without incident, only to come up against the man himself.”

My uncle nodded glumly and said, “This may be as far as we get.”

To explain why my father and uncle voiced annoyance and concern, I must explain some things about this land of Kithai to which we had come. First, its name is universally pronounced in the West “Cathay,” and there is nothing I can do to change that. I would not even try, because the rightly pronounced “Kithai” is itself rather an arbitrary name, bestowed by the Mongols, and only comparatively recently, only some fifty years before I was born. This land was the first the Mongols conquered in their rampage across the world, and it is where Kubilai chose to set his throne, and it is the hub of the many spokes of the Mongols’ widespread empire—just as our Venice is the holding center of our Republic’s many possessions: Thessaly and Crete and the Veneto mainland and all the rest. However, just as the Veneti people originally came to the Venetian lagoon from somewhere out of the north, so did the Mongols come to Kithai.

“They have a legend,” said my father, when we all were comfortably settled in Kashgar’s karwansarai of the Five Felicities, and were discussing our situation. “It is a laughable legend, but the Mongols believe it. They say that once upon a time, long ago, a widow woman lived alone and lonely in a yurtu on the snowy plains. And out of loneliness, she befriended a blue wolf of the wild, and eventually she mated with it, and from their coupling sprang the first ancestors of the Mongols.”

That legendary start of their race occurred in a land far north of Kithai, a land called Sibir. I have never visited there, nor ever wanted to, for it is said to be a flat and uninteresting country of perpetual snow and frost. In such a harsh land, it was perhaps only natural that the various Mongol tribes (one of which called itself “the Kithai”) should have found nothing better to do than to fight among themselves. But one man of them, Temuchin by name, rallied together several tribes and, one by one, subdued the others, until all the Mongols were his to command, and they called him Khan, meaning Great Lord, and they gave him a new name, Chinghiz, meaning Perfect Warrior.

Under Chinghiz Khan, the Mongols left their northland and swept southward—to this immense country, which was then the Empire of Chin—and they conquered it, and called it Kithai. The other conquests made by the Mongols, in the rest of the world, I need not recount in series, since they are too well known to history. Suffice it to say that Chinghiz and his lesser Ilkhans and later his sons and grandsons extended the Mongol domains westward to the banks of the River Dnieper in the Polish Ukraine, and to the gates of Constantinople on the Sea of Marmara—which sea, incidentally, like the Adriatic, we Venetians regard as our private pond.

“We Venetians made the word ‘horde’ from the Mongol word yurtu,” my father reminded me, “and we called the marauders collectively the Mongol Horde.” Then he went on to tell me something I had not known. “In Constantinople I heard them called by a different name: the Golden Horde. That was because the Mongol armies invading that region had come originally from this region, and you have seen the yellowness of the soil hereabout. They always colored their tents yellow like the earth, for partial concealment. So—yellow yurtu: Golden Horde. However, the Mongols who marched straight west out of their native Sibir were accustomed to coloring their yurtus white, like the Sibir snows. So those armies, invading the Ukraine, were called by their victims the White Horde. I suppose there may yet be Other-Colored Hordes.”

If the Mongols had never conquered more than Kithai, they would have had much to boast about. The tremendous land stretches from the mountains of Tazhikistan eastward to the shores of the great ocean called the Sea of Kithai, or by some people the Sea of Chin. To the north, Kithai abuts on the Sibir wasteland where the Mongols originated. In the south—in those days, when I had first arrived in the country—Kithai bordered on the Empire of Sung. However, as I shall tell in its place, the Mongols later conquered that empire, too, and called it Manzi, and absorbed it into Kubilai’s Khanate.

But even in those days of my first arrival, the Mongol Empire was so immense that—as I have repeatedly indicated—it was divided into numerous provinces, each under the sovereignty of a different Ilkhan. Those provinces had been parceled out with no particular attention paid to any previous map-drawn borders observed by former rulers now overthrown. The Ilkhan Abagha, for example, was the lord of what had been the Empire of Persia, but his lands also included much of what had been Greater Armenia and Anatolia to the west of Persia and, on the east, India Aryana. There, Abagha’s domain bordered on the lands apportioned to his distant cousin, the Ilkhan Kaidu, who reigned over the Balkh region, the Pai-Mir, all of Tazhikistan and this western Sin-kiang Province of Kithai where my father, my uncle and I now lodged.

The Mongols’ accession to empire and power and wealth had not lessened their lamentable propensity for quarreling among themselves. They quite frequently fought each other, just as they had used to do when they were only ragged savages in the wastes of Sibir, before Chinghiz unified them and impelled them to greatness. The Khakhan Kubilai was a grandson of that Chinghiz, and all the Ilkhans of the outlying provinces were likewise direct descendants of that Perfect Warrior. It might be supposed that they should have constituted a close-knit royal family. But several were descended from different sons of Chinghiz, and had been distanced from each other by two or three generations of the family tree’s branchings apart, and not all were satisfied that they had inherited their fair share of the empire bequeathed by their mutual progenitor.

This Ilkhan Kaidu, for instance, whose summons to audience we were now awaiting, was the grandson of Kubilai’s uncle, Okkodai. That Okkodai, in his time, had himself been the ruling Khakhan, the second after Chinghiz, and evidently his grandson Kaidu resented the fact that the title and throne had passed to a different branch of the line. Evidently he felt, too, that he deserved more of the Khanate than he presently held. Anyway, Kaidu had several times made incursions on the lands given to Abagha, which was tantamount to insubordination against the Khakhan, for Abagha was Kubilai’s nephew, son of his brother, and his close ally in the otherwise disputatious family.

“Kaidu has never yet rebelled openly against Kubilai,” said my father. “But, besides harassing Kubilai’s favorite nephew, he has disregarded many court edicts, and usurped privileges to which he is not entitled, and in other ways has flouted the Khakhan’s authority. If he deems us friends of Kubilai, then he must regard us as enemies of himself.”

Nostril, sounding woeful, said, “I thought we were only having a trivial delay, master. Are we instead in danger again?”

Uncle Mafio muttered, “As the rabbit said in the fable: ‘If that is not a wolf, it is a damned big dog.’”

“He may snatch for himself all the gifts we are carrying to Khanbalik,” said my father. “Out of envy and spite, as much as rapacity.”

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