Looking for Marco Polo (12 page)

Mark grinned. “Or any of his notes, right?”

“Nobody’s ever seen them,” Hornaday said with a laugh, “but maybe someday somebody like you prowling in an ancient room in Genoa will come upon a falling-apart bag of Venetian leather, and in it …”

Mark pictured himself in a dusty, gloomy room like the basement of his hotel, opening what looked like an
old suitcase, and there were Marco’s notes, small shapes of intricately marked paper fluttering out like butterfly wings.

“Over the years,” Hornaday was saying, “people made their own copies of what Rustichello wrote. A lot got changed. More than a hundred different handwritten versions survive, so we don’t know what’s closest to the story Marco told.”

Mark nodded. “So did people start to believe Marco after his book came out?” he asked.

“No,” said the doctor. “He was always something of a joke in Venice. Now he has rooms in the museum, but then? No. I think Messer Milione died a joke.”

The signora pursed her lips and shook her head.

“Marco Milione, tell us another lie,” she said. “A person always carries his mask in the Christmas pantomime, and always someone calls to him, ‘Another lie, Marco! Give us another lie!’”

“What did you hear about Dad?” Mark called out as his mother walked in.

“The herders are all changing their grazing routes to find water,” she said. “That’s why they can’t find him—because they can’t find the shepherds either. But they’re optimistic.”

Mark guessed this was good news, but his mouth was dry and he had to force himself to eat. He wanted Doc to get on with Marco’s story so he could stop thinking about his dad.

By the time they finished dinner the café was nearly empty. The signora was rigging a string of tiny white lights around the window with a loop circling the Madonna.

She brought over a plate of biscotti, a pitcher of orange juice, and a glass of red wine for the doctor.

“Be comfortable,” she said as she sat down with them.

“The doctor’s going to tell us how Marco goes to Kublai,” Mark said.

“Ah,” said the signora, nodding. “In school for the little ones at this season the children do the
mimica,
acting the story of Marco Polo without words. They put on costumes and masks and pretend to be the travelers and the beasts. The biggest boy, he is always Kublai; the next biggest, Marco. The girls are always the camels, but in my class,” she said with a giggle, “there was not so many boys and they was small, so we say no, the boys are camels now. I was the biggest, so I was Kublai, king of the East.”

She turned to Hornaday. “Doctor, please, the story.”

Hornaday wrapped the red scarf around his head again and, with a growl, whipped out the scimitar and flashed it close to Mark’s face. The boy reared back with a sharp cry.

“Now I am an Arab caravan leader,” Hornaday began as he tucked the scimitar into his belt.

“When we left our travelers, they were fleeing Hormuz. Open desert was better than that oven of smoke and dust. They set out across the desert of Syria. The land became drier and emptier.

“Even with a four-hundred-pound pack, a camel
can go twenty-five, fifty, maybe even sixty miles a day for four or five days without water if there’s grazing. They get moisture from the greens they eat. Their mouths are tough inside, and their teeth sharp, so they can even eat thornbush and get water from it, but where there’s no grazing and no water, they go down after three days.

“Late on the third day Marco’s caravan came to an oasis where the water was so foul-smelling no man would touch it. Camels, though, can drink stuff that
would sicken you and me, but at this place it was so bad the drivers had to cover the beasts’ noses and force open their jaws to make them take it.

“If she’s willing, your camel can suck up several quarts a minute. To water a camel that won’t suck it up herself takes a lot of work—hauling five or ten heavy goatskins of water from a sandy oasis hole, then forcing it down the gullet of a big bubbling, roaring beast that will bite you if it gets the chance.

“It was four days’ hard march to the next oasis. The heat, sand, and pebbles were wearing down the pads on the camels’ feet. The pad is what makes the camel such a perfect sand traveler. It works like a snowshoe, keeping the camel from sinking into the sand, but it can wear thin and suffer cuts from sharp stones. A limping camel is a dying camel. On the third day, two of the caravan animals failed. It was a close thing whether the rest would make it.

“The caravan chief made his men go dry. He doled out the last water to the grumbling beasts. At dusk on the fourth day, they saw the outlines of palms against the dark. He brought them stumbling into a water place at the edge of a green plain.

“At this village they exchanged their worn-out camels for donkeys, mules, and horses and headed into the lowlands of Persia.

“They came to a
caravanserai,
an inn set behind high mud walls built around a well with a watchtower in one corner. It was a government station for merchants. There was a locked warehouse where they could store their goods.

“These inns had been built a day’s walk apart, with stalls and fodder for the animals, rooms for the travelers, food—all free to make the merchants feel safe and encourage commerce along that strand of the Road of Silk.

“The innkeeper kept incense burning because the merchants and the men tending the animals did not wash. There was little water and no soap. People wore filthy clothes and coated their hair, faces, and the exposed parts of their bodies with rancid grease and mineral pastes to guard against the sun and cold and the constant biting flies that could eat a man’s eyes out in hours. The travelers stank.

“Marco’s room was a low square of mud brick with a narrow slit window. Against one wall there was a raised platform of dried mud—the
kang,
or bed. The floor was a hardened paste of ox blood and mud. Hungry ticks, fleas, and lice awaited him.

“The keeper showed Marco an ancient writing some one had left behind—a bundle of thin strips of bamboo tied together and inscribed with Chinese characters
from top to bottom. The characters were blurred and worn from many readings by passing travelers. It was a piece of scripture, what the Buddhists call a
sutra.

“‘You, lad,’ the keeper said, ‘you know the art. Read!’

“Marco couldn’t. He didn’t know Chinese. But rather than disappoint, he repeated what Mustafa had told him about the sound that monks make when they read the sutras.

“‘It’s a sacred Buddhist text,’ he said, ‘a sutra too worn to make out, but if I could—if I read it the way the monk who wrote it did—the holy chant would sound like purring.’

“He made a loud purring sound—
ommmurraaaaah
—like that,” he said as Boss lurched. “
The cat is reading the sutras
is the Chinese phrase for purring.

“They proceeded east,” the doctor continued, “higher and higher through grasslands where they sheltered with herders who lived in yurts—dark, greasy-looking, six-sided tents made of felt and skins rubbed with fat to keep out the rain. It was cold. They huddled with a herder’s family around the dung fire in the center of the yurt. There was no chimney. Only some of the smoke made it out through the hole in the roof.

“At this place they bought fresh horses, short,
sturdy mounts like the ones the Mongol raiders had ridden as they’d accompanied their interpreter some years before—horses that lived on the roots and grass they scratched up as their hungry riders cut open a leg vein and drank their mounts’ blood.”

Mark made a face.

“Now they began the long climb,” the doctor was saying. “In the mountains of Afghanistan they hired yak pullers as guides and yaks to carry their baggage—powerful, patient animals with shining black coats so long and shaggy they drag on the ground.

“Alive and dead the yak is valuable: his coarse hair is woven into stout cloth for outer garments; the thick hide makes sturdy boots and thongs for tying tents. The females give rich milk; the meat is ground into sausage; the horns are carved to make utensils and knife handles. The tail they keep as a prize,” the doctor said, reaching into his coat. “The yak tail is the symbol of the Mongol leader.”

Mark heaved back as Hornaday swished the hairy wand around. “A souvenir of one that served us,” he said as Boss sniffed and frowned.

“You ate the rest of him?” Mark asked.

“We did,” said the doctor, “and I bet Marco’s party did the same.

“The men rubbed their faces, hands, and necks
with yak butter,” he went on, “slathering it on as thick as they could to keep off the sun and keep out the cold.

“Their trail zigzagged up and up along the mountainside. At some places they had to clear the way of ice. The air grew thin; the cold wind cut like blades. The horses would take a few steps, then pause while their knees shook and their heads drooped. The yaks panted, their breath whistling.

“The drivers slit the beasts’ nostrils so they could get more air. They treated the cuts with a white paste they carried to stanch the bleeding.

“At dusk they’d dig pits in the snow big enough for two or three men and cover it with a dome of snow blocks, leaving a side hole just large enough to crawl through. They’d light a yak-fat candle inside. The candle’s heat and that of their bodies would melt the snow overhead, so pretty soon the inside of their hut was sealed with ice and almost warm. If someone’s feet got really cold, he’d put them against his partner’s bare belly as the other rubbed his legs to get the circulation going.

“One afternoon a blizzard of numbing cold stalled the horses. Some of them froze stiff in place with their riders. One could tell the rider was dead if his teeth showed, the lips drawn back in a grin.

“At noon the next day a yell went up from the lead men. They’d come to a gap—a five-foot section of road had slid away. There was rock wall on one side, a steep drop on the other. There was no going around.

“The wind was blowing snow.

“‘We leap it!’ the guide hollered.

“With shouts and coaxing they got the horses over, but when it came her turn, the lead yak balked. She was carrying a heavy pack. She went to the edge and looked down. She wouldn’t jump.

“The guide backed her up, tightened his hold on the cord through her nose, thwacked her hard on the rump, and began to run as everyone yelled and pushed. He leaped across; she followed, eyes closed, her front legs tucked up as if she were diving. Had she balked again, or gone down, the guide would have plunged to his death.”

The signora gasped. Mark’s heart was pounding.

The doctor went on. “The wind tore at them, making their fingertips split, their lips and cheeks crack and bleed. That night they sheltered under rocks. The ice crust was too thick for them to dig pits in the snow.

“The next day they pressed on, gasping in the thin air, sometimes hanging on to the tails of their horses, forcing the beasts to drag them up the icy steeps, scooping out pits in the snow to rest.

“Marco grew weak. He’d been feverish for days. Then one afternoon he fainted and fell off his pony.

“At that place in the mountains he nearly died. The air was thin, he couldn’t get his breath, he had a chest infection—probably pneumonia—and he was sick in his gut with parasites and worms. He’d been weakened by a year of constant travel, bad water, and poor diet.

“A shaman came, a priest who uses magic in his cure. He came with a great black dog.”

With a woof, Boss heaved up and nearly overturned the table.

Doc nodded and went on. “The shaman was old. He wore a flat black hat and a yak-skin coat. He brought a wand with tiny bronze bells and jingles, and a small drum painted orange and red with figures of animals and men in black. On his shoulder there was a bag of embroidered silk stuffed with garlic, rhubarb root, dried herbs, mushrooms, moss, lichens, and scrapings of mold—a primitive form of penicillin.

“He waved the wand and started beating his drum—
tap tap tap,
like this,” said the doctor, hammering out a slow rhythm on the table with his spoon and fork.

“He circled around his patient,” Hornaday said, “faster and faster until Marco grew dizzy watching as the old man drummed and skipped and danced and sang himself into the spirit world. His mouth was foaming
when he fell to the ground clutching the wand as his drum rolled off toward the fire.

“After a while he got up. As the spirits instructed, he prepared a stinking red gruel. The rhubarb root in it worked as a purge for worms. He had to pinch Marco’s nose to get him to swallow it. Then he made him eat clove after clove of garlic.”

“Argggh!” Mark went. His stomach churned. He felt he was there with Marco, shivering and nauseated.

“And you complain about the stuff I give you,” the doctor said to Mark.

He continued. “Once the shaman had forced his medicine down Marco’s throat, he lit sticks of harsh incense and began a howling chant.

“His medicine had weakened the bad things inside Marco. Now his singing made the spirits come and draw the sickness out.