Looking for Marco Polo (5 page)

Hornaday nodded. “I’m pretty sure he went to Mongolia and China, and later to India. His last adventure is as full of truth as anything I’ve ever read—his coming-home story.”

Mark nodded. “Mom and I went to where his house was,” he said. “I went through the arch they walked under. That’s all that’s left.”

Hornaday got up and took a spoon and a bottle of red liquid from his case. He shook the bottle and poured. “Swallow,” he said, aiming the spoon.

“Argh!” the boy sputtered, spitting and making a face. “That’s awful—like something you’d put in a car.”

“Right,” said Hornaday. “Pipe cleaner. Label says it’s cherry-flavored.”

“Don’t believe it.”

Doc shrugged. “Probably no worse than what the medicine man gave Marco when he got sick in the mountains.”

“I haven’t got to that part,” Mark said. He looked hard at the doctor. “Can you tell me about Marco Polo?”

“Nobody knows much,” Hornaday replied as he sat down again. “We know what’s in his book, but beyond that? We don’t even know what he looked like.”

“I’ve seen pictures,” Mark said. “The museum—”

The doctor cut him off. “Venice is full of Marco pictures—paintings and drawings, sculptures too—all done after he was dead. They didn’t think much of him when he was alive, so they didn’t paint and sculpt him like they did the priests and politicians we don’t hear about anymore. Was he fair or dark? By some accounts, he had African blood, so maybe he looked like me. More than anything, though, I’d like to know who made him so curious about the East.”

“Maybe his teacher at school?” Mark ventured. “Or his father and mother?”

Boss grew more and more restless, rattling his collar, sneezing, snorting, making a sort of humming noise.

“Does he need to go out?” Mark asked.

“Him? No,” said Hornaday, reaching down and rubbing the dog’s head. “Marco talk always gets him stirred up.”

“How come?”

“He’s got a family connection to Marco Polo’s dog,” the doctor explained.

Mark looked at Boss.

The dog grunted deeply.

“It wasn’t Marco’s parents that taught him about the East,” Doc said. “His mother died soon after he was born, and his father left on a trading trip before he was three. Marco didn’t see him again until he was fifteen. It must have been somebody else.”

“Who then?” Mark asked.

“Nobody knows for sure. You’ll just have to imagine it.”

“You can’t imagine history!” Mark exclaimed. “That’s for stories.”

“Really? Why?” the doctor asked. “History
is
stories. It comes from what the historian imagines. He soaks up everything he can and then imagines what happened. I bet if you pretend you’re on your own like Marco was, you’ll learn a lot,” said Hornaday.

Boss thumped his tail.

“My dad’s on his own like Marco,” Mark said slowly. “Right now the people who sent him can’t find him because the water dried up where he was supposed to be and he had to go somewhere else.

“Can you tell me about Marco’s father?” Mark asked.

“He was a trader,” the doctor began, “off with his brother on the Silk Road, swaying at the caravan’s pace on one of the strands that ran to China and back, loaded down with the goods they’d taken on at Venice, poking their noses out like hungry squirrels, venturing farther and farther east to get the best price.

“They got caught between warring tribes. They were surrounded by a horde of horse warriors dressed in black.”

Mark shivered.
What if that’s what’s happened to Dad?

“How did they escape?” Mark asked.

“They didn’t,” said Hornaday. “The chief decided to take them to his cousin, Kublai Khan, conqueror of all China, emperor of the East. He figured Kublai would give him more for a pair of European slaves than he’d ever get for the captives’ clothing and kit.

Marco’s father and uncle ended up in Mongolia at Kublai’s summer palace. They were the first Europeans
he ever met—‘Colored-Eye People,’ he called them. Mongol eyes are black.

“Kublai was curious about Europe, so he sent them home with gifts for the doge—the Venetians’ ruler—and a letter to the pope asking for a hundred teachers.”

Mark’s breathing was still ragged, but right now he wasn’t thinking about how he felt.

“Did his father send letters home about what the East was like?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” the doctor replied. “There wasn’t any mail in those days. Maybe he tried to send back word with one of the caravans heading west, but I don’t think Marco heard from him until he got back to Venice.”

“Did he miss his dad?” Mark asked.

“I guess at first,” the doctor said, “but as the years went by he must have come to think he was an orphan. It must mean something that he doesn’t say much about him in
The Travels.
”

“Yeah, I guess,” Mark said. “Did he read books about China while his dad was away?”

The doctor shook his head. “Marco lived before people in the West knew about printing,” he said. “In his time books were handwritten on specially prepared sheepskins called parchment. They were so valuable
they were kept on chains in the libraries. But I don’t think Marco was a reader. Not many people were back then. Maybe he could read the merchants’ manuals, but not much beyond that. How about you,” Doc asked, “are you a reader?”

“Some,” Mark said.

Hornaday rubbed the dog’s ears.

“So nobody at home in Marco’s time knew what China was really like?” Mark asked.

“The pope and the doge probably had some idea,” Hornaday said, “but what they knew was really limited. Until Marco described it, few people in the West had any idea of China’s immensity and variety of life. You know the story of the three blind men describing the elephant?” the doctor asked.

“Sure,” said Mark. “One guy says it’s like a long hose, the next guy says it’s like the trunk of a tree, the third guy says it’s like the side of a hairy ship.”

“Right,” said Hornaday. “Well, the returning missionaries and merchants were like those blind men, bringing back reports about the tiny parts they’d visited, totally ignorant of the whole.”

Mark pushed himself back up on an elbow. “So you think until his father got back and told him about it, Marco didn’t know anything about where he’d been?”

The doctor raised his eyebrows.

“He was fifteen when his father returned. By then I think he knew a lot.”

“How? Who taught him?” Mark asked.

“He’d studied in the school of the street.”

“What’s
that?”

As Hornaday drew the creaking chair up close, Boss twitched his tags.

“In any town that’s where you’ll find the best gossip, the biggest lies, and the truest truths,” the doctor said. “Marco’s Venice was a special place. Its school of the street was like no other in the world. Venice in those days was Europe’s main port for goods from North Africa and the East. Every day the long black galleys arrived from Alexandria, Constantinople, Trebizond, and Acre, loaded with rare merchandise, slaves, sailors, and soldiers.

“Outside her taverns and alongside her docks and warehouses, old sailors lounged along with released slaves, worn-out pirates, and broken-down soldiers ending their days in sun-warmed corners. They’d traveled, they had tales, and Marco, being a boy, had ears. I think they taught him.”

“How come he wasn’t in regular school?”

Hornaday shook his head. “You’re reading his book. Do you picture him sitting at a desk?”

Mark thought and then shook his head. “No….”

“Me neither,” said the doctor. “I see him slipping away to listen to men who knew things his teachers, the doge’s spies, and the pope’s missionaries had no idea of. Maybe the men of the street could tell him something about where his father was. That’s what he was after: news of his father.”

Just like me,
Mark thought.

The doctor half closed his eyes as if he were squinting at something far away.

“I see Marco squatting in the warm sun, listening as an old man grows young telling what he’s seen and heard, teaching an eager-faced boy the Ladino names of things he’d need on the Silk Road, telling him how to make his way in strange eastern places.”

“What’s Ladino?” Mark asked.

“One of the traders’ languages,” the doctor replied. “It’s a blend of Spanish and Hebrew. It was a code that only a few people knew, so the traders could exchange secrets with each other without being understood by spies, servants, and ears behind the tent flaps.”

Hornaday yawned.

“Imagine yourself as Marco, bored and curious, hanging around footloose on the docks, wondering
where your father is. Close your eyes; maybe you’ll meet his street teacher.”

Pretty soon the doctor closed his own eyes. His breathing grew deep and steady with an occasional snore.

Mark fit the Chinese pillow under his head. Once he warmed it and moved it around a little, he began to get used to it. He closed his eyes. It wasn’t very long before he saw a boy sitting on a broken crate beside a stranger on a stone-paved quay. The stranger’s eyes were milky, almost unseeing. He was the color of old wood. There was the slap and smell of dark green seawater. The stranger shook open a large square of white cloth and wiped his watering eyes, then his face. There was the scent of oranges.

The boy had a sack of dried fruit. He held it out to the stranger, brushing the man’s hands with it.

“Frutta,”
the boy said.

The man reached, then took.

“Grazie,”
the stranger rumbled. “You share with a beggar?” he asked, staring hard at the boy. His voice was hoarse, his accent strange.

“No, sir,” the boy replied. “I take you for a traveler. Maybe you can tell me where my father is.”

“He is a sailor, merchant, soldier, what?”

“A merchant. A trader.”

The man nodded, pressing his large lips together. “And he set out for?”

“I don’t know. The last we heard he was leaving Constantinople,” said the boy.

“To come home?” the stranger asked.

“To go east,” the boy answered.

“Ah,” said the stranger as he dug in the sack. He didn’t say anything more.

“Who are you?” the boy asked finally.

“A weary, almost blind old man,” the stranger
answered. “I have nothing for you. Why do you bother with me?”

“For what you can tell me,” the boy said.

For a long moment the dark man rocked silently from side to side like the sea marker in the channel beyond.

“Call me Mustafa,” he said at last. “My name in my tribe is too long for you to remember. My people were Arabs of the desert, tent dwellers in the black tents of my tribe. We kept sheep and goats. When I was your age, a band of Tartars swooped out of a dry fog they’d conjured up with a devilish trick and captured my family. I was sold with our animals to a Silk Road caravan boss to help manage the beasts. At night by the fires I heard stories. Then I traveled the eastern road myself.

“The way of it is this,” Mustafa continued. “To go where your father has gone, you must sail through pirate waters to where the desert begins. Once there you will head northeast, following the sunrising and the way of the Greek Wind. You will cross the broad plains and sand wastes where tribes of bandits like the men who captured me wait for you. They are thick-faced, those ones, with squashed noses and squat bodies. They will kill for a taste of butter or a pinch of salt.

“You will trust no one, least of all the oasis men,
for woe to the man that fainting or lingering falls into their hands. They will cut his throat for his purse. On the desert all look through their fingers and take nothing for the way it first appears.”

“Ooh!” exclaimed the boy, his eyes wide.

“You are surprised?” asked the old Arab. “Listen, boy, men on the desert are wolves to each other. So what if they are hyenas to strangers? Distress of that place edges all men’s spirits. They are reckless in the desert, cruel, greedy for anything of life. They have no souls. The heat, the cold, the burning light of that place kills all soul.

“Bribing or escaping those who would make a slave of you, you will go up mountains so steep that your horse must drag you as you hang on his tail. Then you will cross the unmarked desert where there is no water and as many die of cold as of heat.

“Now I teach you how to behave before the ruler of the East,” the man said.

“Do you think I’ll go there someday?” the boy asked.

The old Arab whispered, “Already you are on your way, boy. Listen,” he rasped, “when you meet the great Kublai Khan, you will act like the proud European you are. You may bow a little, but you must not perform
the Oriental greeting of submission, the forehead-to-floor
kowtow.
”

“Why not?”

“To surprise him. Do the unexpected. You must keep him unsure of what you are, your place in your tribe. Perhaps you are a prince? Do not show too much respect. Act bold as if you expect respect from him!

“It is said, boy, that in all the lands that Mongols rule not a dog might bark without his leave—but you, you must be different.

“If you put your neck down like one of his common subjects, the Oriental prince will step on it! Better you hold your head up. At worst he cuts it off; at best he takes you for what you are: fearless. Every day risk all. Hold nothing back and you may survive. Gather small gifts as you go: he is a child for presents. Glass beads from this place are as jewels to those people.