Figure Eight

Back in the Khan's winter capital, I ponder the emptiness of the world. How will I continue to protect myself without the help of Rashid, poor Rashid, my friend, my companion? Meanwhile, I am visited by a dwarf eunuch from the Khan's harem.

Snow started to fall, slowly at first, then thickening until half the air filled with white puffs. Staring from his chamber in the Khan's palace, Marco watched snow collect in the willows and maples in the imperial gardens, filling up the curling pathways and dissolving in the lake. Since returning from Hang-chow Marco had spent many hours staring out into the blue air, grey air, black. Sometimes all day, sometimes half the night.

Nothing for me here. Nothing.

A half-dozen plump birds, soft dark grey, pumped past his vision. He watched as flakes of snow drifted into the black lake.

“Man from the West.”

Marco turned from the view to see an odd little creature standing in his room by the door. He was about three feet tall and three feet wide and was dressed like a juggler from the Khan's court.

“Who are you?”

“I have a name. But it is not my name.”

“A riddler then?”

“Yes, a riddler, and much more besides.”

“And what would that be?”

“As you can see by my dress I am a juggler and acrobat of the Khan's harem.”

“A eunuch then?”

“Supposedly. I am also an ambassador of magic and gramarye, an alchemist, a mechanic skilled in the use of machines of entertainment as well as devices of illusion. I am also a leech and a star-clerk, but few know of this. Everyone watches me perform for them, but none know me. I have knowledge of ivory, rhinoceros horn and tortoise-shell, none of which will help you, nor the Khan, out of your current dilemmas. Unlike the elder Polos I know nothing of jewels. I do conjure, spit fire, dance with a thousand and one balls and interchange the heads of cows and horses.”

The little eunuch was never still, rocking from foot to foot, the small curved knife at his belt in its jeweled scabbard swinging. Suddenly he tucked his chin into his chest, leaned forward and rolled like a ball, somersaulting again onto his feet.

“You strike me as having the looks of a Hindu. Are you from those lands?”

“Yes. There is also the blood of Mongols and Chinese in my veins. My mother a Hindu, my father a Muslim. Beyond that, no one knows.”

“What is it you want?”

“Your thoughts.”

Marco tilted his head and stared. “What?”

“I feast on thoughts. I eat them, good or bad. But the thoughts of a man or woman in deep sorrow are particularly rich and delicious. I want to eat your sad thoughts. That is why I can never be still. Because I am so filled with the energy of thoughts, I tumble and run like a rodent. I juggle with the heads of a thousand and one birds swallowing their thoughts of flight even as they rise and fall through the air.”

“And how do you propose to eat my thoughts?”

“You will see in a moment. But first, did you not wish to ask me something about the harem?”

Marco shook his head, as if startled. “Yes, yes I did. You said before, in answering my question about whether you are a eunuch, you said, ‘supposedly’. What mean you by that?”

“I am indeed a guard of the Imperial couch, but when they first came to cut me, having control over such things I hid my manhood inside my body. They said I was naturally born to the harem. Despite my size, my jeweled stem is the equal of any emperor's.” His black eyes twinkled. “Each night I make my rounds under cover of dark, imitating the Khan's voice, having my choice of the harem's delicacies. In the morning I tumble for them, and juggle, and swallow their sweet thoughts.”

“And my thoughts– have you eaten them too?”

“Oh, yes, every last one, the heavy sad ones, and the sweet-tasting light ones. For me your thoughts have the taste of the exotic, being from so far off, from such a distant land. And a bit salty too, I must add, from your time spent at sea, no doubt.”

Marco nodded. “Are you a ghost?”

The little man laughed. “No. Nor demon. Neither am I incubus, and certainly not succubus. I am not made of spirit but flesh, blood and bone like any man. All of us under the sign of Death branded invisibly on our foreheads. But I must return.” Walking to the door, he paused. “One more thing. You can call me Adim.”

One green and shining day, I visit the Imperial Silkworm Gardens with Adim. In the mottled light, I learn that all opposites have a point of connection, as in a figure-eight: day and night, waking and dreams, myself and the assassin.

Marco stood with Adim outside the walls of the Imperial Silkworm Gardens. He watched as an old man, grasping a long arced wooden pole, lowered a clay pot into a well. To the astonishment of Marco and Adim, he raised the pot brimming with clear sparkling water which he dumped into a basket at his feet. “A basket!” Marco turned to Adim. “Is he mad? The water runs into the ground.” Adim, a puzzled look on his face, shrugged his shoulders.

Adim and Marco stepped past a guard and through a door in the high stone wall– Marco looking both ways along the outside of the wall could see neither its beginning nor its end– and entered the Imperial Silkworm Garden. Once inside, Marco saw that the walls around the garden formed a huge square within which a forest of mulberry trees grew. At the end of the well-worn path heading to the garden's center he saw a compact wooden building which he surmised was a silkworm breeding house.

Adim, his bamboo staff marking the dirt of the path, held to his silence as they walked.

Other than the workers, only those most intimately involved with the affairs of state were allowed access to the gardens, for silk was valued as highly as silver or gold. Those who worked the imperial gardens lived apart from the world so they could never divulge the secrets of the royal cocoons.

Adim halted. “Look…here.” He ran his hand along the bark of a tree. “We have joined two kinds of mulberry in one.”

It was the peak of spring, the rounded heart-shapes of the serrated mulberry leaves a dark rich green sparkling in the sunshine and flickering in the sensuous breeze speckled with birdsong.

“We have taken the wild mulberry with its strong trunk and root and joined it to the farmer's mulberry with its larger leaves. We want a smaller tree so the harvesting girls can pick more easily. And yet we want a tree that has more leaf to feed to the silkworms. You see– we have taken the wild and joined it to the cultivated, and so we improve things.”

They arrived at the small clearing before the breeding house and sat on a stone bench. Here the mulberry trees were huge and ancient, the mottled sunlight flickered on the ground. Marco felt as if he were inside a cathedral or great temple, the air hushed and clear and radiant.

Adim leaned forward and drew a square in the dirt with the tip of his bamboo staff. Inside the square he drew two bisecting lines, dividing the square into four perfect inner squares. “Thien,” he said. “The Chinese character for field, the shape of the girls' baskets, the shape of the garden. Four quadrants. Within this order, chaos is charmed and learns to serve.”

“Tell me, Adim. You have spoken of the way of the silkworm. What is it?”

“Egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, moth. We say it begins with the egg but the egg came from the moth and the moth from the chrysalis and so on. The cycle is eternal, with no beginning and no end. The silkworm moves its head about continuously in a figure-eight pattern in constructing its cocoon, ejecting a thin filament of silk from its mouth.”

“Silk flows from their mouths, you say? So, it is the tale they have to tell.”

“Yes. Only a few breeding moths are allowed to hatch from the cocoon, however, for hatching severs the threads and ruins the silk. Those allowed to hatch lay their eggs on a mulberry leaf and the cycle begins anew.”

“The chrysalis must be killed inside the cocoon? How?”

“With heat, applied at the correct time. The way of the silkworm depends on time. Without time's order there would simply be worms and eggs and moths. No silk.”

They sat in silence and watched as three girls approached along the path, each with jet black hair hanging down her back where it was tied with a double-looped bow. One carried a hooked stick for pulling down the mulberry branches. They smiled shyly and disappeared into the house with their full baskets of leaves.

“What is inside the house?” asks Marco.

“Silkworm mats, trays, a heating stove, all the necessary apparatus for the breeding of silkworms, and….”

The eunuch stops. Leaning on his staff he gazes into the distant blue sky studded with high white clouds.

“And that is all, nothing else?”

Adim turns and looks at Marco, his sad grey eyes measuring this young man from the other side of the world. “At the center of the square house there is an altar that holds a book with red silk covers. Very old. It would certainly crumble into dust if you were to touch it.”

“And what is in the book?”

“A riddle. The riddle of the figure-eight– the world on one side…” Adim pauses and thinks.

“And, on the other side?”

“Another world, dreams, stories, the imagination…it depends. You– and the one who seeks to destroy you.”

“We are connected then, the assassin and I. What connects us?”

“That itself is the riddle.”

“Might I see this book?” Marco is already rising to enter the house.

“No. It is not allowed. No one may see the book. Not even Confucius. Not even the Buddha.”

“Then,” Marco settles back down onto the bench, “how is it you know what is in the book?”

“I don't. I imagine it. It is all the same to me.”

The girls exited the house, their baskets now empty, and passed again. “I will tell you the story of the Empress and the Lion,” Adim said when the girls had gone. “It was long ago. I will leave it to you to decide if the story is myth or one of those tales about the world that reveals a hidden truth.”

“Once, near the beginning of time, an Empress was about to give birth. She demanded that she be brought to this very garden. On passing through the stone wall, her ladies-in-waiting saw that the birth pains had begun and a messenger was sent for the midwives. Under a towering mulberry tree, she fell asleep three times and awoke three times. During each sleep many strange and magical events occurred. The sky darkened, as in an eclipse of the sun. A flock of ducks was seen to fly backwards. A stream that flows through the garden ceased flowing and turned the muted opalescent colour of raw silk. Leaves on the mulberry tree above her turned into swallows and flew away. A water-clock in the breeding house for no reason stopped dripping.

“A sage present at the birth told the frightened women that time had been stilled, that outer time had become disengaged, while inner time continued moving toward its fruition. The women did not understand, and were frightened even further when the Empress gave birth to what appeared to be a child wrapped in a silk cocoon. But they could see, under the taut white sac, that it wasn't a child but a beast of some sort breaking through the translucent skin. It grew larger and larger and, when the sac tore, they stood staring at what lay still on the ground before them. A dragon– half-eagle, half-lion– wrought of gold.

“When the Emperor heard of the miraculous birth, he had the winged beast placed on the altar at the center of the silkworm breeding house. But inner time and outer were disengaged during the birth, as the sage had said, with the result that the silkworm oracle's prediction for the hatching of the moths was incorrect. The breeding house was filled with silkworm cocoons that should have been killed with heat at the appropriate time. Instead, the delay allowed the hatching of hundreds of thousands of moths in the house. The collective thrum of their wings lifted the house with the golden dragon into the heavens where it disappeared in the clouds. The house you see now was built at a later time.”

After a moment's silence, Adim leapt up from his seat and headed along the path. Marco joined him and, as the sun began to fade and dissolve behind the tangle of branches, they walked under the overarching mulberry trees.

Outside the walls, Marco noted that the old man still had not succeeded in filling his basket with water.

Once again, I sense that I am caught in a story that turns in upon itself. Nothing is as it seems– east is west and west is east, and there is but one channel that leads from one to the other. If the assassin passes through those narrows first, all is lost. If I, by the grace of God and the Virgin, pass through first, I will have defeated him.

Adim paced back and forth in Marco's chambers, shaking his head. “He is here. He has penetrated to the very heart of the court, and whispers against you in willing ears.”

“Yes– I have not seen him, but I know he has arrived. I hear him, the whispering goes on all night, like a black icicle, dripping.”

“Indeed, he has a great talent for evil, this one.”

“Whose ear does he have?”

“The Muslim, Mahmood's.”

“I thought you said his power would soon wane.”

“I did, I admit it.” Adim continued to pace. “Fate has been delayed by the arrival of your assassin.”

“How is it no one knows he is here?”

“He has a certain magic, a miraculous power. He appears as he wishes.”

“No. He has no magic. There is no truth in this.”

“Don't deny it. Do not underestimate him. That would be a grave error.”

Marco went to the window and stared out at the dusk. “Damn it!” He pounded with his right fist on the wall beside the window. “The devil take him!”

With a quick somersault, Adim was standing next to Marco. He put his hand over his mouth and spoke softly. “Never stop listening for him. It is your only defense. As for Mahmood the Intriguer, his fate is sealed. Your fate, on the other hand, is too intertwined with your evil countryman's for me to discern. Once again, the Khan's plans for you will intervene. You will go with him to a battle in the north. You will be safer there under a rain of arrows than in this court while the Khan is gone.”

As we head for the battleground in the north, the Khan tells me I look grey and worried, thinking I fear the coming battle. I cannot tell him I fear more what comes from behind than what waits ahead. I have seen many battles and begin to tire of this sport. Here is the forest of tragedy, weeping pines, torn poplars, beasts gone mad.

From a distance of thirty li, Marco could see the pillars of smoke holding up the grey sky. Pulling up on the reins and leaning toward the Khan, he pointed. The Khan's constant frown deepened in his jowled face. “Funeral pyres beyond the field of battle– the enemy is burning his dead.”

Marco nodded slowly. The constant pounding of hooves and the passage of tens of thousands of infantry had beaten the earth into a dry wasteland. To their left stood a forest of pine, grey with dust. Out of the distance ahead came riding a contingent of Mongol soldiers, each with a pair of red silk streamers trailing from his helmet.

The main column, a thousand horsemen strong, halted as the general and two guards broke off from the smaller group and rode up to the Khan. Dismounting with ease, they stood, heads bowed, at the Khan's feet. “General Li, how goes the battle?”

“A thousand blessings on you, My Lord. The two armies are ranged along the opposite sides of the next valley. We only await your order to attack. Your camp is nearby and all is prepared. I have no doubt, Your Majesty, that we will vanquish them, for our numbers are greater, our skill superior, our leaders by far the bravest.”

“Yes, yes. Ride ahead and secure us a vantage point above the valley.”

“It is already accomplished, Your Majesty.”

General Li and his two lieutenants leapt onto their horses and rode off. The Khan, reining in his restless horse, watched the horsemen disappear in the distance. Around him the column shifted, awaiting his word to move on. “I fear my general is a fool.” He looked at Marco seriously. “A skilled fool, even a brave fool, but a fool nonetheless. What think you, Marco? To the attack? Or is another disaster awaiting us?”

“My Lord, I know little of the situation. What do your advisors say?”

“My advisors? I can no longer hear them. They make my ears ring and my feet hurt. My most trusted concubine, Chiga, wants me to bring her the head of our esteemed enemy, Prince Nayan the traitor. She understands nothing of the situation, of course. If we lose this valley, Nayan's forces will enter a region where many of the peasants support him. They will be able to move quickly then, and I fear will threaten my capital by the fall. We must halt them here, now. Let us ride.”

With a slight nod from the Khan to his flagman, the column of the imperial horseguard began moving. “I am too old for another battle. I have seventy-two years, Marco. My sword grows heavy in my hand. I look around and wonder who will be dead by tomorrow's eve.”

The Khan lapsed into silence. Marco glanced out of the corner of his eye at him. His wide jowly face was covered in red blotches. His enormous form weighed down his horse.

As they sat on their horses above the valley Marco thought the Khan looked all-powerful in his armour which shone with the brilliance of the sun. But the thought struck him that it was a late-afternoon sun, low on the horizon. He knew the soldiers would look from the valley to the Khan on his great horse halfway up the hillside behind them and they would marvel at the radiance of their emperor. But the dragon swirling about his filigreed gold helmet was a spent force, spinning in circles, going nowhere.

The Khan raised his right hand in the air, then stopped and lowered it slowly. A lone horse had run out onto the field between the opposing armies. A handsome horse, deep rich grey with an oiled black tail and slick black mane. It was impossible to tell which side the horse had come from. But it was easy enough to see that the beast had gone mad. It ran back and forth in a fury, throwing its head from side to side as if trying to remove something from its back, a bloody foam coming from the mouth, its eyes enormous.

The Khan, on his own horse with its gold and purple silk trappings, surrounded by his imperial troops, said, “The beast feels the fear. It senses the future of this place, when the soil of the valley will be soaked a sword's depth with blood.”

“Look.” Marco pointed.

From the end of the valley, a single warrior walked out from behind the loose stone piles and began warily to approach the beast. “It is Nayan himself.” The Khan told the flagman to signal the troops to hold their arrows.

With a round silver shield on his arm, the prince moved with the grace of a young lion. As Nayan walked slowly across the field, Marco could sense his pride, his contained disciplined power. The horse raged back and forth, rearing up to kick its front legs at the air, its eyes bulging. As Nayan approached with caution, he turned his shield aside so a sudden flash would not frighten the beast. Nayan carried no weapon but stroked the air with his empty right hand.

“The prince is calling to him.” The Khan's eyes were riveted on the figure in the field. The valley was silent but for the calling of crows high on the hills.

The horse had stopped running. A long string of foamy spittle hung from its mouth down to the ground. Its ears perked. As Nayan drew close, the beast stepped back. Nayan with his hand raised in front of him kept caressing the air in a placating motion. He stepped closer again. The horse shied, again perked its ears. Nayan placed his hand on the beast's neck and stroked it. The horse relaxed and Nayan turned and began to lead the horse off the field. At that moment it happened.

Even the crows ceased their complaints. An uncanny silence penetrated every stone, every dry blade of grass, every soldier's thoughts. A moment of silence so deep it filled the air with unimaginable energy and power, as if the empty light itself had somehow come alive and brightened, as if Nayan's silver shield were reflecting the glare of the sun into every man's eyes.

An arrow arced out of nowhere– it could have come from either side of the valley– missed the prince by inches and lodged deep in the horse's right eye. The beast let out a great cry, kicked out at Nayan, missing him, and began swinging its lowered head side to side as it stumbled about the field.

The Khan rose up in his saddle and looked about to see if he could locate the source of the arrow, but it was impossible. He sat down, gritted his teeth and nodded to the flagman on his left. When the flagman waved a red banner in the air, the sky was instantly filled with arrows and the silence was shattered with terrible cries.

I tire of this palace, this fetid overwrought court. I spend each evening sitting at the feet of the Khan, my head bowed, listening to the fervour of intrigue. Mahmood has confirmed my worst suspicions. I must leave, even if it puts me at the mercy of the assassin. I must quit this city. I must.

“Who passes?” The voice of the guard came sharply out of the darkness at the wide palace gate.

Adim cocked his head at the sound of the voice but said nothing.

“The younger Polo and the harem eunuch, Adim. The Khan has requested our presence,” Marco said.

It seemed odd to Marco that the guard was standing out of the moonlight, half-way behind the high bamboo gate.

Suddenly Marco felt Adim jerk on his arm with such force that he went flying and tumbled to the ground. In the same moment, moonlight flickered along a blade as it flashed and sparked off the cobbles where Marco had just stood. By the time Marco and Adim had their own blades out, the sound of the assailant's retreat was a distant echo.

Inside the gate they found the bodies of the two regular guards. Blood glistened from their bamboo chest armour and still oozed from their expertly slit throats.

Marco wandered a short distance away and collapsed against a wall. Adim paced back and forth in front of him. “This is not the work of Mahmood and his web of spies– and yet the chaos he has brought to the court makes it possible. You must leave for good. Return to your home. The Khan cannot control things much longer. He is failing. Once he is gone, your enemies will crawl from their hiding places and find you in the full light of day. Return. Return now.”

In the middle of the night I wake in a sweat, my breath coming in jagged bursts, the dream flooding back in with chaotic light.

I have seen him. I have spoken to the assassin. “What has my father done? What have I done that makes me worthy of your tireless searching,? We are innocent. Why do you hound us?”

The assassin spoke and in his speech it grew clear to me that he was as driven by fate as any stream in its bed or machine in its works. “My orders are beyond guilt and innocence. I am like a water clock; I go on dripping, despite the season, without regard to changes in the political winds, without reference to anyone's wishes or wants– whether those of king or common man. As for your father, he no longer interests me. One cannot get blood from old leather. It is you I seek.”

In the silence of hollow night, I understood him at last– and feared him the more.

Across the wide plain Marco rode with Niccolo and the Khan and his retinue of three dozen guards toward a stand of willow trees. Above and beyond the line of horsemen, ranging along the horizon, ran a frieze of towering clouds. Past the willows, the flat landscape rose into a long low hill.

The party left the capital early in the morning and rode hard, imperial flags flapping. They had covered the first fifty li of the journey by noon. The Khan and the Polos rode in silence in the middle of the pack. A line of clouds massed along the horizon beyond them, looking like a great white city of palaces and towers and turrets, crenellated battlements and slowly drifting walls and ramparts; a city disappearing into its own silence, dissolving in the wind.

Under the willow trees they reined in their horses and dismounted. The Khan wore riding robes of yellow silk and a sword with a sharkskin-covered hilt. His face tumescent and purplish, he gave orders for the main party to wait while he and the foreigners went on.

Marco and Niccolo walked on each side of the Khan, while three guards in light chain mail followed close behind. Over the hill, they came upon another plain covered in barley that reached to their knees. At the mound's foot, a lone maple tree stretched its extravagant limbs, not up into the air but out, as if trying to touch the horizon's edge.

The Khan shaded his eyes and pointed.

When the party reached the tree, the emperor instructed the three guards to wait as he walked on with Marco and his father.

They walked several li into the field and the Khan stopped. “There.” He approached what appeared to be a slab of stone visible just below the heads of barley, the rock mottled with pink, green and pale blue rosettes of lichen. Stepping up onto the slab, he surveyed the fields where wind shivered through the grain. “Beneath this earth are the ruins of a palace. On this spot, kings with armies of servants held sway, feasted, loved their queens and concubines, planned campaigns with their generals, punished traitors. Now, nothing.”

The wind whipped through his yellow robes, ran in rivulets through the barley.

“Why?! Why is it– you must tell me again– why is it you wish to leave?”

The Khan stepped down heavily from the stone and began pacing back and forth in front of the other two, his gaze down as he listened.

Marco spoke. “It is time to return, Your Majesty. You have been more than generous, and your kindness knows no bounds, but we must leave.” Marco looked at his father.

The Khan continued to pace back and forth, then stopped abruptly. He drew his sword with a clear metallic ring, a shocking sound under the vast and empty sky. Grasping the hilt with both hands, he thrust the sword into the earth, and continued his pacing as the sword swayed slightly on its point.

“You know it cannot be the same when you return. All will have changed, the very earth will have risen or fallen as the gods dictate.”

Marco and Niccolo nodded.

“You have served me well,” the Khan gazed at Marco. “Indeed, you have been as a son to me. I have offered you double what you now hold in jewels and gold, if you would but stay, and yet you deny me. Four times since the snow season ended I have refused your father's petition to return to the land of his birth because I could not imagine being without your assistance, or your comradeship. But, I begin to understand. You believe I will die soon– no, do not deny it, it is perhaps true– and you think that once I have died your protection here will be gone and you will be at the mercy of whomever follows in my footsteps. Is it not true?”

“Yes, it is partly true.”

“Partly true?”

Marco nodded. “More than that. We believe that our return could never be accomplished without your assistance. We would need the mercy of your passage to move through your realms.”

Marco watched the Khan continuing to pace, gazing at the ground, his hands opening and closing beneath his wide yellow sleeves. Finally, his nostrils flared as he took in a deep breath and smelled the wind. He approached the sword, gripped it again with two hands and drew it from the earth.

“I have decided. Though I bear in my heart a sorrow as boundless as the sky, I give you leave to go, and in going you will fulfill one more duty on my behalf. Listen well. The emissaries of Argon of India have asked that I allow you to help them return to their land. As you know, I have given Argon what he requested of me– a lovely young maiden of seventeen from among the relatives of my dead queen. The emissaries left with the princess Kogatin eight months ago. Unfortunately, they have recently returned, their progress obstructed by wars along their way. With your help, they wish to attempt the journey again, this time by sea. I have told the three barons that they may have your services as navigators for the journey so long as they assist you in your attempts to return to Venice. And once you have seen your home, you will return to me again, and we will feast and talk through the night and conquer whatever remains of the world to be conquered.” The Khan smiled and returned his sword to its scabbard.

“The party will be equipped with fourteen sailing ships, and as many sailors and fighting men as you need. You shall have stores and provisions for two years. And I will furnish you with two golden tablets with instructions that you be provided safe passage through all my dominions. In you I vest the authority to act as my ambassadors to the Pope, the kings of France and Spain, and all the Christian Princes. Now, let us return and feast and drink in sad farewell; let us talk our last talks until dawn or the end of time.”

I prepare myself for the journey to come. I know now he will find me. I begin to long to see his face.

Marco sits on the roof of a house under the whirling stars. The Great Dipper tips out a river of darkness sparkling with milk, stars caught in the whirlpool and dizzying around the skirt of the heavens. On the flat roof of the house, Marco, insomniac, leans back, astonished as much at the spacing and pattern of the stars as at their number and brilliance.

In two hours the deep blue of the dawn bell will boom from the base of the Bell Tower. The great machine of time, of which I am an inconsequential piece, will shift a degree, the chronosphere will twist and click, the gears of the sun will catch the gears of the earth and another day will begin, my final one in Cathay. There is no stopping it.

On the black lacquered table before him rest a map and a scroll calendar. The edges of the map– beyond east, west, north and south– are marked Terra Incognita. As he picks up the calendar to consult it by the flickering candlelight, a sudden swirling wind, seeming to come from nowhere and all directions at once, tears the scroll from his hands and spins it into the black amnesiac air, and in the same moment, extinguishes the candle.

Marco, sitting in the sudden dark, hears the distant sound of an arrow rending silk.

With my father and uncle, I inspect the “starry rafts,” Chinese junks, rocking in the harbour. The wind is in my hair. I can taste salt. My heart beats and thumps like a sail.

The raked sail of the midship foremast had come loose and wrapped round like a shroud. Marco watched, squinting against the sunlight, as half-a-dozen nimble sailors unwound and adjusted the sail.

“A good wind.” Uncle Maffeo smiled at Marco through his blackened teeth, his grey-speckled beard.

The wharf was a bustle of activity and last-minute preparations, men loading provisions for the journey, barrels of rice and fresh water, dried fish and salt. Sailors shouted over the general din of families saying farewell, carts clattering, horses clomping and whinnying. Marco gazed at his father's old lined face. Now, like me, he looks more Chinese than Venetian.

“Hello, Man from the West.” Marco recognized the voice of Adim, the dwarf tumbler from the Khan's harem. Marco nodded a greeting.

“I have just heard. I too am coming on the journey. I will cook for the princess, and entertain her, and tell stories to the men when the nights are long. But I must hurry. Many provisions yet to load. You will see me again.”

He ambled into the crowd and disappeared.

The Polos, the barons and Kogatin with her ladies-in-waiting would travel together on one ship, the largest of the fourteen. The smell of salt wind whipping the sails roused Marco and quickened his blood. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. On opening them, he saw his father smiling at him.

The Khan had said his farewells, heaped riches on them, many of which they had to leave behind, gifts to trusted servants and friends. Between Niccolo and Maffeo sat a sign of the Khan's munificence: a casket filled with rubies, pearls and other jewels.

Marco and his father often had little to say to each other, but when it came to ships, they had much to discuss. They both inspected the junk with a practiced eye. Marco commented how it appeared slightly unwieldly in the upper works, though the lower and underwater lines of the pinewood hull and its keel–its “dragon bone”–seemed sweet and generally functional. The stem and stern ribs had been grown to their curved shape, cut from special trees for the purpose.

Marco glanced across the waves as his father talked about the ship. Soon they would be on the water. Once I am at sea, he thought, I will already be home.