The Journeyer (104 page)
Authors: Gary Jennings
He said portentously, “No one, Marco, can foretell the day.”
I almost snapped an exasperated reply. But it was impossible for me to feel exasperation at him, or share his morbidity, or work myself into a mood of apprehension. I was a new-made wealthy man, and a happy one, and about to go journeying into new country, and with my dearest companion at my side. I merely clapped an assuring hand on my father’s shoulder and said, not with resignation but with genuine jollity, “Let come the day! Sto mondo xe fato tondo!”
IT was again the Orlok Bayan I was off to find, and this time he was much farther away, but this time I had no need to get to him in a hurry. So I again arranged that Hui-sheng and I travel with attendants and supplies—her Mongol maid, two slaves for any necessary camping chores, Mongol escorts for protection, and a string of pack animals. But I also laid out each day’s march so that we traveled not arduously, and frequently got fresh mounts at the horse posts, and arrived each night at some decent karwansarai or some sizable town or even some provincial palace. In all, we had to cover about seven thousand li of every kind of terrain—plains, farmlands, mountains—but by doing it slowly and leisurely, we managed to sleep comfortably every night while we traversed more than five thousand of those long li. Going southwest from Khanbalik, we were, for much of the way, following the same course I had previously taken to Yun-nan, and so we stopped in many places I had stayed before—the cities of Xian and Cheng-du, for example—and only when we got beyond Cheng-du were we in territory I had not seen before.
From Cheng-du we did not, as I had had to do before, turn west into the highlands of To-Bhot. We continued southwest, directly into the province of Yun-nan, and to its capital, Yun-nan-fu, the last big city on our route, where we were royally received and entertained by the Wang Hukoji. I had one private reason for being eager to see Yun-nan-fu, but it was a reason I did not mention to Hui-sheng. When I had been last in these regions, I had finished my part in the Yun-nan war and taken myself out of it before Bayan besieged the capital city, not availing myself of his invitation to be among the privileged first looters and rapers. Having forgone that opportunity to “behave like a Mongol born,” I now looked about me with a special interest—to see what I had missed —and I took notice that the Yi women were indeed handsome, as reported. No doubt I would have enjoyed disporting myself with Yun-nan-fu’s “chaste wives and virgin daughters,” and no doubt would have believed I was enjoying some of the most comely women in the East. But I had since had the great good fortune to discover Hui-sheng, so now the Yi women looked to me distinctly inferior, and far less desirable than she was, and I felt no deprivation at never having had any of them.
From Yun-nan-fu onward, bearing ever southwest, we were traveling what had been called, from ancient times, the Tribute Road. It was so named, I learned, because the several nations of Champa had, since earliest history, at one time or another all been vassal states of the powerful Han dynasties to the north—the Sung and its predecessors—and that road had been tramped hard and smooth by the traffic of elephant trains bearing to those masters Champa’s tribute of everything from rice to rubies, slave girls to exotic apes.
From the last mountains of Yun-nan, the Tribute Road brought us down into the nation of Ava at a river plain and a place called Bhamo, which was only a chain of rather primitively constructed forts. They were also apparently ineffectual forts, for Bayan’s invaders had easily overwhelmed their defending force’s, and taken Bhamo and gone on past. We were received by a captain commanding the few Mongols left to garrison the place, and he informed us that the war was already concluded, the King of Ava in hiding somewhere, and Bayan now celebrating his victory in the capital city of Pagan, a long way downriver. The captain suggested that we could get there more comfortably and quickly by river barge, and gave us one, and Mongol crewmen for it, and a Mongol yeoman scribe named Yissun, who knew the Mien language of the country.
So we left our other attendants there at Bhamo, and Hui-sheng and her maid and I had a slow river voyage for the last thousand li or more of our journey. That river was the Irawadi, which had begun as a tumbling torrent called the N’mai, away up in the Land of the Four Rivers, high in To-Bhot. Down in this flatter country, the river was as broad as the Yang-tze, and flowed sedately southward in great swooping bends. It was full of so much silt, perhaps carried all the way down from To-Bhot, that its water was nearly viscous, like a thin glue, and unpleasantly tepid. It was a sickly tan color across its immense sunlit breadth, and brown in the deep shade on both extremes, where an almost unbroken forest of giant trees overhung the distant banks.
Even the enormous width and endless length of the Irawadi River must have looked, to the numberless birds flying overhead, like a mere insignificant gap meandering through the greenery that covered the land. Ava was almost entirely overgrown with what we would call jungle, and the jungle natives called the Dong Nat, or Forest of the Demons. The local nat, I gathered, were similar to the kwei of the north: demons of varying degrees of badness, from mischief to real evil, and usually invisible but capable of assuming any form, including the human. I privately imagined that the nat seldom put on corporeality, because in the dense tangle of that Dong jungle there was scarcely
room
for them to do so. Beyond the muddy riverbanks, there was no ground to be seen, only a welter of ferns and weeds and vines and flowering shrubs and thickets of zhu-gan cane. Out of that confusion towered the trees, rank on rank, shouldering and elbowing each other. At their tops, their crowns of leaves merged together high in the air to make a veritable thatch over the whole land, a thatch so thick that it was equally impervious to rainstorm and sunlight. It seemed permeable only by the creatures that lived up there, for the treetops continuously rustled and shook to the coming and going of gaudy birds and the leaps and swings of chattering monkeys.
room
for them to do so. Beyond the muddy riverbanks, there was no ground to be seen, only a welter of ferns and weeds and vines and flowering shrubs and thickets of zhu-gan cane. Out of that confusion towered the trees, rank on rank, shouldering and elbowing each other. At their tops, their crowns of leaves merged together high in the air to make a veritable thatch over the whole land, a thatch so thick that it was equally impervious to rainstorm and sunlight. It seemed permeable only by the creatures that lived up there, for the treetops continuously rustled and shook to the coming and going of gaudy birds and the leaps and swings of chattering monkeys.
Each evening, when our barge steered for the shore to make camp—unless we happened on a clearing with a cane-built Mien village in it—Yissun and the boatmen would have to get out first and, each wielding a broad, heavy blade called a dah, hack out a place sufficient for us to spread our bedrolls and lay our fire. I always had the impression that, on the next day, we would have got only around the next bend downstream before the rank, greedy, fervid jungle closed over the little dimple we had made in it. That was not an unlikely notion. Whenever we camped near a grove of zhu-gan cane, we could hear it crackling, even when there was not a breath of wind; that was the sound of it
growing.
growing.
Yissun told me that sometimes the fast-growing, very hard cane would rub against a soft-wooded jungle tree, and the heat of friction would start a blaze and—damp and sticky though the vegetation always was—it could blaze up and burn for hundreds of li in all directions. Only those inhabitants and denizens able to reach the river would survive the terrible fire, and they would likely fall victim to the ghariyals which always converged on any scene of disaster. The ghariyal was a tremendous and horrible river serpent which I took to be related to the dragon family. It had a knobby body as big as a cask, eyes like upstanding saucers, dragon jaws and tail, but no wings. The ghariyals were everywhere along the riverbanks, usually lurking in the mud like logs with glaring eyeballs, but they never molested us. Evidently they subsisted mostly on the monkeys which, in their antics, frequently fell shrieking into the river.
We were not molested by any of the other jungle creatures, either, although Yissun and the Mien villagers along the way warned us that the Dong Nat was the habitat of worse things than the nat and the ghariyal. Fifty different kinds of venomous snakes, they said, and tigers and pards and wild dogs and boars and elephants, and the wild ox called the seladang. I remarked lightly that I should not care to meet a wild ox; the domestic kind I saw in the villages looked vicious enough. It was as big as a yak, a sort of blue-gray in color, with flat horns swooping in a crescent backward from its brow. Like the serpent ghariyal, it liked to lie wallowing in a mudhole, with only its snout and eyes above the surface, and when the huge beast lumbered loose from the mud, there was a noise like huo-yao exploding.
“That animal is only the karbau,” Yissun said indifferently. “No more dangerous than a cow. The little children herd them. But a seladang stands higher at the shoulder than the top of your head, and even the tigers and elephants move out of its way when it walks through the jungle.”
We could always tell from afar when we were approaching a riverside village, because it always had what looked like a cloud of rusty-black smoke hovering over it. That was actually a canopy of crows—called by the Mien “the feathered weeds”—raucously rejoicing over the village’s rich litter of garbage. Besides the crows overhead and the swill underfoot, every village had also a span or two of the karbau draft oxen, and some scrawny black-feathered chickens running about, and a lot of those pigs with long bodies that sagged in the middle and dragged in the swill, and an incredible lot of naked children that very much resembled the pigs. Every village had also a span or two of tame cow elephants. That was because the jungle Mien’s only trade and craft was the taking of timber and other tree products out of this wilderness, and the elephants did most of the work.
The jungle trees were not all ugly and useless, like the riverside draggles of mangrove, or pretty and useless, like the one called the peacock’s tail, a solid mass of flame-colored flowers. Some gave edible fruits and nuts, and others were hung with pepper vines, and the one called chaulmugra gave a sap which is the only medicine known for leprosy. Others yielded good hardwood lumber—the black abnus, the speckled kinam, the golden saka which, when the wood has seasoned to a rich, mottled brown, is known as teak. I might record that teakwood looks much more handsome in the form of a ship’s decking and planking than it does in its natural state. The teak trees were tall and as straight as ledger lines, but dingy gray of bark, with only scraggly branches and sparse and untidy leaves.
I might also remark that the Mien people were no adornment to the landscape, either. They were ugly, squat and dumpy, most of the men being a good two handspans shorter than myself, and the women a hand or so shorter than that. Even in their daily toil, as I said, the men put most of the labor onto their elephants, and at all other times the men were idle slovens and the women limp slatterns. In Ava’s tropical climate, they had no real need of clothes, but they could have contrived some costume more comely than they had done. Both sexes wore woven-fiber hats like large mushroom tops, but were otherwise bare from the waist up and the knees down, wearing a drab cloth wrapped around them like a skirt. The women, indifferent to their flapping dugs, did add one article for modesty’s sake. Each wore a sash with long ends, weighted with beads and hanging front and rear, so that it dangled to screen her private parts when she sat in a squat, which was her customary position. Both sexes would put cloth sleeves on their calves when they had to wade in the river, as protection against the leeches. But they always went barefoot, their feet having got so horny-hard that they were proof against any irritant. As I recall, I saw just two men in that whole region who owned shoes. They wore them slung on a string around their neck, for preservation of such rarities.
The men of the Mien were unlovely enough as they stood, but they had devised a means of making themselves even more so. They smirched their skin with colored pictures and patterns. I do not mean paint, but a coloring pricked into and under the skin, and ineradicable ever after. It was done with a sharp sliver of zhu-gan and the soot from burned sesame oil. The soot was black, but put under the skin it showed as blue dots and lines. There were so-called artists in that craft, who traveled from village to village, and were welcome everywhere, for a Mien man would be considered effeminate if he were not decorated like a qali carpet. The pricking was begun in boyhood and, with time off for rest between the painful sessions, was continued until he was latticed with blue patterns from knees to waist. Then, if he was really vain, and could afford the artist’s further ministrations, a man would have other designs done, in some kind of red pigment, in among the blue, and was considered handsome indeed.
That ugliness was reserved to the males, but they generously let the females share in another one: the unsightly habit of constantly chewing. Indeed, I believe the jungle Mien did their forestry work only so they could afford to purchase another tree product—a chewable one—that they could not grow, but had to import. It was the nut of a tree called the areca, which was found only in seacoast regions. The Mien bought those nuts, boiled them, sliced them and let them dry black in the sun. Whenever they felt like having a treat—which was all the time—they would take a slice of the areca nut, dab a little lime on it, roll it in a leaf of a vine called the betel, pop that wad into the mouth and chew it—or rather, chew a constant succession of wads—the whole day long. It was to the Mien what the cud is to cows: their only diversion, their only enjoyment, the only activity they engaged in that was not absolutely necessary to existence. A village full of Mien men, women and children was not pretty. It was not made prettier by the sight of all of them champing their jaws up and down and about.
Even that was not the extremity of their deliberate self-defilement. The chewing of a wad of areca and betel had the further effect of making the chewer’s saliva bright red. Since a Mien child began chewing as soon as it was off the teat, it grew up to have gums and lips as red as open sores, and teeth as dark and corrugated as teak bark. Just as the Mien accounted handsome a man who elaborated on his already awful body colors, they accounted beautiful a woman who put a coat of lacquer on her already teak-bark teeth and thereby colored them absolutely dead black. The first time a Mien beauty gave me a smile all tar-black and ulcer-red, I reeled backward in revulsion. When I recovered, I asked Yissun the motive for that ghastly disfigurement. He asked the woman, and relayed to me her haughty response:
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