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Authors: Gary Jennings

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Most of them had faces paler than mine, of a delicate ivory tint, like the best grade of parchment, and bearing little or no facial hair. Their eyes were not narrowed by heavily pouched lids, like the Mongols’, but were nevertheless so very slitlike as to appear slanted. Their bodies and limbs were fine-boned, slim and seeming almost fragile. If, when one looked at a shaggy Mongol or one of his Uighur relatives, one thought at once, “That man has lived always out of doors,” then one was inclined to think, when looking at a Han, even a wretched farmer hard at work in his field, filthy with mud and manure, “That man was born and raised indoors.” But one did not have to look; a blind man would perceive a Han to be unique, merely hearing him talk.
The Han language resembles no other on this earth. While I had no trouble learning to speak Mongol, and to write with its alphabet, I never learned more than a rudimentary comprehension of Han. The Mongol speech is gruff and harsh, like its speakers, but it at least employs sounds not too different from those heard in our Western languages. The Han, by contrast, is a speech of staccato syllables, and they are
sung
rather than spoken. Evidently the Han throat is incapable of forming more than a very few of the sounds that other people make. The sound of
r,
for one, is quite beyond them. My name in their speech was always Mah-ko. And, having so very few noises to work with, the Han must sound them on different tones—high, mid, low, rising, falling—to make a sufficient variety for compiling a vocabulary. It is like this: suppose our Ambrosian plainsong
Gloria in excelsis
had that meaning of “glory in the highest”
only
when sung to its traditional up and down neumes, and, if the syllables were sung in different ups and downs, were to change its meaning utterly—to “darkness in the lowest” or “dishonor to the basest” or even “fish for the frying.”
But there were no fish to be had in Kashgar. Our Uighur innkeeper almost proudly explained why. Here in this place, he said, we were as far inland as a person could get from any sea on the earth—the temperate oceans to the east and west, the tropic seas to the south, the frozen white ones in the north. Nowhere else in the world, he said, as if it were a thing to boast about, was there any spot farther from the sea. Kashgar had no freshwater fish either, he said, for the Passage River was too much befouled by the city’s effluxions to support any. I was already aware of the effluxions, having noticed one sort here that I had never seen before. Every city spews out sewage and garbage and smoke, but the smoke of Kashgar was peculiar. It came from the stone that burns, and this was the first place I saw it.
In a sense, the burnable rock is the exact opposite of that rock I earlier saw in Balkh, which produces the cloth that will not burn. Many of my untraveled fellow Venetians have derided both stones as unbelievable, when I have spoken of them. But other Venetians—mariners in the English trade—tell me that the burning rock is well known and commonly used for fuel in England, where it is called kohle. In the Mongol lands it was called simply “the black”—kara—for that is its color. It occurs in extensive strata just a little way under the yellow soil, so it is easily got at with simple picks and spades, and, being rather crumbly, the stone is easily broken into wieldy chunks. A hearth or brazier heaped with those chunks requires a kindling fire of wood, but once the kara is alight it burns much longer than wood and gives a greater heat, as does naft oil. It is abundant and free for the digging and its only fault is its dense smoke. Because every Kashgar household and workshop and karwansarai used it for fuel, a pall hung perpetually between the city and the sky.
At least the kara did not, like camel or yak dung, give a noxious flavor to the food cooked over it, and the food served us in Kashgar was already dismally familiar of flavor. There were flocks of goats as well as sheep, and herds of cows and domestic yaks all over the landscape, and pigs and chickens and ducks in every backyard, but the staple meat at the Five Felicities was still the everlasting mutton. The Uighur peoples, like the Mongol, have no national religion, and I could not then make out whether the Han did. But Kashgar, as a trade crossroads, represented in its permanent and transient population just about every religion that exists, and the sheep is the one animal edible by communicants of all of them. And the aromatic, weak, not intoxicating, hence not religiously objectionable cha was still the staple beverage.
Kithai did introduce one pleasing improvement to our meals. Instead of rice, we got a side dish called miàn. That was not exactly new to us, as it was only a pasta of the vermicelli string sort, but it was a welcome old acquaintance. Usually it was served boiled al dente, just as Venetian vermicelli is, but sometimes it was cut into small bits and fried to crunchy kinks. What was new about it—to me, anyway—was that it was served with two slender sticks for the eating of it. I stared at this curiosity, nonplussed, and my father and uncle laughed at the expression on my face.
“They are called kuài-zi,” said my father. “The nimble tongs. And they are more practical than they look. Observe, Marco.”
Holding both of his sticks in the fingers of one hand, he began most adroitly to pick up bits of meat and skeins of the miàn. It took me some fumbling minutes to learn the use of the nimble-tong sticks, but, when I had, I found them to be notably neater than the Mongol fashion of eating with the fingers, and indeed more efficacious for twirling up strings of pasta than our Venetian skewers and spoons.
The Uighur landlord smiled approvingly when he saw me begin to pick and peck and spool with the sticks, and informed me that the nimble tongs were a Han contribution to fine dining. He went on to assert that the miàn-vermicelli was a Han invention, too, but I contested that. I told him that pasta of every variety had been on every table of the Italian peninsula ever since a Roman ship’s cook fortuitously conceived the making of it. Perhaps, I suggested, the Han had learned of it during some Caesarean era of trade between Rome and Kithai.
“No doubt it happened so,” said the innkeeper, he being a man of impeccable politeness.
I must say that I found all the commonfolk of Kithai, of every race—when they were not bloodily engaged in feud, revenge, banditry, rebellion or warfare—to be exceptionally courteous of address and comportment. And that gentility, I believe,
was
a contribution of the Han.
The Han language, as if to make up for its many inherent deficiencies, is replete with flowery expressions and ornate turns of phrase and intricate formalities, and the Han’s manners are also exquisitely refined. They are a people of a very ancient and high culture, but whether their elegant speech and graces impelled their civilization or simply grew out of it, I have no idea. However, I do believe that all the other nations in proximity to the Han, though woefully inferior in culture, acquired from them at least those outward trappings of advanced civilization. Even in Venice, I had seen how people ape their betters, in appearance if not in substance. No shopkeeper is ever anything loftier than a shopkeeper, but he who purveys to fine ladies will converse better than the one who sells only to boat wives. A Mongol warrior may be by nature an uncouth barbarian, but when he chooses—as witness the first sentry who had challenged us—he can speak as politely as any Han, and exhibit manners suitable for a court ballroom.
Even in this rough frontier trade town, the Han influence was evident. I walked through streets with names like Flowery Benevolence and Crystallized Fragrance and, in a market square called Productive Endeavor and Fair Exchange, I saw lumpish Mongol soldiers buying caged bright songbirds and bowls of shiny tiny fish to adorn their rude army quarters. Every stall in the market had a sign, a long, narrow board hung vertically, and passersby helpfully translated for me the words inscribed in the Mongol alphabet or the Han characters. Besides giving notice of what the stall sold: “Pheasant Eggs for Making Hair Pomade” or “Spicy-Odored Indigo Dye,” each board added a few words of advice: “Loitering and Gossiping Are Not Conducive to Good Business” or “Former Customers Have Induced the Sad Necessity of Denying Credit” or something of the sort.
But if there was one aspect of Kashgar that first told me Kithai was different from other places I had been, it was the endless variety of smells. True, every other Eastern community had been odorous, but chiefly and awfully of old urine. Kashgar was not free of that stale smell, but it had many and better others. Most noticeable was the odor of kara smoke, which is not unpleasant, and into that were blended countless and fragrant incenses, which the people burned in their houses and shops as well as in places of worship. Also, at all hours of the day and night, one could smell foodstuffs cooking. That was sometimes familiar: the simple, good, mouth-watering aroma of pork chops frying in some non-Muslim kitchen. But the scent was often otherwise: the smell of a pot of frogs being boiled or a dog being stewed defies description. And sometimes it was an exotically nice smell: that of burned sugar, for example, when I watched a Han vendor of sweets melt bright-colored sugars over a brazier and then, as magically as a sorcerer, somehow blow and spin that fondant into delicate shapes of floss—a flower with pink petals and green leaves, a brown man on a white horse, a dragon with many wings of different colors.
In baskets in the market were more kinds of cha leaves than I had known existed, all aromatic and no two smelling alike; and jars of spices of pungencies new to me; and baskets of flowers of shapes and colors and perfumes I had never encountered before. Even our Inn of the Five Felicities smelled different from all the others we had inhabited, and the landlord told me why. In the plaster of the walls was mixed red meleghèta pepper. It discouraged insects, he said, and I believed him, for the place was singularly clean of vermin. However, this being early summer, I could not verify his other claim: that the hot red pepper made the rooms warmer in winter.
I saw no other Venetian traders in the city, or Genoese or Pisan or any other of our commercial rivals, but we Polos were not the only white men. Or white men, so-called; I remember being asked by a Han scholar, many years later:
“Why are you people of Europe called white? You have more of a brick-red complexion.”
Anyway, there were a few other whites in Kashgar, and their brick-redness was easily visible among the Eastern skin colors. During my first day’s stroll through the streets, I saw two bearded white men deep in conversation, and one of them was Uncle Mafio. The other wore the vestments of a Nestorian priest, and had a flat-backed head that identified him as an Armeniyan. I wondered what my uncle could have found to discuss with a heretic cleric, but I did not intrude, only waved a greeting as I went by.
 
ON one of the days of our enforced idleness, I went outside the city walls to view the camp of the Mongols—what they called their bok—and to exercise what Mongol words I knew, and to learn some new ones.
The first new words I learned were these: “Hui! Nohaigan hori!” and I learned them in a hurry, for they mean “Olà! Call off your dogs!” Packs of large and truculent mastiffs prowled freely through the whole bok, and every yurtu had two or three chained at its entrance. I learned also that I was wise to be carrying my riding quirt, as the Mongols always do, for beating off the curs. And I early learned to leave the quirt outside whenever I entered a yurtu, for to carry it inside would be unmannerly, would offend the human occupants, being an implication that they were no better than dogs.
There were other niceties of behavior to be observed. A stranger must approach a yurtu by walking first between two of the camp fires outside, thus properly purifying himself. Also, one never steps upon the threshold of a yurtu when entering or leaving it, and never whistles while inside it. I learned those things because the Mongols were eager to receive me and to instruct me in their ways and to query me about mine. Indeed, they were almost overwhelmingly eager. If the Mongols have one trait exceeding the ferocity they show to inimical outsiders, it is the inquisitiveness they show about peaceable ones. The single most frequent sound in their speech is “uu,” which is not a word but a vocal question mark.
“Sain bina, sain urkek! Good meeting, good brother!” a group of warriors greeted me, and then immediately inquired, “From under what skies do you come, uu?”
“From under the skies of the West,” I said, and they widened their eyes as much as those slits would widen, and they exclaimed:
“Hui! Those skies are immense, and they shelter many lands. In your Western country, did you dwell beneath a roof, uu, or a tent, uu?”
“In my native city, a roof. But I have been long upon the road, and living under a tent, when not the open sky.”
“Sain!” they cried, smiling broadly. “All men are brothers, is that not true, uu? But those men who dwell beneath tents are even closer brothers, as close as twins. Welcome, twin brother!”
And they bowed and gestured me into the yurtu belonging to one of them. Except for its being portable, it bore little relation to my flimsy sleeping tent. Its interior was only a single round room, but it was a commodious six paces in diameter and its top was well above a standing man’s head. The walls were of interlaced wooden laths, vertical walls from ground level to shoulder height, then curving inward to form a dome. At its top center was an open roundel, whence the smoke from the room’s heating brazier escaped. The lath framework supported the yurtu’s outer covering: overlapping sheets of heavy felt, colored yellow with clay, lashed to the frame by crisscrossed ropes. The furnishings were few and simple, but of good quality: floor carpets and couches of cushions, also all made of brightly colored felt. The yurtu was as sturdy and warm and weather-repellent as any house, but it could be dismantled in an hour and compacted into bundles small and light enough to be carried on a single pack saddle.
My Mongol greeters and I entered the yurtu through the felt-flapped opening which, as in all Mongol edifices, was on its southern side. I was motioned to take a seat on the “man’s bed” of the establishment, the one on the north side of the yurtu, where I could sit facing the good-omened south. (Beds for women and children were ranged around the less-auspicious other sides.) I sank down on the felt-covered cushions, and my host pressed into my hand a drinking vessel that was simply a ram’s horn. Into it, he poured from a leather bag a rank-smelling and bluish-white thin liquid.
“Kumis,” he said it was.
I waited politely until all the men held full horns. Then I did as they did, which was to dip fingers into the kumis and flick a few drops in each direction of the compass. They explained, well enough for me to comprehend, that we were saluting “the fire” to the south, “the air” to the east, “the water” to the west and “the dead” to the north. Then we all raised our horns and drank deeply, and I committed a bad breach of manners. Kumis, I would learn, is to the Mongols a drink as beloved and sacrosanct as qahwah is to the Arabs. I thought it was awful and, unpardonably, I let my face express my opinion. The men all looked distressed. One of them said hopefully that I would grow to like the taste in time, and another said I would like the exhilarating effect of it even more. But my host took my horn and drank it empty, then refilled it from a different leather bag and handed the vessel back to me, saying, “This is arkhi.”
The arkhi had a better smell, but I sipped at it cautiously, for it looked just like the kumis. I was gratified that it tasted much better, rather like a wine of medium quality. I nodded and smiled and asked the source of their beverages, for I had seen no vineyards in the vicinity. I was astonished when my host said proudly:
“From the good milk of healthy mares.”
Except for their weapons and armor, the Mongols manufacture two things, and only two, and those are made by the Mongol women, and I had just encountered both of them. I was seated on felt-covered pillows in a felt-covered tent, and I was drinking a beverage made from mare’s milk. I think the Mongol females are not ignorant of the arts of spinning and weaving, but scorn them as basely effeminate, for these women are veritable Amazons. Anyway, the woven fabrics they wear they buy from other peoples. But they are most expert in beating and matting together the hairs of animals into felts of every weight, from the heavy yurtu coverings to a cloth that is as soft and fine as Welsh flannel.
The Mongol women also disdain every kind of milk except the equine. They do not even give their children to suck from their own breasts, but nourish them from infancy on mare’s milk. They do some uncommon things with that fluid, and it did not take me long to overcome my repugnance and become an enthusiastic partaker of all the Mongol milk products. The most prevalent is the mildly intoxicating kumis. It is made by putting fresh mare’s milk into a great leather sack, which the women beat with heavy clubs until butter forms. They scoop off the butter and leave the fluid residue to ferment. That kumis then is pungent and sharp to the tongue, with an aftertaste rather like almonds, and a man who drinks enough of it can get estimably drunk. If the sack of milk is beaten longer, until both butter and curds are separated, and the very thin remaining liquid left to ferment, it becomes the more agreeably sweet and wholesome and effervescent sort of kumis called arkhi. And a man can get drunk on that without drinking a very great deal of it.
Besides making use of the butter acquired from the milk, the Mongol women make an ingenious use of the curds. They spread them in the sun and let them dry to a hard cake. That substance, called grut, they crumble into pellets which can be kept indefinitely without spoiling. Some of it is set aside for the wintertime, when the herd mares give no milk, and some is put into pouches to be carried as emergency rations by men going on the march. The grut has only to be dissolved in water to make a quick and nourishing thick drink.
The actual milking of the herd mares is done by the Mongol men; it constitutes some kind of masculine prerogative and is forbidden to the women. But the subsequent making of kumis and arkhi and grut, like the making of felt, is women’s work. In fact,
all
the work in a Mongol bok is done by the women.
“Because the only proper concern of men is the making of war,” said my host that day. “And the only proper concern of women is the tending of their men. Uu?”
It cannot be denied that, since a Mongol army goes everywhere accompanied by all the warriors’ wives, and extra women for the unmarried men, and the offspring of all those women, the men seldom have to give attention to anything but the fighting. A woman unaided can take down or put up a yurtu, and do all the necessary chores of keeping it supplied and maintained and clean and in good repair, and keeping her man fed and clothed and in fighting humor and cosseted when he is wounded, and keeping his war gear in ready condition, and his horses as well. The children also work, collecting dung or kara for the bok fires, doing herdsman and guard duty. On the few occasions when a battle has gone against the Mongols, and they have had to call up their encamped reserves, the women have been known to seize up weapons and go themselves into the fray, and give good account of themselves.
I regret to say that the Mongol females do not resemble the warrior Amazons of antiquity as portrayed by Western artists. They could almost be mistaken for Mongol males, because they have the same flat face, the broad cheekbones, the leathery complexion, the puffed eyelids making slits of eyes that, when visible, are always redly inflamed. The women may be less burly than the men, but they do not appear so, because they wear equally bulky clothes. Like the men, accustomed to riding for most of their lives, and riding astride, they have the same shambling horseman’s gait when afoot. The women do differ in not wearing a wispy beard or mustache, which some of the men do. The men also have their hair hanging long and braided behind, and sometimes shaven on the crown like a priest’s tonsure. The women pile their hair up on top of their head in an elaborate fashion—and perhaps they do this just once in a lifetime, because they then varnish it in place with the sap of the wutung tree. And on top of that, they fix a high headpiece called a gugu, a thing made of bark, decorated with bits of colored felt and ribbons. Her cemented hair and her gugu together make a woman some two feet taller than a man, so cumbrously tall that she can enter a yurtu only by bowing her head.
While I sat conversing with my hosts, the woman of the yurtu several times came in and went out, and she had to bend like that every time. But the bending was not a genuflection, and she showed no other signs of servility. She simply bustled about at her work, fetching fresh flagons of kumis and arkhi for us, taking out the emptied ones, and otherwise seeing to our comfort. The man who was her husband addressed her as Nai, which just means Woman, but the other men said courteously Sain Nai. I was interested to see that a Good Woman, although she works like a slave, does not behave like a slave and is not treated as a slave. A Mongol woman does not, like a Muslim woman, have to hide her face behind a chador or hide her whole self in pardah or endure any of the other female humiliations of Islam. She is expected to be chaste, at least after marriage, but no one is appalled if she uses immodest language or laughs at a bawdy story—or tells one, as this Sain Nai did.
She had, unbidden, laid a meal for us on the felt carpet in the middle of the yurtu. And then, equally unbidden, she squatted down to eat with us—and was not forbidden—which surprised and delighted me almost as much as the meal did. She had served a sort of Mongol version of the Venetian scaldavivande: a bowl of boiling-hot broth, a smaller bowl of red-brown sauce and a platter of strips of raw lamb. We all took turns dipping pieces of meat into the scalding broth, cooking it to our taste, dipping it into the piquant sauce and then eating it. The Sain Nai, like the men, dipped her bits of meat barely long enough to warm them, and ate them nearly raw. Any doubts about Mongol women being as robust as their men were dispelled by the sight of that one tearing at the hunks of meat, her hands and teeth and lips all bloodied. One difference: the men ate without talking, giving all their attention to the food; the woman, in the intervals between her devourings, was most voluble.
I gathered that she was making fun of the newest wife her husband had acquired. (There was no limit to the number of women a Mongol man could wed, so long as he could afford to set up each one in a separate yurtu.) The woman acidly remarked that he had been dead drunk when he asked for the hand of this latest one. All the men chuckled, the husband included. And they all snickered and giggled as she listed the new wife’s shortcomings, evidently in ribald terms. And they absolutely guffawed and fell about on the carpet when she concluded by suggesting that the new wife probably urinated standing up, like a man.
That was not the most comical thing I had ever heard, but it was certain evidence that the Mongol women enjoy a freedom denied to almost all other females in the East. Except in comeliness, they are more like Venetian women: full of liveliness and good cheer, because they know they are the equals and comrades of their men, only having different functions and responsibilities in life.
The Mongol males do not simply sit idle while their women drudge, or at least do not all the time. After our meal, my hosts walked with me about the bok, showing me the work of men variously occupied at fletching, armoring, currying, cutling and other military crafts. The fletchers, having already laid up a good store of ordinary arrows, were that day forging special arrowheads pierced with holes in a way that, they told me, would make the arrows whistle and shriek in their flight, thereby putting fear in the heart of an enemy. Some of the armorers were thunderously hammering sheets of red-hot iron into the form of breastplates for men and horses, and others were more quietly doing the same with cuirbouilli, heavy leather boiled to softness, then shaped and let dry, when it gets almost as hard as iron. The curriers were making wide waist belts ornamented with colored stones—not to be worn for mere decoration, they told me, but to protect the wearers against thunder and lightning. The cutlers were making wicked shimshirs and daggers, and putting new edges onto old blades, and fitting helves to battle axes, and one of them was forging a lance that had a curious hook projecting from the blade—to yank an enemy from his saddle, the maker told me.

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