The Journeyer (54 page)

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Authors: Gary Jennings

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But the name Kalmuk, I learned, is not a national or tribal designation. It is only the Mongol word meaning one who stays, or one who settles down in any place. All normal Mongols being nomads, they have a deep disdain for any of their race who ceases roaming and takes up a fixed abode. In the majority opinion, any Mongol who becomes a Kalmuk is doomed to degeneracy and depravity, and if the Kalmuk people I saw and smelled were typical, then the majority have good reason to despise them. And now I recalled having heard the Ilkhan Kaidu speak slightingly of the Khakhan Kubilai as “no better than a Kalmuk.” Vakh, I thought, if I find that he is, I shall turn around and go straight back to Venice.
However, despite my awareness that the word Mongol was a too general term for a multiplicity of peoples, I found it convenient to go on using the name. I soon realized also that the other, the original, inhabitants of Kithai were not all Han, either. There were nationalities called Yi and Hui and Naxi and Hezhe and Miao and God knows how many others, of skin colors ranging from ivory to bronze. But, as with the Mongols, I continued to think of all those other nationalities as Han. For one reason, their languages all sounded very much alike to me. For another, every one of those races regarded every other as inferior, and so called each other by their various words meaning Dog People. For still another reason, they all called any foreigner, including me, a name even less deserved than Frank. In Han and in every other of their singsong languages and dialects, any outlander is a Barbarian.
As we rode farther and farther along the Silk Road, it became increasingly crowded with traffic—groups and trains of traveling traders like ourselves, individual farmers and herders and artisans taking their wares to market towns, Mongol families and clans and whole boks on the move. I remembered how Isidoro Priuli, our clerk of the Compagnia Polo, had remarked, just before we left Venice, that the Silk Road had been a busy thoroughfare from the most ancient times, and now I saw reason to believe him. Over the years and centuries and maybe millennia, the traffic on that road had worn it down far below the level of the surrounding terrain. In places it was a broad trench so deep that a farmer in his nearby bean patch might see no more of the passing processions than the flick of a cart driver’s upraised whip. And down inside that trench, the cartwheels’ ruts had worn so deep that every cart now had to go where the ruts went. A carter never had to worry about his vehicle’s overturning, but neither could he pull it to one side when he needed to relieve himself. To change direction on the road—say, to turn off to some side-village destination—a driver had to keep going until he came to a junction where there were diverging ruts in which to set his wheels.
The carts used in that region of Kithai were of a peculiar type. They had immensely big wheels with knobbed rims, standing so high that they often reached above the wooden or canvas cart roof. Perhaps the wheels had had to be built bigger and bigger over the years just so their axles would clear the hump of ground between the road ruts. Each such wagon also had an awning projecting from its top front, to cover the driver from inclement weather, and that awning was considerately extended on poles far enough so that it also sheltered the team of horses, oxen or asses pulling the wagon.
I had heard much about the cleverness and inventiveness and ingenuity of the inhabitants of Kithai, but I now had cause to wonder if those qualities might be overrated. Very well, every cart had an awning to shelter its draft animals as well as its driver, and maybe that was a clever invention. But every wagon also had to carry several sets of spare axles for its wheels. That was because every separate province of Kithai has its own idea of how far apart a cart’s wheels should be, and of course its local wagons have long ago put the roads’ ruts that far apart. So the distance between the ruts is wide, for example, on the stretch of Silk Road that goes through Sin-kiang, but narrow on the road through the province of Tsing-hai, wide again but not quite so wide in Ho-nan, and so on. A carter traversing any considerable length of the Silk Road must stop every so often, laboriously take the wheels and axles off his wagon, put on axles of a different breadth and replace the wheels.
Every draft animal wore a bag slung under its tail by a webbing around its hindquarters, to collect its droppings while on the move. That was not to keep the road clean or to spare annoyance to people coming along behind. We were by now out of the region where the earth was full of burnable kara rock, free for the taking, so every carter carefully hoarded his animals’ dung to fuel the camp fire on which he would prepare his mutton and miàn and cha.
We saw many herds of sheep being driven to market or to pasture, and the sheep too wore peculiar backside appendages. The sheep were of the fat-tailed breed, and that breed is to be seen all over the East, but I had never seen any so fat-tailed as these. A sheep’s clublike tail might weigh ten or twelve pounds, nearly a tenth of its whole body weight. It was a genuine burden to the creature, and also that tail is considered the best part of the animal for eating. So each sheep had a light rope harness to drag a little plank behind it, and on that trailing shelf its tail rode safe from being bruised or unnecessarily dirtied. We saw also many herds of swine being driven, and it seemed to me that they could have used some expenditure of inventiveness, too. The pigs of Kithai are also a distinctive breed, being long in the body and ludicrously swaybacked, so that their bellies actually drag the ground, and I wondered why their herders had not considerately provided something like belly wheels.
Our escorts Ussu and Donduk were contemptuous of the wheeled vehicles and slow-plodding herds on the road. They were Mongols, and they thought all rights of way should be reserved to horseback riders. They grumbled that the Khakhan Kubilai had not yet kept a promise he had made some time ago: to level every least obstruction on every plain in Kithai, so that a horseman could canter across the entire country, even in darkest night, and never fear his horse’s stumbling. They were naturally impatient of our having to lead packhorses and proceed at a sedate pace instead of galloping headlong. So they now and then found a way to enliven what to them was a boring journey.
At one of our night stops, when we camped by the road instead of pushing on to a karwansarai, Ussu and Donduk bought from a nearby camp of drovers one of their fat-tailed sheep and some doughy ewe cheese. (I should probably say they
procured
those things, for I doubt that they paid anything to the Han shepherds.) Donduk unslung his battle-ax, sliced away the sheep’s tail-drag harness and in almost the same single motion cut off the animal’s head. He and Ussu sprang onto their horses, and one of them reached down to catch up by the club tail the sheep’s still-twitching and blood-spouting carcass, and the two riders began a gleefully galloping game of bous-kashia. They thundered back and forth between our camp and that of the sheepherders, wrenching the trophy animal from one another, slinging it about, dropping it frequently, trampling over it. Which of them won the game, or how they could tell, I do not know, but they tired at last and flung down at our feet the limp and gory thing, all covered with dust and dead leaves.
“Tonight’s meal,” said Ussu. “Good and tender now, uu?”
Somewhat to my surprise, he and Donduk volunteered to do the skinning and butchering and cooking themselves. It seems that Mongol men do not mind doing woman’s work when there are no women about to do it. The meal they made was one to remember, but not with bon-gusto. They began by retrieving the sheep’s lopped-off head, and it was spitted with the rest of the animal over our fire. A whole sheep should have sufficed to gorge several families of hearty eaters, but Ussu and Donduk and Nostril, with not much help from us other three, consumed that entire animal from nose to fat tail. The eating of the head was the least appetizing to watch and listen to. One of the gourmands would slice off a cheek from it, another an ear, the other a lip, and they would dip those awful fragments in a bowl of peppered juice from the meat, and chew and slurp and slobber and swallow and belch and fart. Since Mongols consider it bad manners for men to talk while they dine, that succession of good-mannered noises was not varied until they got down to the body bones and added the sound of sucking out the marrow.
We Polos ate only the meat sliced from the sheep’s loins—well-beaten by the bous-kashia and admittedly most tender. Or we would have preferred to eat only that, but Ussu and Donduk kept carving and pressing on us the real delicacies: pieces of the tail, meaning blobs of yellow-white fat. They quivered and trembled repulsively in our fingers, but we could not in politeness refuse, so we somehow managed to gag them down, and I can still feel the way those ghastly gobbets went slimily palpitating down my gullet. After the first dreadful mouthful, I tried to clean my palate with a hearty swig of cha—and nearly strangled. Too late I discovered that Ussu, after brewing the cha leaves with boiling water, had not stopped there as civilized cooks do, but had melted into the drink chunks of mutton fat and ewe cheese. That Mongol-style cha would make a nourishing full meal all by itself, I suppose, but I must say that it was downright revolting.
We ate other meals on the Silk Road that are more pleasant to recall. This far into the interior of Kithai, the Han and Uighur karwansarai landlords did not limit their fare to only the things a Muslim can eat, so we found a good diversity of meats—including that of the illik, which is a tiny roe deer that barks like a dog, and of a lovelily golden-feathered pheasant, and steaks cut from yaks, and even the meat of black bears and brown bears, which abound here. When we camped in the open, Uncle Mafio and the two Mongols vied at providing game for the pot: ducks and geese and rabbits and once a desert qazèl, but more usually they sought ground squirrels to shoot, because those little creatures thoughtfully provide the fuel for their own cooking. A hunter knows that, when he has no kara or wood or dried dung to make a fire with, he has only to look for the ground squirrels and their holes; even in a desert barren, they somehow contrive to put a weather-protective dome over their holes, of laced twigs and grass, well dried for the burning.
There were many other wild creatures in that region, not for eating but interesting to observe. There were black vultures with wings so broad that a man would have to take three paces to walk from tip to tip; and a snake so much resembling yellow metal that I would have sworn it was made of molten gold, but, having been informed that it was deadly venomous, I never touched one to find out. There was a little animal called a yerbò, like a mouse but with extravagantly long hind legs and tail, upon which three appendages it hopped about upright; and a magnificently beautiful wild cat called a palang, which I once saw making a meal of a wild ass it had downed, and which was like the heraldic pard, only not yellow of coat, but silvery gray with black rosettes spotted all over it.
The Mongols taught me to pick various wild plants as vegetable dishes for our meals—wild onions, for example, which go so well with any venison meat. There was a growth that they called the hair plant, and it did look exactly like a shock of black human hair. Neither its name nor its appearance was very appetizing, but when boiled and seasoned with a bit of vinegar, it made a delicate pickle condiment. Another oddity was what they called the vegetable lamb; they averred that it was indeed a mongrel creature bred from a mating of animal and plant, and said they preferred eating it to eating real lamb. It was tasty enough, but it was really only the woolly rootstalk of a certain fern.
The one ravishingly delicious novelty I found on that stage of the journey was the wonderful melon called the hami. Even the method of its growing was a novelty. When the vines started forming their fruit buds, the melon farmers paved over the whole field with slabs of slate for the vines to lie on. Instead of the melons’ getting sunshine only on their upper sides, those slates reflected the sun’s heat so that the hami ripened evenly all the way around. The hami had flesh of a pale greenish-white, so crisp that it crackled when bitten, dripping with juice, of a cool and refreshing flavor, not cloying but
just
the right sweetness. The hami had a taste and a fragrance different from all other fruits, and was almost as good when dried into flakes for travel rations, and has never been surpassed in my experience by any other garden sweet.
When we had been traveling for two or three weeks, the Silk Road abruptly turned northward for a little way, the only time it touched the Takla Makan, making a very short traverse across that desert’s eastern-most edge, then turning directly east again toward a town named Dun-huang. That northward jink of the road took us through a pass that twined among some low mountains—really they were extremely high sand dunes—called the Flame Hills.
There is a legend to account for every place-name in Kithai, and according to legend these hills once were lushly forested and green, until they were set afire by some malicious kwei, or demons. A monkey god came along and kindly blew out the flames, but there was nothing left except these mountainous heaps of sand, still glowing like embers. That is the legend. I am more inclined to think that the Flame Hills are so called because their sands are a sort of burnt ocher color, and are windswept into flame-shaped furrows and wrinkles, and they perpetually shimmer behind a curtain of hot air, and—especially at sunset—they do glow a truly fiery red-orange color. But the most curious thing about them was a nest of four eggs which Ussu and Donkuk uncovered from the sand at the base of one of the dunes. I would have thought the objects were only large stones, perfectly oval and smooth and about the size of hami melons, but Donduk insisted:

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