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Authors: Gary Jennings

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The rumblings of the several avalanches would have overwhelmed the noise of battle in the valley, but there was no more of that shouting and war-crying and clinking together of sword blades. The poor people had at last perceived what was happening, and so had the camp’s herds of horses, and the people and horses were scurrying hither and thither. Being myself in a state of some agitation, I could not too well discern what the people were doing individually. I saw them rather as an indistinct mass—like the blurred masses of landscape coming down the mountains roundabout—the thousands of people and horses all running in a tremendous, untidy bunch. The way they were moving, I might have thought the whole valley floor was tilting back and forth and sloshing them from side to side of it. Except for the numbers already struck down in combat, lying motionless or moving only feebly, the people and horses seemed first, and all at the same time, to glimpse the havoc hurtling toward them down the western slopes, and they all ran in a body away from there, only to see the other calamity coming down the eastern slopes, and all in a body they surged back again to the middle of the valley floor, all but a few who jumped into the river, as if they were fleeing a forest fire and might find safety in the cool water. Some two or three dozen individuals—I did make out that much—were running straight down the valley’s middle, toward us, and probably others were scampering up it in the other direction. But the avalanches were moving faster than any mere human could.
And down they came. Though the swooping blurs of brown and green contained whole forests of full-sized trees and countless boulders as big as houses, they looked, from where we stood, like cascades of dirty, gritty, lumpy tsampa porridge being poured down the sides of a giant tureen to puddle in its bottom, and the towering clouds of dust they raised on the way looked like the steam rising from that tsampa porridge. When the several separate slides reached the lower skirts of their mountains, they coalesced on either side into a single stupendous avalanche roaring into the valley—one from the east, one from the west —to meet in the middle. Rasping across the flat valley floor, they must have slowed their rush to some slight degree, but not so I could see it, and the front face of each cataract was still as high as a three-story wall when they came together. And when they did that, it made me remember once having seen two great mountain rams, in the season of rut, gallop at each other and butt their huge horned heads together with a shock that made my own teeth shake.
I would have expected to hear a similarly teeth-rattling crash when the two monster avalanches met head on, but their thunder climaxed instead with a sort of cosmically loud kissing noise. The Jin-sha River, on its way through this valley, ran along its eastern edge. So the landslide sluicing down from the east simply scooped up a considerable length of that river as it careered across it, and, as it continued on, must have churned that water into its forward content so that its front became a wall of sticky muck. When the two careening masses came together, then, it was with a loud, slapping, moist
slurp
!, suggesting that the avalanches were cemented there to be the valley’s new and higher floor for all time to come. Also, at the instant of their collision, the sun bounded into view beyond the eastern mountains, but the sky was so thick with dust that its disk was discolored. The sun came up as suddenly and as brassy of hue and as blurred around the rim as if it had been a cymbal thrown up there to ring the finale to all the commotion in the valley. And, while the trailing rubble skirts of the slides continued to sweep down from the heights, the noise did indeed die down, not all at once, but with the kind of wobbling, clashing, diminishing clangor that a cymbal makes as its blur slows to stillness.
In the sudden hush—it was not a total silence, for many boulders were still thudding and bouncing down from the heights, and trees still crunching and skidding down, and patches of turf still skittering down, and unidentifiable other things still caroming about in the distance—the first words I heard were the Orlok’s:
“Ride now, Captain Toba. Fetch our army.”
The captain went back the way we had come. Bayan leisurely took out from a purse the great gleaming device of gold and porcelain that was his teeth, and forced it into his mouth, and gnashed it a few times to settle its jaws to his own. Looking now a proper Orlok, ready for his triumphal parade, he strode off down the hill in the direction we were facing. When he dimmed into the cloud of dust, the rest of us followed after him. I did not know why we were doing that, unless to gloat on the completeness of our unusual victory. But there was nothing to be seen of it, or of anything really, in that dense and stifling pall. When we had gone only as far as the bottom of the hill, I had lost sight of my companions, and only heard Bayan’s muffled voice, off to my right somewhere, saying to somebody, “The troops will be disappointed when they get here. No battlefield loot to pick over.”
The enormous cloud of dust thrown up by the avalanches had, by the time the two masses met, entirely obscured our view of the valley and its ultimate devastation. So I cannot say that I actually witnessed the annihilation of something like a hundred thousand people. Nor, in all the noise, did I hear their last hopeless screams or the snapping of their limbs. But they were now gone, together with all the horses, weapons, their personal belongings and other equipment. The valley had been resurfaced, and the people had been wiped out as if they had been no bigger or more worth keeping than the crawling ants and beetles that had inhabited the old ground.
I remembered the bleached bones and skulls I had seen lying about the Pai-Mir, the remains of animal herds and karwan trains that had encountered other avalanches. There would not be even that much trace left here. None of the Ba-Tang Bho we had excused from the march—little Odcho and Ryang, for instance—if they journeyed here to visit the place where their city’s population was last seen, would ever find the skull of a father or brother to fashion into a sentimental keepsake like a drinking bowl or a festa drum. Maybe some Yi farmer tilling this valley in some far distant century would turn up with his digging stick a fragment of one of the less deeply buried corpses. But, until then … .
It occurred to me that, of all the men and women who had been so frantically running about, and those who had crouched pathetically in the river, and those who had been already lying wounded or unconscious or dead, only the insensible had been the fortunate few. The others had had to endure at least one terrible last moment of knowing that they were about to be stamped on like insects or, even worse, buried alive. Maybe some of them were
yet
alive, uncrushed, still conscious, trapped underground in dark, tight, contorted little graves and tunnels and pockets of air that would persist until the great weight of earth and rocks and rubble had finished shifting and settling in its new location.
It would take some while for the valley to accommodate itself to its changed topography. I could tell that because, even while I groped about and coughed and sneezed in the cloud of dry dust, I found that I was sloshing about in muddy water that had not been there before. The Jin-sha River was nuzzling and probing at the barrier that had so abruptly impeded its flow, and was having to spread out sideways beyond what had formerly been its banks. Evidently, in my trudging about in the dimness, I had veered over to the left, to the eastward. Not wanting to walk any deeper into the gathering water, I turned right and, my boots alternately sucking and slipping in the new mud, went to rejoin the others. When a human shape loomed up before me in the murk, I called to him in the Mongol language, and that was an almost fatal mistake.
I never had a chance to inquire how he had survived the catastrophe —whether he was one of those who had gone running the length of the valley instead of back and forth, or whether he had simply and inexplicably been lifted up by the avalanche instead of crushed beneath it. Maybe he could not have told me, for maybe he did not know himself how he had been spared. It seems that there are always at least a few survivors of even the worst disaster—perhaps there will even be a few after Armageddon—and in this case we would discover that there were about four score still alive of the hundred thousand. Half of those were Yi, and about half of the Yi were quite undamaged and ambulatory—and at least two of them were still armed and brimming with a rage for immediate revenge—and I had had the misfortune to meet one of those.
He may have believed himself to be the only Yi left alive, and may have been startled to encounter another human form in the dust cloud, but I gave him the advantage when I spoke in Mongol. I did not know what he was, but he knew instantly that I was an enemy—one of the enemy that had just swept away his army and his companions in arms and probably close friends, even brothers of his. With the instinctive action of an angered hornet, he made a swipe at me with his sword. Had it not been for the new mud in which we stood, I should have perished at that moment. I could not have consciously dodged the sudden blow, but my involuntary flinch made me slip in the mud, and I fell down as the sword went
whish
! where I had been.
I still did not know who or what had attacked me—one thing went through my mind: “Expect me when you least expect me”—but there was no mistaking the attack. I rolled away from his feet and grabbed for the only weapon I carried, my belt knife, and tried to stand, but got only to one knee before he lunged again. We were both still only indistinct figures in the dust, and his footing was as slippery as mine, so his second swing also missed me. That blow brought him close enough to me that I made a dart with my knife point, but it fell short when I slid again in the mud.
Let me say something about close combat. I had earlier, in Khanbalik, seen the imposing map of the Minister of War, with its little flags and yak tails marking the positions of armies. At other times, I have watched high officers plotting out battle tactics and following the progress of them, using a tabletop and colored blocks of different sizes. Such exercises make battle look neat and tidy and perhaps, to a remote officer or an observer not involved, even predictable in the outcome. Back home in Venice, I had seen pictures and tapestries depicting famous Venetian victories on land and sea—over here Our fleet or cavalry, over yonder Theirs, the combatants always facing each other squarely and loosing arrows or aiming lances with precision and assuredness and even a calm look of equanimity. A viewer of such pictures would take a battle to be a thing as orderly and trim and methodical as a Game of Squares, or Shahi, played on a flat board in a well-lighted, comfortable room.
I doubt that any battle has ever been like that, and I know that close combat cannot be. It is a flailing, messy, desperate confusion, usually on wretched terrain and in vile weather, one man against another, both of them having forgotten in their rage and terror everything they ever were taught about how to fight. I suppose every man has learned the rules of swordplay and knifeplay: do thus and so to parry your opponent’s offense, move like this to get past his guard, execute these other feints to expose the weak places in his defense and the gaps in his armor. Perhaps those rules apply when two masters stand toe to toe in a gara di scherma, or when two duelists politely face off in a pleasant meadow. It is quite different when you and your opponent are grappling in a mud puddle with dense cloud all about, when both of you are dirty and sweaty, when your eyes are gritty and watering so you can barely see.
I will not try to describe our struggle, blow by blow. I do not remember the sequence. All I recall is that it was a time of grunting, panting, squirming, thrashing desperation—a very long time, it seemed —with me trying to get close enough to him to stab with my knife, and he trying to keep enough distance to swing his sword. We were both body-armored in leather, but differently, so that we each had an advantage over the other. My cuirass was of supple hides, allowing me freedom to move and dodge. His was of cuirbouilli so stiff that it stood out around him like a barrel; it hampered his agility, but made an effective barrier against my short, wide-bladed knife. When at last, more by chance than skill, I struck at his chest and the blade went in, I realized that it had penetrated the cuirass, and was stuck there, but could only lightly have pricked his rib cage. So in that moment he had me at his mercy, my knife wedged in his leather, I clinging to its handle, while he was free to wield his sword.
He took that moment to laugh derisively, triumphantly before he struck, and that was
his
mistake. My knife was the one I had long ago been given by a Romm girl whose name meant Blade. I squeezed its haft in the proper way, and I felt the wide blades jar apart, and I knew the inner, slim, third blade had leapt out from between them, for my foe bulged his eyes in unbelieving surprise. He gave a snarling gasp and his mouth stayed open, and his back-flung hand let drop his sword, and he belched blood all over me, and he toppled away from me and fell. I yanked my knife loose of him and wiped it clean and closed it up again, and I stood up, thinking: now I have slain two men in my lifetime. Not to mention the twin women in Khanbalik. Do I also take credit for the whole victory here, and count my lifetime kill as one hundred thousand and four? The Khan Kubilai ought to be proud of me, having cleared such ample room for myself on the overcrowded earth.
 
MY companions, I saw when I located and rejoined them, had also encountered a vengeful enemy in the fog, but had not fared so well as I. They were grouped around two figures stretched on the ground, and Bayan whirled with his sword in his hand as I approached.
“Ah, Polo,” he said, relaxing as he recognized me, though I must have been bloody all over. “Looks as if you met one, too—and dispatched him. Good man. This one was insanely fierce.” He pointed his blade at one of the supine figures, a Yi warrior, much hacked about and obviously dead. “It took three of us to slay him, and not before he had got one of us.” He indicated the other figure.
I exclaimed, “A tragedy! Ukuruji has been hurt!” The young Wang was lying with his face screwed up in pain, and his own two hands clutched around his neck. I cried, “He seems to be strangling!” and bent to loosen his hands and examine the injury to his throat. But when I raised the clenched hands, his head came along in their grasp. It had been completely severed from his body. I grunted and recoiled, then stood looking sadly down at him, and murmured, “How terrible. Ukuruji was a good fellow.”
“He was a Mongol,” said one of the officers. “Next to killing, dying is what Mongols do best. It is nothing to weep over.”
“No,” I agreed. “He was eager to help win Yun-nan, and he did.”
“He will not govern it, unfortunately,” said the Orlok. “But his last sight was of our total victory. That is no bad moment to die.”
I asked, “You regard Yun-nan as ours, then?”
“Oh, there will be other contested valleys. And cities and towns to take. We have not annihilated every last one of the foe. But the Yi will be demoralized by this crushing defeat, and will be putting up only token resistance. Yes, I can safely say that Yun-nan is ours. That means we will next be battering at the back door of the Sung, and the whole empire must fall very soon. That is the word you will take back to Kubilai.”
“I wish I were taking him the good news unalloyed with bad. It cost him a son.”
One of the officers said, “Kubilai has many other sons. He may even adopt you, Ferenghi, after what you did for him here. Behold, the dust is settling. You can see what you accomplished with your ingenious brass engines.”
We all turned from contemplating Ukuruji’s body, and looked down the valley. The dust was finally sifting out of the air and laying itself like a soft, gentle, age-yellowed shroud on the tormented and tumbled landscape. The mountain slopes on both sides, which earlier in the morning had been thickly forested, now had trees and greenery only fringing the edges of their open wounds—great gouged-out gullies and gorges of raw brown earth and new-broken rock. There was just enough foliage left on the mountains that they looked like matronly women who had been stripped and violated, and now were clutching to themselves the vestiges of their finery. Down in the valley, some few living people were picking their way through the last shreds of dust fog, across the jumble of rubble and rocks and tree limbs and upended tree roots. They had apparently espied us, gathered at this clear end of the valley, and decided this was the place to regroup.
They kept plodding and hobbling up to us during the rest of that day, singly and in little groups. Most of them, as I have said, were Bho and Yi survivors of the devastation—with no idea how they had lived through it—some injured or crippled, but some entirely unscathed. Most of the Yi, even the unhurt ones, had lost all will to fight, and approached us with the resignation of prisoners of war. Some of them might have come running and frothing and swinging steel, as two of them already had done, but they came in custody of Mongol warriors who had disarmed them on the way. The Mongols were the volunteers who had accompanied the mock army as musicians and rear guards. Since they had been at the leading and trailing ends of the march, hence at the farther ends of the camp, and had had foreknowledge of our plans, they had had the best chance to run out of the way of the avalanches. Though they were only a score or two in number, those men were loud with congratulations on the success of our stratagem, and with self-congratulation on their own escape from it.
Even more to be congratulated—and I made sure to give each of them a comradely embrace—were the Mongol engineers. They were the last survivors to join us, for they had to come all the way down the ravaged mountain slopes. They arrived looking justifiably proud of what they had done, but looking also rather stunned, some of them because they had been standing close to the concussion when their engines ignited, but some because of the sheer awesomeness of what had then occurred. But I told every one of them, and sincerely, “I could not have done the positioning better myself!” and took his name, to praise him personally to the Khakhan. I must remark, though, that I collected only eleven names. Twelve men had gone up into the mountains, and twelve balls had done what they were supposed to do, but we never learned what happened to the man who did not return.
It was the middle of the night when Captain Toba returned, in company with the leading columns of the authentic Mongol army, but I was still awake at that hour and glad to see them. Some of the blood with which I was caked was my own, and some of it was still flowing, for I had not emerged entirely undamaged from my private contest with the Yi. That warrior had given me some cuts on the hands and forearms, which I had hardly noticed at the time, but by now were quite painful. The first thing the army troops did was to erect a small yurtu for a hospital tent, and Bayan made sure that I was the first casualty attended by the shaman physician-priest-sorcerers.
They cleaned my cuts and anointed them with vegetable salves and bandaged them, which would have sufficed me. But then they had to engage in some sorcery to divine whether I might have sustained internal injuries not visible. The chief shaman set upright before me a knotted bunch of dried herbs that he called the chutgur, or “demon of fevers,” and read aloud to it from a book of incantations, while all the lesser physicians made an infernal noise with little bells and drums and sheep’shorn trumpets. Then the head shaman tossed a sheep’s shoulder bone onto the brazier burning in the middle of the tent and, when it had charred black, raked it out and peered at it to read the cracks the heat had produced. He finally adjudged me to be internally intact, which I could have told him with a lot less fuss, and let me leave the hospital. The next casualty brought in was the Wang Ukuruji, to be sewn back together and made presentable for his funeral the next day.
Outside the yurtu, the darkness of the night had been considerably abolished by the light of many tremendous camp fires. Around them, the troops were doing their stamping, leaping, pounding victory dances, and yelling “Ha!” and “Hui!” and liberally sloshing all onlookers with arkhi and kumis from the cups they held while they danced. They were all rapidly getting quite drunk.
I found Bayan and a couple of the just-arrived sardars, still fairly sober, waiting to present me with a gift. On the army’s march south from Ba-Tang, they told me, its advance scouts had routinely swept every town and village and isolated building, to rout out any suspicious persons who might be Yi soldiers passing as civilians to get behind the Mongol lines as spies or agents of random destruction. And, in a run-down karwansarai on a back road, they had found a man who could not give a satisfactory account of himself. They produced him for me, with the air of giving me a great prize, but he looked no such thing. He was just another dirty, smelly Bho trapa with his head shaven and his face clotted with that medicinal brown plant-sap.
“No, a Bho he is not,” said one of the sardars. “A question was put to him which contained the name of the city Yun-nan-fu, in such a way that he had to repeat the name in his reply. And he said fu, not Yun-nan-pu. Further, he claims his own name to be Gom-bo, but he was carrying in his loincloth this signature yin.”
The sardar handed the stone seal to me, and I duly examined it, but it could equally well have said Gom-bo or Marco Polo, as far as I could tell. I asked what it did say.
“Pao,” said the sardar. “Pao Nei-ho.”
“Ah, the Minister of Lesser Races.” Now that I knew who he was, I could recognize him despite the disguise. “I remember once before, Minister Pao, you had trouble speaking out plain and clear.”
He only shrugged and did not speak at all.
I said to the sardar, “The Khan Kubilai commanded that, if this man was found, I was to slay him. Will you have someone see to that for me? I have already done enough killing for one day. I will keep this yin to show to the Khakhan as evidence that his order was obeyed.” The sardar saluted, and began to lead the prisoner away. “One moment,” I said, and again addressed Pao. “Speaking of speaking—did you ever have occasion to whisper the words, ‘Expect me when you least expect me’?”
He denied it, as he probably would have done in any case, but his expression of genuine surprise and bafflement convinced me that he had not been the whisperer in the Echo Pavilion. Very well, one after another, I was diminishing my list of suspects: the servant girl Buyantu, now this Minister Pao … .
But the next day I found that Pao was still alive. The whole bok woke late, and most of its people with aching heads, but all of them immediately set to preparing for Ukuruji’s sepulture. Only the shamàns seemed to be taking no part in the preparations, now that they had readied the funeral’s centerpiece. They sat apart, in a group, with the condemned Minister Pao among them, and they appeared to be solicitously feeding him his breakfast meal. I went in search of the Orlok Bayan, and asked in annoyance why Pao had not been slain.
“He is being slain,” said Bayan. “And in a particularly nasty way. He will be dead by the time the tomb is dug.”
Still somewhat testily, I inquired, “What is so nasty about letting him eat himself to death?”
“The shamans are not feeding him, Polo. They are spooning quicksilver into him.”
“Quicksilver?”
“It kills with cruelly agonizing cramps, but it is also a most efficacious embalming agent. When he is dead, he will keep. And he will retain the color and freshness of life. Go look at the Wang’s corpse, which the shamans also filled with quicksilver. Ukuruji looks as healthy and rosy as any bouncing babe, and will look so throughout eternity.”
“If you say so, Orlok. But why accord the same funerary rites to the treacherous Pao?”
“A Wang must go to his grave attended by servants for the afterlife. We will also be killing and entombing with him all the Yi who emerged from the disaster yesterday—and a couple of Bho women survivors, too, for his afterlife enjoyment. They may get handsomer in the afterlife; one never knows. But we are giving special attention to Pao. What better servant could Ukuruji take into death than a former Minister of the Khanate?”
When the shamans adjudged the hour to be auspicious, the troops did a lot of marching about the catafalque on which Ukuruji lay, some afoot and others on horseback, with commendable dash and precision, and with much martial music and doleful chanting, and the shamans lit many fires making colored smokes, and wailed their foolish incantations. Those performances were all recognizably funerary of aspect, but some other details of the ceremony had to be explained to me. The troops had dug for Ukuruji a cave in the ground, right at the edge of the avalanche rubble. Bayan told me the position was chosen so it would be unnoticeable to any potential grave robbers.
“We will eventually erect a properly grandiose monument over it. But while we are still occupied with the war, some Yi might sneak back into this valley. If they cannot find the Wang’s resting place, they cannot loot his belongings or mutilate his corpse or desecrate the tomb by making water and excrement in it.”
Ukuruji’s body was reverentially laid in the grave, and about it were laid the fresher cadavers of the newly slaughtered Yi prisoners and the two unfortunate Bho females, and close beside Ukuruji was laid the body of the Minister of Lesser Races. Pao had so contorted himself in his death agonies that the proceedings had to be briefly delayed while the shamans broke numerous of his bones to straighten him out decently. Then the burial detail of troops set up a wooden rack between the bodies and the cave entrance, and began to affix to it some bows and arrows. Bayan explained that for me:
“It is an invention of Kubilai’s Court Goldsmith Boucher. We military men do not always scorn inventors. Regard—the arrows are strung so they aim at the entrance, and the bows are hard bent, and that rack holds them so, but on a sensitive arrangement of levers. If grave robbers ever should find the place and dig into it, their opening the tomb will trip those levers, and they will be met by a killing barrage of arrows.”
The gravediggers closed the entrance with earth and rocks so deliberately untidy that the tomb was indistinguishable from the nearby rubble, at which I inquired:
“If you take such pains to make the tomb undiscoverable, how will
you
find it when the time comes to build the monument?”
Bayan merely glanced to one side, and I looked over there. Some troopers had brought one of their herd mares on a lead rein, closely accompanied by her nursling foal. Some of the men held to the lead rein while the others dragged the little infant horse away from its mother and over to the grave site. The mare began to plunge and whinny and rear, and did so even more frantically when the men holding the foal raised a battle-ax and brained it. The mare was led kicking and neighing away, while the buriers scraped earth over the new body, and Bayan said:

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