“It is a good yin, and it will last forever,” said the Khakhan. “I had the Yinmaster Liu Shen-dao make it of the marble which the Han call chicken-blood stone. As to the fineness of the engraving, that Master Liu is so expert that he can inscribe an entire prayer on a single human hair.”

And so I left Khanbalik for Yun-nan, carrying, besides my own pack and clothes and other necessities, the twelve brass balls of flaming powder, the sealed letter to the Orlok Bayan, my own letter of authority and the confirming pai-tzu plaque—and my very own personal yin, with which I could leave my name stamped, if I chose, all across Kithai. This is what my name looks like, in the Han characters, for I still have the little stone yin:

I was not sure, when I set out to war, how long I would last. But, as the Khan Kubilai had said, my yin could last forever, and so might my name.

TO-BHOT

1

IT was a long journey from Khanbalik to the Orlok Bayan’s site of operations, nearly as many li as from Khanbalik to Kashgar, but my two escorts and I rode light and fast. We carried only essential traveling gear—no food or cookware or bedding—and the heaviest items, the powder-charged brass balls, were divided among our three extra horses. Those were also fleet steeds, not the usual trudging pack animals, so all six horses were capable of proceeding at the Mongols’ war-march pace of canter and walk and canter. Whenever any horse began to show signs of wearying, we had only to pause at the nearest of the Road Minister’s horse posts and demand six fresh ones.

I had not known what Kubilai had meant when he said that he had already sent advance riders to “ready the route.” But I learned that that was an arrangement made whenever the Khakhan or any of his important emissaries made a long cross-country journey. Those riders went ahead to announce the journeyer’s imminent approach, and every Wang of every province, every prefect of every prefecture, even the elders of every least village, were expected to prepare for the passing-through. So there were always comfortable beds waiting in the best possible accommodations, good cooks waiting to prepare the best available fare, even new wells dug if necessary to supply sweet water in arid regions. That is why we were enabled to carry only the lightest of packs. Every night, too, there were women supplied for our enjoyment, but, as Kubilai had also said, I was too fatigued and saddle sore to make use of them. Instead, I spent each night’s short interval between table and bed in scribbling down on paper what details and landmarks I had noticed during that day’s travel.

We rode in a southwestering arc from Khanbalik, and I cannot remember how many villages, towns and cities we passed through or spent a night in, but only two of them were of estimable size. One was Xian, which the War Minister Chao had pointed out to me on his great map and told me had once been the capital city of the First Emperor of these lands. Xian had dwindled considerably in the centuries since, and, though still a busy and prosperous crossroads city, possessed none of the finery of an imperial capital. The other big city was Cheng-du—in what was called the Red Basin country, because the earth there is not yellow, as in most of the rest of Kithai. Cheng-du was the capital city of the province called Si-chuan, and its Wang inhabited a palace city-within-a-city almost as grand as that of Khanbalik. The Wang Mangalai, another of Kubilai’s sons, would gladly have had me stay a long time as his honored guest, and I was much tempted to rest there for a least a while. But, mindful of my mission, I made my excuses, and of course Mangalai accepted them, and I spent only a single night in his company.

From Cheng-du, my escorts and I turned directly west—into the mountainous border country where the Kithai province of Si-chuan and the Sung province of Yun-nan and the land of To-Bhot all mingled together—and our pace slowed as we began a long climb that soon became a steep climb. The mountains were not so sky-reaching as, for instance, the Pai-Mir of High Tartary. These had much more forest growth on them and no snow, and even in deep winter, I was told, the snow never clung to them for long, except on their very tops. But these mountains, if less high than others I had seen, were much more vertical in their general configuration. Except for the wooded slopes, they were mostly monstrous slabs set on end, separated by narrow, deep, dark ravines. But at least they were solid mountains; we did not have to dodge any avalanches, and I did not ever hear any of them booming roundabout. The country was called by its inhabitants the Land of the Four Rivers, those four streams being locally named the N’mai, the Nu, the Lan-kang and the Jin-sha. But those waters, said the natives, broadened and deepened as they flowed out of the mountains, to become the four greatest rivers of that part of the world, better known by their downstream names of Irawadi, Sal-win, Me-kong and Yang-tze. The first three of those, when they got beyond Yun-nan Province, ran southward or southeastward into the tropical lands called Champa. The fourth would become that Yang-tze of which I have earlier spoken—the Tremendous River—which runs eastward clear to the Sea of Kithai.

But I and my escorts were crossing those rivers far upstream of where they became only four—in the highlands where the rivers began as a multitude of tributary streams. There were so many that they did not all have names, but none was contemptible on that account. Every single stream was a rushing white water which, through the ages, had worn its own individual channel through the mountains, and every single channel was a slab-sided gorge that might have been cleft by the downward slash of some jinni’s giant shimshir sword. The only way along and across those precipitous gashes in the mountains was by way of what the local people proudly called their Pillar Road.

Calling it a road at all was a considerable exaggeration, but it did stand on pillars—or, more accurately, corbels—logs driven and wedged into cracks and crannies in the cliffsides, and planks laid across them, and layers of earth and straw piled on. It could better have been called the Shelf Road. Or even better, the Blind Road, because I traveled most of it with my eyes shut, trusting in the surefootedness and imperturbability of my horse, and hoping it was shod with the never-slip shoes made of the “Marco’s sheep” horn. To open my eyes and look up, down, ahead, behind or sideways made me equally giddy. Glancing upward or downward gave much the same sight: two walls of gray rock converging with distance to a narrow, bright, green-edged crack—up there the sky between two fringes of trees, down yonder the water that looked like a moss-lined brook, but was really a rushing river between two belts of forest. Ahead or behind was the vertiginous view of the Pillar Road shelf that looked too fragile to bear its own weight, never mind a horse and rider, or a train of them. Looking to one side, I would see the cliff that brushed my stirrup and seemed to threaten to give me a sudden shove. Looking the other way, I would see the farther cliff, which appeared to stand so close that I was tempted to reach out and touch it—and to lean was to risk toppling from my saddle and falling forever.

The only thing more dizzying than following the Pillar Road along the cliffsides was the crossing from one side of a gorge to the other, on what the mountain folk, without exaggeration, called the Limp Bridges. Those were made of planks and thick ropes of twisted cane strips, and they swayed in the winds that blew ceaselessly through the mountains, and they swayed worse when a man stepped out onto them, and they swayed even worse when he led his horse out behind him, and during those crossings I think even the horses shut their eyes.