My staying with the Khakhan’s entourage also enabled me to keep a protective watch over Hui-sheng, but that had no influence on my decision not to hurry ahead. Hui-sheng was still traveling in company with her Mongol mistresses, and had no knowledge of my interest in her or the arrangements I had made for her future. I did pay her some occasional little attentions, just so she would not forget me—helping her climb in or out of the concubines’ carriage when we stopped at a karwansarai or some provincial official’s country mansion, fetching her a dipper of water from an inn-yard well, gathering a posy of a village’s thrown flowers and presenting it to her with a gallant bow—trifles like that. I wished her to think well of me, but I had now more reason than before not to force my suit upon her.

I had earlier decided to wait a decent interval; now I had to. It seemed to me that my whisperer enemy knew always where I was and what I was doing. I dared not risk that enemy’s learning that I had any special attachment to Hui-sheng. If he was malicious enough to strike at me through a dearly esteemed friend like Mar-Janah, God only knew what he might do to someone he thought really dear to me. It was hard for me to keep my gaze from lingering on her and to resist doing little services for the reward of her dimpled smile. I would have had an easier time of it if Ali and I had ridden on ahead, as he wanted to do. But, for his sake and Mar-Janah’s, I stayed with the train, trying not to stay always near Hui-sheng.

KHANBALIK AGAIN

1

IN addition to the troop of horsemen staying a day ahead of us, there were other riders continually galloping off to Khanbalik or galloping up to us, ostensibly to keep the Khakhan informed of developments there. Ali Babar anxiously questioned each arriving courier, but none had any further word of his missing wife. In fact, the riders’ only function was to keep track of the train of the Dowager Empress of the Sung, which was also approaching the city. That enabled Kubilai to set our rate of march so that our procession finally swept down the great central avenue of Khanbalik on the same day—at the same hour—that hers entered from the south.

The entire populace of the city, and probably of the whole province for hundreds of li around, was jammed along the sides of the avenue and clogging every fringe street and dangling from windows and clinging to roof eaves, to greet the triumphant Khakhan with roars of approval, with flapping banners and swirling pennants, with the booming and flaring overhead of the fiery trees and sparkling flowers, with a ceaseless and ear-thumping fanfare of trumpets and gongs and drums and bells. The people continued to carry on as the only slightly less splendiferous train of the Sung Empress came up the avenue and halted respectfully on meeting ours. The crowds muted their clamor a little when the Khakhan got chivalrously down from his throne-carriage and advanced to take the old Empress’s hand. He gently helped her down from her carriage to the street, and enfolded her in a brotherly embrace of welcome, at which the people bellowed and blared a really deafening uproar of noise and music.

After the Khan and the Empress had both got into his throne-carriage, there was a period of confused milling, as the contingents of the two trains churned about to coalesce and march all together to the palace, where would begin the many days required for the ceremonies of formal surrender: the conferences and discussions, the drafting and inditing and signing of documents, the handing over to Kubilai of Sung’s great seal of state or Imperial Yin, the public readings of proclamations, the balls and banquets mingling celebration of victory and condolence of defeat. (So condolent was Kubilai’s chief wife, the Khatun Jamui, that she settled a generous pension on the deposed Empress and granted that she and her two grandsons be let to live out their lives in religious retirement, the old woman in a Buddhist nunnery, the boys in a lamasarai.)

I held my horse back in the less congested rear of the procession as it moved toward the palace, and motioned for Ali to do the same. When I had the opportunity, I reined my mount alongside his and leaned close so he could hear me over the ambient tumult without my having to shout: “You see now why I wanted us to arrive with the Khakhan. Everybody in the city is congregated here today, including any who know where Mar-Janah is, and so now they know we are here, too.”

“It would seem so,” he said. “But no one has plucked at my stirrup to volunteer any word.”

“I think I know where the word will be volunteered,” I said. “Stay with me as far as the palace courtyard and then, when we dismount, let us seem to separate, for I am sure we are being watched. Then this is what we will do.” And I gave him certain instructions.

The untidy procession went shouldering and elbowing and nudging its way through the pressing onlookers and well-wishers, so slowly that the day was ending when we finally reached the palace, and Ali and I entered the stable court as we had done on our very first arrival at Khanbalik, in a deepening twilight. The courtyard was a turmoil of people and animals and noise and confusion; if anyone was watching us, he could not have had a very clear view. Nevertheless, when we got down from our horses and handed them over to stable hands, we made a distinct show of waving farewells and going off in opposite directions.

Walking as tall and visibly as I could, I went to a horse trough and splashed water at my dusty face. When I straightened up, I looked about and made faces expressive of distaste at the surrounding commotion. I started jostling through the mob toward the nearest palace portal, then stopped and made flagrant gestures of repugnance—not worth the effort —and plowed my way out of the crowd to where I was conspicuously alone and apart. Keeping my distance from everyone I met, I sauntered slowly across uncovered walks and through gardens and over streamlet bridges and along terraces until I came to the newer parkland on the other side of the palace. I stayed always in the open, out from under roofs or trees, so that anyone who wanted to could see me and follow me. On the farther side of the palace grounds, there were fewer people, but still there were people about—minor functionaries trotting here and there on court business, servants and slaves scurrying about at their chores—for the Khakhan’s arrival naturally caused a beehive stir.

However, when I came to the Kara Hill and began idly to climb its path, as if I were only seeking to get away from the crush of people below, I really did. There was no one else in sight up there. So I strolled on uphill to the Echo Pavilion, and first walked around its entire outside perimeter, to give my putative pursuer a chance to dodge inside the wall. Finally, as if paying no least attention to where I was or what I was doing, I ambled through the Moon Gate in the wall and around the inside terrace. When I was at the farthest remove from the Moon Gate, the pavilion squarely between me and it, I leaned back against the ornamental wall and contemplated the stars coming out one by one in the plum-colored sky above the pavilion’s dragon-ridge roof. I had moved only leisurely the whole way from the entry courtyard to here, but my heart was beating as if I had run hard, and I feared that its thumping must be audible all around the pavilion precincts. But I had not long to worry about that. The voice came, as it had come before: a whisper in the Mongol tongue, low and sibilant and unidentifiable even as to gender, but as clearly as if the whisperer were right at my side, whispering the words I expected:

“Expect me when you least expect me.”

I immediately bellowed, “Now, Nostril”—in my excitement forgetting his new name and estate.