Daughter of Xanadu - Dori Jones Yang [59]
Despite the wild environment, we passed numerous towns and villages and even two cities where the valley widened into a small plain, in a land called Szechwan, or Four Rivers. The food was zesty, flavored heavily with hot peppers and garlic, which locals claimed would prevent illness. Between cities, we camped under the stars. While the scenery was stunning, the travel was wearisome; I was disheartened to hear it would take a month through such rugged terrain to reach the region of Carajan.
In Szechwan, we stocked up on all the food and provisions we would need. We were preparing for a journey through wild, uninhabited country and then through a mountainous region called Tibet, a friendly part of our Empire. Marco traded one of his silk carpets for salt, which Tibetans used as currency.
Before we reached Tibet, the land became even more rugged. This part of Szechwan, Abaji told us, had been sorely ravaged in the battles led by Khubilai Khan to control the area twenty years earlier. Abaji, who had served under Khubilai, told us many stories about the battles they had fought in this part of the empire.
One town, by a rushing river with mountains at its back, had been burned to the ground by Mongol troops. The crumbling bricks of the town’s wall still stood, but the houses inside were charred remains. We stopped to water our horses, and Abaji told us how the town leaders had resisted, feigning surrender at first but then surprising the Mongolian horsemen by attacking with arrows from hideouts on cliffs and blocking the way with boulders. I looked up and shivered, imagining a torrent of arrows coming from those cliffs. It had taken three days for the Mongol troops to break through. When they did, they killed everyone in the town and burned it to the ground.
I noticed something half hidden behind a boulder and pointed to it. Abaji led the way, and several of us followed, including Marco. When we rounded the boulder, we saw that it was a stack of human bones and skulls, piled higher than the roof of a house. Most of them had been bleached in the sunlight and half rotted during the wet winters. Twenty years earlier, the stack must have been twice as high. Someone had placed all those bodies in one spot after the Mongol troops had left. Who? Wives or mothers?
The eyes in the skulls were empty holes, staring at us from the past, filling me with horror. I remembered that Marco had told me of seeing similar stacks of bleached bones many times during his journey from the West. But seeing them with my own eyes was far worse than hearing about them. Some were small, children’s bones. It seemed impossible that brave Mongol soldiers would kill so many. That the great Khubilai Khan, with his good humor and intellectual interests, could have ordered it. That fat, good-natured Abaji himself had helped carry out such atrocities.
“They resisted,” Abaji explained. “Now the land is at peace, and we can pass safely, without fear for our lives.”
I tasted bile in my throat and looked away. Marco closed his eyes and turned, walking away without looking back. Yet without such killings, we Mongols could not have established wise rule and peace in these wild places.
I had often imagined fighting in a battle between two armies, and I had dreamed of killing armed enemy soldiers by the dozen. But a village of ordinary people, including women and children? In resisting the Mongols, they had merely been defending their homes. No wonder Marco wanted to prevent this from happening in Christendom.
That night, we camped under the open sky. Abaji picked an open area along a stream that flowed into the river, near the edge of a forest. “Few people remain in these parts,” he told us. “The biggest danger is wild beasts. Lions and bears are hungry and often attack travelers. But I know an excellent way to keep them far away—a technique they use in this part of the Empire. Let me show you.”
Abaji