Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [102]
“At last the king of Mien, seeing that it was impossible to make them stand or to resist the attack of the Tartars, the greater part of his army being either wounded or dead, and all the field full of blood and covered with slain horses and men, and that they were beginning to turn the back, he, too, set himself to fly with the remainder of his people.
“When the Tartars saw those that were turned in flight, they went beating and chasing and killing them so evilly that it was a pity to see, for they were for the most part dead. And the Tartars had the victory.”
MARCO FAULTS the ill-starred king of Mien and Bengal, who should have “waited for them in a wide plain where they would not have been able to bear the charge of the first armed elephants; and then with the two wings of horse and foot he should have surrounded them and destroyed them.” Such an outcome was not to be. The Mongol army came away from the battle with a great prize, more than two hundred elephants. Those elephants were far from the dumb beasts Marco had once taken them for; he now claimed that “the elephant has greater understanding than any other animal that is.”
In the end, Marco pays tribute to the victors, his Mongol masters: “This day’s work was the cause of the Great Khan winning all the lands of the king of Mien and Bengal, and making them subject to his rule.”
Unlike the regions around Cambulac, Karagian was Mongol in name only. Despite the Pax Mongolica imposed on it, the southwestern province remained treacherous, even for the most experienced traveler. Marco had painstakingly mastered his survival skills, but peril awaited him at every turn.
CHAPTER TEN
The General and the Queen
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me….
WHEREVER HE ROAMED in these remote provinces, Marco Polo found examples of the natural order of things overturned: astrologers conjuring up tempests at will; salt employed as money; householders inviting strangers to lie with their wives, sisters, and daughters; deadly serpents yielding life-saving medicine—a dizzying succession of curiosities and paradoxes.
No group better exemplified the region’s topsy-turvy customs than certain inhabitants of “Uncian,” thought to be western Yunnan. The men were lazy, self-important, and mostly useless, or, as Marco puts it, “gentlemen, according to their notions. They have no occupation but warfare, the chase, and falconry. All work is done by women, and by other men whom they have taken captive and keep as slaves.” Yet something about this otherwise disreputable group caught Marco’s attention. Expectant parents practiced couvade (the word derives from the French for “to hatch”). As he describes it, “When the ladies have been confined and have given birth to a child, they wash him and wrap him up in clothes, and the lord of the lady gets into the bed and keeps the infant that is born with him and lies in the bed forty days without getting up except for necessary duties. All the friends and relations come to see him and stay with him and make him great joy and entertainment. They do this because they say that his wife has borne great fatigue in carrying the infant in her womb.”
The new mother, meanwhile, went straight back to work. “As soon as she has given birth to the child, she gets up from the bed and does all the duty of the house and waits on her lord, taking him food and drink at the time he is in bed, as if he himself had borne the child.”
No wonder Marco’s first audiences believed he had made up this custom for the sake of amusement. He described behavior so extreme, so fantastic, that he seemed to be satirizing imaginary heathens just to divert his listeners. But he was not inventing, and couvade