Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [59]
Clemency—what little of it there was—took a mercenary form. If a horse thief could afford to make ninefold restitution for his crime, he escaped with his life, if not his honor.
ONE MONGOL custom in particular astounded Marco: the marriage of dead children. He took pains to explain the elaborate rites to Europeans likely to dismiss them as grotesque fantasy. “When there are two men, the one who has a dead male child inquires for another man who may have had a female child suited to him, and she also may be dead before she is married; these two parents make a marriage of the two dead together. They give the dead girl to the dead boy for wife, and they have documents made about it in corroboration of the dowry and marriage.”
When such a ceremony was complete, a necromancer—a shaman or magician who communicated with the dead—burned the documents, with the smoke announcing to the spirits of the dead the marriage of these two deceased children. A marriage feast ensued. Later, the families fashioned images of the dead newlyweds, placed them on a horse-drawn cart adorned with flowers, and paraded them throughout the land, until, when they were done feasting, they consigned the images to the flames, “with great prayer and supplication to the gods that they make that marriage known in the other world with happiness.”
The two families bound by the marriage of their dead children exchanged gifts, even a dowry, as if bride and groom walked among them, erasing the boundary between life and death. Afterward, “the parents and kinsmen of the dead count themselves as kindred and keep up their relation…as if their dead children were alive.”
But Marco is only warming to his theme, and he has something “really marvelous to put into writing.” How could anything outdo the wonders he has already described? He has his answer ready: “We shall speak of the rule of the Great Khan and of his court, which in my judgment I hold, having searched out and seen many parts of the world, that no other dominion can be compared to.” Not only that, but “I shall bind myself for certain not to say of it more than is according to the truth.”
MARCO SPEAKS breathlessly of the “very wild” Mecrit people, nomads who domesticated and rode deer as large as horses; he enthuses over the kingdom of Ergiuul, with its “three races: there are some Turks and many Nestorian Christians, and idolaters [Buddhists] and some Saracens who worship by the law of Mahomet.” Discussing the province of Sinju, he waxes rhapsodic over the oxen and cows “as large as elephants” that were “very beautiful to see, for they were all hairy except the back, and are white and black.” Their wool, “more fine than silk” so impressed him that, he says, “I, Marco Polo, brought some of it here to Venice as a wonderful thing, and so it was counted such by all.” Not only that, but the region “produced the best musk…in the world.”
He was not alone in his fascination with musk; it was fabled throughout Europe as an ingredient in perfumes, aphrodisiacs, and potions of all kinds. Now Marco learned that the magical substance was actually obtained from an egg-sized abdominal gland of the male musk deer. He speaks of the musk he discovered in a “wild animal” resembling a gazelle. “The animal,” he advises, “has deer’s hair,” but much thicker, feet as large as a gazelle’s, and a tail like a gazelle’s, “but it has four teeth, two below and two above, which are three fingers long and are very thin, and white as ivory, and go two upward and two downward.” The Mongols, he notes, call the animals gudderi.