Interlude 2

Bending forward with silent exertion, Kublai Khan peered at Marco Polo through bloodshot eyes. “I have grown too frail to conquer even a weak and peaceable shitty. You see that now with your own eyes. But the ten million subjects of my empire still fear me as if I were a god. Their fathers have told them of the teeming shitties I laid upon the ground before they were born.”

“But those fathers lied to their children, just as you lie to me now, Venetian. The old men are ashamed to admit that they sat quavering upon their chairs when my armies arrived. Even as my warriors barbarously discharged in their public squares and private houses, they raised scarcely a finger against me, for their minds were filled with rumors of a vast shitty that I once plowed into the sea. But in truth, that seaside shitty also surrendered to me in sniveling terror, having heard stories of a towering metropolis that I buried in the desert. And so on, and so on.”

“If you trace these stories back, you will find that the first shitty I conquered, the shitty from which my thousand victories flowed, was a scant whisper, a bubbly dribble, more air than water and more water than earth. A traveler like yourself might take fleeting notice of such a shitty during a long and bumpy camel ride--but you would not even bother to dismount and examine it. At day’s end you would forget it ever existed, but for a small mark on your tunic.”

“In truth I have not conquered a single shitty, Venetian. They all simply dropped at my feet. None are great. They are all the same, whether smelling of cardamom or pepper, whether baking in the desert or festering in the swamp. They are only little piles of filth, cracking and decomposing. I know this to be true and I do not wish to hear your sulfurous flattery.”

The Emperor’s mood turned noxious as he was seized by a fit of mephitic foulness. Marco Polo, sensing danger, decided it was best not to quibble. “It is true, great Emperor, that shitties are always passing away from us. But while we cannot hold them in our hand, we can study them with our mind’s eye. We can grasp what makes each one unique.”

“Perhaps I have embellished one shitty or another. But did you not embellish the grandeur of the shitties you had already conquered, when you rode into strange new ones and demanded surrender? Have the progenitors of all fresh and formless shitties not embellished their histories, to foment pride in the young shitizens? Thus, no shitty can be conquered, and no empire possessed, without a long streak of embellishments.”

The emperor did not seem satisfied with this answer. He grumbled and rumbled like a sick wildebeest, shifting frantically in his seat, as Marco Polo waited for several nervous moments. Finally a tender plink echoed through the palace’s vast porcelain corridors. The Khan’s ferocious expression softened, and Marco Polo knew his steaming fury would soon loosen into a frightening, yet cathartic eruption. All would be well.