“And so I went south,” said the old master lying in bed, before he began to cough.

  Sitting nearby on the floor at a low table was the secretary, who scribbled complex characters in a book—writing top to bottom, right to left. A servant stood waiting by the kitchen doorway. All three of these people were in the master’s modest house in the imperial capital.

  When the old master stopped coughing, he continued. “We looked everywhere for Princess Li Sato for months, years. All over Po-ssu. We couldn’t find her. It was as though she had just disappeared. But that’s how things go sometimes. People come into your life, and then they go…”

  The secretary looked at him. “You don’t feel upset about this, master?”

  “It was such a long time ago.” The master was racked with coughs, and the secretary asked if they should stop for the day, but the master shook his head. Nonetheless, the secretary ordered the servant to stoke the fire in the stove which was heating the master’s bed.

  “We can send for medicine,” the secretary added.

  “The Buddha of Medicine himself couldn’t help me now,” the old master said, when the coughing had stopped. “I fear this sickness will soon get the best of me. Now where was I? Ah, yes, you were asking if I was upset. Well, it was decades ago. Of course I’m still sad about it. Of course I’m still upset. I always wanted to go back…I always wanted to return and find out what happened to Ba-ku-ya, what happened in Fulin, but I was so busy searching for the princess, I never made it…”

  “Please tell me where you went next, master.”

  The master smiled, his face a map of deepening wrinkles, his voice hoarse and faint. “Soon I found myself in what you would call the Western Regions—Indu—in the land of the Chalukyas, the Rashtrakutas, the Cholas. Those are some of the different dynasties which ruled those lands, though I have been gone for so long now, things may have changed in the mean time.”

  The secretary sounded out these terms and assigned them the appropriate characters. Only the Cholas with their southern maritime empire were familiar to him, though the Seres called this country “Chulian.”

  At this point, the master noticed his bed getting hotter. The servant returned from the kitchen and bowed. Pipes from the kitchen stove went under the bed and then into a chimney outside. Without this Seran heating technology, the old master could never have kept his limbs warm. No matter what he did, the bitter cold was always creeping up from his toes and making him shiver.

  “Indu,” the secretary said. “That is the land of the Buddha, the bodhisattvas and arhats, where Xuanzang went on pilgrimage to retrieve the Tripitaka. He was born not far from here, you know, at around the time of the fall of Great Sui.”

  “Indu is a land of many things,” the old master said. “It’s a big country. Hot, humid, mostly flat, aside from the Ghats to the east and west and the Himalay in the north. It’s green, too, very green, spread with misty jungles and rice paddies—though we came there through the vicious Lut Desert, through barren mountains so bereft of life one could hardly breathe. In Indu, you’ll find warriors, nobles, temples, peasants, monks, kings, the juggernaut processions of the gods where four-storied chariots are pulled by trumpeting elephants, and the idols inside are decked with more lotuses than any wedding bride. There are emperors who call themselves ‘wheel-turners,’ and sages who seek a path free from the dualistic contradictions of the universe, the annihilation of annihilation, guarded in their meditations by thousand-headed cobras called nagas, whose hoods are made of diamonds. Thus do they escape the labyrinthine mandala, the samsara game of life, as a musician strums a glissando from a sitar.”

  The secretary nodded, painting letters in the book with his brush.

  “I adventured there many years,” the old master said. “Serving as sipahi for how many royal durbars? But I could never bring myself to settle down and start a family. It felt like a betrayal of the ones I had lost. Always I searched for the princess, my dreams haunted by dragons, one of light, one of darkness, both chasing the pearl of wisdom. There would be no devi waiting in purdah in the crimson zenana for me, no elegant apsara of perfect impossibility distracting from the Middle Way for me. All instead would form from dust, and then turn to dust again. Even now, as you can see, I have no sons to care for me, nor to light incense at my tomb. I have only paid servants, a most lamentable fate. Soon enough, I shall become a hungry ghost.”

  The secretary dipped his reed pen in the inkwell and kept writing.

  So many scriveners in Dongjing, the master thought. Hearing I was sick, he came here to record my life, as the city’s farthest-traveled resident. I might as well make it worth his while.

  “Sometimes you even find talking parrots in the Western Regions,” the old master continued. “And I mean, very talkative parrots. They can lecture people in articles of faith, the vedas and shastras and puranas, and tell stories more eloquently than you or me. I met one named Vaishampayana—”

  “Vai-sham-pay-ya-na.” The secretary sucked his breath through his teeth. “Difficult names you Dashi have.”

  “That’s why I took the name Li Alai long ago,” Master Li said. “None of you could pronounce my actual name.”

  “What was that, by the way?”

  Master Li shut his eyes and narrowed his wrinkled brow. “Alexios Leandros.” He laughed. “Almost forgot. It’s been so long since anyone’s called me that.”

  The secretary nodded, sounding out the name and taking it down. “No need for names to be so long.”

  “That’s how I felt in Indu,” Master Li said. “With people like Vaishampayana.”

  “Your real name is actually longer than his.”

  Master Li counted the syllables on his fingers. “That’s true! What do you know?”

  “Tell me about this parrot. He sounds most extraordinary.”

  Master Li nodded. “Indeed, he was. A composer of poems and songs, Vaishampayana claimed that his talents originated in merit gained in previous lives. He had many eloquent turns of phrase. He would say things like: ‘the night was an elephant, and the moon was a lion of light devouring the elephant’s flesh of darkness.’”

  The secretary cocked his head. “It is a rather violent, martial metaphor, is it not?”

  A reminder of Secretary Fan’s past, Master Li thought. Less than one in a hundred applicants pass the Confucian exams. Only the most obsessive students and ass-kissers make it through. He was appointed to the Ministry of Personnel…the young man is no doubt at the beginning of a long and illustrious career…

  Secretary Fan cleared his throat.

  “But the most important thing was the curry,” Master Li said. “In the Western Regions—the far Western Regions, mind you, far beyond Indu, where you find Po-ssu, Fulin, and the lands of the Falang—there isn’t much spice. The Fulinese like their salad and fish oil, and even farther west, people eat little more than bread with ale and the occasional meat pie. It’s a culinary hell, really. I had been living without spicy food for so long, it was such a relief to come to Indu. I served many lords there as their retainer or bodyguard, just trying to save money so I could spend a few months traveling around looking for the princess.”

  “Yet you never found your dragon, nor did you manage to locate this princess, Lee Sa-to.”

  Master Li shook his head. “I wonder if it really was some sort of delusion. What would have happened if I had stayed back in Fulin with my friends? Could we have defeated Nar-se Kai-sa, the Fulinese Son of Heaven?”

  “Sometimes one man makes no difference.”

  “There was an old poem from where I come from. An old nursery rhyme about a nail. ‘For want of a nail, a battle was lost.’”

  Secretary Fan looked up from his book. “How can this be?”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Without the nail, a horse had no shoe. Without the horse, the army went into battle without enough force. Without enough force, the army lost the battle. That’s the gist of it.”

  “Ah, I understand now!” Secretary Fan smiled and nodded. “What delightful wisdom from these Far Western Regions of yours!”

  “Be careful you don’t become too enamored of them,” Master Li said. “I have read the accounts of Fulin and Daqin in the imperial archives. The writers knew little of what they were talking about. One wonders if they even made it to Fulin at all. Sometimes we would encounter such people—they were especially adventurous silk traders—but I don’t know if any of them ever made it back here. It’s a kind of occidentalism from those writers. They considered the Fulinese a kind of noble savage, as ridiculous as that sounds. Tacitus did the same to the Germans. Every writer has an axe to grind, whether or not they admit it.”

  “We have heard of Fulin,” Secretary Fan said. “As a kind of reflection of the Great Song Empire, a far-western version of the Midlands, where the Sons of Heaven are dethroned if they displease the people and lose the mandate.”

  Master Li shook his head. “If only it were so. Certainly the Fulinese have some interesting stories, ideas, and innovations, but these are a mere handful of diamonds shining in an otherwise dangerous cave. They can’t be trusted. They’ll betray you. I’ve done what I could to advise the Son of Heaven on these issues—to be wary of Fulin and the Falang, to build alliances with other powers to oppose them. I even told him to send ships far into the Eastern Ocean, beyond the voyages of Xu Fu, beyond the white clad people of Kao-lee and the black-toothed people of Cipangu, there to warn the peoples of the great lands of the danger that is coming, the dawn of the world’s end, when all of this will be swept away.” He waved his veiny hand to encompass everything in his room.

  “I have heard,” Secretary Fan said. “You told the Son of Heaven—in a royal audience, while he was sitting on the Dragon Throne—that the journey would last many months, and be full of peril. No ship we possess has food or fresh water stores for such a journey. Even an armada with a crew of thousands would be insufficient…”

  “I told him to send the ships north, along the coast. Far to the north, the gap is not so wide, perhaps a journey of only a few weeks in open sea. The problem is the cold weather, and the islands in those lands are all erupting volcanoes whose lava flows down mountainsides coated in snow.”

  “Such a voyage seems expensive, with little immediate benefit. You must understand that people and treasure come to us, Master Li. We of the Midlands do not go to them. It also seems difficult to believe that these Falang, as you call them, could ever rule over us. Not in thousands of years have outsiders of any kind come close to ruling their superiors, for that would disrupt the supreme harmony of the universe. Of much greater and more immediate concern to us are the Tanguts and Jurchens. Even then, they are mere border raiders. Great Song will fall one day, yes, but that is because, as the sages say: ‘The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide.’ Another imperial dynasty will replace Great Song. Outsiders cannot rule the Midlands, anymore than oxen can.”

  They never stop treating me as though I arrived here just yesterday, Master Li thought. Though I’ve been here for decades.

  “The benefit is long-term,” Master Li said. “The lives of countless people, all of them yet unborn, are at stake. Everyone thinks I’m wine-drunk when I talk like this. But what do I know? I’ve only traveled more than anyone else alive.” He sighed. He was getting worked up, and needed to control himself.

  “Master Li has indeed traveled for many thousands of li,” Secretary Fan punned.

  “We have another story, you know, from the Western Regions, about a woman who could see the future, yet no one would believe her, and everything she said came true. Her name was Kassandra. She predicted disasters, and they all came to pass.”

  “Ka-san-du-ra.” Secretary Fan wrote the name. “A truly terrible fate.”

  “One all too familiar to me. It seems more practical to send an embassy to Fulin, just to see what has happened since my departure. I fear what Nar-se Kai-sa has been up to for all these years. Timing the monsoon winds correctly, a ship could make the journey from the coast of Great Song all the way to Basra in Irak, where my friend Miriai came from. After that, it’s only a ride of a few weeks to the Middle Sea, and then another week on a sailboat to the capital. I advised the Son of Heaven on the matter…”

  “He was rather patient with this presumptuous blue-green-eyed Dashi.” Secretary Fan nodded to Master Li. “Few of us are even granted the right to be in the same room as that old venerable Buddha—and if we are allowed inside the royal chambers, we do not speak unless spoken to, we do not argue. To do so would violate the relationship between ruler and ruled. And always we keep our eyes to the floor. Yet you argued with him, and survived. Even the Empress Dowager and the eunuchs left you alone!”

  “They were merciful,” Master Li said. “The Son of Heaven favored my stories, and only had me whipped ten times for my presumption. I still carry the scars on my back.”

  Secretary Fan laughed. “Things could have been worse for you. And I must wonder about the validity of your argument in the first place. You understand that the situation in the west is perilous for traders, armies, and embassies of all kinds. Little gets through the bandits by land or the pirates by sea.”

  “That will change too, one day, when pirates and bandits rule the world.”

  “Yes, you have told us even more fantastic stories. These ones are about flying birds of metal, and steel contrivances which speak to one another. Thus have you added to your reputation as a teller of the very tallest tales. Once you became too old to be of much use as an imperial bodyguard, you were almost appointed court entertainer. The Son of Heaven always liked having a Dashi around. It seemed you were his very own Vajra guardian.”

  Master Li waved his hand, wincing with the effort. “I have done what I could. Yet I always wish I could do more.”

  “How did you find your way to the Midlands?”

  “Many years ago I came with a tribute convoy the Chollas sent to Zaiton. So many Dashi live there, the place is like Fulin away from Fulin. Most were Muslims, Persian and Arabian traders, you understand, but there were also plenty of Jews, Manichees, Zoroastrians, and Nestorian Christians. But these words are meaningless to you, are they not?”

  “Sometimes Dashi traders come to Great Song from faraway places and amass much wealth,” Secretary Fan said. “But I confess, I know little about them.”

  Of course, Master Li thought. What point is there in understanding what is of inferior quality?

  “From Zaiton,” Master Li continued, “the great emporium, it was a matter of little consequence to ride the rivers and canals north to Dongjing. I had heard much about the great city from my friends, and wished to see it.”

  Here Master Li began coughing again. The bout was so severe that the servant pounded his back and gave him a cup of scalding hot cha.

  “Well,” Secretary Fan said, when the coughing had subsided. “We have much of your life taken down in broad strokes, but we still need many details. Perhaps we can fill these in the next time we speak.”

  Master Li nodded, though he had grown so tired he was unable to speak. Secretary Fan closed his book, put away his ink pot and reed pen, and bid Master Li farewell. The servant conducted him to the doorway to the crowded street outside, and soon Secretary Fan had vanished into the masses—the buffalo carts, the donkeys hauling sacks, the men dragging carriages laden with goods, the merchants selling fried pork dangling on strings suspended from sticks, the servants carrying umbrellas and sedan chairs, the river packed with junks.

  Yet the fire in the stove kept burning, and Master Li’s bed remained hot. He reflected that in his younger days he would have gone out to explore the city in his free time. There was so much to see, so many different people, and everything was always changing, one building rising while another was torn down. With no end to the entertainment to be found in a place like this, Dongjing was the greatest city in the world. When you were bored, all you needed to do was go outside and walk around. But now Master Li was old, tired, sick. He contented himself with roaming over his decades of thought and memory. His servant, a young and clever city boy named Long, had little to do, now that his master had accepted his fate. To help him void the contents of his stomach, to change his clothes, turn him over, give him cha and broth, read to him and keep him company, and clean the house—these were Long’s responsibilities, as well as the other servants assigned to Master Li by the Son of Heaven himself, in gratitude for many years of loyal service.

  As daylight dimmed, Long lit the oil lamps, sitting at the table beside the drowsy Master Li and reading a slim book of poetry while sipping at a cup of foamy sweet white elegant Shilla rice wine from Kao-lee.

  “Ah,” Master Li said. “That is the life. Poetry and wine. What could be better?”

  Long looked at him. “Apologies, master, I didn’t offer you any rice wine. Would you care for some?”

  “I really shouldn’t, you know, with my condition,” Master Li said. “Doctor Cao would never forgive me. Should we consult the astrologers, I wonder, and see if the time is auspicious, according to the heavens, for the drinking of rice wine? But I developed a taste for the farmers’ wine during my long stay in Kao-lee. They were so polite, always bowing to you and offering more. Perhaps just one sip would be enough to take me back. One sip to recall my entire life. For so many years I wondered if living was mere memory, if I was at the end of my life on my deathbed and merely dreaming through my past as I walked the sunny stone palaces of Tanjore. I wonder if this will be the day, this the night? Either I will meet the dragon I was promised, or I will cease to exist, cease to care. I have wondered so long about what would happen at this point, and now I am here…”

  Long had poured another cup of foaming wine as Master Li rambled. He pressed the cup to the master’s lips, and allowed him a sip. Master Li gasped with delight, then had more.

  “It’s just right,” he said. “It always tastes better when you steal it from someone else. Forgive me. It seems I have been waiting all my life for you, Long. But they brewed it perfectly. Where did you get it?”

  “There’s a new brewery next to Ma Yu Ching’s Bucket Chicken House,” Long said. “Everyone’s going there these days.”

  “Ma Yu Ching’s Bucket Chicken House,” Master Li repeated. “How many times did I go there? If only I were still strong and young, I would go again tonight—you and me, Long, we could party with the courtesans until sunrise! I would buy everyone twenty rounds!”

  Long laughed. “Perhaps when you get better.”

  Master Li had no interest in arguing with his servant on this point, and so he responded merely by drinking more of the sweet white foamy liquor. It seemed, however, that he had drunk too much, for he began to cough, and this time his bout of coughing was so serious that he had trouble breathing. Long set down the cup of wine and pounded the old man’s back, but it was too late. Old Master Li had already taken his last breath.