The Connoisseur

Chapter 25 - Khans, Boys and LBDs

They did go everywhere.

Two days after they met at the cafe, they journeyed across seven centuries to the vast plains of China in the summer.  There they found a caravan led by three Italian merchants, who marvelled at their sudden appearance of two fellow Europeans, dressed in the finest travelling gear, from out of the grasslands.

“Whence come you, dear lady?” said the youngest Italian, a youth who could be no older than Sophia.

“England.”

“England?  Daverro?  How can a lady so charming come from so barbaric a land?”

“What is it with England and barbarians?” muttered Sophia.  “Maybe you should visit my country some day, Signor Polo.”

“Si, signora.  I should like that very much.”

He took her hand and kissed it.  Sophia looked at Alexander and put on her most girlish face.  He returned a good-humoured pout.

A great wall loomed ahead, and the travellers were inducted into the summer palace of the great Khan, Kublai, at Shangdu.  As they passed through the gardens, Sophia gazed at flowers in every colour of the rainbow, fountains of exquisite design and sweet-smelling meadows with the brightest green grass, all shaded by plum and peach trees laden with fruit.  They came across the hunting party of the Khan himself.  Sophia tensed at the sight of a full-grown leopard on a leash beside the Emperor, but it appeared tamed, and she watched the master of China and Mongolia loose the great predator on those animals in the park it was his pleasure to hunt.

They crossed a high bridge over a watercourse that tumbled down the rocks below.  Alexander turned to her as they walked behind the Khan’s party.

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A Stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.”

“Oh, who wrote that?  I should know,” said Sophia.

“Coleridge, five hundred years from now.  He dreamt of this place.  I think he caught something of it, don’t you think?”

“God, yes.”

“Though the opium might have helped.  He was, as you might say, off his face on the stuff.”

“Stick that in your book.”

“I have done.”

Later that evening, after they had eaten with the Khan, the Polos and all the great people of China and Mongolia, Sophia let Alexander lead her away from the audience chamber.  They came to the royal stables.

“The great Khan appreciates your gift,” said a groom, approaching them, “And has ordered that his horses be made ready for you.”

Sophia stared at the two noble animals, fabulously caparisoned, and her jaw dropped.  Alexander’s smile was tremendous.

“I’ve never ridden before,” she whispered.  “I’ve no idea what I’m doing.”

“You’ll get it,” said Alexander, swinging himself into the saddle.

She did, after a while.  As the dusk sun set fire to the last clouds of the day, the two of them galloped across the plains, dust in their wake, laughter on their lips.  The wind flew through Sophia’s hair, and it didn’t stop for seven hundred years.