Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
35
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan…
THE MOST REMARKABLE THING happened at the end of the 1960s: A man landed on the moon.
It took me a couple of centuries in the country, but eventually I’d adapted to life in America. It changed so rapidly I had difficulty keeping up at times. I considered myself pretty sophisticated, with a television, an automobile, and a nearby movie theater. But the last week in July, I sat alone on a rooftop for seven days and seven nights, simply staring into the sky at the moon.
I cursed at Pinaruti again for not having given me wings. I would fly to the moon. Or farther. The television and theaters were filled with science fiction movies. People would one day fly farther than the gods of Olympus. I didn’t say that aloud. Hubris.
I had never actually flown. Perhaps that is why I spent so many years of my life sailing the oceans. The wind in my hair. The salt spray of the seas. The loving companions from the infinity room. But even in my own infinity room, where I should be able to make any rule I wanted, my feet were firmly anchored to the ground.
And then, ten years after that historic small step for man, Liz came to me and said, “My momma’s sick. Can we go visit her?”
I immediately thought of the houses I had under construction and dismissed any thought of staying because of them. I had good foremen and they would work without me for a few days. I’d said yes before I really considered what it implied. Her parents were on the West Coast. We were in the Midwest. I thought of the long car ride ahead of us. If her mother was that sick, we might not make it in time for Liz to say goodbye. I made the heart-shaking decision to fly. In an airplane. I bought tickets and we boarded a ship that took to the air. I was ecstatic! In just a couple of hours, we were in California and Liz joyfully ran to her mother’s bedside.
I never regretted that trip. I flew! The feeling of leaving the earth behind us and flying through the sky, higher than any birds flew, was so intense it made me weep. It reminded me of my time with the Khaan.
Which Khaan? Well, all of them. It was Chinggis Khaan that I first encountered near the western mountains. He had just been declared the Great Khaan of all Mongols and was riding eastward to consolidate his kingdom. The Mongol Horde followed in his wake, subjecting all to his dominion. And I was somehow in his path.
I was brought before the great Khaan and paid appropriate homage to him. And then we sat and talked. He was a man of uncommon intellect and great wisdom as well. I told him stories of my travels and he laughed at them, because he knew no man could live long enough to have so many adventures.
He was especially interested, however, in the tales of Alexander and Caesar. He had me describe over and over how certain battles were staged and how they were won. He created a large board where I could build models and push troops around to show him how each battle was fought. The big difference between the Khaan’s forces and either Caesar or Alexander was that nearly all the Khaan’s troops were mounted. They couldn’t really lock shields and march forward like the two great emperors did. But he learned strategy and tactics from everything I showed him as he prepared to move toward the Song dynasty in the south east.
The kingdom of the Mongols was a horse-based culture. Not only did they ride them, but they ate them. I was even served a fermented drink made from mare’s milk, and it wasn’t half bad.
And then one morning, Chinggis Khaan had me mount a horse and ride beside him.
I had been on horseback at times before and I had harnessed a horse to my chariot. I had horses pull my show wagon and had seen Alexander mounted on Bucephalus. But I had never mounted a horse and galloped for an entire day. We flew! It was like sailing across the great plains of Asia.
The Great Khaan captured cities that thought they had time to prepare. He did it by arriving days before they were ready. He swept up their armies and made them part of his own. But the horse brigade always arrived first.
The wind in my hair and the sun in my eyes was the most glorious feeling I had ever known.
And that was the feeling I had when the airplane took Liz and me to California. It was wonderful!
“Bob, may you live forever,” Chinggis said to me one day as we walked about a city he had conquered near the Black Sea. “I am building a great empire. It needs a great city from which to rule it.”
“This city might not be a good choice, Khaan. It is far from the center of your empire and is really not very well maintained,” I said.
“These things are true. But I want no one to say of my capital city, ‘Chinggis Khaan stole this city from the people and drove them out so he could rule in comfort.’ No, I want a city that people will come to and say, ‘The Khaan built this city to rule over our vast empire.’ I want them to see the glory of the Khaan.”
“That is a noble thought, Great Khaan. Where should this city be?”
“Over there somewhere,” he said waving a hand vaguely to the northeast. “I know that sounds vague, but I don’t know where to build this great city. The empire is vast and its emperor must travel from end to end each year in order to rule it. But he must have a place to call his home in this strange world.”
“This would be a great endeavor,” I said.
“Make no mistake; I will never see this city. Perhaps you will live forever, but I will not. I am already getting old. I have sons and they have sons. My son Ugedei has set out with an army to conquer Europe. Eventually, some one of my sons or grandsons will rule over the entire Mongol Empire and that one needs to summon his subjects to the most glorious city on earth. You have spoken of the gardens of Babylon. Make gardens for the Khaan. You have talked about the palaces and temples of Rome and Greece and Egypt. Create a palace and temples for the Khaan. You have seen the prosperity of India. Make a place where my heirs can prosper. Do this, Bob. Grant this wish to an old king.”
“I will find a place where the Khaans of the Mongol Empire will prosper,” I said. “If I cannot live long enough to make this place by myself, I will lay it out so the walls can go up when the Khaan arrives.”
“I will tell my descendants to seek a Chinese monk called Bob and follow him to the place of honor. Go now, Bob. I don’t know how long it will be.”
I left the next morning, separating from the horde and riding the horse Khaan gave me off to the northeast, while he turned to conquer the south.
It was almost fifty years before I had direct contact with the horde again. The second Great Khaan was Ugedei, Chinggis’ third son. Where his father had set about conquering the south and pushing into China as far as the sea, Ugedei Khaan set his sights on Europe and the land of Alexander. He annexed most of what is now Russia, all of China north of the Yangtze River, and pushed through the lands of Persia and Asia Minor.
Ugedei apparently missed his father’s tale of a city prepared for him. He built his capital at Karakorum, one of the palaces he stopped at during his annual rides from China to Europe. He was poised outside Vienna and ready to attack when he died suddenly. Thrown into disarray, his army withdrew to await the decision of the next great Khaan.
That took some time. Two more Khaans rose to power, a brother of Ugedei and a nephew. But Ugedei’s strong influence encouraging trade throughout his empire, kept the empire from falling apart. It took until the Fifth Great Khaan, Hubilai, to create a government that could administer and control the great empire.
Traveling in the general direction that Chinggis had pointed me, I journeyed much more slowly than the horde. I surveyed all the likely places that I might lay out a city of the sort he described. I kept track of my location based on the star charts I always maintained. Released from the pressure of the moving horde, I spent time in the infinity room with my wives and concubines. If it weren’t for my knowledge that one day a great Khaan would move through this area, I might have attempted to hide my satchel in this vast empty land and claim it for my own. But I knew that anywhere on earth a person claimed as his own would one day be conquered. I could not risk that for my people.
I had been traveling for a few years, crisscrossing the land, when I came upon a perfect location. There were mountains on one side and a river on the other. Water was plentiful with lakes and springs. The vegetation was lush and materials were plentiful. I paced around the area I would claim and it took me two days to make the full circuit of what would one day become Kaiping, the city of the Great Khaan.
After I had surveyed the land by eye, I set up a place where I could shelter in a cave and opened a gateway to the infinity room. My wives and concubines all came out to view the territory and comment on where the palace would be located and how the streets would be laid out.
“It reminds me of Bathra,” Nimia said as she cuddled next to me in front of a fire. “A very lush and green Bathra,” she giggled, remembering how dusty and dry the ancient city had been when we first arrived.
“At least we don’t need to move people away in order to lay the city out,” I said. “I wonder how long it will take before people discover us here and begin to move in.”
“Not long, I would say. Have you ever noticed how word of a place seems to travel even when no one has seen it? It is almost as if thinking of a place puts its image in the air and people suddenly speculate that the place must exist. They even draw maps of it before anyone has explored there.”
Words like ‘not long’ and ‘suddenly’ might have had a somewhat different meaning to Nimia than to people in the natural world. Though she still looked as fresh and lovely as the first time I saw her bathing next door, she was the only person in the infinity room who might say she was older than I was. By a few years. She was still in her early teens when I was summoned. So, after three thousand years, saying ‘not long’ could mean sometime in the next century.
“My love, lie with me in this cavern tonight,” I said gently. “Let your breath mingle with mine and our love be heard before our city is built.”
Nimia’s mind and body were still as lusty as the teen’s she had been when we met. She pushed me back and pulled my robes from me.
“First, my demon lover, I would have you in the shape I first saw you. I want the demon my mistress Ariane laid eyes upon and sacrificed all to be with him. Come, my lover. Come to me as you really are.”
And so, I shed my human form and returned to myself. In a way, it was a relief to not be encumbered by a human body, even though I always chose splendid examples of fitness and strength to inhabit. She reached up and stroked my horns—one nicked by the demon in the desert of Arabia. She ran her hands down my chest and arms. She dipped her head to kiss the grand staff that stood from between my legs, and ran her hands down my hairy legs to my very hooves.
Nimia was as fascinated with my demon form as she had been the first time it was revealed to her. And she loved it. I kissed her and tickled at her sensitive points with my claws, careful not to injure her delicate skin with their sharpness. My tongue snaked out to enter her secret valley and dive all the way to its depths, then curl back along the top, sending her into spasms of delight. And then I entered her with my rod. In my demon form, my phallus was what Pinaruti had imagined, which was considerably more than most women could contain. But Nimia opened to me and I sank deeply into her as we kissed and she thrust against me.
We had both participated in the tantric sex games we learned in India. When I was in the form of a woman, she had taken the form of a man and entered me to find a completion she had not experienced before. And since she knew what a man felt when he entered a woman, and I knew what a woman experienced when she was fucked, we judged our responses and built slowly to our climaxes.
When we reached the peak of our pleasure, we both cried out with such passion and pleasure that the water in the cavern split into new streams to enter the valley of our city and the hot baths of the cavern were surrounded with ice pinnacles that reflected light in all directions. The echo of our passion seemed to never die as I emptied myself into her waiting womanhood and she milked me of all my come.
Nimia was also a great help in city planning. She, too, had seen Bathra, Babylon, Troy, Rome, Athens, Carthage, and Alexandria, as well as the great cities of India and Nihon and China. I remember a few hundred years later, she helped me plan the development of houses I built in the Midwest.
“People who own luxury homes want to imagine they have an estate, not just a house,” she told me. “Straight city blocks remind them of the common man. They want to believe no one else has as grand a mansion as they have, so they don’t want to look next door and see another just like it.”
To facilitate her planning, which she had done much of in the infinity room, she enlisted the services of a mathematician in the room and they designed a network of streets that did not run in a straight grid. Each dwelling appeared to be on its own isolated plot where others could not see it. We had to do a lot of grading of the land to get hills and valleys where we wanted them. Adding utilities to the neighborhood was a puzzlement to the city. But when we were finished and had planted trees and erected fences, most people had a view of their property with little or no view of their neighbors. We planted high shrubs along all the streets, so that when a resident entered through the gates to the community, they had the impression they were driving down their own long lane to their home, and not down a street lined with houses just like theirs.
Later developments of the eighties attempted to copy our winding streets, but they did it without changing the terrain or landscaping the homes. As a result, they looked like knotted messes of streets with houses stacked one on top of another. It was a perfect example of the mass production of something that had been a craftsman’s dream without any of the infrastructure that a true craftsman would start with. By the nineties, housing developments had returned to straight gridded streets with houses set a uniform distance back and facing the same direction. Beauty proved to be too much work.
In the Khaan’s city, I began work, assisted by those who wished to visit the natural world they’d once known and then return to the infinity room. We were not a large crew, but we surveyed and cut and dug and piled. We changed the terrain and put in streets and water and sewer before we built a single dwelling.
Because this was not only a city, but a fortress, I chose to make it perfectly square, about ten miles on each side. The mountains were in the north and the river ran to the south, but several streams ran through the city itself, providing fresh water. We took spare dirt and stone to a pile where the palace would be. Around this, we laid out an inner wall, a mile square, to define the palace grounds. Next to this, I created a modest temple. On the south, we lined up a main gate to a bridge across the river, leading to the gate of the palace complex.
Strategically, one would wonder about having a street running straight for a few miles from the gates of the city to the palace. But all the houses and places of business that lined this street were equipped with a rampart where soldiers could be lined up to shoot down on the street. I shuddered to think of what a killing field that would be should someone have the temerity to attack the palace of the Khaan.
I can talk about all the work as if it were the labor of a few days, but in fact, we worked on the city layout for years. And true to Nimia’s predictions, people began to migrate to our city. With more people, there were more laborers. Small businesses grew up. I chose to let the area outside the city grow organically and farms were established with crops and animals. As we had always done, we provided for those who labored. Some worked fields, some tended pastures, and some built buildings. It was turning into a glorious city.
When the envoy of Hubilai Khaan the Great, emperor of the Mongols, arrived to lay claim to the city, he expected to have a siege. Instead, he found a peaceful city of some 20,000 inhabitants, waiting to welcome the king. I continued building, working on the temples, and making sure the houses of the populace were maintained and well-constructed. They were a mix of stone and timber and showed a prosperous front.
Hubilai Khaan arrived with much of the horde at his back.
“Where is Liu Bingzhong, called Bob?” he shouted at the southern gate.
I approached and bowed low. My Chinese appearance was now as an old man.
“Oh, Great Khaan. Welcome to your city. May the gods shine down upon you and your reign. May you live forever.”
Khaan dismounted and walked into the city with me, looking in all directions. The main avenue led straight through the center of the city to the inner wall of the royal compound. And in the center of the compound rose the palace of the Khaan.
“Shangdu,” the Khaan breathed. “It is good.”
There was a bit of chaos that ensued, but the king’s envoy had already set up administrative offices and managed the settling of the hundred thousand in Khaan’s migrating force with relative ease. I sat with the king at dinner and he offered me food from his plate.
“Bob, this pleases me. How may I reward you?” he asked.
“Great Khaan, if you please, grant me leave now to return to my homeland by the sea that I might die among my ancestors, for I am very old.”
“But you can have gold, jewels, women, horses. Anything to take with you,” he said.
“What good are these things in a man’s tomb?” I asked. “Still, if it pleases you to give me a horse, it would make my journey easier.”
Of course, leaving a king is not as easy as saying ‘goodbye’ and going. Khaan wanted a tour of every inch of his city. We toured the temples where I had trained monks in the martial arts and Khaan immediately wanted his troops trained to fight in this manner. In fact, it took nearly five years for me to leave Xanadu.
In that time, I met the Italian explorer, Marco Polo. Some other time, I will tell you of our meeting.
At last, however, the day came. Hubilai Khaan, the fifth great Khaan of the Mongols, bid me farewell and granted me a horse. I left through the east gate and rode with the wind in my hair toward the coast.
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