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NOTE

FROM THE HISTORICAL RECORD

Herein lies aseventeen-year-old Venetian nae to the palaces of Kublai Khan in China It was a journey that would last twenty-four years and bring forth stories of the exotic lands that lay to the east of the knoorld: wondrous tales of endless deserts and jade-rich rivers, of tee fleets, of black stones that burned and money made of paper, of impossible beasts and bizarre plants, of cannibals and mystic shamans

After serving seventeen years in the courts of Kublai Khan, Marco returned to Venice in 1295, where his story was recorded by a French romanticist named Rustichello, in a book titled in Old French, Le Divisament dou Monde (or The Description of the World) The text swept Europe Even Christopher Columbus carried a copy of Marco's book on his journey to the New World

But there is one story of this journey that Marco refused to ever tell, referring only obliquely to it in his text When Marco Polo had left China, Kublai Khan had granted the Venetian fourteen immense ships and six hundred men But when Marco finally reached port after two years at sea, there rehteen men

The fate of the other ships and men remain a mystery to this day Was it shipwreck, storms, piracy? He never told In fact, on his deathbed, when asked to elaborate or recant his story, Marco answered cryptically: "I have not told half of what I saw"

The pestilence cahty Mongolian Tartars waged siege upon the Italian Genoese, ol arreat e catapults to cast their diseased dead over the Genoese walls, and spread plague in a litter of bodies and ruin In the year of the incarnation of the Son of God 1347, the Genoese fled under sail in twelve galleys back to Italy, to the port of Messina, bringing the Black Death to our shores

—Duke M Giovanni (1356), trans by Reinhold Sebastien in Il Apocalypse (Milan: A, Mondadori, 1924), 34-35

Why the bubonic plague suddenly arose out of China's Gobi desert during the Middle Ages and slew a third of the world's population reues and influenzas of the last century—SARS, the Avian Flu—have arisen out of Asia

But what is knoith fair certainty: the next great pandeain out of the East

—United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Compendium of Infectious Diseases, May 2006

Midnight

Island of Sumatra

Southeast Asia

The screams had finally ceased

Twelve bonfires blazed out in the ht harbor

"Il dio, li perdona"his father whispered at his side, but Marco knew the Lord would not forgive them this sin

A handful of boats, the only witnesses to the funeral pyres out upon the dark lagoon As the alleys, had been set to torch with all hands still aboard, both the dead and those cursed feho still lived The ships' ers of accusation toward the heavens Flakes of burning ash rained down upon the beach and those feho bore witness The night reeked of burned flesh

"Twelve ships," his uncle Masseothe silver crucifix in one fist, "the same number as the Lord's Apostles"