The Plague Lord

The book opens with Marco Polo in Venice. It is 1322 and the first wave of the fourteenth-century plague later to be known as the Black Death has arrived in Europe - and Marco, an old man now, remembers events in China thirty-five years earlier that heralded the coming of this plague.

China, at that time part of the vast Mongol Empire, was ruled by Kublai Khan. Marco, whom Kublai has appointed "principal magistrate in the Prefecture of Cambaluc", is summoned to the palace to participate in discussions about a sequence of very strange and very bloody murders - what seems to be a chain of murders, the murderer being always the next victim - and always both murderer and victim are members of the Guild of Pourers, the organisation of workers responsible for keeping the city clean.

Taking an active part in the discussion and in the subsequent investigation are Brother Raphael, the Pope's special envoy sent to warn Kublai that seers in Italy are prophesying a terrible plague which will have its advent in China, and Su-Ling, a Buddhist nun who is herself a seer and has suffered the same terrible dreams and visions.

It transpires that a powerful sorcerer, with the support of the clandestine Water Lily sect, has conjured up the demon known in the west as Azrael and in the east as Wen Yi Kwei, the Plague Lord, and that Azrael is even now on the loose in the city ...

If you have not already read The Travels of Marco Polo, then reading The Plague Lord may stimulate you to do so. It was written (like the memoirs of Christopher Columbus) in prison. In the Prologue, we read that Marco Polo, wishing in his secret thoughts that the things he had seen and hear should be made public by the present work, for the ebefit of those who could not see them with their own eyes, he himself being in the year of our Lord 1295 in prison at Genoa, caused the things which are contained in the present work to be written by master Rustigielo, a citizen of Pisa, who was with him in the same prison at Genoa; and he divided into three parts.

How we treat our great men!

Marco Polo's Travels is (like John Mandeville's Travels) a mix of observation and hearsay, of what seems to be fact and what seems to be fiction, but Marco certainly knew China, and knew it well. Most of his time abroad was spent there, and he not only became a personal friend of the Great Khan but he and Kublai developed what must have been a very unusual mutual esteem: this open admiration for the pagan emperor is actually what upset medieval readers, not the fantasy element in his narrative or the inexplicable omissions that incline certain modern critics to reject the whole thing. Omissions such as The Great Wall of China, for instance - a difficult thing to miss: how can he have travelled to Cambaluc in northern China, they protest, and be blissfully unaware of its existence? Yet critics must be very, very careful when criticising an author on matters of historical fact - any author, for they have done research that the critic has not and have sources the critic may know nothing about, but especially an author who was there: it turns out that the Great Wall was built after Marco's time.

For late-night light-reading then, especially if you are interested in the East, The Plague Lord cannot be bettered. And for the fourteenth-century world view, The Travels of Marco Polo is a must.

MBG