The Bird and the Blade

by Megan Bannen

  Dedication

  For Jenny and Kathee

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Map of the Mongol Empire

  Prologue

  Part One: The First Riddle—The City of Khanbalik, Khanate of the Yuan Dynasty, Autumn 1281

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part Two: Hope—The City of Sarai, Kipchak Khanate, Autumn 1280

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three: The Second Riddle—The City of Khanbalik, Khanate of the Yuan Dynasty, Autumn 1281

  Chapter 15

  Part Four: Blood—Chagatai Khanate, Summer 1281

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part Five: The Third Riddle—The City of Khanbalik, Khanate of the Yuan Dynasty, Autumn 1281

  Chapter 25

  Part Six: Princess—The City of Lin’an, Song Empire, Autumn 1278

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Seven: The Last Riddle—The City of Khanbalik, Khanate of the Yuan Dynasty, Autumn 1281

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Megan Bannen

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Cast of Characters

  JINGHUA

  a slave girl

  WEIJI

  Jinghua’s brother, a ghost

  KHALAF

  prince of the Kipchak Khanate

  TIMUR

  Khalaf’s father, khan of the Kipchak Khanate

  ZHANG

  chancellor of the Mongol Empire

  THE GREAT KHAN

  khan of the Yuan Dynasty and ruler of the Mongol Empire

  TURANDOKHT

  the Great Khan’s daughter and heir to the empire

  HULEGU

  ruler of the Il-Khanate, brother of the Great Khan, enemy of Timur Khan

  ABBAS

  a Persian merchant

  MAZDAK

  a camel trader

  QAIDU

  descendant of Genghis Khan, enemy of the Great Khan

  The Mongol Empire

  Prologue

  The City of Sarai, Kipchak Khanate

  Autumn 1280

  THE FIRST TIME I DREAM OF my brother’s ghost is on the night I meet Khalaf.

  In the dream, I’m sitting at a lacquered desk in the women’s quarters practicing calligraphy when someone pulls aside the curtain. I look up from my work to find Weiji standing at the door. He still wears his battle armor, its hardened leather plates smeared with blood. His head is half severed from his body, a downward stroke that leaves a pulpy chasm running from his shoulder to his heart.

  I drop the paintbrush in shock. Ink drips and bleeds over the paper as Weiji steps across the threshold. The curtain swings shut behind him. He reaches for me with skeletal hands.

  I’m hungry, Jinghua, he rasps, his voice hardly a breath. Feed me.

  I wake in the slaves’ ger of Timur Khan’s tent city, where I lie on a thin mat, sweating fear and revulsion. My brother’s words haunt me in the darkness, like the phantom lights burned into one’s eyes after fireworks have burst.

  Feed me.

  I’m a slave. It’s not like I keep a stash of food under my mat. The only way I can honor Weiji now is to steal from the Mongols’ stores. If I get caught, I could be killed, and then who will feed my brother’s spirit? We’ll both haunt the earth forever.

  The pendant I wear under my shirt weighs uncomfortably against my breastbone as I tiptoe over the other slaves, through the door, and out into the open air. Overhead, the stars glint like ice crystals in the frigid night. I snake my hands up inside the long sleeves of my deel to keep them warm as I creep between the white felt gers that glow like evenly spaced moons across the steppe.

  Sarai is a strange mobile city—“city” being pretty loose with the language—that moves up and down the Volga River depending on the time of year, so the food stores are kept on large covered carts. I head for one full of peasant fare for the servants—barley, cabbage, fruit—and that’s just as well, as far as I’m concerned. The Mongols can keep their nasty cheese curds to themselves.

  There’s a snoring guard posted outside with a skin of the fermented mare’s milk they call qumiz at his feet. I’m certain my pounding heart will wake the man as I sneak by him, but he wheezes through sleep-slackened lips without pause.

  What little light there is disappears altogether as I climb over the huge wheels and into the cart like a monkey. I feel my way through the sacks from memory even though I arrived here only eight weeks ago.

  And what have I done in those two months? I’ve scrubbed plates with sand and cooked horseflesh and served food and fetched supplies from the carts. Basically, I’ve done nothing. It’s pathetic. I’m pathetic.

  Feed me, my brother’s nightmare voice echoes in my mind. My grief for him, dulled by two years of loss, sharpens to a point as I think of the pathetic ghost I saw in my dream.

  I reach for one of the baskets where the apples are stored. I’ve only tasted apples a couple of times since my arrival, but I think Weiji might like them.

  Suddenly, the cart trembles beneath my feet, and I hear someone climb up the back. Panicked, I squint my eyes and look for a place to hide, but the cart is crammed with bags and supplies, and there’s no time to conceal myself.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell Weiji, my failure as cold as the hint of winter in the air.

  A stranger enters the cart. He’s not the guard but a young man I’ve never seen before holding an oil lamp. He cocks his head to the side, taking me in, noticing my guilty hand on the apples. I stare back at him, mute. I’m as good as dead.

  “Hello,” he says. He takes a step closer, holding the lamp out to see me better, and now I can see him better, too, a typical Kipchak Mongol wearing a plain wool deel belted with red silk. His face and hands are scrubbed clean, but his clothes are dusty, as if he’s been on the road. His hair is braided in loops behind his ears, and on his head he wears a fur-lined leather cap with flaps hanging down the back of his neck. The whites of his eyes are remarkably white, as if he were lit up from the inside.

  “You’re a slave?” he asks, but it’s not really a question. I fall to my knees and bow before him, praying that he’ll have mercy on me. I’m not sure what happens to thieves in the Kipchak Khanate, but it can’t be good.

  The young man takes another step forward, and the upturned toes of his boots enter my field of vision. “What are you doing here?” he asks.

  “I was . . . I was . . .”

  He sets the lamp down on top of a covered bin and crouches to my level. “Stealing?” he finishes for me. I’m baffled by the fact that he’s not yelling, but if anything he’s soft-spoken.

  “Forgive me, sir,” I plead to his feet.

  “Are you so hungry that you would steal?” he asks gently, and I’d swear that
even the flicker of the lamp’s flame grows still in his presence.

  “It’s not for me,” I explain. My eyes are still downcast, but I sense him listening—really listening to what I have to say.

  “For whom, then?”

  I wipe my face with the prickly wool of my sleeve. “For my ancestors.”

  “And are they slaves here as well?”

  He doesn’t understand. I dare to look up at him and find a face that is not unkind. “They’re dead,” I tell him, feeling a fresh stab of grief.

  He studies me for a moment. “And they need to be fed, these ancestors?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What will happen if you don’t feed them?”

  Really, you don’t realize how loud most people are until you encounter someone who very distinctly isn’t.

  “They could lose their way,” I tell him. “Their souls might become confused or angry. They might haunt the living . . .” My voice trails off. Misery swells in my chest. It kills me that Weiji might be one of these ghosts. I’m fluent in Mongolian, but my words are hopelessly inadequate to explain something so large.

  “I see,” says the young man. He rises, steps around me, and starts to rifle through the apples in the basket. He takes one, holds it up for inspection in the dim light, and puts it back. He does this a second time, then a third. Finally, he finds one that is acceptable, and he repeats the process until he holds three perfect apples. He returns to crouch in front of me and holds up one of the apples before my eyes.

  “Did you know that if you have a spherical, reflective object, like this apple for example, and a light source, like that lamp, you can calculate the exact point on the surface from which the light will be reflected back to the observer?”

  “I . . . no?” is my bumbling response. I have no idea what to make of this boy.

  He sets the apples in the bowl created by the bowing of his deel between his knees, and he takes a dagger from his belt. I shrink away from the blade, assuming that he’s going to punish me at last. Instead, he lightly carves a figure in the wooden board beneath us, a circle with two lines jutting outward to meet at a point beyond the circumference and a cross within the circle that connects the points where the two lines touch the outer edge.

  I begin to understand it, to see how light can be measured and calculated. My flaccid mind stretches like a cat waking up from a nap in a square of sunlight.

  “Ibn al-Haytham’s theorem is all about optics, you see,” he explains, “creating an equation to the fourth degree. It’s sheer, beautiful mathematical genius.”

  He smiles at me. It’s not a huge smile, not bright or toothy, just a turning up at the corners of his mouth, a slight crinkling of his eyelids, the hint of a crescent-shaped indent in his left cheek. For the first time in over two years, I believe the world is not an entirely terrible place simply because this one decent person lives in it.

  He takes one of the apples and holds it out to me, his hand flattened like a platter. “For your ancestors,” he says. The sheer kindness of the gesture inspires an aching lump in my throat as I take the fruit from his hand.

  “Thank you.”

  He offers me another apple in the same way. “And for you. We must also feed the living.”

  The lump in my throat blossoms into tears. I can’t even manage a thank-you this time, so I just nod.

  “‘God does not judge you according to your appearance and your wealth, but He looks at your heart and looks into your deeds.’ So please don’t cry.” With that, he crunches into the third apple and rises to his feet. He slides the dagger back into its scabbard, retrieves the lamp, and tells me, “Come along, fellow thief. It’s easier to climb out by lamplight.”

  I wipe my nose. “Won’t we be caught, sir?”

  “You let me worry about that,” he assures me, but I stay where I am. His expression softens. “I would not leave you alone in the dark, little one.”

  He thinks I’m a child. As diminutive and flat-chested as I am, I can’t blame him. My legs feel tingly and weak when I stand, but I follow him out of the cart.

  “Hello, Buri,” the boy calls as he hops down and claps the dozing guard on the shoulder.

  My heart stops as I hit the ground behind him. What is he doing?

  The guard snorts awake, sees the young man, and jumps to his feet, knocking over his stool in the process. “Prince Khalaf, I didn’t know you had come home.”

  “Only just,” says the boy.

  Who is Prince Khalaf.

  Prince Khalaf.

  His name hits me like a loose ceiling tile clattering on my head. I lean against the back of the cart, hardly able to stand.

  “I’m afraid I have a confession to make, Buri,” says the prince. “I have stolen into the khan’s stores and absconded with three apples.”

  The guard stares at him quizzically. “Apples, my lord? Since when does the khan’s son eat the servants’ food?”

  Prince Khalaf shrugs. “I like them,” he says. “Not to worry, though. This loyal servant caught me in the act and made sure the damage was minimal.” He looks to me with those bright eyes. “Excellent work. You may return to your quarters now, I think.”

  “Yes, my lord.” I bow my head and scuttle off between the gers as quickly as I can, leaving the whole mortifying scene behind me.

  Khalaf, each footstep says as I hurry away, and layered beneath it is the memory of Chancellor Zhang mocking the sounds of the Mongol language: Pilaf. Kumar. One of those unpronounceable Turkic names.

  Once I’ve returned to the slaves’ ger, I kneel on my mat, take the thong from around my neck, and set the pendant down in front of me. It’s so pale that it glows faintly, its subtle shape blurred by darkness. We had an entire room dedicated to our ancestors back home. Now I have only this broken piece from an incense burner.

  And I have two apples as well, I remind myself. I offer them both to Weiji.

  Afterward, I lie down and watch the smoke from the brazier billow out of the hole above. But in my mind, all I can see is Prince Khalaf of the Kipchak Khanate smiling back at me.

  Part One

  The First Riddle

  The City of Khanbalik, Khanate of the Yuan Dynasty

  Autumn 1281

  1

  A GUARD WAVES TIMUR AND ME through the north gate of Khanbalik without question. Apparently, we don’t seem like the sort of people who threaten the safety of the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, which is hilarious when you think about it. Timur Khan of the Kipchak Khanate isn’t a threat to the Great Khan? Really?

  Granted, Timur is the overthrown khan of the Kipchak Khanate, and the Great Khan’s brother, Hulegu Il-Khan, is hunting him down like a dog. But still.

  My body sags with relief as we take our first steps inside the city. Again, the irony is not lost on me. Timur leans his great bulk too heavily on my bony shoulders as we walk. He needs to eat. So do I, for that matter. The constant need to eat also weighs too heavily on my bony shoulders.

  Maybe it’s the fault of my empty stomach, but I suddenly remember in stunning detail the sight of Khalaf crouched before me in the cart last autumn, holding out an apple, the instrument of my doom. That apple would taste fantastic right about now. But I have no apple or any other food for that matter, so I keep us moving.

  There’s so much to see as we trudge ahead: fine houses with red-winged rooftops, lush gardens, and a staggering number of silk-clad pedestrians. And since Timur and I have only one decent set of eyes between us—my own—it’s up to me to search the faces around us on the street.

  “Slow down, girl,” Timur says. The hungrier he gets, the more he tries to mask it with rough authoritarianism. The hungrier I get, the more I want to yank him by the beard. It’s not pretty, but there you have it.

  “We’re never going to find him here,” I say as I wipe a ticklish strand of hair out of my face. Even caked in sweat and dust, the baby-fine wisps defy gravity.

  “Don’t be a pessimist. We’ll find him.”


  “Says the man who can’t see.”

  A year ago, I would not have dreamed of speaking so insolently to the khan, but months of traveling in exile and deprivation by his side have bound us together in surprising ways. He may once have ruled over his own sprawling piece of the Mongol Empire, but, from my perspective, he’s just my grumpy old goat.

  He stops to glare at me and, while I know he can’t see me clearly, I wither. Even gaunt and impoverished, the man has eyebrows that can command armies. It’s his son I’m talking about here, and my . . . well, I’m not entirely sure what to call Khalaf in relation to me, but it’s big and important and much larger than my selfish irritability. I bow my head and say, “Sorry.” Timur folds his arms. I roll my eyes and add, “My lord.”

  He nods and lets me lead him again. As I’m calling him old goat in my mind for the thousandth time, he squeezes my shoulder and says, “It’ll be all right, little bird. Just keep looking.” My heart cramps as hard as my stomach.

  The streets of Khanbalik are wide enough for seven horsemen to pass abreast, but I still feel penned in like a rabbit in a trap. As the sun wheels toward the western walls of the city, a constant, low-grade worry eats at my insides.

  I’m pretty sure I’m going to die.

  I know, we all die, but my dying feels imminent. It’s breathing down my neck like an eager, wet puppy.

  A sedan chair floats by on the shoulders of six slaves, its silk curtains as opalescently pink as a sunset. It reminds me of home, the way the elite rode through Lin’an in sedan chairs just like this when there was still a Song Empire and I lived in it. I stare after it longingly until a young man brushes past me, waking me from my reverie. He’s humming a familiar tune under his breath: “Mòlìhuā.” Jasmine flower. I turn my head as he walks away, and my entire body freezes.

  It’s Weiji.

  My brother’s gait, his frame, even the rakish tilt of his black cap, the way his thick braid sways behind him—all of it as familiar to me as the song he’s singing. I’m about to run after him, to shout his name, when Timur tugs my sleeve.

  “What?” he asks, hopeful. “Is it him?”