The Bird and the Blade

by Megan Bannen

  For you. I don’t know if I’ve said this in my real voice or in my dream voice.

  “You saved us,” says Timur. “Not her. She was nowhere to be found until the end. And she was pretending to be a boy. I don’t trust her. We should leave her to fend for herself like the lying dog she is.”

  If Khalaf answers, I don’t hear him. I taste sweet water in my mouth and I watch the bamboo in my family’s garden sway in the wind as I sing.

  Jasmine flower

  Your willowy stems clustered with sweet-smelling buds

  8

  WHEN I WAKE, IT’S NIGHT, BUT no one has erected the makeshift tent. I’m lying by the embers of a small fire that cast a glow against Timur’s sleeping bulk across from me. Beside him, Khalaf is sitting up, staring off to his right. Here, in the middle of nowhere, half starved and swathed in ragged wool, he still manages to look poised. I doubt his brothers could have carried this off. He has a serenity about him they never had, that most of us will never have. By now, the other princes would have grown as rough as Timur has, and it would have been impossible to discern them from common beggars. Khalaf doesn’t look like a beggar to me.

  I can’t even let myself think how he looks.

  His hair still hangs loose down his back. He’s got the topmost portion knotted behind his head to keep it out of his face. That’s when I realize that the soft cloth beneath me is his turban. His generosity, his kindness, the very goodness of him are almost as infuriating as his father’s gruff insults.

  When he turns his head and notices I’m awake, I feel that dagger-in-the-heart sensation again and try to push it away.

  “Hello,” he says, the first word he ever spoke to me back in Sarai.

  “Hello,” I reply. My voice is scratchy, my throat dry.

  “Can you sit up? There’s fruit to eat.”

  I push myself up, but even that small motion makes my head spin. My eyes widen as I discover a pile of quinces and late-season pomegranates heaped on the ground beside me. Khalaf turns his head away again, maybe so that I can gorge myself in relative privacy.

  “Go slowly,” he urges without looking at me. “It’ll take your stomach time to adjust to having decent food in it again.”

  “Thank you, my lord.” My mouth is already full of half-masticated quince.

  “Khalaf.”

  I’m too busy chewing to answer. Oh, my heaven, I have never eaten so well. I will treasure this fruit all the days of my life, however long that may be.

  “You lied to me,” he says, his face still turned away, his profile lit by the flickering light.

  I stop chewing. There’s no point in playing dumb. I swallow and say, “I didn’t lie to you exactly.”

  “Fine, then. You deceived me.”

  I consider this. “Yes,” I agree. “I deceived you.”

  He turns back to me, his expression inscrutable. “Why?”

  “Would you have taken me with you if you had known I was a girl?”

  “Of course not. This is no place for a girl.”

  “This is no place for anyone.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he insists.

  “Where else would I go?”

  He has no idea how deep this question runs for me. He hugs his arms across his chest and brings his right hand to his mouth, flicking at his bottom lip with his thumb. “I should have known,” he chastises himself. “Now that I’m looking at you, you’re very clearly . . .” He clears his throat and brings his hand back down, folding his arms tighter in front of himself. “Female,” he finishes.

  “Forgive me, my lord.”

  “You were that girl with the apples. It didn’t occur to me until now, but that was you.”

  “Yes.” I dip my head, partly because I’m ashamed of myself and partly because I’m pleased that he does remember me after all.

  “Do you need to make an offering to your ancestors?” he asks, his cool tone replaced by a gentleness that inspires pointless, stupid tears to pool on the rims of my eyes.

  In my feverish state, I had returned home and played hide-and-seek with my brother. Waking up in the present, thousands of lĭ from Lin’an, feels like losing Weiji all over again. I blot my eyes dry with my sleeve and answer, “I will soon. Thank you, my lord.”

  He nods. After a brief silence, he says, “When we lost the war with the Il-Khanate, all the other servants fled, but not you. Why?”

  His eyes probe my face. The expression isn’t suspicious exactly, but it’s clear he believes there’s more to my story than simple loyalty. And really, why am I here? I keep asking myself the same thing, but I haven’t found a decent answer to tell myself yet, much less him.

  “You gave me apples,” I reply. It’s true enough.

  “You’ve risked life and limb and shared in our anguish because of apples?”

  “Cruelty is easy to repay, my lord. Kindness is another matter.”

  He looks off into the trees, mulling this over. I suspect he doesn’t buy it, not entirely. “I wish you would stop ‘my lord’-ing me” is all he says.

  I taste the sounds of his name in my mouth, feel them floating on the surface of my teeth. Khalaf. It begins with an explosion and ends in a whisper.

  “You are a prince, my lord, not a slave,” I tell him.

  He gives me a humorless laugh. “Tell that to heaven.”

  I can’t help but raise my eyebrows at this uncharacteristic hint of bitterness, a gesture that doesn’t go unnoticed. He sighs and says, “Forgive me. God has shown me the steep pass, and I must climb it, much as I may not want to.”

  “The ‘steep pass,’ my lord?”

  He tilts his face toward the heavens and recites a passage, I assume, from the holy book of his faith.

  “And what will apprise thee of the steep pass?

  [It is] the freeing of a slave,

  or giving food at a time of famine

  to an orphan near of kin,

  or an indigent clinging to the dust,

  while being one of those who believe and exhort one another to

  patience, and exhort one another to compassion.

  Those are the companions of the right.”

  “There,” he says to me, “if I am not a slave as you say, perhaps it is because I have been set free by the compassionate as all slaves should be. That is the will of God.”

  He eyes me on the word “compassionate,” as if I am the one who could free him from his misfortune. What can I say to that? It’s easy to speak philosophically of slavery when you’re only wearing the yoke metaphorically. I take a moment to finger the duck’s head pendant to make sure it’s still there before changing the subject. “My lord, where are we?”

  “I don’t know. It’s an oasis of some kind. I found a trail that leads out to the plain, and this was at the end of it.” He nods in the direction behind me and says, “There’s a fountain.”

  I turn around and find, to my amazement, a three-tiered fountain brimming water over its edges, tinkling and dripping. I can’t believe I didn’t notice the sound until now.

  “And there’s an orchard all around us,” he tells me.

  I can see now that we’re camped in a grove of trees, the fruit uplit in the firelight. I suspect that it will look positively miraculous in the morning light.

  As I begin to break open a pomegranate, I’m tempted to ask how I got here. I also don’t want to ask how I got here. Or how they figured out I was a girl. The answer to both these questions is likely more humiliating than I can bear at this moment. Instead, I say, “How is your shoulder, my lord?”

  “Better. May I ask you something?”

  I nod. Does he really think I can tell a prince no?

  “You have welts all over your back,” he says.

  Oh, my heaven, he has seen way too much of me. A combination of worry and humiliation makes me want to hide under the nearest rock, although it’s clear he has no idea how cleanly he has hit the mark. I remember in vivid detail the sensation of my hip bumping again
st him, the way the tea sprayed all over his arm, the exact moment my life turned so hard I lost hold of it altogether. And I’ll never get it back.

  “That wasn’t a question,” I answer stiffly.

  “They’re not old scars. That happened recently.”

  “Yes,” I say, wishing he would just leave it alone.

  “Who did that to you?”

  I regard him, his smooth cheeks lit by firelight, his eyes as innocent as those of a newborn fawn. The smartest person I have ever met is, in many ways, the most ignorant, too. It makes me wistful for the naive girl I used to be.

  “The head servant beat me, my lord,” I tell him.

  “Why?”

  My disbelief in his callowness deepens. This boy is as green as grass. “I bumped into you. I made you spill your tea.”

  He gapes at me like I slapped him in the face. “And you were beaten for that?”

  “Of course, my lord.”

  His long stare—the pained eyes—make me look away.

  “I’m sorry, Jinghua,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

  I shrug it off, because I can’t begin to accept an apology from a boy who owes me nothing. I continue to eat, my eyes cast downward. Neither of us speaks until Khalaf finally breaks the silence.

  “What were you singing?” he asks.

  “My lord?”

  “You’ve been singing the same song over and over for the past two days. You don’t remember?”

  So Khalaf or Timur carried me here. One or both of them saw all or part of me naked, and I’ve been singing in my delirium. My stomach turns as it digests a cocktail of fruit and mortification. I slow the pace of my eating as instructed, and I shake my head.

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t remember, would you?” He licks his lips and begins to hum a tune. Music is, perhaps, not his gift, and it takes me a moment to recognize the melody. He stops humming and asks, “Do you know it?”

  “Yes.” I pop a pomegranate seed into my mouth and focus my attention on the fruit staining my hands red.

  “What is it?”

  “‘Mòlìhuā,’” I answer shortly, wishing he’d leave it alone. It’s a song that reminds me of home, and thinking of it makes me all the more homesick. I pluck another seed from the pith and poke it into my mouth.

  “‘Mòlìhuā’?’” he repeats.

  I nod.

  “Is that Hanyu?”

  I nod again.

  “Will you sing it?”

  I choke on the seed, coughing so hard that I launch it from the back of my throat across the fire. It hits the ground, bounces once, and skitters across the dirt, stopping at Khalaf’s foot. Smooth, Jinghua. Real smooth.

  “You want me to sing?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Now?”

  He picks up a long, sturdy stick by the fire and pokes at the embers, sending up little tendrils of flame. “If it pleases you,” he says.

  “Won’t I wake your father?”

  Timur picks this exact moment to let an earth-shattering snore vibrate through his mighty nostrils and out the cavern of his open mouth.

  Khalaf laughs, a genuine laugh. It’s a wonderful sound accompanied by white teeth and squished eyelids and a dimple that is deeper than I realized. “I don’t think he’ll notice,” he says, still smiling.

  When he smiles his whole face lights up. I may as well go back to being a baby cradled in his arms, I’m that helpless.

  So I sing for him.

  At first, my voice wavers horribly like an old lady warbling to her cats. I stop, take a deep breath, close my eyes, and begin again.

  Mòlìhuā . . .

  As I sing, I return to my feverish dream, laughing, hiding from my brother in the garden back home when we were very young. He chased me from bush to bush, but he could never catch up to me.

  Jasmine flower.

  It’s as if Weiji is captured inside the song, and if I just sing it long enough, I’ll be able to keep him here with me. But when the song ends, I open my eyes and find myself irrationally crushed to be sitting in the middle of nowhere, thousands of lĭ away from a home that I will never see again and a family that no longer exists.

  “What does it mean?” Khalaf asks me in the silence that follows.

  The desire to be alone, to nestle my memories back into place, fills me. But since there is nowhere to go, I translate for him, haltingly, having to think over the words in my head as I go.

  Jasmine flower

  Your willowy stems clustered with sweet-smelling buds

  Fragrant and white, everyone praises your beauty

  Let me pluck you down

  And give you to the one I love

  He says nothing at first. He just cocks his head to the side and rubs his lip again. I am coming to recognize this gesture as Khalaf’s Thinking Face.

  “So that’s the song, then,” I babble like a lunatic, squirming under the intensity of his gaze. There’s a thick chunk of quince pulp stuck between my back teeth, and I’m itching to pull it out, but obviously I can’t at the moment without looking like an even bigger idiot.

  “That’s lovely.”

  “Is it?” I ask faintly.

  “Not just the poetry of it. I mean, your voice. It’s very beautiful.”

  No one has ever used the word “beautiful” in association with me, and now I have to add this to the list of reasons why my life is inextricably intertwined with Khalaf’s. I stare across the fire at him with an incongruous mixture of gratitude and resentment as he holds my gaze a few moments longer than is comfortable. This would all be easier to bear if he weren’t quite so lovely himself.

  He turns his concentration back to the fire and begins to poke at the orange coals with the stick as Timur’s big-barreled chuckle cuts through the air like an unwelcome guest at dinner.

  “You’re right, Khalaf,” he says. “She is a little bird.”

  9

  FOR FIVE DAYS WE HEAD SOUTH in a steady descent, each of us hauling as much fruit as we can carry. The path opens up onto a lush plain just south of the Caspian Sea, and whereas the mountains were cool, the air down here is warm and muggy.

  I haven’t seen a town in so long that I had almost forgotten that such things exist, as if the world had become a wilderness bent on killing us and nothing more. Now here we are sitting in the shade of a tangerine tree just outside a niceish town where actual people live normal, everyday lives while the late-afternoon sun scorches the earth. The air seems impossibly hot for spring, although my weeks shivering in the mountains may have changed my perspective on temperature. I suppose I should be thrilled to find myself back in something resembling civilization, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this. If poverty is a great equalizer, civilization tucks rank and propriety right back into place—as Timur quickly proves.

  “Just because Hulegu Il-Khan didn’t follow us through the mountains doesn’t mean he didn’t figure out where we went,” Timur says to Khalaf. “This could be dangerous.”

  “I know.” Khalaf is burnishing his bottom lip with his thumb. I kick myself internally for being jealous of that thumb. I wonder if my circumstances would be different if Khalaf had been an ugly egg instead of a wonderful human being.

  With nice lips.

  I mentally kick myself again.

  “We can’t go in there looking like paupers,” Timur adds.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers, Father.”

  “We aren’t beggars.”

  “Aren’t we?”

  Timur waves his son’s comment away with an impatient huff. “We need money.”

  Oh, I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.

  Khalaf is either too naive or too exhausted to understand what Timur is getting at, because he rubs his tired eyes with the heels of his hands and sighs. “What we need is shelter, followed closely by fresh water and food.”

  “Which one acquires with money.”

  “We don’t have any money,” Khalaf says, his exasperation making a rare appearance
.

  “Sure we do.” Timur looks to me, and I feel as though my entrails have suddenly liquefied.

  “What?” Khalaf asks, catching up. “Jinghua? You want to sell Jinghua?”

  My name, twice over, feels like a bludgeon.

  “No, I want to sell this fine garment I’m wearing,” says Timur as he clutches at what remains of his deel, which is crusted with filth and rent by brambles. “Yes, of course we’re going to sell her.”

  The eloquent Khalaf rendered speechless is as terrifying as the very prospect of being sold. Again. I’d be flattered that this is shocking to him, that my going away would make him unhappy or, at the very least, uncomfortable, if my own self-preservation hadn’t just sent me into a mad panic.

  Timur grins at his son’s discomfort until Khalaf finally asks, “How can you even contemplate such a thing?”

  “She’s a slave, isn’t she?”

  “No, she isn’t just a . . . You can’t sell her like a . . . like . . .”

  “Like what? A horse? A camel? Chattel? That’s what she is.”

  Chattel? I’m chattel?

  “But—” Khalaf begins.

  “There are far prettier slaves in the world, boy. You need to let this one go.”

  Khalaf’s ears turn red either from anger or embarrassment, possibly both. If I weren’t teetering on the edge of disaster, I’d find Timur’s insinuation humiliating, too. “It isn’t like that,” Khalaf insists.

  “Oh, isn’t it?”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  I’m hardly listening by this point. My mind has whirred into action, trying to figure out how I’ll escape and where I’ll go. The running part is easy enough—Timur is too slow and (probably) too blind to catch me, and I doubt Khalaf would hunt me down. Where I’ll go is another matter. And there are so many things left undone, so many loose threads tangling into impenetrable knots.

  “We owe her our lives,” Khalaf argues. “You can’t sell her.”

  “We can sell her and we will sell her,” says Timur.

  I want to kick myself as I stand here, watching two men argue my fate and powerless to do anything about it. I could have ended all this back in Sarai. I could have been halfway home by now.