The Bird and the Blade

by Megan Bannen

  “How do you say ‘Shut up’?” Timur interjects. He sits atop a camel like a king surveying his land, whatever he can see of it with his weak eyes. Frankly, I suspect that’s exactly what he’s doing, thinking, If I play my cards right, this could be mine, too. Men: nothing teaches them, not even a near-death experience.

  “‘Shăguā,’ my lord,” I answer.

  “Good,” says Timur. “Shăguā!”

  He thinks he’s telling us to be quiet, but “shăguā” means “silly melon.” Khalaf has learned enough Hanyu by this point that he giggles. He actually giggles. It’s adorable. He’s adorable. It’s becoming a bit of a problem for me, this adorableness, this adorability. A few weeks ago, I was furious with his willingness to go along with his father’s plan to sell me. One apology later, I’m a doe-eyed idiot. I need to be more careful of him. Of me.

  Ever since I patched him up in the Caucasus, I’ve been thinking of him as a friend, which in and of itself is ridiculous. But now he seems to consider me a friend, too, and I don’t know what to do with that sensation or even what to call it. The only word that comes to mind is “affection.”

  Sometimes, in the middle of a lesson, Khalaf squints at me, as if he can really see me. He may as well peel back the skin over my heart to examine what lies there. I suppose he never expected to find companionship in a scrawny slave girl with round cheeks and oversized lips. Who could blame him for that? I certainly never expected to find anything like Khalaf in the world.

  Affection. Or something like it.

  It’s utterly foreign to me and runs against everything I was taught to understand about what happens between men and women.

  Back home in Lin’an, before the Mongols came, I expected any day to find out that a prospective groom’s family had approached my family about me. My parents would have taken me to a place where the groom could see me, and he would decide if he wanted me.

  I lived in mortal fear that this faceless prospective groom would not want me.

  But if he did, the arrangements would be made, and there would be an elaborate ritual of giving and receiving gifts until, at last, we would be married. He would introduce me to his ancestors, and I would be part of a new family and owe obedience to new parents and produce sons who would honor me when I died. That was supposed to be my future, my life, all decided for me. That was the natural order of the universe.

  And affection between myself and my husband would grow like a sapling into a tree, slowly, over time.

  Affection is supposed to be a result of marriage, not a precursor to . . . what? What happens between a prince and a slave? I blush even to consider it. And I can’t imagine Khalaf, in all his decency and propriety, doing anything that is less than decorous. I can’t imagine myself doing anything less than decorous either, not along those lines at least. I may be a slave, but I was raised to be modest. I don’t see that changing any time soon.

  Then again, it wasn’t decorum that brought me to the Kipchak Khanate in the first place.

  It’s exhausting work, traveling across the world, and Khalaf bears the brunt of the heavy lifting, being the most able-bodied among us. His shoulders broaden by the second under the labor of packing and unpacking and chopping wood for the fire when there’s wood to be had. There is a word that describes those shoulders that is something akin to “adorable” but far more complicated.

  He is so very nice to look at.

  I, however, am not.

  I wonder what he would have thought if he had been the prospective groom eyeing me anonymously in some public house in Lin’an. Would he have nodded his approval?

  Or would he have run for the door?

  12

  WE’VE BEGUN THE WEEKLONG JOURNEY ACROSS the Karakum, a desert that stretches out so flatly in all directions that I have to hike a long way if I want to relieve myself in relative privacy. As I make my way back to camp, Timur’s voice drifts clearly to me where I stand downwind from him and his son.

  “I hate to interrupt your language lessons with a slave girl,” he tells Khalaf, “but do you think you might spare me a moment to discuss what we’re going to do once we cross into the Chagatai Khanate?”

  I squint into the distance. I can see them seated across from each other next to the fire, but I don’t think they can see me where I stand in the darkness.

  “You are my lord and father. You know perfectly well you have my attention whenever you want it.” I can hear Khalaf’s strained tolerance in every syllable he utters.

  “Good. Because I’d like you to stop paying attention to a language you don’t need to know and a girl you don’t need to be associating with. I’d like you to turn your attention back to your khanate and your duty.”

  “Forgive me, my lord,” Khalaf replies. I’ve noticed that he calls his father “my lord” when he’s irritated with him, which brings a smug grin to my face. “I assumed the matter was settled. I assumed that we would seek asylum with Qaidu in the Chagatai Khanate.”

  “You assumed incorrectly.”

  This is news to me. I assumed the same thing since it was Abbas’s suggestion, and he’s the one who sent us on our way.

  “We’re heading for Khanbalik?” Khalaf asks, and I detect intrigue and excitement in his voice, confirming my suspicions. He wants to face those riddles. Surely Timur can hear it as well.

  “Rotting carrion, are you mad? No. We’re going home.”

  So: Khalaf wants to get himself killed in Khanbalik, and Timur wants to get himself killed by returning to the Kipchak Khanate. They’re both out of their minds, and I’m stuck with the pair of them in the middle of a desert. At least I can sympathize with Timur’s desire to go home. Khalaf? I don’t know what to think about him.

  “You want to head north?” he asks his father in a tone that conveys serious misgivings.

  “Once we cross the Oxus,” Timur confirms.

  “From where?”

  “Samarkand. We’ll raise an army among the eastern tribes and march west to Sarai.”

  And I thought my plan to get back to Lin’an was preposterously optimistic. Timur’s delusions of grandeur put me to shame. They’re also stomping all over my own hopes for the future. This is not good.

  “Father, we can’t do that,” says Khalaf. “You know we can’t.”

  “Explain.”

  “We’ve been on the run from Hulegu Il-Khan for three months. We know he was looking for us near Rasht, but he hasn’t caught up to us, has he? So where is he?”

  “Sitting arrogantly in my rightful place while our country goes to hell,” answers Timur.

  “No, he’s figured out which way you went, and he knows you well enough to guess that you’ll try to take the Kipchak Khanate back from the east. He didn’t follow us through the desert because he’s assembling troops on the Kipchak-Chagatai border. And where is the best road between those two points?”

  “You don’t seem to understand.” Even from where I’m standing in the distance, I can see Timur dismiss Khalaf’s rational argument with a wave of his huge hand. “This is the plan.”

  “The best road is the one that heads north from Samarkand,” Khalaf says, standing his ground, answering his own question.

  “Are you with me or are you against me?”

  Khalaf’s head goes back, and I know he’s offering up one of his long-suffering prayers to his god. “I’m trying to give you counsel.”

  “I asked you a question.”

  For a moment neither of them speaks, their profiles still.

  “What if we were to go to Khanbalik?” Khalaf suggests.

  I knew it. I knew it. Each one of us is fostering an impossible hope, and each hope opposes the other two. We are a trio of lunatics.

  Timur snorts. “And do what?”

  “Appeal to the Great Khan. He can’t support Hulegu’s move against us, even if the il-khan is his brother. He may be willing to support us with troops.”

  “He’s dying, and it sounds like his daughter is running the sho
w. As far as I can tell, the empire is in chaos right now.”

  “Then go to Qaidu and ask for help,” Khalaf says, his patience wearing thin in his voice. “He owes you.”

  “No. We head north. We muster troops around the Aral Sea. Then we march on Sarai from the east and take back what’s ours. Is that clear?”

  “So you’re avoiding the Great Khan and Qaidu. Why?”

  Timur lets out a great sigh and rubs his eyes in a gesture that is surprisingly similar to Khalaf’s own eye rubbing. “You are just like your mother sometimes.”

  Khalaf sits up straight and pulls a curtain of cold distance between himself and his father, so frigid I can feel it even from my vantage point. It’s never occurred to me that Khalaf had a mother, just like me, and that his mother appears to be out of the picture, just like my own. It’s never occurred to me that he might long for his mother as much as I long for mine.

  “What does my mother have to do with anything?” Khalaf asks. I’ve never heard him speak quite so coolly.

  Timur snorts. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “Your mother has nothing to do with anything,” Timur snaps. “She’s gone. I’m here. I’m your father. We head north. We take back Sarai. We rule the Kipchak Khanate. Is that clear?”

  There’s another pause, another moment of still silhouettes in the night before Khalaf bows his obedient head and says, “Yes, my lord.”

  My thoughts are a whirlwind of confusion and worry and contrary opinions, and since this seems like an incredibly bad moment to return to camp anyway, I step farther into the darkness with our campfire burning like a beacon in the distance behind me. I need to straighten out my own thinking.

  I kneel on the sandy ground, take the thong from around my neck, and set the duck’s head down before me. I saved a spoonful of lentils from dinner in a small bundle of cloth, which I now pull from my pocket and offer to my brother, who haunts my dreams with increasing regularity. I hope Weiji likes lentils, because I have nothing else with which to honor him in the desert. For my own part, I am sick to death of them.

  Sand oozes up my robe and shimmies into my boots as my knees sink into the earth, but I’m used to that now. Everything is full of sand these days. For the past two nights, I’ve slept on the desert floor under the open, starry sky, so cold I’ve had to cuddle up to the least offensive camel. Every morning, I wake to find myself achy and covered in a thin layer of sand. I thought the Kipchak Khanate was brown and dull, but so far, the lands of the Il-Khanate are even drier and dustier. Rasht wasn’t bad, I suppose, but nothing compares to the green hills of Lin’an, a world bursting with life and color, a world I didn’t adequately appreciate until it was gone forever.

  I remember every detail of my home, from the wooden ancestral tablets and the thick odor of incense in the family shrine to the silk landscape paintings in the women’s quarters, the scent of each flower in season wafting inside through the windows overlooking the garden, all of it so visceral that I feel as though I could grasp it with my hands.

  I just want to go home.

  I am going home, or I’m going to die trying.

  But even as I think the words, it already feels like a lie. I can tell myself I have options, but really it all boils down to one choice:

  It’s either Khalaf’s life or mine.

  And that’s a choice I don’t know how to make.

  Mazdak is off tending to the camels when I return to camp, and the tension between Khalaf and Timur lingers in the air. I sit across the fire from them to take apart my plait, which has become a tangled mess.

  If I were a lady of quality in this part of the world, I’d get to wear a veil, which might help protect my head from the regular onslaught of desert winds. As a slave, I have no such luck, and my already pathetic hair must suffer for it. I brush through the tangled strands with my fingers. It’s a time-sucking ordeal. My hair is not cooperative.

  At some point, I notice that Khalaf is looking at me from across the fire with the strangest look on his face. His eyes are glassy, and his mouth is hanging open a little. I pause, my fingers embedded in my hair, and ask, “Are you unwell, my lord?”

  The question seems to take him off guard, as if he’d forgotten that I have a voice. “Yes. I mean, no. Um, no, I’m quite well. Thank you.”

  Both Timur and I stare at him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Khalaf stammer. The prince glances at his father, who gazes back at him with flinty eyes.

  “I’ll just go see what Mazdak is up to,” Khalaf says, rising to his feet and dusting himself off before he makes his way toward the trader and the camel herd.

  Which leaves me alone with the old goat.

  Timur claps his huge hands together and rubs them briskly. “This seems like the perfect opportunity to get to know each other. Let’s have a nice little chat, shall we?”

  That sounds like about as much fun as a public impalement.

  “You wish that I ‘get to know you,’ my lord?” I ask.

  “It’s more that I’d like to get to know you . . . ah, what was the name again?”

  “How would you like to call me, my lord?”

  “Ha! Very good!” he says with a not entirely pleasant smile on his face. He studies me and repeats, “Very good.”

  Timur forcefully reminds me of Chancellor Zhang, who came to Lin’an two years ago, who knew me in the time before I was a slave. He once assessed me in a similar way: Good. Yes, that’s quite good.

  It’s not a comforting thought.

  “Thank you, my lord,” I tell the old goat.

  Timur nods, takes a gargantuan bite of lentils, and speaks with his mouth full of food in a manner full of false congeniality. “It’s easy for a man to forget who he is when lesser men are not there to remind him.”

  “Then it’s a good thing that I am here, my lord, to remind him of who he is.”

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it? Although, flat as you are, you are not a man. And, forgive me, little slave, why exactly is it that you are here?”

  It was hard enough to answer that question when Khalaf asked me the same thing. The best response I can cough up for Timur is “Maybe it’s the will of the gods.”

  “You and I both know that is a steaming pile of shit, so let me ask again. Why are you here?”

  It is so hard not to hit this man.

  “The prince has always shown me great kindness.”

  “The prince shows everyone great kindness. It is one of his worst traits. And you’ve just handed me another steaming pile of shit. That’s two piles of shit now, and my hands are full. So one more time, slave, why are you here?”

  I bow my head, trying to hide my fear and fury from him. In all my dealings with Khalaf, I forgot what a threat Timur is to me. What did he say, back in the mountains? We should leave her to fend for herself like the lying dog she is. And he wanted to sell me in Rasht, and still wants to sell me somewhere along the way.

  “Look at me,” Timur demands. My fear aside, it makes me seethe, the way he speaks to me when he’s no better than I am. Angry tears threaten the rims of my eyes. I swallow my resentment.

  “Look up, girl!”

  I look at him, doing my level best to keep my face cold. The old khan glares at me for a long, long moment before he barks with laughter. It isn’t a nice laugh. “Oh, so it’s love, is it? And here I thought you were a spy. That’s disappointing.”

  I feel as if I’ve been punched.

  “It isn’t . . . I’m not . . .”

  “Oh? You’re not what?”

  In love with Khalaf? A spy? What are we talking about anymore? My cheeks burn, but I take a breath to compose myself. “I’m repaying a kindness, my lord. That’s all.”

  “And how will you repay that kindness? With your life?”

  “If I must.” And I think that just might be true. How strange to admit it out loud, especially to the old goat.

  “But your life is worth very little,” he points out.

&nb
sp; “It’s worth a great deal to me, my lord.”

  “Good. That should help us all stay alive a bit longer.” His faux congeniality dissolves, replaced by a cutting look. “Just so you remember who you are and who he is.”

  “I’m not likely to forget that, my lord,” I inform him, letting myself enjoy a private moment of self-superiority over Timur, who knows exactly nothing about me.

  “Because there are entire nations relying on him now, whereas there is no one relying on you.”

  “Except the prince and yourself, my lord, and possibly Mazdak. Or were you planning to cook your own lentils and wash your own pot?”

  Liquidate that, you stupid egg.

  Timur laughs again, and this time, he sounds genuinely amused.

  “You know, you’re not much to look at, girl, but I’m starting to think the boy’s not so foolish as I thought. I’m suddenly rather taken with you myself.”

  “That’s because you are a lecherous old man, my lord,” I mutter, since the gloves appear to be off.

  “That I am, girl,” he agrees, setting down his bowl and stretching his arms behind his head. He waggles those incredible eyebrows at me. “That I am.”

  13

  FIVE TIMES EACH DAY, KHALAF AND Mazdak kneel side by side to pray, Khalaf on his sash and the camel trader on his unfurled turban. When water is at hand, they wash their faces, their hands, their arms, and even their feet before beginning. When we’re traveling across long tracts of desert and need to preserve water for drinking, they scrub themselves with sand.

  Sometimes, Timur joins them. I had always assumed he just pretended to be a Muslim from time to time to placate the people over whom he ruled, but he seems to know what he’s doing. They’re very ecumenical about religion, the Mongols. They treat it like a buffet, taking a little of this and a little of that as it pleases them, even Khalaf to a certain extent.