by Megan Bannen
“That’s three times Jinghua has demonstrated her loyalty to us and twice she’s saved your life,” says Khalaf. “She stays with us.”
Timur glares at me. A few months ago, that look alone might have killed me. Now, considering all the things that might kill me, Timur’s glare is pretty relative. I glare right back at him.
“Fine,” he grunts.
“Thank you, my lord,” Khalaf says, sounding less than gracious as he steps out into the hall.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Timur calls after him.
Khalaf is already out of sight. We hear his voice say, “Courtyard,” as the door swings shut, and Timur and I are left sitting alone together in a thick silence.
“Shut up,” he says to me.
The sheer injustice of Timur’s scolding makes my voice shoot up the musical scale, so high I’m surprised dogs don’t start scratching at the door. “I didn’t say anything!”
“Shut up anyway.”
“Ugh!”
I rise to follow Khalaf out into the courtyard.
“Tell him to come in,” Timur orders me. “He shouldn’t be seen.”
I’m on the verge of making a smart-mouthed retort, but the fact that he’s displaying concern for his son’s well-being softens me. “Agreed, my lord,” I answer grudgingly, and the old goat actually gives me an appreciative nod.
By now, the sun has set, and it takes me a moment to find Khalaf. He leans against one of the walls and watches the clear night sky. I walk over to him and lean on the wall beside him.
“You know, al-Biruni postulated that the earth is not a fixed point but moves through the heavens,” he says, still staring upward. “More recently, in The Limit of Accomplishment concerning Knowledge of the Heavens, Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi refined Ptolemy’s principles on planetary motion and even suggested a heliocentric model. It’s fascinating. You should read it sometime. Because you can. You can read.”
This day will not stop being terrible. I sigh and answer, “I never said I couldn’t.”
“You never said you could.” He finally looks at me, and I can see that he’s just as angry with me as he was with Timur earlier today. “Who are you, really? Can you just tell me the truth for once?”
And now I’m mad because he’s mad, and he has no right to be mad at me, not for this, anyway. “You’re not asking me who I am. You’re asking who I was.”
“They’re one and the same.”
“No, they’re not.”
“You’re no slave, Jinghua,” he insists.
“‘Tell that to heaven,’” I quote him, and, just to piss him off, I add, “my lord.”
We stand there, side by side, each of us leaning against our own patch of wall. As my fuming starts to dissipate, I ask, “Why are you so mad?”
Khalaf pushes himself off the wall and steps in front of me, and it is clear that his own fury has not dissipated in the slightest. “Are you joking?” He glances to each side to make sure no one’s listening. “Today? In the bazaar? Il-Khanid soldiers hunting us down? You deliberately put yourself in harm’s way.”
My anger surges right back up. “I got the soldiers’ attention off you so you could get away. I was protecting you . . . and your father. You’re welcome.”
“I don’t need your protection.”
“Don’t you?”
He’s back in pointing mode, his finger jabbing the air as he speaks. “You could have gotten yourself killed today. Don’t you see? You don’t get to make decisions like that.”
I pull myself up straight and tall, as regal as I can manage. It’s a side of myself I’ve never let him see before. He blinks and even looks cowed.
“You told me my freedom—my life—was never yours to give or take,” I remind him. “So yes, I do. I do get to make decisions like that. And your father commands you to return to the room, by the way.”
I leave him stammering in the caravanserai courtyard behind me.
“My lord,” I tack on without looking back.
18
FOR THE NEXT FIVE DAYS HEADING east out of Samarkand, Khalaf hardly speaks to me aside from things like “Pass the stew.” For five days, I suffer Smoldering Khalaf and His Furious Lip Rubbing (although, to be honest, even that is pretty). I’m not sure if it’s because he’s still angry with me or if he’s too busy looking behind us every ten seconds to do much else. Probably both. In either case, once again, Hulegu Il-Khan doesn’t materialize, nor do Turandokht’s soldiers.
It gets steadily colder as we rise in elevation, an apt reflection of the Jinghua-Khalaf relationship. What does he expect me to do, I wonder? Apologize for saving his life? Nope. Not going to happen. I absolutely out-anger him on this.
By the sixth day into this leg of the journey, the Pamirs form a wall of mountains in front of us as far as the eye can see.
“How the hell are we going to get around that?” Timur asks Mazdak with more than a hint of accusation in his voice.
Mazdak laughs. “We’re not going around it, my friend. We’re going through it.” He stands beside Timur, closes one eye, and aims his hand at a dip between two behemoth white peaks. “Right there.”
Khalaf and Timur stare at that dip thousands of feet above us.
“Oh,” says Khalaf.
Timur better captures the sentiment when he utters, “Cancerous, rotted, weeping lamb’s balls.”
Mazdak laughs again and slaps Timur heartily on the back. “Welcome to the Roof of the World,” he says.
Timur said the il-khan’s men wouldn’t follow us into the Pamirs, and I can see why. There are not enough coats and blankets in the universe to make this place bearable. Cairns of sheep skulls reach out of the snow to mark our way, their huge curled horns acting as skeletal signposts. Local men, bundled head to toe, trudge behind their herds of yaks, whose shaggy coats are frosted with snow. The jagged white peaks surrounding us look like teeth ready and waiting to eat us alive.
“Why do I do this to myself?” Mazdak grumbles under his breath. “This is the last time I’m making this crossing.”
When Mazdak complains, I know we’re in trouble.
Three days into the pass, we sleep in a fort, high above the river valley below us. The view would be stunning if I didn’t already hate the Pamirs from the depths of my soul. Even so, it’s a huge improvement over our sleeping conditions of the previous two nights, although that’s not saying much. Tiny stone hovels don’t do much to keep out the cold.
Swathed in my inadequate blanket, I fall into sleep the way one steps off a cliff, slamming hard and fast into a dream of my brother. Tonight, he is not the ghostly creature he has become but the brother I remember at around age ten, his plait flying out behind him as he spins to kick a shuttlecock and keep it airborne.
It’s summer. The air is thick and wet, sticking to my skin. Every breath itches with pollen.
I want to play, too, I tell Weiji, but he laughs and kicks the shuttlecock away from me. When I lunge for it, he takes it up in his hand and holds it high, out of my reach.
Let me have it! I yell at him, furious.
Come and get it! he taunts, running away down the garden path, still giggling.
No matter how fast I run, he’s always faster, and I can’t catch him.
The following day, we’ve reached the highest point of the pass, the Roof of the World, where it’s so high and so prohibitively cold that we can barely get a fire started, and the fire we do start doesn’t give off enough heat to boil a pot of water. I’ve heard of this place before, but I always assumed it was more metaphor or hyperbole than actual fact. I stand corrected, which makes me even grumpier.
I huddle in my blanket on the women’s side of the way station in which we’re spending the night, a tiny square of stone slabs pasted together with clay. I face the tepid fire and pray for sleep that does not come.
“Jinghua?” Khalaf calls to me from the men’s side. It’s the first time he’s said my name since we left Samarkand.
�
�Yes, my lord?” I’m so cold that the word “lord” earns four extra syllables through my shivering.
“Are you all right?”
A peace offering. That’s warm, at least.
“Yes, my lord,” I answer. My chattering teeth barely allow me to answer. Even my voice is frozen. Even my breath is frozen.
“That has to be a bald-faced lie, because I am beyond freezing, and if I’m beyond freezing, you must be half dead over there by yourself.”
The next thing I know, he has come over to my side of the fire, wrapped in his blanket.
“What are you doing?” I ask him, alarmed. I glance across the cabin to where Timur and Mazdak are sleeping.
“Making sure neither of us dies tonight.”
“Shut up,” Timur grumbles.
“But . . . but my lord . . . ,” I protest.
“I’m freezing. You’re freezing.” Khalaf settles down right next to me, bumping against me with his backside.
“My lord!”
He stops. He sits. He looks down at me. “Jinghua, there are rules, but there is also a benevolent God. And I’d like to think that God in His infinite benevolence would prefer that we use our common sense and live rather than follow the rules and freeze to death in the night.”
“But what about Mazdak? Won’t he be offended?”
“Mazdak can go hang if he doesn’t like it,” Khalaf answers, spreading his blanket over both of us.
“I heard that, and all I can say is that God is watching, young master,” says Mazdak, but he sounds more amused than offended.
“‘As for anything wherein you differ, judgment thereof lies with God,’” Khalaf quotes back to him as he lies down beside me and snuggles his back against mine so that he’s facing the outer stone wall and I’m sandwiched between him and the fire. I wonder if he can feel my heart clanging against him. I am suddenly wide-awake, my body humming with the awareness of his body’s proximity to mine.
“Ah!” he sighs with pleasure. “You are so much warmer than you look.”
“Thank you?”
“That didn’t come out right,” he admits.
Khalaf’s warmth seeps into my spine and finally makes me drowsy. My full-body shaking transmutes into shivering and, eventually, stops altogether. His heat radiates against me under the combined power of both our blankets, but given the circumstances, it’s hard to relax. For a time, there is only the wind outside and the weak crackle of the fire and the expansion and contraction of Khalaf’s lungs.
“Jinghua?” he murmurs into the night.
“Yes, my lord?”
“Cancerous lamb’s balls. Go. To. Sleep,” groans Timur.
“If I am going to die on this mountain, I think I’d like to hear you sing one more time.”
I’m waiting for a snarky remark from Timur, but he goes curiously silent.
“You want me to sing, my lord?” I ask, what little resentment I had left fizzling out in the freezing night.
“If it pleases you.”
His voice wraps me up, the way his arms held me when I sobbed all over him beside the Oxus. I remember how his voice carried me across the river a few weeks ago.
Yes, it pleases me. He pleases me.
So I sing “The Beauty of White Chrysanthemums” for him. My voice rises and falls in the darkness. Khalaf’s breath in and out is like the sea, and my voice is the boat that bobs in it.
Heaven ordains you will wither
And your faint fragrance disappear.
No matter how much I love you
You will fade but be remembered in this poem.
Timur’s snoring and Mazdak’s thick breath from across the fire greet me at the other end of the song. I assume Khalaf has fallen asleep, too, until he speaks, only it’s neither Mongolian nor Hanyu coming from his lips but a string of unfamiliar syllables that I take to be Persian.
“What was that?” I whisper in the quiet that follows.
“It’s a quatrain from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.”
“What does it mean?”
He doesn’t answer.
“My lord?” I ask, wondering again if he’s fallen asleep, but his voice comes to me in the night as he translates the words:
“A book of verses underneath the bough
A flask of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
And . . .”
“And?” I press.
“Forgive me,” he says, his voice low and warm like the embers in front of me. “I don’t remember the rest.”
“You remember everything.”
He doesn’t answer me, though, and I can’t help but think that he’s lying, that he does remember the rest and doesn’t want to tell me. Now I desperately, desperately want to know how it ends.
“Jinghua?” he whispers one last time.
“Yes?” I ask, half amused, half exasperated.
“Thank you for putting up with me.”
“You’re welcome, my lord,” I tell him in a stunning display of understatement. And not long afterward, I fall asleep.
There is a small pond surrounded by bamboo. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. The bamboo sways overhead as I shove myself through the growth, the leaves punctuating a colorless sky in sharp points, the stalks reaching out to eternity. I catch glimpses of the water now, but I can’t seem to get there.
The world is soundless. Nothing sings. No crickets saw their music. No fish ripple the water’s surface. Everything has gone silent as my brother, Weiji, wounded and bleeding, tramps through the bamboo at the water’s edge. He holds a falcon on his arm. Gaunt and lost, he looks for me between the reeds, but he does not see me. He cries out, “Look at her, Jinghua. She’s beautiful. I mean, she’s really, really beautiful.”
Part of me wants to rush to him, but my more cowardly instinct is to hide. And so I become a crane. My gawky legs make the water shush as I move freely now through the bamboo and cattails. My intent was to make myself disappear, but it is Weiji who is gone while I am still here.
Now there is a tiger on the other side of the pond. The slick surface of his pelt shimmers moonlight as he moves with sinuous grace through the reeds on the opposite bank. I disappear farther into the bamboo on my side, quietly, carefully. The tiger breaks the surface of the pool with one enormous paw followed by another until the animal is submerged. The water ripples around him, his back shining wet, and he swims toward me until he is nothing but a great head bobbing on the surface.
The light is much brighter now, as if dusk has become morning. There is an explosion of music. Beetles and frogs and sparrows. Seed pods float by on white tails. The tiger swims toward me, his limbs propelling him forward without a splash. When he can touch the bottom, he begins to rise up out of the pool, and I can see he is no tiger at all, but a man. He is naked, and as the inches of his body rise out of the water with each halting step, he is inexplicably dry.
The water music has been saying his name, but I’ve only just now heard it and understood.
I am hiding in the bamboo. I want to see him, but I don’t want to be seen. It’s ridiculous, because he already knows I’m here. He finds me in the bamboo, where I pretend that I’m invisible. I jitter and twitch in the way of birds, my long neck taking me away but not away from him. He offers his cupped hands to me. He calls to me in the soft language of birds. He speaks the language of all things. He reaches out between the stalks, and I let the tips of his fingers trace the patterns of my feathered crest, unable to move from a combination of terror and wonder. He comes closer and with his lips brushes the feathers along the length of my neck, down one side and up the other, slowly, as if he would taste and feel each one.
And when he pulls away to look at me, I am no longer a bird.
And when his lips touch mine, when he presses me against the soft bank, when I push myself against his body in a nest of cattails, I know what I am.
When I wake, I’m breathing Khalaf.
In the
night, our bodies have turned front to front rather than back to back, and my face is burrowed into his ropy neck. His skin smells of rust and smoke and earth. His arm is draped over my waist. There is an unremembered dream shimmering at the edge of my consciousness, and in my sleepy haze this all seems reasonable, lovely.
Perfect.
Until reality comes crashing in.
Our legs are tangled up, our bodies pressed together, and against my abdomen I feel something rocklike pushing against me. My eyes go wide, and I stop breathing.
Oh. My. Heaven.
Terrified that he’ll wake to find me nuzzling him or find himself . . . in his current state, I take Khalaf’s arm and carefully lift it so that I can scoot out from underneath its weight. His arm is much heavier than I would have thought, but I manage. I gently set it down in front of him on the ground. Only once does he stir, a little sound of protest at my taking my heat away, but he never wakes, never opens his eyes.
Outside the blankets, the icy air stabs through skin and muscle, straight to the bone. This is how newborn babies must feel, one moment warm and dark and protected, the next thrust into a frigid world full of light.
I want to crawl back beneath the blanket.
I want.
Why shouldn’t I lie beside him? Why shouldn’t he lie beside me? I ask myself in the darkest, loneliest part of my heart.
Because, my better self answers, and I let my dark, lonely heart fill in the rest.
My hands are shaking with a combination of cold and embarrassment. It takes me a long time to relight the fire, but when I do, I notice Khalaf, still curled on the ground, looking at me with half-opened eyes. He closes them when our eyes meet.
19
SINCE OUR NIGHT OF UNCONSCIOUS CUDDLING, Khalaf has been walking beside his father for the most part, and even when we carry on with our lessons, he’s been guarded, careful, polite.
“How does the intonation sound again?”
“Which word would I use in that circumstance?”
I wonder if he remembers curling up to me with greater clarity than I realized. Maybe he’s as embarrassed and confused as I am.