by Megan Bannen
Hurt and anger well up inside me, pouring out of my mouth in a wave of ruthless honesty to which I have never before treated Khalaf.
“You’re sorry? How could you do this to me?” My fingers clench. I want to wrap them around his neck and tear his flesh away with my jagged fingernails. I am a feral dog, cornered and ready to spring.
“I know. It was wrong of me.”
“You think I’m your concubine, your little slave girl, and you can do whatever you want with me? Well, I’m not. I don’t belong to you. I’ve never been yours.”
“Jinghua—”
“Shut up.” I’m freezing. I reach down for my blanket, slap bits of grass off it, and wrap it around my shoulders once more. “You’re so smart, aren’t you? Brilliant, they said. You think you know everything. Well, I can promise you this, my lord: You don’t know me. You don’t know who I am. You don’t know what I am. You don’t know the first thing about me.”
“It was just a mistake. Please, Jinghua.”
He’s so wretched and pathetic, wringing his hands and begging me for forgiveness. A casual observer would have no idea who was the servant and who was the master here.
“You know, your father was right about you,” I tell him. “You are a prick. And you are an ungrateful little shit.”
I turn my back on him and storm back inside the ger, burning with fury and abject humiliation.
“Let me guess,” Timur says. “That could’ve gone better.”
“Go suck your used tea leaves.”
“Fair enough.”
I lie down and curl up on my side with my back to the door, and I bury myself in the blanket that now smells of earth and grass and Khalaf.
“He’ll come around,” says Timur. “He always comes around.” I think he says this more to comfort himself than me, which is just as well, since I’m too pissed off to care about anyone.
Or so I tell myself.
Khalaf stands right outside the entrance for a long, long time. I can feel his presence there. I lie very still so he’ll think I’m asleep when he finally comes in.
Only he never does come inside.
Time stretches on until, at last, I hear him move. His feet crunch in the brittle grass as he walks away. The sound of his footsteps fades and then disappears altogether.
It was just a mistake, his voice echoes in my head.
I bury my face in my blanket so Timur won’t hear me blubbering.
Khalaf’s kiss is so fresh that my lips are still swollen with it. I wish I could wipe away the sensation of his mouth on mine with the back of my hand, but I know I’ll burn with that memory for the rest of my life.
There used to be ten suns in the sky, scorching the earth until the archer Houyi shot down all but the great light that now rises in the east and sets in the west. I feel like one of the fallen, blazing and bright one moment, dark and defeated the next.
I thought I could guard my heart, but I might as well have tried to dam a river with a handful of pebbles.
24
WEIJI ENTERS THE FAMILY SHRINE, WHERE he bows twice to our ancestors.
Cups of wine, offerings of rice and pork, the incense burner—they all clutter the altar’s surface. And now a falcon lands there as well, knocking over the ancestral tablets and sending thick, sweet wine spilling to the floor.
My brother kneels before the bird. When he holds his arm out to her and calls to her with a clicking of his tongue, she comes to him. Carefully, he gets to his feet and walks over to me.
“Look at her, Jinghua. Isn’t she incredible?”
I open my mouth to warn him, to tell him that she’s dangerous, but flower petals fall out of my mouth instead and float away in the oddly buoyant air of the shrine.
“She’s beautiful,” he tells me.
Let her go, I think, but I can’t speak. Flowers continue to pour from my mouth like vomit, filling the air with the scent of jasmine.
Weiji doesn’t see me anymore. It’s like I’ve ceased to exist. For him, there is only this falcon.
She looms over him, enormous. She draws him into her wings like an embrace, even as she rakes and tears at his chest with jeweled talons.
And all I can do is scream in silence with flower petals falling around me like snow.
The next thing I know, Timur is waking me with a none-too-gentle nudge of his toe into my rib cage. I snort awake, still groggy. My head throbs.
“He never came back.” Timur’s deep voice echoes in the pain chambers of my sinus cavities. A wave of regret and embarrassment gives me a solid emotional wallop as I recall in vivid detail the disaster of the previous evening. I glance over to where Khalaf should be sleeping by the fire. His bedding lies in the same crumpled heap where he left it last night.
“Well? Where is he?” Timur demands.
“I’m not his keeper. How should I know?”
“Because you watch him like a starving man watches a rat.”
I snort again, this time deliberately, and make a big show of throwing the covers over my head, signaling my derision as well as my intention to go back to sleep. He nudges me harder.
“Ow!” I sit up to avoid further onslaught.
“Let’s go,” Timur says, yanking my blanket off me.
“Where?”
“Qaidu’s tent. That boy’s not making a move without talking to me first. And I want breakfast.”
“Fine,” I huff, because, let’s face it, it’s hard to argue with breakfast.
Timur waits while I straighten out my rumpled clothes and attempt to comb and replait my hair. This process takes me all of five minutes, but the old goat says, “No one’s writing a poem to your glorious beauty, girl, so give it up. Move it!”
I glare at him, but I head outside with him. Suddenly, it occurs to me that what I’m seeing is wrong, very wrong. The Mongols are pulling down their gers and loading them onto huge carts.
“My lord, I think they’re packing up,” I tell Timur.
“What? Lamb’s balls!”
My mind whirs, trying to process what’s happening, when Qaidu himself rides up to us atop a brown mare. “Good morning, cousin,” he calls with a little salute.
“What is this?” Timur growls back.
Qaidu grins. “You are infinitely charming, Timur. I’ll give you that. It’s been a pleasure to see you again, but here, I’m afraid, we must part ways. I’ve come to bid you farewell.”
The man’s cheeriness serves as a stark foil to the icy dread that Timur and I share. Frantic, I search the steppes in all directions, but I don’t see Khalaf anywhere.
“Where is my son?” Timur demands.
“He left at dawn. Didn’t you know?”
Qaidu is clearly more than aware that we didn’t know, and his joviality makes the gut punch hurt even more. The pain of it is like a sheep’s bladder, limp and shapeless at first but growing larger and larger as it’s inflated into a ball and kicked around in some brutal game.
Khalaf left us.
He left me.
Qaidu is enjoying himself now, and it makes me want to spit in his face. “He came to me late last night to redeem his two wishes,” he says. “First, he asked that I have him outfitted for a long journey. Second, he asked me to take care of his father and his ‘friend’ that they may live in comfort among my people all the days of their lives should he fail to return. And, no offense, I do think it highly improbable that he will return given the direction of his journey.”
Timur and I stand side by side, as cold and dead as a pair of graves.
“I bear you no ill will, Timur,” Qaidu says. “Our armies have cooperated against a common enemy on more than one occasion, and I’m grateful to you for that—truly I am. But, you see, there’s a hefty price on your head, literally and politically, and I won’t risk the lives of my tribesmen to harbor you.”
“You’re cutting me loose?” Timur spits. “After what you promised my son? I saved your ass, you cowardly son of a bitch. You owe me.”
Qaidu keeps smiling—honestly, genuinely smiling—which, given the situation, makes him look like a scary son of a bitch to me, not a cowardly one.
“Shut up,” I warn Timur under my breath.
“Did you let my son go, or did you send your men after him to kill him?” Timur asks him.
That thought hadn’t occurred to me, and terror for Khalaf’s life takes hold of me.
“No, I didn’t have him killed,” Qaidu answers to my unspeakable relief. “That one has as good a chance as any to rule the empire. I want to make sure I’m on his good side in the unlikely event he wins Turandokht.”
“You think leaving his father to die on the steppes will get you on his good side?”
“He won’t ever know, will he? Besides, I’m doing him a favor. He’ll never amount to anything with this father’s stranglehold on him. The world needs a young prince. It does not need an old khan, especially a deposed old khan.”
“You can’t leave me behind. We’re allies, you and I,” Timur says. It’s starting to sound like begging. Where is the bottom, I wonder? Where is the absolute rock bottom?
“You always tried so hard to emulate our common ancestor, the great Genghis Khan,” Qaidu tells Timur. “Let this be an opportunity for you. He, too, was abandoned by his tribe, yet he rose up to rule the world. Maybe you will survive and do the same. Then, cousin, shall I bend at the knee to you. Until that time . . .” Qaidu shrugs.
“Why not just kill me now, then?”
“I have enough integrity to give you a fighting chance, and I honor you enough to let you keep your blood inside your skin.”
“And when I do rise up with my son, I will spill your blood onto the sacred earth and pick my teeth with the bones of your children.”
Qaidu’s horse fidgets, but the man only smirks at Timur. “I’m not overly concerned about that,” he says. “And you, girl, the ‘friend,’ what will you do?”
It takes a moment for me to register that he’s talking to me.
“What? What do you mean?” I stammer.
“I did promise the boy that I would keep both of you safe. I have had to rescind one promise, but I dislike reneging on two. If you stay with my people, I swear to Tengri, the Eternal Blue Sky, that you will live well.”
“A half promise is worth nothing,” I tell him coldly. “I’m sticking with my lord.”
I’m not sure who’s more shocked by my answer: me or Timur. Qaidu inclines his head and says, “As you wish,” before he turns his horse away from us and trots off to oversee the packing up of camp.
Timur and I spend the next hour sitting back to back, huddled with our few earthly belongings as we watch the Mongols load their carts. I’m stuck with Timur for all eternity. Kill me. But since he’s all I have now, I get up and move so that I’m sitting beside him. He just hunkers there, staring at nothing.
“What are you looking at? You can’t even see.”
He raises a skin of qumiz in my general direction and says, “Cheers,” before guzzling it.
“Oh, seriously? Are you drunk now? Where did you get that?”
“It takes a hell of a lot more than this to get me drunk.” He offers me the skin with a belch.
“Nice. Great. That’s great.”
“It’s just you and me now. Have a drink.”
Since getting drunk seems to be de rigueur these days, I shrug, take the skin, knock back a swig . . . and promptly choke on it.
“This stuff is disgusting,” I inform him between coughing fits. “You drink that on purpose?”
Timur throws his head back and laughs at me. He may as well start prancing around in a country dance for as much as it startles me. His laughter, like his personality, is mammoth. I almost don’t hate him when he’s laughing like this.
“Shut up,” I mutter at him.
He wipes away jovial tears and giggles. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Shut up anyway.”
“Touché, little bird.’”
I don’t know why I don’t tell him not to call me a little bird. I just don’t. Instead, I say, “Can I ask you something?”
“Could I stop you?”
“Why are you just sitting here when you could be chasing after your son so that he doesn’t get himself killed in Khanbalik?”
Timur’s little bout of hilarity evaporates. “Why are you sitting here talking to an old goat when you could be doing the same thing?”
“He won’t listen to me. Obviously,” I tell him, wondering how he’s figured out that I call him “old goat” in my mind.
“Or me.” Timur shakes his head. “My own son just threw me away. He left me—”
“I noticed.”
“—dependent on a milk-blooded turncoat.”
“He left me, too,” I point out.
“It’s different for you.”
“How?”
Timur reaches across me and grabs the qumiz skin. He takes another drink before he answers, “Because you may do as you please.”
I grab the skin back from him and take a drink without choking (although I want to very desperately). “Too bad no one ever bothers to ask me what pleases me.”
“I know he pleases you.”
What can I say to that? I take another gulp and cough again.
“And I can see, by the way,” Timur tells me.
“What?”
“You asked what I was staring at since I can’t even see. And I’m telling you that I can see.”
“No, you can’t,” I sigh. “We’ve been down this road already.”
“Yes, I can.”
I almost take another drink of the qumiz, but I think better of it. It tastes like death, and it hasn’t done Khalaf or Timur any good, if you ask me. And what am I doing here, anyway? Timur’s not my father—thank heaven—and at least one of us should be racing after Khalaf, even if there’s almost no chance whatsoever we’ll catch up to him.
“Forget it,” I mutter.
“I can see,” Timur insists. “It’s like someone burned a hole in the middle of my sight, right in the center, as if my sight were a piece of parchment and someone held it over a candle and scorched it. All around the edges, the world is still there, but if I look directly at a thing, I can’t see it.”
“Oh,” I say lamely. This really is a heart-to-heart, and I have no clue what to do with it.
“I can only see my son’s face if I don’t look at him.”
“That’s awful,” I say with actual sincerity.
“Yes, it is.”
We sit there, side by side, soaking in our sadness, until Timur says, “If you tell anyone what I just told you, I’ll punch—”
“You’ll punch a hole in my chest and rip out my innards and take a bite of my still-beating heart, blah, blah, blah,” I finish for him. “There’s the lord and master I know and love.”
By now, the Barlas and Qaidu’s people have begun to head off to the south in a long train. Many of them stare at us with pitiless eyes on their way out. Some of the children make faces. I give them nothing in return, no emotion, no grief. If they remember me at all, they’ll remember my face as cold and hard as stone.
When they’re all gone, when they’re nothing but specks on the horizon, Timur turns to me and says, “Come on, little bird.”
It’s hard to loathe a man who calls you “little bird.”
“Khanbalik or bust?” I ask.
“Probably bust, but what the hell?”
He takes my hand in his enormous grasp, and I let him, because I’m feeling unmoored and small and alone out here on the steppes and his hand is big and warm and callused and real. But he doesn’t move right away, and we just stand there holding hands. It’s starting to feel awkward.
“Uh, my lord?” I ask.
“Rotting carrion, which way is east?”
“This way, my lord.” And with clear eyes, I pull Timur Khan east to find his son.
Part Five
The Third Riddle
The City of Khanbali
k, Khanate of the Yuan Dynasty
Autumn 1281
25
TURANDOT SAYS,
“From the fountain in the palace courtyard flows
A liquid flame that is no flame at all.
At times pours out an icy stream of woes,
At times pours hot with passion’s burning call.
“When hot, it is delirium and ardor,
The heat of battle, the rusty hue of conquest.
When cold, it is a dull and aching torpor,
A longing, or your marble-encased rest.”
Khalaf bows his head again.
“Seven minutes,” Zhang announces.
Standing here, powerless, watching Khalaf think as the seconds tick by is even more excruciating than it was for the first riddle.
Time is so fickle. It moved at a sluggish pace during our journey across deserts and plains and mountains, so slow and ponderous that it felt like we were traveling across eternity. Now, on an autumn night in Khanbalik, time moves like a rocket, swift and soaring and dangerous. All too soon, Zhang calls, “Six minutes.”
Clearly, I didn’t appreciate all the time I had, didn’t make the most of it, didn’t use it wisely. If I had, we wouldn’t be trapped in this nightmare, and Khalaf wouldn’t be fighting for his life and his khanate at the feet of Turandokht Khatun. I’m so panicked for him that I feel incorporeal, as if I might just float away if Timur’s hand weren’t anchoring me to the earth.
By the time Zhang gets to “Five minutes,” my whole body is wound so tightly, I don’t know how I’m ever going move again. The crowd starts to call out to Khalaf, some with jeers, some with words of encouragement. Khalaf keeps his eyes closed. He breathes in. He breathes out.
I have wasted so much time, and not just the moments I shared with Khalaf and even Timur. I spent the first fifteen years of my life sulking my time away, squandering every single breath before the Mongols came and turned me into what I am now, before I lost my home and my family.
Before I lost Weiji.
I think of the moment just over three years ago when the catastrophe first began to creep into our lives, as quietly as a spider, although we didn’t realize it then. Weiji and I knelt side by side before our parents, the picture of filial propriety. Nice going, he whispered from the side of his mouth when Father wasn’t looking, teasing me for the way I had brought our parents’ disapproval upon myself.