The Bird and the Blade

by Megan Bannen

  I know this.

  Break free and be slave? Or remain and be king?

  I know the answer.

  “Two minutes,” says Zhang in a voice infused with noxious glee at Khalaf’s floundering.

  The people on the ground surrounding the dais are packed in and restless. They’re talking to Khalaf now, words of encouragement from all directions.

  “Come on!”

  “The answer! What’s the answer?”

  “One minute!” Zhang crows.

  He won’t die for her. I let go of Timur and step forward.

  “Little bird!” he whispers behind me like a lost child.

  I ease my way to the front of the crowd and lean into the lamplight, my face visible for anyone to see, and I will Khalaf to look at me.

  “Thirty seconds!”

  Look at me, I think.

  Khalaf buries his face in his hands, his back hunching over in growing hopelessness.

  Look at me, Khalaf!

  “Fifteen seconds!”

  My insides scream, an incomprehensible wail that feels as if it’s turning me inside out. Slowly, Khalaf lifts his head from his hands as if he can hear me. He looks right at me. He finds me with wild, panicked eyes.

  “Ten seconds!”

  I mouth a word to him. He shakes his head. He doesn’t understand. I mouth it again. One word, one message passed between us through the torchlit night. For the span of one breath, it’s as if we were alone, sitting across the fire from each other on the vast steppes between Sarai and Khanbalik.

  “Five-four-three-two—”

  “Turandokht!” he exclaims, turning to face her. “The cage of ice that enslaves you and makes you king. It’s you, Khatun. ‘Turandokht’ is the answer.”

  Khalaf’s voice echoes through the silent square. The scholars in the bell tower forget to confer with Zhang. They turn their heads in one synchronized movement to gape at Khalaf.

  “Well?” Zhang asks them.

  One of them nods.

  Bone-crushing relief crumbles my spine like a clump of dried-out rice. The only thing that keeps me upright is the crowd all around me. I grip a complete stranger by the shoulder, a woman who glares at me and shakes off my hand in disgust as if I were a spider that had landed on her.

  Zhang’s round face becomes drawn, old even. He straightens the front of his robe, gives his khatun a pitying glance, and announces to all of Khanbalik, “The answer is ‘Turandokht.’ The contestant has successfully answered all three riddles.”

  I expect the gathered masses to explode with noise, but the silence stretches on following the announcement of Khalaf’s victory. The realization that this unknown boy, plainly dressed and softly spoken, is now the heir apparent to the throne of the empire begins to sink in. Khalaf draws himself up and stands erect and dignified, the hero, the saintly victor of Turandokht’s game.

  He won. He’ll live. And who knows but I might even get to go home now. It occurs to me that for all these reasons I should be happy. But I’m not. I am the antithesis of happy.

  An apple. A choice. A song. A kiss.

  And wilderness is paradise now.

  He might have loved me. And I wasted it. And then I lost it. And I never deserved it to begin with.

  This is the moment of being airborne, the body caught between earth and sky before it hits the water’s cold edge.

  Zhang clears his throat and returns his attention to his scroll. It gives a brittle creak as he unrolls it to its full length. He’s never made it this far into the decree before.

  “No prince shall be allowed to wed Turandokht Khatun who shall not previously have replied without hesitation to the riddles that she shall put to him. Today, this man has succeeded. The sacred oath of the Great Khan has been fulfilled. The Eternal Blue Sky smiles upon him. Glory to the victor, and ten thousand years to the Great Khan.”

  What begins as a flutter of applause after this proclamation grows exponentially, and soon the crowd is whooping and cheering and pounding on any surface they can find.

  Turandokht stands alone atop the marble stairs. In her pale rose silk, she reminds me of the moon, shining and solitary at dusk. She belongs to Khalaf now, just as he belongs to her.

  My heart’s fissure becomes a valley.

  This is where I disappear, I think. There are other things that could happen to me, worse things. Disappearing is definitely one of my better options at the moment. But it doesn’t feel better. I don’t want to be invisible anymore.

  Turandokht finally moves. She steps before her father and bows in deep obeisance to the Great Khan. “Son of the Eternal Blue Sky, my father, I beg that you will not hand me over to this stranger.”

  Zhang’s words come back to me like a knife in the gut.

  I’m fairly certain my khatun has no intention of marrying, so even if somebody manages to answer the riddles, she’ll have him killed one way or another.

  “No,” I breathe just as Timur pushes his way to the front and grabs my arm. He must have had a terrible time finding me in the crowd with his bad eyes, and he is livid.

  “Rotting carrion, where have you been?” he chides me, and one of my neighbors, the woman I unintentionally grabbed, shushes us, sending a spray of saliva against my round cheek. “Go suck your used tea leaves!” Timur spits back at her.

  “My vow is unbreakable, Daughter,” says the Great Khan, and Timur shuts up to listen. “Would you defame a promise made to the Earth? To the Eternal Blue Sky himself?”

  “Am I chattel?” she counters. “No, I am your sacred daughter, not some worthless slave to be handled like cheap goods.”

  That cuts me hard. She has no idea—no idea whatsoever—what it means to be worthless, to be handled like cheap goods.

  A horse? A camel? Chattel? That’s what she is. Me, the one and only asset to be liquidated.

  “You are more precious to me than all the world,” says the Great Khan, “but this man has bargained his life, and he has won.”

  Turandokht rises to her feet and fixes Khalaf with a piercing glare. “No man will ever possess me—not you, not anyone.”

  “I have no wish to possess you, my khatun,” Khalaf tells her.

  “I am not your khatun. I will never belong to you.”

  It’s almost verbatim what I said to Khalaf when he kissed me in Qaidu’s camp and then pushed me away. I don’t belong to you. I’ve never been yours. Is Turandokht so determined to take everything from me that she must steal my words as well?

  Khalaf’s eyes find me where I stand at the front of the crowd, and for once I don’t try to mask who I am or what I feel. The face he sees in this moment is my honest face, brokenhearted, full of longing, and completely terrified for him. What do I have to lose? His veneer of cool indifference shows its cracks. He’s still looking at me when he says, “You asked me three riddles, Turandokht Khatun. I’ll ask you only one.”

  My internal alarm lights the signal fires. I have no idea what he’s doing, but I shake my head at him.

  He looks up at her and dares to plant one foot on the bottom step. He says,

  “Rich in mind but poor in purse,

  A prince who is a beggar called

  For nearly a year has suffered this curse.

  Took care of his father. For months has hauled

  “His woes upon his troubled back.

  Across the mountains and desert sand

  Fought his way, survived attack.

  He rules no men. He has no land.

  “If by dawn his name you say.

  You decide the price he’ll pay.”

  32

  “WHAT IS HE DOING?” TIMUR HISSES in my ear. I’m still shaking my head.

  “Your offer is completely unnecessary,” the Great Khan says to Khalaf.

  “It’s as I wish it, Son of the Sky,” Khalaf replies, shifting his gaze back to me.

  And wilderness is paradise now.

  I can’t bear to look at him, nor can I bear to turn away. I feel like I’m bre
aking into pieces.

  “Zhang.” The Great Khan summons the chancellor.

  “My lord?” Zhang says as he steps forward on the tower, lapdog that he is.

  “Is there precedent for this?”

  “No, my lord, but I believe the stranger’s riddle must stand.” The chancellor eyes Khalaf with loathing. He wants Khalaf dead and gone. I can see it even from here.

  This is the nightmare that will not end.

  “Hear this now,” Turandokht declares over Khalaf’s head to her restless audience. “No one shall sleep tonight until the stranger’s name is discovered, and whoever unearths his name will be richly rewarded.”

  Greed oozes through the crowd. How many of them saw Timur and me speaking with Khalaf at the foot of the drum tower? Half of Khanbalik will be looking for us, I realize with a sick lurch of my insides.

  “Five hundred silver ingots to the one who discovers his name,” Turandokht declares.

  It feels like a death sentence.

  The mob begins to tear apart. People dash off in all directions to find the name as if it were something you could discover by turning over a stone. Within a minute, the market square has cleared out considerably, and Timur and I are no longer able to fit in with the crowd. Timur especially stands out, the size of him.

  It speaks to the urgency of the situation that he has no snide remarks. He lets me drag him out of the square and into a nearby alley. I take us as far into the darkness as we can go. We find our way into a cramped, smelly corner and stand there, catching our breath.

  “Will this do, I wonder?” I ask Timur. “Should I find us a better hiding place?”

  “What’s wrong with this one?”

  “It’s too close to the market, and it smells.”

  “Then it’s perfect. What idiot would hide here? Besides, it’s more dangerous to be out in the open at this point, even if it is to find a better place to hide.”

  He’s got a point.

  “What do we do now?” I ask him. My heart won’t slow down.

  “We stay hidden. Hidden and silent.” His voice is uncommonly quiet and soothing. He reaches out and strokes my hair with his huge hand. The tenderness of the gesture plus Timur’s utter lack of prickliness magnifies the gravity of our circumstances. His hand is meant to comfort, but the unfamiliarity of his affection makes my nerves scream in fear.

  Timur’s gruff voice breaks the moment. “That riddle was too easy. How many landless princes are running around the empire these days? Fetid, stinking lamb’s balls!”

  “Your ‘insignificant third son who likes to discuss philosophy and play with astrolabes’ thinks Turandokht has no idea who he could be,” I answer. Guilt washes over me, drowning me in remorse. “This is all my fault. I did this to him.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” He leans against the wall behind him and says, “Do you really want to know why he offered up that damn riddle? Maybe it’s time you heard some truth from me for a change, little bird. Maybe you should know what kind of a man stands beside you.”

  His eyes are hollowed out. I feel suddenly careful of him, as if I were handling something fragile, like transplanting an orchid or cleaning a precious vase.

  “I think a good man stands beside me, my lord,” I answer.

  “I think a flawed man stands beside you.”

  “We’re all flawed.”

  “We are all as flawed as our sons think we are,” he answers bitterly. “And how flawed does that make me?”

  I open my mouth to reply and find myself closing it without having said anything.

  “Aha,” he says, pointing that thick finger at me. “There’s no arguing with that.”

  “There’s no arguing with you.”

  “Everyone argues with me.”

  “But nobody wins,” I snap. He doesn’t understand what’s happening here, and I’m breaking under the strain of my own lies and secrets.

  “Did he ever tell you about his mother?”

  Timur’s abrupt change in subject throws me off my guard.

  “A little. Not very much,” I say.

  “Then let me tell you a story. Twenty years ago, the Great Khan sent me a bride, a girl named Bibi Hanem. She was a peace offering, a contract between nations, because he knew I didn’t support his claim to the throne of the empire. When Bibi came to my court, I was ready to cut her head off and send it back to the illegally crowned Great Khan with a bow wrapped around it and a great big note saying, Go suck your used tea leaves. But then I saw her.”

  “And she was beautiful,” I supply. Of course she was beautiful. This story could never have happened if she had looked like me. If the Great Khan had sent me, I’d be headless by now, and my head would be wrapped with a bow and a great big note saying, Go suck your used tea leaves.

  “She was beautiful,” Timur agrees. “And so young. And I was already, well, not young. My first wife was dull and practical, a nice enough woman. And I had plenty of other women. . . .”

  “I’m sure you did,” I sigh. Leave it to Timur to boast of his sexual prowess at a time like this.

  “But I had never loved before,” he finishes, and now, against my will, I find myself sympathizing with the old goat.

  “You say that like loving someone is a bad thing,” I tell him.

  “It is. It’s like being enslaved, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  I give him a mirthless laugh. “I can’t disagree with that.”

  He answers with his noncommittal grunt. The air goes thicker, more serious.

  “Did she love you?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” The words sound pathetic even before they exit my mouth, but out they come all the same.

  “She did her duty by me for a few years. I went away to strangle the Great Khan’s tribute out of the Seljuks, and when I came back, she had a baby boy in her arms for me.”

  “Khalaf,” I guess.

  “I held that tiny thing in my arms and looked into his eyes, and I knew what he would be.”

  I want to ask Timur why on earth he had never bothered to mention any of this to Khalaf, why he never let his son see his raw father’s love. But I can’t bring myself to ask it, probably because Timur is so troublingly delicate at this moment.

  “What happened to her—Bibi Hanem?” I ask.

  Timur’s crevices and hollows deepen, grow darker. His is a face full of chasms. “My next campaign was longer, bloodier. While I was gone, my wife decided to have a mosque built in my honor.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Not when the architect is a pretty boy who imagines himself in love with the khatun of the Kipchak Khanate.”

  “And she . . . ?”

  “And she,” Timur agrees. The unspoken completion of that thought gallops through our stinking alley. “When I came back, and I heard of the situation, I had the man executed. I had his filthy mouth stuffed with stones until he choked on his own rank breath. And two days after I had the bastard killed, my wife climbed to the tallest minaret of the beautiful mosque she had built for me, and she jumped.”

  In my mind, I hear Khalaf’s tuneless rendition of his mother’s lullaby. Like the white duck’s little chick, I call to my mother when she is far from me. Another crack snakes along my heart, this one for both the khan and his son. I put a hand on Timur’s arm knowing full well that anything I might say in response would be an insulting understatement.

  “So if you wanted to know why he asked his own riddle,” Timur says, “you have your answer. At the end of the day, he couldn’t wed a woman against her will. He didn’t want to be a monster like his father. He didn’t want to be me.”

  I take one of Timur’s hands in my own and hold it to my cheek. “You are not a monster, my lord.” His rough thumb brushes my face. “And you’re wrong. I told you, this is all my fault, all my doing.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” The gravel of his voice rubs painfully against my conscience.

  “You don’t underst
and. He doesn’t understand. Zhang wants him dead. Turandokht, too, riddle or no. The chancellor will stop at nothing. I have to see—” I stop myself. Even in this pungent alleyway, I don’t dare speak his name. “I have to talk to him,” I finish.

  “How do you propose to do that? You can’t just saunter into the imperial compound. You’ll never get past the palace gates, much less make it to wherever it is they’re keeping him.”

  I step back. I look at him long and hard, and I assure him, “Yes, my lord, I think I can.”

  “You can get into the palace?” He snorts, but I’m not laughing.

  “Yes.”

  Now I have his full attention.

  “How?” he asks.

  I want desperately to not answer that question. Timur assesses me—whatever he can see of me in the darkness—with those piercing eyes shifted to the side. I watch as the understanding washes over him. “Cancerous lamb’s balls, I don’t want to know who you really are, do I?”

  My face bloats with the urge to cry. “No, my lord, you don’t want to know who I am.”

  “So I was right. Back in the Caucasus, when I told him to leave you dead in a ditch, I was right about you. You’re a rutting spy.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  Timur breathes out a great gust of air, like someone just punched him in the gut. “And you can get into the palace? You’re sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Dammit!” Timur kicks a stone and sends it flying into the wall behind me. A dog starts barking somewhere nearby.

  “My lord,” I warn him.

  “And damn you,” he says, pointing at me with a finger that shakes with anger. He may as well take the dagger from the folds of my belt and stab me with it. “That boy is going to live another day. He’s going to live many, many more days. And do you know why?”

  I shake my head and let the tears fall.

  “Because I deserve the opportunity to tell that little shit I told you so. That means you are going to help me keep that boy alive. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  He takes me by the shoulders with his huge hands and bends his face in front of mine. “Say it with me: I am going to keep that boy alive.”

  “I am going to keep that boy alive,” I repeat.