by Diane Wilson
So mesmerized was I that I did not notice the trembling hand reaching for my chest until I felt the bony fingers probing my del. They searched for, and found, the jade horse pendant I wore hidden next to my skin. Smiling secretively, the fragile woman tapped the pendant twice, then raised her hand to my head. Still she said nothing. Placing her cool, smooth palm firmly against my forehead, she turned her gaze to mine. For the several long breaths we stood face-to-face, I wondered what, if anything, her clouded eyes were seeing. But I had no answer. At last the woman smiled and nodded, dropping her hand.
In the wavering motion of ill health, she bent over to drag several bags from behind her into the dirt outside the doorway. Her hands fluttered, urging me to take the bags. It was almost as if she had been waiting with them, knowing that I was coming. Nodding in acceptance, I clutched two bags in each fist and set them at my feet.
Looking up then, I saw the slight woman silently pointing a finger at the leather pouch given to me by Echenkorlo and strung across my chest. Somehow I trusted her and, also without speaking, lifted the pouch from my shoulder and opened wide its neck between us. With a whistling sound, like that of a bird, the woman excitedly scooped her hands inside the pouch and pulled forth the small bags containing the dried herbs I had taken from Echenkorlo’s possessions the night I buried her. One after the other she lifted them to her nose, each deep inhalation blossoming into a radiant smile. Nodding and gesturing then, the woman seemed to be asking if she might take some of the herbs for herself. I eyed the four heavy bags lying at my feet and nodded agreement. When she kept bobbing her head excitedly, I placed one hand over hers and squeezed. Immediately the woman’s smile widened into a satisfied grin. Stooping over, she pulled several large pieces of silk from a pocket, spread them upon the dirt, and scooped a small handful of each herb into each square. She quickly knotted them, then dropped the silken bags back inside her pocket.
“You come our land.” The woman’s crackly words were haltingly spoken in my own tongue! “Danger come also. Hear the mare.”
The complaining voice of the young mother rose above her child’s wail and with a last warning—“Go! Now!”—the frail woman sank into the room’s shadows. Quickly I climbed into Bayan’s saddle, Bator leaped onto my lap, and with eyes darting this way and that across the horizon, we rode long after the sun had set. Not until many more hills rose and fell at our backs did we stop to hide behind a curtain of drooping tree fronds.
In the darkness of evening and the tree’s shadows, I peered into the sacks offered by the cloudy-eyed woman and found, mostly through touch and smell, some of the favorite foods of my homeland: aaruul, dried mutton, powdered mare’s milk, and a block of tea leaves. Yet so nervous was my stomach that I could only hold a salty-sweet piece of aaruul upon my tongue and lie, ears cocked for danger, until I fell asleep.
The muffled sound of gentle rain awakened me. At my first stirring, Bator meowed sleepily and pushed his feet against my stomach in protest. Rolling over anyway, I saw that Bayan was still kneeling within the tree’s thick shelter, though her black eyes looked at me with alert interest. Remembering the danger that followed us, I set about saddling Bayan so that we could be on our way. Bator pouted and switched his tail.
The fine, continuous rain followed us all morning as we rode past first one and then another cluster of mud-walled homes, their occupants already outside and bending over the endless rows of black ditches. Close to midday, however, a wind blew from the west, chasing away the clouds to reveal a clear sky the deep blue of sapphires. It was with the sun shining upon a freshly scrubbed land neatly embroidered into great squares of yellow and green and black that we came upon another of the gods’ wonders.
At the bank of a wide, slow-moving river, our path leaped into the air and landed upon the other side in a great arching of gleaming white stone. Enormous slabs, carved and smoothed, rested upon gigantic columns that rose magically from the murky brown water. People from both directions were indifferently lifting their heels from the land and walking confidently upon these slabs suspended high above the river.
Bayan snorted and lowered her head. I did not know whether to urge her on or rein her back. Tentatively she placed a hoof upon the rock pathway. It didn’t slip off. She placed another hoof upon the slab and snorted again. Then another hoof and another and we were walking through the air.
My heart was thundering in my ears so loudly that I never heard them coming. With both hands I was clutching the arching front of the saddle, fearful that I would tumble off and into the river below, and fervently staring at the solid ground ahead. Bator was hunkered almost flat against my lap, hiding his face in my del. With one cautious step after another, Bayan crossed over the river and kept us all dry. The instant she set a hoof upon the opposite bank, though, a man’s stern voice spoke in the tongue of my people: “What are you carrying?”
Stunned, I looked up to see a soldier splendidly dressed in black mounted upon a fine dark horse outfitted with a red bridle and blanket. I began to smile, but the man’s hard face, lined like the cracked boulders of the mountains we had passed through, chased it away.
I sat tall. “I am a messenger of the Khan,” I said proudly, pointing to the seals upon the bags.
“Show me your paiza,” the soldier commanded.
My face flushed hot. I looked down at my hands. “I…I lost it,” I lied.
“You are a thief!” the man shouted. “You must come with us.”
In an instant, soldiers—all dressed in black and riding black horses—swept around us like a torrent of rushing water, crowding Bayan tightly. She pinned back her ears and snapped at a bold gelding that likewise flattened his ears and shook his head angrily. Another horse reached out to bite Bayan’s flank. She squealed and arched her back to kick, but the wave was rolling forward, carrying us with it. We galloped, pulled deeper and deeper into this strange land as helplessly as a pale leaf in a muddy current.
25
At the Court of Kublai Khan
They took everything. Everything!
Before we galloped, the soldiers’ leader had lifted the twin goatskin bags and draped them across his own saddle. By his order another soldier had torn Echenkorlo’s pouch from my neck. His groping hands then dug inside my del, pulling a frantically clawing Bator by his tail into the sunlight. The mean-spirited man had held my poor cat upside down in the air and laughed while Bator hissed and screamed.
“Stop! Stop!” I yelled. But my voice was drowned in the coarse laughter of the surrounding soldiers. Bator must have managed to swipe his claws across his tormentor’s exposed wrist, for with a snarling curse, the man slammed him to the ground and lifted the bloodied arm to his mouth. With tear-filled eyes I watched the terrified cat, my faithful friend, tear through the forest of hooves and out of my sight.
But already this horrid soldier was back, his hands digging through my del again. Bayan squealed. In a flash her head snaked out, teeth bared, and snapped at the soldier’s rangy horse. She spun and kicked. I heard bone crack. The big horse shrank back, but the soldier mercilessly spurred him forward, charging against Bayan’s shoulder so hard that we almost toppled over. His hairy hand found the winged horse ornament hidden deep within my pocket. With a chortle, he pulled it into the light.
But there was no time for examining the gold trophy, for his leader snatched it from his raised hand and called for the gallop. Still searching over my shoulder for a glimpse of poor Bator, I was swept along toward Khanbaliq, “City of the Khan.” For more than a moon I had pictured my triumphant entry into the royal city. Now I entered it a criminal.
Riding with a heavy heart, I paid little attention to the sights that would otherwise have thrilled me. I do remember our path was thick with people, even more than I had seen at Karakorum. We rode through markets crowded with sellers and buyers, animals and cooks, sharp smells and loud sounds. Then the high walls of the great city, strai
ght as an arrow’s flight, stretched before us farther than I could see. Calls of greeting met the leader as most of the soldiers split away, leaving only half a dozen to escort their prisoner through a series of huge, heavily guarded gates.
At last we passed into the city, center of Kublai Khan’s vast empire. All was noise, color, and wealth. Under one roof tumbled a pile of saddles, men bent over them hammering upon gold and silver ornaments. Under another spilled thousands upon thousands of bows and arrows. Sweating, bare-backed men pulled great swaths of leather from boiling pots; others bent over fiery hot metal, pounding it into sharp points. Each of the roofs was painted a different brilliant color—red, green, blue, yellow—and polished so that it looked wet and shining in the sun.
With nods exchanged between soldiers, we passed through another gate and, I guessed, onto the palace grounds, for the scene that stretched before me was so astonishing as to dry the tears from my swollen eyes. A winding walkway floated above grasses alive with wild animals that didn’t run from us in fear: white stags, roe deer and fallow deer, squirrels and ermines. Behind them rose an immense green hill that magically sprouted trees of all kinds. A great commotion was taking place near the far slope. My eyes widened in fear and I shrank in the saddle, for monstrous gray and hairless animals—which I later came to know as elephants—were carrying whole trees in their long snouts, expertly setting them into holes at the direction of dark-skinned herdsmen.
At the next gateway we halted and I was ordered off Bayan. Looking into the black eyes that calmly stared back at me, I threw my arms around her neck: I did not know if I would ever see her again. Surrounded by armored soldiers then, I marched into the palace. In front of me the soldiers’ leader carried across his shoulders the leather pouch Echenkorlo had given me as well as the twin goatskin bags I had worked so hard to deliver. Without words we marched through room after room until I was hopelessly lost. Between the thick arms and hunched shoulders jostling me, I caught glimpses of beautifully painted walls—gold and silver and blue—each ornamented with long-tailed birds and great lizards breathing fire.
We stopped again as the soldiers, braced against the bent backs of pretty palace women, pulled off their dirty boots and replaced them with soft leather slippers. I, too, traded my felt boots for white slippers. We waited while the leader passed through the doorway ahead of us. None of the men spoke, although the women stood whispering and looking at me curiously.
When the leader returned, he ripped the slippers from his feet and spat curses from his lips. He ordered the soldiers to replace their boots. Immediately I sat upon the floor and began removing my slippers but was yanked to my feet by the leader’s iron grip.
“The Khan will speak with you.” He shoved me, all alone, through the doorway.
Near to fainting, I tiptoed down a long cool hall, its pale blue ceiling arching above my head as high as the sky itself. Stone columns the size of tree trunks, polished smooth as water, marched at my side. The air was still, yet I caught the sweet smell of steppe grasses. Strange, I thought. Before I had done gathering my courage, I reached the end of the hallway. Holding my breath, I peeked around the corner, not knowing what the fearsome Khan would look like. Or what he would do to me.
At the far side of a huge room, its gleaming stone floor strewn with shirdiks thickly woven and richly colored, sat a fat, balding man. But not in the golden seat of honor, empty at the top of a mountain of stairs. This man reclined, knees lazily spread, upon a wide bottom step between the two goatskin bags—the seals of which he was studying. He was old, a grandfather many times over, and draped in an especially fine silk del the color of snow. I noticed that his small feet were not covered in felt boots or leather slippers but loosely wrapped in the soft skins of some unknown animal. Bare ankles poked from the skins.
The man noticed me and lifted his arm. “Enter, enter.” He, too, spoke in the language of my people, and I grew certain this was the great Kublai Khan, for he, like his grandfather Genghis before him, was born upon the steppes.
Heart in my throat, I nervously began covering the padded distance between us. Each slippered footfall upon the thick shirdiks breathed a sigh and fell silent.
Just as I neared the man, a snarling leopard sprang at me from behind a large table. I was to be killed, I thought in a flash. This was a trap. Dropping to my knees, I covered my head with my arms. But before the large spotted cat could rip me apart, a chain attached to a collar around its neck yanked it to a hissing stop.
“Cease. All is well. At least for now.” Trembling, I looked up. The words were being spoken to the leopard, not to me. “This girl will explain her arrival and then we will decide how you eat.” The leopard flung its body onto a pile of dried grasses, stirring the scent of the steppes into the air, and fixed its green eyes upon me. “We thought they had been lost. How did you come to carry them here?”
With a start I realized these last words were directed at me. Scrambling to my feet, I tried to bring a response into my mouth. But I found myself speechless before the most powerful man in this world. I was certain he had killed thousands of people for lesser slights than not speaking when so ordered, yet all I could do was stare—at the white powder covering his face, just like a woman! The makeup blanched his skin, though his cheeks glowed as pink as tulips. A silky white mustache drooped over a sparse, combed-clean beard. From beneath the limp head covering, which slipped sideways, I saw thin gray hair coiled into braided loops.
Impatient, the Khan posed another question. “Where is my gold paiza?”
“I forgot it,” I mumbled.
“You stole it!”
“I did not!” I cried too loudly. The leopard growled and shifted its haunches.
The Khan grasped the sealed neck of each bag in a fist. “You were caught riding away with these bags but not the gold paiza.”
“I wasn’t riding away,” I insisted. “I traveled more than a moon upon my mare—straight south—to get here. I forgot your paiza and your message pouch at an arrow station, but I didn’t steal them.”
“Then how did you come to lay a hand upon the royal treasure in these bags?”
I saw my way out. Standing tall, I said, “One of your arrow riders slipped down a shale slope, breaking his arm and injuring his horse. I was told to ride in his place.”
“And who told you this?”
“Why, one of your own soldiers,” I answered proudly.
“And he did not give you a gold paiza and possibly a message pouch to deliver with it?”
I flushed. “Yes, great Khan. But…but a woman tried to steal my mare, and I had to fight to get away from her and to deliver these important things to you. That’s where I left the paiza and message pouch.”
“A mare?” The Khan leaned forward. “My captain tells me you were riding a mare just now—a white one—that seriously lamed one of his best horses.”
I nodded, my face burning. “I’m sorry. Is…is my mare…is she all right?” The stammered words sputtered to a whisper. Anxiously I twisted the middle fastening of my del, closing my eyes in fear as I awaited the Khan’s answer.
In a regal voice rippling with indignation, Kublai Khan replaced my question with one of his own. “How dare you say ‘my mare’? Were you not providing the services of an arrow rider?”
My eyes flew open; I sensed a new danger. Dumbly I nodded.
Kublai Khan’s powdered face was twisting into anger. “Arrow riders serve the length and breadth of the empire, of which I am head; thus any horse galloping beneath them serves me. Which is to say, I own this white mare, not you.”
“But…but…” I was stammering again, my mind grasping for an argument. “But I am not really an arrow rider, great Khan, for they are all boys.”
As if slapped by my words, Kublai Khan roared, “Silence!” He narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice. “You have but to make a choice: if you were carrying these
two bags away from Khanbaliq, you are a thief and will forfeit your head; if you were carrying these bags toward Khanbaliq, you are an arrow rider—girl or not—and everything you own belongs to me.”
His last words screamed through my ears. I had heard them before and my cheek stung anew with the memory of the heavy-browed soldiers’ leader spitting upon it. Again I saw the terrorized faces of my family and relatives as the soldiers charged into our ail, boldly stealing men and horses. I saw the two urgas choking Bayan and the rough hobbling of three legs. My fists clenched. The powder-faced man before me had authorized this mistreatment.
Shaking, I muttered between gritted teeth, “You’re the thief.”
“Again?”
“You’re the thief!” I shouted so loudly that the leopard jumped up, switching its tail. Guards emerged from the shadows, lances raised. The Khan held up a hand and they halted.
“You stole my uncle and two cousins and all of our best horses. Your soldiers just rode in and—-in your name—took what they wanted.” I shook my fists. “You stole my white mare, and I dressed as a soldier to stay with her. You can’t have her because she’s mine!” I stamped my foot and, to my dismay, nearly tumbled over.
Surprise replaced the Khan’s anger. He regarded me anew. “You act more like the spur-footed cock than a crippled girl. Are you not afraid of me?”
“Should I be?” My reply was brazen, hiding, I hoped, the panic that weakened my knees.
The Khan pressed his lips together. “Yes…and no. I’m a fair man. When I am planning to capture a city, I always extend an opportunity to surrender. That is more than fair. Should a city refuse my offer, I simply leave no living thing breathing.” He shrugged his shoulders, nonchalantly raising his soft palms upward. “If your story proves true, you will be treated just as fairly.” A nod sent several guards hurrying from the room.
