by Megan Bannen
“A gerege!” shouts one of the thieves, waving a thin gold tablet around for all to see before his leader takes it from him for examination. It’s easily the most valuable item in our possession, a passport issued by the Great Khan. It guarantees safe travel and lodging across the major trade routes of the empire.
And now it’s been stolen, too. I let my head fall against the earth in dejection.
Idiot.
The leader approaches Prince Khalaf, who is hauling Timur Khan to his feet. The old man has a black eye and lump on his forehead, but aside from that and a general ragged appearance, he looks none the worse for wear. The prince hoists his father’s arm over his good shoulder, and he stands there with the khan hanging off his neck, panting at the bandits and staring them down with fierce eyes.
“Many thanks for this, my friend,” the leader says, holding up the gerege. “I suppose I should kill you now, but I would sooner kill a fine painter than an artist like you. It’s a rare treat to see a Mongol with such skill in hand-to-hand combat.”
Timur Khan spits a bloody mixture at the bandit’s feet.
“Well said,” the bandit commends the khan, then returns his attention to Prince Khalaf. “To reward you for the astonishing size of your balls, I’ll give you a choice. You can keep either your bow or your tent. You pick.”
It’s a terrible choice. Without the bow, he’ll be dead within days. Without the tent, he’ll be dead much sooner. And either way, I’ll be on a bandits’ wagon headed toward a slave market. Any hope I had foolishly entertained about returning to Lin’an dissolves like blood into soil.
“Take the tent,” Timur Khan tells his son.
“I’ll take the boy,” Prince Khalaf answers instead, nodding to me.
The bandits turn to look at me with curiosity, and it takes my numb mind a moment to wrap itself around what Khalaf has just said.
The boy.
Me.
He’s choosing me.
No slave market. No brothel. It almost tastes like freedom. My whole body aches with abject gratitude.
“That wasn’t a choice,” the leader tells him.
“But it’s what I choose.”
The bandit laughs. “Then it’s my lucky day. The bow and tent are worth five times that useless little runt.”
“What are you doing?” the khan asks his son, but the prince ignores his father and continues to stare down the bandits’ leader as one of the men grabs me by the arm and drags me over to the Kipchaks. Unbelievable. I couldn’t make this scenario up if I tried.
“We’ll take the tent,” Timur Khan insists.
My panic lasts only a moment, because the leader informs him, “It’s not your choice, old man.”
We stand there for an hour under guard while the rest of the bandits rob trinkets from our dead and load up all our supplies. How utterly bizarre to think of Prince Khalaf, Timur Khan, and myself as “we.”
The prince has not looked at his father once through any of this, nor has he looked at me, for that matter. He continues to watch the dismantling of our hope for survival as he presses a torn-off wad of his deel against the wound on his shoulder. I shiver in the dark beside him.
I’ll take the boy, he said. In my mind, I cup those words in my hands, fold them carefully, and place them inside the hollow pendant I wear.
For your ancestors.
We must also feed the living.
If kindness were a dagger, my heart would bleed itself dry. I doubt this soft-spoken, saintly boy will ever comprehend the staggering odds he just defied to earn my undying loyalty. Now I’m as powerless and directionless as a twig carried along on a swollen river thanks to him.
“Rotting carrion,” Timur Khan curses, “Why did you bring a gerege? That made us an easy mark.”
“It wasn’t mine. And it doesn’t matter anyway since it’s no longer in our possession.” Prince Khalaf looks drawn and pale.
“It’s not too late. Tell them now. You want the tent.”
“Not another word, Father. Not a word.” The prince sounds angry, even if his voice is as soft as ever. The khan, who is khan no more, grunts but shuts his big mouth.
6
THE HORIZON HAS GONE PINK BY the time we watch the bandits disappear into the forest. Once they’re out of sight, Prince Khalaf slumps against the tree trunk behind him and turns ashen.
“It’s a shoulder wound,” his father says. “You’ll be fine . . . except for the fact that you chose a useless slave over a bow or a tent.”
“You can’t see,” the prince says, his voice uncharacteristically cold.
“What was that?” Timur Khan snaps.
Prince Khalaf repeats clearly, “You. Can’t. See.”
The khan goes still and icy.
“You claimed it was your old hip wound keeping you out of the war with the Il-Khanids,” says the prince. “But that wasn’t it at all, was it? How long has this been going on?”
“You know nothing.”
“I know you fired an arrow through Nasan’s head. I know my friend is dead because of you and your pride.” Grief and anger roughen his voice.
I’ve been so busy contemplating my own dire circumstances that it takes me a moment to realize I’m listening to a conversation that is none of my business while gawking at what’s left of the Kipchak royal family. In my defense, it’s hard to focus on social niceties when grappling with the fact that I am now stuck in the middle of a mountainous forest with no food or shelter, having given my steadfast allegiance to a beggar prince and, by association, his unpardonably rude father. I discreetly step away, although where I’m going is a mystery to me.
“I was hit on the head,” the khan insists.
“I was the one who hit you on the head. I had to knock you out so that you wouldn’t do any more damage,” Prince Khalaf informs him.
I walk toward a thick stand of trees that lines a nearby stream, hoping the burbling water will drown out the conversation. I leave a long pause behind me, but as I hit the trees, I hear Timur Khan bark, “You!”
I freeze. It’s like he fired the word into my back. I turn around to find him glaring daggers in my direction. He sure looks like he can see to me.
“Yes, my lord?”
“Tend to the prince’s wound.”
Is it possible to blanch and flush at the same moment? I answer, “Yes, my lord,” at the same time Prince Khalaf protests, “I can tend to it myself,” which makes the situation all the more mortifying.
“No, you can’t,” says the khan. “Your worst wound is on the left shoulder. I can tell by the way you’re listing. Because I am not blind.”
The prince remains silent.
“Perhaps if you were to sit by the stream, my lord?” I suggest, gesturing to the water beyond the trees that outline the clearing of our camp, or rather what remains of our camp.
Prince Khalaf sighs, but he moves in the direction of the stream. As I turn to follow him, Timur Khan shouts, “Boy!”
I walk a couple of paces before it occurs to me that he’s referring to me, and I wince. Clearly, I’m not so good at this masquerading business. I turn around. “My lord?”
“If you so much as split one hair on that boy’s head, I’ll plunge my hand into your chest cavity, wrench your organs from your body, and take a bite out of your still-beating heart before your very eyes.”
The thing is, I think he could and would do that. I find it difficult to swallow for a moment. “Understood, my lord.”
“And keep your precious Song hands off him.”
“Yes, my lord,” I answer, although this will be difficult given the fact that I am about to attend to his son’s shoulder, may the gods and ancestors help me.
I find the prince kneeling by the stream as if in prayer. His back is to me and he doesn’t turn around when he hears my approach. He just says, “Leave me. I need a minute.”
I mull over this command. On the one hand, a prince has just told me to leave him alone. On the other hand, a khan ha
s ordered me to tend to this boy’s wounds and has threatened to eat my still-beating heart if I screw it up. It’s no contest. I step gingerly around to Prince Khalaf’s front side and look down at him.
He’s crying—and he begins to cry harder when he realizes I can see his tears. He turns his face away from me, but he can’t hide the wet tracks streaking down his cheek, the grimace of his mouth, the shaking of his chest.
So the last remaining prince of the Kipchak Khanate is not entirely perfect after all. That’s something of a relief to my staggeringly imperfect self, but his vulnerability makes him more human now, more likable. And I don’t want to like him.
Then I remember his voice saying, I’ll take the boy, and my heart hurts. I may not want to like him, but I do like him. Very much.
I crouch in front of him. “My lord?”
He turns his face away further.
“My lord, let me tend to your wound.” I’ve let my voice go too high. I sound like a girl, but I doubt he notices.
“Don’t tell him,” he says, his face still turned away, and I know he means his father.
A memory of my own father surfaces in my mind. She doesn’t shine at all, does she? he said to my mother. Do something with her. My heart clenches even harder.
“I won’t, my lord,” I reply.
“Don’t tell him I cried.”
“I won’t.”
“Miran, Jahangir, and now Nasan, all my men, not to mention my country. What am I going to do? I don’t know what to do.”
He looks to me as if I know the answer to his riddle.
I’m your problem, not your solution, I think with a pang of regret, but I certainly can’t tell him that. All I can do is give him empathy with my sad, sorry face. He wipes the sleeve of his good arm across his eyes and nose, takes a few deep breaths, and pulls himself together.
“I’ll need help getting this off,” he says, getting down to business. He gingerly unties the belt around his waist, moving with a troubling stiffness.
“Here, allow me, my lord.” I realize suddenly that I’m about to see his naked torso, that I’m going to have to touch him. My mortification pulls up a chair and settles in for the long haul. Touching a man other than my brother is as alien to me as holding a sword.
Even before I make contact, I can feel the heat of the prince’s body radiating from him. With unsteady hands, I finish untying the red silk belt, which falls away to the ground. I’m halfway through undoing the clasps along his shoulder and under his armpit when I realize that I’ve stopped breathing. I suck in a breath of air as quietly as I can so I don’t pass out as I grasp the front flap, and although I’m not touching his body at all, I can sense the hard shape of him beneath the wool as I peel it back, helping him shrug out of the right sleeve.
The left side is worse, just as Timur Khan said. I wonder if the prince might be wrong about his father’s eyesight. He grits his teeth as I remove the other half of the deel, but a groan of pain escapes his mouth. When I finally get the first layer off, he’s gone a sickly pale color and he’s panting.
There’s more blood than I realized, because most of it got trapped between the outer deel and the raw silk tunic beneath. The strength of the silk managed to stave off much of the attack, but without a knife I won’t be able to cut through the fabric to remove it. I’ll have to get it off over his head, and I’m thinking that this particular method is going to make the prince pass out in pure, hellish agony.
He takes a deep breath through his nose and says, “Let’s get it over with.”
“May I remove your turban to get the tunic off?” I ask, my voice hardly above a whisper. I have no idea who has the right to remove what in the Muslim world, but I’m pretty sure that if he knew I was a girl, I wouldn’t be allowed to touch him like this, and I definitely would not be allowed to remove clothing. Of course, the Mongols have their own way of incorporating others’ religions into their own. Even so, I have to chastise myself for stomping all over his beliefs like this. Besides, I know for a fact that this whole scenario is completely forbidden from my own standpoint, whatever his beliefs are.
The prince nods even as the memory of my mother shakes her head in utter disapproval in my conscience. It’s not like he can take it off himself, I reason. I doubt he can reach his left arm higher than his shoulder at this point.
I unwind the cloth around his head, and a thick sheath of glossy, black hair tumbles down his back. It’s glorious, actually, the kind of hair a woman would wish for, the kind of hair I would wish for instead of the baby-fine mess I was born with. I fold the turban cloth and carefully set it down on the driest patch of ground I can find.
As the sun rises higher, wisps of steam billow off his tunic. I help him work his right arm through the armhole and slowly scrunch the fabric upward to take it off over his head. The heel of my hand brushes the bare skin of his ribs, and his body responds, jerking away as if I’ve tickled him.
“Sorry,” I say, mortified.
“It’s all right.”
His tunic is wadded up in my hand, halfway between his waist and his shoulder, revealing the lean, taut muscles of his stomach and a strip of hair running along his breastbone. My cheeks burn with embarrassment, and I have to remind myself to keep going.
As we get his right arm out of the tunic, I can see that his arm and shoulder are badly bruised, but even so, everything up to this point goes more smoothly than I would have thought. And then I realize that the silk around the left shoulder wound is stuck to his skin and clotted thickly with blood.
“My lord . . .”
“On the count of three.”
I nod, and because I know he can’t manage it, I take his beautiful hair in my hands and pull it gently over his right shoulder. My face burns even more hotly, if that were possible.
“One . . . ,” he says. “Two . . .”
I rip off the tunic before he gets to three, thinking the element of surprise might help.
It doesn’t.
He cries out and falls forward, pressing his head into the silt loam of the stream bank. He’s making awful sounds with each breath, but he does manage to avoid weeping. I’m not sure what I should do. Should I help him up? Should I let him recover for a few minutes?
“My lord?” I ask tentatively.
“What’s going on over there?” Timur Khan yells from the camp. “That slave had better not be as worthless as I think he is.”
Oh, heavens, I hope my still-beating heart remains in my chest cavity after all this is said and done.
“It’s all right,” Khalaf calls back, even though he looks anything but all right. With audible effort, he manages to push himself back into a kneeling position with his right hand. Fresh blood is seeping out of a straight slit in his shoulder. I cover my mouth at the sight of it.
“I’m sorry, my lord.”
He hasn’t quite caught his breath to answer, but he shakes his head.
“Shall I clean it now?” I ask.
“Yes,” he breathes.
I cup the cold mountain water in my hands and pour it on the wound. He moans again, but gasps for me to keep going. I pour clean water from my cupped hands over the wound until blood no longer stains the skin on each side of the wound and my fingers go numb with cold.
“Don’t tell my father you’re doing this.” His voice is nearly as ashen as his face.
“What, my lord?”
“Washing the wound with water. Most of my people believe that water is a sacred spirit. My blood pollutes the water.”
This boy is a saint. How could his blood pollute anything? “That’s a Mongol belief, isn’t it?” I say. “I thought your father was a Muslim now.”
“My father is many things,” he answers in a threadbare voice. “I keep a needle and some sinew in the pocket of my deel. Can you stitch it up?”
“I think I can, my lord. I know how to sew.” Badly, I add in my head.
“That’s all this is,” he tells me. “It’s just sewing.”
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I riffle through his pockets until I find the needle and sinew, and then I warm my fingers in my armpits for a minute before beginning. At the first jab of the needle, he stiffens and breathes hard through his nose.
“My lord?”
“Keep going. Just keep going.”
I choose my pace carefully, quickly enough to get it over with and slowly enough to get it done right, not that I know what “right” is in this situation. I try not to think too hard on exactly what it is I’m sewing together. The prince keeps his breathing slow and even.
I understand that her embroidery is also dreadful, my father’s voice says in my mind. I push it away. This is not embroidery. I can do this.
“I owe you thanks,” the prince says.
I pause in my work.
“Don’t stop,” he commands, adding softly, “please.”
I keep working. “You don’t owe me anything, my lord.”
“You helped me when I needed it most, when you fired your arrows. We’d be dead if it weren’t for you.”
The enormity of the night presses down on me. “It was nothing,” I mumble.
“It wasn’t ‘nothing,’” he insists, but I don’t respond. “I thought you had run off.”
“I’m still here.”
Forever. A slave to my dying day. I don’t want to think about that now, so I focus on the stitching, on the needle and sinew moving in and out through skin and muscle. My hand moves with the same cadence and rhythm of my mother’s hand if not as elegantly.
“I’m the one who should be thanking you, my lord,” I say impulsively before I immediately regret having said anything at all. I wonder if he can hear the crushing shame in my voice.
“It was nothing,” he says, repeating my words back to me, and even in his pain and exhaustion, he manages to smile at me, that same smile from the night we met. At this moment, I loathe myself. I am lower than dirt, truly I am.
