by Megan Bannen
“It was a part of a larger piece,” I tell him, “an incense burner from my family’s ancestral shrine. It broke off. Obviously.”
“How?”
I remember how it felt when I smashed it, how the slim shards of porcelain skittered across the floor, my entire world shattering right along with it. Khalaf’s gaze drifts back to my face, and his dark eyes go liquid with sympathy.
“You don’t have to answer that,” he says gently.
“Thank you.” I sniff a couple of times and pull myself together. I don’t want to remember how the duck’s head broke free. That life and this one—the one I’m living with Khalaf in the present—I don’t want them touching. I don’t want him in any way associated with what came before.
“It’s all I have left of my old life,” I explain, taking my hand from his, tucking the pendant back into place, hiding it between my clothes and my heart.
“Thank you,” he says. “You honor me with this.”
I nod. I keep my gaze on the ground where he snuffed out the cycles of the moon.
“Will you sing tonight?” he asks after a moment. It’s a purposeful distraction, and I cling to it for dear life. I sing Li Qingzhao’s “Remorse” for him to the tune of “Rouged Lips,” my voice so soft that only he can hear it in the caravanserai courtyard.
I fully admit to being snobbish when it comes to the kingdoms under Mongol rule. They pale so pathetically in comparison to Lin’an. But even I have to admit that Samarkand is beautiful, an oasis of blue domes and towers. This city looks like the sky cut off a piece of itself and set it down here on earth. The caravanserai courtyard boasts an ornate fountain at its heart with arched doorways surrounding it on all sides. Even the camels look elegant here.
I hate the sight of it.
This is where the present ends and the future begins. This is where the road diverges into many paths, and none of us wants to be on the same one.
I know it. Khalaf knows it. Even the damn camel trader knows it.
“The Kipchaks say this is where we part ways,” Mazdak tells me as I help him stable the camels at the caravanserai. “I assume you’re going with them?”
“That’s right,” I answer, but now that he’s asked the question, I realize that I am also assuming I have a choice, that if I decide not to run away, from this point Timur and Khalaf will take me with them.
Assumptions can be wrong.
I leave Mazdak to finish up and head to our sleeping quarters. I’ve got my hand on the door when I hear Timur’s voice on the other side say, “I know you’re fond of the girl. I don’t dislike her myself. But men in our position don’t have the luxury of choosing what we do and do not want in this world. We have other, larger matters to contend with.”
“I made a promise,” Khalaf says. “I promised her that we wouldn’t sell her. I’m not going back on a promise. And if you ask me, we have no right to sell her in the first place.”
“Well, I didn’t ask you, and it’s time you learned that the promise of a khan is worth very little.”
“Khan of what? Look at us, Father. Do we look like khans?”
“You owe it to your people to survive and prosper so that you can come back to liberate them.”
If Khalaf answers, I can’t hear him.
“We’re heading into war. Do you want to take her into battle? Is that what’s best for her?”
Silence.
“We’ll see that she finds respectable service,” Timur continues. “We won’t just sell her to some brothel. You’ll be able to set your mind at ease on that point.”
Silence again.
“Is the Kipchak Khanate really worth less than one girl?” Timur asks.
I step away because I don’t want to hear Khalaf’s answer.
The truth hurts.
I’m halfway down the hall formulating my escape plan when I hear the door burst open behind me.
“Jinghua,” Khalaf’s voice rings out, loud, bouncing off the stone walls. I turn around to find him storming toward me.
Timur stands at the door. “We’re not through here.”
“Yes, we are,” Khalaf answers gruffly without looking back. He doesn’t break stride but takes me by the arm and drags me along with him, saying, “Come on. We need supplies.”
“Fine. Be angry. You know I’m right. Enjoy your outing, because it’s going to be your last,” Timur shouts after us, his voice echoing off the arched ceiling as Khalaf drags me out into the courtyard. The glaring sun hurts my eyes when we emerge from the darkened hallway, but Khalaf doesn’t stop.
“My lord?”
It’s hard to keep up with his longer gait, and his hand is too tight on my elbow. I pull myself free, and he finally stops. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands and says, “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
I wonder for what transgression he’s apologizing, but I don’t ask for details. Honestly, I don’t want to know. I’m terrified to know.
“Should we go to the bazaar?” I ask like the cowardly little mouse I am.
“Did you hear that?” he asks bluntly. “Back there, did you hear what we were talking about?”
I don’t answer, but I guess I don’t need to, because he says, “We are not going to sell you. You came with us by choice, and that means you stay with us by choice or you leave us by choice.” He points his finger each time he says “choice” as if his hand were a dagger aimed at his father’s intentions. “I made a promise to you that I had no right to make, because you never belonged to us to begin with. Do you understand?”
In this moment, he is the Khalaf I glimpsed in the Caucasus: pared down, intense, dangerous, and for reasons that are so far beyond me I can’t even begin to comprehend them, I want to wrap my arms around his neck and press him against the courtyard wall and kiss him hard. I’ve never even wanted to kiss someone normally, much less hard. What on earth is happening to me?
Why taste honey when it has been poisoned? the slave girl in Khalaf’s story asked her king. Why want something you absolutely cannot have? I don’t want to want him.
But I do.
There’s no denying it, not to myself anyway.
“What are you saying?” I ask him, my bewilderment on full display. “Are you giving me my freedom?”
He finally softens. His shoulders relent, but the intensity of my wanting doesn’t.
“I’m supposed to walk the steep pass, remember?” he says. “I can’t be a companion of the right if you are not free. Your freedom was never mine to give or take. That is the will of God.”
His words melt me. Just when I think my life can’t get any messier, it does. “Thank you,” I tell him. It’s like taking the apple out of his hand all over again.
“I know how much you want to go home, Jinghua, wherever home is for you. You’ve never said it, but I know.”
To be known. To be unknowable. What does it matter? I have so few truths to give him anyway. I may as well give him this one.
“Lin’an. I’m from Lin’an.”
“Lin’an,” he repeats as if I’ve handed him a gift, as if the word itself were made of gold. “I wish I could take you there.”
“There is no ‘there’ to go back to, my lord. Not for me.” I wipe my face with my sleeve and let myself sink into the cold, hard truth of it. Even if I made it past the Pamir mountain range to the east, there’s no way I’d survive the journey on my own. And if by some miracle I found myself in Lin’an, what then? I’d be a beggar on the streets or worse. Why did it take me two years and thousands of lĭ to understand this? Maybe Khalaf would be alive and well and studying at university if I had realized from the beginning that home was dead and gone.
Now, home is crossing deserts and mountains and rivers beside Khalaf. I don’t want to lose that any sooner than I have to, so I take his right hand in both of mine. It’s heavier than I expect, rougher, harder. His eyes widen at the gesture.
“I choose to stay with you,” I tell him. I deliberately do not call him my lord.
>
His chest rises and falls. He swallows so hard I can see his larynx bob under the taut skin of his neck.
I want to kiss that, too.
Jinghua! I scream at myself.
He blinks. He nods.
I release his hand and say, “Supplies?”
“Supplies,” he agrees, clearing his throat. We head to the stables as Mazdak is coming out, and the trader rolls his eyes in irritation as we ask for a camel to load up at the bazaar.
17
THE MARKET SPRAWLS IN THE SHADOW of a mosque whose domes are covered in lapis lazuli. Khalaf and I stock up on melons, dried apricots, peppers, onions, and chickpeas.
“I thought you might want a change from the lentils,” he comments to me as we watch the vendor shovel scoops of the latter into a huge cotton bag for us. His knowing grin makes my cheeks go hot. I wonder how long he’s known the depths of my lentil-inspired despair.
“You don’t miss much, do you?” I say.
“Really? I’d say I’m missing a great deal.” His eyes skate across my lips before he looks away. Oh, my heaven, if his eyes make my skin burn like this, what on earth would his lips do?
Jinghua! I berate myself again.
As I struggle internally to overcome my pointless attraction to the prince of the Kipchak Khanate, Khalaf’s focus shifts to a public notice pasted on the mosque. He hands me the reins of the camel and our coin purse, and he walks over to read it.
I pay the vendor when he’s finished with our order, and I lead the camel over to stand beside Khalaf, who hasn’t moved away from the notice even though he could have read it in its entirety ten times over by now. It’s written in several languages, including Hanyu:
Let it be known that this is the law: 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. If his answers prove satisfactory, she will consent to his becoming her husband. But if the reverse, he shall forfeit his life for his temerity. This the Great Khan has sworn to the Earth and to the Eternal Blue Sky.
Turandokht.
Her name hasn’t come up in weeks, but she never stops haunting me, never relinquishes her death grip on my life, as malevolent as any evil spirit. My hand strangles the camel’s reins as I seethe at the sight of her name.
There at the very bottom of the page is more salt to rub into the wound: Edict of Chancellor Zhang by order of the Great Khan of the Great Yuan Dynasty and the Empire of the Mongols.
I curse under my breath before I realize that Khalaf still stands beside me, only now his eyes are no longer on the edict. They’re on me, noticing things I wish to hide.
Like the fact that I can read.
“What does it say?” I ask clumsily.
His eyes remain narrowed. “Nothing.”
I’m about to try to wriggle my way out of this blunder when I look over Khalaf’s shoulder and notice a group of Mongol warriors milling about in the area of the market we just vacated.
“My lord, what is Hulegu Il-Khan’s standard?”
He grows very still. His lips hardly move when he answers, “Red on a yellow background.”
I nod to the men interrogating the chickpea seller we visited not five minutes ago, soldiers wearing the standard of Hulegu Il-Khan, as brazen as you please in the Chagatai Khanate. Khalaf surreptitiously peers over his shoulder, then turns back to me. He takes the camel’s reins from my hand and says, very quietly, “Stay calm. No one has seen my father in town except maybe the caravanserai keeper. We walk back to our quarters, and we stay there, inside.”
“Have you seen a Kipchak merchant—an old man—possibly traveling with a grown son?” one of the soldiers is asking the farmer.
They know Khalaf is alive. This is getting worse by the second.
The farmer laughs. “Every other man who comes through here is an old Kipchak merchant with a grown son. Now, do you mind? I’m running a business here.”
That response doesn’t go over well. I flinch as one of the warriors kicks over the cart, sending the round beans sailing through the air and spilling over the dirt. The leader yanks the vendor by the front of his tunic out into the main thoroughfare in a kicking, screaming cloud of dust. Now that they’ve created a scene, now that all buying and selling has come to a full and complete halt, the warrior holding the vendor announces for all to hear, “We speak for Hulegu Il-Khan by the blessing of Turandokht Khatun. We are looking for an old man—a Kipchak Mongol posing as a merchant. He may have his grown son with him.”
I’m frozen in place. There must be an arban of ten hunting Khalaf down, him and Timur. The Il-Khanids aren’t just waiting on the border. They’re right here. With Turandokht’s approval. Her long arm reaches halfway around the world to slap me down. I want to throw my head back and howl my outrage to the Mongols’ Eternal Blue Sky.
“How about you, girl?” the leader says to me, dropping the skinny chickpea seller off to the side. “Seen an old Kipchak and his son? He’s a big man, hard to miss.”
I’m so alarmed that my ears start ringing.
“Go,” I whisper to Khalaf without moving my lips, praying he can hear me.
“No!” he hisses, loud and clear even though his back is to me.
I don’t give him a choice. I step forward and answer the soldier. “No, sir.” To my relief, I can hear Khalaf moving on behind me, taking the camel with him.
The soldier swaggers a few paces in my direction. “Are you sure about that?”
I piss myself, just a tiny bit, and nod.
“Why are you bothering with her? She’s not even a little pretty,” one of his fellows calls over his shoulder, and the other men laugh.
“She’s got an air about her. She’s striking,” the leader argues.
“Forget this. We’ll catch them on the road north before they make it back to the Kipchak Khanate. What are they going to do? Outrun us and Turandokht’s men?”
They all laugh again and find a prettier girl to torment, leaving me sweating out my panic with a carpet of chickpeas beneath my feet.
I want to run. I want to go tearing back to the caravanserai to make sure Khalaf is alive and well and still in the world. But I know that would draw attention, so once I’m certain the soldiers aren’t looking, I make myself walk back to the caravanserai on a meandering route.
My feet may wander, but my mind does not. Or maybe it’s simply my heart informing my mind that the decision has been made, and logic be damned.
I’m not going home.
My goal has moved outside myself.
I’m going to keep Khalaf alive. That’s it. Pure and simple. He’s not going to follow his father’s mad plan to return to the Kipchak Khanate. He’s not going to Khanbalik to face Turandokht’s riddles. He’s going to find this Qaidu person, and he is going to live out his life in relative peace. And I am going to make that happen.
If he isn’t dead already, I think in sick terror.
A good half hour has passed by the time I get back. When I step into our quarters and find Khalaf and Timur playing a game of cards with Mazdak as if they had nothing better to do to pass the time, my knees nearly give out with relief. Khalaf closes his eyes when he sees me walk in. His cards vibrate with the shaking of his hands.
Mazdak serendipitously excuses himself to pee, leaving me, Khalaf, and Timur alone for a few minutes. It’s clear that Khalaf has managed to fill in his father about the fact that Hulegu Il-Khan has sent men here to catch him with the approval of Turandokht Khatun. I add the nail in the coffin and pray he doesn’t shoot the messenger.
“They said they would capture you on the northern road to the Kipchak Khanate, my lord.”
“Rotting carrion!” Timur points an accusatory finger at Khalaf. “If you say, ‘I told you so,’ I will rip your balls off.”
I can see Khalaf offer up a prayer to his god before he says calmly, “What now?”
Timur tosses his cards on the floor in disgust. “We stick with Mazda
k. We keep heading east, and we try to find Qaidu. You can’t tell me Hulegu Il-Khan is going to follow us past the Pamirs.”
Yes, yes, and yes. This will all be excellent news if we manage to escape from Samarkand with our lives.
“Are you sure Qaidu will ally himself with you at this point?” asks Khalaf. “Why not appeal directly to the Great Khan, tell him your side of the story? What do we have to lose?”
Of course Khalaf wants to go to Khanbalik. Why run away from Hulegu Il-Khan when he can run toward perfect, beautiful, brilliant Turandokht Khatun, who, apparently, wants to kill the Kipchaks, too? It’s ridiculous how much the very idea makes my chest hurt. Well, it’s not going to happen. I won’t let it happen.
“Are you kidding me?” says Timur. “With his daughter sending men after us? Who knows where the Great Khan stands?”
Khalaf narrows his eyes to the point where I wonder how he can even see. I’m glad I’m not the one on the other end of that suspicious gaze for a change. “You’ve been avoiding the Great Khan from the very beginning,” he says, “and now his daughter has sent men to hunt you down, too. Why?”
“Don’t be so dramatic. I’m not worried about some girl’s milk-blooded army. We’ll try Qaidu. I have my reasons.”
“Would you care to share those reasons with me?” Khalaf asks.
Timur answers with stone-faced silence. His son shakes his head and rises to his feet. “I need some air.”
“Did you have a better plan?” Timur challenges him.
I think of Khalaf standing in front of the edict before I saw the il-khan’s men. Let it be known that this is the law. . . . He licks his lips, but he says, “No, my lord.”
“Then stop sulking.”
Khalaf peeks his head out into the hallway. He must not see Mazdak returning yet because he tells Timur, “There’s one more order of business we need to discuss.”
Timur crosses his thick arms over his even thicker chest. “Oh, here we go: the slave.”
I love it when they talk about my fate in front of me. “I’m right here,” I say.
