The Bird and the Blade

by Megan Bannen

  “Jinghua,” Timur says, coaxing, even as my soul stretches thinner, even as I float farther away. “Jinghua, come on now. The sun is rising. Wake up, little bird.”

  “She’s dead, old man,” Zhang tells him, his own spirit radiating fear of me, of what I might become to him in death.

  Imagine, fearing me.

  Or me, says my brother beside me above the world we leave behind. I take his hand in mine.

  Timur throws back his shaggy head and cries out, a sound so primal it speaks to the falcon in the sky, the buffalo in the desolate wilds. He lunges for Zhang, but the guards kick him back down as the chancellor darts out of the way.

  Khan no more, utterly powerless, my old goat pushes himself back up onto his aching knees, his shoulders stooped in defeat. He places a hand on his son’s shoulder and urges him to ease the burden of my body back down to the ground. When Khalaf reaches for me again, Timur holds him back.

  “She’s gone,” he says softly. “She’s gone now.”

  Khalaf can’t hide the wet tracks streaking down his cheeks, the grimace of his mouth, the shaking of his chest. He remembers the feeling of my hands stitching him back together in the mountains.

  Don’t tell him I cried.

  I won’t, my lord, I promise him.

  From all around, silent prayers weave into a great spirit song that buoys me and Weiji farther upward and outward. The only voice that is absent is Turandokht’s. She’s all hollowed out. Her utter isolation and loneliness pour into all her empty places.

  I want to go home now, Jinghua. Can you take me home? Weiji asks me.

  Yes, I tell him. I know the way.

  The men come forward then, the guards who had been keeping me and Khalaf apart. One of them picks up my little body and carries it out of the square and toward the palace while the other one hovers at his shoulder as if I were someone who mattered.

  Khalaf and Timur stay where they are, kneeling side by side in stunned disbelief by the puddle of blood that once pulsed within my body.

  What remains of me stretches two ways: the part that longs for the body and the part that longs for the people I leave behind, like a slingshot, pulled and unreleased with only Weiji’s hand to anchor me.

  Another imperial guard unit arrives on the scene with five foreigners dressed in the yellow standard of the Il-Khanate.

  “Forgive us for intruding at such a delicate moment, my khatun, but we have the name you seek,” says one of Hulegu Il-Khan’s men.

  “Yes?” she says flatly. “Speak.”

  “This man is Khalaf, son of Timur Khan of the Kipchak Khanate.”

  “You’re certain?” she asks the guard.

  “Yes, my khatun.”

  Turandokht watches my body grow smaller and smaller as her guards carry me away before she strides to Khalaf where he kneels on the ground, staring at my blood. “Khalaf, son of Timur,” she calls down to him.

  The face he raises to look up at hers is filthy and streaked with tears. He is sick with failure and grief.

  You died for nothing, his soul cries to mine.

  No, I didn’t, I answer, but he can’t hear me now.

  “Khalaf,” says Turandokht, “I have unriddled you.”

  “Then may you triumph in my death.” With the lithe grace of a tiger, he leaps to his feet, takes her by the back of the head, and presses his lips hard on hers. There’s nothing tender about it. It’s a vindictive gesture and a self-excoriation. He smears my blood on her robe, her cheek, her lips.

  The guards land upon him, ripping him from her as Turandokht orders, “Don’t hurt him! I want him alive!”

  Khalaf doesn’t fight the guards who jostle and bind him again. He only regards Turandokht with a cold hatred.

  Her victory tastes like ashes in her mouth. She looks to the east, where an eyelash of sun glints over the horizon. Zhang, sensing victory, oozes up behind her and says from his respectful distance, “It’s dawn, my khatun.”

  “It’s dawn,” she agrees wearily, regarding Khalaf, who glares back at her. If a man could kill with his eyes, Turandokht would be dead.

  “After all this, you give away your life so easily?” she asks him.

  “Take it,” says Khalaf. “I’m not afraid to die.”

  In his heart, for this one terrible moment, he wants only to join me where I have gone.

  Not yet, I tell him.

  There’s one last stretch of my spirit, taut as a drawn bow. As the sun rises, slaves arrive with one more imperial sedan chair. They pull back the curtains to reveal the Great Khan, who struggles out of his transport with their assistance. Turandokht’s sickly father surveys the scene and marvels at the macabre sight before him.

  “I know his name, Father,” Turandokht tells him without shifting her gaze. She nods to the bloodied prince of the Kipchak Khanate and announces, “This day, I will wed Khalaf, son of Timur.”

  The bow snaps. I hold my brother’s hand and together we scatter into eternity.

  And I am everywhere and I am myself and I am nothing and I am changed.

  And I am what I have never thought to be.

  Epilogue

  A VOW IS A VOW. THEY married. Throughout the known world, people are calling it the golden age of the empire. How could it be otherwise with two such rulers?

  He is who he is, so he’s forgiven her. He has always sought to learn what he could not understand. She is no different. She was a puzzle, and now he understands her, and he respects her.

  He doesn’t love her, though.

  He’ll never love her.

  His father chooses neither to understand her nor to respect her. He does tolerate her, and that’s pretty good for the old goat. He’s completely blind now and nearly deaf as well. Sometimes, when he’s not busy goosing the plum-cheeked maid who pushes his wheelchair along the gravel path, he thinks of me. He finds my voice somewhere in his cloudy mind and holds my hand in his. When his bones ache in the darkness, he calls to me. He tells me how he longs to follow me to where I have gone. When he calls to me, I come to him quietly in the breeze that billows in his long, white beard and tickles the thick hairs of his outrageous eyebrows.

  And sometimes, she calls to me, too. I am, for her, the sole recipient of her sadness and loneliness, her love for a man who can hardly bear to look at her. When she calls to me, I am the lily in the pool, the rustle of leaves. I ride before her on a fast horse.

  One day, she’s brave enough to speak of me. They are walking side by side in the garden. They’re so rarely alone like this.

  “I never even knew her name,” she says.

  He remains silent for a few paces before he answers, “Jinghua. Her name was Jinghua. It means ‘illustrious capital city.’” But in his mind, he still calls me “jìnghuā.” Quiet Flower.

  He walks ahead of her. He remembers that he kissed me once, and his lips turn up at the memory, and then they fall again. He still feels the dull ache of grief.

  He’s forgiven her, but he hasn’t managed to forgive himself yet. I wish he would, but his hair grows gray at his temples now, so I doubt he ever will. Not in this life, at least.

  In his private chamber, he had a woodworker from Lin’an install a little altar carved with a motif of jasmine flowers. He places a small, finely painted porcelain cup on its polished surface and fills it with steaming tea or rich wine. He sets out offerings of rice and cakes on a pretty saucer.

  And apples.

  Always apples.

  After his evening prayers, he cleans the dishes himself and dries them carefully with a square of fine muslin.

  When he calls to me, I am the scent of jasmine in the garden, the word on the page, the birdsong at his window, his name on the wind.

  When he needs me, I am there.

  Author’s Note

  One day during the summer of 2008, I was listening to the opera Turandot and bristling over the slave girl’s tragic demise when, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, I suddenly thought, Hey, this story would make a
great young adult novel!

  Because nothing says great young adult novel like opera.

  Ten years and ninety-two thousand words later, my outrage over the death of a fictional character has turned into a reinterpretation of an eighteenth-century French tale set in the thirteenth-century Mongol Empire. There’s a little fact and a whole lot of fiction in these pages. Should you care to separate the two, read on.

  THE ORIGINS OF THE STORY

  The Bird and the Blade is a retelling of “Prince Khalaf and the Princess of China,” which first appeared in a collection of tales called The Thousand and One Days. The author, a French scholar named François Pétis de la Croix, claimed that the book was a translation of a Persian text given to him by a dervish.

  The story bears a strong resemblance to a tale from Haft Paykar by the medieval Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. In this version of events, a beautiful princess with too many suitors walls herself up inside a mountain fortress. Any man who wishes to marry her has to make his way past killer automatons, then answer three riddles correctly. The point here is that a great king, in addition to being a military badass, must also possess wisdom.

  Pétis de la Croix’s tale has been adapted into many plays and operas, most notably by Carlo Gozzi, Friedrich Schiller, and Giacomo Puccini. These Western versions view the story through a more misogynistic lens. Here, Turandokht is a viper, a female full of pride who must be brought to heel by her male counterpart, Khalaf. The retellings tend to pick up the story at the point when Khalaf arrives in Peking (Khanbalik in my version), ditching the long journey and great suffering that preceded it.

  The slave girl character appears in every iteration of the tale. In most cases, she is Turandokht’s slave and the instrument by which the princess learns Khalaf’s name. While she’s not a very likable character in these stories, she is, in my view, the most complicated and compelling. A princess-turned-slave who loathes Turandokht for destroying her family, she still forks over Khalaf’s name to the ice queen when she realizes that he’ll never return her love.

  Puccini and his librettists did something different with this character: They made her the loyal servant of Timur and Khalaf. Complicating matters further is the fact that Puccini died before finishing the work. Composer Franco Alfano completed the score, but when the opera premiered at La Scala on April 25, 1926, the conductor, Arturo Toscanini, set down the baton after the slave girl’s funeral procession, turned to the audience, and announced that this was the point at which the maestro had died. That night, the opera ended right there, and if you ask me, that’s where it should have ended anyway.

  THE MONGOL EMPIRE

  The Mongol empire, which began in the early thirteenth century and extended well into the fourteenth, grew to envelop most of the Asian continent as well as parts of Europe. While I set The Bird and the Blade in this particular time and place in history, it’s important to understand that I took many liberties with the facts in the telling of this tale. For instance, while the Il-Khanate and the Kipchak Khanate fought against each other, the Il-Khanids never defeated the Kipchaks or vice versa. Additionally, Timur and his older sons would have had multiple wives and many children, but I have chosen to omit them for the sake of narrative clarity. Khubilai Khan, who was the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire at the time, had several children and was succeeded by one of his grandsons. And Zhang would not have counted down the minutes and seconds after Turandokht posed each riddle, since the basic unit of time measurement was the kè, roughly equivalent to fifteen minutes. These are just a few examples of the many, many liberties I took with history for the sake of fiction.

  I should also mention that the story of Khalaf’s mother, Bibi Hanem, is anachronistic to the time period. This legend is linked to Amir Timur (better known in English as Tamerlane), a fourteenth-century Turco-Mongol conqueror who may have inspired the character Timur. The blue domes of Samarkand were built under Amir Timur’s rule, which makes them anachronistic to the story as well.

  That said, many people and events referenced here are real, although I have condensed several decades of history into a span of three years. The descendants of Genghis Khan’s son Tolui did stage a coup d’état to take over the position of Great Khan. Qaidu, a descendant of Genghis Khan’s son Ogodei, did fight against the Toluids (and his daughter Khutulun is thought by some to have inspired the character Turandokht). The sacking of Baghdad did kick off a war between the khan of the Kipchak Khanate and Hulegu Il-Khan, although that event occurred in 1258, not 1281. Finally, the route taken by Jinghua, Khalaf, and Timur across the Mongol Empire closely resembles that of Marco Polo’s famous journey.

  One final note on the Mongols: They were remarkably tolerant of others’ spiritual beliefs, and they financially supported a wide variety of religious institutions. Some of the early rulers of the empire were Nestorian Christians, but the Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty eventually adopted Buddhism while the Kipchaks converted to Islam. Pétis de la Croix makes it clear that Khalaf is a devout Muslim, but subsequent versions of the story tend to erase this facet of the tale. I thought it important to reinsert the prince’s unwavering faith into the story as one of the character traits that makes Khalaf the stellar human being he is.

  THE SONG (SUNG) DYNASTY

  The Song Dynasty of China is generally divided into two eras: the Northern Song and the Southern Song. The Northern Song Dynasty existed from 960 to 1127, when it was defeated by the Jin Dynasty. The Song moved their capital south to Lin’an (modern-day Hangzhou) and were conquered by the Mongols in 1279. The Song period is associated with a strong adherence to neo-Confucianism, a renewed dedication to living by secular Confucian ideals within a highly stratified social structure.

  Once again, taking any part of this novel as historical fact would be a bit like viewing “Hansel and Gretel” as a tract on German history. For example, Jinghua would probably have had her feet bound, but since that would make her journey across most of the Asian continent impossible, I have omitted it from the story. Also, Jinghua could never have accessed the Song or Yuan palaces as she does in this novel. Only the ruler and his consorts could live in a palace, which was heavily and carefully guarded. Although the Mongols did conquer the Song, events did not transpire as described in this book. In reality, the Mongols were the aggressors, not the Song, and the surviving members of the Song imperial family were allowed to live out their lives in exile, not slavery.

  Poor little Emperor Bing did drown, though. When it was clear that the Song had lost their last battle against the Mongols—a naval defeat—a Song official carried the boy over the side of the ship rather than let him fall into Mongol hands.

  LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE IN THE BIRD AND THE BLADE

  In an attempt to anchor The Bird and the Blade in the thirteenth-century Mongol Empire, I have had the characters in the novel use non-English terms on occasion. While I have tried to incorporate elements of both Hanyu (Mandarin Chinese) and Mongolian into an English-language novel, I have made a few word choices that don’t translate well. I’m afraid “old goat” just isn’t something a Song girl would call even the most crotchety of overthrown khans.

  The characters also frequently refer to poetry and other works that would have been available to them during this period. In chapter 10, Khalaf quotes several lines from Nizami’s Haft Paykar to Abbas, paraphrased from Charles Edward Wilson’s translation. In chapter 13, he quotes several Persian poems, including “The Newborn” by Farid al-Din Attar in my own wording paraphrased from Coleman Barks’s translation; “The Parrot of Baghdad” by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, translated by E. H. Palmer; “Guardians” by Saadi Shirazi, translated by E. B. Eastwick; and Laili and Majnun, the epic poem by Nizami, translated by James Atkinson. In chapter 14, Khalaf tells Jinghua two stories from Haft Paykar, which I have paraphrased with the aid of Julie Scott Meisami’s translation, and The Seven Wise Princesses: A Medieval Persian Epic by Wafa Tarnowska.

  There are references throughout the book to a quatrain from
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which I adapted from the translation by Edward FitzGerald. FitzGerald’s translation is not terribly faithful to the original Persian text, but it is considered a great work of English-language poetry in its own right.

  Khalaf also quotes the Qur’an on several occasions, including 94:5 in chapter 7, 90:12–18 in chapter 8, and 42:10 in chapter 18. All English translations were taken from The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr et al. Additionally, Khalaf quotes Sahih Muslim, 2564, in the prologue, English translation found in A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam by I. A. Ibrahim.

  Jinghua sings excerpts from several poems by the Song poet Li Qingzhao, translated into English by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, including “Sorrow of Departure” in chapter 13, “Remorse” in chapter 16, “The Beauty of White Chrysanthemums” in chapter 18, and “A Morning Dream” in chapter 29. In chapter 27, she listens to a recitation of a Tang Dynasty poem called “A Woman’s Hundred Years,” translated by Patricia Ebrey and Lily Hwa. In chapter 28, Zhang recites “What Plant Is Not Faded?” from The Book of Songs, said to be compiled by Confucius, translated by Arthur Waley.

  Throughout the book, Jinghua sings a Chinese folk song called “Mòlìhuā.” The song is anachronistic to the time period, but Puccini threaded this melody throughout his opera, which is why I chose to use it in the novel. I consulted several translations and tweaked the wording to suit the story.

  Also in the opera, Turandot (Turandokht) sings an aria called “In questa Reggia” (“In this Kingdom”) in which she delivers her argument for shunning men and marriage. It occurred to me that one of the most powerful women in Western history faced a similar struggle. For this reason, Turandokht’s speech in chapter 1 borrows heavily from two speeches by Queen Elizabeth I of England: her “Marriage Speech to Parliament in 1559” and her “Response to Parliamentary Delegation on Her Marriage in 1566.”