She shook her head and took a few steps closer. She could almost touch his naked back. “No,” she said, which wasn’t entirely true. The servants had been reluctant to speak clearly about what had happened in the throne room, which spoke quite plainly about what had happened.
With sudden rage, he jabbed his sword into the heart of the tree. His fury startled Lian, made her jump back like a frightened animal. “What am I doing here?” he said, whirling on her. His face was distorted by his anger and confusion.
Lian chose her words with care. “You were sent by the Khagan’s brother, to help the empire.”
“How?” Gansukh demanded. “By becoming a lapdog of the Khagan’s court? Am I supposed to be more like…like him?”
“Munokhoi?” Lian shook her head. “No. You are nothing like him.”
Gansukh yanked his sword free of the tree and, somewhat ruefully, ran his fingers along the edge, checking for nicks. “What am I, then?” he mused quietly. “Chucai admonishes me for being a hunter. Am I supposed to set aside everything that I have done, that I have learned, so that I may be more likable to the Khagan? How does that help the empire?”
Lian approached him and placed a hand on his bare shoulder. He almost shuddered at the touch, as if he had been expecting her to attack him. His muscles were tense, his bare skin hot beneath her hand.
He completed his examination of his sword. “If the Khagan is all-seeing and wise, then why does he not see Munokhoi for the sheep-killing dog he is?” he wondered. “And Master Chucai. He taught the Khagan’s father so much, and the Khagan does not…” Gansukh abruptly stopped, and when he glanced back at Lian, he couldn’t hold her gaze. She sensed he was holding something back.
“What?” She tried to draw him out.
He shook his head, and she didn’t press it further. The trust between them was still too tenuous. She couldn’t afford to lose it. Not now…
“It’s all wrong.” He made a sweeping gesture, indicating the palace. “I was sent here to help the Khagan find his strength, but no one here thinks it is missing. Instead of being a strong warrior, I am being taught how to bow and crawl on my belly for his amusement. When a threat against him is exposed, it is simply silenced as if it never existed. This whole place is an illusion, and I am the only one who can see it for what it truly is. What can I do?”
She slid her hand down his arm, stood beside him, and grasped his hand tightly. When he looked at her, when he squeezed her hand, she fought hard to keep her face expressionless, to keep the flush from rising in her cheeks. So lost, she thought. So earnest, but without knowing which way to go.
“What you know is right,” she heard herself say, and she was quietly surprised to realize she meant every word.
The sun had crossed the sky and begun to slip behind the mountains by the time Gansukh managed to talk his way into the Khagan’s private quarters. He had spent the day tracking down all the Khagan’s personal advisors—other than Master Chucai, whom he carefully avoided—and he had even gone to several Torguud noyon before, finally, one of his wives—Mukha—agreed to speak to the Khagan on his behalf. She had confided to him that his humor was “most black,” which Gansukh took to be her euphemism for “drinking heavily.” As he approached the portal to the Khagan’s sitting room, he noticed the lanterns in this corridor smelled like oranges rather than the musty smell of beef tallow so prevalent in the rest of the palace.
The touch of a woman, he thought, reflecting again on the feel of Lian’s hands on his body earlier that day.
The black-cloaked guards at the Khagan’s door nodded with tight-lipped smiles, signaling that they had been warned of his arrival, while simultaneously giving him a look that said, Better you than us. They shut the door quickly behind Gansukh, just in case he tried to change his mind.
The room was long and dim, lit by only a few lanterns. Most of the light came from the balcony, where Ögedei Khan stood, a broad-shouldered silhouette against the darkening sky. The night wind—the last breath of a vanishing sun—slithered through the room, rustling silk curtains and making the candles in the lanterns dance. Bands of flaming red clouds streaked the indigo sky, and as Gansukh approached, he could see the stark line of the mountains along the horizon, their tips outlined in orange fire. Soon that light would die too, and the world would plunge into darkness again.
Gansukh tried not to think about what course of events had begun at this time only a day before. He lowered himself to one knee and cleared his throat. “Oh Khan of Khans, master of the world, long have I…I have…” This flowery language did not come naturally to him, but he thought it best to pay proper respect to the Khagan before even embarking on the bulk of the questions he had. A most black humor, he thought, and faltered.
Ögedei turned from the balcony. There was a cup in his hand, and his gait was unsteady as he came into the room. “Ah, young pony,” he rumbled. “You have been looking for me.”
Gansukh nodded. “I am in need of some…guidance.”
“Get up and come over here, then.” The Khagan sipped from his cup. “I do not need a statue.” He waved a hand toward the open balcony. “I have one down there already. Have you seen it?”
Gansukh had. It was hard to miss it. Especially when there was wine and honeyed drink and Blue Wolf knew what else pouring from the spouts. He rose, one hand straying to his sash, where he had tucked the tiny lacquered box. “The woman who tried to enter the palace last night,” he started. “Do you know what she was after?” Did you watch her being tortured? was the question he couldn’t bring himself to ask.
The Khagan’s face remained expressionless, giving Gansukh no sign he understood the subtext of what the young man was asking. “Secrets,” he slurred. “Chucai said she was a spy, gathering information. She ran off before she could learn anything useful.”
Gansukh swallowed heavily, forcing his stomach to hold still. “Did she tell you this or did Master Chucai?” he asked, still unable to speak plainly.
Ögedei drank from his cup as he wandered closer to Gansukh, staring intently at the young man’s face. “Master Chucai did,” he said.
Gansukh felt his knees tremble—a sudden terror colliding with an unwarranted joy in his guts. “You weren’t there,” he whispered.
Ögedei leaned toward Gansukh and put his finger to his slack lips. His breath stank of sour wine. “Shhh,” he whispered back. “I am rarely where I am supposed to be, and that’s a secret.” He laughed suddenly, spraying spittle on Gansukh’s face. “I know many secrets, young pony.” He clapped Gansukh on the shoulder. “Is that what you need to know? Is Chagatai concerned that I will become such a drunk that my lips cannot remain shut? That one of my enemies will send someone in to steal them while I sleep?”
“No,” Gansukh countered, flustered by the sudden change in Ögedei’s mood. “It’s Master Chucai—”
“Chucai.” Ögedei spit out the name like it was something caught in his throat. “He’s an old goat herder who thinks the hills are full of wolves.” He drew himself up to his full height and thrust out his chest. Some of the liquid in his cup slopped out, darkening his already stained sleeve. “I am not a goat.”
“No,” Gansukh replied. “Of course not.”
Something caught Ögedei’s attention and he beckoned Gansukh to follow him. He staggered out onto the balcony and pointed at the great war banner mounted at the edge of the balcony. It was a gigantic spear, much too long to be wielded easily from a horse; beneath the iron blade hung thick strands of black horsehair, the tails of an entire herd, and they streamed and twisted in the embrace of the night air.
“The Great Spirit Banner of Genghis Khan,” Ögedei said. “Do you know the story, young pony? My father’s spirit is still alive, inside that pole, making sure his empire expands until it covers all the lands.”
Gansukh nodded. “I’ve heard the story.”
“It’s just a story,” Ögedei slurred. He leaned against Gansukh, who staggered, trying to support the Khagan
’s sudden weight. “It’s superstition,” Ögedei hissed. “There’s a secret…” He became entranced with his cup. When he drank, some of the wine spilled down his chin. “It’s older than my father,” Ögedei continued, oblivious to the wine dripping off his face. “He did not make it. It was given to him, long before he became Khagan. He never told me where…” Ögedei stared at the banner for a while before continuing.
“He told me how to listen to it, though. He told me how to see things in the way the hair moves. It’s more than a banner…I can look at it, and it tells me of battles I have never seen, battles that have not happened, and even some that I know never will. I can put my hands in the hair of a thousand horses and feel the rhythm of their movement. How to attack, how to feint, how to retreat—I can feel how every battle can be won.”
Gansukh gazed at the banner, trying to see what the Khagan saw, but all he saw was black horsehair vanishing into the approaching night. “My Khan, with all due respect, you are drunk.”
Ögedei’s attention snapped to Gansukh’s face and then to the cup in his hands. He drank greedily from it, as if there were answers to be found in its dregs. His eyes were even more glazed when he lowered the cup, and he stared out at the horizon, not seeing anything, not even the fact that the sun was gone and night had fallen. “You don’t understand, pony,” he said. “I am Khagan, and I do as I like. And the empire depends on that. My father’s empire. It must continue on. For the memory of all those who sacrificed themselves. For the memory of Tolui.” Tears started to form in the corners of Ögedei’s eyes.
“You don’t understand,” the Khagan shrieked suddenly, pushing Gansukh away. He threw his cup too, and Gansukh ducked, letting it sail past him and into the room. “None of you do. Not Chucai. Not Chagatai. Not any of my generals. None of you understand what is truly important. You all want to tell me what to do, but you don’t know. You don’t know what to do!”
Gansukh backed away, his hands held in front of him. “My Khan, I’m—” he started, but he was cut short by a tremendous wail that came howling out of Ögedei. He watched, startled, as the Khagan tore an ornamental cap off the balcony railing and hurled it into the night. When the Khagan whirled on him, Gansukh retreated quickly, but the Khagan’s interest only lay in the furniture and vases in the sitting room.
Gansukh continued to retreat toward the door, stunned by the transformation that had come over Ögedei Khan. He was no longer the leader of the Mongol Empire; he had become a gigantic infant, throwing a horrific temper tantrum. He threw vases across the room. He picked up furniture and dashed it against the floor, and when he couldn’t pick it up easily, he kicked and hit it. All the while, his body shook with great wracking sobs.
The door opened, and Gansukh, filled with both shame and revulsion, slipped out of the room. The guards closed the door and stood in front of it, their eyes forward, their postures saying quite plainly that they would never acknowledge any of the sounds coming through the portal. What happened behind them was a secret they would never reveal.
Gansukh’s hand slipped inside his deel, touching the tiny lacquered secret held therein. Ögedei’s voice chased him as he walked away from the Khagan’s private room, an echo that grew louder and louder in his head as the real sounds grew fainter: None of you understand what is truly important.
CHAPTER 20:
THE DEATH OF A FRIEND
A messenger does not kill; a Binder does not take life. But there was blood on her hands and on the knife.
“Do you need help?”
Cnán heard Raphael’s voice distantly, and for a moment she thought he was asking the question of her, but when she raised her head to reply, she saw he was speaking to Percival.
“I raised him from a foal,” Percival said. His face was a mask; his lips barely moved as he spoke. “I will do it alone. Help the others see to Taran.” The solemn knight turned and walked into the woods, following a trail of blood and crushed grass.
The silence of the field and forest closed around Cnán. Her knife still dripped blood into the hoof-trodden dirt and grass. She stared, seeing but not seeing the trees at the edge of the woods in their strangely placid beauty. Yasper’s lingering smoke rendered the sight eerie and ghostlike. The dagger in her hands felt light as air, and that seemed wrong. She wanted to be rid of it, but at the same time couldn’t make herself throw it away.
They had wrapped Taran in a cloak and taken him back to camp, where a grave would be dug. The Dutchman wandered the field, dousing the flames, and about him the remaining smoke wreathed and whirled. She stepped over the corpse of a Mongol, facedown in the dirt, the body positioned just as Taran’s had been. She suppressed a shudder and moved on, feeling as though she would be violently ill.
How far had she fallen, to permit herself to arrive here and to use this tool, a killing tool, as it was meant to be used? She wiped the blade clean with a clutch of dried leaves, shock wearing away slowly, like feeling coming back into a sleeping limb and, with it, the first prickles of returning conscience.
Not what she wanted to feel.
She took another step, planning to get away from the company and be by herself. Her feet took over. As she walked, she heard arguments behind her: Roger’s raised voice, Feronantus’s reply. The words were empty and distant, intrusions into an awful dream. Was this the penance for what she had done?
A strange, sad sound reached her, seeped into her mind, and pulled her along the direction in which she walked. Tall weeds brushed against her legs. She stopped at the edge of the wide open stretch through which Mongols had rushed only a short time ago, and her focus returned with a sickening lurch as she realized that she had not been wandering aimlessly, but following another’s footsteps across the field and back toward the woods.
Cnán stood still, watching as Percival knelt by his mount. Obeying some instinct that had told it to seek refuge, the horse had staggered into the shelter of the trees and then collapsed.
The knight’s frame caught the rays of sun falling through the canopy of high trees, mail over muscle moving with a deliberate, gentle softness so utterly at odds with his violent motion before. Cnán heard again the husking, ragged sound that had pulled her from her malaise—deep whimpers from Percival’s mortally wounded destrier.
His own breath seemed to blend with the slow panting of the large horse where it lay amidst the ferns.
Her stomach clenched, and a lump formed in her throat as he removed a mailed glove and ran a callused hand over the animal’s thick neck. A shaft jutted from the animal’s flank. The horse gave a louder moan, and its chest heaved. Percival stood back a few steps as it thrashed and then twisted in agony.
So often in her short life, she had witnessed horses and men fall, had absorbed the horror of the image and moved along—as was required of her. Yet this was different. Here and now, the sight stopped her, stilled her; she was suddenly unable or unwilling to move from where she crouched half concealed among the ferns that grew along the forest’s edge.
As Percival tried to soothe the beast that had borne him across the miles, it seemed as if she were watching an essential part of the great, noble man suffer and die.
What sort of world was this, she thought, that made such a man? A person for whom violence could be summoned like an obedient hound, then put away with the sheathing of a sword.
How immediate the violence had been for her, how utterly sudden and desperate. Was it the same for Percival every time he drew his sword? Did he feel the same shock as she did? If not, how easily a person might be pulled into a life where the hound of violence became a mad wolf, pulling at its chains, ready to come out whether its master wished it or not!
But now he knelt on one leg as if in prayer, and she saw in this stance that it was not just the destrier that drew forth his silent grief.
Her throat constricted. Her eyes grew wet. She was shaking. This aftermath, this horror and shock, was what Percival endured, what they all endured, every time they were called to f
ight.
Abruptly Percival’s voice broke through her gray misery, speaking to his horse. “I have asked so much of you, Tonnerre. You have crossed miles and endured hardships, many of them meant for me. Always, you have been loyal, patient, and kind. A man could not reasonably ask for a tiny share of what you gave.”
The horse’s tail twitched, as though in answer. Cnán saw its head rise, and she caught a look of sorrowful intelligence in its dark eyes. There was pain, but also a remnant of questioning innocence that brought Feronantus’s words back to her heart. The lot of their faithful mounts: food and burdens, suffering and death, for the sake of the men who raised and trained and rode them.
“You have traveled far and served us wonderfully well,” Percival said, his voice almost too low to hear. He moved beside the great head and leaned over, gently taking one ear and angling it toward his lips. “I cannot take away the pain, nor ask you to run again. And so I will not keep you here to suffer, Tonnerre.”
As Cnán watched, the knight drew his dagger with the reticence of a man who would sooner cut off his own hand than do what he was about to do.
Her view of him blurred, and she felt hot tears roll down her cheek.
Her knife, in desperation; Percival’s, in mercy.
“We are lessened by your departure,” Percival said, his voice breaking. Two companions lost, one at the hands of the enemy, one he must now release himself. Again, she had seen this last rite many times across the years and across the miles. Animals so grievously hurt that it was a mercy to put them down rather than leave them to suffer and die slowly.
But never before had it been like this. The truth of that was etched in the way he held the blade and in the quaver of his eternally calm voice. Cnán turned away and tightly closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear to look.
There came a spasmodic pounding of hooves, a brief, rustling flurry of violent shuddering, and then stillness.