“What do you think will become of the empire?” he asked Lian.
She raised herself up on her arms, hair sliding down perfect shoulders. “You’d ask about history at a time like this?”
“I wasn’t asking about history. I was asking about the future.”
She favored him with a smile as she stretched out a hand for her robe, discarded so frantically some time ago. “History is the future. Its cycles repeat themselves like the seasons.”
“You are always teaching me,” Gansukh grumbled, running his hand down her exposed back. He took delight in how she shivered at his touch. “So what does history have to say?”
Lian elegantly slid her arm into the sleeve of her robe. “Every empire decays, in time. They become old and corrupt, and fall apart, or they become soft and complacent, and are conquered by the young and ambitious.”
“Will the Mongol Empire suffer the same fate?” he asked.
She paused, the sleeve of her robe pulled halfway up her arm, and gave him a raised eyebrow. It was a look she had given him many times during his studies, an expression that said, This question is not mine to answer.
“I think…” he sighed, and lay back to stare at the ceiling of his ger. “It has already begun. The Khagan carries a great sadness within him, and the drink only deepens it. These-” He shook his head. It wasn’t the fights between the foreigners that bothered him. It was… everything they represented. They were not fights for survival or for the glory of the empire. They existed for purely base, selfish reasons: the fighters were there to entertain the Khagan; the Khagan was there to vicariously feel the joy of battle.
“What if he cannot rid himself of his sickness?” he asked, more of himself than of her. “It festers, like an arrow wound that is not properly dressed. The skin may grow back, but the head of the arrow is still inside the body. Eventually, the rot will kill him, and when he dies, the empire will fall as well.” He pointed at the thick pole rising in the center of his tent. “Take that down, and the whole ger collapses,” he said.
“And yet you do not abandon him,” she said as she slid her other arm into her robe. “You still see something worth saving in him.”
“I do,” he said. “I must, because-” He stopped, unwilling to give voice to what lay in his heart. He listened to the whisper of silk as Lian tied her robe. Was she getting ready to leave?
“What if he does heal himself? What happens when the empire spreads across the world, from sea to sea?” He broke the near silence with his questions. Not because he thought she might know the answers, but because he didn’t want unspoken question to become true. “What will we become when there are no more lands to conquer? Will we become civilized, provincial administrators of our new lands? Instead of feeling the wind and rain on our faces, we will throw on more layers of silk and fur and hide inside our new fortresses. Instead of counting horses, we will tabulate numbers on our abaci. We will not chase the seasons across the steppes. We will stay in one place all year, and be neither Mongols nor Chinese. We will be…” What? he wondered. What will we become?
“But what of the people you rule?” Lian said as she knelt beside him, her hair hanging down across her robe and jacket. “They will learn Mongol customs, they will bear half-Mongol children. As they change you, you change them. As I have changed you. As you have changed me.”
Gansukh toyed with the yellow fringe on the lower edge of her jacket, contemplating asking her to take all her clothes off again.
“How old were you when you first killed a man?” she asked.
Gansukh frowned, annoyed at the intrusion of violence into his thoughts. “Ten,” he said.
“So young! How did it happen?”
“We were herding goats to pasture. My father, my uncle, and myself. Five men of the Spring Hawk Clan came down from the hills, thinking they could take our goats. They rode noisily, trying to scare us with their numbers.”
“Five against three. They thought they had an advantage.”
Gansukh nodded. “They were poor shots, though. I was frightened, but my father and uncle did not flee. They calmly took up their bows, and my father admonished me to do the same. My uncle and father each killed one as I was trying to ready my bow. And then we each took one of the remaining three.” Gansukh let go of Lian’s jacket and touched the hollow of his throat. “Right here. That is where my arrow landed.”
Lian’s eyes went to Gansukh’s throat, and she swallowed heavily.
“Even then,” Gansukh said, “I was an excellent shot.”
“Was it easy?” she asked.
“If I hadn’t fired my bow, they might have killed me. As it was, we lost two goats to their arrows.” He shrugged. “The Spring Hawk Clan never challenged us again”
“What did it feel-” She hesitated, and he watched her quietly as she struggled to ask her question. Her shoulders hunched forward and her body shivered slightly.
“He was some distance away,” Gansukh said softly. “He fell off his horse and we left him. I never saw his face.” He reached for her hand. “The first man I killed with a blade was in Volga Bulgaria. To stare into a man’s eyes as he dies is a much different experience. Some enjoy the feeling.” He squeezed her fingers. “I did not.”
“I’m afraid to sleep,” Lian whispered. “I’m afraid that his ghost will be there, haunting my dreams.”
“You took a man’s life to save mine. Would you rather my ghost haunted your dreams?”
She shook her head, and in the weak light, he saw the gleam of a tear tracking down her cheek.
“Then you did the right thing,” he said. He tugged gently at her jacket.
She slid down onto the bedding next to him, burying her face against his chest, and he let his arms fall around her. He held her tight and listened to the ragged sound of her breathing.
How long will this last? he wondered. How long will any of it last?
These questions remained unspoken and unanswered, long after Lian had fallen asleep, and he found their roles reversing. However, when he slipped from the bedding, she did not stir.
Gansukh remembered this too. The exhaustion that comes in the aftermath of the first kill. You cannot sleep for all the thoughts racing around your head, he thought, but your body demands it anyway.
He was dreaming about escaping from his cage again, though this time he did not try to steal a horse and ride out onto the steppe. This time, when he managed to get out of his cage, Haakon stole toward the center of the camp. The Khagan slept in the enormous tent on wheels. It was easy to find, and once he sawed his way through the heavy fabric, it would be equally simple to slay the man inside.
It was all very easy in his dream, but Haakon knew the reality would not be as simple. The Khan of Khans was always under the protection of his elite guard, who would not be blind to his efforts to cut a hole in the tent. He would have to fight at least one man, and the noise of combat would draw others, until he fell beneath a sea of Mongol warriors.
It was a fantasy. Nothing more. A way to pass the time, and while he wished his mind would dwell on more practical matters, he did not fret at the presence of such desires in his head. They meant he had not given up, that he still sought to stay alive.
Haakon stirred, sloughing the weight of sleep. His cheeks and left jaw ached, and his throat ached when he swallowed. The physical reminders of his fight the previous night. All in all, his bruises were slight in comparison to his opponent’s. Eating might be a little more painful, but then, the Mongols hadn’t been feeding him much more than a bowl of watery slop. Very little chewing was required.