The room was small, not much bigger than the large sleeping platform covered with furs and skins. Sheer yellow silks hung from the ceiling, falling like frozen sunlight around the bed. Behind the bed were screens, painted with red flowers. On the leftmost one, a heron—its long neck extended—was taking flight.
“Is it to your liking?” Chucai asked.
Gansukh struggled to find some appropriate words, and the only thing he could muster felt totally inadequate. “It is a magnificent chamber, Master Chucai.”
Chucai nodded. “It is yours.” He held up a hand to forestall Gansukh’s objection. “There’ll be a dinner in honor of Governor Mahmud Yalavach later this evening. Perhaps you might wish to observe the Khagan when he is in a better mood. Have you sat at a formal court dinner before?”
Gansukh shook his head. “Around the fire, we gather each night to make boodog or horhog.”
“I think you’ll find table manners are somewhat different when you’re not eating greasy roast goat with your hands. I’ll send along some scrolls so you can learn how to behave in civilized society.”
“Master Chucai…” Gansukh put his left hand over his closed right fist. The combination formed a double prison, one wrapped around the other. The ceiling and the walls of the palace preventing him from seeing the sky and the horizon. This mission—even with the insight offered by Ögedei’s advisor—was another cage. He was trapped. And yet, looking at his hands and imagining what it would be like to be trapped inside—a carrion fly or a moth—he realized that no matter how tightly he squeezed, he could never quite close the narrow gap where his index finger dug into his palm, even if he moved his thumb. “Master Chucai,” he said, “on the steppes, the opportunities to read are few, and I…”
Chucai gave him a look of paternal reassurance. “I could send someone to read them to you, if you wish. Perhaps as you take your bath?”
Gansukh opened his hands and stared at his palm. Would the moth be crushed by the pressure of its prison before it could escape? “My gratitude is endless, Master Chucai.”
Gansukh drifted in a cloud. The walls of the room were obscured by the steam from the pool, and he floated in the hot water. The pool was larger than the interior of a chieftain’s ger, and initially he had balked at soiling so much water.
His clothes, stiff with dried sweat and dust, had been taken away by pale-robed servants. He had sat naked at the edge of the pool for a few minutes, the steam from the water opening his pores. Eventually he had put his feet in, and the temperature of the water had made his skin tingle. He had then allowed himself the luxury of complete immersion, and it felt good.
He wasn’t alone. Gansukh jerked out of his reverie, splashing the water around him as he found his footing on the bottom of the pool. She was kneeling at the pool’s edge, the light-blue silk of her robe darkening at the knees from the water. Her long hair was unbound from the twisted coiffure most Chinese women wore, and it fell across half of her face like a sheet of black water. He could only see one of her eyes and half her mouth, but it was enough to tell she was amused.
“Who are you?” he demanded, more strenuously than he intended. He felt exposed in the water, and not just because he was naked. The servants had taken everything, and he hadn’t even thought to keep the small knife he usually carried. He slapped the water as if the noise might scare her away, but the woman didn’t even flinch. Fool, he thought. All it took was the offer of a bath and he had dropped his defenses.
“My name is Lian,” the woman said. Judging by the smooth paleness of her skin and the shape of her face, her life prior to Karakorum had been one of indolence and wealth.
“Did Master Chucai send you to attend to my needs?” Gansukh asked. He made the water ripple with his hands. “If so, you should be in the pool.” It wasn’t that he desired the company of a woman; it was more that he didn’t like her sitting there on the edge. There was something on the floor beside her, and Gansukh stood on his tiptoes, trying to see what it was.
“No,” she said, the humor leaving her face. “As I tell every other Mongol, I’m a tutor, not a whore.” She picked up the bundle beside her, and Gansukh realized it was a thick scroll. She unrolled it and proceeded to read.
Once his confusion had passed, Gansukh listened for a few minutes as Lian read to him about the practices of civilized behavior. Her enunciation and diction were flawless, and her voice was pleasing to his ear. However, the material she was reading was the most tedious recitation Gansukh had ever heard—even more so than the countless reiterations of his ancestry recited in celebration after a victorious battle. “‘A son should not occupy the southwest corner of the home, nor sit in the middle of the mat, nor walk in the middle of the road, nor stand in the middle of the doorway. He should be as if he were hearing his parents when there is no voice from them and as if seeing them when they are not actually there.’”
He could hold his tongue no longer. He flicked water, interrupting her. “I am to act as if I were haunted by the ghosts of my ancestors?”
Lian sighed. She pushed her hair back over her shoulder and stared at him. “You have very little imagination, don’t you?” she asked. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You are, after all, just an itinerant horseman.”
Gansukh growled and chopped his hand into the water, throwing a much larger gout of water at her. She adroitly protected the scroll from the spray of water, but the rest of her wasn’t as fortunate. Gansukh admired the shape outlined by the wet cloth and momentarily forgot what he was angry about.
“It is a metaphor,” Lian said. She uncurled from her kneeling position and dipped a foot in the pool. “Do they not have metaphors on the steppes?” she asked as she kicked water at him.
Gansukh ducked instinctively, even though the water was harmless rain against his already wet skin. “What does a warrior need with a metaphor?” he grumbled. “Can a metaphor keep me alive? Can it slaughter my enemies?”
Lian danced back from the edge of the pool, avoiding his next splash. “Consider the swallows,” she said. “They dart through the air at their prey, then wheel around to retreat and strike again. Now consider how a group of horsemen approach their enemy. Do they not present themselves as one unit: riding in and firing their arrows, and then swooping away? Is that not the Mongol way? If you were a general and you told your men to ride in Swooping Bird Formation, would they not know what you meant? How is that not using a metaphor to slaughter your enemies?”
Gansukh let his tongue lie quietly in his mouth, and he acknowledged Lian’s point with a gentle inclination of his head.
She appeared to not notice, or perhaps she was feigning ignorance of his gesture. Her attention returned to the scroll and she unrolled it again, searching for the place where she had left off. “Let us continue then,” she said. “‘A man should not ascend a height, nor approach the verge of a depth; he should not indulge—’”
Gansukh slipped under the surface of the pool, letting his legs collapse until he was sitting down. Lian’s image wavered through a layer of water and steam, and her pale skin seemed to glow as if she were a ghost. He closed and opened his eyes a few times, but she didn’t vanish. Finally, his lungs burning, he pushed up and emerged from the water.