“Was it worth it?” Zug asked.
Kim shrugged. “I’m stuck in here with you now,” he said. “I should have given that more thought.”
Zug grunted and kicked him lightly as he shuffled back to his mat. His strength was returning, albeit too slowly for his—or Kim’s—liking.
Kim ignored Zug, closing his eyes and letting his breathing slow. He had some pain in his lower abdomen and would probably be pissing blood sometime in the next few days, but it would all pass. He could be patient for a while; he had waited long enough.
“Two,” he murmured as he started to relax.
“What?” Zug grunted.
“I took down two armored Franks.” Kim smiled. “They never touched me. When you’re feeling strong enough, maybe I’ll show you how it’s done.” He drifted toward sleep as Zug unleashed an elaborate string of Nihongo curses.
He’s definitely getting better…
CHAPTER 25:
THE SUBTLETIES OF WRESTLING
Master Chucai left them, galloping back to Karakorum. Black robes streaming behind, he looked like a giant raven clinging to the horse, its talons digging into the animal’s flesh. Lian and Gansukh rode in silence, letting their horses pick their own pace. Neither felt any compelling desire to return to the bustling hive that was the Imperial Court.
“Stop. Look,” Lian said as they came in view of the walls. She touched his arm, drawing him out of his maddeningly convoluted reverie, and pointed toward an expansive cluster of colorful tents clustered around the nearest gate. “The traders who have come for the festival. Let us think about something else for a little while.” Her lips parted, and Gansukh again caught a flash of her teeth. She snapped her horse’s reins. “If you are to face Ögedei, perhaps it would be best to find suitable clothes.”
“I have—”
But she was already ahead of him, and he sat on his horse, grinding his teeth. He would never understand her. Her mind was too foreign, too strange in the way it leapt from subject to subject. He couldn’t let go of things as readily as she did, and other matters that seemed nonsensical and pointless to him were of paramount importance to her.
The wind, full of her laughter, swirled past him.
He cursed, then wheeled the horse about and tapped it into a trot. Why not? he rationalized. If I’m going to be exiled for failure, I might as well have a clean shirt or two to take with me. He laughed as he rode after Lian, not sure how else to react to both this insight and the fact that he did understand courtly thinking more than he wanted to admit.
The caravans hadn’t bothered to enter the city. The camels and pack animals had come to a stop outside the eastern gate, and the merchants had set up their shops in the middle of the road. Their manner of dress was not familiar to him, and he gawked openly at the men’s garish clothing: brightly colored silk pants with tops that didn’t match, shirts that billowed at the arms and waist, sweeping body-length coats with high collars. And the women! Some seemed to wear hardly anything, or what they wore was tight and dark or bright, translucent, and swirling. Many of the women were bare-footed and wore heavy ornamental rings or torques on wrists, necks, ankles. Coins like fish-scale mail armor lay in wreaths on their breasts. The men were more likely to dress in white than the women. Small silver bells hung from belts at their waists, and the high, step-rhythmic tinking of jewelry, coins, and bells added a melodic jangle to the raucous atmosphere of the bazaar.
As Gansukh let his horse pick its way through the crowds, he found himself wondering if Lian would ever wear any such adornments.
Somewhere up ahead, in the shadow of the wall, musicians were performing. The strange, loose music sounded an exotic backdrop to the cacophony of shouting and arguing and haggling. The scents were more foreign still, and Gansukh’s stomach grumbled as he picked out the greasy scents of boiled mutton and roasting chicken, along with the blood smell of dozens of recently slaughtered sheep—the heady, almost overwhelming miasma of a bazaar. Idly he wondered if his stomach could stand up to any food sold from the makeshift stalls. He had only just become accustomed to the rich food of the court.
“They are Persians.” Lian was suddenly at Gansukh’s left elbow. She had wound her hair up in a ball at the back of her neck, held in place by a lacquered comb.
“Persians,” he grunted. Persia was a vast place. “Where in Persia?”
“From the Khwarezmian Empire,” Lian reminded him.
“Ah, yes—the one Genghis defeated.”
Lian pursed her lips, but there was laughter in her eyes. “Genghis Khan defeated many empires,” she said.
“Yes,” he shot back, suddenly weary of her constant role of tutor. “And it is sometimes difficult to remember them all.” As soon as he said the words, he wanted to take them back.
The humor went out of her eyes, and she spat something at him in her native tongue, a language she knew very well he did not understand. Before he could stop her, she kneed her horse into the crowd. He meant to follow her, but a resounding crash of metal on metal startled his own mount. By the time he worked through the crowd and got his horse under control, Lian had vanished.
He stared glumly in the direction she had gone, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Her people belonged to one of those empires. He sighed and glanced around for the source of the noise that had startled his horse. He needed a distraction; he needed time to let his mind untangle itself from the knots into which it had been tied.
He got down from his horse and led the animal through the crowds, halfheartedly looking for Lian. Mostly he wandered, trying to lose himself in the bazaar—trying to let his mind go blank. Soon enough he was surrounded by dark, grinning faces, with long hooked noses and black desert eyes, offering up jewelry, meats, flagons of wine or beer or arkhi.
His stomach had finally decided it could stand a bit of meat, and as Gansukh paused to get his bearings, surrounded by a thick cloud of savory meat smells and spices that now made his mouth water, a vendor caught his eye and waved him over. This one was a more sedentary man, sticking close to his cooking station, also dark-skinned but broad of nose and bushy of beard, and he jabbered at Gansukh, punctuating his words with rapid gestures. The fact that Gansukh had no idea what the man was saying made no difference. Beside him, on a squat stand, was a stone basin filled with fiery coals. Suspended above on a makeshift wire grate were a dozen or so wooden skewers laden with meat, and the entire time he was gabbling—haggling, Gansukh realized—he flipped and rotated the sticks without glancing at them.
The vendor threw up his hand in disgust and waved him off when he tried to purchase only one skewer. His stomach rumbled in disappointment, so Gansukh settled for two. Perhaps he could make himself sick in some sort of penance. Chicken, he thought as he plucked off one of the chunks of meat with his fingers, popped it into his mouth, and chewed. A bit gamey, he decided. But the spices soon took his thoughts away from the age and toughness of the old bird.
The tingling started on the tip of his tongue, and before he could finish swallowing the first piece, the back of his throat was on fire. When he raised his fingers to his face to wipe his streaming eyes, he realized they had plucked the meat from the stick to begin with—too late. He had spread spice to his lids and cheek, and now he could barely see.