“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”