Gansukh grunted and stood up, his knees popping. He began to pantomime, and Haakon quickly interpreted the gestures to mean, You fought another man; other man lost.
Haakon nodded again. “Yes,” he said in Mongol tongue. “I fight.”
Gansukh smiled. “You fight,” he replied, and then he said something else, which was beyond Haakon’s limited vocabulary. Reading Haakon’s shrug, Gansukh took to pantomime again, though this series of gestures was harder to follow. He pointed at Haakon, mimed holding a sword, made mock slashes in the air, and then he pointed to himself and pretended to be...
Haakon shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said in his native tongue. He tried to think of how to say the same thing in Mongolian. He could say “no,” but that wasn’t what he wanted to tell the warrior.
Gansukh tried the pantomime again, refining his gestures. You fight was easy to read. I... watch. Haakon nodded, following that much. The last part was trickier.
Haakon smiled as he deciphered Gansukh’s signs. He wants to see how I fight, he realized.
Haakon took his time getting up, stretching his stiff limbs as best he could in the cramped space of his cage. He bristled somewhat at the idea that he was expected to perform for this man, but another part of his mind considered the benefit of this man’s interest. At the very least, he might be able to bargain for more dried meat.
Haakon put his hands together as if he was holding a sword and settled into a simple stance. He had to duck his head forward and hunch his shoulders due to the cage, but Gansukh seemed to understand what he was doing.
The warrior mimed drawing a sword of his own and he held it out before him, the imaginary tip pointed at Haakon’s chest.
Haakon responded, twisting his hands up to beside his head. Imagining his own sword point, he thrust his hands forward quickly, and Gansukh clapped his right hand to his left shoulder, crying out in mock pain.
Haakon laughed. The young warrior played the fool well, and his judgment as to where Haakon’s point would have struck was sound. Gansukh left off his playacting and brought his hands together over his head with a sharp clap. He swung them down, a quick overhead stroke of his imaginary sword, and Haakon reacted instinctively.
In his mind’s eye, he saw where the blade would fall, and he brought up his hands to parry as he slid a half step to his right. He barked his knuckles on the rough ceiling of his cage, and he growled lightly in his throat. He knew the appropriate response—he could hear Taran’s voice, telling him to strike quickly and true, making the long diagonal cut from the shoulder to the groin—but there wasn’t enough room to perform that motion.
Haakon lowered his arms and shrugged. “Can’t fight in cage,” he said.
“A horse can’t run when it is hobbled,” Gansukh replied with a nod. He looked down at his hands as if he were examining his imaginary sword, and then with another curt nod, he departed, leaving Haakon to wonder what the young warrior had hoped to learn from their mock battle.
The shaman’s tent squatted on the verge of the caravan, leaning, like an old tree, away from the rest of the tents. The shaman’s horse, a bony gray gelding, quietly cropped a ridge of dry grass nearby, and an unruly pile of colorful blankets lay near the loose flap of the tent.
As Master Chucai approached the tent, the old gelding raised its head, regarded him for a moment, and then resumed its unhurried grazing. Chucai eyed the pile of blankets, and having gotten a whiff of the smell coming from them he decided to keep his distance. He cleared his throat noisily as he peered past the pile into the dim interior of the tent.
There was a rattle of wood and metal, and part of the pile moved. A bony foot extruded, and soon after—from another side—a hand followed. As the pile quivered and shifted, Chucai caught sight of a cracked set of antlers, festooned with bits of dull metal and shards of bone. The antlers rose up like the ghost of an ancient spirit, and a cracked and weathered face emerged from the blankets. There was a bulbous knob of a nose and a ragged hole that Chucai suspected was a mouth; only one of a set of eyelids managed to flicker open.
Chucai bowed, holding his beard against his belly so that it didn’t drag on the ground. “O servant of the wind and sky, I seek your guidance,” he began. “There is a matter that puzzles me greatly as of late.”
The shaman continued to shift around in his expansive layers of clothing as if he were trying to find a more comfortable position. Or perhaps he was simply trying to find something he had lost among the voluminous folds of his robes. Either way, his expression did not change and the gaze of his single eye remained fixed on Master Chucai.
“The great Spirit Banner of the Khagan,” Chucai continued. “?gedei received it from his father, and I wish to know how his father—Genghis Khan—acquired it.”