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 ?gedei, 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.