I can discover the secrets of this box.
He held the box gently, his eyes half closed, breath slowing, fingers moving so carefully across its smooth surface. In his mind’s eye, he saw the long seam that ran along its length, and as he traced it slowly with his long finger, he imagined drawing his bow, sighting on his target. As he felt the end of the box, he paused, his finger resting lightly on the lacquered surface, his thumb gently caressing the underside. He listened for that moment, that minute quiver wherein his target would begin to suspect its death was approaching, and when he felt something shift inside him, he let go.
When he opened his eyes, his hands were empty. The box—rather, the three intricate pieces that it was comprised off—lay on the floor. He pushed aside the pieces to reveal the secret contents of the puzzle box. It took him a moment to make sense of it, in its startling simplicity.
It was a green twig—a sprig cut from a tree. Despite its time in the box, away from soil and light, it was still supple, with tight, youthful bark—and one soft, tiny yellow-green leaf.
He raised the sprig to his nose; it smelled like…the mud along a riverbank in the spring, when the ground was redo-lent with young sprouts. When he put his fingertip on the leaf, he could almost feel it pulse like a miniature heart.
Sleep eluded him.
Opening the box had not solved its mystery, and after an hour of lying on his bed, staring at the sprig, rolling it gently in his fingers, he had wrapped it in a piece of silk and tucked it inside his robe. Hiding it once again, much as the thief had done.
But his mind could not rest; his thoughts buzzed like angry bees swarming from a disturbed nest. The more he tried to get comfortable on his bed, the more aware he became of how small and cramped his room was. The walls were too close; if he threw out his arms, he felt as if he could touch opposite walls. He was like the sprig, rattling around in a tiny box.
How could anything survive in such a box? he thought, throwing a wool-trimmed jacket over his robe. Maybe the sprig only seemed alive once he opened the box. Maybe it was rejuvenated by fresh air…
He strode out of the guest quarters, inhaling great draughts of air as he left the confines of the building. I am not a man of this place, he reflected, peering up at the night sky. Torches still sputtered and danced along the paths, the fading remnants of the revelry that had filled the palace earlier, and their light made it difficult to see the stars.
A strange cry filled the air, raising the hair on Gansukh’s arms. He heard other voices too—men shouting—and he staggered, unable to comprehend how he had been thrown into the past, back to the night when the thief had fled ?gedei’s palace and changed everything.
But it wasn’t that night. The noise came again, a trumpeting bleat of an angry animal, and when Gansukh reached the corner of the palace, he spied the source of the tumult.
In the square, a majestic beast struggled. Gray and titanic, nearly twice as tall as a man, with ears like tent cloth, great tusks like a boar, and a long snout that curled and uncurled like a snake—a monstrous beast was rearing on tree-trunk hind legs, straining against ropes wrapped around pegs and held by men who were trying to contain it. As if rope alone could restrain such a creature, Gansukh thought. Proof of Heaven’s humor. Its handlers—brown-skinned men with tall wrapped hats—prodded at the beast with long, hooked spears, shouting frantically at each other.
The beast bellowed and trumpeted, stomping the ground with its huge feet, each one as thick as a tent-pole log. As Gansukh watched, both awed and amused that men would try to tame a creature such as this, it reared again. The ropes groaned like men in pain and then tore free of their moorings. The ground shook as the beast came down, and it flung its trunk to the side, smacking a puny handler. The man flew across the square like a child’s doll as the other handlers tried—valiantly but hopelessly—to control the beast.
Released from its bonds, the great animal vented a triumphant cry, like a dozen blatting horns, and pounded across the square in a ponderous but unstoppable gallop.
Gansukh shrank against the side of the building as the animal thundered past him. He felt like an insect clinging desperately to a stone shaken by a fierce earthquake. He knew its power by the slow sway of its huge belly and the thick muscles and sinews of its thumping limbs…and by the deep bellows of its lungs pumping a grassy, sour breath.
Why, it’s simply a great, snouted bull, with ears like flapping carpets and gray, pitted, wrinkled skin like armor…