invincibility, Chucai knew there was a more practical reason. The Khagan had not been the target of the Chinese raid. What they had wanted was the Spirit Banner.
His thumb unconsciously strayed to the rough scab on the pole.
He had fruitlessly searched the bodies of the three Chinese men who had tried to steal the banner. They hadn’t been wearing any insignia or common markings on their armor, and other than a short string of glass beads in the pocket of one man, they had been carrying nothing. Which in itself was interesting, and had he been less distracted by the mystery of the banner, Chucai might have wondered more where these men had come from. But they were dead and their corpses offered him no useful clue. As he roamed through the camp, he was also keeping an eye out for any prisoners-living men who could answer the question burning in his mind.
A cheer rose from the men surrounding the Khagan’s ger, and it was answered by the host trailing behind him. Chucai grimaced, and beat the butt of the staff against the ground a few times as he slowed his relentless pace through the maze of tents. The soldiers of the Imperial Guard who had been left to watch over the Khagan had seen the Spirit Banner. Their shout was a roar of recognition, but it held an inquisitive note: Those who return, tell us of your victory!
Chucai sighed, and using both hands, raised the banner overhead. The string of soldiers behind him cheered as he waved it back and forth. When the Imperial Guard responded with another cheer, he angled toward the Khagan’s ger, leading his ragtag column of combatants to the celebration of their victory.
The Khagan, summoned from within his tent by the shouting, appeared at the flaps of his ger. The crowd, spotting him, began cheering even louder, and the noise became a tumult as men-wanting to be more boisterous than their voices would allow-began to beat their swords against the shields and to stomp their feet. By the time Chucai reached the base of the steps that led up to Ogedei’s ger, the noise was so loud he wondered if it could be heard in Karakorum.
Ogedei waved at him to come up the stairs, indicating that he wanted to hold the Spirit Banner. Chucai nodded, and with some gravity, ascended a few of the steps so that he could hand over Genghis’s legacy. Ogedei, his eyes startlingly clear, reached down and gripped the banner firmly. His brow furrowed slightly when Chucai did not immediately release the staff, and with some reluctance Chucai removed his hand from the banner.
The Khagan stood up straight and tall, raising the banner over his head. The crowd of warriors shouted in unison, their voices rising and falling in concert with the motion of Ogedei’s arm as he shook the staff with exaggerated slowness. The horsehair braids undulated, and staring up at them, Chucai saw-for a split second-the manes and tails of an endless procession of wild horses, so many of them that he could not see the ground over which they ran.
Chucai thought of himself as an educated man, one well versed in the esoteric reaches of Chinese philosophy and mysticism, as well as the shamanistic legacy that underlay the Mongolian reverence for the Great Blue Sky. Intellectually, he knew the spirit trances that the Mongolian shamans sought for their enlightenment were-in all likelihood-a combination of wakeful dreaming and overactive imaginations, but that had never prevented a part of him from wondering about the experience of ecstatic vision. It would require more than a modicum of faith to accept. It was not a lack of spirituality; it was simply that he preferred to believe what he could see and touch.
He fell to one knee, his hands clutching at the wooden step of the Khagan’s wheeled ger. The thundering noise of the crowd overwhelmed him, echoing in his head like the roaring sound of a flash flood as it rushed through a narrow defile. He gasped, struggling to breathe, feeling like he was a small tree that had been uprooted by this flood. He was being hurled at the foaming crest of this wave.
Horses. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Running from one end of the world to the other.
“I am the Khan of Khans,” Ogedei shouted, his voice cutting through the storm of noise. “My empire will cover the world.”
With a great deal of difficulty, Chucai raised his head and stared up at Ogedei. The Khagan’s face was glowing with sweat, and his teeth were bared in a feral grin. A wind tugged at his hair and the horsehair braids. Wisps of smoke swirled overhead, shapes like late summer thunderheads that were pulled into long streaks stretching out across the star-dappled sky.
The manes of horses, streaming behind them as they ran.
Following the Khagan’s appearance, and with the rout of the Chinese raiders, most of the dignitaries and courtiers milled around for a little while before returning to their interrupted feast. A pall of smoke hung over the tents and wagons, and the air stank of scorched leather, fabric, flesh, and wood. And yet, they fall to gorging themselves again, as if nothing has happened. Master Chucai shook his head in disgust as he passed the banquet area. Having completed a tour of the sprawled camp, he was returning to the Khagan’s ger.
An accurate assessment of the damage done by the raid and the fire would have to wait until daylight. Making an inspection of the camp had been his excuse for leaving the Khagan’s ger so soon after returning the Spirit Banner, and he had performed this duty during his perambulation. Balancing the Khagan’s desire to move swiftly with the need to provide properly for both the Khagan, his retinue, and the soldiers had been a tricky business, and Chucai was already making calculations in his head as to how he was going to manage the loss of supplies.
Mostly, he had wanted to clear his head after the confusing experience of the vision.
Where had it come from? He was exhausted, his mind dulled by the endless preparation for the Khagan’s trip, and he was more susceptible to the mental confusion produced by a powerful oratory. But the Khagan’s speech had not been very elaborate, nor terribly arousing in its content. Not the sort of rhetoric that should have been able to move him, even in his sleep-deprived state.
He had heard the Khagan make similar speeches in the past, in fact, and while he had seen how they impacted the warriors, he had never been impressed in the same way as he had been earlier. He had been able to watch the Khagan stir up his troops with a bemused detachment, much like the way he had observed Lian manipulating Gansukh. It was a simple skill every leader-and most women, for that matter-learned instinctively, and as an educated man he was somewhat inured to such manipulation.
And yet, he had been caught up in the fervor, like some fresh recruit eager to spill blood for the empire. An addled fool, hanging on each word.
He paused at the foot of the wooden stairs that led up to the immense platform of the Khagan’s mobile ger. Had it been the Spirit Banner? The thought had been nagging at him during his examination of the camp. He had tried to shake it loose, but it remained, a barbed porcupine quill caught in the spongy depth of his brain.
The Chinese had launched a foolhardy raid on the caravan in an effort to steal the banner. Given the Khan’s dramatic appearance before his men, he couldn’t dismiss the power that such a symbol as the banner had had on the warriors, but if all the Chinese had wanted to accomplish was a symbolic assault then why hadn’t they simply destroyed the banner? It would have been easy enough to throw it in any one of a number of fires that their archers had started. Why steal it?
Because it had power.
Chucai snorted, rejecting that answer. He waved at the guards outside the ger, indicating that he wanted to see the Khagan, and when they acknowledged his presence, he mounted the steps. “My Khan,” he called through the opening at the top of the tent flaps. “May I have a word?”
He listened for a response, and hearing little more than a single grunt of an answer, he glanced at the nearest guard and raised an eyebrow. The guard shrugged, and pulled back the flaps of the ger. Chucai ducked and entered.
The Khan was sitting in a cypress yokeback chair, a recent gift from a provincial sub-administrator from Ningxia, facing away from the ger flaps. He stared at the wall, lost in the roseate light
