Mark Teppo - The Mongoliad - Book Two

The shouting of the guards stirred him from his meditation, and his eyes snapped open. His ger had been dark but for a single flame in a small brazier and the ambient light from the camp that slipped through the space he had left open at the top of the tent flaps, but there was more light spilling into his ger than he had expected to see. Not sunlight. Firelight.

Master Chucai leaped to his feet and raced to the entrance of the ger . He clawed open the flaps and rushed out. His primary concern was the Khagan ’s ger , and he quickly ascertained that it was undamaged and that the figures milling around it were the Imperial Guard. He was too far away to make out individuals among the clustered guards, but he assumed Munokhoi would not tarry long at the Khagan ’s ger. He will take the fight to the enemy , Chucai thought as he strode through the maze of tents and wagons. The men guarding the Khagan will be diligent, but they won’t be imaginative.

He had had some reservations about putting the hotheaded jaghun captain in charge of the entire Imperial Guard that was accompanying the caravan to Burqan-qaldun, but Ogedei had ignored his concerns. While he had no doubt Munokhoi would ruthlessly deal with the fools who had mistakenly thought they had stumbled upon a wealthy caravan, it would probably be best to ensure that the Khagan remained safe during the fracas.

Chucai came to a sudden halt. He stared at a nearby tent, watching as a trio of overdressed courtiers struggled to douse the flames slithering across the tent’s roof. Blinking his eyes clear of the dust and ash floating in the air, he slowly turned his head and carefully examined the spread of the fires throughout the camp. An idea swam in the depth of his brain, like an enormous koi in a murky pond, and he tried to remain still so as to not spook it, so that it would come to the surface where he could fully apprehend it. There was a pattern to the fires. They weren’t randomly scattered throughout the camp.

Archers , he noted, firing from an elevated position . He scanned the horizon, trying to spot some sign of where the attack had come from, but the smoke from the fires dirtied the air too much to spot any such sign. This isn’t an accident , he realized, discarding the idea that this attack had been a case of mistaken identity.

Initially, the Khagan had wanted to travel with a smaller entourage-none of his wives, a minimum of supply wagons, and only a single jaghun to protect him. The idea had been ridiculous, and Chucai had dismissed it outright, arguing that the Khagan could travel with no less than a minghan -one thousand men-as his personal security force. And, of course, a thousand men would have required a commensurate increase in supplies, which would have, in turn, increased the amount of time it would take to assemble the caravan. While Chucai thought the desire to travel to Burqan-qaldun was more than a passing fancy on the part of the Khagan , he wasn’t the sort of eager sycophant who would fail to question the ramifications of an idle whim. While the Empire was fairly safe to travel-especially in the heart of territory that had been under Mongol rule for several generations-it didn’t mean that the Khagan ’s personal safety wasn’t still of paramount importance. There was always the possibility of attacks by roving bandits-clanless men who would prey on an insufficiently protected caravan or a group of nomadic herders.

But bandits didn’t announce themselves with a volley of flaming arrows. Fire would destroy the very cargo they were hoping to steal.

His own reaction to the attack had been mindless. He had leaped to a conclusion that wasn’t supported by what was actually happening around him. Wasn’t that one of the very lessons Zhu Xi sought to impart in his commentary? This attack was directed at the Khagan ; the raiders knew whose caravan they were attacking. The true question-the one he should have been asking earlier-was why?

Chucai heard a distant crump of noise, and he knew at once that it was the sound of black powder igniting. Grimly, he nodded to himself as he began to walk toward the Khagan ’s ger again. He wasn’t hurried. He took his time, his gaze sweeping back and forth across the chaos. His height gave him an advantage; while he couldn’t see over the tents, the scurrying frenzy of panicked courtiers and concubines and shouting soldiers did little to block his field of view. Chucai walked and watched, looking for the real reason the camp had been attacked.

If the goal of the attack was to assassinate the Khagan , then why hadn’t they set fire to the Khagan ’s ger ? Were their archers that unskilled? Chucai doubted that was true. In which case, the fires were a distraction, a means of splitting the Imperial Guard. But why?

Chucai cut to his right, no longer moving directly toward the Khagan ’s ger . Something had caught his eye. He wasn’t sure what he had seen, and it was possible he was chasing a ghost, a writhing smoke shadow cast by firelight.

The koi was surfacing in the pond in his mind.

He caught sight of the movement again, and the feeble phantom coalesced into the dim shapes of three men, dressed in dark clothing, skulking between tents. They carried long sticks-spears, though one was longer than the other two.

“Hai!” Chucai shouted, curious to see if these phantoms would bolt like startled rabbits.

The three men froze, dark blots against the dull leather of a tent. If he hadn’t been staring right at them, he might have not seen them. During the day, they would have stood out quite plainly, but in the night-with the haze of the smoke-they were nearly invisible. Which is exactly what the fires were for , Chucai realized. Cover.

“Hai! Men of the Imperial Guard,” he bellowed, directing his voice toward the Khagan ’s ger . “To me! There are assassins among us.”

The men moved, two of them sprinting off between the tents; the other man lowered his spear and charged Chucai, hoping to silence the alarm that had given them away.

Master Chucai had but a moment to ready himself. He had no weapon, and briefly he chided himself again for reacting without thinking, but then the man was upon him, screaming at him in Chinese as he thrust the spear.

Chucai flowed like a wisp of smoke, the thick sleeve of his robe sweeping up and around like a fan. Angling his body so that he became a thin reed, he felt his sleeve tug as the spear pierced the silk fabric. His hand kept moving, inscribing the course a bird makes as it dives down on a lake and scoops up an unwary fish. The bird then rises back into the sky, burdened by what it has clutched in its talons. Chucai brought his hand up and turned, feeling the Chinese man struggle to pull the spear out of his sleeve. He clenched his other hand into a fist.

The spearman looked up, a realization dawning on his face that he had underestimated the length of his opponent’s reach, and then Chucai’s fist smashed into his nose. He cried out and fell back, his hands rising to stem the sudden rush of blood.

Simultaneously with the strike to the man’s face, Chucai had closed his other hand around the shaft of the spear and yanked it free of the man’s grip. Dropping his left hand to the spear, he stepped back, whipping the spear around to catch the man under the left arm. As soon as he felt the spear bite into leather, he pulled it back. The man lowered his arms, staggering from the slice, and Chucai stabbed him in the throat.

The other two had vanished among the tents, but Chucai heard shouts coming from up ahead. His alarm had been heard. Pulling the dead man’s spear free, he ran toward the voices.