Short story sampler: a holiday gift

 I’m moving more of my short stories – most published, some not – from their often out-of-print formats onto more permanent ones, such as this. How can I resist starting with this one, titled:

CHRISTMAS LEAVE

According to orthodox histories, in 1175 the future conqueror of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, Sultan Saladin, narrowly escaped an Assassin’s knife. But other histories say the sultan died as his enemies intended, letting a medieval kingdom survive to complicate Middle Eastern politics. In those alternate histories it is. . .

Autumn A.D. 1260, Kingdom of Jerusalem and Antioch

Queen Isabelle felt her husband rise from their bed. She watched him in the lamp light—stocky of body, with the bowed legs of a lifetime on horseback. Quietly, as if he hoped not to wake her, he slipped on the quilted and padded silk tunic he wore under his armor without waiting for the help of his page. As his coat of mail slithered over the tunic with a metallic clink, he looked over his shoulder, his mouth under the sparse Mongolian mustache softening. It was an expression few had seen from Hulagu, grandson of the great Khan, conqueror of Baghdad and Damascus, and by right of his marriage to its queen, now ruler of Jerusalem. Although she was not his only wife.

Image: Pixabay

“Don’t come to see me off, my dear.” He stooped to kiss her. “I want to remember you like this.”

She shrugged off the bedcovers and pulled a sable-lined cloak over her shoulders. “I’m coming with you.”

His face hardened. “You’ll stay here. You’ll do as you’re told.” Then, as she opened her mouth to pr
otest, “For the sake of our child. For the sake of the kingdom.”

“When will you return?”

He hesitated, slung the baldric of his sword over his back. “God knows.”

“You don’t intend to come back, do you? You’re going to her, to Dokuz.”

She should, Isabelle knew, say farewell with some noble sentiment, not with shrewish complaints, but the thought of him in the arms of his first wife, the one whose advice he sought in all decisions, even the matter of his marriage to her, Isabelle, infuriated her.

Without looking back, he left the chamber. The slap of her thrown slipper against the closing door did little to ease her fury. 

*** 

December 1915, Hulagu Palace, Jerusalem

“Oh, not the gray one, my lady.” Maryam Halaby pouted prettily into the mirror at the dress Isabelle Hulagu, princess royal of the kingdom, held up. “Not with the young men on leave from the war. They’ll think you’re in mourning.”

“What then? The mauve?” Isabelle fingered the pale silk of the Worth tea gown.

Her lady in waiting shook her head. “If you were dressing to please the Count. . .”

Isabelle made a moue of dislike.

“But for your brother’s American friend, for Monsieur Jack Solms, now,” Maryam said, “wear something festive. Something the color of an American Beauty rose.”

Dressed at last, Isabelle pattered down the hallway to her father’s apartments. She had to know what his intentions were. Before the dance. Before she saw Jack.

Her father’s valet met her at the door. “His Majesty is riding his Mongolian fad again,” he said under his breath.

“Thanks for the warning, Hugo.” She smiled and slipped into the room, watching her father.

King Baudoin Hulagu turned from his mirror. “Ah, there you are, daughter. Take a look at this tie. Are you sure the knot’s quite smooth?”

Nearing fifty, the king was still as wiry and straight-backed as his ancestor’s ferocious horsemen. Though there had been no Mongolian royal family for the Hulagus to marry with for centuries, Baudoin had made the pilgrimage to their dynasty’s windswept homeland as a young man. And he still wore his mustache clipped in what he fondly believed to be a Mongolian fashion.

She adjusted the four-in-hand. “It’s fine, Dad.”

“Dad? Where do you pick up such language? From that American, I suppose.” He eyed himself in the dressing room mirror. “Look at this! A lounge suit! A lounge suit for Christmas dinner. I look like a damned journalist.”

“You’re too handsome and sober to be a journalist.”

“Humph.” He fiddled with his collar. “And what’s that you’re wearing?”

Isabelle twirled before him, spreading her rose-red skirt. “A tea gown.”

“A tea gown in the evening? And no corset. What is the world coming to? I don’t know why we can’t dress properly for dinner.”

“Because M. Solms doesn’t have a dinner jacket.”

“So, the rest of us must be inappropriately attired because M. Solms doesn’t bother to buy himself evening clothes?”

“Guillaume will wear his uniform also.”

Her father snorted. “A foreign uniform. The French Foreign Legion. What an idea.”

“Guillaume hopes for aid from the Allies to save us from the Ottomans once the war is over. We’ve discussed all that.”

“As if I’ve forgotten?” Baudoin sighed. “I know what your brother’s up to now, bringing his friend here. Don’t think the lot of you can put something over on me.”

“We’re not putting anything over on anyone. M. Solms is Guillaume’s friend. That’s all.”

“These Americans think because they’re rich, they can buy anything.” Baudoin recollected himself. “Except proper dinner clothes, of course. Why didn’t M. Solms go home to his own country when he got leave?”

“He didn’t have much leave, and it takes a frightfully long time to sail to America and back. Would you rather Guillaume had gone to visit M. Solms’s family in Texas instead of having them both here?”

“I suppose he knows you’re going to marry Tyre?”

“This isn’t a good time to talk about marriage, Father, with the war going on.” Isabelle bent to flick a petal of the white hothouse violets in her corsage.

“Well, who else can you marry? Not that many neutral royals left. No point looking to Europe. It’s done with. This war will finish it. We’ve got to look to our own people. Asia. That’s the future.”

Baudoin fussed with the eau-de-cologne scented handkerchief in his breast pocket. “The question of marriage has to be faced. And with your brother going back to the front. . . Where is he, by the way?”

Isabelle smiled. The coolness between her father and brother had been exaggerated for diplomatic reasons. Officially, Baudoin hadn’t approved of his heir’s enlistment in the French Foreign Legion, but there was no private estrangement between them.

“Running an errand,” Isabelle said. “A Christmas gift for Maryam.”

Baudoin frowned. “I don’t care for the way he’s been hanging around that woman of yours.”

“Baron Halaby’s daughter? I thought you liked her.”

“Not for a daughter-in-law. My heir’s duty is to marry into a good alliance.”

“Her father’s rich as Croesus. If that’s not a good enough alliance. . .”

“We need someone with wider connections. I was thinking of Spain.”

“Where’s the man who just said Europe’s finished?” Isabelle asked.

“Spain has connections—England and Germany. No matter who wins the war, we’d have allies.”

“But Guillaume loves . . .”

“Love, all this talk about love! It wasn’t like that in my time. Your dear mother and I knew our duty and we did it. And we got along famously.”

“Because Mother wrapped you around her finger.”

“That’s what good wife does. What you’ll do with Tyre.”

“Do you want Guillaume wrapped around a Spanish wife’s finger? Besides,” Isabelle hesitated. “The Spanish boy has that disease. That bleeding disease.”

“What of it? The girls are perfectly healthy.”

“It runs in their family. Jack, that is, M. Solms, says so.”

“Is M. Solms a physician? No? Then I don’t want to hear any more ‘M. Solms this and M. Solms that.’ Just be glad, my girl, that no one can expect me to announce an engagement, either yours or your brother’s, dressed like this.”

Baudoin slapped his hand to the breast of the despised lounge suit. He grimaced suddenly, pressing his fist hard to his chest.

“Father. . .” Isabelle flew to him, loosening his tie.

“My drops.” He waved a hand toward his dressing table.

Isabelle poured a glass of water from the carafe on the table and measured the medicine into it. “Father, are you sure you’re well enough for a party?”

Baudoin gulped down the glass’s contents and some color flowed back into his face. “I’m perfectly all right. Just anticipating my indigestion this evening.”

A knock sounded at the outer door and Crown Prince Guillaume opened the door a hands-width. “What’s all the whispering in here? What are you two plotting?”

“The future of the kingdom,” Isabelle said.

“Well, hurry up with it. Jack and I are ready to dance.”

***

Later that evening, after dinner, Isabelle sat by Jack at the piano, breathing his scent of tobacco and bay rum, luxuriating in the warmth of his arm around her waist as she surveyed the expanse of his horizon bleu-clad shoulders.

“You don’t have a boutonniere, Jack,” she said.

“It’s not regulation.”

“Perhaps you can stretch regulations this far.” She tucked a violet from her corsage into his buttonhole.

Jack’s look, from Isabelle’s face to the flower and back again made her drop her eyes.

“I do so want to learn this ragtime that’s all the fashion,” she said.

“Nothing to it. You can rag anything. Just follow me.” He laid his hand over hers, open over the keyboard. Together they picked out the tune of a popular waltz, then Jack swung into the syncopated beat of a rag.

“You’re not really going to marry him, are you?” he asked, under cover of the music.

“Marry who?”

“Count Tyre.”

“He’s my father’s choice.”

“Is he yours?”

“M. Solms, really, that’s no concern of yours.”

Jack’s grip on her hand tightened as a shadow fell across the keyboard.

“Shall we dance?” Isabelle looked up with a start at the Count of Tyre, looming over them. The American kept his hand on hers.

“M. Solms is on my dance card,” she said.

“M. Solms is playing for this dance,” Tyre said. “If he’s not dancing, he doesn’t need a dance partner.”

“I don’t see why M. Solms should lack company just because he’s obliging enough to give us some of that American music.”

“Besides,” Jack said, “I need Her Royal Highness to turn the pages for me.”

Tyre looked pointedly at the sheet music emblazoned with the title of the Merry Widow waltz on the piano stand.

“She turns the pages for your American music. I see.”

“Don’t you have a partner for this dance?” Isabelle asked. “Surely your card’s not empty. Let me look.”

“Mademoiselle Halaby,” Tyre said. “The lady seems not to be available.”

“Impossible. I saw her only a moment ago with my brother.”

“And now neither of them is present.” Tyre bit his lip, the jutting lower lip that ran in the family of his Hapsburg mother. “I think neither M. Solms nor your brother will want for company tonight.”

“Watch your language!” Jack rose from the piano.

Tyre shrugged. “I suppose the Prince has a right to amuse himself with that little chit.”

The circle of onlookers idling around the dance floor between sets drew back in delighted horror, and then closed around the two men.

“Make way, make way!” King Baudoin shoved a passage through them, followed by his gentleman attendant. “How dare you, sirs! Leave! And if you show your faces here again tonight. . .”

Guillaume, followed by Maryam, emerged from behind the potted orange trees at the room’s edge. He grabbed Jack’s arm and pulled him off his opponent. Tyre slunk away.

“You’re hurt, Jack.” Isabelle dabbed his bruised face with her handkerchief.

“Nothing as bad as he is.” Jack glared at his retreating rival. “I wonder what your dad will think of him now? Seems to me that fellow’s danced away his marriage.”

***

Later that evening, Isabelle sat in her apartment that evening, an unread book in her lap, staring into the glowing coals of the hearth. A knock on her door broke her reverie. Guillaume, of course, she thought. Maryam never knocked.

Congratulations for what she supposed was her brother’s successful proposal were on her lips when Jack appeared in the door. “Your brother sent me. It’s your father. He’s very ill.”

Isabelle stood, staring at him. “Father? What. . .?”

“Please hurry. I’ll wait in the hall while you dress.”

“No need,” Isabelle said, pulling shawl over her rose-red gown as she took Jack’s arm. Baudouin’s attendant gentleman, Hugo d’Ibelin, stopped them outside his chamber.

“Where’s Father?” Isabelle demanded. “What’s happened?”

“His chest,” Hugo said. “The pains got worse. You, Your Highness, may go in now but I must warn you—the king may not know you. Father LaSalle has been with him. We thought it was for the best.”

Isabelle shivered as she entered her father’s bedroom. The detested lounge suit was now flung on a chair, the dressing mirror reflecting the curtained bed and the man lying on it. His face gleamed with the oil of extreme unction. Guillaume sat on a stool beside the bed, clasping his father’s hand.

They watched through the night—Isabelle and Guillaume, Hugo d’Ibelin, the royal physician, and the priest. A clock ticked loud in the silence. Isabelle dozed and waked as her head drooped forward. She looked toward her father. He lay as he had before.

“Guillaume,” she whispered, touching her brother’s hand. “We must talk.”

She led him into the hall. Jack, standing outside the door, hastily dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed it out.

“You can’t go back to the war,” Isabelle said. “Not either of you. You can’t leave me here. Not with Father like this.”

“What are you saying, Bella?” Guillaume asked, although Isabelle was sure he understood her meaning.

“You must be regent while he’s. . . While he’s like this.”

“I can’t stay here. I’m a soldier.”

“The Kingdom is neutral,” Isabelle said. “What will France do if you don’t return? Attack us?”

“Isabelle.” She jumped as if at a jolt of electricity, at Jack’s voice.

“I thought that if any woman could understand honor, it was you. We’ve got to go back, your brother and me. We’ve given our word.”

“An oath to a country that isn’t either of yours. An oath my father hates. The council of barons won’t name me regent,” Isabelle continued. “I’m a woman. And they’ll say I’m too young. They’ll name…”

“Tyre,” Guillaume acknowledged.

“I’ll have to marry him.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a muscle twitch in Jack’s face. “I’ll have to marry him,” she continued, “or there won’t be anyone to speak for our house. The barons won’t respect an unmarried woman. There will be no one to speak for the House of Hulagu. Unless. . .” She faced Jack. “M. Solms, Jack. Will do something for me?”

“Anything,” he said.

“Marry me.”

And so, Isabelle and Jack were married; Father LaSalle laying aside his violet stole, Hugo d’Ibelin and Guillaume as witnesses, Isabelle still in her rose-red gown and Jack in the uniform of the Foreign Legion.

Guillaume walked them back to Isabelle’s apartment with the pale light of winter dawn filtering through the windows.

Isabelle hesitated at the door. She turned to Jack, offered him a tentative cheek. He stared at her for a moment. Then, with a laugh, he picked her up and stepped across the threshold, kicking the door shut behind them. Inside, he threw himself into a chair, still holding her.

“Now, missy, tell me what we’re up against. And if it’s a long story, I’ll need to smoke.”

Hours later, the door to Isabelle’s rooms opened just enough to show Guillaume silhouetted within its frame.

She groped on the floor for her dressing gown and flung it on.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Good news, Bella.” Guillaume’s nose twitched as he looked at her. “Have you been smoking?”

“It was just Jack,” she said, “that is. . .”

Guillaume waved away her explanation. “It’s Father,” he said. “He’s awake. The doctors say he’s going to be all right.”

Isabelle looked over her shoulder at her sleeping husband. “All right?” she said. “Then there’s no danger?”

“No danger anymore for him. No danger of Tyre for you.” Guillaume grinned. “Come see Father. He’s asking for you.”

THE END

*** 

And a final story, for now, from the Hulagu family:

THE KHAN’S BURIAL 

Azerbaijan, August 1266

As grooms untied the Mongols’ horses, the boy Ulan Chila’un paused in the tale he spun for his child queen, Maria Paleologos, and her still more childish attendant. Dropping to his belly, he parted the grass at the edge of the horse yard to peer through.

“What happened then, Red Stone?” three-year-old Oyunna asked, using the Mongol meaning of Ulan’s name. Her babyish cheeks flushed with excitement.

“Hush, Oyunna,” Maria said. “Can’t you see they’re leading the horses out?”

At thirteen, Maria was the oldest of the children. She softened the indignation of her tiny lady-in-waiting by popping her thumb into Oyunna’s mouth. The little girl sucked at it as the children watched the grooms lead a string of horses from the picket line in khan Abagha’s summer camp.

“Now!” Ulan leapt to his feet with a yell and charged the horses. He heard Maria panting behind him, then a wail from Oyunna, whose short legs could never keep up with the rest.

Ulan yanked a halter rope from the hands of a startled groom, scrambled onto the back of a wiry little Mongol horse, and kicked it into a canter. He shook his tangled hair from his face and looked for his companions. Maria had turned back to the weeping Oyunna. She grabbed the little girl, balancing her on her hip, and scampered to catch up.

Guiding his horse by the rope looped around its nose, Ulan circled the shouting grooms. He grabbed Oyunna from Maria’s outstretched hands and tossed her across the horse’s withers. Maria seized the horse’s tail and followed at a run.

“I’m scared, uncle,” Oyunna said, whimpering as every stride bounced her against the horse’s bony shoulders. “I’m falling.”

“Hold onto the mane.”

“I can’t, I can’t!”

“Yes, you can. You’re not a baby anymore.”

At three, even Mongol girls would be climbing onto horses, although, Ulan admitted, not in Oyunna’s awkward position.

The little girl grabbed handfuls of thick mane. The wind of their speed dried her tears. Ulan extended his hand to Maria, pulling her over the horse’s haunches and onto its back. She gripped him around the waist. With a final shout of derision for the grooms, Ulan thumped the horse’s ribs with his heels and the children sped out of camp, shrieking with laughter. 

They could have asked the grooms for the loan of a horse, as Maria had so reasonably pointed out before their charge.  She was, after all, the khan’s wife. But Ulan thought asking sounded too tame.

“Demanded, then,” Maria said in her Greek-accented Mongolian. “We could have ordered them to give us a horse. Give each of us a horse.”

Ulan didn’t bother answering.

“Where are we going?” Maria asked now, as the grooms’ curses faded in the distance. Her hair, blown loose from the plaits proper for a married woman, mingled with the boy’s as she bent over his shoulder.

“You’ll see.” Ulan slowed the horse to a walk as the tents of the Mongol encampment disappeared in the distance.

“Tell me now,” Maria said. “Don’t be such a horrid little boy.”

“I’m not a horrid little boy.”

“I’m hungry,” Oyunna said.

“One at a time,” Maria said in exasperation. “How do you expect me to keep up with your barbarian chatter?”

She pulled a fragment of bread loaf from the breast of her robe and passed it to the little girl before addressing Ulan again.

“Red Stone, I’m thirteen and you’re only eight, so I should know best whether you’re horrid or not.”

“Well, you’re a horrid girl,” he said.

His queen cuffed his ear for his impertinence.

The horse halted as Ulan dropped to the ground, pulling Maria off with him and grabbing her hair. But the need to keep one hand on the lead rope hampered the boy’s fighting ability.

Oyunna, still slung over the horse’s back, struggled to get down. One of her kicks caught Ulan a blow on the mouth that burst his lip. Maria seized advantage of the distraction to throw him onto his back.

Now she sat on his belly, pummeling him with her fists. “How dare you talk that way to the queen of the Mongols!”

A wail from the abandoned Oyunna caught their ears. Maria stood and flounced away from the breathless and bleeding Ulan to catch the horse.

“There, darling, don’t cry.” Maria helped Oyunna to the ground. “I’ll give you a sweetie if you stop crying.”

A hopeful expression spread over Oyunna’s tear-streaked face. Maria reached into the breast of her robe again and drew out a lump of sugar, grayed and crumbling.

Ulan picked himself up, swiping the back of a hand across his bleeding lip as he rejoined the girls. He looked around. This was the place. The grass was shorter here. Bare earth and a small cairn of stones showed between the yellowing clumps. He rubbed his lip hard to start the blood again and shook a drop onto the earth.

“What are you doing?” Maria asked. She dropped the lead rope as the horse busied itself cropping the long steppe grass. With Oyunna balanced once more on her hip, she knelt to watch the boy.

“I’m giving something to her,” Ulan said. “I bring her something every time I come here.”

“You give someone your blood?”

“Only when I can’t get the blood of some horrid girl instead.”

Oyunna’s mouth opened in consternation and sugary spittle dribbled down her chin.

“Who is ‘she’?” Maria asked.

“My mammy, Dokuz the old queen,” Ulan said, using his baby name for his stepmother, who fostered him after his own mother’s death. “This is her grave.”

He pulled a pebble out of the front of his robe and added it to the cairn.

Maria rocked back on her heels, looking uneasily at the circle of trampled grass and earth.

The Byzantine girl shivered, despite her derision of the Mongols’ superstitious avoidance of traffic with the dead. “Aren’t you afraid to be here?”

“Not with her,” Ulan said. “I was never afraid with her.”

Maria set Oyunna on the ground and stood, dusting off her skirts. “The sun is nearly setting. We should go home soon.”

“Scared?” Ulan asked.

“Was anyone else buried here?” Maria had heard the stories about the burial of Hulagu Khan, the boy’s father, of course, although her husband the new khan discouraged them. It was ill luck to invoke the dead.

“Queen Dokuz was buried alone,” Ulan said. “Not like my father. There was no one to go with her in the dark.”  He wiped away the tears cutting tracks through the blood and dust on his face.

Maria patted Ulan’s shoulder, and as she did, he hid his face in his hands. First his father Hulagu Khan’s death last year. Then Dokuz, the only mother he had known, following soon after her husband.  Dying of grief, everyone said.

In the turmoil following the death of Dokuz Khutan last summer, Maria had arrived with the embassy from her father, Emperor Michael Paleologos of Byzantium, ready to fulfill a marriage alliance with Hulagu, whose Mongols threatened to overrun all the world. Instead, Maria had found her intended bridegroom dead and herself left in his will to his oldest son Abagha, as if she had been a spare cloak. Now she was thirteen and styled herself queen of the Mongols of the Persian Il-Khanate, although her court—as much as her husband the new khan could spare from the demands of his other wives—consisted only of Abagha’s three-year-old daughter from a senior wife and Ulan, the product of another of Hulagu’s marriage alliances.

“We should get home,” Maria said again. “It’s getting dark.”

“Are there comets?” Oyunna asked.

She was too young to remember the great events of two summers earlier, or even imagine what a comet looked like. But like any sensible person, she feared the terrible messenger from Blue Sky which had heralded the death of the old khan.

“No comets,” Maria said, taking the little girl’s hand.

“What happened, Red Stone?” Oyunna asked.

“What?”

“In the story. Before the horses. Tell us.”

So, as they rested beside Queen Dokuz’s grave, he took up the thread of his tale again, the tale of Hulagu Khan’s great convocation in the year of the Panther and the terrible omen.

***

The morning after a great gathering of Hulagu’s vassals, Ulan woke before dawn in Dokuz’s tent, roused by a clamor outside the door.

“Here,” Dokuz said to her women as they peeked from behind the curtain partitioning the tent. “Help me into my mantle. Quickly, now. Don’t wake the master.”

She pulled the garment out of their hands and, hair still loosened for the night, opened the door.

Outside, the captain of Hulagu’s guard and another warrior fell on their knees before her, shivering. Their weather-beaten faces showed ashen in the dawn of a clear summer morning, although both were battle-hardened fighters. “Lady Dokuz, save us!”

Peering from behind her, Ulan expected to see the encampment in flames, at least, to justify the terror on the men’s faces.

“A comet,” the captain whispered.

Even Dokuz stared at them a moment in horror before she collected herself. “Show me. I won’t have my lord disturbed for some drunkard’s blathering.”

Ulan’s favorite among Dokuz’s ladies – a granddaughter of Hulagu’s general Kedbogha – drew a veil over the queen’s hair and set sandals on her feet as the guards helped her down from the tent’s threshold. They led the queen, Ulan clinging to her skirts, to a clearing between the tents from which they could see the eastern sky.

Low on the horizon, Ulan saw a great star. No, not a star, he realized. The hair on his nape prickled in fear as he spied the celestial object’s bright tail streaming away from the light of the rising sun.

“There, madam.” The captain gestured with a trembling hand at the harbinger of doom.

Ulan grew cold at the sight as Dokuz crossed herself. Comets ever foretold the deaths of great men. And there could be none greater in this quarter of the world than Ulan’s father Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, at the height of his power and surrounded by honor.

“Double the guard around the camp,” Dokuz said. “And order the astrologers to meet in the large tent at noon. But see no one disturbs my lord before then.”

She turned to Ulan and her women, crouched behind her as if she could shield them from the comet’s baneful presence. She motioned to them to follow her back to her tent, but as she turned, she fainted. And that, to Ulan, was the most terrifying omen of all. For never, he had been told, in all the scenes of danger and bloodshed through which Dokuz had accompanied her husband, had she ever succumbed to such women’s frailty.

One of the guards helped the women carry Dokuz to her tent. Ulan crept under the quilts beside her, shivering. He hardly realized Hulagu’s place in the bed was empty until the door was flung open.

The queen sat bolt upright. “Where is he?” she asked, dazzled by the sudden light. “Where is my lord?”

The bright day outside silhouetted Hulagu’s stocky frame.

“I am here, madam,” he said. “And death is at my heels.”

And truly, it was. Before the end of the coming winter, Hulagu returned home from a hunt stricken with a deadly chill. He died before spring brought the new year, died as the comet had predicted before the end of that year of the Panther.

Hulagu’s oldest son, Abagha, ordered his father’s body wrapped in his sable mantle and laid on an ox sledge to be taken to the island tomb at Lake Urmiah in Persia, the tomb where preparations for burial had been underway since the comet appeared.  A bridge of boats linked the shores of the salt lake to the island. The island was a rocky, sheer-cliffed outcrop rising from the waters. Across the bridge streamed men, horses, and goods. And women. Lovely, young women dressed as if for a holiday.

Hulagu’s youngest son and his chief wife, Dokuz, joined the throng.

At first quiet and solemn, Ulan trotted hand in hand by the queen’s side. But the pale winter sunlight, the crispness of the air, the lapis blue of the sky above intoxicated him. He skipped, feeling the rush of cold air on his face as the ear flaps of his fur cap lifted with the motion.

“Red Stone, be still.” The queen tightened her hold.

He twisted sulkily, raising his eyes to the end of the bridge. On an outcropping of the rocky shore, his brother Abagha waited with his bodyguard.

“Red Stone, listen to me,” the queen said. “Do you know your father is dead?”

He stopped fidgeting and stared at her. She looked suddenly old. The light cut harsh lines across her face. Dark half-moons underscored her reddened eyes that puckered in nests of wrinkles beneath her face paint.

As she waited for a reply, the buzz of conversation from her ladies hushed.

Ulan lowered his eyes and scuffed the toe of his boot on the boat bridge.

The queen straightened, holding her head high in spite the shadows of fatigue and grief. “Do you have your dagger?”

He nodded.

“Show it to me.”

He drew out the stone dagger from sheath of gilded leather. Small as the dagger was, only twice the length of a small boy’s hand, it was a blade of power, not forged in a smithy, but knapped from the bones of the earth goddess. The surface of its schist blade gleamed pale as the winter sun. Its tang disappeared into a hilt studded with the blood-colored carnelians that were Red Stone’s talismans.

The queen’s face softened. She took Ulan’s hand again and walked forward at a stately pace. “Do you know what to do with the dagger when we reach your father’s tomb?”

He nodded again.

At the island’s shore, the new khan, Abagha, awaited them.

Ulan raised his eyes up the towering cliffs and from there to the deep sky. He leaned back until he lost his balance and plopped onto the path smoothed into a zigzagging ramp up which the oxen had drawn his father’s body, to the fortress tomb on the island’s summit. He dusted off his grand clothes, fearful of another reprimand from the queen, fearful of his brother’s frown as he handed Dokuz into the litter that would carry her to the top, to her husband’s tomb. Ulan dashed to the open side of the palanquin and scrambled in, snuggling his face against the breast of the queen’s ermine coat, hiding from Abagha’s wrath.

“Tired so soon, Red Stone?” she asked.

He raised his face at the sound of her voice, seeking the glimpse of a smile. She stroked his sweat-dampened hair back from his forehead and tucked it inside his cap. Safe within Dokuz’s arms, he clung to her side as, with a jolt, the bearers raised the support poles to their shoulders. The queen’s ladies moved to close the litter’s pearl-embroidered curtains, but Dokuz stopped them with a wave of her hand.

“Leave them open. The boy will be jumping in and out the whole time, anyway.”

The younger ladies giggled, a sound of frivolity silenced under the new khan’s frown.

Abagha leaned down, face to face with his youngest brother. “Why the queen trusts you, of all people, with this task is beyond my understanding. You’ll probably fall and break your neck or get sick halfway to the top. At least, if you must get sick, do it over the side. Do you understand?”

Ulan nodded. He had learned not to take older brothers lightly, khans or not.

The queen’s procession began its climb. The lurching of the palanquin up the slope was worse than any oxcart. Ulan lay on his belly across Dokuz’s lap, watching the lake surface drop away from the cliffside until dizziness overcame him. Then he flopped onto his back to stare at the sky, and then onto his belly again.

Dokuz halted the litter when she could bear his squirming no longer. “Out. Try not to break your neck, child.”

He leaped out, stumbled to his knees, brushed them off, and ran up the mountain.

The wind on the cliffside buffeted him. He spread his arms, waving them like birds’ wings. He sped around a turn in the trail and threw himself on the ground, panting, to watch the queen’s palanquin swaying below him, and then jumped up and ran back down the slope to climb into Dokuz’s lap once more.

His eyes opened wide with delight as the procession reached its goal. One instant stony red cliffs surrounded him and Dokuz. The next, they were at the top, swaying across the windswept plateau toward a mud brick tower. Twin lines of bonfires edged the path from cliff’s edge to citadel.

Dokuz halted the bearers. Her attendant ladies huddled around her, glancing anxiously at the fires. Some made the sign of the cross over the breast of their robes. Infected with the women’s fear, Red Stone clung to Dokuz.

“The boy and I will go alone from here,” she said.

She stepped out, moving stiffly after the jolting ride, her face as pale as her ermine coat. She removed a glove and grasped Ulan’s bare hand.

“You’re so cold, child,” she said, chafing his fingers. “Where are your mittens?”

“Here, madam.” One of her waiting women fished them out of the palanquin.

Dokuz pulled the mittens onto the boy’s hands. They moved forward between the fires.

“We must come back the same way,” Dokuz said. “Don’t forget and run off, little scatterbrain.”

“Why, mammy?” he asked, using his baby name for the queen. “Won’t the smoke get your coat dirty?”

“When did you ever worry about getting dirty?” she said.

They walked on in silence. A party of soldiers held the reins of the khan’s best horses. One of them also carried Hulagu’s favorite hunting eagle on its wooden perch. The bird’s head moved alertly, even under its hood.

“Once we have entered the tomb, there is no way back to the land of the living except between the fires,” Dokuz said, as if to herself, after a long silence.

Ulan looked at her, startled. He had forgotten his question, so busied had his child’s thoughts been with the strange sights around them.

“The fires purify us from the contamination of the dead.” The queen raised her free hand and plucked at the air with gloved fingers, as if the contagion was tangible.

“The horses won’t want to walk through the fires,” Ulan said. His forehead wrinkled in anxiety for the horses. He stared back at them, not watching where he went until they reached the edge of a pit.

Earthen ramps wide enough for oxcarts sloped into its depths. Music of harps, flutes and drums rose from the pit floor, and the boy leaned over the edge, craning his neck to find the source of the merriment. A crowd of women in dresses that glittered with embroidery and gold sequins swirled, dancing and singing, around a great vat filled with foaming liquor.

Ulan felt Dokuz’s hand jerk from his. He turned to see her fallen to her knees, weeping.

When she had collected herself enough to rise, she set foot on the ramp leading to the pit’s floor. He started after her, but he saw that the guards had left a ladder leaning against the inner wall of the pit, to let the servants hand down skins of koumiss, the foaming fermented mares’ milk filling the copper vat within the tomb. Out of this vessel the ladies chosen to attend his father dipped their cups to drink.

The sun hung overhead, peering into the pit as if to admire the loveliness of the ladies. There were forty of them, all young and of noble families, all brilliantly dressed. The sparks of light from the sun above and torches within glinted off the golden sequins covering their dresses, the reflections flitting around the tomb like fireflies. One of the ladies, idling near the foot of the ladder, looked up as Ulan’s shadow fell across her. She shaded her eyes with her hand.

“Red Stone, do you remember me?” she asked.

Her voice, at least, sounded familiar. He thought he should know her name, although he could not recall it now. These chosen women had lived in Hulagu’s camp since last fall, sent from the court of his brother the Great Khan in Mongolia to await fulfillment of the prophecy the comet had made when it overhung the assembly of Hulagu’s vassals. But this woman’s face was so painted with white clay, with kohl-rimmed eyes and rouged lips, he didn’t recognize her. He was ashamed to admit that. Perhaps he could ask someone later what her name was.

She smiled and waved to him. “Little Red Stone, come down and feast with us.”

He scrambled down the ladder, jumping free of the last rungs. He landed in the woman’s arms. The contents of her cup splashed on his robe.

“Now look what you’ve done, Red Stone. You must pay a forfeit for spilling my drink.” She kissed him. “A toast! A toast to Red Stone.”

She raised a cup to her red mouth, eyeing the empty vessel owlishly, as if she had forgotten its spill. “It’s gone. All gone.”

A tear slid through her eye paint and down her cheek, exposing a rivulet of warm skin. She fell, Ulan tumbling from her arms.

“Don’t cry,” he said. “I’ll get you more.”

He scooped up her fallen cup, ran to the vat and bent over it.

“Red Stone! Don’t touch that! Come back to me now!”

He stopped at Dokuz’s shout, dropping the cup into the foaming drink. The neck of his robe tightened as Dokuz grabbed him. She knelt beside him, gripping his shoulders with both hands.

“Stop, Red Stone. “It’s poison.”

“I spoiled the lady’s drink,” he protested, wriggling in the queen’s grip. “I promised to get her more.”

“Look at her.” Dokuz dragged him from the vat and turned his face toward the ladder’s foot.

The young woman sprawled, oddly still. As he watched, a guard picked up her body and moved it into the shadows.

“She has gone to your father,” Dokuz said. “Come.”

She led him deeper into the tomb, into a roofed room closed from the sky. Now only the light of torches pierced the darkness. Torchlight reflected off a wall of gold.

“Your father will take the ladies with him, just as he takes his treasure,” Dokuz said. “As he takes his horses and his eagle.”

The golden wall was built of metal ingots, stacked from bottom to top of the chamber, ingots melted from the treasure of the cities Hulagu had sacked. The enclosed air was stuffy. Permeating everything, under the scent of earth and the perfume of the ladies, the rank smell of the guards in their leather jerkins and the sweat of horses, was a sickly stench. It emanated, the boy knew, from the corpse laid prone on a stone bier that stood table-like before the towering stacks of gold. His father’s corpse.

The chill of winter had kept the scent at bay during their journey. Resting at last in the dry earthen tomb, the odor stretched and spread itself.

Dokuz led the boy toward the bier, to stand gazing into Hulagu’s face, his eyes closed below his helmet’s rim, his mouth clamped tight. The boy had not loved Hulagu the way he loved Dokuz, but his father was always present, always feared and obeyed. Now there was no more father.

Dokuz slipped her hand from the boy’s small fist. “Do what you came here for.”

He unbuckled the dagger sheath from his belt, his mittened hands fumbling with the fastenings and held up dagger and sheath uncertainly. His father’s hands had been laid over his chest, wrapped in a coat of sable skins that covered him from chin to the upturned toes of his horseman’s boots.

Dokuz lifted one of her husband’s dead hands, cradling it in both of hers. Ulan thought he would not have dared to do that. He laid the dagger on his father’s chest and Dokuz placed Hulagu’s hand over it. Ulan looked from his father to his stepmother’s face, still as the dead face but drenched in tears, and tears at last crept over Red Stone’s face as well.

“Go, wait for me,” Dokuz said in a choked voice.

Her sobs followed him as he fled past the ladies in their bright dresses, all now fallen like flowers cut down by frost.

THE END