Daughter of Xanadu - Dori Jones Yang [57]
“See what?”
“You know what I mean. You have worked too hard to become a soldier.”
Suren’s words hit their mark. I had been fooling myself into thinking I was being kind to Marco. In reality, I was feeding my attraction to him. I was playing with fire.
That night, I again willed myself not to think of Marco. But my reveries had gone too far. What would the hair on his arm feel like? Was his beard soft? Was his chest hard? Such thoughts were wrong. My heart and my mind battled against each other, neither one able to win decisively.
One night, Abaji told us the story of how Chinggis Khan’s two great generals, Subedei and Jebe, led the army westward around the Caspian Sea, using clever tactics to defeat the princes of Russia. Once they diverted a river and flooded a city. Often they would start a retreat and lure the enemy forces into a river valley surrounded by cliffs, only to block the enemy into the valley using a hidden rear guard of Mongol soldiers.
Marco’s face showed little emotion as he listened to General Abaji tell his stories. One night, though, when other men were not paying attention, he spoke. “When I was a boy,” he told Abaji, “everyone in Christendom feared the Mongol hordes. They were known for rape and murder and pillage.”
Abaji laughed. “How little you knew! We had only a few hundred thousand troops, yet we conquered lands with millions of inhabitants. Fear was our best tactic.”
“Surely some kingdoms resisted with great force?”
Abaji leaned forward, his face serious. “Every kingdom was given a choice: Cooperate, and we will spare you. Resist, and we will destroy you. Once people saw how fiercely we destroyed our enemies, they gave up without a fight.”
“So that is how so few men could conquer almost the entire world?”
“Ah. That is the miracle, isn’t it? Chinggis Khan and his commanders were the most brilliant military men in history. They hired local men to gather intelligence before entering each land. They sent the information back to headquarters quickly, using a highly organized system of horse riders. Mongol soldiers were well-trained archers, extremely disciplined. They used clever strategies to outwit much bigger armies. There has never been a leader like Chinggis Khan, and our army continues that tradition.”
When Abaji spoke, Marco seemed fascinated. Who would not be? The story of Chinggis Khan’s conquest of the world was the best ever told. Surely now Marco could understand why I had wanted to join this army, why the Great Khan deserved to rule the entire world. But remembering Marco’s preference for peace, I began to have doubts again.
All those afternoons in the sun in Xanadu had gradually reshaped my view of the world, polluting my Mongolian idealism as surely as a cow pollutes a streambed. Even if I had not watched Marco’s face during Abaji’s stories, I probably would have heard them with different ears. But with Marco’s foreign face before me as he tried hard to remain polite despite his distaste for our tactics, I was robbed of my central faith—faith in the absolute glory and wisdom of Chinggis Khan.
I began, despite myself, to look at all the familiar stories from the point of view of the vanquished, a dangerous angle of vision. I tried to resent Marco for opening my mind to this, but could not. Instead, I often found myself imagining his thoughts and feeling his emotions. It was as if an invisible rope linked us together.
Each night, when my thoughts became untethered from military discipline, I thought of Marco. My fingertips caressed the skin of my arms and belly as I remembered each moment he had touched me, on the shoulder, on the hand, on the back. At first I tried to banish such thoughts, but gradually I came to savor them. What harm was there in imagining something that could never happen? My nightly forbidden thoughts became ever more vivid.
Each morning, I reminded myself how lucky I was to be a soldier on a mission, traveling ever farther from all that