Time’s Eye

During this period of deliberation, though, Genghis Khan was aware of the need to keep his troops fit and occupied. He set up a rigorous program of training, including long forced marches and rides. And he ordered a battue to be organized. This would be a mighty hunt spanning kilometers, and it would take a week to organize. It would be an exercise in maneuvering troops, using weapons, maintaining discipline, communications and hardship. It was a significant event; the hunt was at the core of the Mongols’ self-image as well as their military methods.

Sable, meanwhile, explored the yurt city. She particularly targeted the troops, hoping to learn how they fought.

The Mongol warriors saw Sable as an irritation. Kolya learned that, given that the usual pattern of courtship here was to kidnap your wife from the yurt of your neighbor, women had surprising influence in Mongol society—as long as they were members of the Golden Family anyhow. Genghis Khan’s first wife Borte, about the same age as the emperor, was a key voice in the decision-making of the court. But women didn’t fight. The warriors were wary of this strange Heaven-woman in her orange clothes, and they weren’t about to submit to her inspections.

The turning point came when one cavalryman, drunk on rice wine, forgot about the power of Heaven and tried to rip open Sable’s jumpsuit. He was a stocky, powerful man, a veteran of the Mongols’ first Russian campaign, and so probably personally responsible for hundreds of deaths—but he was no match for twenty-first-century martial arts disciplines. With one pale breast exposed, Sable floored him in seconds and left him screaming on the ground, with a leg broken in two places.

After that, Sable rapidly grew in stature and in aura. She was allowed to come and go where she pleased—and she took care to ensure that the tale of her victory, suitably embellished, found its way back to the court. But the Mongols were growing nervous of her, Kolya saw, and that surely wasn’t a good thing.

Come to that, he was nervous of her. Her fear had long burned away, and as the days wore by, and she pushed against one barrier or another with impunity, she grew in confidence and determination. It was as if her stranding in this bit of the thirteenth century had liberated something primeval inside her.

Kolya, meanwhile, spent his time with Yeh-lü, the empire’s chief administrator.

Born in one of the neighboring nations, Yeh-lü had been brought into the Mongol camp as a prisoner; an astrologer by training, he had quickly risen in this empire of illiterates. Yeh-lü and other educated men in the court had been appointed by a farsighted Genghis Khan to administer the growing empire.

Yeh-lü had used China as his model for the new state. He selected the most able of the prisoners the Mongols brought back from their raids into northern China to help him in this project, and extracted books and medicines from their booty. Once, he said modestly, he had been able to save many lives during an epidemic in Mongolia by using Chinese medicines and methods.

Yeh-lü sought to moderate the Mongols’ cruelty by appealing to higher ambitions. Genghis Khan had actually considered depopulating China to provide more pasture for his horses, but Yeh-lü had deflected him. “The dead don’t pay taxes,” he had said. Kolya suspected his long-term ambition was to civilize the Mongols by allowing the sedentary cultures they conquered to assimilate them—just as China had absorbed and acculturated previous waves of invaders from the northern wastes.

Kolya had no idea how his personal adventure would turn out. But if he was stuck here on Mir, in people like Yeh-lü he saw the best hope for the future. And so he was happy to consult with Yeh-lü about the nature of the new world, and to draw up plans for what to do about it.

Yeh-lü had been taken by Sable’s first attempt to sketch a world map on the dirt floor. He and Kolya now assembled a detailed map of the entire world, based on Kolya’s memories and charts from the Soyuz. Yeh-lü was an intelligent man who had no difficulty accepting that the world was a sphere—like the Greeks, Chinese scholars had long ago pointed out the curving profile of the Earth’s shadow, cast on the Moon during a lunar eclipse—and it was easy for him to grasp the mapping of a globe’s surface to a flat sheet.

After some preliminary sketching Yeh-lü assembled a team of Chinese scribes. They began work on an immense silk version of the world map. When finished it would cover the floor of one of the yurts in the emperor’s great pavilion.