One Night in Xanadu

Chapter 12 - Come, Be Not Afraid

Before and around and behind us, the picked guards of the Khagan strode, ever alert, swords in hand, eyes constantly roving as my father's guards eyes had constantly roved, ever searching for any danger, any threat. Behind them, and close to my back, strode Chingay with a dozen of his picked men and in the midst of those guards, my hand in the Khagan's, I walked the hallways of a palace such as I had never imagined. My eyes roamed, ever curious for it had never dawned on me that men's hands could create a single building as enormous as this.

Hallway after hallway we trod, long corridors, great halls whose purpose I could not imagine, verdant courtyards paved with stone walkways, fountains with flowing water, lanterns hung, and always around us the guards, moving ahead and behind and around us. Beside me the Khagan strode silently, and it was not my place to speak unless I was bidden. Curious though I was at all we passed through, I restrained that curiosity, walking silently at the Kagan's side; silent as a woman should be unless her husband or her father bids her speak, although I was not always so obedient.

"Wait, Lord, Lady," one of the bodyguards spoke as we reached two carved wooden doors flung wide, guards to either side and half a dozen pairs of the guards who had escorted us from the banquet hall moved ahead through the doorway. Thus had my father's guards moved ahead of my father as he entered a yurt.

I waited, my hand in the Khagan's as if it were a child's, and my fear and my excitement rose within me.

"Patience, little wildcat," the Khagan murmured, smiling as I glanced up at him and now I was shy, for I had never been with a man, as befits a Princess who must retain her virtue for her husband and for her wedding night.

"All is safe, Lord." The guards emerged.

"Come, my Princess." The Khagan led me through the doors and into such a room as I had never seen before. There had been much in this Xanadu, this Summer Palace of the Khagan, that had been beyond anything that I imagined; and this room, this chamber of pleasure, for that is what it was, it was beyond anything my eyes had yet seen.

Used I was to sleeping in my father's yurts, the walls hung with tapestries, the ground lain over with thick rugs of knotted wool, a burning brazier keeping all warm through the long cold of winter on the steppe. Used I was to sleeping on thick sheepskins and layers of felt, covered by blankets of wool. Used I was in the harsh frozen weeks of mid-winter to sleeping kneeling on my forearms and my knees to raise my body from the chill of the frozen ground that sucks the heat from the body even when overlain by thick layered felt and by woollen fleeces and blankets.

This room, this bedchamber, it was a room of such palatial splendor that my heart caught in my throat and my breath came in a gasp of astonishment.

"Do you enjoy my bedchamber, Princess?" the Khagan smiled down at me as I gazed around in open admiration.

While this room was in the midst of this great palace, it could almost have been the interior of my father's great yurt but twice, perhaps thrice the size, and for one man alone where my father's yurt was his and whichever of his wives and family he chose to eat and sleep there with him. My father's pride and joy was a single silk painting of the Han, brought to him by the Han "princess" gifted to him when he had succeeded as Chanyu, and I had never met her, for she had died before I was born.

Of a weakness of the lungs, my mother had said. I would not have put it past my mother to have rid herself of competition to her children, for my father had treasured that princess of the Han for her frail and delicate beauty. At times when he turned maudlin with the heady strength of the airag he would talk to me of her, for it was to me my father turned rather than my brother the fool; and always I listened, for even in his drink my father was a wise man, and words of great wisdom often fell from his lips.