The Mountain Cage (8 page)

I searched among the captives for Elgigetei and Ajiragha. At last an old man told me that they had been taken by a fever only a few days before we attacked the harbor. I mourned for them, but perhaps it was just as well. My son might not have survived the journey north, and Dasiyu would never have accepted a second wife. I had the consolation of knowing that my deeds had not carried their deaths to them.

Clouds of migrating birds were darkening the skies when I went with Yesuntai to our two remaining ships. A mound of heads, those of the officers we had executed, sat on the slope leading down to the harbor, a monument to our victory and a warning to any who tried to land there.

The Noyan’s men were waiting by the shore with the surviving Frankish and Dutch sailors. The ships were provisioned with what we could spare, the sailors ready to board. Men of the sea would be useless in the northern forests, and men of uncertain loyalties who scorned the ways of the Flint People would not be welcome there.

Yesuntai beckoned to a gray-haired captain. “This is my decree,” he said. “You will sail east, and carry this message to my father.” He gestured with a scroll. “I shall recite the message for you now. I will make a Khanate of this land, but it will not be sullied by those who would bring the sins of Europe to its shores. When an ulus has risen here, it will be the mighty nation of our long-lost brothers. Only then will the circle close, and all our brothers be joined, and only if all the Khans accept the men of this land as their equals. It is then that we will truly rule the world, and if my brother Khans do not join this ulus of the world to come willingly, only God knows what will befall them.”

“We cannot go back with such a message,” the captain said. “Those words will cost us our heads.”

“You dishonor my father by saying that. You are my emissaries, and no Khan would stain his hands with the blood of ambassadors.” Yesuntai handed the scroll to the old man. “These are my words, marked with my seal. My father the Khan will know that I have carried out his orders, that the people of Inglistan will not set foot here again. He will also know that there is no need for his men to come here, since it is I who will secure this new Khanate.” He narrowed his eyes. “If you do not wish to claim the Khan’s reward for this message, then sail where you will and find what refuge you can. The Khan my father, and those who follow him to his throne, will learn of my destiny in time.”

We watched as the sailors boarded the longboats and rowed toward the ships. Yesuntai threw an arm over my shoulders as we turned away from the sea and climbed toward Yeke Geren. “Jirandai,” he murmured, “or perhaps I should call you Senadondo now, as your Long House brothers do. You must guide me in my new life. You will show me what I must do to become a Khan among these people.”

He would not be my Khan. I had served him for the sake of the Flint People, not to make him a Khan, but would allow him his dream for a little while. Part of his vision would come to pass; the Long House People would have a great realm, and Yesuntai might inspire them to even greater valor. But I did not believe that the Hodenosaunee, a people who allowed all to raise their voices in their councils, would ever bow to a Khan and offer him total obedience. My son would honor Yesuntai as a brother, but would never kneel to him. Yesuntai’s sons would be Ganeagaono warriors, bound to their mother’s clan, not a Mongol prince’s heirs.

I did not say this to Yesuntai. He would learn it in time, or be forced to surrender his dream to other leaders who would make it their own. The serpent that had wakened to disturb the lands of the Long House would grow, and slip westward to meet his tail.

Afterword to “The Sleeping Serpent”:

I spent much of the late 1980s immersing myself in the history and culture of Mongolia, in order to write a historic novel about Genghis Khan. As have many students of Mongol history, I found myself wondering what might have happened if the Mongol armies, on the verge of even more victories over their enemies, had not suddenly withdrawn from Europe in late 1241. Had they continued to move west, their empire, already the largest land empire ever won by conquest, might have reached as far as the Atlantic Ocean, but political necessities in the Mongol homeland forced them to abandon Europe. Ogedei Khan, the son of and successor to his father, Genghis Khan, died suddenly in 1241 (reportedly after a prolonged bout of drinking), and the commanders of the Mongol forces, by tradition, had to return to Mongolia to elect a new Khan. Ogedei’s death probably prevented the Mongol conquest of all Europe.

What might have happened if the Mongols had continued with their string of European victories? What the Mongols could not use, they destroyed, and many of the lands they conquered bear the scars of their depredation to this day; Central Asia, once irrigated by a network of canals and waterways, reverted to desert when Mongol invaders destroyed this irrigation system. The history of conquered Russia, with its exploitative aristocracy (some of whom claimed descent from Genghis Khan) and oppressed peasantry, offers a glimpse of what all of European history might have been like if Ogedei had not died when he did. For one thing, there might have been no Renaissance in either the arts or the sciences. In a letter to me, writer and physicist Gregory Benford wondered whether Western scientific inquiry, in the form that we know it, would ever have developed if all of Europe had been overrun by the Mongol armies.

It was Greg Benford who asked me to contribute a story to an alternate history anthology he was editing with Martin H. Greenberg,
What Might Have Been: Alternate Americas,
and immediately I thought of the Mongol conquest that Western Europe had so narrowly avoided. Surely the Mongols, sooner or later, would have begun looking for new conquests, and perhaps the sailing ships and nautical skills of the people they conquered would eventually have brought them to our shores. It was an inspiration, which had the additional pleasure of allowing me to bring the Mongols to the island of Manhattan and then up the Hudson River to meet the Mohawks who once inhabited my own home town of Albany, New York.

Which points up one of the particular joys of the alternate history story: being able to bring people together who could not possibly have met in our “real” world.

THE MOUNTAIN CAGE

Mewleen had found a broken mirror along the road. The shards glittered as she swiped at one with her paw, gazing intently at the glass. She meowed and hunched forward.

Hrurr licked one pale paw, wondering if Mewleen would manage to shatter the barrier, though he doubted that she could crawl through even if she did; the mirror fragments were too small. He shook himself, then padded over to her side.

Another cat, thick-furred, stared out at him from a jagged piece of glass. Hrurr tilted his head; the other cat did the same. He meowed; the other cat opened his mouth, but the barrier blocked the sound. A second cat, black and white, appeared near the pale stranger as Mewleen moved closer to Hrurr.

“She looks like you,” Hrurr said to his companion. “She even has a white patch on her head.”

“Of course. She is the Mewleen of that world.”

Hrurr narrowed his eyes. He had seen such cats before, always behind barriers, always out of reach. They remained in their own world, while he was in this one; he wondered if theirs was better.

Mewleen sat on her haunches. “Do you know what I think, Hrurr? There are moments when we are all between worlds, when the sights before us vanish and we stand in the formless void of possibility. Take one path, and a fat mouse might be yours. Take another, and a two-legs gives you milk and a dark place to sleep. Take a third, and you spend a cold and hungry night. At the moment before choosing, all these possibilities have the same reality, but when you take one path—”

“When you take one path, that’s that.” Hrurr stepped to one side, then pounced on his piece of glass, thinking that he might catch his other self unaware, but the cat behind the barrier leaped up at him at the same instant. “It means that you weren’t going to take the other paths at all, so they weren’t really possibilities.”

“But they were for that moment.” Mewleen’s tail curled. “I see a branching. I see other worlds in which all possibilities exist. I’ll go back home today, but that cat there may make another choice.”

Hrurr put a paw on the shard holding his twin. That cat might still have a home.

“Come with me,” Mewleen said as she rolled in the road, showing her white belly. “My two-legged ones will feed you, and when they see that I want you with me, they’ll honor you and let you stay. They must serve me, after all.”

His tail twitched. He had grown restless even before losing his own two-legged creatures, before that night when others of their kind had come for them, dragging them from his house and throwing them inside the gaping mouth of a large, square metal beast. He had stayed away after that, lingering on the outskirts of town, pondering what might happen in a world where two-legged ones turned on one another and forgot their obligations to cats. He had gone back to his house only once; a banner with a black swastika in its center had been hung from one of the upper windows. He had seen such symbols often, on the upper limbs of two-legged ones or fluttering over the streets; the wind had twisted the banner on his house, turning the swastika first into a soaring bird, then a malformed claw. A strange two-legs had chased him away.

“I want to roam,” he replied as he gazed up the road, wondering if it might lead him to the top of the mountain. “I want to see far places. It’s no use fighting it when I’m compelled to wander.”

Mewleen bounded toward him. “Don’t you know what this means?” She gestured at the broken mirror with her nose. “When a window to the other world is shattered, it’s a sign. This place is a nexus of possibilities, a place where you might move from one world to the next and never realize that you are lost to your own world.”

“Perhaps I’m meant to perform some task. That might be why I was drawn here.”

“Come with me. I offer you a refuge.”

“I can’t accept, Mewleen.” His ears twitched as he heard a distant purr, which rapidly grew into a roar.

Leaping from the road, Hrurr plunged into the grass; Mewleen bounded to the other side as a line of metal beasts passed them, creating a wind as they rolled by. Tiny flags bearing swastikas fluttered over the eyes of a few beasts; pale faces peered out from the shields covering the creatures’ entrails.

As the herd moved on up the road, he saw that Mewleen had disappeared among the trees.

Hrurr followed the road, slinking up the slope until he caught sight of the metal beasts again. They had stopped in the middle of the road; a gate blocked their progress.

Several two-legged ones in gray skins stood by the gate; two of them walked over to the first metal beast and peered inside its openings, then stepped back, raising their right arms as others opened the gate and let the first beast pass. The two moved on to the next beast, looking in at the ones inside, then raised their arms again. The flapping arms reminded Hrurr of birds; he imagined the men lifting from the ground, arms flapping as they drifted up in lopsided flight.

He scurried away from the road. The gray pine needles, dappled by light, cushioned his feet; ahead of him, winding among the trees, he saw a barbed-wire fence. His whiskers twitched in amusement; such a barrier could hardly restrain him. He squeezed under the lowest wire, carefully avoiding the barbs.

The light shifted; patches of white appeared among the black and gray shadows. The trees overhead sighed as the wind sang. “Cat! Cat!” The birds above were calling out their warnings as Hrurr sidled along below. “Watch your nests! Guard your young! Cat! Cat!”

“Oh, be quiet,” he muttered.

A blackbird alighted on a limb, out of reach. Hrurr clawed at the tree trunk, longing to taste blood. “Foolish cat,” the bird cawed, “I’ve seen your kind in the cities, crawling through rubble, scratching for crumbs and cowering as the storms rage and buildings crumble. The two-legged ones gather, and the world grows darker as the shining eagles shriek and the metal turtles crawl over the land. You think you’ll escape, but you won’t. The soil is ready to receive the dead.”

Hrurr clung to the trunk as the bird fluttered up to a higher limb. He had heard such chatter from other birds, but had paid it no mind. “That doesn’t concern me,” he snarled. “There’s nothing like that here.” But he was thinking of the shattered mirror, and of what Mewleen had said.

“Foolish cat. Do you know where you are? The two-legged ones have scarred the mountain to build themselves a cage, and you are now inside it.”

“No cage can hold me,” Hrurr cried as the bird flew away. He jumped to the ground, clawing at the earth. I live, he thought, I live. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with piney air.

The light was beginning to fade; it would soon be night. He hunkered down in the shadows; he would have to prowl for some food. Below ground, burrowing creatures mumbled sluggishly to one another as they prepared for sleep.

In the morning, a quick, darting movement caught Hrurr’s attention. A small, grayish bird carelessly landed in front of him and began to peck at the ground.