“I am not a convict,” I respond. “All I need are some supplies and a place to spend the night,
then I’ll be out of your way.”
The chief laughs. “You are an optimistic young woman if you think I will just give you
supplies. Meat and water are hard to come by in this desert. You don’t look like you have much to
trade, so I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed with what I have to offer.”
I glance around desperately, and notice the sentry’s eyes fixed intently on me. There is a long
silence, punctuated by the rhythmic drone of voices from the direction of the fire. The chief turns.
“Wait!” I shout, suddenly panicked. I pull the star chart from my pocket, holding it out to the
chief. “This is valuable.” I watch silently as he unrolls it and squints at the markings in the dim light.
He looks up at me. “Where did you get this?”
“I took it,” I say quietly, “from a monastery near Ningxia. I was using it to find my way across
the desert.”
“Where are you heading?”
The question unnerves me. A child’s face flashes across my vision, but I force it away. “If you
please, I would like some supplies now.”
The chief grins unpleasantly. “Of course. Bataar here will give them to you. You can share a
tent with his daughters tonight.”
As we approach the edge of the camp and start towards a small tent, Bataar leans in and
whispers, “Where
are
you heading, Odval?”
I stop so suddenly I almost topple forward into the sand. Moonlight suddenly sparse, I rip the
torch from the sentry’s hands and hold it close to his face, gaping at his features, searching for
some familiarity in the creased skin.
“I never said my name,” I say. Bataar is silent. “I never told anyone my name,” I insist.
“Do you really not recognize me?”
I scour my memory, searching for his face among the blurred crowds of Ningxia, among the
now ghostly figures of the drunken city guard and the few monks in their long robes who slept
peacefully while I stepped across their still forms to snatch the chart. But none of them knew me,
at least not by name, and certainly not by
that
name. In Ningxia they called me Kushi. I haven’t
been to Odval for sixteen years.
“You’re from my tribe,” I whisper.
“Don’t you remember your own uncle?”
His words slice into me more deeply than if he’d drawn his moonlit scimitar and used it to slash
open my skin. My uncle is here. The desert seems suddenly to have shrunk, as though the gods
pulled back infinite handfuls of sand and scattered the specks of earthly light across the Heavens
before closing the gap. The moon reemerges as Bataar embraces me, and I remember him. Inside
the supply tent, I tell him everything that happened since the army took me. I tell him how I was
forced to skin animals and cook with the other children, and how we were made to help restring
bows after each battle. I tell him how I was traded for some jade after they took Ningxia, how
I lived as a slave for years before deciding to run. I tell him how I escaped when the men were
intoxicated, how I broke into the monastery and stole a horse from the edge of the city.
“You still haven’t answered my earlier question,” Bataar says when I finish, “about where you
are going.”
I smile. “I want to find my parents.”
My uncle wrinkles his forehead. The torchlight accentuates the shadow of each crease, and I
