A sky so blue it stings.
Beneath it, dozens stood waiting in orderly lines upon a steppe stretching across the heart of the plateau.
Today was the day the Yeke Kurultai convened; the great and small tribes of Mongolia—now the enfeoffed kings and nobles of the vast conquered territories—had all gathered in one place.
The council had but a single agenda.
The great rebellion of Goryeo that had risen against the Mongols, and the execution of the two who had led that treason.
At the end of the road they had formed, split into two columns, stood the Khan. Between them, a man and a woman were bound and dragged forward, limp and helpless, like a withered donkey walking a road.
The general who had escorted the two criminals to Karakorum completed his duty with a silent bow before the Khan, and the Khan dismissed him with a glance, looking down at the man and woman kneeling before him.
"..."
While a silence cold enough to make one’s flesh ache enveloped the steppe, the Khan merely watched. His beard twitched, his face flushed red and flinched, yet he uttered not a single word.
"Great Khan, how shall the two criminals be—"
Unable to endure the atmosphere any longer, one general cautiously gauged the Khan's mood and opened his mouth—
Shring!
Before he could finish, the Khan snatched a curved blade from one of the Keshig standing in formation beside him.
It was his answer to the question of the general standing nearby.
"Bring him here."
The soldiers moved busily; the man was thrown roughly to the ground, while the woman was made to kneel carefully. They gauged the expression of the Khan standing before her—so very cautiously, as though handling a porcelain vessel on the verge of shattering.
"The younger brother of the King of Goryeo... Chang."
The Khan slowly looked down at him. He coldly stared at the man who had once been the younger brother of the King of Goryeo, a hostage and guest of Karakorum, and the one who had taken his daughter to wife.
"Have you nothing to say to me?"
Following those words, the curved blade—flowing with the fury and betrayal the Khan felt—halted before his eyes.
In his memory was the man his daughter had led into the ger by the hand. His fingertips trembled as vividly as his daughter's voice, pleading to him, 'I cannot be without this person,' still rang in his ears.
"Answer me. I personally appointed you as Güregen; why in the world—"
"What more is there to say?"
But the eyes of the man who was the younger brother of the King of Goryeo, and who in Goryeo was called by the title of Ankyeonggong, were rugged, serene, and sharp.
A quiet voice. Within it lay a resolve that could split rock.
"Nothing to say...?"
The Khan's voice sank low, having barely held himself back from swinging the curved blade with his own hand.
"Why do you not speak of how you led Goryeo and incited rebellion? How dare you—"
How dare you, how dare you, how dare you! His heart blazed so fiercely that he could not even find the words, a silence weightier than words. And finally, it ignited with the man's answer.
"I have never said I did not know of the grace you showed me."
A clear voice brushed through the grass enveloping the steppe.
"It is true that Your Majesty's army removed the military overlords and restored order to Goryeo. Thanks to that, Goryeo, which had been toyed with by its own subjects, was finally able to break free from treacherous officials."
His eyes flared wide.
"But that is all. Had you seen the suffering of the Goryeo people, you would surely know why I chose rebellion!"
Five hundred cattle, a thousand horses, twenty falcons, dozens of tribute maidens. Every year, the weight of the tribute the Mongol darughachis dragged northward crushed the lives of the Goryeo people.
Countless extortions, and the maidens who were dragged away, never to return. With no way to know how they lived or where, those who had sent their daughters to Mongolia could only bury them in their hearts and go on living.
"I do not think you are ignorant of all these things."
A shout thick with resentment. Taking it as a signal, the fingertips of the Khan, who had held silent until then, finally moved.
Shhhk—
The curved blade cut through the air in a clean motion. It was a flawless movement, utterly impossible to believe came from the hand that had been trembling until moments before.
It was a movement he must have learned during the long years of wandering the steppe, piecing back together the Mongolia that had collapsed in the generation of his forefathers.
And so precisely did the blade fall toward his neck that Wang Chang, the Ankyeonggong of Goryeo, could speak no more. Blood soaked the earth, and even the sound of breathing vanished from the silent steppe.
----- -----
"...Daughter."
The Khan turned his head. Now before his eyes was his only daughter among his children, and thus the one he had cherished so terribly.
She knelt beside the corpse of the husband she had once had, gazing at him in silence.
"My daughter, my daughter Oljei. Why did you point a blade at me? Why?"
The voice of Esen Khan—the Khan of a Mongolia unified for the second time—trembled and faltered more than ever before.
Was it because this was a reality he did not wish to believe, or because of the desperate intuition that the inevitable had come?
Or perhaps even the iron-blooded conqueror was, in this moment, merely someone's father.
"Daughter, confess even now. If you admit your crime and beg for forgiveness... I shall prepare a place where you can live quietly with your child."
Stifled gasps. Someone among the kings and nobles filling this place had unconsciously let out a sound.
He must have done so upon witnessing a sight he had never once seen before: the Khan showing mercy to one who had pointed a blade at him.
"When all has quieted, I can call you back... Perhaps you can live as before, as if nothing had happened. So—"
"Great Khan."
Between the Khan's cracking voice, a voice that had once been clear but was now greatly subdued and spent pierced through the people's ears like water through rock crevices.
"Is there a clause in Mongol law that says a traitor should be spared?"
"Daughter, why do you speak such words? Are you not my daughter? Do you truly not know this father's heart that seeks to save you?"
Oljei, a woman who had been raised as the noble princess of a great house that once unified Mongolia, slowly raised her head.
The sunlight shining down from the flawless clear sky illuminated her face, revealing an expression that made clear she had already cast everything aside.
"My husband died as a man of Goryeo. I too shall die and become a ghost of Goryeo."
Did she know that her relief would become someone's despair? At any rate, she closed her eyes, and once more the curved blade split the air.
With it, all were trapped in a stillness where no one dared move.
----- -----
A trembling movement. A little child staring as if unable to believe what was happening to herself.
A child quietly collapsed before the corpses of the two.
The child left behind by the owners of the fallen corpses, the daughter of Wang Chang and Oljei. That child, in whose veins flowed both Goryeo blood and Mongol blood, only murmured powerlessly in Goryeo words that no one present could understand.
"Great Khan... what will you do with this child?"
While all stared vacantly in a daze, the one who had come to his senses fastest dared to ask before the Khan could open his mouth, yet no one was about to fault such discourtesy.
"..."
The Khan silently watched as the child, who had been approaching the corpses of her parents, was seized by the soldiers' hands.
Seeing the child's face, sobbing and brimming with tears, he slowly lowered the curved blade.
She looked exactly like his own daughter at the age of ten—that daughter who had lost the one who bore her to a disease that blackened and rotted the skin. Held in the soldiers' hands, that child gazed at him.
For some reason, the blood that had stained his hands countless times now felt heavy, and he began to walk away with faltering steps, turning his back on the steppe.
"Lock her away."
After walking a few steps, his feet returned from unsteady strides to straight ones, and his voice too had returned before anyone knew it to that of a Khan commanding the entire Great Mongol State.
"Confine her to the inner palace of the temple at Karakorum. Without my permission... let no one meet her."
And yet his voice was somehow dark. It was a day when the sky was a damnable shade of blue.