“Then it is Ogotai that I seek,” I replied.

“Shall I send you to Karakorum,” he said, “as an emissary from a land so distant that you do not know who sits upon the golden throne? A man who can stop arrows with his bare hands and break the back of the strongest wrestler? Are you an emissary or a sorcerer? What business do you have with Ogotai?”

I wish I knew, I said to myself. To Hulagu I stated, “My instructions are to speak to none but the High Khan in Karakorum, my lord. I would be unfaithful to my ruler if I failed to carry out my orders.”

“I think you are a sorcerer. Or worse, an assassin.”

I lowered my voice. “I am not, my lord.”

Hulagu sank back into his cushions and extended his right hand as he gazed at me through narrowed eyes. It was impossible to tell from his expressionless face whether he was afraid, worried, or angry. A man with the high-arched aquiline nose of the true Arab and the air of gentility about him handed Hulagu a golden cup. He sipped from it, still eying me suspiciously.

“Go,” he said at last. “The guard will find you a place to sleep. I will decide about you tomorrow.”

Something about the way he said that made me think that he had already decided.

I had enough presence of mind to bow. Then I picked up my shirt and jacket and, carrying them over my arm, followed my armed escort out of the tent. I took a last glance at Hulagu; he was staring at the arrow lying on the carpet where I had knocked it.

It was outside in the dark coldness of the night, as I was pulling the lice-ridden shirt over my head, that they attacked me. There were six of them, although I didn’t know that at first. I was knocked to the ground, the shirt still tangled around my head and arms, and they were on top of me. I flailed and kicked, tore the shirt away and saw the glint of a dagger blade in the moonlight. I fought for my life without worrying that I might kill some of them as they kicked and beat me with clubs. Then the flaring pain of a knife slashing cut into my gut, again and again. I could feel my own hot blood spurting across my skin. A final blow to my head and I lost consciousness.

When I awoke, a few minutes later, the attackers had gone and I had been dragged behind a cart. I could see the cleared space that surrounded the Orkhon’s white tent and the two big bonfires in front of its entrance. I clamped down on my slashed blood vessels as hard as I could, and the bleeding slowed. But I could not stop it altogether. I felt very weak, and I knew that if I passed out again, my control over the severed vessels would fade and I would bleed to death.

I heard voices from somewhere in the darkness behind me. I tried to turn, but even the effort to move my head left me giddy and sliding toward unconsciousness.

“Here, my lord,” a man’s whispered voice said. “They dragged him here.”

I heard another man make a huffing kind of grunt. “So he is not a demon after all. He bleeds just like any man.”

It took a supreme effort of will to turn my head toward the voices. I could barely make out the shadowy silhouettes of two men standing against the moonlit sky.

“Take him to Agla. Maybe the witch can keep him from dying.”

“Yes, my lord Subotai.”

The silhouettes melted into the darkness. The voices faded away. It seemed to me that I lay there for hours, forcing myself to remain awake. Then other men came and lifted me roughly from the ground by my shoulders and legs. The sudden flare of agony made me cry out, and then everything went blank.

I came back to a sort of semi-consciousness. I felt warm, too hot to be comfortable. My head swam and my eyes refused to focus properly. I tried to sit up but did not have the strength.

“No, no… lie back,” crooned a woman’s voice. “Be still.”

I felt the touch of cool fingers against my burning cheek. “Sleep… go to sleep. Agla will protect you from harm. Agla will heal you.”

Her voice was hypnotic. I drifted away, feeling somehow safe within the calming power of her words.

I was told later that it was two days and two full nights before I opened my eyes again. I lay flat on my back, staring up at the sloping felt walls of a round yurt. I could see a bright blue sky through the smoke hole at the top. My whole body ached, and it pained me to take a breath, but I could raise myself up on my elbows and examine my midsection. The daggers had sliced deeply, but already the wounds were healing. Within a few days there would be nothing left of them except scars, and in time even the scars would disappear. I wrinkled my nose; the tent smelled of sour milk and human sweat. The Mongols were not much for bathing, I knew.

She pushed aside the leather flap that covered the entrance to the yurt and stepped inside.

“Aretha!” I gasped.

Her skin was suntanned to a radiant golden brown, her dark hair braided and coiled in the Mongol fashion. She wore a long skirt and a loose blouse over it that reminded me of the buckskins of the old American West. Necklaces of shells and bones were strung around her neck, and a leather belt about her waist was hung with pouches and amulets.

But I recognized that beautiful goddess-like face, her lustrous dark hair, those gray eyes that a man could lose himself in.

“Aretha,” I said again, my voice nearly breaking with the wonder of her being here, being alive.

She let the entry flap fall behind her and stepped to the straw pallet on which I lay. Sinking to her knees, she stared at me silently. I could feel my heart beating within my chest.

“You have come back to us,” she said. It was Aretha’s voice.

“You’ve come back to me,” I replied. “Across all these centuries. Across death itself.”

She frowned slightly. Touching my forehead with the back of her cool hand, she said, “The fever is gone; yet you speak wildly.”

“You are Aretha. I knew you in another time and place, far from here…”

“My name is Agla,” she said. “My mother was Agla, and her mother was, also. It is the name for a healer, although some of the barbarians believe that I am a witch.”

I sank back onto the straw. But when I reached out my hand, she took it in hers.

“I am Orion,” I said.

“Yes, I know. The lord Subotai brought you to me. The Orkhon, Hulagu, tried to have you killed. He fears you.”

“Subotai does not?”

She smiled at me, and the rancid, stuffy yurt seemed suddenly filled with sunshine.

“Subotai is greatly interested in you. He gave me no uncertain orders. I am to heal you or lose my own life. He has no use for those who cannot carry out his commands.”

“Why is he interested in me?”

Instead of answering my question, she went on, “When they brought you here to my yurt, I was terrified. I tried not to show my fear to Subotai, but from the wounds they had inflicted upon you, I was sure that you would not live out the night. You were bleeding so!”

“But I did live.”

“Never have I seen a man with such powers,” she said. “There was little I could do for you except to keep your wounds clean and give you a potion to dull your pain. You have healed yourself.”

I couldn’t get it out of my mind that she was Aretha, the woman I had known so briefly in the twentieth century, recreated here in the thirteenth. But either she had no memory of her earlier existence (or should I say later existence) such as I did, or she was truly a different person who looked and sounded exactly like Aretha. A clone? How could that be? If Ormazd could bring me through hell and death with all my memories of that other life intact in my mind, why doesn’t Agla recall being Aretha?

“If the barbarians knew that you have healed yourself,” she went on, “they would think you are truly a sorcerer.”

“Would that be an advantage for me?”

She shuddered. “Hardly. Sorcerers die by fire. Either they are burned alive or they have molten silver poured into their eyes and ears.”