I never saw Ahriman. It was as if we operated in two different time-frames, two separate dimensions. He was there in Karakorum,. I knew. He knew I was there as well. We both saw Ogotai almost daily — or nightly. Yet, either by the High Khan’s adroit planning or Ahriman’s, we never met face to face in all those many weeks.

The wind sweeping down from the north began to have an edge to it. The grass was still green, but soon the storms of autumn would begin, and then the winter snows. In the old days the Mongols would move their camp southward and collide with other tribes who claimed the same pasture lands along the edge of the Gobi. Now, with Karakorum becoming more of a fixed city every day, the High Khan prepared to stay the winter and defy the winds and storms that were to come.

The Mongols organized a hunt each autumn, and Ye Liu Chutsai summoned me to his tent to tell me that the High Khan requested my company on the hunt.

The mandarin’s tent was a tiny slice of China transported to the Mongolian steppes. Solid, heavy furniture of teak and ebony, chests inlaid with ivory and gold, an air of quiet and harmony — unlike the boisterous, almost boyish energy of the Mongols. It was the tent in which I had asked him for my first meeting with Ogotai. I had not realized then that Liu lived in it. Now I could sense the philosopher’s stoicism all about me: Ye Liu Chutsai slept here, probably on that cherrywood bench covered with silks, but this tent was really a home for the books and parchment scrolls and stargazing instruments of the mandarin — more precious and rare than the body of an aging Chinese administrator.

“The High Khan has shown a great fondness for you,” Liu said, after sitting me down at his cluttered desk and offering me tea.

“I have a great fondness for him,” I admitted. “He is a strangely gentle man to be the emperor of the world.”

Liu sipped from his miniature teacup before replying, “He rules wisely — by allowing his generals to expand the empire while he maintains the law of the Yassa within it.”

“With your help,” I said.

“Behind every great ruler stand wise administrators. The way to determine if a ruler is great or not is to observe whom he has selected to serve him.”

Cardinal Richelieu came to my mind.

“Yet, despite your friendship,” Liu went on, speaking slowly, carefully, “the one called Ahriman is also close to the High Khan.”

“The High Khan has many friends.”

The mandarin placed his cup delicately on the lacquered tray next to the still-steaming teapot. “I would not say that Ahriman is his friend. Rather, the man seems to have become something of a physician to the High Khan.”

That startled me. “Physician? Is the High Khan ill?”

“Only in his heart,” said Liu. “He wearies of his life of idleness and luxury. Yet the alternative is to lead an army into the field and conquer new lands.”

“He won’t do that,” I said, remembering how Ogotai had told me he was sick of bloodshed.

“I agree. He cannot. Hulagu, Subotai, Kubilai — they lead the armies. Ogotai’s task is to remain in Karakorum and be the High Khan. If he began to gather an army together, what would the Orkhons think? There are no lands for him to conquer except those already being put to the sword by the Orkhons.”

I began to understand. Ogotai literally had no worlds left to conquer.Europe,China, the Middle East were all being attacked already. He would start a civil war among the Mongols if he went marching in any direction.

But then I thought of India.

“What about the land to the south of the great mountains, the Roof of the World?”

“Hindustan?” Ye Liu Chutsai came as close to scoffing as his cool self-restraint would allow. “It is a land teeming with diseased beggars and incredibly rich maharajahs. The heat there kills men and horses. The Mongols will not go there.”

Liu was wrong. I seemed to remember that the Mongols eventually did conquer India, or at least a part of it. They were called Moghuls by the natives, a name that became so associated with power and splendor that in the twentieth century it was cynically pinned on Hollywood executives.

The mandarin brought me out of my reverie by saying, “Fortunately, it is the season for the hunt. Perhaps that will cure the ache in the High Khan’s soul, and he will have no need of Ahriman’s sleeping draughts for a while.”

A hunt by the Mongols was little less than a military campaign directed against animals instead of men. The Mongols had never heard of sportsmanship or ecology. When they went out to hunt, it was to provide food for the clan over the bitterly cold and long winter. They organized with enormous thoroughness and efficiency.

Young officers scouted out territories of hundreds of square miles and brought reports back to the ordu so that the elders could select the best location for the hunt. Once the place was selected, the Mongols got onto their ponies and rode out in military formation. They formed an immense circle, perhaps as much as a hundred miles in circumference. Every animal within that circle was to be killed. Without exception. Without pity.

The hunt took more than a week. No actual killing was allowed until the High Khan gave the signal, and he would wait until the noose of armed horsemen had been pulled to its tightest around the doomed animals.

Between the horsemen walked the beaters, clanging swords on shields, shouting, thrashing the brush all day long, driving the animals constantly inward toward the center of the circle. At night they lit bonfires that kept the beasts within the trap. All day long we rode, drawing closer and closer to each other as the circle tightened.

At first I could see no animals except our own horses. Nothing but slightly rolling grassland, with waist-high brush scattered here and there. By the third day, though, even I could spot small deer, rabbits, wolves darting through the high grass. An air of panic was rising among the animals as predator and prey fled side-by-side from the terrifying noises and smells of the humans.

I rode on the High Khan’s left, separated from him by two other horsemen, nephews of his. Ye Liu Chutsai had not been invited to the hunt, nor would he have been happy out here in the steppes. I could see that Ogotai loved it, even though the physical strain must have been hard on him. He was in the saddle at daybreak like the rest of us, but bymiddayhe grew haggard and quiet. He would fall out of the line then, and rest through the afternoon. At night he retired early, without the long drinking bouts he led at Karakorum. But even though his body seemed stiff with age and pain, Ogotai’s spirits remained high. He was free of the luxuries and cares of the court, breathing clean fresh air, away from the decisions that had weighed upon him at Karakorum.

And I felt free, too. Ahriman was far from my mind. I thought of Agla, especially at night as I drowsed off to sleep on the hard ground, wrapped in a smelly horse blanket. But all that could wait. They would still be in Karakorum when we returned: problems never go away; they simply wait or grow worse until you return. For the present I was enjoying myself hugely, and I recalled that the Persian word, paradise, originally meant a hunting ground.

It would ruin the whole strategy of the hunt if animals were allowed to break through the tightening circle of horsemen. For the first few days, the animals simply fled from us, but as the noose closed in on them, some of the terrified beasts tried to break out. There was no alternative but to kill them. To allow even one to escape was regarded as a disgrace.

The sour-faced Kassar was riding on my left the morning that a wolf, slavering with fear and hate, launched himself at the space between us. Kassar spitted him on his lance while I sat on my pony, too hesitant to beat him to the game. The wolf howled with agony and tried to reach around and gnaw at the lance, but three of the beaters rushed up and clubbed it to death.