The Golden Tablet
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 20
Spring came to Shangdu the way spring came everywhere in this country — without ceremony, without announcement, one morning simply different from the one before it. The ice on the ornamental lakes cracked and retreated. The horses grew restless in their stables. The roads that had been closed since the first hard frost began appearing in the morning reports as passable, then reliable, then open.
Khutulun appeared in the archive room on the first morning of the third month with her riding braid and her outer coat and the Paiza at her belt and looked at Niccolò across the long table where the Kunlun preliminary survey was spread with four months of their corrections accumulated in the margins.
“The southern pass is open,” she said.
He looked up from the notation he was finishing. Looked at her. Looked at the window where the morning light had a quality it hadn’t had yesterday — something warmer in it, something that had made a decision.
He put down his pen.
“How long to provision the column,” he said.
“Done,” she replied. “Since yesterday.”
He looked at her. “You provisioned the column before the pass was confirmed open.”
“The pass opens the same week every year,” she said. “Within two days. I’ve been through it four times.” She held his gaze. “I provisioned the column three days ago.”
He thought about a woman who planned for everything and had removed his map roll from his saddlebag while he slept and had known the river ford was thirty yards upstream from where anyone had marked it and had thrown a rope with perfect accuracy before he’d taken two steps.
He should not have been surprised.
He was not surprised.
He stood and rolled the Kunlun preliminary survey with its four months of margin corrections and tucked it under his arm and looked around the archive room — the shelves, the long table, the south facing window that had held the winter light and given it to the maps — and felt the particular feeling of leaving a place that had done what a place needed to do.
“Niccolò,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Leave the preliminary survey,” she said. “We’ll make a better one.”
He looked at the roll under his arm. At four months of work in the margins. At the corrections they’d made side by side in the good light.
He set it on the table.
She was right. They’d make a better one.
The column assembled in the outer courtyard in the early morning with the efficiency he had stopped marveling at four months ago and had simply come to understand as how things worked when she was in charge of them.
Foscari was there, looking considerably more confident on a horse than he had eleven months ago when they’d ridden out of this same courtyard into the Tianshan. He had spent the winter learning Mongolian with the focused dedication of a man who had decided that understanding what was being said around him was worth the effort. He was not good at it yet. He was considerably less bad than he’d been.
Riva had, somewhere in the four months, become indistinguishable from the Keshig in everything except his face. He moved like them, ate like them, and had developed opinions about horses that he expressed with an authority that would have been unrecognizable to the young Venetian who had joined the expedition in Kashgar.
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