The Golden Tablet
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4
The first pass nearly killed Foscari.
Not through any fault of the terrain or the enemy or the cold, which was considerable as they climbed through the morning into air that thinned and bit simultaneously. Through his own horse, which found a loose shelf of shale on the eastern approach and went down on its front knees with a lurch that sent Foscari over its neck and sliding toward an edge that had no bottom anyone could see.
Niccolò was off his horse moving toward him when the rope landed.
It came from above and to the left with the accuracy of something that had been aimed rather than thrown, the loop dropping over Foscari’s arm as he scrabbled at the rock face, and then it went taut and Foscari stopped sliding and hung there making the sounds of a man reacquainting himself with the concept of being alive.
Niccolò looked up.
Khutulun had her stallion braced crosswise on the path above, her weight back in the saddle, the rope wrapped twice around the pommel, holding Foscari’s weight with the calm expression of someone waiting for water to boil.
Two of the Keshig were already descending to collect him.
She looked down at Niccolò. “His horse chose the wrong line,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I told the column to take the left side of the path on this approach. The right side is loose from the spring melt.” She paused. “This was in the morning briefing.”
Niccolò had been in the morning briefing. He had translated the terrain information to Foscari and Riva himself. He looked at Foscari, who was now being hauled upward by two Keshig riders with the limp cooperation of a man whose legs had not yet resumed normal function.
“He forgot,” Niccolò said.
“Men who forget on this road,” she replied evenly, coiling the rope with practiced hands, “become a problem for the men behind them.”
“He understands that now.”
“Does he.” Not a question exactly. The tone of a woman filing information about the reliability of the Venetian party and finding the file wanting.
Foscari arrived at the path level and sat down heavily on a rock and put his head in his hands. One of the Keshig said something to him in Mongolian. Another laughed — not unkindly, the laugh of soldiers who have all been Foscari at some point and have the grace to remember it.
Khutulun watched this and something in her expression shifted almost imperceptibly. Not softening exactly. Something more like acknowledgment — that fear was a reasonable response to almost dying and the man was allowed his moment of it.
“His horse?” Niccolò asked.
“Unhurt. The Keshig have it.” She looked at him. “Can he ride?”
“Give him ten minutes.”
“We have five,” she said. “The weather is moving from the northwest. We need to be through the col before it arrives.”
He looked northwest. The sky was doing something complicated in that direction, a mass of grey building with the focused intention of weather that has somewhere to be.
“Five minutes,” he agreed.
She nodded and turned her horse and moved up the column and Niccolò went to Foscari and crouched in front of him.
Foscari looked up. His face was the color of old paper. “I heard the briefing,” he said in Venetian, before Niccolò could speak. “I heard it. I don’t know why I—”
“Because the path looked solid,” Niccolò said. “Because your eye told you one thing and the briefing told you another and you trusted your eye.” He paused. “Don’t trust your eye up here. Trust her.”
Foscari looked up the column to where Khutulun sat her horse at the head, watching the northwestern sky. “She threw that rope before you’d taken two steps toward me.”
“I know.”
“She was already watching for it,” Foscari said. “She knew the path was going to take someone.”
“She knows everything about this road,” Niccolò said. “That’s why we’re here and she’s in charge. Are you able to ride?”
Foscari looked at his hands, which had stopped shaking. “Yes.”
“Then get on your horse.”
They came through the col forty minutes later with the weather three ridgelines behind them and dropping fast.
The descent on the western side opened into a valley that stopped Niccolò’s breath — not from cold or exertion but from the simple fact of it, the scale and the color and the quality of light that existed in this particular bowl of mountain at this particular hour, the kind of thing that made a mapmaker’s hand itch with the inadequacy of paper.
He reached for his instruments.
“We’re not stopping,” Khutulun said, from somewhere to his left.
“Five minutes.”
“No.”
“The valley floor—”
“Is not going anywhere,” she retorted. “The weather is. We camp in the valley. You can draw your pictures when we’re not moving.”
He looked at the valley. Looked at the sky behind them. Looked at his instruments in his hand.
He put them away.
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