Baraat was zuun-lord of the 332nd zuun of the 95th myangan of the 5th tumen of the Chrome Horde, which is the will of the Batu Khan, made manifest. The men under his command - following the losses sustained during the tank incident - totaled 185, with almost a half-dozen mounts lost in the cross-fire.
These men were divided in ten arbats, each maintained by an arbat-lord, most of them men older than Baraat, themselves wizened beyond their years. They were veterans, of a sort, who had had their fair share of pillaging and looting. Some of them, Baraat later discovered, had met the Batu Khan himself in those early days, as he trekked across the ruins in his trusty Lada, across plains and old mountain roads, calling men to join his holy cause.
It was only natural that these men would look at a boy like Baraat with some disdain, as they found themselves reporting their rank and their weapons examined, forced to salute a crippled teenager who moved across their men and popped the hoods of their mounts, nodding thoughtfully.
Some of them looked at Kushi puzzled during all this, struggling with the sight:
“Is this a joke?” they would whisper among themselves or ask Kushi when they knew their zuun-lord was out of hearing range.
“Is this boy serious? Is the myangan-lord serious?” they asked him as they milled around him by their tents, when the report was over and Baraat was making his way to Gansukh Kiryat’s tent, to report there in turn.
“So he is.” Kushi replied.
“If they expect us to follow this green-horn, they have another thing coming! This boy doesn’t know the first thing about shooting a gun, nevermind leading men into battle!” said the arbat-lords. “Chuluun was bad enough -no offense, Kushi - but a child?”
“This child took down a Kazakhstani tank by himself. This child cleared the path for us to take this entire damned country. All we have to do now will be to drive all the way West and before you know it, we’ll have Kazakhstan bending the knee. Trust me, it’s going to be easy women and easy killing from now on.”
“You had best be right, Kushi. You had best keep an eye on the boy. He makes a slip, then you’ll need to take care of him.”
Kushi nodded yes and rolled his cigarette in silence, as his fellow warriors dispersed. And he knew, at that moment, even though the gods provided no obvious sign, that his fate had been woven to Baraat’s with the invisible, unbreakable bonds that only fate herself could weave.
***
The myangan-lord’s RV head quarters was a maelstrom of beeping machinery and glinting gold, decorated with wall-to-wall printed fabric, taken from the finest storages of Yumanshu. Klimt prints looked lustily down at the gathered officers, shining a bright imitation gold even as they were set against the solemn Rembrandts and the austere Smiths.
Heng sat beside Gansukh Kiryat, poring over long lists and doing her absolute best to look like she was working hard, setting them right and interpreting the arcane jottings and scribbles in the borders. This was her defense mechanism, when faced with tedious semantics.
Gansukh Kiryat spoke to his men in a deep, commanding voice, his stance shamelessly ripped off from the Night Watch print set above his subordinate’s heads over the door. Heng would often smile at the thought of the Mongol warlord, standing in the dead of night before the painting, the full-view mirror she knew had hidden in his closet placed beside him as he tried to reproduce the regal bearing of the Nights watchmen, perhaps awed by their calm, silent majesty and fully unaware of their lowly, treasonous actions that Rembrandt had immortalized.
How would he feel she wondered, if he knew that those men were peddlers in child prostitution and blackmail? Would he take down the print and replace it with something else? Or would he simply shrug and say ’What they did, I can do better’? No, the world is bad enough without men like Gansukh trying to rise above their personal heroes.
“173 men, 25 dead, 2 currently hospitalized, myangan-lord.” One of the zuun-lords, a man who in Heng’s eyes looked like a shaved rat doing its absolute best to pass for a man, said and seated himself.
“And where is the young wolf?” Gansukh Kiryat said, looking at the empty seat beside the ratty zuun-lord. “Has he gone out hunting too far from his pack? With a busted hind leg no less?”
The zuun-lords laughed on cue. Heng did the same, though her outburst was motivated by the crooked grin of the rat rather than Gansukh’s pretense at wit. They were halfway through their chuckle, when the RV’s door opened and Baraat hobbled inside, grunting as he looked around awkwardly, searching for his appointed seat.
“So glad you could join us, Baraat of the Buriyat. How did you find your zuun?”
“In perfect condition, myangan-lord,” Baraat responded, his face blushing fiercely. Finding his spot on the chair beside his rat-faced comrade, he moved across the men and sat down with little grace, his crutches clattering on the floor as he set them against the wall. The other zuun-lords tutted at the sight. Heng only looked away, embarrassed by the display.
“What is your report, zuun-lord?” Gansukh Kiryat asked the boy, who immediately began to fumble in his vest pockets, looking for the piece of crumpled paper where he had kept the specifics of his command and instead producing a veritable avalanche of smudged paper. Heng looked in awe at the mess: she saw prayer strips and bits of notepad paper filled with indiscernible smudges; she saw scribbled, torn post-its and cigarette-cases where characters had been jotted in the borders and over the brand logos. She even saw what looked like a condom-box, splayed out for the world to see, its insides dotted with novice attempts at calligraphy.
Finally, after what seemed an impossibly long time, Baraat produced an official-looking notepad with an Enron logo, flipped through the pages and said:
“Currently active personnel, 185, 10 dead 5 hospitalized. Tngri Erlik in proper working condition, requiring no-”
“It is customary” Gansukh Kiryat cut in “for the zuun-lord to be standing at attention when delivering his report to a superior.”
The zuun-lords looked at each other and back at Heng, as if seeking an explanation: whats is this? they asked without speaking. First we wait for the boy, then we have to wade through his mess and now the myangan-lord wants to draw out this farce some more?
“Myangan-lord, it would be ill-advised to ask this of the zuun-lord. His condition-” Heng suggested, before she was cut off.
“No. It’s alright.” Baraat said, as he leaned back against the RV wall and grabbed blindly around him, looking for purchase. Finally grasping a balsa-wood nightstand beside him, he heaved himself up, gritting his teeth. Heng saw the boy grunt, groan and then go pale as he very obviously leaned down on his broken leg. But he did not falter. Instead, he only gasped and raised himself up, striking a salute despite his very special sort of agony.
“Currently active personnel, 185, 10 dead 5 hospitalized. Tngri Erlik in proper working condition, requiring no maintenance for the time being. Expected time of replenishing mount-fuel, 48 hours. No considerable inventory losses, beyond those relating to recreational use,” Baraat managed, his face twisted in agony.
Gansukh stood in silence, his eyes fixed on Baraat’s. Heng watched the boy suddenly wobble, his knees buckling before finally collapsing on the floor. No-one moved to help Baraat, as he crawled back into his place against the wall, his expression stern, a torrent of sweat dripping from his brow.
Gansukh struck a salute and grinned.
“That’s the spirit. We might make a zuun-lord out of you yet, Baraat of the Buriyat!”
“Yes, sir” Baraat responded, his eyes driving daggers into the myangan-lord.
“We have received no word from our forward-scouts as of yet,” Gansukh Kiryat said, sitting down “There has been no ham-radio communication so far, nor have we received any confirmation via GPS from any scouts of the other myangan, meaning that the rest of the A353 could very well be unguarded. This means that we will be a week ahead of schedule to meet with the 93rd and 72nd myangan in Astana. With that in mind - and of course, thanks to zuun-lord Baraat’s contribution to our cause - I declare the following day a holiday of the taking of Kazakhstan!”
Every zuun-lord except for Baraat grinned and nodded, twirling their moustaches. Heng kept her eyes on Baraat, his agony suddenly lifted if only for a moment.
“Will it be a movie-night? This holiday?” the rat-faced zuun-lord asked.
“Naturally” Gansukh Kiryat responded and the men roared with elation. Even Baraat seemed to have forgotten his recent humiliation and joined in. It was so strange to Heng, this sight of grown men, of killers no less, to react in this manner at the prospect of watching reruns of decades-old trash.
“According to tumen-law, we are no longer allowed to show soap operas,” Gansukh Kiryat said, amid a chorus of grumbling voices. But then again, Heng knew the necessity of such a law: soap-opera projections forced the myangans to stop more often, wasting valuable time on the road, causing them, on occasion, to miss their appointed rendezvous with the other forces of the Horde. It was said that the Bold and the Beautiful marathon of the 64th myangan had caused them to miss their rendezvous with the main force in Beijiing and nearly cost the Horde its victory. Other times, soap operas would cause unnecessary agitation among the men, the cliffhangers making them unable to concentrate on their tasks at hand as they spent hours debating Rich’s marriage or the validity of Brook’s amnesia. Heng knew that in other cases, series could cause a rift even among those hardened warriors: the 21st myangan, it was said, had torn itself apart when Rachel and Ross broke up for the third time in the same season of FRIENDS. The zuuns soon picked sides and turned against each other, almost destroying the entire regiment in the process.
It was thus decided by the tumen-lords that series and soap operas were no longer allowed to be viewed on movie-nights or for the duration of the campaign. Instead, only action movies and light or slapstick comedies were allowed. Straight-forward narratives which would not agitate the starved-for-entertainment barbarians. Granted, it was not Heng’s cup of tea, but she wasn’t going to complain if the armed madmen avoided killing each other over a make-believe pregnancy.
“We do, however, have better alternative, fitting the spirit of our myangan!” Gansukh said and the zuun-lords beat their chests with excitement: the prospect of steel, blood, of latex-suited monsters and hackneyed jokes was enough to get their blood pumping.
Heng smiled despite herself, taken in by the sheer, bestial excitement of the gathered men, jostling around and rattling their sabers. Her smile died the second she noticed Baraat’ searching, wide-eyed look.
It was the kind of look she had almost forgotten, since the world decided to spit out its guts and bleed on the sidewalk of history. It was the look a man would give a woman only when his belly was full and his survival was ensured and his loins called for a mate. Baraat's obvious lust scared her and she knew this was going to require a show of strength. She tried to meet his gaze, to break past it with her usual, indifferently cold treatment but that didn’t seem to work.
Baraat broke contact with her a minute later, as Gansukh Kiryat excused his subordinates. Her heart was pumping, but not out of desire: she was a hostage - a useful one, for a change - in this place of madmen and naked violence. So far, she had managed to avoid the worst of it simply because she knew how to fight against it: by bearing it, maintaining her cold façade, disguising her constant terror as boredom brought about by desensitization.
But to have a zuun-lord, no matter how young, look at her this way? To want her, perhaps driven by some adolescent desire? That was enough to send shivers down her spine. Heng would have to avoid the boy-warlord at all costs, if she didn’t desire for herself the fate of the women of Jiunquan, of Beijiing and Koktal.
Heng was shaking all the way to her tent, until she reached out for the strongbox hidden under her bed, which she opened, taking out the unlabeled vial of clear liquid. With reverence, she inserted a hypodermic syringe and withdrew a very small amount, sealing it once again.
If she failed to avoid Baraat Buriyat’s attentions, if the worst came to pass and she could no longer grin or even bear it, she could always make her problem go away in the most efficient way she knew.
