The city was smoke.
Samarkand had burned all day and now it glowed like a bad tooth in the dark.
Genghis Khan sat in a tent made of stolen silk.
His boots were still wet with blood,
and he smelled like a horse that had been riding since the world began.
Somebody brought him a skin of kumis,
that sour mare’s milk that tastes like it crawled out of hell.
He drank straight from the skin, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand,
then laughed at nothing, like the devil telling himself a joke.
The girls were waiting.
Persian girls, their fathers dead, their eyes wide as moons.
He didn’t ask names.
Names were for poets.
He picked one up like a man grabs a sack of rice,
and threw her down on a pile of carpets.
The others looked away.
Outside the tent, the soldiers sang like wolves, drunk on loot,
drunk on the idea that the world belonged to them.
And he fucked her,
hard, the way a man takes the earth when he knows no one is coming after him.
When it was over he lay there,
breathing like a bull,
thinking about the next city,
the next river to cross,
the next skull to crush.
For him, this was all there was:
war, drink, fuck, move on.
The next morning, he was sober.
He mounted his horse.
And the horsemen rode west,
toward the next burning city.