“None. It is a useful skill,” he admitted grudgingly. “Can it be taught?”
Kokchu smiled, no longer afraid. “The spirits will not come to those they have not chosen, lord.”
Genghis nodded, stepping away. Even in the cold wind, the shaman stank like an old goat and he did not know what to make of the strange wound that did not bleed.
With a grunt, he ran his fingers along his blade and sheathed it.
“I will give you a year of life, shaman. It is enough time to prove your worth.”
Kokchu fell to his knees, pressing his face into the ground. “You are the great khan, as I have foretold,” he said, tears staining the dust on his cheeks. He felt the coldness of whispering spirits leave him then. He shrugged his sleeve forward to hide the growing spot of blood.
“I am,” Genghis replied. He looked down the hill at the army waiting for him to return. “The world will hear my name.” When he spoke again, it was so quiet that Kokchu had to strain to hear him.
“This is not a time of death, shaman. We are one people and there will be no more battles between us. I will summon us all. Cities will fall to us, new lands will be ours to ride. Women will weep and I will be pleased to hear it.”
He looked down at the prostrate shaman, frowning.
“You will live, shaman. I have said it. Get off your knees and walk down with me.”
At the foot of the hill, Genghis nodded to his brothers Kachiun and Khasar. Each of them had grown in authority in the years since they had begun the gathering of tribes, but they were still young and Kachiun smiled as his brother walked amongst them.
“Who is this?” Khasar asked, staring at Kokchu in his ragged deel.
“The shaman of the Naimans,” Genghis replied.
Another man guided his pony close and dismounted, his eyes fastened on Kokchu. Arslan had once been swordsmith to the Naiman tribe, and Kokchu recognized him as he approached. The man was a murderer, he remembered, forced into banishment. It was no surprise to find such as he amongst Genghis’s trusted officers.
“I remember you,” Arslan said. “Has your father died, then?”
“Years ago, oath-breaker,” Kokchu replied, nettled by the tone. For the first time, he realized he had lost the authority he had won so painfully with the Naimans. There were few men in that tribe who would have looked on him without lowering their eyes, for fear that they would be accused of disloyalty and face his knives and fire. Kokchu met the gaze of the Naiman traitor without flinching. They would come to know him.
Genghis watched the tension between the two men with something like amusement.
“Do not give offense, shaman. Not to the first warrior to come to my banners. There are no Naimans any longer, nor ties to tribe. I have claimed them all.”
“I have seen it in the visions,” Kokchu replied immediately. “You have been blessed by the spirits.”
Genghis’s face grew tight at the words. “It has been a rough blessing. The army you see around you has been won by strength and skill. If the souls of our fathers were aiding us, they were too subtle for me to see them.”
Kokchu blinked. The khan of the Naimans had been credulous and easy to lead. He realized this new man was not as open to his influence. Still, the air was sweet in his lungs. He lived and he had not expected even that an hour before.
Genghis turned to his brothers, dismissing Kokchu from his thoughts.
“Have the new men give their oath to me this evening, as the sun sets,” he said to Khasar. “Spread them amongst the others so that they begin to feel part of us, rather than beaten enemies. Do it carefully. I cannot be watching for knives at my back.”
Khasar dipped his head before turning away and striding through the warriors to where the defeated tribes still knelt.
Kokchu saw a smile of affection pass between Genghis and his younger brother Kachiun. The two men were friends and Kokchu was beginning to learn everything he could. Even the smallest detail would be useful in the years to come.
“We have broken the alliance, Kachiun. Did I not say we would?” Genghis said, clapping him on the back. “Your armored horses came in at the perfect time.”
“As you taught me,” Kachiun replied, easy with the praise.
“With the new men, this is an army to ride the plains,” Genghis said, smiling. “It is time to set the path, at last.” He thought for a moment.
“Send out riders in every direction, Kachiun. I want the land scoured of every wanderer family and small tribe. Tell them to come to the black mountain next spring, near the Onon River. It is a flat plain that will hold all the thousands of our people. We will gather there, ready to ride.”
“What message shall they take?” Kachiun asked.
“Tell them to come to me,” he said softly. “Tell them Genghis calls them to a gathering. There is no one to stand against us now. They can follow me or they can spend their last days waiting for my warriors on the horizon. Tell them that.” He looked around him with satisfaction. In seven years, he had gathered more than ten thousand men. With the survivors of the defeated allied tribes, he had almost twice that number. There was no one left on the plains who could challenge his leadership. He looked away from the sun to the east, imagining the bloated, wealthy cities of the Chin.
“They have kept us apart for a thousand generations, Kachiun. They have ridden us until we were nothing more than savage dogs. That is the past. I have brought us together and they will be trembling. I’ll give them cause.”
Read on for a special preview of
KHAN: EMPIRE OF SILVER
Available December 28, 2010
PROLOGUE
He trudged through a landscape of gers, like grubby shells on the shore of some ancient sea. Poverty was all around him: in the yellowing felt, patched and repaired endlessly over generations. Scrawny kid goats and sheep ran bleating around his feet as he approached his home. Batu stumbled over the animals, cursing as water slopped from the heavy buckets. He could smell pungent urine in the air, a sourness that had been missing from the breeze over the river. Batu frowned to himself at the thought of the day he had spent digging a toilet pit for his mother. He had been as excited as a child when he showed the results of his labor. She had merely shrugged, saying she was too old to go so far in the night, when good ground was all around her.
She was thirty-six years old, already broken by sickness and the years passing. Her teeth had rotted in her lower jaw and she walked like a woman twice her age, bent over and limping. Yet she was still strong enough to slap him on the rare occasions Batu mentioned his father. The last time had been just that morning, before he began the trek to the river.
At the door of her ger, he eased the buckets down and rubbed his sore hands, listening. Inside, he could hear her humming some old song from her youth, and he smiled. Her anger would have vanished as quickly as always.
He was not afraid of her. In the last year, he had grown in height and strength to the point where he could have stopped every blow, but he did not. He bore them without understanding her bitterness. He knew he could have held her hands, but he did not want to see her weep—or worse, to see her beg or barter a skin of airag to ease her misery. He hated those times, when she used the drink to hammer herself into oblivion. She told him then that he had his father’s face and that she could not bear to look at him. There had been many days when he had cleaned her himself, her arms flopping over his back, her flat breasts against his chest as he used a cloth and bucket to scrub the filth from her skin. He had sworn many times he would never touch airag himself. Her example made even the smell of it hard on his stomach. When its sweetness was combined with vomit, sweat, and urine, it made him retch.
Batu looked up when he heard the horses, grateful for anything that would keep him outside a little longer. The group of riders was small by the standards of a tuman, barely twenty horsemen. To a boy brought up on the edges of the camp, it was a glorious sight for a morning, a different world.
The warriors rode with very straight backs, and from a distance, they seemed to radiate strength and authority. Batu envied them, even as he ached to be one of their number. Like any other boy of the gers, he knew that their red and black armor meant they were Ogedai’s own Guard, the elite warriors of the tumans. Stories of their battles were sung or chanted on feast days, as well as darker tales of betrayal and blood. Batu winced at the thought. His father featured in some of those, which prompted sidelong glances at his mother and her bastard son.
Batu hawked and spat on the ground at his feet. He could still remember when his mother’s ger had been of the finest white felt and gifts had arrived almost daily. He supposed she had once been beautiful, her skin fresh with youth, where now it was seamed and coarse. Those had been different days, before his father had betrayed the khan and been butchered for it like a lamb in the snow. Jochi. He spat again at the word, the name. If his father had bent to the will of the great khan, Batu thought he might have been one of the warriors in red and black, riding tall among the filthy gers. Instead, he was forgotten and his mother wept whenever he talked of joining a tuman.
Almost all the young men of his age had joined, except for those with injuries or defects of birth. His friend Zan was one, a mixed-blood Chin who had been born with a sightless white eye. No one-eyed man could ever be an archer, and the warriors had turned him away with kicks and laughter, telling him to tend his flocks. Batu had drunk airag for the first time with him that night and been sick for two days. The recruiters had not come for him either, not with the betrayer’s blood running in his veins. Batu had seen them out looking for strong lads, but when their gaze passed over him, they shrugged and turned away. He was as tall and strong as his father had been, but they did not want him.
With a shock, Batu realized the riders were not passing through. He watched as they stopped to speak to one of his mother’s neighbors, and he took a sharp breath in amazement as the old man pointed in Batu’s direction. The horsemen trotted toward him and he stood rooted, watching as they came closer. He found he did not know what to do with his hands and folded them over his chest twice before letting them dangle. From inside the ger, he heard his mother calling some question, but he did not reply. He could not. He had seen the man riding at the head of the group.
There were no pictures in the poor gers, though one or two Chin paintings had found their way into the homes of the wealthiest families. Yet Batu had seen his father’s brother once. On a feast day years before, he had crept up close, peering between warriors for a sight of the great khan. Ogedai and Jochi had been with Genghis then, and time had not faded the bright memory, among the most bittersweet in all his young years. It had been a glimpse of the life he might have had, before his father threw it all away for some petty squabble Batu did not even understand.
Ogedai rode bareheaded, in armor lacquered shining black. He wore his hair in the Chin style, as a heavy rope falling from a topknot on a bare, shaved scalp. Batu drank in every detail of the man as his mother’s voice called plaintively again from inside. He could see that the great khan’s son was looking directly at him and speaking, but Batu was tongue-tied, dumb. The yellow eyes were bright up close, and he was lost in the realization that he was staring at his uncle by blood.
“Is he slow-witted?” one of the warriors said. Batu shut his open mouth. “My lord Ogedai is speaking to you, boy. Are you deaf?”
Batu found himself flushing with great heat. He shook his head, suddenly irritated to have such men ride up to his mother’s ger. What would they think of the patched walls, the smell, the flies in the air? It was humiliating and his shock turned quickly to anger. Even then, he did not reply. Men like these had killed his father, his mother said. The life of a ragged son would mean little to them.
“Have you no voice at all?” Ogedai said. He was smiling at something and Batu responded crookedly.
“I have,” he said. He saw one of the warriors reach down, but he did not expect a blow and he staggered a step as a mailed glove connected with the side of his head.
“I have, my lord,“ the warrior said without heat.
Batu shrugged as he straightened up. His ear was burning, but he’d known worse.
“I have a voice, my lord,” he said, doing his best to remember the warrior’s face.
Ogedai discussed him as if he wasn’t present. “It wasn’t just a story then. I can see my brother in his face, and he’s already as tall as my father. How old are you, boy?”
Batu stood very still, trying to collect himself. Some part of him had always wondered if his mother had been exaggerating his father’s position. To have it confirmed so casually was more than he could take in.
“Fifteen years,” he said. He saw the warrior begin to lean forward again and added “my lord” quickly. The warrior leaned back in his saddle and nodded to him complacently.
Ogedai frowned. “You’re old to be starting out. Training should begin at seven or eight at the latest, if you’re ever to draw a good bow.” He saw Batu’s confusion and smiled, pleased to be able to do such a thing. “Still, I will be watching you. Report to General Jebe tomorrow. He has his camp about a hundred miles to the north, near a village by a cliff. You can find it?”
“I have no horse, my lord,” Batu said.
Ogedai glanced at the warrior who had struck him, and the man raised his eyes to heaven before dismounting. He passed the reins into Batu’s hands.
“Can you ride at least?” the warrior said.
Batu was awed as he took the reins and patted the muscular neck. He had never touched an animal as fine.
“Yes. Yes, I can ride.”
“Good. This mare is not your horse, understand? She will carry you to your post, but then you will take some old swayback and return her to me.”
“I don’t know your name,” Batu said.
“Alkhun, boy. Ask anyone in Karakorum and they’ll know me.”
“The city?” Batu asked. He had heard of the stone thing rising from the soil on the back of a million workers, but until then, he had not believed it.
“More a camp than a city at the moment, though that is changing,” Alkhun confirmed. “You can send the horse by the way-station riders, but tell them to go easy with her. I’ll take any whip marks out of your hide. Oh, and welcome to the army, boy. My lord Ogedai has plans for you. Don’t disappoint him.”
ONE
The air swirled with marble dust that glittered as it caught the evening sun. Ogedai’s heart was full as he guided his horse down the main thoroughfare, taking in every sight and sound around him. There was a sense of urgency in the cacophony of hammer blows and shouted orders. The Mongol tumans had gathered outside the city. His generals, his people, had been summoned there to see what two years of labor had created: a city in a wilderness, with the Orkhon River tamed and bent to his will.
Ogedai reined in for a moment to watch a group of workmen unload a cart. Nervous under his gaze, the laborers used ropes, pulleys, and sheer numbers to maneuver blocks of white marble onto low sledges that could be dragged into the workshops. Each milky block was subtly veined in a light blue that pleased Ogedai. He owned the quarry that had birthed the stones, hundreds of miles to the east, just one of a thousand purchases he had made in the last years.
There was no doubt he had been extravagant, spending gold and silver as if it had no value. He smiled at the thought, wondering what his father would have made of the white city rising in the wilderness. Genghis had despised the anthills of humanity, but these were not the ancient stones and teeming streets of an enemy. This was new and it belonged to the nation.
There had never been a treasury like the one he had inherited, amassed from the wealth of China and Khwarezm, yet never spent by its khan. With the tribute from Yenking alone, Ogedai could have sheathed every new home in white marble or even jade if he had wanted. He had built a monument to his father on the plains, as well as a place where he himself could be khan. He had built a palace with a tower
that rose above the city like a white sword, so that all men could see the nation had come far from simple gers and herds.
For his gold, a million men had come to work. They had crossed plains and deserts with just a few animals and tools, coming from as far off as Chin lands or the cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Kabul. Masons and carpenters from Koryo had made the journey, called to the west by rumors of a new city being built on a river of coins. Bulgars brought stocks of rare clays, charcoal, and hardwood in great caravans from their forests. The city filled with traders, builders, potters, foodsellers, thieves, and scoundrels. Farmers scenting a profit brought their carts for days of travel, all for the strings of metal coins. Ogedai gave them gold and silver from the earth, melted and shaped. In return they gave him a city, and he did not find it a bad bargain. For the present, they were the colorful crowds of his city, speaking a hundred tongues and cooking a thousand different foods and spices. Some of them would be allowed to stay, but he was not building it for them.
Ogedai saw green-handed dyers flatten themselves against the walls, their red turbans dipping in respect. His Guards cleared the way ahead, so the son of Genghis could ride almost in a dream. He had made this place from the camp of gers his father had known. He had made it real, in stone.
It still amazed him. He had not paid for women to travel with his workers, but they had come with their husbands and fathers. He had wondered for a time how he would establish the businesses every city needed to thrive, but traders had approached his chancellor, offering horses or more silver to lease new properties. The city was more than a simple collection of houses. Already it had a vitality of its own, far beyond his control.
Yet not completely. A quirk in the plans had created an area of small alleyways in the south of his city. Criminal gangs had begun to flourish there until Ogedai heard. He had ordered eight hundred buildings torn down, the whole area redesigned and rebuilt. His own Guard had supervised the hangings.